A Question of Return

by Robert Carr

  Around five in the morning she got out of bed and left her room for a walk. She hoped the exercise would calm her so that she could sleep afterward. She was shuffling past the nurses’ station for the second time when a telephone rang there. Not a loud ring, somewhat mute, but it reminded her of the telephone ring she had been awakened by while being in bed with Laukhin. On her bird’s eye view of the events of Saturday night, the ring came from inside the box with the glass walls. And, slowly, very slowly, as she stood there frozen with anticipation, the smoky walls of the box began to clear.

  She remembered shaking Laukhin awake, and his getting up and going downstairs into the kitchen where the phone was. She heard him talk on the phone for some time, and then he returned to the bedroom. He said he had to go and rescue his idiot student Paul Karman from a pub. He said he was terribly sorry and upset about it, and that he’d be back in an hour.

  She remembered jumping out of bed, searching her purse and giving Laukhin some money. She also fetched a nightgown from her overnight bag and slipped it on.

  Afterward she couldn’t sleep. She remembered lying there, in Laukhin’s bed, in the dark—well, it wasn’t that dark, because there was enough light coming through the large windows and past the drawn curtains—and thinking that her life had significantly changed in a few days, and that she couldn’t quite explain how or why.

  And then the door to the bedroom opened slowly. It couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen minutes after Laukhin left, and she remembered thinking how quickly he had returned, and how considerate he was tiptoeing through the house because she had not heard the front door open, or any steps on the stairs or on the landing. She also thought that maybe she had fallen asleep, and it had been more than ten or fifteen minutes since Laukhin left.

  It wasn’t Laukhin. First one man stepped cautiously into the room. He had a flashlight. He quickly spotted her, and then the flashlight blinded her, but not before she saw another man coming in, also with a flashlight. She was too afraid to scream or move. They saw her, and one of the men came closer with his blinding flashlight, and she hid her face under her elbow. Then the light left her face and she felt the man sit on the bed. Somebody moved her arm away from her face, and then a gloved hand covered her mouth. He talked to her. He said that they hadn’t expected to find her there, but that she had no reason to be frightened. They were looking for something, and no harm would come to her if she kept quiet. That was all she needed to do, very simple: keep quiet. He asked her if she understood. She nodded. He asked her where her boyfriend was. From his voice he was a middle-aged man. She said Laukhin had been called away—an emergency with one of his students. He asked her the time her boyfriend had left. She said, perhaps ten, fifteen minutes earlier, she wasn’t sure. He asked her when she expected him to return. She didn’t know whether it was better to say shortly or in a long while, not knowing what they were after. So she told them the truth, or her guess at the truth—in about half or three-quarters of an hour. He nodded and patted her shoulder. He said, “Good girl. You see, it’s easy, and nobody gets hurt.”

  She had been very afraid, trembling uncontrollably, and she had peed herself, not much, a trickle. She couldn’t think properly, but told herself to do as they said, whatever, unless they tried to harm her, in which case she would scream as loud as she could.

  There was a third man with them, waiting in the upstairs hallway. They had switched on the light there when they came in, and she saw him at the doorstep, a large dark silhouette against the light.

  They found whatever they were looking for quickly, something on Laukhin’s worktable. It was the second man who had entered the room who found it. He spoke in an accent when he said, “I think this is it. Come and see,” and she realized the one who had sat on her bed and talked to her did not have one. He also said something to the third man—she assumed it was in Russian, but wasn’t sure—the man she had seen on the doorstep. He came in and said, “Light, the light,” and they switched on the room light. He was older, in his late sixties or early seventies, but in good shape. A large man, tall, with sparse white hair. Unlike the other two, he was not wearing a balaclava. He had a green corduroy jacket on that had seen better days, and a grey fedora. She was struck by how huge his shoes were. He barely looked at her. He took whatever the other man had found and sat down at Laukhin’s worktable. She remembered the chair cracking under his weight. He sat with his back to her, reading or looking at whatever had been handed to him. She heard paper being shuffled. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry. After a few minutes, probably no more than five, he said, “Yes. Good.” He stood up and turned to leave. He was holding Laukhin’s green folder. Without thinking, she said, well, it was probably more of a whisper, “You can’t take that. That’s Laukhin’s work.” The older man stopped and glanced at her—he probably didn’t understand what she had said. When he took another step, she jumped out of bed, ran to him, and grabbed his arm, shouting, “You can’t take this.” She had no idea how she had the strength or the courage to do that, since minutes earlier she’d been so frightened she peed herself. She was convinced she looked ridiculous, a barmy figure clad in a nightgown that covered little. But she had annoyed the older man, because she was clinging to his left arm, the arm with the green folder, trying to halt him, and he said something to her, first in Russian, and then in English, ordering her away, back to the bed. But she didn’t let go of him, and so, angry or merely irritated, he swung his arm.

  He must have done it with a lot of force, because she lost her balance. That’s when she probably hit her head on the table. Or maybe somebody hit her on the head, possibly with a flashlight. The last thing she remembered, though, was his face, the face of the older man. She saw the scar on the left side of his face, a highly visible scar that began on his forehead, went past his left eye, and ended in the middle of his cheek. And she immediately knew who he was. She had read about him on Friday morning, sitting in the same chair he had just got up from. Tall, big, the scar on the left side of his face. The age was right too. Cornilov, still alive.

  * * *

  Laukhin would have stayed longer with Audrey, but the same nurse who had frowned at him earlier chased him out. “The neurosurgeon will be here any moment now,” she said. “He wants to do more tests and we have to prepare Ms. Millay.”

  Outside Audrey’s room, Laukhin told the nurse that he wanted to talk to the surgeon.

  “Are you a relative?”

  “No.”

  “He won’t talk to you.”

  He walked back to Alumni Hall weighed down by what Audrey had told him. Ben passed by his office just as he was opening the door. Laukhin asked him in and told him what Audrey had remembered.

  Ben seemed bewildered. “You mean Cornilov came here, to Toronto, to get the Tsvetayeva excerpts?”

  “It seems so.”

  Frowning, Ben lowered himself into a chair near Laukhin’s desk. They sat there in silence, looking at each other.

  “I should ring Bart,” Laukhin said at last. “I dread this call.”

  “Maybe Helen is right,” Ben said, “and we should call the police.”

  Laukhin didn’t answer.

  “They broke in and stole things,” Ben went on. “They hurt Audrey.”

  “They won’t catch them. It’s been more than twenty-four hours. Cornilov is long gone out of the country.”

  “I don’t know, Artyom Pavlovich …”

  “Let me think about it, Ben. That’s all we need at this time, the police.”

  Ben got up. “I better get back to my desk.” He turned around at the door and asked, “Why, though? Why would they risk that much?”

  “Who are they, Ben?” Laukhin asked looking at his student.

  “Well, the Soviets, the KGB.”

  Laukhin was doubtful. “Maybe.”

  “Breaking into your house could have easily been a disaster for them. If you had been there, and scared enough or mad enough to begin screaming or making a commotio
n that your neighbours could hear … It could have turned nasty for them.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t the Soviets, as you put it,” Laukhin said. “Maybe it wasn’t the KGB.”

  “What?”

  “Ben, Ben, this is not the thirties or the fifties. Yes, the Soviets would like to stop the publication of Pavel Laukhin’s journals, or at least discredit them, but how much effort would they put on such a thing? Not much, in my view. It’s 1985. The journal is all about things that happened thirty, forty years ago, and few in the politburo or the central committee would get heartburn over some Stalin-bashing literary memoir. Many such memoirs have already been published. What else is there to fear? And the Soviets themselves have already decided—many of them, anyway—that Stalin was a monster.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You’re right about the risks they took. You’re right that the whole enterprise seems risky, hit-and-miss, not at all the usual modus operandi of the deadly Soviet secret service. And they are deadly, Ben, believe me, they are very good at what they do. But the Soviet secret service might not have been behind this.”

  “Are you saying that it was Cornilov acting on his own?”

  He shrugged.

  “I’m not following you.”

  “I don’t know, Ben. I don’t know what to think, especially now when I have the excerpts to reconstruct—we have the excerpts to reconstruct—and the galleys to go through, and the introduction to finish.” Looking at his watch, he added, “And now another song and dance from famous poet Artyom Laukhin—the talk with Bart. To be followed, of course, by the conference call that Bart will insist on with all the affected publishers. Bart likes conference calls.”

  Ben was still on the subject of Cornilov. “What was worrying Cornilov to such an extent? Why would he do it? Even if the truth about Tsvetayeva’s execution came to light, all he had to say was that he was following orders. He could always defend himself that way—he would not be the first or the last. What did he have to fear?”

  “A wife.”

  “A wife?”

  “I’m not sure, Ben. Yes, a wife, his second, much younger. He adored her—from what I heard before I left the Soviet Union—and probably still does. She gave him the illusion that his old deeds were forgiven and forgotten. Forgotten, anyway. Perhaps he feared his wife’s horror, her revulsion, shock. He feared the scorn and contempt of others, too. Tsvetayeva is far from unknown in the Soviet Union these days. She has slowly become celebrated there. Her most famous poem, The Rat Catcher, was published in 1956, and a selection was published in the sixties. Shostakovich set six of her poems to music. They even named a newly discovered asteroid after her—3511 Tsvetayeva. When the bundle is published everybody will learn that the poet Cornilov was one of Tsvetayeva’s murderers. I mean, everybody who matters to him—his family, his friends, the literati, those in artistic circles. News and copies of the story will travel, and Moscow will be abuzz with it.”

  * * *

  He called the nursing station around four o’clock and was told not to come because Ms. Millay was tired after the surgery.

  “Surgery?”

  “Yes. The neurosurgeon was not happy with what he saw this morning. He ordered more tests and then decided to operate immediately. There were complications.”

  “Complications? What does it mean?”

  “It usually means there has been some bleeding that has put pressure on the brain. The surgeon will know the details.”

  “Is she worse? This morning she seemed to be doing all right.”

  “These things take time.”

  A guarded response, not reassuring at all. “Why wasn’t I called?”

  “Whom am I talking to, please?”

  “My name is Laukhin. Art Laukhin”

  “Are you related to Ms. Millay, Mr. Laukhin?”

  “Yes,” he lied.

  “Let me look.” After a while he heard somebody say, “No, not there,” and after another long pause the same women’s voice came back on the line and said, “I don’t see your name here. We called her mother in Montreal, and her father in the United Kingdom. Who did you say you were?”

  “Her fiancée.”

  “It’s best to talk to the surgeon.”

  By six o’clock Laukhin couldn’t stand it anymore and walked to the hospital. The nursing station was crowded, and the staff seemed tense. A nurse he had not seen before told him he could only glance in at Audrey and then he’d have to leave. “Don’t talk to her. Maybe tomorrow.”

  The nurse did not tell him that somebody was already with Audrey. When he looked in through the open door, he saw Martha sitting on a chair pulled closed to Audrey’s bed. Audrey’s eyes were closed, but somehow she felt his presence, because she half-opened them and wiggled her fingers weakly at him. Martha turned toward the door and stared at him. She frowned, looked at Audrey who had closed her eyes again, and then back at him, and said, “Now, we don’t want to tire the patient, do we? I was told there’d be no one else today.”

  She had a travel bag with her, and he gathered she must have come directly from the airport. Not a good sign.

  After saying something to Audrey that he didn’t catch, Martha came over to him and gestured him out. She came with him and said, “What happened? I can’t get the real story from her. She fell? Somebody hit her? Somebody pushed her? I can’t tell if she’s just too tired to explain or the injury has made her incoherent. The information on her chart is that she fell. Did she fall?”

  “Yes. Kind of.”

  “Kind of?”

  “She might have been hit.”

  “Might have? Did it happen in your house? Audrey said it did, but she wasn’t making much sense.”

  “In my house, yes.”

  “You must know more then.”

  He sighed. “I wasn’t there, Mrs. Osterhoudt.”

  “You weren’t there?”

  “I was out.”

  “You were out.” She paused, as if to take stock of what he just said. “Brilliant. Where were you?”

  “I was called away. One of my students needed help. An … emergency.”

  “What kind of an emergency?”

  “He was detained somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “In a pub. Look—”

  “And you rescued him. Bravo.”

  “How is Audrey doing?”

  “Not well. When was this—when did it happen?”

  “Saturday night. Well, Sunday morning.”

  “What time?”

  “Between two and three.”

  “And you weren’t there.”

  “No.”

  “You have Audrey in your house—in your bedroom, I gather—and you went out between two and three in the morning?”

  “It’s a long story, Mrs. Osterhoudt. I’m sure Audrey will tell you the moment she feels better.”

  “For God’s sake, can’t you see what’s happening? Audrey may not be able to tell me. Ever.” Martha barely moved her lips, yet he felt the impact of ever like a blow. “The doctors are not very encouraging. What happened while you were away?”

  “What are you saying?” He must have misheard her, or it came out wrong because of Martha’s obvious dislike of him. “She was all right this morning.”

  Martha shook her head, exasperated. “What happened while you were away, Mr. Laukhin?”

  She had remembered his name. “Some people broke into the house to steal something, and she objected, and, I don’t know, was pushed or hit.”

  “Hit on the head?”

  “Maybe. Audrey doesn’t remember exactly.”

  “Did you tell the police?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It didn’t seem … I didn’t have the time.”

  “No time? What did they steal?”

  “Some papers.” He was well aware how ridiculous his story sounded. The police would have a great time with it, if they ever got involved.

  “Paper
s? What kind of papers?”

  “About a poet, a woman poet, Russian. About the circumstances of her death.”

  “Papers about a dead poet,” Martha echoed him. “My daughter is between life and death, Mr. Laukhin, and you’re mocking me?”

  “No, look, I know what I’m saying sounds odd, but if you knew the whole story, it would make perfect sense. I love your daughter, Mrs. Osterhoudt—”

  “Yet you left her alone at night in your house because one of your students was detained in a pub.”

  “How could I know—”

  “Yes, Mr. Laukhin, how could you possibly know that some nasty people would turn up to look for some papers about a dead poet. When did she die, by the way?”

  Relentless Martha. No wonder Audrey was always fighting with her. He’d have snarled at anyone else, but relentless Martha was a grieving mother. Feeling like a fool, he whispered, “In 1941.”

  “Indeed. How could you possibly know that some nasty people would turn up to look for some papers about the death of a Russian woman poet more than forty years ago.” She turned away, but then stopped and stared back at him. “Well, my lawyers or the police will have a field day with what you’re saying. Let’s hope it’s my lawyers, Mr. Laukhin. Pray to God it’s them and not the police. But you’ll pay for this, one way or another.”

  She went back into her daughter’s room.

  Laukhin found a doctor at the nursing station who was able to talk about Audrey. Young enough to be an intern, he went into a long explanation, using medical terms that meant nothing to Laukhin. Listening to him, Laukhin was overwhelmed by the feeling that whatever he did or asked made no difference. He heard the doctor say they were doing all they could, but in cases like Ms. Millay’s, with complications from an unexpected hemorrhage, only time would tell. Only time would tell. Ominous, hammer-blow words, the secular equivalent of it’s in God’s hands now.