The sharpest pain was from skin burned by the current— second—series of cobalt-ray treatment, dispensed thrice weekly in a clinic opposite the Hippodrome. My London salve—the only medicine I was able to obtain, and the least important since it was irrelevant to the disease itself—helped, but the sting on his buttocks made driving arduous. He cut the spine of the driver's seat and blocked it back like a naval ship's captain's chair so he could pilot the Volga, with as much caution as he used to show daredevil, in a half-reclining position, propped up by a collection of pillows. The former combination of Hell's Angel bike and My Friend Flicka became a pathetic rather than a mischievous wreck.
Second to sex, his infirmity showed most here. My grandfather, a refugee of a Polish ghetto, used to stretch his neck manfully to peer through the bottom inches of his Nash's windshield, holding himself on guard against the outside world that was permanently preparing a missile for him. It was spooky to see the same muscle movements in Alyosha's straining for vantage above the Volga's dashboard. Playing on the slang for "outperform," which is literally "outspit," he challenged Ilya to a contest of whether they could avoid each other on a narrow street.
Maxi increased Alyosha's handicap by licking his face, easily reachable in his lowered position. And we were vulnerable to bad-tempered traffic cops as well as faster cars. The knowledge that if stopped in his condition, his license would be revoked on the spot until he passed a stiff new physical bolted him upright at the sight of a gray uniform, he commenting on his own lunge in
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the voice of a fervent sports announcer. If this was too late and the law insisted on a closer look, he played the radiantly healthy yet properly humble citizen, who had been creeping at twenty kilometers out of respect for Alexandra Kollontai, whose date of decease Comrade Constable surely remembered. These diverting little skits of eagle eyes and obstinate will cheered us on our way to some minor errand.
When they became more forced, I took the wheel. Eager to help, or uneasy about my inexperience, Maxi volunteered to move her bulk to the back seat, regarding us with dubious eyes from there. Fall drizzle and mud camouflaged her whiteness.
Despite the sharp risk of my driving without a license, we prepared no excuse. Somehow we assumed that the emergencies, unspokenly defined as the times when Alyosha wasn't well enough to drive, made everything possible for us, as if we were on our way to report to the War Cabinet during this time of national crisis. I thought about our escapades on last winter's ice, which took more skill than I could have imagined before handling the tank myself. Under five miles an hour, the wheel required a wrestler's strength; over five, I practically had to stand on the brake to achieve a gradual stop. And the clutch rasped for its master's touch.
What saved me was the "wingman's" directions. Alyosha allowed me to concentrate on mechanical operations by calling out obligatory right turns, unlit road signs and police traps forty yards in advance. His keen coaching on the welter of singular traffic patterns was the introduction to a campaign to impart general knowledge of the city, for he had reversed his earlier objection to my returning and now suggested I settle in Moscow, preferably as a correspondent.
"Luxury on minimum work. Five or six annual R & R's in Helsinki or the fleshpot of your choice. Of course I can't say how far you'd go in the States, but a local sinecure might be appealing. Think it over, muchacho.^''
Then we went to a dramatization of Ballad of a Sad Cafe at a theater he used to scorn for its highbrow repertoire, including a carefully pessimistic selection of Western plays. An interest in serious literature had replaced his urge for frivolous entertainment. In this, and especially in his eagerness for me to have the
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life of free time and easy money he used to, he was a dying man, concerned about fruitful expenditure of his remaining days and about his heir. It was a fitting twist that I was the one to get the tickets. How childish I'd been, resenting Anastasia for not praising my skill at it last year. What a big deal I made of myself; how much happier we could have been with her appetite for cultural enrichment, which was almost opposite to Alyosha's last-opportunity one. I waved my passport in the same box-office lines, but it was the November of life. And the ticket sellers were growing tired of me.
Yet in our way, Alyosha and I were happy too. We accepted the worst only at the deepest level. Some days were normal enough to fool girls who dropped by, not having heard. We shrugged off "corporal tenderness" with them: even without the general malaise of X-ray bombardment, Alyosha would not show his burns, which disfigured his lower stomach too. Instead, we joined matronly types taking constitutionals on a tree-lined boulevard near his house. And hunted for gas fittings and clean plywood: Alyosha was redoing his kitchen in contemporary studio style with a fitted unit combining refrigerator and cabinets. His plan was a Paris-Match advertisement that brought out his hammer and saw and brought down the wall between the kitchen and the main room the very day he saw it in August. He was sick of the pigpen style, he kept insisting. No more zinc sink, no blackened stove, no stretching across one to reach the other. A Yugoslav exhaust fan for "modern disposition" of cooking smells. "Who says technology's not for the people?"
He played his enthusiasm straight and I honestly couldn't tell—or, of course, ask—whether the project expressed faith in a better future or the desperation of doom. For we still didn't know his prognosis. If there was self-deception in this, it was partly genuine too: the specialists' unwillingness to promise anything made more credible their assurances that recovery was possible. It depended on where the cancer had spread and how it was responding to treatment—which could still only be guessed at. The doctor in direct charge of his case said it was not permitted to discuss a patient's progress except with immediate relatives; and even with them, they were usually less frank. She was bending the regulations for me in recognition of my loyalty in
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coming all the way from abroad to be with Alyosha, who had talked of me all summer. Besides, I'd donated three extra tubes of the salve to her department.
She was a thirtyish blonde whom Alyosha nicknamed "Luxuriant" in honor of her cherubic bottom. "You've opened the final horizon for me, Doctor. I thought I knew about positions to assume for cultivated women. And thanks to your, er, skill, I don't feel a bit embarrassed."
She blushed delicately, and accepted his box of bonbons. Like a widowed landlady titillated by a notorious lodger's charms, she took pleasure in his mellow palaver. Even she called him "Alyosha" instead of Patient so-and-so, exempting her favorite from clinical bossiness.
This helped gild the pill of the medical hours. And the cost of the treatment itself was surely a good omen. Together with the use of the capital-intensive X-ray equipment, he was being injected with a new American solution for better tissue response. From what we knew about the Soviet approach, neither would have been so liberally given if it were felt he'd never rejoin the nation's work force. And his clinic, the Central Institute for Advanced Specialist Training, was one of the country's best.
What puzzled us was why they weren't keeping him permanently there, as with most patients of his type, and as they had during his own first X-ray series in August. Now he slept at the institute only twice a week; on the other days, they merely told him to stay in bed four hours daily. Alyosha was so happy to be home that he often did rest for two or three hours, and never raised the question, in case the arrangement was a mistake.
But the real mistake was his failure to have sought help long ago. He had had a year for this. His general health and attitude conspired to preclude it.