Once when he awoke, a rescue party was there, apparently from a local collective farm. So . . . the high-tension wire had led somewhere real. He could raise his legs from the ground, but not his head or trunk. More vehicles arrived; by the late-evening dusk, all wounded had traveled the road to the nearest hospital in the outpost town of Karshi. Each rut wrung a whimper
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through Joe's teeth, but at last he was between clean sheets and falling asleep. What a day!
In marched a delegation of local government officials to wake him and announce that he would be driven to better facilities in Tashkent. Joe begged to be left with the other wounded. Were they trying to give the grim reaper a second chance? Finish him off with another, much longer ride? He implored them to give him at least one night's sleep. Determined above all to relieve themselves of responsibility for the foreigner, the bumbling town fathers packed him into a vehicle, volubly assuring him that their handsome gesture was for his precious health alone.
It was not a vintage Packard but an ambulance. It narrowly missed being demolished by an oil truck when stopped on the road to repair a ruptured fanbelt with tape. Tashkent was attained well after midnight. During a further half hour, the driver was lost on its streets. It was Joe's longest, most action-packed day; whatever else was wrong with his body, it was pounds lighter.
Despite everything, part of him looked forward to recuperation in Tashkent. He was now placed to observe far more interesting sights than all he'd missed here under Mrs. Vogl's deodorized wing. To start with, there were a few things he wanted to record about Aeroflot's crack-up debut. The collective farmers who first arrived on the scene hesitating to comfort the parched, groaning wounded with bottles of mineral water still intact in the plane's tail—for fear they be charged with stealing state property. The failure to direct even that seat belts be buckled as the plane held its doom course. (The loudspeaker system was broken, as well as many belts, but the stewardesses could have shouted over the engine noise as they had to announce the takeoff, giggling like children on a summer camp stage.) The Karshi Party man's assurance that the plane had made a "forced landing" because of electrical storms, resulting in a number of broken bones. . . . His hospital stay might provide material to deepen these observations with more generalized sociological analysis. The insights into daily life and human relations here would make a fascinating comparison to Solzhenitsyn's panorama of the cancer ward of a similar hospital—perhaps this very one, although he hesitated to ask. He might put it all on paper: Tashkent ward, twenty years
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later. Break into print with it faster than with his unfocusable dissertation.
Joe's ruminations provided the silver lining required by the human psyche as compensation for tragedy. The hospital had other ideas. Another dead-of-night hour was consumed transferring a bewildered patient from his isolated private room so that the American could be moved in. Examined and given a sedative, he at last had his sleep.
He awoke the following evening to a delicious vision: Eva Marie Saint playing nurse at his bedside. She seemed Slavic, but with finer features than most Russian girls; and she was murmuring comfort tinged with adoration. "You mustn't worry; there is nothing further to fear." (Was this a dreamed improvement of Mrs. Vogl? Was it in fact "Big Boy" and not "My Large One" she was whispering—if the apparition was whispering at all?) "I am here; you will be well again."
Joe continued to doubt the latter assertion: he still could not move his neck, and the bandages on his hands suggested severe burns. "What you've endured, my bravest." (Now he imagined cool fingers on his brow.) "Sleep, I will restore you."
When he awoke again, the light was on, his neck pains were horrendous, and the fair whisperer was washing her hands in a corner basin: curious behavior for the angel of a semidelirious dream. Her name was Barbara. A Polish name because she was in fact a Pole: the daughter of a well-to-do Lublin mother, whose family had been uprooted and exiled to Kazakhstan after the 1939 Soviet occupation, and of a Polish prisoner of the same invasion who was also not allowed home after the Second World War. Her mother's first husband had been a cavalry Major who was executed in a massacre carried out by Soviet soldiers on the same day as the notorious one in the Katyn Forest. In a show of something, Barbara chose to bear his surname rather than her father's. Although her legs were largish and her face wasn't Polish-princess white—none remained so under that desert sun—a small mole on her cheek was a very model for an aristocratic mark. Altogether, she was the loveliest creature ever to cradle Joe's head, let alone sponge-bathe his hairy—and now sweaty and itchy—arms and legs.
How to explain her instant infatuation for him? Barbara's
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uncommonly romantic nature showed even in the blonde braids she wore upswept on her head, like a Turgenev maiden in her family's summer estate. Her background also contributed. All her life, she had dreamed of being rescued from Tashkent. Borne away to Poland or some other gentle land—not that this had prevented two marriages to local bulldozer operators. Nor that she had made any effort to save herself, even when free (after the Khrushchev reforms) to resettle, say, in Tula or Kiev. She waited. And Joe arrived.
"I will return your strength, my pathfinder."
It was Barbara who told Joe about the deaths of twenty-four of his fellow passengers. Freakishly, however, most of the survivors were not seriously hurt, if the word-of-mouth information from Karshi was reliable. (Needless to say, the press mentioned nothing about them, nor the crash itself) When Joe asked several representatives of the Tashkent City Soviet's Committee of Friendship and Hospitality, as the men who came to call on him identified themselves, about poor Pavel, their quick answer was that no such person had been on the plane.
"What?" Surviving the accident had given Joe a flush of courage. Moreover, he knew that the authorities' concern over the potentially damaging publicity of an American witnessing such an affair gave him a weak hold on them. "Look here, I've been in your country a full year. That boy was no archaeology student, but he got us on that flight."
Startled by this boldness, anxious about where it might lead, the officials agreed a mistake was possible. On the next visit, only two of the group appeared, of whom the talkative one was obviously a local KGB chief He said that the passenger list had been studied, no one of that description was on it and Meester Sourian must continue to rest, since delirium was an indication of a continuing condition of shock. Thus did Pavel pass from Joe's existence, for he decided not to press the issue—nor to argue with the Aeroffot representative who appeared to investigate the value of his valises. Joe's lost suits alone could not have been replaced for a thousand rubles but, beset by a slight relapse, he felt too tired to itemize and suggested five hundred. Outraged, the man offered fifty, together with a declamation about the inconvenience of "this whole episode" to Aeroffot, and the
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danger, in a collectivist state, of concocting fraudulent claims.
Barbara's reappearance after each visit was beauty after the beasts. Because she had been warned to tell her patient nothing ("You understand,'" the hospital chief had said sternly, "that unpleasant news might retard his recovery") she put herself at some risk by mentioning the fatalities. By that time, however, she v/as up to her graceful neck in even greater dangers. For one thing, her hours with him were largely stolen from other duties. Twenty times a day, she slipped through the door and into the room's heavy atmosphere—it was Tashkent's most murderous summer in years, with an unbroken month of hundred-degree days—to fan, stroke and talc his corpulent form to the accompaniment of a Polish ballad popular during the Second World War called "Przemin§k)y Wiatrem": "Gone With the Wind."