"You knew Boris Hulak?"
"He and my grandfather would rant on the telephone for hours about traitors who shut down the plant. But my grandfather would never really hurt anyone."
"That's good to know."
Oksana seemed relieved. If a man in a wheelchair a train ride away was not going to attack him, Arkady was happy, too.
"Look." She pointed out a stork skimming over its mirror image on the surface of the river.
"Like you. You simply come and go."
She shrugged and smiled. For inscrutability, the Mona Lisa had nothing on Oksana Katamay.
He asked, "Do you remember Anton Obodovsky? A big man in his mid-thirties. He used to box."
Her smile spread.
Arkady tried an easier question. "Where would I find the Woropays?"
Dymtrus Woropay skated on a street of empty houses, gliding backward, sideways, forward, handling a hockey stick and rubber ball around potholes and grass. His yellow hair lifted and his eyes were intent on the rolling ball. He didn't notice Arkady until they were a few steps apart, at which point Dymtrus pushed forward and cocked his stick, and Arkady threw the trash-bin cover he had carried behind his back. The cover cut off Dymtrus at the ankles. He went down on his face, and Arkady put a foot on the back of his neck and kept him splayed.
"I want to talk to Katamay," Arkady said.
"Maybe you want a stick up your ass, too."
Arkady leaned. He was afraid of the burly Dymtrus Woropay, and sometimes fear could be exorcised only one way. "Where is Katamay?"
"Get stuffed."
"Do you enjoy breathing?" Arkady dug his heel into Woropay.
"Do you have a gun?" Woropay twisted his eyes up to see.
Arkady unclipped Woropay's pistol, a Makarov, militia issue. "Now I do."
"You won't shoot."
"Dymtrus, look around. How many witnesses do you see?"
"Fuck off."
"I bet your brother is tired of being your brother. I think it's time he stood on his own two feet." Arkady pushed off the pistol's safety and, to be convincing, put the muzzle to Dymtrus's head.
"Wait. Fuck. Katamay who?"
"Your friend and teammate, your fellow militia officer Karel Katamay. He found the Russian at the cemetery. I want to talk to him."
"He's missing."
"Not to everyone. I talked to his grandfather, and soon two thugs, you and your brother, begin playing hockey with my head."
"What do you want to talk about?"
"The Russian, pure and simple."
"Let me up."
"Give me a reason." Arkady applied more weight to the decision making.
"Okay! I'll see."
"I want you to take me to him."
"He'll call you."
"No, face-to-face."
"I can't breathe."
"Face-to-face. Arrange it, or I will find you and shoot off your knee. Then we'll see how you skate." Arkady applied one last squeeze before getting up.
Dymtrus sat up and rubbed his neck. He had a sloped face like a shovel and small eyes. "Shit."
Arkady gave Dymtrus his mobile-phone number and, since he felt Dymtrus tensing for a fight, threw in as an afterthought, "You're not a bad skater."
"How the fuck would you know?"
"I saw you practice. You prefer ice?"
"So?"
"I bet you're wasted on the league down here."
"So?"
"Just an observation."
Dymtrus pushed his hair back. "So what? What do you know about ice hockey?"
"Not much. I know people."
"Like who?"
"Wayne Gretzky." Arkady had heard of Wayne Gretzky.
"You know him? Fuck! Do you think he'd ever come down here?"
"To Chernobyl? No. You'd have to go to Moscow."
"He could see me there?"
"Maybe. I don't know."
"But he might? I'm big and I'm fast and I'm willing to kill."
"That's an unbeatable combination."
"So he might?"
"We'll see."
A Dymtrus with a more positive frame of mind got to his feet. "Okay, we'll see. Could I have my gun back?"
"No. That's my guarantee that I will meet Katamay. You get your gun back after."
"What if I need it?"
"Stay out of trouble."
• • •
Feeling in a better frame of mind himself, Arkady rode to the café, where he found Bobby Hoffman and Yakov working on black coffee in the absence of a kosher kitchen.
"I figured it out," Bobby told Arkady. "If Yakov's father was here when they sank the ferry full of Jews, and that was 1919, 1920, that makes Yakov over eighty. I didn't know he was that old."
"He seems to know his business."
"He wrote the book. But you look at him and think, All this guy wants is to sit in a beach chair in Tel Aviv, take a nap and quietly expire. How are you feeling, Renko?"
Yakov raised a basilisk's gaze. "He's fine."
"I'm fine," Arkady said. Despite the accumulation of bruises, he was.
Yakov was tidy, like a pensioner dressed to feed the birds, but Bobby's face and clothes were corrugated from lack of sleep, and his hand was swollen.
"What happened?"
"Bees." Bobby shrugged it off. "I don't mind bees. So what about Obodovsky, what's he doing in Kiev?"
"Anton is doing what you'd expect someone of his stature to do when he's visiting his hometown. He's showing off money and a girl."
"The dental hygienist?"
"That's right. We're not in Russia. Neither Victor nor I have any authority to pick him up or question him."
Bobby whispered, "I don't want him questioned, I want him dead. You can do that anywhere. I'm out on a very long limb here. And nothing is happening. My two Russian cops are taking tea, visiting the malls. I give you Kuzmitch, you don't want him. You see Obodovsky, you can't touch him. This is why you don't get paid, because you don't produce."
"Coffee." Yakov brought Arkady a cup. There was no waiter.
"And Yakov, here, he prays all night. Oils his gun and prays. You two are a pair."
Arkady said, "Yesterday you were patient."
"Today I'm shitting a brick."
"Then tell me what you were doing here last year."
"It's none of your business." Bobby leaned to look out the window. "Rain, radiation, leaky roofs. It's getting to me."
A militia car swung into the space beside Yakov's battered Nissan, and Captain Marchenko emerged slowly, perhaps posing for a painting called The Cossack at Dawn, Arkady thought. A lot of things had escaped Marchenko's notice – a slit throat, tire treads and footprints at a murder scene – but the Zone's two newest residents had caught the captain's eye. The captain entered the café and affected friendly surprise at the sight of Bobby and company, like a man who sees a lamb and the possibility of lamb chops. He came immediately to the table.
"Do I see visitors? Renko, please introduce me to your friends."
Arkady looked at Bobby, asking in a silent way what name he would care to offer.
Yakov stepped in. "I am Yitschak Brodsky, and my colleague is Chaim Weitzman. Please, Mr. Weitzman speaks only Hebrew and English."
"No Ukrainian? Not even Russian?"
"I interpret."
"And you, Renko, do you speak Hebrew or English?"
"A little English."
"You would," the captain said, as if it were a black mark. "Friends of yours?"
Arkady improvised. "Weitzman is a friend of a friend. He knew I was here, but he came to see the Jewish grave."
"And stayed overnight not one night but two, without informing the militia. I talked to Vanko." Marchenko turned to Yakov. "May I see your passports, please?" The captain studied them closely, to underline his authority. He cleared his throat. "Excellent. You know, I often say we should make our Jewish visitors especially welcome."
"Are there other visitors?" Arkady asked.
There
was an answer – specialists in toxic sites – but Marchenko maintained a smile, and when he handed back the passports he added a business card.
"Mr. Brodsky, please take my card, which has my office phone and fax. If you call me first, I can organize much better accommodations, and perhaps a day visit for a much larger group, strictly supervised because of radiation, naturally. Late summer is good. Strawberry season." If the captain expected an effusive response from Yakov, he didn't get it. "Anyway, let's hope the rain is over. Let's hope we don't need Noah and his ark, right? Well, gentlemen, a pleasure. Renko, you weren't going anywhere, were you?"
"No."
"I didn't think so."
As the captain climbed into his car, Bobby waved and muttered, "Asshole."
Arkady asked, "Bobby, how many passports do you have?"
"Enough."
"Good, because the captain's brain is like a closet light that sometimes lights and sometimes doesn't. This time it didn't; the next time it might, and he'll connect Timofeyev and me and you. He'll check on your papers or call Ozhogin. He has the colonel's number. It might be wise to go now."
"We'll wait. By the way, Noah was an asshole, too."
"Why Noah?" Arkady asked. This was a new indictment.
"He didn't argue."
"Noah should have argued?"
Yakov explained, "Abraham argues with God not to kill everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah. Moses pleads with God not to kill worshippers of the golden calf. But God tells Noah to build a boat because He's going to flood the entire world, and what does Noah say? Not a word."
"Not a word," said Bobby, "and saves the minimum. What a bastard."
Perhaps Eva had gone to the Panasenkos' to give Roman a physical examination, but the cow had gotten out during the storm and trampled the vegetable garden, and Maria and Eva were in the middle of trying to resurrect what they could when Arkady arrived and joined in. The air was hot and humid, the ground damp and baked and oozing humors, and each step produced a sharp scent of crushed mint or chamomile.
The old couple had laid out their garden in straight- as- a- string rows of beets, potatoes, cabbage, onion, garlic and dill, the necessities of life; celery, parsley, mustard and horseradish, the savor of life; buffalo grass for vodka and poppies for bread, everything chopped by the cow into muck. The root vegetables had to be rebedded and the greens salvaged. Where water pooled, Roman shaped drainage with a hoe.
Maria wore a shawl around her head and around her waist a second shawl to hold what she picked. Eva had laid aside her lab coat and shoes to work barefoot in a T-shirt and shorts, no scarf.
They worked separate rows, digging their hands into the mud and freeing the greens or replanting root vegetables tops up. The women were faster and more efficient. Arkady hadn't worked in a garden since he was a boy, and that was just at the dacha to keep him out of the way. The neighbors – Nina on her crutch, Olga squinting through her glasses, Klara with Viking braids – came to witness. From the general interest and the size of the lot, it became clear that Roman and Maria fed the entire population of the village. Maria could have pulled a small train behind her, the way she leaned in to the work and smiled with satisfaction in it, except when she looked up from strangling red-veined greens of beets to gaze on Roman.
"You're sure you latched the cow's stall? She could have been eaten by wolves. The wolves could have gotten her."
Roman acted deaf, while Lydia, the cow, peeked through an open slat of her stall; the two put Arkady in mind of a pair of drunks who remembered nothing.
Eva had ignored him since his arrival, and the more he thought about it, the more he realized that the night with her had been a mistake. He had gotten too involved. He had lost his sacred objectivity. He was like one of those telescopes launched into space with lenses so distorted it could be seeing either headlights or the Milky Way.
When the garden was done, Maria brought cold water for Arkady and Eva and kvass for Roman. Kvass was a beer made from fermented bread, and a summons to life for Roman. Eva managed to keep one of the old couple between her and Arkady at all times: a dance of avoidance.
Arkady's mobile phone rang. It was the director of the Moscow children's shelter.
"Investigator Renko, this is impossible. You must return at once. Zhenya waits every day."
"The last time I saw Zhenya, he didn't as much as wave goodbye. I doubt very much that he's upset."
"He's not demonstrative. Explain to Zhenya."
Again the void on the phone, from either the bottom of a waste bin or an undemonstrative boy.
"Zhenya? Are you there? Zhenya?"
Arkady heard nothing, but he could feel the boy pressing a receiver close to his ear and pursing his lips in a disagreeable way.
"How are you doing, Zhenya? Driving the director insane, it sounds like."
Silence and perhaps a nervous shift of the phone from one ear to the other.
Arkady said, "No news about Baba Yaga. Nothing to report."
He could see Zhenya gripping the phone tight with one hand and chewing the nails of the other. Arkady tried to outwait him, which was impossible, because Zhenya just hung on.
"We had a storm during the night. A dragon got loose and went on a rampage, tearing up the fields and knocking over fences. Bones everywhere. We chased him over the fields to the river, where he escaped because the bridge was guarded by a monster that had to be defeated in a game of chess. None of us was good enough, so the dragon got away. Next time we should take along a better chess player. Other than that, nothing happened in the Ukraine. We'll talk again soon. In the meantime, behave."
Arkady folded the phone and discovered Roman and Maria regarding him with astonishment. Eva seemed unamused.
Nevertheless, they carried scythes into the field behind the cow barn to cut grass and barley bent by the rain. The scythes were long two-handled affairs with blades so sharp they whistled. Eva and Maria bundled cut grass into sheaves with binding twine, while Arkady and Roman waded ahead. Arkady had cut grass in the all-purpose Red Army, and he remembered that the rhythm of scything was like swimming; the smoother the motion, the longer the stroke. Straws flew and insects spiraled in a golden dust. It was the most mindless labor he had performed for years and he gave himself over to it completely. At the end of the field, he dropped the scythe and lay down in high grass, in the warm stalks and cool ground, and stared numbly at the sky slightly spinning above.
How could they do it? he wondered. Work this field so happily when a short walk up the path, four grandchildren lay in unmarked graves. He imagined each funeral and the rage. Could he have stood it? Yet Roman and Maria and the other women seemed to approach every task as God's allotment. Work is holy, he remembered one of Tolstoy's heroes saying.
A body dropped nearby, and though he couldn't see her, he heard Eva's breathing. It was so normal, Arkady thought. Although it wasn't in the least normal. Did he normally perform farm labor? Through closed eyes, he felt the dull pulsation of the sun. What a relief to think of nothing, to be a rock in the field and never move again. Even better, he thought: two rocks in the field.
Unseen behind the grass, Eva asked, "Why did you come here?"
"Yesterday Maria said you would be here."
"But why?"
"To see you."
"Now that you've seen me, why don't you go?"
"I want more."
"Of what?"
"You."
Directness was not a language he generally spoke, and he expected her to leap to her feet and walk away.
There was a stir, and Eva's hand grazed his.
She said, "Your friend Zhenya plays chess."
"Yes."
"And he's very good?"
"Apparently."
He heard a murmur of satisfaction in a guess confirmed.
"You didn't ask," Eva said.
"Ask what?"
"Whether the garden was radioactive. You're becoming a real citizen of the Zone."
"Is that good or
bad?"
"I don't know."
"For you," he asked, "is it good or bad?"
She uncurled his fingers and laid her head on them. "Disaster. The worst."
Arkady's mobile phone rang as he coasted into town, and he turned onto the side street of beech trees to take the call. It was Victor phoning from the state library in Kiev. "Encyclopedia entry 'Felix Mikhailovich Gerasimov, 1925 to 2002, director of the Institute of Extremely High Temperatures, Moscow.' Blah, blah. National prizes for physics, esteemed this and that, theoretician, patents for fuck-all, different state councils on science, international atomic controls, 'nuclear prophylaxis,' whatever the hell that is, papers on waste management. An all-around guy. Why are you interested? He died two years ago."
Arkady leaned the motor bike on its stand. The sun danced through the trees, belying the fact that the street was dead and the houses empty. "Something someone said. Any connection to Chernobyl?"
Sounds of paper flipping. "Not much. A delegation six months after the accident. I bet every scientist in Russia was there by then."
"Anything personal?"
Eva had told Arkady that he and Alex Gerasimov had more in common than he knew. He had a suspicion of what, but he wanted to be sure. While he talked, he paced by houses, each in its individual state of decay. At one window stood a doll, at least the third or fourth he'd seen at windows in Chernobyl.
Victor said, "These are scientific books and journals, not fan magazines. Lyuba called last night. I told her about the lingerie shop here. She said to pick out anything I wanted. My choice."
"Look for Chelyabinsk."
"Okay, here's an article translated from the French about an explosion of nuclear waste in Chelyabinsk in '57. Which was a secret site, so we kept the lid on that. Gerasimov must have been a kid at the time, but he's mentioned as helping run the cleanup. I don't think they cleaned it up much. Okay, here's more nuclear pollution on Novaya Zemlya test grounds. Gerasimov again. For a theoretician, he did weird shit. A peace prize for military research. Very astute. This is how you climb the academic ladder. What is the Institute for Extremely High Temperatures, anyway? Could build warheads, could cure cancer."
Could dump radioactive water into the MoscowRiver when the pipes at the institute froze. Arkady remembered Timofeyev's confession.