“What is the book?” asked Nina, standing next to the bed where Porfiry Petrovich was packing his suitcase.
Nina was eight years old and for the first two months she and her twelve-year-old sister, Laura, had lived with the Rostnikovs she had said nothing. Now, still very serious and thin, she was explosive with questions about everything.
“It is a book about policemen,” Rostnikov said.
The girl shook her head knowingly, her hands clasped behind her back, her body twisting slowly from side to side.
“Russian policemen?” she asked. “Like you?”
“American policemen,” he said. “In a place called Isola.”
He finished filling his bag, looked down, and removed the Ed McBain paperback novel Jigsaw and placed it in his pocket. It was badly dog-eared. He had read it three times over the past decade and looked forward to returning to it. He closed the suitcase.
“You are ready?” Nina asked.
“I am ready,” he said, straightening up and looking at her.
“My grandmother says you are going to Siberia,” she said. “What did you do wrong?”
“Many things,” he said. “Many things. But I am going to find a criminal. I will be back in a few days. I’m going on the Trans-Siberian Express.”
“What is that?”
“The greatest train in the world,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Almost six thousand miles long, the longest continuous railroad in the world. They began building it from Moscow and from Vladivostok in Siberia on the Sea of Japan in 1891.”
“Two places?”
“They met at a bridge in Khabarovsk in 1916. I’ll show you on the map. It is one of the world’s greatest accomplishments, one of Russia’s greatest triumphs. Thousands of miles of track had to be built and rebuilt. It cost more than a trillion rubles.”
“How much is that?”
“If you take rubles and piled them on top of each other, a trillion would reach almost to the space station.”
“The space station is as high as a star,” the girl said in awe.
“Not that high, but high enough. The train goes over hundreds of bridges and through almost a hundred tunnels, traveling at one hundred and twelve miles an hour between stops.”
“You’ve been on it’ many times,” she said.
“Never before,” answered Rostnikov, trying to think if he had forgotten something.
“Can I go with you?”
“Perhaps another time,” he said. “Perhaps when you are grown you can go with your husband.”
“I am not married,” she said seriously.
“Perhaps you will be,” he said, satisfied that he could think of nothing further to pack. “Let us go in with the others.”
“I am not going to get married,” the girl said. “I am going to be a foot doctor.”
“A noble ambition,” he said, taking her hand. “You can be my foot doctor.”
“I’ll only charge you half,” she said. “Because you have only one foot.”
“Most generous and fair. Maybe your sister will become an engineer and she can work on my other foot.”
“She wants to be a plumber,” Nina said as they moved through the bedroom door into the living room-dining room area. “Like you.
“An equally noble ambition,” said Rostnikov.
Sarah, Galina, and Laura were seated at the table. The adults had said nothing to the children about the meeting with their mother.
Sarah Rostnikov was talking about a concert they would be going to while he was gone. They had an extra ticket. Sarah’s cousin, Leon the doctor, was appearing with his quartet. Leon played piano, had a particular passion for Mozart, and made lots of money in his practice catering to those who could afford his services and held the widespread and almost mystical belief that Jewish doctors were far better than those who were not. Rostnikov was not a fan of classical music though he went dutifully to such concerts and found that he could lose himself in a dreamy, open-eyed meditation almost approaching the near-nirvana he felt when he lost himself in the pragmatic magic of a plumbing problem.
Sarah looked up at him and smiled. He nodded to show that he was packed. Sarah was still a beauty. Her natural and shiny red hair had grown out following her surgery and she had regained some but far from all of her former plumpness. Her pale smooth skin was a bit more pale than he thought looked healthy, but she’d survived. Except for the frequent headaches, Sarah had recovered enough to go back to work at the Dom music shop on a half-time basis.
Not for the first or thousandth time, Rostnikov thanked whatever gods might be (or common genetic chance) that their son had turned out to look like his mother. Porfiry Petrovich was not ugly, but he knew that he possessed the flat, homely face common to millions of Russians descended from dozens of generations of peasants. He was comfortable with his face, the face of his own father, and his body, the compact solid body that had earned him the nickname of “the Washtub.”
“The cake is good,” said Laura, who bore a resemblance to her mother even more striking than Iosef’s to Sarah.
“Your grandmother is the giver of all cakes and cookies,” he said. “Look at me. I have grown fat with the sweets she brings home from the bakery.”
“You are not fat,” Nina said, touching his stomach. “You are round and strong and have a plastic leg.”
“Thank you,” said Rostnikov.
There were five chairs at the table. Three matched. The other two did not. One of the solid metal chairs with the slightly padded seat was always left open for Porfiry Petrovich, who had learned from experience that the last few inches before he hit a chair with a slight thud could do great damage to a wooden chair. He had destroyed two of them and taken falls that would have embarrassed him had anyone but Sarah been present when they happened.
There was a mug in front of his place, his Dostoyevsky mug, white, with a drawing of Fyodor on the side. Dostoyevsky had been the favorite author of Porfiry Petrovich’s father. Porfiry Petrovich was, in fact, the name of the lawyer in Crime and Punishment to whom Raskolnikov eventually confesses. It was a name that played at least a small part in Rostnikov’s becoming a policeman when he got out of the army. He had been a child soldier. He had lost the use of his leg to a German tank outside of Rostov.
Sarah poured hot coffee into his mug and Rostnikov nodded thanks.
“Are you going to do the weights?” Laura asked.
It was one of the high points of the girls’ day. Rostnikov would solemnly open the cabinet under the television and CD/cassette player, pull out his bench and heavy rings of weights, turn on something by Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, or Ella Fitzgerald, and in his black gym shorts and one of his sweat shirts with the sleeves cut off, he would do curls, presses, and crunches with appropriate grunts and sprays of sweat. His favorite shirt was a black one with the words “The Truth Is Out There” in white letters across the front.
The girls would watch, sitting on the floor, enthralled by the spectacle of the powerful one-legged man turning red, the veins of his muscles expanding in purple bands.
“Yes,” Rostnikov said. “Very soon.”
Tonight he would wear his Chicago Bulls red sweat shirt, his second favorite. He would do his regular routine, shower, dress, call the cab, and then pick up Sasha and head for the train station.
“Which way is Siberia?” asked Nina.
“Toward the rising sun,” said Rostnikov.
“I had a dream about the sun,” Laura said.
They all looked at the girl.
“In the dream,” she said, “the sun faded away slowly, so slowly you couldn’t be sure it was disappearing.”
“Were you frightened?” Rostnikov asked with great interest.
“No,” she said. “It was in no hurry and neither was I, and something or someone said ‘Don’t worry.’ I think it was you.”
“It was,” said Rostnikov. “I have been thinking about the sun.”
Galina looked at him, remembering the conversation in the Paris Café with her daughter and Rostnikov’s curious comments about the sun.