“Are you hungry?” the child asked.
“Very,” he said. “Let us find something to eat.”
In the morning the sun was shining and the snow had stopped falling. Vendors, packed in layers of clothes, looking like ragged Marioshki dolls, set up their tables near the metro stations selling kvas, chestnuts, crinkly cellophane packages of American corn chips. People passed. The world was white. The ponds in the parks would be almost frozen by now.
There was a wariness held in deep check, the recollection of a bombing that kept some of the vendors out of the underground pedestrian tunnels that carried swarms of shuffling people under the broad streets. After the bomb, people had braved the dangers of reckless drivers rather than go where they might be trapped by explosion. Now, more were going through the echoing tunnels.
Viktor Dalipovna had called in to his office and said he would not be coming in that day and possibly the next and possibly the one after that.
He had taken the metro, gone through a pedestrian tunnel, and walked many blocks. He could have gotten closer, but he wanted time to think, the cold air, the tingle that should slap at his cheeks and make him truly understand the reality of what had happened to his daughter.
They had given him an address, actually a street where a neighborhood police station was tucked between an old gray five-story office building and a garage. The station was on a small side street. Viktor had lived all of his fifty-five years in Moscow but remembered no police station here.
There were many things he had not noticed in his lifetime.
The station was dark. Uniformed young men who did not look old enough to shave stood inside the doors with automatic weapons. People, mostly policemen talking to each other, moved by him, ignoring him.
Viktor moved to an old desk behind which sat a man with pockmarked face, a heavy man with gray-black hair and a uniform with a collar so tight it turned his exposed neck into a line of taut ridges. The man’s face was red and he wheezed slightly when he spoke.
“My name is Viktor Dalipovna,” he said. “My daughter is here. I was told I could come.”
The man behind the desk looked up at him with disapproval and then down at a list on the desk. Viktor could see names, some of them lined out, some open, others underlined in red.
“Room seven,” the man at the desk said, filling out a small rectangular form and handing it to him. “That way.”
Viktor took the sheet and moved past the flow of policemen. The station smelled of age and decay. He found room seven, knocked, and a voice called, “Enter.”
Viktor opened the door and found himself in a very small, dirty white room with a wooden table. On the other side of the table his daughter Inna sat, her hands handcuffed together awkwardly because of the white cast on her right wrist. Next to her sat a man who looked at Viktor and pointed to a wooden bench facing himself and Inna.
Viktor sat, keeping his eyes on his daughter.
“I am Inspector Iosef Rostnikov of the Office of Special Investigation,” Iosef said.
“Yes,” said Viktor, hardly glancing at the tired-looking young man. “You were on the television. The policewoman. The one Inna … is she? …”
“She will be well,” said Iosef.
Inna looked at her father. He saw nothing in her eyes, no emotion, no fear, anger. Perhaps a quiet resignation.
“You have ten minutes,” Iosef said.
“Can we be alone?” Viktor asked.
“No,” said Iosef. “I am sorry.”
Viktor turned to his daughter and reached out to touch her manacled hands. She neither responded nor pulled away. Her hands were cold. Or perhaps it was his hands which were cold.
“Inna,” he said. “Do you really hate me so much?”
“I do not hate you, Poppa,” the woman said flatly.
At that moment, and just for a moment, Inna reminded Viktor of his dead wife, Inna’s mother at the very end when she had decided to ignore what remained of her life and those who had been a part of it.
“Then why?” he asked.
“I love you, Poppa,” she said. “And I hate you. I want to kill you, to make you see me as a person, not as a pathetic child, a sick child. But I do not want you to die. You want to know why?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Because I am afraid of being alone. I am afraid you will go with my mother and leave me alone. I hate you for that and I hate her because she might come and take you. I am afraid and I hate her and you.”
“Have I been that bad to you?”
“You have not been anything to me at all,” she said. “I am your burden. I clean and cook and shop and I do not exist.”
“We talk,” he said.
“You talk,” she said. “I pretend to listen.”
“But to kill people, Inna?”
She looked away and said, “They say I am crazy. I hear them. The doctor last night. She said I was crazy, but she did not use that word. They are going to put me in a crazy house, Poppa. Who will make your meals, do your shopping?”
“That is not important, Inna,” he said.
She pulled her hands away from his touch.
“Not important? It has been the only meaning my life has had and now you say it is not important?” she said, showing not anger but pain.
“I did not mean-” he tried.
She started to rise but the young inspector put his hand gently on her arm and guided her back into her chair. Inna closed her eyes.
“I will get a lawyer,” Viktor said. “Kolya in my office, who handles our contracts. He knows lawyers.”
“You will be alone now, Poppa,” she said, so softly that he was not sure if she had spoken or he had only imagined her voice.
“Inna-” he started.
“I want to go back now,” she said, turning to Iosef.
Iosef nodded and rose. Inna Dalipovna rose too and looked at her father. He sat, unable to rise, frozen by the look on the face of his daughter. She was smiling, not the smile of happiness or the calm smile of feeling alive, but a smile of satisfaction.
In the morning the sun was shining and the snow had stopped falling, but he no longer cared. The Naked Cossack would have cared, but he was no longer the Cossack. His father had taken care of that. He was no longer Misha Lovski. He had renounced that. He was no one.
He had been informed that his brother had been treated by a doctor and would be well. He did not care. Songs did not run through his mind. There were no causes. There was just his father, who sat there.
He sat across the breakfast table in the dacha, cleaned and scrubbed, in new casual clothes, a plate of food before him which he did not look at.
“You feeling better, Misha?” Nikoli Lovski asked.
“Better than what?”
“Better than you did yesterday, Misha,” Nikoli said, working on his coffee.
“Better? Of course. You locked me in a cage, tried to drive me insane, took away my identity. How could I not be better?”
“Misha …” Nikoli Lovski began calmly.
“Do not call me that,” he said.
“What shall I call you?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Call me nothing.”
“You are not nothing,” said his father with a sigh, putting down his coffee cup. “You are an educated young man, a Jew, a member of my family, an important family. You can have a great deal, be someone important.”
“Nothing,” the young man said. “I want nothing. I am nothing.”
“Would you like to go to South America?” Nikoli said.
“I embarrass you here,” was the reply.
“Yes, you do, but that is not the reason I want you to go to Chile. You can start your life again. We have a television station there. You can work, be something.”
“I was a cossack,” he said angrily.
“You were never a cossack,” his father answered. “You are a Jew. The cossacks would stomp on you with their boots and leave you with your insides steaming on the street without giving it a thought.”
“And so I am nothing,” he answered.