"So while we're the vanguard of the proletariat, we simultaneously defend the interests of civilization as a whole. We represent the toiling masses and mankind's future; that's what real men want to serve."
He had started the dunning earlier this evening. Perhaps his bosses had told him to speed things up. I wished I could remember their faces at the group dinners: Bastard surely planned nothing on his own. But that was a diversion. There
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were a hundred and forty minutes to go, and I had to think of something embarrassing but unexploitable to confess, without making any sHps that might contradict my half-truths of last time.
The second operation caused less relative damage because Alyosha was too feeble for drastic decline. It only made a very sick man sicker, which was less shocking and more exhausting.
The hope was correspondingly shorter, for his thighs had new lesions within two weeks. The doctors theorized that the star-tlingly rapid spreading might somehow be driven by the same remarkable vigor that was keeping the patient alive. Alyosha's cancer was in the image of himself This probably meant little in terms of life expectancy, since the two forces would tend to cancel each other out, but it made the battle and pain exceptional. Yet the nurses still heard no more than an occasional gasp from him.
Not fortitude for its own sake moved him, but a desire to salvage something worthwhile of his remaining time. He stopped talking about the two or three years, transferring all his expectations to a final spring we'd enjoy together. Meanwhile, he wanted to read— Cancer Ward first. I brought him a copy of a pocket edition, convenient for sneaking past customs guards. Early the next morning, he was three-quarters through the long text; I realized he must have read most of the night. He was holding up the outlawed novel to the light, a photograph of triumphant factory smokestacks on the newspaper bookcover he'd made to avert questions. Two thin arms propping up the five-ounce volume as if it were a dictionary: this was Alyosha in his own cancer ward, devouring the account of patients in the other one facing their approaching deaths. I waited in the doorway, grateful that his concentration was undisturbed by the tiny print and the pain.
The brainstorm struck as he was greedily spooning the last of the caviar-chik, but I held back to polish the details. First let him know how impressed I was by his last lecture about the inevitable triumph of the world working class. Then keep a straight face when I came out with it, in my searching-for-the-truth-under-his-guidance voice.
396^MOSCOW FAREWELL
"Evgeny Ivanovich, I'm all confused. History says the Revolution will win in the end, but is this the right moment for a new popular front in France?"
And finally knit my brows in earnest interest as he dragged himself from his morsels, wiped his fingers into a napkin and undertook to reply.
He couldn't refuse. The same microphone that plagued me was keeping a check on him, and failure to answer well in terms of the current line might alert his bosses to his political unpreparedness. Nor could he vent his anger on me: the question, after all, seemed prompted by the success of his own indoctrination of me. Here was I, expressing an interest in the advance of the Communist movement, revealing a secret desire to be on the winning side!
But he, of course, didn't give a damn about France as a whole, let alone its stupid working class. He stared in frustration and disgust at this American punk with his idiotic curiosity. Hating the goddam Frogs, sweating over his ignorance of European politics, angrily suspicious, despite everything, that I had trapped him, he offered a rambling, incoherent "analysis" of French Communist intentions. In the end, he was so tangled in his doubletalk that he could only mumble, then half-shout, that our job was to leave the ideological challenges to the Party experts.
"Don't you worry, we've got lots of them—the best. They don't make mistakes."
I watched him squirm, surprised I could enjoy my little triumph. Its best part was the twenty minutes I'd managed to kill. Next time, I'd ask him about socialism in China and hear him gnash his teeth. Pavlov confirmed!
When it reached the lungs, neither X-rays nor surgery could be used. The last resort was chemotherapy. Somewhere I heard that it worked in sixteen per cent of such cases.
Rumors weaved their way through his ward: a miraculous new Swiss substance. West German ampules, an experimental Japanese pill. . . . Cursing myself for not having tried harder in London, I put a call through to the Royal Institute consultant I'd seen. He was abroad, and the man who took the call understood
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neither who I was nor what I wanted from Moscow. The American Embassy doctor, a bland last-straw, knew less about intestinal cancer than I did at this point. Abruptly, I remembered how Bastard entered my life. Perhaps there was a VIP clinic somewhere in the country—in which case it was only a tremolo to our curse.
The old Alyosha would have flirted and probed his way to the source of the rumors in a morning. His shadow waved a hand to indicate I shouldn't bother. He no longer believed in cure. The X-rays, operations, false leads had been a grand illusion to mask the theft of his numbered months. Although he had come to terms even with this, further effort would be "a profanation." He wanted only to keep free of escapism and to live until New Year's Eve, his champion holiday. To see the new year in together would be a fine finish and a portent of good luck. We'd celebrate in fitting style, at the Sovietskaya, where he first invited me to join his party for the actress and models. I placed a deposit on a table.
And passed on his attitude to the doctors in case he was unable to make himself clear. They agreed that the operations might better have never been performed; but medicine could not work in hindsight, only on judgment of what seemed best at the time. Now as then, their obligation was to continue pursuing every available means.
They were going to try an extremely powerful drug, used when other treatments fail. Perhaps because of my intercession, I was told he could not have visitors during the first two days. This was going to be so hard for him that I said nothing about it. On the third morning, I was ushered directly into an atmosphere tenser than ever before. He had been so weak, I was told, that he collapsed after the second injection and was heart massaged back from clinical death.
He himself knew nothing of this until later, but thought he'd been under sedation. His dreams were so compelling, he said, that he resented waking up. The cough that had been bothering him for weeks was now a steady series of salvos convulsing his body and threatening to burst his lungs. I tried reading to him, but my mistakes in Russian seemed to worsen the hacking and I let him doze.
398^MOSCOW FAREWELL
When Bastard got to the message for which he'd been preparing me—for which his entire operation had been mounted—I almost enjoyed another forbidden laugh. I knew perfectly well, he enlightened me, that I had invested too much in learning Russia's language and ways to waste by shifting to something else. Yes, and loved it too much; my heart would always be here. But neither sacrifice was necessary: I could settle in Moscow with my friends and my interests and earn the livelihood that would make me a real man. Never mind that my research had flagged; I wasn't cut out for scholarship anyway. My real interest was life itself, not egghead books. And he had convinced his colleagues to make everything possible by not opposing my presence in the capital.
"You'll always be welcome. Doors shut tight to other foreigners will open to you. Because we've come to like you. . . ."
What I must do, he confided, is return home after the semester and get a job that would quickly send me back. Become a Moscow correspondent or join the diplomatic service; I was free to choose the best path for myself, and once here they would provide me with information to advance me further. And as a full-fledged member of Moscow's American community, I'd be party to Embassy talk—precisely the "real life" he'd just mentioned. It went without saying that I would want to tell him about plans to wound or slander the Russia I loved.