Peotor and Aleksandr Merhum stood to the right of me coffin along with a plump woman with a pretty round face and an ancient nun whose eyes never left the coffin. In the crowd, close to the front of the congregation, stood two more of the men who had met Karpo and Rostnikov at the train station. Vadim Petrov, the burly farmer, stood on the right of me mayor, who tried not to fidget. A woman, who seemed to be the mayor’s twin and was probably his wife, kept nudging him to stand erect.
The thin, bearded priest who conducted the ritual appeared to be no more than forty. He incensed the body, sang prayers, and placed a paper and candle in the dead hands. Then, amid a great deal of weeping, Father Merhum’s family, even the boy, and the ancient nun kissed the hands and forehead of the dead man.
Peotor Merhum, however, did not weep, nor did he smile or pretend. His face was solemn, but he seemed to be thinking of a chore that had to be done somewhere far away.
When the family was finished, the congregants and visitors lined up to kiss the corpse. The little girl with corn-gold hair was held up by a woman who could have been her mother or grandmother. The girl looked at the dead priest and then at Emil Karpo as if there must be some connection between these two frightening pale figures.
When the line of mourners ended, two men stepped forward. The candle was removed from the hands of the corpse and the two men laid the coffin lid over the body and hammered in the nails. The echo of their hammers brought a new round of wailing.
When the priest who had conducted the ceremony disappeared, the old nun moved through the crowd, touching hands, kissing, and consoling. When she reached Emil Karpo, who had not moved during the entire ceremony, she said, “Policeman?” Though she was old, her skin was barely wrinkled. Her back was straight and her voice steady. Her black habit made her face look round.
“Yes,” he said.
“I am Sister Nina. Come with me.”
She turned and walked to the entrance of the church. Karpo caught up to her and walked at her side. Behind them the mourners continued to hover around the coffin.
“I watched you,” she said.
Karpo had not seen her lift her eyes from the coffin, but he did not doubt her, especially when she added, “Something touched you.”
He did not answer as they moved down the steps, through the people gathered outside the church, waiting to see the coffin. Something had happened to Karpo during the funeral. Perhaps it was the heat of the small church, but in the midst of a prayer sung by the congregation he had felt an impulse either to weep or to join the song. It had passed quickly, but it had been there and it had been like nothing he could remember.
No, wait. He had felt like this before. When?
“You are trying to remember something,” the nun said as they reached the street and headed toward the woods.
Karpo said nothing as they passed small houses and a few shops that were closed in mourning.
“You wonder how I know,” she said. “You are not used to people understanding you. It makes you uncomfortable.”
“Uncomfortable? No. Curious perhaps.”
“Come this way.” She stepped onto a paved pathway between two houses spaced further apart than the others they had passed. “The house is this way, just beyond those trees.”
As they moved along the path an animal scuttled through the bushes.
“I have spent a lifetime watching people during services. Almost all nuns have an intuition. You are a particularly difficult person to feel.”
Karpo followed the woman silently. They walked for about ten minutes through the woods until they came to an old house.
“Here,” she said.
He followed her through the gate.
“It was there he died in my arms,” she said, pointing to the path just inside the gate.
Karpo looked at the path and saw nothing. He followed her through the unlocked door into the house.
“I’ll make us tea. Wait here, please,” she said, and moved into the next room.
The walls of the room in which he stood were covered with icons. One depicted a man in a striped prison uniform. The man was gaunt and pale, more pale than Karpo, but similar enough to be his brother.
“You are looking at the icon of Saint Maximilian Kolbe,” the nun called from the other room. “Everyone who comes here is drawn to it. The Catholic pope canonized him four years ago.”
Her voice was closer. Karpo turned to watch her enter the room and gesture at one of the five chairs that circled the room. The chairs, all wooden, straight-backed, and armless, faced a plain wooden table in the center of the room. On it stood a brass candle holder.
The austerity of the room suited Karpo and he felt comfortable as he sat facing the nun.
“The tea will be ready soon,” she said.
“Maximilian Kolbe,” Karpo said.
“Ah,” said the nun with a smile. “One of Father Merhum’s favorites. He was a Polish Catholic priest who exchanged places with a Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz during the war. The prisoner escaped, dressed as a priest, and Father Kolbe perished.”
Sister Nina smiled, and Karpo suddenly remembered when he had felt the way he did in the church. When he was a boy of ten, he had gone to his first party meeting in the gymnasium near his house. The massive banners with the red star and hammer and sickle had draped the wall behind the makeshift stage flanked by massive paintings, Lenin on the right and Stalin on the left. The room had been crowded and his father had been excited and had looked down at him with pride. People had smoked and talked until a trio of speakers had stepped forward. There was wild applause.
Then the three had spoken. With conviction and power they had spoken of the revolution, of the new world to come, of sacrifices and discipline. Emil Karpo had not understood it all, but he had been seized by it, by the cheers, the deep voices, the paintings, the banners. It had given his life meaning, a dedication to the party that had been torn from him in the past months.
“You remembered,” she said.
“I remembered,” he admitted.
A hissing came from the kitchen and the nun rose. “A moment,” she said.
Karpo willed the memory to go away, but it would not obey. He remembered vividly the worn pants of his father, and the man who stood to their right at that meeting, a cigarette dangling from his lips, his few teeth showing. The cap upon his head. He even remembered that his own palms had grown moist and that he had known that everyone in the hall felt as he did. He had been certain they were all of a single mind, a family united by communism.
The old nun returned with two cups and handed one to Karpo. The cups were brown, simple and large. The nun settled back in her chair across from the policeman.
“I wish to ask you some questions,” he said.
“What would you like to know?”
“Father Merhum, who might want to kill him? Who is Oleg?”
“Yes,” she said. “His last words to me. It was none of the Olegs who live in Arkush.”
“You are sure?”
“Yes,” she said.
“How can you be sure?”
“The Oleg from whom Father Merhum sought forgiveness is with our Lord. I can say no more.”
Karpo took one sip of the strong, hot tea and put the saucer and cup on the floor. “How long did you work with Father Merhum?”
“I have served him and our Lord for the past fifteen years,” she said. She had not drunk her tea, though she continued to look into it from time to time and to touch the rim of the cup with a tentative fingertip.
“And before you came?”
“Father Merhum’s life was inseparable from the history of our church. Have you time?”
“I have time,” he said.
“In 1917, when I was two years old,” she began as if she were a Gypsy reading the images that appeared in the steaming cup she cradled in her hands, “before your revolution, there were over a thousand monasteries and nunneries in Russia. There were also more than eighty thousand Orthodox churches. Today there are seventy-five hundred.