I kept thinking of the fool I'd been to rekindle their interest by volunteering to meet them again. And I slowly became aware of the man—Bastard—who was going to be my persecutor when this party was over and I'd be alone with him at a series of suppers grim as Goya on war. He said nothing, but his eyes stuck to my skin like leeches, making their blackness felt even when my back was turned. The wart on his cheek was something from an evil dream.
I thrust ahead with long, steady strides, yet made no progress toward his ward, as if I were walking against the current of an airport pedestrian conveyor. The five days of tests and rest, the operation, then four days when I couldn't see him and was told only that he was "as expected." Four days when I actually began writing a scholarly article because nothing else would kill the
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time. And no trick in the book of special pleas made any impression on the hospital staff.
But their permission this morning was a good sign. Postsurgical patients could ordinarily be seen only by their immediate family; this exception for me wouldn't have come if things had gone poorly for him. He was just at the end of this shiny corridor, if I could ever reach it. The thousand things I had to tell him all came down to two or three. The operation had to work; all alternatives were unthinkable.
I reached the ward. It was clean, uncrowded, reassuringly antiseptic-smelling. But the forms languishing on its beds broke my hope like kindling. I knew I was crossing the Styx.
Most patients retained too little strength to scream and could only join a chorus of moans, one relieving the other to keep the sound constant while the first gasped for breath. Was Alyosha somewhere among these tortured mutilations? He'd strolled down the corridor just over a week ago, waving. Whatever was festering inside him, and aside from the X-ray burns and occasional nausea, he had nothing in common with them.
Something kept me going. It was my first look at a cancer surgery ward, in Russia or anywhere else. I remembered Tolstoy's sketches of the Crimean War wounded. Part of me wanted to swap bodies with him, another part to accept that all was finished and to run. Then I saw it. Gazing toward the ceiling, the yellow copy of his face with a blankness in place of his spark. All the theory, plans and logic on which we'd lived since my return burned in one searing instant, like a strip of magnesium.
I took a breath and said his name. During the long minute between his accomplishing a turn of his head when he heard me and forcing something through his teeth, I welled up with guilt for having disturbed him. He had to repeat himself because I couldn't decipher his mumble.
"Hello muchacho . . . place to sit down."
The nurse had said that since the anesthetic had worn off his pain was "fairly bad." I was afraid of being sick.
His eyes tried to smile. They were the same, but looked very different, like the headlights of a wreck, still on after a hideous highway accident—because everything else had degenerated. He
382.^MOSCOW FAREWELL
was encased in bandages from ankles to waist and had to lie in a persecuting scrunch designed for recovery from his operation. But it was his moisture of weakness when I bent down to kiss him that told me he would never again be the Alyosha all Moscow knew, even for the time it took to deliver a single punch line.
His face had shrunk and his mouth had begun to sink, giving him an eerie resemblance to his faintly Neanderthal Rostov aunt. The overnight aging of some men who long looked much younger than their years was only part of his transformation. He had become decrepit.
I remembered the young internist who had originally rushed him to the Advanced Training Institute. Leaving the apartment after a visit in September, he broke down under my wheedling and divulged his personal prognosis: that the cancer was furiously malignant and had already spread to some internal organs; only Alyosha's constitution was keeping him on his feet. And the operation? I pressed. In one chance in a million, it would help. Otherwise, it would weaken him—and spread the metastases even faster through his system. Then he, the brainy little Jewish boy who loved Alyosha, repeated almost word for word the advice of the upper-class London consultant who had urged me to "help the patient prepare for death" instead of writing the prescriptions Alyosha needed. The Englishman had straightened his Bond Street cuff, whereas Alyosha's friend broke down with me. "I'm only a doctor," he said, his face turning to baby's blubber. But both specialists feared the operation would only shorten his life. And they were right.
All this I knew before Alyosha and I exchanged a sentence. And he knew I knew. But he was also deeply grateful to see me—all the more because he hadn't suspected I could talk my way into his ward. As if it represented some important sacrifice, he asked if I could stay until the nurse told me otherwise. But well before this, he went silent: he was too weak to talk.
The staff allowed me in every day. They were the only Russians I'd ever met who were embarrassed by little gifts—not to be confused with bribes, because they wanted to help. And the flower vendors I'd earlier condemned seemed to be performing a noble service; all the more because I stopped bringing delicacies,
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which, lying uneaten on his Httle table, turned to the wrong kind of symbols. Besides, he was surprisingly fond of "posies," as if in compensation for his loss of appetite. Like a child waiting for a present from parents returning home, he looked toward my hands as I entered.
Bastard was a caricature of his service. All the general talk and specific stories I'd heard suggested that many KGB officers were above average in looks, intelligence and education. Masha's lover in Perm, a feckless Yalta agent who became Alyosha's friend after being tossed out for drinking—a fair share of essentially decent blokes filled the modern ranks. Chingiz once mentioned that the KGB boss of a Volga town where he worked was the most enlightened man for miles. Nothing more significant than bad luck stuck me with my repulsive hack. I kept hoping for a substitute.
The first impression he conveyed when on his own was of malevolence trying to pass for self-importance. He was permanently angry—at his own physique, if nothing better was handy; at nature's mistake in assigning a janitor's countenance to a Big Man.
Next I noticed his leer, which exposed his jaundiced resentment of me under attempted congeniality. Envy of my height, my shirt, my freedom—everything. His bile was so sour and his cover pose so weak that whatever they were supposed to be saying, his every word and gesture in fact proclaimed his relish for exercising power over me. Once he came right out and said it, pointing up to a radiator grill above our table.
"Supposing our conversations here are being recorded, what of it? We've got nothing to be ashamed of This is a cozy supper with honest heart-to-heart talk among friends. Now let's drink to your health and happiness, which is all that really counts."