Legends

She gazed out a window. “I was studying piano at the conservatory when my husband, Samat’s father, was falsely accused of being an enemy of the people and sent to Siberia.” She held her fingers up and examined them; Martin could see that the palms of her hands were cracking from dryness and her nails were broken and filthy. “My husband—for the moment his name slips my mind; it will surely come back to me—my husband was a medical doctor, you see. He never returned from Siberia, though Tzvetan, who made inquiries after the death of Koba, whom you know as Stalin, heard tales from returning prisoners about his brother running a clinic in a camp for hardened criminals, who paid him with crusts of stale bread.”

“Did you and Samat suffer when your husband was arrested?”

“I was expelled from the Party. Then they cancelled my stipend and expelled me from the conservatory, though it was not because my husband had been arrested—he and Tzvetan were Armenians, you know, and Armenians wore their arrests the way others wear medals on their chests.”

“Why were you expelled, then?”

“Dear boy, because they discovered I was an Israelite, of course. My parents had given me a Christian name, Kristyna, precisely so that the Party would not suspect I had Jewish roots, but in the end the ruse did not work.”

“Did you know that Samat went to live in Israel?”

“It was my idea—he needed to emigrate because of the gang wars raging in the streets of Moscow. I was the one who suggested Israel might accept him if he could prove his mother was Jewish.”

“How did you make ends meet when you lost your conservatory stipend?”

“While he was in the gulag, Tzvetan arranged for us to be taken care of by his business associates. When he returned he personally took us both under his wing. He convinced Samat to enroll in the Forestry Institute, though why my son would want to learn forestry was beyond me. And then he sent him to the State Planning Agency’s Higher Economic School. What Samat did after that he never told me, though it was clearly important because he came and went in a very shiny limousine driven by a chauffeur. Who would have imagined it—my son, driven by chauffeur?”

On a hunch, Martin said, “You don’t seem mad.”

Kristyna looked surprised. “And who told you I was?”

“I heard one of the peasants from the village say you were a raving lunatic.”

Kristyna frowned. “I am a raving lunatic when I need to be,” she murmured. “It is a formula for protecting yourself from life and from fate. I wrap myself in lunacy the way a peasant pulls a sheepskin coat over his shoulders in winter. When people take you for a raving lunatic, you can say anything and nobody, not even the Party, holds it against you.”

“You are not what you seem.”

“And you, my dear, dear Jozef, are you what you seem?”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that …”

“Samat brought you here—he said you were friends from school. I accepted you in place of the son I had lost at childbirth. The Oligarkh received you as a member of his entourage and, after several months, as a member of his family. And you betrayed us all. You betrayed Samat, you betrayed me, you betrayed Tzvetan. Why?”

“I don’t … remember any of this.”

Kristyna looked at Martin intently. “Does your amnesia protect you from life and from fate, Jozef?”

“If only it could … I run as fast as I can, but life and fate are endlessly and always right behind and gaining on me.”

Tears seeped from under Kristyna’s tightly shut lids. “Dear Jozef, that has been my experience also.”

Taking leave of Kristyna, Martin headed back toward Prigorodnaia’s church. The crowd of peasants had long since followed the priest back to the church to offer up special prayers for the soul of Jozef Kafkor. Martin was unlatching the garden gate when he heard Samat’s mother calling from a window.

“It was Zurab,” she shouted.

Martin turned back. “What about Zurab?” he called.

“Zurab was the given name of Samat’s father, my husband. Zurab Ugor-Zhilov.”

Martin smiled and nodded. Kristyna smiled back and waved good-bye.

When he reached the paved spur, Martin found the Zil parked off the roadway in the shade of a grove of birches leaning away from the prevailing winds. Katovsky, his shoes off and trousers rolled up, was down slope from the car soaking his feet in the cool currents of the Lesnia. “You wouldn’t by any chance be familiar with the fourth game A. Alekhine versus J. Capablanca 1927?” the driver called as he scrambled uphill toward Martin. “I was just now playing it in my head—there was a queen sacrifice more dazzling than the thirteen-year-old R. Fischer’s celebrated queen sacrifice on the seventeenth move of his Grünfeld Defense against the grandmaster Byrne, which stunned the chess world.”

“No,” Martin said as Katovsky sat on the ground to pull on his shoes. “Never played that game.”