Y.T.

by Alexei Nikitin

  It was a long time since Sinevusov and I had enjoyed a tête-à-tête at the same table. That this wasn’t the table covered with papers and bureaucratic penholders in his one-time office on Volodymyr Street but an ordinary and hastily cleared little table in a watering hole in the Podolsk neighborhood, set with two beers and pistachios in a chipped dull-blue saucer, but nothing seemed to have changed. Nor had the two problems before us that we were going to have to solve together. He was Sinevusov, I was Davidov, and once again we were divided by a table and the questions left unanswered twenty years before.

  In Rabelais Sinevusov hadn’t spoken. He had listened to Kurochkin, kept his silence and eaten.

  ‘Why did you have to drag him into this?’ I asked Yurka once we’d returned to the car. ‘If you’ve contacted him, you may as well contact the others. The general, your Ryskalov, and the rest.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Kurochkin agreed unexpectedly. ‘But where can I find them?’

  ‘Wherever you found Sinevusov.’

  Kurochkin shook his head.

  ‘Ryskalov was killed in a car crash in 1993; that’s a fact. Their chief retired in the late 1980s and kicked the bucket soon after. Of the remaining three agents, two were transferred before the collapse, one to Murmansk, the other to Kyrgyzstan. They’re both pensioners now. I checked. The fifth got the sack. He tried running a gang and for a while he handled two markets in the city and controlled a chain of filling stations, but it didn’t last long. He was screwed by his own men. A tough business.’

  ‘No joke,’ I said. ‘You were quick pulling your information together.’

  ‘With these guys it’s easy. They come from the system. It’s harder with other people.’

  ‘What about Sinevusov?’

  ‘What do you mean? You’ve just seen him.’

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Kurochkin shrugged. ‘Why don’t you ask him.’

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’ I didn’t believe him.

  ‘He’s not doing anything in particular. He’s retired, too, you know. What else do you want? Twenty years have gone by.’

  ‘But he left the KGB a long time ago. It’s been at least ten years, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. It seems something happened. But how did you know?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, paying Kurochkin back for his ‘I don’t know.’ Kurochkin waggled his brows and feigned nonchalance, but he was obviously displeased. Nor did he like the fact that I knew something about Sinevusov and wouldn’t tell him how. But what could I actually tell him? That one day I’d decided to have myself a bun and a cup of tea? It was ridiculous.

  After I’d finalized matters with Malkin the day following our meeting and won my two weeks of freedom, I agreed to meet up with Sinevusov. Two weeks is a long time. Long enough to meet Mishka Reingarten and Kanyuka, find out whatever we didn’t know about Korostishevski and convince myself one more time that none of us had anything to do with the ultimatum or the disappearance of the money.

  ‘Very Dostoevskian,’ I said with a nod at the room. The room wasn’t remotely Dostoevskian. It was just your average watering hole, moderately filthy and immoderately full of smoke, refuge of the local drunks and of the traders from Zhitni Market.

  Sinevusov looked around the room, a group of young people—clearly students—briefly holding his eye, then shrugged. ‘I don’t like Dostoevsky.’

  I didn’t say anything, gave him time to graze on the nuts, one after the other, and drink some beer.

  Finally, he continued. ‘Dostoevsky was a wimp—a wimp and a coward. A brilliant coward. He broached such themes … plumbed such depths … it took your breath away. And then what? Nothing. He carefully tiptoed around it. Along the very edge, softly, softly, so that, God save him, he wouldn’t plant a foot wrong.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘What about Smerdyakov? Tell me, where’s it, say, that Smerdyakovs get hanged? Karamazovs get hanged, but Smerdyakovs live happily ever after. Because the rules of our world are written and approved by Smerdyakovs. It’s suffocating here for Karamazovs, but Smerdyakovs find it comfortable. Do you remember what he did to Ivan and how he framed Dmitri? Just masterful. Do you think a man like that would stick his head through a noose over such a trifle?’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly a trifle.’

  ‘Not to anyone else, but to him it was a trifle. To him everything was permissible. That’s the point.’ Sinevusov looked me straight in the eye and asked sternly, ‘Can’t you see?’

  ‘Who gave him permission?’ I shuddered under his gaze.

  ‘No, you can’t see …’ His gaze softened, the lines on his face smoothed out and formed a smile. A calm, clear smile. ‘He allowed himself everything. He was his own supreme authority. There was no other. Now do you see? And Dostoevsky went and hanged him. And for what?’ Suddenly Sinevusov broke into ear-splitting laughter. ‘Because some Ivan Karamazov denied his words? What are words? They’re like the wind; they blow and they disappear. And, for this, Smerdyakov hanged himself. He gave his life. He wouldn’t have given a torn rouble that easily, but here … What sort of psychologist does that make of your Dostoevsky, eh?’ Sinevusov didn’t finish. He waved his arm contemptuously and reached for his beer. ‘He was a wimp …’

  He spoke firmly and confidently, and I could see he had carefully thought through everything he’d said. There was truth in his words, but it was the truth of our times, times that believed in nobody and nothing. Although who could say Dostoevsky’s times were any different?

  ‘Look,’ whispered Sinevusov, leaving aside his beer and looking across the room at the large group of students sitting at two tables that had been pushed together. They were drinking beer and having a quiet discussion. As often happens, the general conversation fragmented after a while, and the group split into smaller groups according to interests. It wouldn’t have been worth the attention but for a short, energetic bloke with the look of an ageing Mephistopheles who was flitting among them. Half a glance was enough to see that he was a foreigner. Mephistopheles half sat with one group of students then another, constantly striking up conversations, asking questions and immediately jotting notes into a notebook.

  ‘You see?’ said Sinevusov, still whispering. ‘There are hundreds of them here. I used to work at the Soros Foundation. I’ve seen my share.’

  ‘Huh?’ I said, mystified. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘He’s a spy. It’s a long time since I’ve come across such a colorful example. Watch—he could have stepped right out of a poster.’

  Sitting across from me only moments before had been a home-grown Nietzschean, reader and commentator on the Russian classics, retiree and nonentity; but just as soon as quarry flickered across his field of vision, his hunter’s instinct had surfaced. Tiny caplets of venom appeared on Sinevusov’s cheeks.

  Unaware that a beast of prey was lurking near by, Mephistopheles was chatting away lightheartedly with the students. He looked absurd and out-of-place.

  ‘What does he want with the students?’

  Sinevusov tore his gaze away from Mephistopheles and looked at me. All I had asked was one completely neutral question. But a sequence of other questions, although unspoken, was effortlessly discernible. Suddenly I saw an old paranoiac, unhinged by the world of spies, ready to dig away at any foreigner until under the dusky artificial tan he found the rapacious grin of a worldwide cabal. And he knew as much.

  ‘Students?’ repeated Sinevusov.

  ‘Yes, what can they tell him?’

  ‘They’re not students. They’re journalists. I know at least three of them. Not stars but not exactly bottom of the heap either. I can’t imagine what the hell they’re doing in this dump.’

  ‘They’re spying on the old goat.’

  ‘And I’m trying to figure out who the old goat is,’ snorted Sinevusov. He scowled. ‘Davidov, I may strike you as an incurable maniac, but I’ve learned a thing or two, that’s one; and
two, it’s a long time since I’ve been in the service, so espionage is no longer my concern. But if I see what I’m seeing then what am I to do? Deny what’s before my very eyes? Kiev has become a hotbed of espionage. Everyone is here working against Russia: the French, the British, the Germans, the Poles. Not to mention the CIA. The Chinese are the only ones who are stealing local technology on the sly and don’t give a damn about anything else. For now.’

  ‘This one doesn’t exactly look Chinese.’

  ‘Well, the small fry are international. They gather rumors, gossip, search for compromising evidence. Anything that anyone else might want. Just like you and me, incidentally,’ he said, taking an unexpected dig. ‘Get a pen and write this down.’

  From his jacket pocket Sinevusov took out a notebook and read, ‘Reingarten, Mikhail Aleksandrovich. Born 1966. Diagnostic-Treatment and Scientific-Pedagogical Psychiatric Centre …’

  ‘What?’ I was confused.

  ‘Frunze Street, 103.’

  ‘Whatever … Scientific-Pedagogical …’

  ‘Department four. Will you go?’

  ‘I’ll go tomorrow.’

  ‘They don’t have visiting hours tomorrow.’

  ‘When do they have visiting hours?’

  ‘Today.’

  ‘You’re saying I should go right now? Are you going, too?’

  Sinevusov screwed up his left eye, tutted and shook his head.

  ‘He’s your friend, not mine. You haven’t seen each other for ages, so go and visit him. You think I’ve any reason to go to the hospital, that I’ve forgotten something there?’

  ‘I’ll remind you what you’ve forgotten.’ I nodded and got up from the table. ‘Clearly your memory is failing you. You drove someone into a nuthouse for fifteen years—as good as killing him. And no one wants to remember. Retirees …’

  Outside it was beginning to get dark. Ice was floating in the dark mud in the flooded hollows of the pavement. Along the Upper Bank a solid line of cars was crawling slowly and gloomily by. I glanced through the window of the café. Sinevusov was standing with his arm across Mephistopheles’ shoulder, saying something into his ear.

  The day had disappeared. I walked around evening Podol, lazily ruminating about Mishka, Sinevusov, why the agent had wanted to meet in that particular filthy dive. A minute’s telephone conversation would have sufficed to give me the number of the department where Mishka was being held. But Sinevusov made me waste an entire day. Or maybe he just wanted to talk. The whim of an old soldier, languishing from the boredom of forced idleness.

  I told Sinevusov I would go see Reingarten, but visiting hours at the hospital were surely over by now, and it would be pointless going to Frunze Street. Instead, I turned on to the first side street, banished Sinevusov from my mind and breathed deeply the raw Podol air.

  It had been a long time since I’d last been here. And it just happened to be during the lilac Podol sunsets I’d once loved more than anything. They come towards late February/early March when the snow is pressed up to the curbs and hardened into black snowdrifts, and the smell of the day’s thawed earth, smoke and old rotting fences rises above the asphalt. It’s a time of cosmic solitude and metaphysical breakthroughs.

  I slowly made my way along the Upper Bank to Frolov Street, occasionally casting a backwards glance at the black silhouette of Castle Hill perched carefully on the brink of the dense-mauve Kiev sky as it filled swiftly with darkness. In the intervening years nothing had changed here. Everything was the same, the street, Castle Hill, the heaviness of the raw evening sky. A savage canine howl could be heard from the direction of Schekavitsa Hill, and very close by, along Konstantine Street, the sound of automobiles at long last breaking free of the gridlock. When I reached Contract Square I stopped. The Dutch embassy was here. And the Church of the Assumption. ‘The Lay of Prince Igor’ came to mind: ‘Igor rides along the Borichev to the Church of the Mother of God of Pirogoscha. The lands are victorious, the cities rejoice.’ The lands are victorious … Show me these lands. Here was Borichev, the Church of the Mother of God that they’d finished rebuilding ten years earlier. It was a dead place. Here it seemed that everything was the same as it had ever been: the howling dogs, the old snow at the beginning of spring, the incredible colors of the evening sky. Even the smells were the same. Even Castle Hill. But the bridge to the cosmos had been destroyed. It was gone. There was no cosmos. No metaphysics.

  I moved on. People were filing out of the church. At the entrance they turned back and crossed themselves, then went on their way quickly and silently. Here a woman came out, then another two women, then another. The next person to emerge was Associate Professor Nedremailo. I recognized him instantly, as if I’d been preparing for this meeting for the last twenty years. But he hadn’t been, so without even noticing me he quickly stepped past, shielding his face with the collar of his coat.

  He walked quickly, limping slightly and shivering as if it wasn’t the usual freezing temperatures but a full-blown minus twenty-five. Evidently the professor had got thoroughly chilled inside the damp church. After the metro had been built in Podol the cellars of the surrounding houses began to flood in the spring. Greetings from the rivers Kiyanka and Glybochytsa, buried underground and in history.

  Nedremailo headed for the metro. I followed him.

  Even in 1984 we had no doubt that the whole thing—the searches, the arrests and what followed—had been cooked up by Nedremailo. First of all, the entire department knew the professor was an informer. How we knew this I’ve never found out, but everyone did. Second, it was Nedremailo who took the folder of papers from Sashka Korostishevski at an electrodes seminar. Korostishevski was keeping drafts in the folder: the draft ultimatum, estimates of the strength of the armed forces, sketches of campaign maps and lots of other working papers necessary for the administration of a great power such as the Holy Roman Empire. Having quickly solved an electrodynamics problem Emperor Karl XX was preparing for battle. At the time we were doing all we could to ready ourselves for war: calling men to arms, conducting maneuvers, riveting together tanks and howitzers in our factories. But not in Nedremailo’s seminar. Who wanted to tangle with Nedremailo? Not Korostishevski. But it came to that. His folder was taken away, words were exchanged and the Holy Roman Empire was deprived of important documents. Who could have known this wasn’t merely the beginning of our story but a preface? A prologue.

  Then the bell rang and the seminar was over. Nedremailo left the classroom and headed down the corridor towards the stairwell, Korostishevski’s folder tucked under his arm. We followed. We watched him carrying the folder; in his other hand the professor gripped a heavy briefcase. And as we watched we panicked and talked rubbish, constructing impossible plans, calculating how we could get the folder back. But Nedremailo quickly drew away from us, limping and slightly stooped.

  He was walking just as quickly now. Past the tram stop, the grandmothers hawking sunflower seeds, the underground passage leading to the metro. Nedremailo mounted the steps to the Home Cooking Café. I entered the café right behind him.

  What do associate professors eat for dinner? Borscht, dumplings with potato and mushrooms, sour-cucumber-and-sauerkraut salad. Bread. Beer. I confined myself to beer.

  ‘Is this place free?’

  Nedremailo raised his tired eyes to me. Then he looked pointedly around the half-empty dining room. I acted like I didn’t understand. I said, ‘Thank you,’ and sat down across from him. Just over an hour ago Sinevusov and I had been sitting in exactly the same way. Nedremailo shrugged and began eating his borscht.

  When the professor turned to his dumplings I asked, ‘Do you still lecture on electrodynamics in the radiophysics department?’

  ‘When did you graduate?’ He studied me but couldn’t remember who I was.

  ‘I didn’t graduate. We were expelled in 1984 for truancy. Perhaps you recall …’

  ‘No,’ Nedremailo said, and jerked his shoulder in irritation.

  ‘… K
orostishevski, Reingarten, Kurochkin …’

  He certainly remembered Kurochkin.

  ‘Ah yes, now I remember. That was an unpleasant business.’ He rotated his fork, dumpling impaled at one end. ‘But why truancy? As I recall, you were expelled on completely different grounds.’

  ‘If you remember that much I’d like to ask you a favor. Could you give me the folder you took away from Korostishevski?’

  ‘It’s been many, many years since I’ve had that folder.’ Nedremailo waved the fork and dumpling.

  ‘Eat the dumpling,’ I said. ‘It will get cold. Or fly off your fork. And I’d hate it to end up in my beer. So where’s the folder?’

  ‘They took it away at the very first interrogation.’

  ‘Interrogation? I always thought your dealings with the authorities went by another name.’

  ‘Look here, what’s your …?’

  ‘Davidov.’

  ‘Right, Davidov. Look here, I’m not about to justify myself to you. You are not my judge. Is that clear?’

  ‘It certainly is.’

  ‘Then stop interrupting,’ Nedremailo said quietly. ‘I don’t have to talk to you at all. Besides, it all happened a long time ago. Although I can understand why you’re interested …’

  ‘I certainly am,’ I couldn’t help saying.

  ‘And I want you to know that I had nothing to do with that business. And I have nothing to do with it now.’

  ‘Well, that just figures.’ I crossed my arms and laughed. ‘It just figures.’

  ‘A lot of people in the department thought otherwise. A few people had words with me. They criticized me, and I couldn’t even deny it. I was in a ridiculous position, you’ll agree. But my hands were tied. I’d sworn an oath.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘In short, yes, the KGB did come after you but not through me. You may think it ironic, but I really was summoned for interrogation a few days after your arrest, and that’s when they took the folder. It was an unpleasant discussion.’