Kilometer 101 by Maxim Osipov

Author:Maxim Osipov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2022-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

3.

Near the entrance to the cemetery, leaning against the fence, stands Anatoly Vasilyevich, pale-faced, gasping. The old man is having chest pain, but he refuses the offer to call an ambulance or even a taxi: It’ll pass, it’s getting better—you go on, Alexander Yakovlevich, and look at what they’ve done to the grave.

Approaching the plot, this is what he sees: enormous footprints everywhere, especially in the right corner, where his mother is buried, human excrement, and on the headstone—both on the back and the front, over her name—black swastikas. On Yakov Grigoryevich’s marker, he reads the words DETH TO YIDS, spelled phonetically.

A long time ago, back in the 1990s, when Sasha had just learned to drive, some guy had grabbed and squeezed his face, really hard, right in the middle of the road. Apparently he didn’t like the way Sasha had changed lanes, so he cut him off, blocked him, walked over, thrust his gross, meaty paw through Sasha’s window, and wrapped his fingers around his face, pressing down on his cheeks, his nose, his eyes. As soon as the pain subsided and Sasha could see again, he stepped on the gas. He had no idea what he might do if he caught up with the bastard. Of course, he never did catch up. It was this same fury, and even a similar pain in the eyes, that he felt now—only there was no one to chase.

“Don’t you worry, Alexander Yakovlevich, we’ll clean it up, wipe it off. It’s just coal, not paint,” Anatoly Vasilyevich assures him.

No, not until the police arrive. And Sasha will go file the report by himself: a person with chest pain has no business hanging around a police station. Not that Anatoly Vasilyevich wanted to go. He’d prefer to stay right here, fix everything up, and put it all out of his mind—that’s what he’d do. He didn’t like the police, anyway. But this isn’t about liking them, is it?

An hour later, Sasha is sitting in the dimly lit reception area of the Luxemburg police station, waiting for the detective, who needs to send an urgent fax (who sends faxes nowadays?) before they can drive back to the cemetery. Or walk: it’s not very far. The detective’s surname is Grishchenko, his rank unknown, likely not very high. For now, Sasha observes Grishchenko at work, rummaging through a pile of papers: he’s lost the document he needs to fax. That’s a stupid way to do it, picking up random documents and throwing them right back where you found them; it would be better to lay the discarded ones to the side. How many documents does he have there? Say two hundred. Three seconds each, and you’ll be done in ten minutes, tops. Otherwise, what’s the probability of coming up empty-handed after two hundred random attempts? Let’s think: one minus one, divided by n, close the bracket, to the power of n. What’s the limit? Intuitively, one over e. Sasha works it out: yes, that’s right, 1/e, nearly 40 percent—fairly high.

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