"Yes, I must," he kept saying. "I want to." The next day he talked about pitching in after the operation, when his mind would be freer and he'd need something constructive to fill the boring recovery weeks. I soon dropped the subject until a better time. Reminders only depressed him.
I reread his summer letters to see if they might fit some literary form, but none went beyond banter to reveal the thoughts that now concerned him.
Greetings, Redcoat!
Everyone who gets wind of your rash intention to visit an old buddy here is much taken by the implied loyalty. 'Now
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there's a true friend'—to which I reply that no less of this virtue resides in me, inasmuch as if anything should happen to you, God forbid, I'd want to set out in your direction instantly. Furthermore, I'd even visit you over there without a convincing excuse, no indisposition necessary. . . . True, I won't be able to embark during the coming few days. I'm going for a high on something called cobalt. . . .
On he went to describe the sunglasses needed to consummate our fancy-wrought Hungarian holiday. It seemed to me that everything would be saved if only he could complete his book. But if so, he'd have no need to write it.
The final cobalt treatment was the day after tomorrow.
When our "presurgery soiree" was well started and Alyosha was drinking as he hadn't since May, he began calling his 1950s friends. They arrived within the hour in their new Soviet Fiats: movie producers, theater managers, songwriters waving bottles as they mounted the stairs, like studio stand-ins invited by a Hollywood magnate. Their mistresses swelled the ranks of Erstwhiles, and the intellectual and philosophical thrusts with which they tried to impress the scores of lovelies and themselves brought a touch of a free-wheeling seminar on the state of the arts and the soul to the otherwise sprawling blast. It was so loud that I couldn't make out even our Ray Charles theme song. When the floor space was exhausted, people stood on the stacks of kitchen cabinet plywood. It was one of those parties whose very diversity generates a unified life of its own.
Gradually the presence of two plainclothesmen became felt. They had appeared ostensibly because of the noise, perhaps to investigate why a dozen cars were parked in the courtyard and street.
"What's the excessive revelry. Citizens?"
Suddenly everyone remembered why in fact he was here, and stopped in midmotion. The silence was strained enough to convince the detective that he had uncovered something suspicious. Finally Alyosha himself broke the tension, in his driest deadpan.
"It's a little early this year. Marshal. We're seeing in the Jewish New Year."
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A sense of relief—this was the vintage Alyosha who'd never change—spiked the roar. But having laughed, only a handful of determined merrymakers could forget where Alyosha would be tomorrow. The party slid downhill; within an hour, everybody had self-consciously wished Alyosha merde and left. He roamed the empty room, guzzling last drops from bottles and declaring he didn't give a damn what some fool surgeons found inside him.
The following morning, we drove to the Order of Lenin Infirmary named after S. P. Botkin, a highly reputed clinical hospital in the same cluster of medical institutes. The operation was scheduled for five days from then, after tests, rest and making ready. He was worried where I'd spend the time, and for a moment, talked of calling everything off". If he was going to die—which he didn't believe for a moment—let him, without the damned nuisance of being cut open and laid up. Then he took himself in hand again, reasserting the order-of-the-day optimism.
"Kovo ebat budyem," he said as the hospital appeared, but it came out feebly and he wished he hadn't tried.
The flower vendors outside the new building nettled me with their callousness. Some people will trade on anything. The staff" was more understanding, but politely refused to let me into his ward. We parted quickly and he walked down the corridor swinging my BOAC bag, which contained his overnight things. Proud of it, he was asking a nurse for a hospital gown "of equivalent elan." Anyone who didn't know would have taken him for a peppy man in his prime.
A second Moscow fall is far gloomier than the first. With the novelty exchanged for knowledge of what awaits you, the descent to winter is like the early months of military service. As if for spite, the compensations of snow and frosty air were delayed this year; instead there was rain, rawness and the remorseless trap of grim climatic forces. Environment Determines Consciousness.
The afternoon murkiness was worst. I felt I was being sucked into whatever it was that had retarded certain parts of Europe— Slovakia, Albania, Transylvania—for centuries. My new room looked out on a small railroad depot, full of messy piles of ties and greetings to the Twenty-fourth Party Congress. How could I have thought them quaint on the day I arrived? The same
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slogans leered like cretins from every public room. One more poster, the very next radio program, would snap my nerves.
My new roommate was cut from the cloth of the Party banners: a fine figure of a careerist Young Communist who talked in newspaper language. We had nothing to say to one another. Joe Sourian was gone, together with his magazine- and fun-packed room, which had been like a base canteen for whenever you didn't know what to do with yourself in the dormitory. As if to underline the loss, the Edward who begged Westerners for pity because he informed on them now lived in Joe's old room. I knew none of the new crop of exchange students, nor did I want to in their initial period of mothering by the Embassy.
Forty-eight hours before the operation, when Alyosha was in an isolation ward with radioactive needles doing the final preparation on his ulcers, the suspense and loneliness in my dormitory room crossed some line of tolerance. I called the chief administrator at the institute. Whatever I already suspected about him, there was a possibility he might obtain what he had offered, and I damned the scruples that had made me wait this long.
He tried to make his surprise at hearing from me emerge as delight, then excused himself and promised to call the following morning—which he did. That evening, I went to the second meeting.
It was in a smaller room with fewer hosts and a correspondingly less luxurious table. The atmosphere was even odder. There were occasional mentions of mutual help, but nothing more than hints about any for Alyosha. My health was inquired about, as if I were the purpose of "our consultations." Many of the comments were made with the slightly overquick anticipation of an amateur group performing a whodunit play, and long silences between the lines suggested that my fellow diners were doubling as the murdered corpses. We poured our own vodka. I drank, and felt nothing.
The specialist, they said, was on an extended trip abroad. But cooperation between peoples of good will never depended on a single patient's progress. We could only wait.
The rotting bait of Alyosha's cure killed my appetite. It was
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easy enough to sense I was in something unclean; but not how to pull away. Someone volunteered that Alyosha's present treatment was devilishly expensive, but "of course" The People's State never considered such things. The threat was both preposterous and reaclass="underline" whoever these men were, they surely had some connection with Alyosha's care.
One murmured that everything possible was being done. He may have been a genuine doctor, and ashamed. I was given to understand I should not ask about the chief administrator, who was neither present nor mentioned. The dour man at my left took a persistent interest in where I'd tried to "acquire" the Western medicines Alyosha had asked for. I couldn't specify what trouble this might get us in, but his tone suggested he knew they came from a CIA fund, and I was already developing the facility of weighing my words from every possible angle yet giving the appearance of a simpleton abroad. Instinct told me to talk effusively—and emptily. My long, earnest description of the London clinic's coolness to foreigners was intended to convey a burning desire to damn capitalism's well-known flaws in all my American naivete, while giving me the needed seconds to think what might be dangerous for Alyosha or me. I think my act fooled them but it also dragged me further in. The friendlier I made myself appear in order to ward off" some ominous threat, the more I was their pet.