His temperature fell and the tormenting cough virtually ceased, but was replaced by fits of agonizing shortwindedness, during which his eyes threatened to pop out in the effort to draw a breath. If he had to suffocate, I said to myself, let it come quickly to end his gruesome gasping. The spectacle of the shriveled thing writhing in pain was sometimes too horrible to watch.
410^MOSCOW FAREWELL
Occasionally he reached for Nina's or my hand; other times he begged us to go away, and for me to return to America. Why did we subject ourselves to his "performances"? But he clamped together his yellow teeth and still did not cry.
Nights were sometimes better, although Nina was away and Alyosha had no more than three hours' peace at a stretch despite the hospital's pills. I slept on the divan, moved near the bed. Before dawn one morning, a foreboding woke me. The lamp was on, as always. Alyosha of the starving Biafran's shoulders was sitting up in bed, pajama top removed and pressed up against his stomach.
Before my eyes focused, I was struck by the reek—the same as in the hospital bathroom weeks before, but concentrated to a new degree of putrid awfulness. I was about to go to him when I saw. Discharge from an open fission below his rib cage was soaking the pajama. Attending to himself silently, he looked for something dry, which is when he caught my eye and turned away. Stifling the urge to retch, I cleaned him with a fresh towel and held his face in my hands to drain away his horror of himself Then I switched off" the lamp to erase the ghostly light and shadows.
Soon we were used to this. The broken fistulas served as channels for blood, puss, endocrine fluids and unidentifiable liquids. New reddish-blue tumors were growing on the soil of the old, then opening up to spread the poison. He was rotting alive.
He named a prominent Yale professor of international relations who had arrived in Moscow two weeks ago for research. Before congressional committees and in popular periodicals, the professor had been urging caution on detente because, he warned, long-term Soviet intentions remained unchanged. And two years ago he had tried to do the right things for a Soviet exchange student who defected in New Haven, later announcing that Soviet diplomats threatened his family with reprisals. Bastard suspected that the professor had "played a dark role" in that "trumped-up" affair. "And in general, he's a corrupt man, paid to blacken socialism and poison Soviet-American relations." But he wasn't "absolutely certain," and wanted my help "exposing the truth."
GoldMedaI^411
"For your own sake, I urge you to see him. Take a couple of your girls to his room; why shouldn't two countrymen have some fun together?"
But the wile of photographing sex on a hotel bed was too obvious even for him. He lowered his sights.
"Just go meet him, find out how he sees things in today's changing world. A serious conversation will be rewarding for you. Believe me, there's nothing more noble than removing suspicion from an innocent man."
Whose suspicion, you aberration? But this was no time for tripping him up in his double-talk; Bastard's very lack of threats that evening told me his bosses had decided to test me. I had reached the end of the stalling line.
As it happened, I had met the prim professor at a seminar. But even at Yale, he would hardly have understood my need for a social call, let alone questioning him about detente. Yet I couldn't fake a claim to have met him; surely Bastard was having us both followed.
He was staying in the new Rossiya Hotel. On my way, I stopped in the Lenin Library, displayed my passport and obtained back copies of the Congressional Record from a closed archive. An hour of shaky searching produced one of his articles, on which I made notes. Then I went to his room, from which I had to extract him to prevent our talk being recorded. The bait—an invitation to sample "real" Soviet life through a foreign-policy harangue at the University—was genteelly swallowed and we were together two hours, hopefully seen but not overheard.
When I presented my summary of the professor's article as notes on our "free-ranging, off-the-record" conversation. Bastard's eyes bulged with exciternent over his success, tinged with angry suspicion because he understood almost nothing of my handwriting in English. Shuffling the pages, he grumbled that I had not "developed sufficient detail." But the fake won me my breather: I heard no more about my "report" nor the professor himself.
Alyosha stopped mentioning New Year's Eve, both the party and the date. "Let's talk about more important matters." But
412.^MOSCOW FAREWELL
even more than contact through words and thoughts, I sensed he wanted the solace of touch: reassurance that his unstanchable discharges had not made him disgusting. I got into bed and lay with his bones as something inside them tried to assert a claim to life by recalling images from one life story.
He rambled, repeated, forgot; he recounted the visit of a string quartet to baffled tank crews resting from battle only to fume because he couldn't remember where the incongruous concert had taken place. Many recollections seemed too much for his narrative power; while he gripped my hand in silence, I felt him reliving literally stirring episodes. He kept saying he wanted to make something clear about the days of "riding errands" with Granny in his wagon, but digressed into less significant vignettes. He explained he had left Moscow "society" ten years ago because it was a depressing collection of little people trying to be big through dachas, entree to the Cinema Club and the regime's pathetic privileges, but I sensed he was omitting the truly important memories for sheer lack of strength, and was unhappy with himself for waiting too long to try to put his life into some kind of perspective.
Occasionally a brilliant cameo emerged of a recollected person or place. A streetcorner in wartime Sukhumi where, among Parker pens and Remington shavers, you could buy battlefront decorations, impeccable draft exemptions and diplomas from any university in the land. A high-school dropout he once defended who had passed himself off as a chess master, ace fighter pilot, champion parachutist and high-school inspector, presenting medals in stadiums, collecting pensions as a Hero of Socialist Labor and touring the country in style as a hotel director, Aeroflot manager and financial inspector. Replacing a friend's head on his torso after a tank battle; collecting parcels for a violinist too terrified to go to the post office because they came from a sister in Paris.
Although trying to convey something with this jumble, he only commented "That's the way it was in those days, the screwy way it was." I had moved his bed back to the window. He looked up at it from upside down, his spiked nose like a bustard's beak. Despite the snow, a few leaves had freakishly stuck to the courtyard tree.
Gold Medal^413
"And that's what is left. I keep hoping they'll continue to cling. What nonsense!" And to Nina: "You must find your man, Ninochka. I get such pleasure from your health."
I studied his glinting skull through half-closed eyes, trying to decide whether I hated it enough to kill him if he pushed me. The paradox was that he was actually helping me "grow up," as he never stopped urging. I felt myself emerging from a prolonged childhood of witless optimism, grasping for the first time that at least half the world was hardship and evil—and that this is what made me feel, from the first weeks last year, that I had come home to Russia. I was learning to accept pain as the country did, to put my own defects in perspective, to recognize my American compulsion to be—to pretend to be—the strong, smiling success type for what it was. As centuries of senseless tragedy had taught Russians, even the most terrible failures need not outrage or shame you. This was not a meager lesson for an exchange student.