51±¾É«

By EsterRose Enos

It was an unholy hour when Lieutenant Kuznetsov arrested his old friend. Really, it would have been better to describe the two of them as acquaintances. Good acquaintances. Strangers who were joined at the hip in their schoolboy days and then separated when adulthood approached. He remembered they had tried keeping correspondence at the start, even as both of them knew it was a futile endeavour.

In those times, Kuznetsov tirelessly laboured as an up and coming officer whose place of residence changed on a month-to-month basis, and on rare occasions, from week-to-week. Days passed at a brisk pace and he had kept his nose to the grindstone.

Boris, on the other hand, had an aimless existence. He carelessly meandered through life as if it was a game, unemployed one night and a dazzling waiter with a handsome smile for some high class eatery the next. The lieutenant in his younger, more superstitious years theorized that a guardian angel had settled on Boris’s shoulder, an invisible horseshoe yoked around his neck that supernaturally guided the strange boy from opportunity to opportunity.

Above all else, Lieutenant K. Kuznetsov remembered that Boris was vulnerable to the vices of the world. When they were young that meant Boris stole the toffee candies from his pockets and charmed whatever girl was hanging off of his arm, but now in their older age, the lieutenant could only suppose that Boris had sired a dozen children with several different mothers and taken up vodka as a mistress. Jolly and lecherous was what most of his schoolmates from St. Vasily’s turned into and Boris would surely fit the bill.

Kuznetsov, as it turned out, was quite wrong.

After beating his fist on the stained door of the apartment listed as Boris’s in the unscrupulous arrest list, he waited two minutes, maybe three, before he heard the tread of dragging footsteps slowly approach him.

He didn’t recognize the man who tentatively opened the creaking door. The fellow had cheeks cut up from shaving with a sloppy hand and unkempt hair crisply trimmed to a dozen different lengths as if the barber had been tipsy before taking a go at it. His figure was as poor as his face, with a threadbare set of slacks cinched to his waist being the only thing to clothe his scabbed, skeletal form. If it weren’t for the shallow rising and falling of his chest, Kuznetsov would have thought he was staring at a standing corpse.

This pockmarked specimen of extremely poor health was one of the farthest cries imaginable from the robust, rosy-cheeked teenager that had seen him off at the train station in Moscow after he was assigned his first post.

The man looked the lieutenant up and down with squinted eyes and a grim mouth tightened into a thin line.

Kuznetsov cleared his throat before uttering the familiar phrase delivered to every unfortunate soul whose name was typewritten on one of the several hundred arrest lists comprised of baseless accusations of conspiracy, of espionage, and especially of Trotskyism. It was hard times they were living in and the men seated in upper offices had long since issued that defeating the enemy of the people would require paving over traitorous portions of the populace.

“Boris Korobochka. You are now under the custody of the state. Do not resist.”

The man gaped and swallowed. Kuznetsov could practically hear the cogs whirring in the fellow’s head.

“Could I grab a few changes of clothes before we go?” He asked. Heavens, he even sounded like Boris, just older and raspy with tiredness.

Lieutenant Kuznetsov could only nod. As the scrawny thing stumbled back inside the apartment, he took a moment to breathe, slow and deep, letting the stale air filtrate through the cavity of his chest before pushing into no man’s land.

The place was a horrid mess with splintered furniture, mold creeping from the vents, and knotted carpet flooring. Most distastefully, Kuznetsov could see clothing strewn about that could by no means be used by a grown man. Kitten heels and girlish hats and small, woollen stockings.

He could hear the shuffling of his subordinates waiting in the hallway and the muted whimpers of the old woman, a neighbour they dragged out of a room a few doors back to sign on as witness. Her ragged body crumpled in on itself when she saw whose apartment they stopped at.

“Good boy,” she mumbled, teary eyed. “He’s a good boy. A sweet boy. It’s a pity, oh such a pity.”

A few minutes passed with no sign of the man. Briefly, K. Kuznetsov considered barging in and getting the job done, but such a train of thought was unnecessary. It was a sixth floor apartment. The only escape would be smashing onto cracked pavement after falling through an open window.

Finally, the gaunt fellow emerged with a tattered bag slung over his shoulders. The cheap lamplight made him appear rank with jaundice and his mouth flapped open in a manner not dissimilar to a fish thrown on a dock, trapped above water.

“Boris Korobochka,” the lieutenant repeated. “You are now under the custody of the state. Do not resist.”

The man continued gaping at him.

“Konstantin… Kostya, is that you?” That raspy voice called out. Kuznetsov couldn’t meet Boris’s eyes. He could only vaguely gesture towards the door.

“Oh God, it is you,” Boris exclaimed. “How many years has it been? Twenty? It has to have been less than that, eighteen?”

“Please, to the door,” Kuznetsov said. Sweat began beading under his uniform, clinging to the nape of his neck.

“You look almost the same, just a bit older, but not even the best of us can escape time, isn’t that the truth. Don’t worry about it,” Boris said. He trudged to the door at a slug-like tempo.

“I have three girls now. Remember when I was young I said I only wanted boys. That was so long ago, of course I wouldn’t trade them for the world now, but you should’ve seen my face year after year at the hospital when the nurse said, ‘It’s a girl!’ Dolly named all of them, she was the only one who prepared for girls. I always thought we’d have at least one boy I’d be able to teach hockey to and scold for mucking up clothes so badly that Dolly would have to spend hours scrubbing and wringing to get the scum out. Oh, remember our old school? I hated the place, and I think I still do. It’s practically criminal the money they demand for some hick place in the middle of nowhere, but I suppose it had its charms. And—“

“You are now under custody of the state. Please do not resist,” Lieutenant K. Kuznetsov repeated, his eyes focusing on the space above Boris’s head.

“Remember when we tried to smuggle a couple cases of spirits into the commons?” Boris was only a few feet away from the exit. “God, we were stupid then.”

There was a womanly shriek and then sets of uniform-clad arms outstretched from the open doorway, curling around Boris’s arms, his shoulders, his neck. The pits of hell had cracked open and devils were dragging an ignorant soul into eternal damnation with the accompanying chorus of the old witness’s wailing.

Boris dug his heels in and tried to turn his head, his wild eyes meeting the lieutenant’s. “Kostya!” he said, his petition accompanied by the intense flaring of his nostrils. He was a workhorse being pulled to the slaughter. “Dolly can’t afford—the oldest one’s only eight. Please Kostya. The expenses, there’s so many—!”

A nimble, gloved hand muzzled Boris as they yanked him out of the dingy apartment.

There was a quick scuffle, a squawk of indignance from the haggard neighbor, a few shoves, and then Kuznetsov was left with no living soul in his close vicinity. He walked with heavy feet from kitchen to living room, flicking light switches and turning lamp knobs until the putrid yellow lights gave way to a more comfortable shade of unlit midnight darkness. Carefully stepping over the ratty winter coats and scuffed work-boots and children’s school uniforms, he cleaved his path through the shoddy apartment.

Slowly, he stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind him. His subordinates worked at a brisk pace and Boris with the old woman were surely being hauled down the stairs if not already outside the premises.

An uneasy silence dwelt in the hall but the lieutenant heard erratic, muffled sobbing and the sound of little feet scuffling against hard flooring within Boris’s apartment.

“God forgive me,” Konstantin Kuznetsov whispered into the lonely dreariness and his hesitant, trembling hand made the sign of the cross.