Ekaterina (22 page)

-

Ilyitch sat in the café, cursing his bad luck. Captain Spasonov was on the woman like glue. If Ilyitch didn’t watch it, everything he’d spent the last five years building would explode. The last thing he needed was for the FSB Captain to look up and see him nursing a beer in the hotel café.

Kat had the book. He watched her zip it into her backpack. Across from her, Spasonov looked wrung out, like he’d been dragged behind a Russian
Kamaz
about a hundred miles. His face was lined, his hair spiking in all directions, his shoulders slumped. He appeared about as capable as a
babushka
in a fifty-meter dash.

Perfect.

-

Vadeem leaned against the hood of Pyotr’s ancient blue
Zhiguli
, crossed his arms, and shot daggers at Kat.

Tears weren’t going to move him. He’d summoned his defenses and planned for her attack.

But her latest tactics left him outflanked and weakening quickly. She wielded her miraculous smile, like a weapon against his icy resolve, and he was melting fast. He ground out another no, desperate for her to comprehen that what she was asking was unthinkable. “I just. . .can’t.”

Her beautiful smile dimmed. “Don’t go anywhere.”

Relief whooshed through him with a sigh. No, he was resigned to park here for the next three hours in misery, staring at a small, green, log cabin church, listening to believers sing songs that would unravel time and pain and take him to a place he had tried to forget. Her amber eyes committed him to that much. “Don’t worry. I’ll be here when you get back.”

She turned and headed into the church, waiting as a hunched
babushka
wrapped in wool headscarf and brown polyester coat, shuffled in before her. The door opened, and for a brief moment, the light from inside pushed out into the twilight, illuminating the worn wooden steps
.

His light has illuminated my dark paths. He has set me free. Peace can be had for those who have faith.
Vadeem opened the diary Kat had left with him, in hopes, he supposed, that if she couldn’t get him inside the church, he might find some spiritual wisdom from her ancestors. She’d practically shoved it in his hands, despite his protests. “There have to be answers in here, Vadeem, and we don’t have time for me to decipher every word like an archeologist. Please, do what you can to figure out what secrets Anton buried in here.”

He opened to the page where he’d left off. Secrets, indeed. How about finding the secret dark path God’s light had illuminated for Kat’s deceased relative?

From what had Anton been set free? The burden of the crest? Or something deeper, more hideous?

Like betraying his family? Vadeem, too had seen a building burn, heard the sounds of anguish echoing into the night. Had Anton been freed from memories and guilt so gut-wrenching it could make a man wake at night, screaming?

Vadeem closed his eyes and pushed back a wave of pain so hot he thought he might gasp.

“
Moshchina
, could you help me?”

Vadeem opened his eyes.

“You,
Moshchina
.” A small woman, her skull outlined by baggy skin and a cherry red headscarf, smiled up at him. She leaned heavily on a smooth weathered walking stick, scoliosis wrestling her nearly half over. Her backbone jutted from a thin, gray sweater. Her arthritic hand reached out to his arm, grasping his jacket with thin fingers. “Could you help me?”

He ran a tongue over his dry lips, his heart pounding. “Sure, Babushka.” Her brown eyes, set deep, lit up like candles inside an earthen pot. “Please help me into that building there. My old bones can’t make the steps.” She gestured with her head to the church across the street.

Vadeem stared at the building and felt something heavy crash into his chest. He swallowed. “
Ladna
.” He shoved the diary into his pocket and angled out his elbow.

They shuffled across the street, toward the church, Vadeem’s feet weighing a thousand kilograms each. He helped her up the stairs, and breathed considerably easier when she opened the door.

It swung in. He glimpsed Pyotr in front, standing between two endless rows of pew benches crammed with bodies. The familiar smell of body heat, aged wood, and dust rushed back to Vadeem. His head started to spin.

The
babushka
shuffled in, her hand knotted in his jacket. She seemed to have forgotten him, her eyes on the pastor. Vadeem put a hand on hers, intending to work her grip free before he passed out, or worse, lost the battle with his churning stomach and delivered the
borscht
he had for lunch onto the sanctuary floor.

No one turned around, thankfully. His heart lodged in his throat when she stopped at a back pew and gestured for him to enter. He looked at her, unable to voice his horror.

She pushed him, powered by some mystical
babushka
force that wielded him helpless. He found himself stumbling into the pew, his feet taking a mind of their own. He tried to turn around, to force his way back, but the
babushka
shuffled in behind him, blocking him in, sandwiching him between herself and a padded crony in a brown wool shawl and green headscarf. His legs betrayed him again and he sat, hard.

The room spun, and Vadeem focused on Pyotr in a desperate attempt to keep from dropping to the floor. This was some sort of psychological reaction to the fear he’d bottled for twenty-five years. He just had to clench his teeth and bear it out, just like he’d endured basic training and a hundred life-risking missions.

It didn’t help that Kat sat in the front row, like a lighthouse, her eyes glued to Pyotr. If she knew Vadeem was sitting in the sanctuary, a mere fifteen rows behind her. . .well, she was liable to jump the pews and drag him to the front.

Pyotr opened his Bible, and the plump
babushka
beside Vadeem handed hers to him. It smelled of wisdom. He shook his head, but she shoved it into his hands. He gave a half-grunt of thanks.

John eleven. The pages crackled as he turned them, not needing to read the words. The story came back to him like a fresh breeze on a hot day. The miracle of Lazarus. He closed his eyes and tried to block out Pyotr’s voice as he read.

“This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory, so that God’s son may be glorified through it all.”

Vadick what have you done? His father stood in the doorway, holding the pin, his face contorted with a pain Vadick had never before seen. Vadick’s heart dropped to his knees, and his legs wobbled. He tried to find words, but they locked in his chest, along with his breath. His father shook his head. “Son, you already belong to a brotherhood of believers.” His voice seemed mournful, like when Babushka Nina had passed on without the “saving grace of God.” Vadick’s eyes burned.

“You don’t need this.” His father dropped the pin and ground it into the dirt with the heel of his boot.

“Papa, no!” Horror drove Vadick to his knees. He scrabbled after the mangled emblem.

His father caught him in his meaty, gentle hands. “The way of the Pioneers ends in death, boy. Don’t be duped.”

“A man who walks by day will not stumble. For he sees by this world’s light. It is when he walks by night that he stumbles, for he has no light.”

Vadick buried his hand in his pocket, his fingers curled around the mangled pin. His face burned under Sergei’s stare. “Where is it?” his friend repeated.

Vadick couldn’t bear to voice the truth. He didn’t have to. Sergei grabbed his hand, pried open his fingers, and horror was written in his expression. “Father Lenin’s face is. . .” Sergei’s eyes widened. “You’re in big trouble.”

Vadick snatched back the pin. “We’ll fix it. I’ll hammer it back together. Color in Lenin’s eyes.”

Sergei shook his head, his voice low. “Who did it, Vadick? Your pop?” Only Sergei, his dearest friend, comrade, Pioneer brother, could have read Vadick’s wretched expression. Sergie’s face darkened and the Pioneer creed flashed through Vadick’s mind. “Protect the Motherland”. . .The pin, ruined in his pocket.

“Don’t Sergei. Don’t tell. Please.”

“Lazarus is dead, and for your sake, I’m glad I was not there, so that you may believe.”

Vadick hung his feet over the wooden-edged pew, playing with his wool shopka. The pastor’s words droned on, now a blur in the boy’s mind. Spring beckoned outside. A fresh and hopeful spring with the smell of apple and lilac blossoms thickening in the air. The kind of spring that made a boy tear off his boots and run through the muddy fields, earth squishing between his toes, oblivious to the switching he’d earn
—

The back door to the small house church slammed open. Vadick turned, his mind ripped off springtime whimsies, and his heart froze at the sight of NKVD officials, silver tanagers in their grips. “This church is an unregistered body. Everyone is under arrest.”

Vadick tried to become a millimeter small as Comrade Korillovich stepped out from the cluster of black-coated men and stared at him. A smile tweaked the Pioneer leader’s cheeks.

Vadick glanced up at his father, who’d gone white, and suddenly he wanted to cry.

“I am the Resurrection and the Life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”

The mud squished up between his boots, into the knees of his pants as Vadick crouched behind the fence, watching, hiding after he’d snuck out in the confusion of threats and violent arrests.

Papa never looked more fierce. He stood, facing the NKVD officials, his dark eyes challenging, on fire. His gaze moved beyond the soldiers and fixed on Vadick.

Vadick thought he might go up in flames.

Then came a scream, a collective moan, and a torch sailed through the air. It landed atop the church. The roof whooshed into flames.

“No! The Bible!” Mama’s voice, high above the crowd, sent terror through Vadick’s veins.

“Save the Bible!” Vadick heard his father’s voice, or maybe his own. The family Bible, left on the rough-hewn pew. The Bible with the copied pages, the three-generation Bible.

Vadick left his senses behind the fence and scrambled toward the burning church. He dashed behind a NKVD guard, and dove into the building.

Screams behind him. Heat blistering his face.
Save the Bible.
Then an arm grabbing him, hauling him out.

“When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jew who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled”

Vadick sprawled on the ground, eyebrows singed, watching paralyzed as the NKVD guard wrestled Papa to the ground. Knee in his back, the soldier held a gun to Papa’s head. “Wreckers die.”

Mama’s arm tightened around Vadick’s chest. Her tears fell on his singed face. “Please God, help us.”

A shot parted the crack and hiss of flames.

Vadick closed his eyes and wept.

“Jesus wept.”

Vadeem stared at Pyotr. Grief fisted his chest in a death hold. Fury rolled into a ball in his throat and threatened to close it. It hurt to breathe.

“Jesus wept,” Pyotr repeated. “Our Lord saw Mary’s pain, and it moved him so that he wept for her.” He looked up, eyes on the congregation, mercifully moving past Vadeem without hesitation. “And he weeps for you. He knows the trials, the horrors we’ve all suffered, and he weeps for us.”

Vadeem felt tears gather at the back of his eyes and he ducked his head. The old woman’s hand still gathered the folds of his jacket. He wrenched it away, wishing he could dive over her and crawl of out this miserable sanctuary, out of this town, out of this life.

“Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

Vadeem’s head snapped up, gaze tight on Pyotr as the pastor read. Vadeem held his breath.

Pyotr smiled. “Did I not tell you, that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” He closed his Bible, reciting the rest from memory. “Lazarus come out! The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen and a cloth around his face.”

Pyotr paused. In the space of sound Vadeem counted his heartbeats as they slammed against his chest.

“So they might see the glory of God and believe, my friends. Only God can take tragedy and carry us through it, showing Himself glorious. Only He can free us from our pain of suffering, our losses. Only He can take us out of death into life. It is all about believing in the eternal. Believing in the plan of God. Believe. . .and you will see the glory of God. ‘A man who walks by day will not stumble. For he sees by this world’s light. It is when he walks by night that he stumbles, for he has no light’. Keep your eyes on the light and believe.”