They started walking again in silence. Arkady felt watched. In marble and bronze, the dead stood over their graves. A dancer whirled dreamily in white stone. An explorer paused, compass in hand. Against a bas-relief of clouds, a pilot pulled aviator goggles from his eyes. They shared a somber, communal gaze, restless and restful at the same time.

“It was a closed coffin, of course,” Belov muttered.

Arkady was distracted because moving in the opposite direction on a parallel path was another, longer procession with an empty cart, a larger battery of horns and tubas and, among the mourners, some familiar faces. Bolstering a widow on either side were General Penyagin and Rodionov, the city prosecutor, both of them with black bands on their sleeves. Arkady remembered that Penyagin’s predecessor at CID had died only days ago; presumably the woman was the dead man’s wife. The three were trailed by a slow-moving entourage of militia officers, Party officials and relatives parading fixed expressions of boredom and grief. None of them noticed Arkady.

His own cortege had turned down an alley of shaggy pines and stopped at a gate open to a fresh hole in the ground. Arkady looked around. Since Soviet tombstones were not anonymous slabs, he felt introduced to his father’s new neighbors. Here was a statue of a singer listing to music inscribed in granite. There, a sportsman with bronze muscles shouldered an iron javelin. Behind the trees grave diggers hunkered over cigarettes, hands on their shovels. Beside the open grave was a small marker of white marble almost flush with the ground. Space was tight at Vagankovskoye, and sometimes husbands and wives were stacked on top of each other, but not this time, thank God.

As the generals formed ranks by the grave, Arkady recognized the four he had seen in Red Square. Shuksin, Ivanov, Kuznetsov and Gul looked even smaller in the daylight, as if the men he had feared and detested as a child had magically bent into beetles with carapaces of green serge and gold brocade, their sunken chests stiffened by tiers of campaign medals, honors and orders, a dazzling clatter of ribbons, brass stars and coins. They were all weeping bitter vodka tears.

“Comrades!” Feebly Ivanov unfolded a piece of paper and began to read. “Today we say good-bye to a great Russian, a lover of peace, yet a man forged …”

Arkady was constantly amazed at peoples’ faith in lies. As if words had the remotest relationship to the truth. This band of veterans were nothing but little butchers bidding a mawkish farewell to a great butcher. Take the arthritis from their joints and they would drive the knife home as vigorously as in their glorious youth, and they believed every lie they uttered.

By the time Shuksin took Ivanov’s place, Arkady wanted his own cigarette and a shovel.

“ ‘Not one step back!’ Stalin ordered. Yes, Stalin. His name is still sacred to my lips.…”