“What have you been thinking?” Laura asked.
“That it is a miracle,” he said; “That if mankind has anything to worship, it is the sun. The ancient religions were right. We owe all to the sun. But the sun does not need our worship. It does not think. It simply is. Just enough of it means life. Too much exposure is dangerous.”
“I do not understand,” said Nina.
Rostnikov looked at Sarah, who smiled.
“Nor do I,” said Porfiry Petrovich. “Nor do I.”
“Are you going to do the weights now?” asked Laura.
“As soon as I finish my coffee,” he said.
The weights were round like the sun and the full moon. There was a wholeness to the circle. The circle Director Yaklovev had given him was not whole. It was not bright, a flawed icon. There was much he had not been told about his mission and much he had been told that rang of Russian fairy tale more than the reality of three hundred pounds of weights on a steel bar.
“Are you going to be in the weight-lifting contest in the park? Grandmother says you are.”
“I am,” Rostnikov said, removing the bench, bar, and weights from the cabinet under the television in the living room.
“Will you win?” Nina asked.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But there are other strong men in Moscow, many, and they do things to help them win.”
“Like what?” Laura asked as he slid the weights onto the bar.
“Take pills, herbs they think will make them stronger, legal pills,” he said, making sure the weights were balanced.
“Is that fair?” asked Nina.
“It is legal,” he said, getting next to the weight and lifting it so that he could set it atop the bracket at the end of the bench.
“What else do they do? To win?” asked Laura.
“When the judge claps his hand, the competitor must lift,” he said, lying on his back. “If one is watching the judge, one can begin an instant before the hands come together and have a fraction of a second more for the lift.”
He was reaching for the bar now, looking at the weights on either side.
“Do you do these things?” asked Laura.
“No,” said Rostnikov.
“You do not want to win?” the girl pressed.
“Yes, I want to win,” he said, “but I want to win knowing that I have followed the rules, my rules. If I do not, there is no pleasure in winning, simply a trophy which I do not feel I deserve. You understand?”
“Yes,” said the girl. “I think.”
“Good,” said Rostnikov, gripping the bar. “Now, when you are ready, clap your hands.”
Misha Lovski, the truly Naked Cossack, tapped his forehead on the steel bars to the driving beat of his own voice and guitar being played at concert volume.
He could feel the vibrations when he put his hands to the walls or wrapped them around the bars. The music had been playing for hours. He didn’t know how many hours. It might even have been days. He had tried to sleep but the bright lights and pounding music made it impossible.
He sang along with himself now.
Keep the clubs beating faster.
Keep the fists driving harder.
Drive them back against the wall.
Nail the fuckers one and all.
If you don’t kill them, they’ll kill you.
Do it to them before they do it to you.
You know who they are. Line up along the street.
Pull it out and beat your meat.
Slam the running slant-eyed freaks.
Smash the screaming Jewish beaks.
Ram the rotten queers and geeks.
Shout like Cossacks as they fall.
Then have a pint of blood alcohol.
His voice was almost gone. All that came out was a hoarse croak. He had cried and laughed, huddled in the corner with his mattress. He had crapped and pissed in the plastic bucket, using torn-up sheets of old newspaper that had been left for him. With his fingers he had eaten what they had given him, though he had no idea what the brown mush in the bowl was, something like meat mixed with kasha. And they had given him just enough water, also in a pot.
Like a trained monkey he had learned that when the lights went out and the music stopped, the door to the room beyond his cage would open, revealing nothing, and he would be expected to put out his bowls, which would be replaced by others.
He had tried to talk to the person whose footsteps he heard. He had tried each time.
“What do you want?” he had demanded the first time. “Money? Call my father. He’ll pay. Just get it done.”
No answer. Just a door closing. The next time it was, “Get me something to wear, you bastard, you gol-uboy, queer fucking bastard.”
No answer. Just a door closing. Then, after hours of light and blaring music, “Leave the lights on. Keep the music coming. It gives me something to do, something to sing and beat.”
No answer. Just a door closing. The last time it had been but his hoarse croak, “Turn it off. No more light. No more music. If I don’t get some sleep, you will kill me.”
No answer, so he added, “The hell with you. Drive me mad. Drive me crazy. I will go okhvet, nuts, but I will emerge a mad genius, more popular than ever, and I will find you and beat your head in with my guitar, drag you on stage and beat you till your putrid blood and brains run and smell. See, you inspire me. I have just written the words to a new song. I will call it ‘Surviving the Cage.’”
This time, just before the door closed, he heard a sound in the darkness, perhaps a laugh. It wasn’t much but he held onto it, tried to place it. But before he could, the lights were on and he heard his own voice screaming over the speaker, “Kill your mother. Kill your father. You never asked them to be born.”
He reached through the bars for the cracked metal bowl of brown mush and the cup of warm water. As he ate, he rocked his head. He knew it was only a matter of time before he was completely mad. The problem was that he did not know how much time had passed.
He stopped rocking. An idea had come. A project. Something to keep him busy. Yes. He smiled and looked beyond the bars at the far wall behind which he was certain they were watching him.
He touched the fuzz of his growing beard, leaving a stigma of brown mush, and smiled cunningly toward the wall.
The Naked Cossack had a plan.
Chapter Seven
Zelach had dined with his mother in their small apartment which she kept impeccably neat and clean, smelling and looking like something from a different era, a different place. The place it looked like was an apartment in Voronezh south of Moscow, near the Ukrainian border. Zelach’s mother had been born there, a gypsy who did not look like one and who escaped to marry a slow-witted but decent Moscovite policeman who thought her quite beautiful. Akardy Zelach had been born six months after they had married. She had never, to this very day, told him of his gypsy blood. There was no reason to do so. The boy had looked like his father the moment he was brought painfully into the world.
Zelach’s mother loved her son and worried about him. He had talents but no great intellect. He was a follower, and when she died she wondered whom he might follow.
They ate boiled potatoes, thick fish soup, and bread with water.
“I must work tonight,” he said as he ate.
“I know,” she said.
He had not told her before this moment, but her comment did not surprise him. She almost always knew when he had to work, when his mind was on something other than the meal or the television screen. She usually knew what he was thinking. This did not disturb him. It was reassuring.
The words to one of the Naked Cossacks songs kept running through his head: