A rush of pity and dismay washed over me. This was the sign I had been fearing: his unnatural cheeriness was working into mania, from which the inevitable plunge would leave him in \ unreachable depression. The Maxi fantasy was an unmistakable
symptom: however impeccable her breeding, it was unbalanced to expect even a mention for the never-groomed whelp in a first
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show. But Alyosha prattled on about painting one wall white for better display of the gold medal, almost snarling when I tried to talk sense to him.
Depressed myself with the futility of it and all it represented, I spent the rest of the day crisscrossing the city for a new head to fit a prewar German clipper he'd bought together with Maxi herself, but never used. It was one chance in ten thousand that his contacts could supply this recherche item, and I tried to think of a substitute distraction of some worth while going through the motions of searching. His new urge to spruce up his life-style, as in last week's insistence that I buy him "California-thick" bath towels to replace his stringy ones, had bogged him down in pathetic trivia, wholly detached from his future.
But I actually found a suitable shaving head. Gripping it in my fingers, I momentarily felt the queasy exhilaration of a powerful coincidence, as if fate were guiding me and anything were possible.
When I returned, Alyosha reached out as if I were handing him nothing more unusual than a glass of mineral water. I was immediately redispatched for every library and Central Canine Breeders' Association booklet on the care and training of poodles. The same evening, I was holding that bathed and carefully dried Maxi on the bed while Master and Nina bobbed her on the pattern of the books' photographs.
There was a trace of the old, Yankee-ingenuity Alyosha in his tackling this new, improbable project—but a reservoir of hysteria underneath. Last year, he'd have come no closer to a dog show than a choice bon mot. Now he was freakishly tense about the clipping, and although faint with exhaustion, snapped annoyance when I tried to make him rest. At the last minute he heard of someone with a new "championship" shaving head, and threatened to "write off" our friendship unless I promised to launch a new search in the morning.
With some new source of strength, he began training her, his voice and my body doing the work. For four days the room was a kennel. He had memorized the booklets and taken notes on a searching interview with the breeder while I held the telephone to his ear. Mastering commands and movements, Maxi's intelligence amazed us; I could have sworn that she understood what
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was at stake and wanted to give him a big gift. Like her master, she worked her heart out.
But it was Maxi's love of hfe, revived by this new interest in her, that dehghted us most. And her charm—which Alyosha nourished— "You're a splendid lady," he kept croaking to her, "the purest representative of your sex and breed—remember that, my darling."
As he weakened, his line of encouragement became more defiant. "You're not going to take it on the nose just because I am," he said. "You're brimming with beauty and health, you're meant to win.'''
On the Sunday of the show, his pain was back full force. I knew I shouldn't leave him; with an eerie combination of mock gruffness and feeble defiance, he insisted I go.
"And don't bother coming back without the gold medal. You or Maxi: handsome is as handsome is judged."
The Moscow Exhibition of Auxiliary Service Dogs was held, with all the confusion of a nonmilitary Soviet event, in an outlying field house. With Maxi's "passport," Alyosha's notarized authorization deputizing me to serve as her handler in the competition convinced the head-scratching officials I had the right to enter her. Maxi's medical certificates were also accepted, although at that moment she herself looked as unhealthy as I had ever seen her. The first sight of the thousands of competitors and spectators—bored time-passers and fanatic enthusiasts, the usual Russian ragtag of total amateurism and the most pedantic expertise—badly startled her. The first hour of barking, snarling and shouting then reduced her to cringing.
I wanted to go home even more than she did but dreaded the empty-handed return. Alyosha's kidding about the prize had been much too serious. Deepening as the moment of truth approached, my despondency about how to cope with his fantasy led to daydreams about bartering my sheepskin coat for someone's first prize. It was the kind of enterprise—like how to handle Bastard—that cried out for the finesse of Alyosha himself.
German shepherds, Great Danes, Spaniels; morning dragged into afternoon while patriotic speeches substituted for postponed decisions. The field house was a mass of whining puppies and children, nagged by exhaustion and thirst. At last it was the turn
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of the poodles and a hundred of them, chiefly brown and black, were going through their paces, all more neatly than the uncomprehending, irritable Maxi of the conspicuous new whiteness.
Then she came alive. With a cock of her head, she seemed to realize that the hours of waiting had been nonsense; this was the Big Show. Her flair grew every time she jumped one of the necessary barriers, climbed a ladder as we had coached her, gave her paw and—now like a circus performer—barked at my request. Her college try was suddenly so moving that a section of nearby fans began cheering for her. I loved her as never before for this: I could tell Alyosha honestly that she hadn't disgraced herself
I had heard that the judges were amenable to bribes, but when we began our parade around them—seven or eight relatively clean-suited men in the center of a dirt expanse—they seemed to belie this, for they kept advancing us, as if to toy with my hope against hope, from near the rear of the four-abreast column where we'd started toward the front, where the winners would be. Maxi held her neck as never before; she was brighter than the country snow outdoors. "You're a splendid lady," I kept saying in Alyosha's rasp, and she agreed with her shining eyes. We were moved up from nineteenth place to eighth to fifth to third. That was more than I dared think of out loud, but only the gold medal would do for Maxi, who began prancing, even smiling at the judges. They submitted to this winsomeness; she was the winner!
In glee, we dashed to the table, ignored our instructions to stay for the walk-past of best-of-breeds and ran for the exit. Driving back to the apartment, I pushed the Volga almost as hard as Alyosha used to. My key had hardly touched the lock when he cried out from bed.
"Where's that medal, lad? Hurry, I told you I want to see it."
Maxi bounded in to lick his face furiously. To spice his reward with a second's tease, I said the judges had been blind.
"Muchacho, how could you?" he howled, pushing Maxi away. "Not even the silver? What for, why have you dishonored us so terribly?"
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produced the gold medal. He was as triumphant as if vindicated of a Dreyfus-like wrong.
"Aha, what did I tell you?"
He took a sip of brandy with us to celebrate. The day had been like a "happy" episode in a very sad film I'd already seen. If only his uncanny guess about the prize were a symbol of something.
"I'm not asking you to steal your Embassy's codes. Join the CIA and hand me a list of its spies. I'm giving you a chance to prove your own principles and construct a real life for yourself."
The slump that ended his upswing seemed largely psychological. His mood changed again: he was detaching himself from all reality apart from his immediate surroundings and his reveries, which he kept to himself. I wondered whether the growth had reached his brain.
In the middle ground of the outside world, his intelligence shrunk. Too short of concentration for books, he took to newspapers, itself a dismaying regression, scouring them for human interest items which he reported to us like a cleaning woman telling movie plots. An Irtutsk man who had been sentenced again and again for drunkenness until it was discovered that a malfunctioning pancreas was secreting alcohol into his bloodstream. A counter woman in a Moscow department store who had won a public commendation for actually being polite. A group of factories in Rostov that received fifteen thousand railroad cars of gravel annually from Stavropol, two hundred miles away—while neighboring quarries in Rostov shipped an equal amount of the same material to Stavropol plants. . . . We tried to know whether to restrain or feed this giggly appetite for such babble.