Tatiana

The cottage of Ludmila Petrovna had, perhaps, been a carriage house before the war. Although bricks had half disintegrated to rust-colored sand and tape crisscrossed the windows, the house preserved a faint imprint of Koenigsberg style in a neighborhood of grim architecture and small shops selling CDs and cut-rate travel. Arkady and Maxim opened the gate to a vegetable garden where sunflowers peered over the wall, fat tomatoes drooped from wooden stakes and eggplants lay fat and lazy on the ground.

  When Ludmila didn’t answer her doorbell, Maxim tossed pebbles up against a window. Arkady saw no lights inside but the window creaked open and a woman hung a cage with a canary. She wore a scarf babushka style, gardening gloves and wraparound dark glasses, and she teased the bird for fluffing up in the cold.

  “Always complaining, always looking for sympathy. Just like our old friend Maxim. Always the center of attention.”

  “Hello, Ludmila,” Maxim said.

  “And with a disreputable friend,” she added when Arkady introduced himself.

  “I’m sorry about your sister.”

  “Then I’m sure you have some scheme to make money out of her death. You and Obolensky, so ready to make her a martyr.”

  “Did you identify Tatiana Petrovna’s body?” Arkady asked.

  “From a photograph. There was no use going to Moscow.”

  Maxim said, “Ludmila is sensitive to light. It makes traveling difficult.”

  “Didn’t you want to identify her body?”

  “The picture was enough.”

  “Weren’t you concerned with what happened to her body?”

  “Frankly, I’m more concerned about my body.”

  “Did you ask to have her cremated?”

  A minute before the rain had almost stopped; now it was drumming. Arkady heard the bustle of the market beyond the garden wall as racks were pulled under cover. Anyone else would have invited Arkady and Maxim in.

  “Poor Juliet is getting wet.” She stroked the canary under its beak. “They don’t sing, you know, after they’ve lost their mate.”

  “You don’t remember whether you asked to have your own sister cremated?”

  “I have my own life to live.”

  A circumspect one between the vegetables and the bird, Arkady thought.

  “What other animals do you have?”

  “Well, we can’t have any cats. That would make Juliet too nervous.” She pulled in the cage.

  Arkady asked, “Didn’t Tatiana have a dog?”

  “Yes, a nasty little thing. You know what my favorite pets are? Vegetables.” She closed the window, only to reopen it a second later. “Don’t steal any either,” she added, and shut the window for good.

  “Sorry,” said Maxim. “Like I told you, Ludmila is hard.”

  Arkady lingered between tomato plants. He had counted on Ludmila Petrovna’s outrage or, at least, curiosity about the death and ill handling of her sister.

  “You can catch the evening flight to Moscow,” Maxim said. “Too bad you came all this way for nothing. What’s that?”

  Arkady waved him over, and the two of them stood over a small dog turd that was liquefying in the rain. Headlines raced through his mind. SHIT BRIGADE CALLED OUT. TURD DISCOVERED IN VEGETABLE GARDEN. EVIDENCE LOST IN DOWNPOUR.

  It was not nothing, but laughably close.

  19

  Her name was Lotte. This time she didn’t let Zhenya off the hook. Being a pawn down to her was a slow descent into the grave. He knew what she was going to do; he simply couldn’t stop her. By the end of the match, her cheeks were flushed and Zhenya was as sweaty as a wrestler. Mr. Stanford was gone. Almost all the onlookers were gone because they had expected a quick victory for Lotte, and the match had run into class time. It was the first game Zhenya had lost in weeks, yet he was strangely exhilarated.

  She lived in an artistic household across from the conservatory, where music drifted from floor to floor. Her grandfather was Vladimir Sternberg, the most famous portrait artist of his time. Sternberg had cannily decided to paint only one subject: Stalin. Stalin addressing the Sixteenth Congress of the Soviets, Stalin addressing the Seventeenth Congress of the Soviets, and on and on, painting a Stalin a little taller, a bit more substantial, without a withered arm and never, ever with another Party leader, those fatuous demi-tyrants who sooner or later were erased from pictures and marched to a cell. Sternberg avoided them as if they were contagious, while the stature of the Beloved Leader only grew until all that surrounded him were silvery clouds and the beams of a radiant sun.

  Sternberg was little more than bones and blue veins dressed in a lounge robe and slippers, but he maneuvered his rattan wheelchair around easels draped with cloths. Smaller works of art, also covered, hung on the wall.

  “Lotte, sweetheart, get this young man some tea. You’ve put him through the wringer.”

  Zhenya took his cue and sat.

  “Lotte has told me all about you,” Sternberg said.

  Zhenya didn’t know what the artist was talking about. He was still surprised that Lotte had even noticed him, and he felt as out of place as a bird that had flown haphazardly in an open window. He had been sleeping on a mattress behind a video arcade, enduring the relentless chatter of machine guns and the whoosh of rockets long into the night. In comparison, the easels were silent and solemn in their drop cloths. Palettes and tables were daubed in colors. He had never noticed before that paint smelled and never seen cloths so mysterious.

  “Go ahead, take a look,” Sternberg said.

  “Which one?”

  “Any one.”

  Zhenya cautiously pulled a cloth from an easel and stepped back to study the painting. Stalin was waving; it wasn’t clear at whom or why, only that he was watching out for his people below. Zhenya unveiled a second portrait and a third, each painted with the forceful edge of propaganda. Stalin was a quick-change artist, in army green one moment and summer whites the next, and perpetually waving.

  Sternberg said, “I could do five a day.”

  Zhenya supposed that was “pretty good.”

  “Good?” Sternberg almost rose from his chair. “That’s faster than the school of Rubens. Of course, the market for portraits of Stalin suffered for some time.”

  Lotte delivered tea to Zhenya and whispered, “Ask my grandfather about his other paintings.”

  “He’s not interested,” Sternberg said.

  “Whatever,” Zhenya said.

  “It’s not interesting. I painted them privately.”

  “Look.” Lotte unveiled a painting of a village in banks of blue snow.

  It was a rustic night scene, and the more Zhenya looked, the more he saw. Rendered in agitated strokes, embers from the fireplaces turned to imps of fire. Frozen shirts flew through the air. Windows lit so late at night suggested gaiety or disaster, and Zhenya crossed his arms for warmth.

  The rest of the paintings—half a dozen—were the same and different. Each promised a rural subject and each, on examination, was at the point of explosion. A barn about to be a tinderbox, a skater under the ice, a horse’s eye rolling in panic.

  “You hid these?” Zhenya asked. “Why?”

  “A bold question from a first-time guest, but I like that.”

  “So?”

  “What do you think? To save my head. Lotte, would you bring some cookies too? Thank you, dear. You are too good.” To Zhenya, he said, “She loves her grandfather. So, tit for tat, what are you going to do with your chessboard? What are your plans?”

  “Nothing in particular.”

  “Which is nothing at all, of course. Lotte says you’re actually quite good at chess, a diamond in the rough. How good are you?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Just okay? Maybe twenty players in the world make a living at chess. Are you one of the twenty best players in the world?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You aren’t even ranked because you don’t play in real tournaments. Invisibility might be a shrewd tactic if you’re hustling g
ames in a railroad station, my friend, but to the chess world, you don’t exist.”

  Lotte returned with madeleines.

  Sternberg produced a smile. “Lotte, I was just telling your friend the good news. The Stalin portraits are beginning to sell again.”

  Zhenya and Lotte made nice for ten minutes. His glance stole to the paintings of snowbound villages, peasant revels, bear cubs following their mother. Nothing warmed a Russian heart like bears up a tree.

  Later, when Zhenya and Lotte were alone in a café, she said, “I love my grandfather. He’s a sweet man and a fantastic artist. But to spend your life denying your art? Now no one knows him and it’s too late.”

  • • •

  Maxim was driving Arkady back to the airport in the rain. The ZIL’s windshield wipers slapped back and forth. Foot traffic had become huddled umbrellas. Boots made an appearance. At sidewalk stalls, shopkeepers stretched tarpaulins over boxes of fruit, a table of Prada knockoffs, a row of bicycles.

  “Pull over,” Arkady said.

  “What now? You’re going to miss your flight,” Maxim said.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  He stepped over a gutter and slipped between the water that drained from either end of an awning that read KOENIG BICYCLES. A repairman in a plastic bag repositioned bikes. Another, in the dark of the shop, fine-tuned a wheel, spinning it until the spokes blurred and hummed. The more Maxim gestured for Arkady to hurry, the more Arkady was the picture of someone in a mood to browse among pennants, key chains, calipers, bright biking gear and brighter helmets.

  Posters of the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia, Tour St. Petersburg streamed on the walls in one endless, continuous race. A bulletin board announced local races from Kaliningrad to Chkalovsk, to Zelenogradsk, to the Curonian Spit.

  “It’s an obsession, isn’t it?” Arkady ran his hand over a rack of glossy helmets.

  The man with the wheel murmured, “It becomes your fucking life. You can’t let it take over.”

  “Well put,” Arkady said. “You do a lot of rides?”

  His friend said, “We have a club that rents bikes and tents. We’re very sociable. I would suggest a nice local tour from Kaliningrad to Zelenogradsk or Baltijsk. We go overnight, build a campfire, have a dip in the lake. It’s kind of an adult tour.”

  Arkady studied the array of pennants. “It looks like you do races too. Do you use your own bikes?”

  “Of course. I mean, we’re showing off the goods, aren’t we?”

  “Do you ever fly with them?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do they go as cargo?”

  The man at the wheel stopped it short. “Fuck no. I’m going to put a thousand-dollar bike in the hands of those apes in cargo? We buy a seat for the bike and stow it in the vestibule.”

  “Your name is . . . ?”

  “Kurt. I’m Kurt, he’s Karl.”

  “A thousand dollars? Is that the limit?”

  “There is no limit.”

  “Ten thousand dollars?”

  “We can do that,” said Karl.

  “Ten thousand dollars? You’re wearing a plastic bag and you’ve got bikes selling for ten thousand dollars?”

  “Not in the shop. Not at the moment.”

  “But we can get whatever you want,” said Kurt.

  “I want an Ercolo Pantera.”

  This was the point at which they should have tried to steer him to another “top of the line” bike in the shop. Instead, they asked, “What would a Pantera be doing in Kaliningrad?”

  That was the question, wasn’t it? Arkady thought.

  20

  “Whose place is this?” Lotte asked.

  “A guy I know.” Zhenya looked into the refrigerator, where a husk of cheese kept a lonely vigil.

  “He lets you have a key? He must be a good friend.”

  “Sort of. He’s an investigator.”

  “Really.” Arkady had allowed Anya to hang photographs of convicts and their tattoos, with an accent on dragons, Madonnas and spiderwebs, and they caught the girl’s eye. “I saw these in a magazine.”

  “Would you like a beer?” Zhenya popped two bottles.

  “Is your friend a little strange?”

  “Arkady? They don’t come more ordinary.”

  Lotte walked along the bookcases. “He really likes to read.”

  “Your beer. I’m afraid it’s warm.”

  Offhand she said, “It’s British. Warm beer is British, cold is American.”

  “Okay, here’s your British beer.” He was feeling socially inept. He knew it was a mistake to bring her to Arkady’s apartment. It was all too rushed, but he had no other place to take her. He had expected her to beg off with some excuse about a lecture or a previous engagement. In the official chess world he was a bottom-feeder. Fortunately, he did know how to move the pieces. Chess was alive with traps, gambits, the shepherding of a passed pawn or the menace of rooks aligned like cannon. It was drama. The Sicilian Defense smacked of black deeds in back alleys. Each notation read like a story. No matter how lowly, every player brushed shoulders with the game’s immortals. Morphy and his shoe fetish. Fischer the genius and Fischer the crank. The serene Capablanca and Alekhine, a glutton who ate with his fingers and choked to death on beefsteak.

  Besides chess, they had zero in common, Zhenya thought. A little adventure with a hustler was how she’d remember the day. He figured she was probably nineteen, which made her more than a year older, and most likely had her life mapped out: a year of rebellion, followed by a few minor chess trophies, marriage to a millionaire, children, a series of affairs with oligarchs, finally tossed overboard in Monte Carlo.

  “What are your plans?” she asked.

  “Plans? Join the army and have my brains kicked in.”

  “Seriously, what do you want?”

  “To be rich, I guess. Have a nice car.”

  “What about a home?”

  “I suppose,” Zhenya said, although he couldn’t picture what a home would look like.

  “You’re so evasive.”

  So she said, but he knew if he told her the truth, she would bolt.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “It’s simple. I heard you shot somebody.”

  “Who says that?”

  “Everybody. That’s why they’re afraid to play chess with you.”

  “You’re not afraid.”

  “Because I’m a redhead. Everyone knows that redheads are crazy.” In a sterner voice, she added, “Don’t become my grandfather. Don’t be a coward.”

  “What should I become?”

  “Somebody.”

  “I get by.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I live freely, on my own.”

  “Except when you’re in the cold.”

  “Everyone should have to live out of a backpack. They’d find out what’s essential.”

  “Like an outlaw? What are your essentials? Show me.”

  He was backed into a corner and it dawned on Zhenya that arguing with Lotte was like chess, and, once again, he was losing.

  “Okay.” He dug into his backpack and, one by one, placed on the table a folded chessboard, a velvet pouch of chess pieces, a chess clock, a notebook and pencil, a paperback of Beyond Bobby Fischer and plastic bags containing a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste and soap.

  “How many games of chess have you won? More than a thousand. And this is all you have to show for it? Some outlaw.”

  “I can beat you.”

  “But you didn’t.” She picked up the notebook and opened it to savor her victory a second time. “ ‘Bd5 to b3, Qe2 to d1.’ That was your blunder.”

  He followed her around the table. “I’ll play you again, right now.”

  “The match is over.”

  “Then if I’m such a waste of time, why are you still here?”

  “I never said you were a waste of time.” She turned and gave him a kiss full on the lips. “I never said that.”

 
• • •

  Maxim’s apartment was essentially a tunnel bored through pizza crusts, half-empty bottles of beer, totally empty bottles of vodka, and books, newspapers and poetry reviews everywhere, spilling off shelves, stacked on the floor, sliding underfoot. A fine volcanic ash of cigarettes hung in the air.

  “It’s more comfortable than it looks.” Maxim swept a pizza box and manuscripts off the couch. “What made you decide to stay in Kaliningrad?”

  “Its charm. Maybe I should just go to a hotel,” Arkady said.

  “And pay their prices? Nonsense.” Maxim batted cushions. “I know there’s a bottle here somewhere.”

  They danced around each other to get from one side of the room to the other.

  Arkady said, “I can’t help but feel I’m in the way.”

  “Not a bit. Of course if I’d known I was going to have a guest, I would have . . .”

  Ordered up an earthmover, Arkady thought. “The life of a poet,” he said. “Where would you like me to hang my coat?”

  “Anywhere will do. There’s only one rule.”

  “Yes?” Arkady was eager to hear it.

  “Don’t light a cigarette until you have located an ashtray.”

  “Very wise.”

  “We’ve had some trouble in the past.”

  “With other poets, no doubt.”

  “Now that you mention it. Sit, please.”

  Arkady picked a sheaf of papers off the floor. “For Review Only” was written on the front page.

  “The author is a talentless hack consigned to well-deserved obscurity,” Maxim said, and added an aside: “He’s after the same fellowship in the States that I’m after.”

  “You know he just died.”

  “He did? In that case, Russia has lost a singular voice . . . struck down too early . . . leaves a void. I mean, why not be generous?”

  “You never told me.”

  “Never told you what?”

  “The name of the fellowship.”

  “Didn’t I? I don’t think they have a name yet. They’re just starting. Hush-hush until they make their choice.”

  “Amazing. You really would do anything to get out of Kaliningrad?”

  “There is no Kaliningrad.” Starting at the front door, Maxim pantomimed a man entering the apartment, maneuvering to a coffee table, visiting the bedroom and returning with a pillow, from which he pulled a bottle of vodka as shiny as chrome. “It’s only a matter of reenacting what you last did.”