"Look at this," he said like a pupil in a reading class. "See what is happening to me."
He opened his gown. His chill fingers guided mine. A new net of knots had appeared in his right armpit, and the lump on his neck was prominent enough to make out without touching.
I saw tears in his eyes: despair prying loose his party line as a killer wrenches his victim's hands from a window ledge. Nothing was going according to plan; the notion of even temporary recovery was a sham. He was back to May, when he first confirmed the doom of "cancer"—and again his courage briefly lapsed. He broke down and sobbed, grasping my hand, then pushing it away and turning over so that only our old mascot nose, which was becoming grotesque in comparison with the puckered rest of him, was visible. When he rolled back to see where I was, I read the terrible thoughts, the most dreadful prospect, in his eyes. There was nothing to do but to hold him, repeating my palliative phrases.
He recovered from this the same afternoon but remained dazed. He was in a bad dream, he said. He couldn't believe it could drag on so long without a cure. The law of probabilities said a lick of good luck had to slip into this year's run of punk.
388^MOSCOW FAREWELL
The next day he settled into something between extreme pessimism and his fancy that the encumbrance would somehow disappear. "Recovery is like a horizon that recedes as I approach it," he said. "You've traveled more than I have soyou dope it out: should I make haste or loiter?"
I knew that not answering Bastard's calls would only provoke him and that he would keep pestering me until I did. Even if his men weren't following me that day, there was nowhere I could say I'd been to explain an absence of more than several. hours. No hiding place from his advances, I thought to myself as I trudged toward one of the dormitory booths.
I picked up the telephone, picturing his smirk at the other end. He expressed his satisfaction in trapping me for another evening by breathing into the receiver before speaking.
"How's every little thing with my favorite student?"
The very unctuousness of the greeting was calculated to taunt me through demonstration of his control of my time. Sometimes he would ask where I'd been the previous evening, and if I said "a movie" he'd name the one, "casually" recommending I see it one day. Or feign surprise in a way that made it plain he had known all along and was establishing for the nth time that he had ways of checking my every movement. Nevertheless, the sting of his own repugnance spoiled his triumphant moment of delivering the invitational command. Despite everything, he was afraid he might be slighted, that I might refuse him. He was caught in the perversion of performing the very actions that made him most hateful.
"You've been losing weight," he drawled into the receiver held tight to his mouth. "Nothing you can do just sitting at the bedside: I'll take you someplace for a bit of a nibble."
The same canting generosity; the clumsy fraudulence of concern for my health, while the picture of his crapulous feeding on KGB funds during Alyosha's crisis brought bile to my throat. For the first time, I made a serious effort not to go. I wasn't feeling very well, I said, with the conviction of the truth.
His tone was transformed. Whenever he suspected I underestimated his power over me, he switched instantly from the fatherly policeman to the mean one, eager to punch.
Gold Medal^389
"Don't play the prima donna with me. It's now five-thirty. Be there at seven o'clock."
The "somewhere" we went for "a bit of a nibble"—he invariably used the same laboredly coy phrases—was the Aragvi. There was still a slim chance for reprieve. Twice previously, he had called back at the last moment to cancel, emphasizing his importance as an agent summoned to something more urgent, and underlining his mysteriousness. He thought it enhanced his prominence to tell me nothing whatever about himself and would smile his pretension to a significant smile when, for distraction, I asked whether he'd ever visited Leningrad. Or would turn the question around, urging me to tell him what / ought to about my travels. My every personal question—his taste in Black Sea resorts, which newspaper he preferred—was an insidious attempt to crack his identity, and while it sometimes seemed prudent to ply him with precisely these queries to kill time and flatter his self-importance, there was the opposite danger he would take them seriously as evidence that I was coached by the CIA.
But I did know he worked in Lubyanka, not only through his hints—this fact made him seem important and threatening enough to be exempted from his strict secretiveness—but by seeing his black car there one afternoon with the license I remembered. I also knew that his name was not the Evgeny Ivanovich Rastuzov he supplied. Hoping to cancel once, I called the emergency number he had given me for office hours. The three-minute failure at the other end to recognize his pseudonym and amateurish whispering with a hand over the receiver were enough to convince an adolescent television detective of its phoniness.
I also assumed he worked where he logically should have, in Lubyanka's department for resident Americans. Occasionally he disclosed knowledge of a genuine fact about America—a state capital, the senatorial term of election—that had probably been imparted in a background course for junior agents. He was proud enough of this too to breach his own silence with it; even to utter such phrases as "crime rate" and "drop out" in English. But resentment of my more fluent Russian curbed his desire to display his feeble linguistic skill.
390.^MOSCOW FAREWELL
I waited for the reprieve until the last possible minute, then hurried uphill from the metro station, pushing through Gorky Street's evening crowd: he was always worse when I arrived late. Mingling in the line outside the entrance, I enjoyed my last free frosty seconds until he saw me through the glass of the door, grinning a snake's welcome as he motioned to the doorman to admit me.
His greeting chimed with delighted surprise, as if the recent telephone summons had never been. Lifting his stubby arms to help me with my coat, he moved as he thought a kingpin should—and smugly, because this fake gesture at playing gracious host was his notion of irony to remind me of who in fact was master. In the rush I had forgotten to remove my brass-buckled belt, at which he scowled. Before I learned to dress down, he resented my pastels more than anything. His bully's flush bloomed at the provocation of my pink shirt, which humiliated him while defiling Moscow. A thousand old fogies in Viennese cafes couldn't have hated a thousand hippies more.
He was in his evening suit, darker than his office one but of the same boxy cut. However, the tie blocked tight into the white nylon collar most clearly identified him and what he represented. He stuck to the skinny black band out of fear to be seen by his masters in a colorful Western one. It was his badge of loyalty to Marxism-Leninism and to the Soviet system that galled him: the tyranny that made him what he was also kept him from being the smart detective he longed to be. The GUM garment symbolized the petty gangsters who do the dictatorship's menial work yet can't get the pickings—the Broadway cravats—they crave.
"Shall we partake of some refreshment?"
And his cheek wart! The bartender's mien that kept him even from fantasizing about himself as he wanted! He strode down the corridor toward our room, his aversion for his physical self and itch to lash out at others tensing his fists. He disliked walking in front of me for the vantage point it gave me to look down on his bald spot, but couldn't let me go first because he always had to lead the way. I pictured myself sneaking off but hiding close enough to enjoy his expression when he wheeled around to no one following.
Gold Medal^391
Paneled in walnut, the room was just big enough for two or three diners. Bastard felt better when the door was closed and he could assume his role without the interference of outsiders who elbowed him aside until shown the card in his wallet. He pointed to my customary chair. The table had been laid out in advance with the usual bottles and hors d'oeuvres, but the main course wasn't yet chosen because it was part of his pleasure to order for me.