Sergei asked them to give him the shiv, but that was impossible, because it had been made physical evidence, and so he never even saw it.
Semion was arrested two days later. He was accused of twenty-six murders, three of them involving rape. He confessed to his “own,” but denied and refused to admit to the others. But it had already been decided on high that all the militia’s “cold cases” be hung on him. They gave him the death penalty, which was implemented a half-year later. No appeal was entered, and no psychiatric testing was performed . . .
Part Four
1
EVERY TIME ZHENYA STOPPED IN FRONT OF THE DOOR OF the apartment where she had spent her childhood she experienced the most complex of emotions: affection, anger, melancholy, and tenderness. The door was battered and chipped, the bronze plate with her deceased grandfather’s surname was tarnished. Alongside the door, to the neighbors’ aggravation, stood a broken chair piled high with sacks stuffed with Toma’s crap. It reeked of destitution and a communal apartment.
Zhenya had not had keys since they changed the old lock. It just happened that way: they hadn’t taken her key away, they just forgot to give her a new one. Zhenya asked once, but they ignored her request . . . She rang the bell. Toma hobbled down the corridor, tapping with her cane. The poor thing’s arthritis had flared up again.
“Zhenechka, is that you?”
She opened the door. And gasped. “How round you’ve got!”
Mikhail Fedorovich—smelling of Chypre aftershave, sweat, and, for some reason, old leather—peeked out of Granny’s room. “How unfair I am toward them after all,” she reproached herself. “They don’t stink on Sundays. They take baths on Saturdays.”
Zhenya’s inner smile showed slightly on her lips.
“How are you, Mikhail Fedorovich?”
All the time he had served in the army, he had always greeted his senior officers first. Now, in civilian life where there were no lieutenant colonels, he decided as he saw fit whom he was supposed to greet first—the director, the deputy director for operations (not the deputy director for research), and the head of the polyclinic he was assigned to . . .
Mikhail Fedorovich nodded with self-importance, “. . . day.” With no name. And remained standing in the doorway. Which was unusual.
Zhenya removed her shoes, bending over her stomach first from the right side, then from the left. With a sense of repugnance she put on some old, crudely stitched house slippers and set off down the corridor to Granny’s room. Toma stopped her.
“Zhen, we’ve done some rearranging. Rozina’s relatives gave us their big bookcase. It didn’t fit in there, so we had to put it in here . . . Mikhail Fedych’s collection fit perfect, so we moved Granny to Vasilisa’s room . . .”
The blood rushed to Zhenya’s head. By hook or by crook. They’d chucked Grandma out into the pantry.
“What do you mean?” Zhenya’s chin trembled with rage. Mikhail Fedorovich’s collection was mind-boggling idiocy: newspaper and magazine cuttings about aviation . . .
“What difference does it make to her? She didn’t even notice. It’s peaceful and quiet in there. We took out Vasilisa’s chest and put a table in. She can eat there too. Vasilisa, rest her soul, always ate there.”
Mikhail Fedorovich remained standing in the door of Granny’s room ready to step in at any moment.
Zhenya held back and said nothing. She went to the kitchen without even looking into the room that last week had been her granny’s and would always be Granny’s . . .
She walked through the kitchen and opened the pantry. They had not changed anything in there since Vasilisa’s death. There were the two large icons she had known since childhood, the Mother of Kazan and an Elijah the Prophet that had been either rent by a Red Army ax in times immemorial or had split from age, with a crude seam of glue running down the flying red mantle and separating it from the swarthy hand . . . So where are you now, all you helpless helpers?
Granny was sitting on a bentwood chair with a hole cut through the seat, her face toward the tiny window that looked out onto a solid brick wall. A bucket stood under the chair. The pantry smelled of urine and aged infirmity. One gray cat slept on the blanket that covered the trestle bed. Elena Georgievna held a second on her lap, her fingers with their unevenly trimmed nails lying on the cat’s striped side.
Zhenya kissed her thinning hair with the two wisps at the temples, where young Lenochka had used to stick bobby pins. The old woman stroked the cat’s side.
“Hi, Babulya. Why did you . . .” Zhenya began agonizingly, because she knew that it would be better for her to keep silent in this shameful, intolerable situation. “We’re going to take a bath now . . .”
The old woman silently stroked her on the hand. In the kitchen water was flowing and knives were chopping. Toma and her husband divided everything in half, the housework included. They peeled the four potatoes in pairs: two for him, two for her. For reasons of family fairness.
Zhenya headed for the bathroom. As she passed through the kitchen she noticed that Toma and Mikhail Fedorovich were now sorting the buckwheat—they’d finished with the potatoes.
The bathroom was, as always, beyond description. Wet laundry hung on lines. Saturday was bath day. Half the day they prepared, and half the day they washed. And then they relaxed—with tea, candies, and ginger cookies. A patriarchal family scene. Everything totally serious. On Sunday morning, before Zhenya’s arrival, the week’s laundry was done in the tiny washing machine Mikhail Fedorovich had bought for the needs of his small family. He was squeamish, and washing Granny’s nasty linen in the machine was not allowed.
Zhenya pulled a washbasin out from under the old footed bathtub. From the zinc container with the bent lid she pulled out shabby rags and pieces of sheets, all of them damp and soiled. The disposable diapers she used to buy had gone unused: Toma thought that they were synthetic, and Mikhail Fedorovich did not tolerate synthetics. Zhenya had stopped bringing anything into the apartment for Granny long ago: Toma would immediately take away anything new, saying: “Oh, Zhen, what a swell nightshirt this is: good enough to get buried in . . .”
At moments like this Zhenya did not know whom to pity more: Granny, who had shattered her own psyche so as not to notice what she could not battle, or Aunt Toma with her mousy snout and arthritis-stiff knee, happy with her marriage, proud of her past, present, and the future toward which she was making slow but steady progress. She was writing her candidate’s dissertation on the viral infections of her evergreens and considered herself the spiritual successor of her famous mentor, Pavel Alekseevich Kukotsky. That might possibly have been the case . . .
Zhenya sorted the pile on the stool-bench, where she would sit Granny for her bath. Old washbasins, one inside the other, jars, and raggedy loofahs. How close-fisted they were . . .
Turning her nose aside, she soaked Granny’s rags in the largest basin and pushed it under the bathtub. After the bath would come laundry. She cleaned out the bathtub. The faucets dripped, and water collected under the tub. Everything was shabby, but cleverly fixed to get by. Mikhail Fedorovich was a genius when it came to tying clotheslines, twisting wires, filling holes, and making patches. Wonder what he did in aviation?
At long last, everything was ready. The water was a bit hotter than needed. It would cool down while she got Granny ready. At the last minute she dripped some shampoo into the water. To make foam. Toma never used anything that Zhenya brought into the house. She and Mikhail Fedorovich did not use shampoo: they couldn’t stand anything foreign. Patriots they were. Not soap, not medicine, not clothing. Their line for everything was “ours, made in the . . .” How pathetic . . .