Shred of Evidence

It is a little before dinnertime when they approach my rented cart, the woman and her baby boy, the woman winding her way through the crowded mall while the baby squirms in her arms. She looks like she needs a place to rest. Her little one throws himself to the side and I see shoes on his feet; clearly he wants to be allowed to walk, but his mother, she will not allow it. Maybe because there are too many shoppers, this evening a week before Christmas.

They approach my cart and I see her looking over my carvings, at my sign that tells her the wood comes from the Holy Land, and I see something spark in her eyes. She is a plain girl, this young mother, but her long blonde hair is pretty, the way it shines under the dangling Christmas lights. Her baby has inherited her hair.

She stops in front of the carvings of the Mary. Her baby screeches and claws at her arm. Her eyebrows draw together as if she is in pain. Before I know what I am about I go up to her, my finger crooked, and I chuck the young one’s cheek. He stops his fussing and stares up at me, his brown eyes wide. He is a beautiful child, so innocent. I hold out my arms even though I tell myself Stop, you foolish old man, you do not draw attention to yourself. “I like babies,” I tell the mother, and I hope my smile reaches my eyes.

She allows me to take her son and I see relief in her face. She begins to circle the cart, to look at the carvings more closely. She will buy something from me as a thank-you for helping her.

Even so I see her watching me from the corners of her eyes. She tries not to be obtrusive, she does not want to offend, but I know what she sees: an old man dressed all in black like a priest without a collar, a priest who has been—how you say, defrocked—but does not want to believe it, maybe one of those on the news who hurts little children? I see all this flash in her eyes and I know she will make her purchase soon, even though she looks with care.

In my arms her young son is content, serious, stroking his tiny fingers across my sweater as if he has never before touched wool. I smile down at him and that is when I feel it, the tips of my ears burning like the ends of cigarettes, the way they always do when someone is watching me.

Without showing what I am doing, I am old but my instincts do not age, I raise my eyes and see a man sitting on the bench but a few meters away. He is perhaps fifty, tall and broad in the shoulders, dressed in a fisherman’s coat, and he is staring at me. Not at me; at the baby in my arms. His stare is like that of the wolves on the steppe and I want to take the young mother by the shoulders and turn her toward him and say Not me, him. Do you see?

But she comes up to me now with a small statue of the Holy Family. “I’ll buy this,” she tells me, and pulls out her wallet.

“For you, discount. Five percent,” I tell her, smiling again, it is my policy to discount to all who choose with care, but I am sure she thinks I do it for the baby. She nods her thanks and begins to write my check. “Where are you from?” she asks as she writes.

I tell different people different things. But for her, the truth. “From Russia.” She does not need to know the rest: how I travel the world selling these carvings, how I never return to my homeland because so much as a breath of the air will bring back too many of the memories I wish to fade.

She hands me the check and takes the baby. I wrap the carving in tissue paper and slip it into a plastic bag. Then I open the drawer under my cash register. Inside is a little plastic case that has inside a rosary once given me by a customer who mistook my work for faith. It was blessed by the Holy Father, she told me.

I give the case to the baby. “For teeth,” I explain. She will find the rosary later, maybe she will try to return it, but I will figure out what to say then.

She smiles thanks and they walk away. The man does not follow them. He has turned his attention instead to a stroller with no one watching it. Inside, a baby not much older, asleep. The man turns away when the father appears a few moments later.

This is what he does, this man, until after dinnertime when the families begin to leave. I do not take dinner, I sit and watch him watching the children, calculating the risk behind his eyes, this ievratit. He leaves before the mall closes and I cannot follow him. The carvings are my only possession, my livelihood. I cannot leave them in the open.

But I do not see the man again the next night, nor the night after, and I fear the worst. I do not believe in much anymore, not the Jesus whose carvings I sell nor the God who fathered him, but it is the children I believe in, the innocents, the ones who have died in his name since he was a tiny child himself. I should have done something to protect them, I am old but my debt remains unpaid.

I see nothing on the news about the ievratit and still I feel weighted down. I should have done something.

He shows up again on Christmas Eve, it is him with a different coat and darker hair, but I never forget eyes even when the hair and clothing and faces change. A priest would say it is Providence that brought him back to me, but it is chance alone. A second chance. That is all.

This time I leave the carvings behind to follow him. The sky is like coal and snowflakes have begun to fall. I follow the ievratit to his car and I wait until he has opened his door. Then I do not wait for him to see me. I come up behind him and slit his throat, my carving blade but a whisper against his skin. The only sound after that is a spattering, but I do not hear the gurgling that follows because I have already moved on, back into the mall, back to my rented cart, where I will wrap the carvings and box them and bring them to my next destination. Already the memories are coming back, I wish them to fade but it is as if I have gone home again, to do my work for the KGB, the work I swore I would never do again. If there were a God I would tell him this work is different, this is not some dissident, but the memories crowd back into my head and my only comfort is the sound of the children in the mall, caroling “Silent Night.”