Denouncer (13 page)

Brodsky, impressed with Galina’s intelligence, had advised Sasha to put her in charge of the school library’s French literature collection, even if it meant earning the displeasure of Anna Rusakova. Sasha had agreed, and to please her, even read some of the French masters: Hugo, Flaubert, Stendahl, and Zola. Of an evening, he’d invite her to stroll with him along one of the woodland paths, all the while talking about some book, for example,
Madame Bovary
or
The Red and the Black
.

Lively and engaging conversation, of course, can as easily ignite a romance as a pretty face. Slowly their talk of great literature and personal experiences led to more intimate disclosures and behavior, and finally coitus. Throughout, Sasha had behaved like an old-fashioned swain, courting his damsel with sweet words, kindliness, small gifts, and an avowal of his honorable intentions, knowing full well that she was married and her husband still living. In short, he wished to enjoy her both intellectually and physically in a state of freedom, not marriage. She, in turn, made it clear that even if she obtained a divorce, she didn’t wish to remarry. With that agreement, they began sharing his bed, not hers, so Alya wouldn’t know. Their lovemaking, even allowing for the hesitancy of the first time, was never a riotous stew. They sweated over one another, but not passionately. She occasionally cried when she climaxed, and he would ask why. But it took several months before she admitted the source: his gentleness. With her, yes; but the fact remained that two men were dead. Decapitated. By him. His gentle touch had hardened into a fist as it gripped the sickle. At the time, he felt not so much as a moment’s hesitation or remorse. Gentle? Perhaps now, but not then. Galina’s idea of gentleness did not include murder but tonguing. When she asked him to run his lips down her body and engage in cunnilingus, she climaxed immediately and then took him in her mouth, a new reality for Sasha, exhilarating and addictive.

For the sake of appearances, she never remained in his bed the whole night, but retreated to her own room, where she could hear Alya breathing in the adjoining alcove, which had been remodeled for her. The few times the child awoke and called for her mother, Galina instantly materialized, dressed in a robe and slippers that she kept at the ready. Initially, her only fear was pregnancy, given the paucity in the countryside of condoms. But that fear was eclipsed by another, her husband, who had emerged from a photograph and taken up temporary residence with Father Zossima. Yes, it was Petr. He had sent her a note; he would come to the farmhouse. But if he wished to engage in conjugal relations, would she insist, as she had before his disappearance, that he sleep on the couch? Just his presence on the premises would mean an end to the lovemaking with Sasha, a prospect that saddened her.

Late one night, she heard fingernails lightly tapping on her window. Pulling aside the curtains, she saw an emaciated, bearded man with long hair and sunken eyes. It took her a minute to recognize Petr, whom she admitted through a back door that adjoined the pantry. He looked sick, his eyes bloodshot, his skin covered with suppurating sores, his gait unsteady. Even his teeth were bad and his breath worse, which became apparent the moment he opened his mouth. They stiffly hugged, and he said without self-pity:

“I’m not well.”

“I’ll make you some soup.”

Rather than use the kitchen she shared with Sasha and risk waking him, she resorted to the hot plate and kettle in her sitting room. Her small supply of personal provisions included tea, biscuits, and a few dried soups: leak, potato, and beet. Slowly stirring the potato broth, she looked not at Petr but at the pot, afraid that eye contact might reveal more than she wished. He was sprawled across the armchair she favored for reading. The slipcover she’d made to hide the chair’s tattered state was now disarrayed, revealing the old sackcloth and rough stitching.

“Tell me,” she said, without looking up, “where have you been? I was told you were dead. Killed. I even received a government stipend for your loss.”

“Living with a priest in the village,” he breathed laboriously. “A Father Zossima.”

“No, before that. It’s been well over a year since the murders.”

“What do you know about that?”

“Only what I read in the police report.”

“Never saw it.”

“Were you even there?”

“Yes . . . and no.”

She looked up. Her need to know was urgent. “Tell me!”

The story he conveyed came in starts and stops, and not always in order. He had been living with the priest because he feared that the police had learned of an army deserter in the area.

“The name ‘Sasha Parsky’ provided the scent I’ve been following to track you down.”

“What does he have to do with you or the murders?”

“They took place at his parents’ farm.”

“I don’t believe you! You must have the wrong Parskys. Besides, the police never told me the name of the family. How would you know?”

“Viktor told me.”

“Viktor Harkov? I don’t believe a word you’ve said. You’ve always been jealous of him.”

“Ask Sasha Parsky. From what I understand you’re living under the same roof.”

A flustered Galina blurted, “But not in the same bed.”

“That no longer matters,” said Petr. “I met a girl in Ukraine, from Kiev. That’s another reason I came looking for you. If I asked for a divorce, the authorities would know I’m alive and my whereabouts. If you divorce me—after all, I’m presumed dead—no one will be any the wiser.”

Distraught, Galina slumped on the couch with her head in her hands, as if trying to keep the tears or the anger from leaking out. He didn’t know which. “Tell me more,” she mumbled. But he merely stared, as he often did in the presence of great emotion. Slowly, Galina raised her head. Only once before had Petr seen the fury in her face bulge the bones in her eye sockets. “Surely, there’s more,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “There always is in a world of murderous hatred.”

Alexander Harkov and Petr had orders to expel the Parskys from their farm. They had been denounced as kulaks. As Galina knew, Petr had come to regret the “expulsion detail” assigned to Alexander and him. It was raining torrents. They—he and Alexander—had stopped at an inn before they reached the Parsky farm. A drunken Martyn Lipnoski, a fellow soldier heading home on leave, had spent the night in that wretched place with a whore . . . who had gone off with his wallet and papers. They greeted their comrade warmly and bought him a drink. In fact, two. He was broke. Alexander even paid to fill Martyn’s flask and offered him a lift in the truck.

The kettle whistled. She poured the water into a mug, and then emptied the contents of the packet. “Here’s your soup,” said Galina, handing him also a tin of biscuits. Although she had brought the soup to a boil, he guzzled it. The biscuits he shoved whole into his mouth, wadding his cheeks, until he could flush them down with the soup. As she watched him voraciously eat, she could feel his hunger, resulting, no doubt, from the priest’s meager stores.

He said that Martyn was delighted to join them, but the closer they came to the Parsky farm, the greater Petr’s apprehension. When they stopped on a ridge above the farm, he exited the truck. Whether owing to the impending expulsion or to some intuition, he couldn’t say, but he stood in the road refusing to get back in the cab. Martyn carelessly offered to change places with him, and Petr gladly accepted. Alexander fumed, told him it could cost him ten years in a work camp, begged him not to do this “stupid thing,” and then drove down the hill in a huff.

Standing in the trees next to the road, he had watched. He knew from the expulsion papers given him and Alexander, the Parskys were elderly, but their farmhand, who must have been an illegal itinerant, looked young. Waiting for the rain to abate, he watched and then ran off in the opposite direction. Surely his eyes had deceived him. What he imagined he’d seen could not have been true. But to go to the farm was out of the question. He was now a deserter and had to find places to hide. That same night, he came to a barn that belonged to a collective. He found a pair of overalls and a coarse woolen shirt, which he exchanged for his uniform, and then continued walking. The back roads teemed with workers who had left their state farms and were heading in every conceivable direction, just so long as that direction did not lead back to Bolshevik control of the land.

A group of men heading to Ukraine invited him to join them. The number of wretched villages and hamlets he passed through were innumerable, and the suffering immeasurable. People had been reduced to cannibalizing their pet animals and even their dead friends and relatives. What he witnessed was a government-made famine, forced starvation, to punish farmers who fiercely resisted the confiscation of their land and livestock. After a year of wandering, he made his way back to Ryazan, where Viktor Harkov temporarily housed him. From Viktor he learned that Sasha Parsky had been at school when the murders occurred.

“You must be mistaken. You have the wrong Sasha Parsky.”

“Not according to Viktor.”

“How would he know? It wasn’t in the police report given to us.”

“He knew there was a son, and he knew his name. That’s how I got here. Maybe you ought to ask Sasha about his parents, and don’t forget the farmhand. Because if you don’t ask him, I will. That’s one of the reasons I returned.”

“Viktor and I,” said Galina, “were led to believe that the family and farmhand simply disappeared.”

“For good reason.”

“You saw it?”

“The rain, the truck, they made it hard to see, but I saw the farmhand bury two bodies, and the same man drove off with the couple.”

“It has to be a different Parsky family.”

“We can easily find out. In the morning, we’ll ask.”

Galina stared into space and mumbled, “Viktor never said anything to me, but then he hasn’t written in ages.”

“As usual, he’s plotting.”

“Vladimir Lukashenko?”

“Yes.”

But Galina’s mind was not on Commissar Lukashenko. It was on Sasha. She never slept a wink that night in anticipation of morning and the opportunity to confront Citizen Parsky. Petr had slept on the couch. Before breakfast, while Galina was asking Sasha questions, he played with Alya. His turn would come later.

No longer able to keep his secret, certainly not while staring into the large puzzled, tearing eyes of Galina, Sasha confessed—and lied—at the same time. “Yes, the murders occurred at my parents’ farm. But I was away at school. So shocked was I by the crime that I volunteered to call on you and Viktor Harkov.”

“Occurred at your parents’ farm?” she dumbly repeated. “Then you must know who the murderer is.”

“All I know is that after I returned to school, my parents were planning to hire one of the free laborers roaming the road to help with the farmwork. A day later the police were questioning me. Me! As if I knew anything. I would have gladly assisted them, but I was as shocked as they . . . as shattered as you.”

“But surely your parents have friends and relatives in other parts of the country. Right?”

“Yes, and I made inquiries, but to no avail.”

“When you first came to see me, you said nothing. Why?”

“I thought it would only increase your suffering.”

“Even though you knew I was desperate for information.”

“And once you learned where the crime had occurred, and that my parents owned the farm, what then? That information leads nowhere.”

Incredulous that this man with whom she’d been sleeping was the son of accomplices to a crime in which two men were killed, one of whom could easily have been her husband, she lashed out sarcastically, “Do your parents always hire killers to work their land? They probably abetted the murderer.”

He bowed his head, occasioning a muteness from Galina worse than her scalding words. Squeezing his eyes closed with such force that his nose wrinkled and his teeth clenched, he wanted to scream at the tangled web he had woven. Where would it end? To prevent discovery of his perfidy, he was leaving his parents unprotected, not only from the law, but also from the calumny of the victims’ relatives. His parents, models of goodness, did not deserve to be thought of as criminals. That he had put them in that position, and that he now found himself suspected by a person he loved of covering up a heinous crime . . . of keeping from her information that she believed could lead to the apprehension of the murderer . . . introduced him to a thousand torments.

Obviously hurt, she challenged him with a question. “How could you have told Viktor and not me?”

“I told him nothing.”

“You must have said something . . . maybe while playing chess, because he knew about you and passed the information to Petr. That’s how Petr found out.”

To persuade her, Sasha would have agreed to trial by ordeal—fire or water or both—but Galina remained convinced that Viktor could have learned about the Parskys and Sasha from only one person, and that person was sitting in front of her at the kitchen table. When he reached across the table, intending to touch her consolingly, she withdrew her hand. Defensively, he allowed that if he were Viktor’s source, she could draw a knife across his throat; and he begged her to prove his innocence by contacting Viktor.

“He goes through moody periods. I suspect he’s in one now.”

Hoping to turn her attention from him to Viktor, he said, “Frankly, Galina, he must be privy to confidential police information, and that worries me. We know that conspiracies in this country are rife. Tell me about this obsession of his with Commissar Lukashenko.”

She rose, looked down at him distrustfully, and replied, “You’ll have to ask Petr.” Then she stiffly strode out of the room, returning to her own quarters.

Through the kitchen window, Sasha could see Petr leading the pony with Alya atop the animal she called Scout. She had taken the reins to show him how well she could ride, turning, stopping, and backing up the horse. With each move, Petr clapped and ostentatiously tipped his hat to celebrate her equestrian achievements. She glowed. When she finally dismounted and came from the stable, they walked hand in hand into the house. Alya clearly adored him. Sasha exited the kitchen and returned to his own room, guessing correctly that Petr would make his daughter a cup of hot chocolate. He could hear Petr telling Alya a story, “The Tale of Stalin’s Barber.”