Legends (45 page)

Kommunisticheskaya called the Commercial Club. In his mind’s eye he could make out the thin figure of a man settling onto the stool next to him. Of medium height with a pinched, mournful face, he wore suspenders that kept his trousers hiked high on his waist, and a midnight blue Italian suit jacket draped cape-like over a starched white shirt, which was tieless and buttoned up to a very prominent Adam’s apple. The initials “S” and “U-Z” were embroidered on the pocket of the shirt. Martin saw himself placing on the burnished mahogany of the bar a Bolshoi ticket that had been torn in half. From a jacket pocket the thin man produced another torn ticket. The two halves matched perfectly.

Moving his lips like a ventriloquist, Samat could be heard mumbling, What took you so long? I was told to expect the cutout to make contact with me here last week.

It takes time to establish a cover, to rent an apartment, to make it seem as if we are meeting by chance.

My uncle Tzvetan wants to see you as soon as possible. He has urgent messages he must send to Langley. He wants assurances he will be exfiltrated if things turn bad. He wants to be sure the people you work for lay in the plumbing for the exfiltration before it is needed.

How do I meet him?

He lives in a village not far from Moscow. It’s called Prigorodnaia. I invite you to his dacha for the weekend. We will tell everyone we were roommates at the Forestry Institute. We studied computer science together, in case anyone should ask.

I don’t know anything about computers.

Except for me, neither does anyone else at Prigorodnaia.

Martin caught sight of the low wooden houses on the edge of the village ahead, each with its small fenced vegetable garden, several with a cow or a pig tethered to a tree. A burly peasant splitting logs on a stump looked up and appeared to freeze. The large axe slipped from his fingers as he gaped at the visitor. He backed away from Martin, as he would from a ghost, then turned and scampered along the path that ended at the small church with paint peeling from its onion domes. Nearing the church, Martin noticed a patch of terrain behind the cemetery that had been leveled and cemented over a great circle had been whitewashed onto the surface blackened by engine exhaust.

An Orthodox priest wearing a washed-out black robe so short it left his bare matchstick-thin ankles and Nike running shoes exposed stood before the doors of the church. He held a minuscule wooden cross high over his head as men and women, alerted by the log splitter, drifted through the village lanes toward the church.

“Is it really you, Jozef?” the priest demanded.

As Martin drew nearer many of the women, whispering to each other, crossed themselves feverishly.

Martin approached the priest. “Has Samat come back to Prigorodnaia?” he asked.

“Come and departed in his helicopter. Donated this cross, fabricated from the wood of the True Cross of Zuzovka, to our church here in Prigorodnaia, where his sainted mother prays daily for his soul. For yours, too.”

“Is he in danger?”

“No more, no less than we were after it was discovered that the planks over the crater in the spur had been removed and the man buried alive had gone missing.”

Martin understood that he was supposed to know what the priest was talking about. “Who protected Samat?” he asked.

“His uncle, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov, the one we call the Oligarkh, protected Samat.”

“And who protected his uncle?”

The priest shook his head. “Organizations too powerful to have their names spoken aloud.”

“And who protected you when you removed the planks over the crater and freed the man buried alive?”

“Almighty God protected us,” said the priest, and he crossed himself in the Orthodox style with his free hand.

Martin looked up at the onion domes, then back at the priest. “I want to talk to Samat’s mother,” he announced, thinking she might be among the women watching from the path.

“She lives alone in the Oligarkb’s dacha,” the priest said.

“Kristyna is a raving lunatic,” said the peasant who had been splitting logs. Crossing themselves again, the other peasants nodded in agreement.

“And where is the Oligarkh, then?” Martin thought to ask.

“Why, none of us can say where the Oligarkh went to when he quit Prigorodnaia.”

“And when did the Oligarkh leave Prigorodnaia?”

“No one knows for sure. One day he was here, struggling down the path near the river on aluminum crutches, his bodyguards following behind, his Borzois dancing ahead, the next the dacha was stripped of its furnishings and echoed with emptiness, and only a single candle burned in a downstairs window during the long winter night.”

Martin started toward the sprawling dacha with the wooden crow’s-nest rising above the white birches that surrounded the house. The peasants blocking the path gave way to let him through; several reached out to touch an arm and a toothless old woman cackled, “Back from the dead and the buried, then.” Gaunt chickens and a rooster with resplendent plumes scrambled out from under Martin’s feet, stirring up fine dust from the path. Drawn by curiosity, the villagers and the priest, still holding aloft the sliver of a cross, trailed after him, careful to keep a respectful distance.

When Martin reached the wooden fence surrounding the Oligarkh’s dacha, he thought he could make out a woman singing to herself. Unlatching the gate and circling around toward the back of the dacha, he stepped carefully through a neatly tended garden, with alternating furrows of vegetables and sunflowers, until he spotted the source of the singing. An old and frail crone, wearing a threadbare shift and walking barefoot, was filling a plastic can with rainwater from a barrel set under a gutter of the dacha. Long scraggly white hair plunged across her pale skin, which was stretched tightly over her facial bones, and she had to stab it away from her eyes when she caught sight of Martin to get a better look at him. “Tzvetan, as always, was correct,” she said. “You will have been better able to survive the winter once the hole was covered with snow, though I was dead set against their burying you before you had eaten your lunch.”

“You know who I am?” Martin asked.

“You didn’t used to ask me silly questions, Jozef. I know you as well as I know my own son, Samat; as well as I knew his father, who hibernated to Siberia during the time of Stalin and never returned. Curious, isn’t it, how our lives were utterly and eternally defined by

Stalin’s whimsical brutality. I knew you would come back, dear Jozef. But what on earth took you so long? I expected you would surely return to Prigorodnaia after the first thaw of the first winter.” The old woman set down her watering can and, taking Martin’s hand in hers, led him across the garden to the back door of the dacha. “You always liked your tea and jam at this hour. You will need a steaming cup to see you through the morning.”

Kristyna pushed through a screen door hanging half off of its hinges and, slipping her soiled feet into a pair of felt slippers, shuffled through a series of deserted rooms to the kitchen, all the while glancing over her shoulder to be sure Martin was still behind her. Using both thin arms, she worked the hand pump until water gushed from the spigot. She filled a blackened kettle and put it to boil on one of the rusting electric plaques set on the gas stove that no longer functioned. “I will fetch your favorite jam from the preserves in the larder of the cellar,” she announced. “Dearest Jozef, don’t disappear again. Promise me?” Almost as if she couldn’t bear to hear him refuse, she pulled up a trap door and, securing it with a dog’s leash, disappeared down a flight of steps.

Martin wandered through the ground floor of the dacha, his footfalls echoing from the bare walls of the empty rooms. Through the sulfur-stained panes of the windows he could make out the priest and his flock of faithful gathered at the fence, talking earnestly among themselves. The double living room with an enormous stone chimney on either end gave onto a study filled with wall-to-wall shelves devoid of books, and beyond that a small room with a low metal field-hospital cot set next to a small chimney filled with scraps of paper and dried twigs waiting to be burned. Half a dozen empty perfume bottles were set out on the mantle. A small pile of women’s clothing was folded neatly on an upside down wooden crate with the words “Ugor-Zhilov” and “Prigorodnaia” stenciled on several of its sides. A dozen or so picture postcards were tacked to the door that led to a toilet. Martin drew closer to the door and examined them. They’d been sent from all over the world. One showed the duty-free shop at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, another the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, a third a bridge spanning the Vltava River in Prague, still another Buckingham Palace in London. The topmost postcard on the door was a photograph of a family walking down a paved country road past two identical clapboard farm houses built very close to each other. Across the road, a weathered barn stood on a small rise, an American eagle crafted out of metal sitting atop the ornate weather vane jutting from the mansard roof. The people pictured on the postcard were dressed in clothing farmers might have worn going to church two hundred years before the men and boys were attired in black trousers and black suit jackets and straw hats, the women and girls were wearing ankle length gingham dresses and laced-up high shoes and bonnets tied under the chin.

Martin pried out the tack with his fingernails and turned over the postcard. There was no date on it; the printed caption identifying the picture on the postcard had been scuffed off with a knife blade, the post office cancellation across the stamp read “fast New York.” “Mama dearest,” someone had written in Russian, “I am alive and well in America the Beautiful do not worry your head for me only keep singing when you weed the vegetable garden which is how I see you in my mind’s eye.” It was signed, “Your devoted S.”

The old woman could be heard calling from the kitchen. “Jozef, my child, where have you gone off to? Come take tea.”

Pocketing the postcard, Martin retraced his steps. In the kitchen the old woman, using a torn apron as a potholder, was filling two cups with an infusion that turned out to have been brewed from carrot peelings because, for her, tea had become too expensive. She settled onto a three-legged milking stool, leaving the only chair in the room for her visitor. Martin pulled it up to the table covered with formica and sat across from her. The woman kept both of her hands clasped around the cracked mug as she summoned memories and gently rocked her head from side to side at the thought of them. Her lidded eyes flitted from one object to another, like a butterfly looking for a leaf on which to settle. “I recall the day Samat brought you back from Moscow, Jozef. It was a Tuesday. Ah, you are surprised. The reason I remember it was a Tuesday is because that was the day the woman from the village came to do laundry she was too terrified to use the electric washing machine Samat brought from GUM and scrubbed everything in a shallow reach of the river. You and Samat had been roommates in a school somewhere, so he said when he introduced you to his uncle’s entourage. Later, Tzvetan took you aside and asked you question after question about things I did not comprehend what in the world is an exfiltration? You do remember the Oligarkh, Jozef? He was a very angry man.”

Martin thought he could hear the angry voice of an older man raging against the regime as he lurched back and forth on aluminum crutches before people too cowed to interrupt. My grandfather was executed during the 1929 collectivization, my father was shot to death in a field gone to weed in 1933, both were found guilty by itinerant tribunals of being kulaks. Do you know who kulaks were, Jozef? For the Soviet scum, they were the so-called’ rich peasants who wanted to sabotage Stalin’s program to collectivize agriculture and drive the peasants onto state farms. Rich my ass. Kulaks were farmers who owned a single pair of leather shoes, which would last a lifetime because they were only worn inside church. My grandfather, my father would walk to and from church wearing peasant shoes made of woven reeds, what we calledlapti, and put on their leather shoes when they crossed the threshold. Because they owned a pair of leather shoes, my grandfather and my father were branded enemies of the people and shot. Perhaps now you understand why I wage one-man war against Mother Russia. I will never forgive the Soviets or their heirs…

Martin looked across the table at the old woman sipping her infusion. “I remember him saying something about leather shoes,” he said.

The woman brightened. “He told the story to every newcomer to the dacha how his grandfather and father had been executed by the Soviets because they owned leather shoes. It could have been true, mind you. Then, again, it could have been imagined. Those who lived through the Stalinist era can never get out of it. Those who were born afterward can never get in. You are too young to know the Soviet states greatest secret why everyone spent their waking hours applauding Stalin. I shall educate you: It is because the walls in the new apartment buildings were insulated with felt, which left the rooms well heated but infested with clothes moths. Our indoor sport was to clap our hands and kill them in mid flight. We kept score on any given evening the one with the most cadavers was declared to be the winner. Ah,” the woman added with a drawn out sigh, “all that is spilt milk. Samat and Tzvetan, they are both of them gone from here now.”

“And where have they gone to?” Martin asked softly.

The old woman smiled sadly. “They have gone to earth they have hibernated into holes in the frozen ground.”

“And in what country are these holes in the ground?”

She gazed out a window. “I was studying piano at the conservatory when my husband, Samat’s father, was falsely accused of being an enemy of the people and sent to Siberia.” She held her fingers up and examined them; Martin could see that the palms of her hands were cracking from dryness and her nails were broken and filthy. “My husband for the moment his name slips my mind; it will surely come back to me my husband was a medical doctor, you see. He never returned from Siberia, though Tzvetan, who made inquiries after the death of Koba, whom you know as Stalin, heard tales from returning prisoners about his brother running a clinic in a camp for hardened criminals, who paid him with crusts of stale bread.”