Wolves Eat Dogs (18 page)

Roman introduced Arkady to a pig that rubbed with exquisite pleasure against the slats of its sty as Roman poured in slops.

“Oink, oink,” said Roman, “oink, oink,” his cheeks apple red from the rays of the setting sun and pride of ownership. It was possible that Roman had had a nip before Arkady arrived. Alex and Vanko followed in Arkady’s footsteps; the rain had stopped but left the farmyard ankle-deep in mud. The scene reminded Arkady of the official inspections that had once been Soviet fare: “Party Secretary Visits Collective Farm and Vows More Fertilizer.” “Oink, oink,” said Roman, the soul of wit. He seemed delighted to be leading the tour without his wife’s assistance. “Russians raise pigs for meat, we raise pigs for fat. But we’re saving Sumo. Aren’t we, Sumo?”

“For what?” asked Arkady.

Roman placed a finger to his lips and winked. A secret. Which struck Arkady as appropriate for an illegal resident of the Zone. Roman led the way to a chicken coop. In the cool after the rain, Arkady felt the heat of the sitting hens. The old man showed Arkady how he tied the bar of the door shut with a twist of wire. “Foxes are very clever.”

“Perhaps you should have a dog,” Arkady suggested.

“Wolves eat dogs.” That did seem to be the consensus of the village, Arkady thought. Roman shook his head as if he’d given the matter a lot of consideration. “Wolves hate dogs. Wolves hunt down dogs because they regard them as traitors. If you think about it, dogs are dogs only because of humans; otherwise they’d all be wolves, right? And where will we be when all the dogs are gone? It will be the end of civilization.” He opened a barn with an array of shovels and hoes, rakes and scythes, a grindstone, a pulley hanging from a cross-beam and bins of potatoes and beets. “Did you meet Lydia?”

“The cow? Yes, thank you.”

A pair of huge eyes in the depths of a stall beseeched the tour to leave her alone to masticate her hay. Which reminded Arkady of Captain Marchenko when Arkady alerted him to the possibility of a body floating in the cooling pond. The captain had suggested that a loose boat was not sufficient reason to leave a dry office, and the pond was a large body of water to go pounding around in the rain or the dark. The empty vodka bottle aside, had there been blood in the boat? Signs of struggle? Professional to professional, didn’t this sound like a wild goose chase?

Roman led his guests out by a half-shed packed so tight with firewood that not another piece could have been inserted. Arkady suspected that when Roman was too drunk to stand, he could still stack wood with lapidary care. Roman waved to an orchard and identified cherries, pears, plums and apples.

Arkady asked Alex, “Have you gone around the yard with a dosimeter?”

“What’s the use? This is a couple in their eighties, and their own food tastes better to them than starving in the city. This is heaven.”

Maybe, Arkady thought. Roman and Maria’s house was a weathered blue, windows trimmed with carving, one corner resting country-style on a tree stump. It shone amid abandoned houses that were as black as if they’d been burned, with tumbledown barns and fruit trees wrapped in brambles. One dirt path led from the house to the village center; another climbed toward the wrought-iron fence and crosses of the cemetery, within a few steps a compass of peasant life and death.

The interior was a single room: a combination kitchen, bedroom and parlor centered around a whitewashed brick stove that heated the house, cooked the food, baked the bread and—peasant genius!—on especially cold nights provided a second sleeping bench directly over the oven. Lamps and candles lit walls covered with embroidered cloths, tapestries with forest scenes, family photos and picture calendars collected from various years. Photos framed a younger Roman and Maria, he in a rubber apron, she holding an enormous braid of garlic, together with an urbanized group that must have been their son and his family, a timorous wife and a skinny girl about four years of age. A separate picture of the girl showed her maybe a year older, in a sun hat by a rust-pocked sign that said
HAVANA CLUB.

Maria glowed so, she could have been polished for the occasion. She wore an embroidered shirt and apron, a tasseled shawl and, of course, her brilliant blue eyes and steel smile. Despite the crowded quarters, she was everywhere at once, setting out bowls of cucumbers, pickled mushrooms, pickles in honey, thin and fat sausages, apple salad, cabbage in sour cream, dark bread and home-churned butter and a center plate of salted fat with an alabaster glow.

“Don’t even think about your dosimeter,” Alex whispered to Arkady.

“How often do you eat here?”

“When I feel lucky.”

The rattle of a car muffler drew up outside, and a moment later, Eva Kazka appeared with flowers. She also wore a scarf. It seemed to be her style.

“Renko, I didn’t know you were going to be here,” Eva said. “Is this part of your investigation?”

“No. Purely social.”

“Social is as social does.” Roman arranged a row of small glasses around a bottle of vodka. The party had gone a long time without vodka, Arkady thought; Vanko looked as if he had crawled on his knees to a water hole. The host poured every glass to the trembling brim, and Maria watched proudly as he distributed each without the loss of a drop. “Wait!” Roman magisterially struck a match and lit his glassful like a candle, a yellow flame dancing on the surface of the liquid. “Good. It’s ready.” He blew out the flame and raised his glass. “To Russia and Ukraine. May we lie in the same ditch.”

Arkady took a swallow and gasped, “Not vodka.”

“Samogon.” Alex wiped his eyes. “Moonshine from fermented sugar, yeast and maybe a potato. It doesn’t get much purer than that.”

“How pure?”

“Maybe eighty percent.”

The samogon had its effect: Eva looked more dangerous, Vanko more dignified, Roman’s ears went red and Maria glistened. There was a solemn dipping into the food while Roman poured another round. Arkady found the pickles crisp and sour, with perhaps a hint of strontium. Roman asked him, “You went fishing in Vanko’s boat? Did you catch anything?”

“No, although I did see a very large fish. A Chernobyl Giant, people said.” He noticed Vanko smirking at Alex. “You know about this fish?”

Eva said, “The catfish? It’s Alex’s joke.”

“A catfish is a catfish,” Vanko said.

“Not quite,” said Alex. “People here are accustomed to channel catfish that grow to a paltry meter or two. Someone—I couldn’t say who—seems to have imported Danube catfish, which grow to the size of a truck. That’s a respectable fish.”

“It’s a sick joke,” Eva said. “Alex would like a plague to sweep across Europe and kill all the people to make room for his stupid animals.”

“Present company excluded, of course,” Alex said. Maria smiled. The party seemed to be off to a nice start.

“What shall we drink to?” Roman asked.

“Oblivion,” Alex suggested.

Arkady was better prepared for his second samogon, but he still had to step back from the impact. Eva declared herself warm. She loosened her scarf but didn’t remove it.

Maria advised Arkady to eat a slice of fat. “It will grease the stomach.”

“Actually, I’m feeling fairly well greased. This picture of the girl by the Havana Club sign was taken in Cuba?”

“Their granddaughter,” Vanko said.

“Maria, after me,” Maria said.

Alex said, “Every year Cuba takes Chernobyl kids for therapy. It’s very nice, all palm trees and beaches, except the last thing those kids need is solar radiation.”

Arkady was aware of having introduced an element of unease. Roman cleared his throat and said, “We’re not sitting. This is irregular. We should be sitting.”

In such a small cabin, there were only two chairs and room for only two on the bench. Alex pulled Eva down on his lap, and Arkady stood.

“Truly, how is the investigation going?” Alex asked.

Arkady said, “It’s not going anywhere. I’ve never made less progress.”

“You told me that you weren’t a good investigator,” Eva said.

“So when I tell you that I’ve never made less progress, that’s saying something.”

“And we hope you never make any progress,” said Alex. “That way you can stay with us forever.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Vanko said hopefully.

Eva said, “None of us makes progress, that’s the nature of this place. I will never cure people who live in radioactive houses. I will never cure children whose tumors appear ten years after exposure. This is not a medical program, this is an experiment.”

“Well, that’s a downer,” Alex said. “Let’s go back to the dead Russian.”

“Of course,” said Eva, and she filled her own glass.

Alex said, “I can understand why a Russian business tycoon would have his throat slit. I just don’t understand why he would come all the way to this little village to have it done.”

“I’ve wondered the same thing,” Arkady said.

“There must have been plenty of people in Moscow willing to accommodate him,” Alex said.

“I’m sure there were.”

“He was protected by bodyguards, which means he had to escape his own security to be killed. He must have been coming here for protection. From whom? But death was inevitable. It was like an appointment in Samarra. Wherever he went, death was waiting.”

“Alex, you should be an actor,” Vanko said.

Eva said, “He
is
an actor.”

“You were a physicist before you became an ecologist,” Arkady said to Alex. “Why did you change?”

“What a dull question. Vanko is a singer.” Alex poured for everyone. “This is the entertainment section of the evening. We are on a night train, samogon is our fuel and Vanko is our engineer. Vanko, the floor is yours.”

Vanko sang a long song about a Cossack off to the wars, his chaste wife and the hawk that carried their letters back and forth until it was shot down by an envious nobleman. When Vanko was done, everyone applauded so hard they sweated.

“I found the story absolutely believable,” Alex said. “Especially the part about how love can turn to suspicion, suspicion to jealousy and jealousy to hate.”

“Sometimes love can go right to hate,” said Eva. “Investigator Renko, are you married?”

“No.”

“Been married?”

“Yes.”

“But no more. We often hear how difficult it is for investigators and militia detectives to maintain a successful marriage. The men supposedly become emotionally cold and silent. Was that your problem, that you were cold and silent?”

“No, my wife was allergic to penicillin. A nurse gave her the wrong injection, and she died of anaphylactic shock.”

“Eva,” Alex whispered. “Eva, that was a bad mistake.”

“I’m sorry,” she told Arkady.

“So am I,” said Arkady.

He left the party for a while. Physically he was present and smiled at the appropriate times, but his mind was elsewhere. The first time he’d met Irina was at the Mosfilm studio, during an outdoor shoot. She was a wardrobe mistress, not an actress, and yet once the sun lit her huge deep-set eyes, everyone else seemed made of cardboard. It was not a placid relationship, but it was not cold. He could not be cold around Irina; that was like trying to be cold beside a bonfire. When he saw her on the gurney, dead, her eyes so blank, he thought his life had ended, too, yet here he was years later, in the Zone of Exclusion, lost and stumbling but alive. He looked around the room to clear his head and happened to light on the icons high in their corner, Christ on the left wall, the Madonna on the right, the two framed by richly embroidered cloths and lit by votive candles on a shelf. The Christ was actually a postcard, but the Mother was the genuine article, a Byzantine painting on wood of the Madonna in an unusual blue cowl with gold stars, her fingertips lightly pressed together in prayer. She looked like the stolen icon he had seen in the motorcycle sidecar. That icon had been taken over the border to Byelorussia. What was it doing here?

Vanko said, “The Jews are here.”

“Where?” Arkady asked.

“In Chernobyl. Everywhere, walking up and down the streets.”

Alex said, “Thank you, Vanko, we’ve been warned.” He added to Arkady, “Hasidic Jews. There’s a famous rabbi buried here. They visit and pray. Maria’s turn.”

After the formalities of modesty and protest, Maria sat up in her chair, closed her eyes and broke into a song that transformed her from an old woman into a girl looking for her lover at a midnight tryst, and singing in a register so high the windowpanes seemed to vibrate like crystals. When Maria finished, she opened her eyes, spread a smile of steel teeth and swung her feet with pleasure. Roman tried to follow with selections on a violin, but a string broke, and he went hors de combat.

“Arkady?” Alex asked.

“Sorry, I’m low in entertainment skills.”

“Then it’s your turn,” Alex told Eva.

“All right.” She ran her hands through her hair as if that combed it, fixed her eyes on Alex and began: