The Siberian Dilemma (Arkady Renko #9)

by Martin Cruz Smith

The bears had been released by somebody who had left a poster that declared “We Are Animals Too.” Arkady wasn’t going to dispute this.

Five o’clock was the hour when many Russian men got thirsty, especially men who had reached the retirement age of sixty-five and had little else to do. Of course, they weren’t totally retired. They washed cars, collected bottles and cans, or tutored unappreciative students. On holidays they brought out their good suits and caps and chest boards full of medals, then curled up with the cat and drank. Maybe drank moonshine raw enough to make a man go blind.

There were exceptions. Riot police were allowed early retirement at forty-five, and in recognition that the state would collapse without him, the president had the option of living forever. Imagine that. Living forever with Putin.

“And where on the tree of evolution does Homo sovieticus fit in? It’s a sloth-like creature that hibernates in the sofa.

It was a given that chess was the most Russian, most intellectual of all mental contests. It rarely looked like fun, Arkady thought. He had seen pictures of Lenin, Trotsky, Gorky, and Chekhov playing chess. They never looked like they were having a good time. No wonder Russians flocked to it.

“Tell me, why are you always the troublemaker? What do you gain from that?” Arkady broke into a smile. “As Dostoevsky said, ‘Right or wrong, it’s very pleasant to break something from time to time.’ ”

“I would no more get between a man and his poems than get between a bear and her cubs.”

“You should see a doctor,” Arkady said. Kostich spat blood into a handkerchief. “What would the doctors tell me? That I have tuberculosis and they have to retire me early at half pay? They’d love to do that. They’d get a bonus. Fuck the doctors.” Arkady almost sympathized with the warden. Tuberculosis stalked the guards as well as the prisoners. The prison was a place where bodies crawled over each other and mixed their sputum and bacilli, and it occurred to Arkady that the warden was as much a prisoner as Aba Makhmud.

“Someone shot at me.” “That sounds like progress.”

“Send them to my factotum.” “What’s a factotum?” “I’m not sure, but I seem to have one.”

“I love listening to men talk about me in the third person.

“Siberian dilemma?” Tatiana asked. Bolot gestured in Arkady’s direction. “A fisherman is on a frozen lake. He moves around, listening all the time for the ice cracking beneath his feet, ready to jump back to thicker ice if necessary, but sometimes he’s not quick enough. The ice breaks. He falls in.” “So, what’s the dilemma?” “I heard it from my wife, Irina. If he pulls himself out of the water onto the ice, he’ll freeze to death in seconds, a minute at most. If he stays in the water, he’ll die of hypothermia in five.” “Then he must stay in the water,” Tatiana said. “Why?” “He lives longer. Only a few minutes, but longer is longer.” “No. You’re thinking like a Muscovite,” Arkady said. “I am from Moscow,” she said. “Think like a Siberian.” Her brow furrowed as she tried to remember what Bolot had said. Better to do something than nothing. She smiled, knowing she had the answer. “I was wrong,” she said. “He gets out of the water.” “Why?” Arkady asked. “Because that way he’s doing something. He gets out; that’s the crucial thing. He doesn’t just wait to die. He moves; he might run; his circulation starts up again. He might warm up the whole lake. You never know.” “The lesson is it’s better to take action than be passive,” said Arkady. “Better to fight than to surrender, even if you know you’re going to die.”

One day Bolot and Arkady walked into the woods and glimpsed reindeer as they brushed their furry antlers against low branches. “They say that a hunter can chase a reindeer all day long only to find, once he has killed it, that the reindeer is a beautiful woman. It happens all the time.” “Really?” Arkady asked. “It’s what some people say.” Arkady didn’t want to contradict him. “I don’t know if Tatiana is a reindeer,” Arkady said. “I do know that she thinks she can escape hunters, and that’s a dangerous assumption.”