The Stone Bridge

Goltsman

GOLTSMAN

Is a man always to remain alone?

Suddenly as hot as if I’d been wearing a tight -fitting suit, I staggered to a kiosk, bought an icy can of diet Coke, and listened to it hiss when I opened it. I crossed the boulevard, sipping from the can, climbed over a fence on the divider, went through some bushes, and sat down on a park bench. I drank, gasping for air, and listening to myself: still hot? Cooling down? My head burned, blood slammed into my left temple like it was a dam.

A man next to me on the bench looked at me, seeming aloof and free. He was old and exquisitely thin, with a disheveled and grey cloud of hair on his head. He had on soft casual pants and an ancient scholarly cardigan belted over his stomach, the kind you always see in pictures of dying Jewish physicists and immoral scoundrels who buy stolen violins and stamps. His cheeks, stubbly, looked like they was still getting used to the loss of their daily shave; he sat as easily as if he lived somewhere nearby and came here every evening to get some fresh air, on this bench, with the circus on Vernadsky Street behind him.

“Hello, Alexander Naumovich!” I cheerfully moved closer to him on the bench. “What are you reading these days?”

Goltsman smiled with pleasure, and we shook hands.

“Since Regina died, there’s only one book I read. It’s on my bedside table. It’s the Bible. You know, it has everything in it.”

“You know, I meant to tell you: the bed you and Regina Markovna gave me worked out great. I sleep in it all the time.”

“And we had it for seventeen years before you. Until we needed a special one…” Goltsman paused in thought, smiling mournfully at something; his hand twitched at a memory and raised itself away from his lap, then swayed toward my shoulder, but collapsed instead onto the bench between us, exhausted. Everything was clear anyway. “You’ve got to go.”

“There’s nowhere for me to go,” I looked up at the coldly trembling leaves, at the autumn, at my fleeting, meaningless life, and almost cried.

“But you know what’s happening. Clearly someone has identified you. They’ve marked you as a target. We don’t know who they are. I hope it’s something commercial. If you don’t agree to work for them, they will hand you over. You should leave. I don’t see any other options.” He spoke slowly, moving words like heavy furniture, making it clear that we were being followed even here, on this bench. We were guppies in a fishbowl. “You know our capabilities. They are quite limited. If we find enough money… If the right people at the prosecutor’s office and court agree to help… You’ll spend a year in prison just waiting for the trial. Or two. Why go through that? Look at all of this differently. Aren’t you tired? You’ve lived some. You have experienced things that others often miss. Go somewhere warm, to the sea. You can have everything a man needs — a bit of a beach, honest work…” Goltsman wanted to add “a good woman”, but blinked off the word with a tear in his eye. “Trust me, you don’t need anything else. I need to know what you think.”

I have so little life left, was all I could think. I’ve forgotten the meaning of childhood games, of moving toy soldiers in the grass, I’ve lost the joy of New Year’s Eve, the sweet watermelons, enjoying the body of a beloved woman, the sweetness in the sound of my own name, the warm weight of a soaked shirt under a summer downpour— the world looks at me without interest. All I have left is to dream of a healthy old age, without soiling myself, and to hope to die in my sleep.

“I want to work on the Great Stone Bridge. You’ll help me.”

I had noticed Goltsman in reading room number six (scholarly research only) on the second floor of the historical library, I saw him in the archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism (it’s called something else now, something about the socio-political history of the Russian state), I ran into him in the former Archive of the Central Committee of the Communist Party on Ilyinka. We would nod to each other. Exchange pleasantries. Then one day we started talking in the cafeteria, over apple tarts. He’d read me his works and ask why no one was interested in publishing them. With a slavish desperation, the old man carved out, as if with scissors through metal, sketches about heroes of the partisan movement in the winter of 1941. And then made the rounds of magazines and publishing houses, hopelessly, with his load of stories about these unwanted parachutists, lieutenants of state security, and sundry other incredible individuals who on a winter morning, with the hangman’s noose around their neck, would say to the village residents gathered to watch the execution, “Our cause will triumph! I’m not afraid of death! I’ll die as befits a patriot of the Motherland!” This while German motorcyclists were rolling from Khimki to Moscow, past the space where there now sits an IKEA.

Goltsman was only printed by Communist newspapers and the Military-Historical Magazine. I kept wondering: Why is he doing this? To keep himself busy? Does he need money? Does he pay rent on an apartment for his granddaughter? But Goltsman didn’t have any grandchildren, and dragged his metaphorical pebbles to the graves of comrades with intentional stubbornness, as if he were taking part in some great construction project. His wife had cancer, and it took the disease three years to devour her; at some point it became awkward to call Goltsman at home and, if Regina Markovna answered, chat idly with a woman who was doomed to die slowly, consciously, while you stayed behind and watched it happen. Goltsman’s son had given himself over to computers, and went to live in America.

No one still living had really known Goltsman in his earlier life, although there remained his pupils, and his beloved Motherland. In the prefaces to various KGB veterans’ memoirs, Major General A. N. Goltsman was singled out for his achievement in collecting and recording the history of counter-espionage. In the archives, whenever a form required the retired researcher’s “last workplace”, Goltsman always wrote in his tidy, narrow hand, “Assistant to the Chairman of the Information Committee”; as a result, everyone thought he was a journalist. It was little known that the obscurely named Information Committee, in 1947, briefly attempted to unite the military (GRU) and political (First Department of the MGB) intelligence services — the Chairman of the Committee was the number two man in the empire, Vyacheslav Molotov.

For what Goltsman ultimately came to do for us, we didn’t pay him. He helped us on an ideological basis, and he and I were not friends — I can’t be friends with someone and pity them. Compassion only ever leads to unintentional cruelty, and anyway he didn’t know how to be friends with anyone either. We served the Truth, and the rest was nothing, at the end of earthly roads there is nothing, and no one to call to. We simply met and said the things to each other that our work required. Until his wife died. Then Goltsman was taken by an invisible hand, crushed with a quiet crack, and put back on this bench.

“The idea is simple. To unpack the bridge. And get things across to these freaks, to bring them to their senses. They think that all the questions will be closed. That everyone will be buried. I want to show them.”

Goltsman nodded — yes, he had been expecting this:

“That, my dear man, is hopeless. That is useless, dangerous work. It’s not our business. It comes after all of us. There is only one way out for us. It is also open for you. The way out is — here.”

I didn’t turn. Instead, I looked straight ahead at the bikers racing towards the Sparrow Hills, carrying their blond girls in black leather — so I never did see what gesture he made to refer to the book that now ruled him — a cross? Three fingers pinched together?

“And we’ll return.”

“I don’t see a way out. I’ll do what I can.”

We were quiet for a while, companionably. I finished my Coke and tossed the can into the trash-bin.

“What about this… young man? The one who contacted you? Do you think you’ll have what it takes to, let’s say, solve this problem?”

I licked my lips and considered Goltsman’s question.

“He did scare me, at first. It all looked very real, more real than life, in fact. But then I went over it in my head — I spent all night thinking about this guy, replaying our conversation. And here’s the thing: he wasn’t sure how to get into his car. I mean, he didn’t know where he was supposed to sit. At all. He went to the wrong car first, the security people had to nudge him to the BMW, and there, again, he didn’t go to the right seat, they had to prompt him. If I’m lucky, I bet he came to the market alone, without the escort, and the rest of the show was timed, staged for my benefit. What if he just hired the security detail for an hour? Then, it’s just him, acting alone — and he’s wide open. He’s just a clown with ideas. I wrote down the license plate number.”

Goltsman considered this, his face impassive, and finally nodded: yes, that’s possible.

He stood up. It was time for him to go. Now, in his retirement, when he was his own man and didn’t use an alarm clock, he lived according to his own, very strict order.

“The Great Stone Bridge is by the House of Government. I’ve heard a lot about it, but nothing useful. We need to find a way in.” He considered something for a moment and added, indifferently: “The result may be instructive.”

Night is an unreliable time. At night, I become a boy. Everyone who knows me as a different person, and for whom I must be working, is asleep. I sit on the bed alone, and can’t bring myself to turn on the light. As if there were someone else with me whom I might disturb. I can’t turn on the light to read, I can’t listen to music in the darkness. I can only feel that I am a boy — I can touch my face in the dark and smooth it with my hands; I can ignore anything uninteresting, I don’t have to take an interest in pedestrian things. I can hold a ball in my hands, or quietly roll it to the wall.