On the courtyard bench sat two women of the same certain age. The talkative one's Bronxlike voice was working up the scale of indignation.
"So I said to him, what presents did you ever give me? A skinny box of chocolates once; a pair of stockings? Some snapdragons— until it came out that you got them from your own students on graduation day. Let me assure you, I said, you should be ashamed to mention such 'gifts.' . . . And between you and me, darling, what it cost me, oi, to wring even them from him."
I looked to see if she was serious. Most certainly. Life was going on—and, I supposed, in Washington, where Nixon was enjoying his re-election; in Paris, scene of Kissinger's preparations to end the Vietnamese war; in Moscow itself, where Jews were still mourning the deaths of the Israeli Olympic athletes. But I couldn't think beyond this courtyard. From one window giving onto it, a thin man who looked like a former bookkeeper gazed down with a pensioner's blankness. He twiddled his thumbs—first this way for hours, then the other way. This helped him pass the winter; and it helped me, in my breaks for air, to pass mine by looking up at him.
414^MOSCOW FAREWELL
I had gone down while Nina was dealing with the putrescent sheets. Only she could have coped with Alyosha's wastes day after day without the slightest thought of sacrifice nor any need, as I had, for periodic escape. Her deep Orthodox faith inured her to just such earthly awfulness. A peasant child, she had been raised by an illiterate mother on a dishwasher's wages in a room of candles burning in front of the icons and adoration of Stalin. Alyosha stopped her five years ago as she was leaving a church. Her religious faith had kept her pure to share her life with one single man. When her few days with him were over, she was tortured by guilt as well as by desperate longing, and tried to throw herself under a car. Alyosha took her in for another fortnight, patiently coaching her to accept the facts of his life. At last she did, but prayed for him constantly from then on, never even imagining that she might ever love anyone else.
He motioned me back into bed with him. His voice was so weak that I had to hold my ear near his mouth. Something in his thorax reverberated at each word, like beads in a Raggedy Andy.
"Sometimes I don't have the slightest regret. This insipid, dingy, dreary life—who cares about pulling out of it? We have no art, no literature, nothing true. Only propaganda to keep us morons. . . . And my work was a travesty. I defended murderers, robbers, doorway rapists every day. Instead of redeeming that scum through enlightenment, we knout them; they end as animals. I had no profession, lived a useless life . . ."
The shaking of his inner beads ended in a fit of convulsive coughing. Finally he resumed in a softer tone, with long breaks between sentences.
"I wanted to talk about this to my friends. Why we live so purposelessly. They looked at me with bewilderment—with suspicion, mistrust. As if they didn't understand. Then it came to me: almost no one did. So / learned—to shut my trap.
"And to shag skirts. You're so much like me in some ways; yet it's been only a diversion for you, not a life. See a girl. Take her home, watch her undress. Cuddle her—but it's a pose; she doesn't really interest you. Next day she looks at you, puzzled: 'Is that all?' Yes, that's all. And it's when you wish you'd been born a century earlier, before the desecration called Soviet rule. Or a
Gold Medal^415
hundred years from now, when the specter of some civiHzation may again haunt our land. I popped up in the middle."
That night: "Good God, I'm saddling you with all my anger. Making it even tougher for you, which is crazy; you've no reason to be bitter. But you'd have found out for yourself If you stayed here, the bastards would eventually have dragged you under. Made you pimp for them; they kept on trying with me . . ."
When did they try? Again I couldn't ask.
The last-chance visitors included Erstwhiles too shy to come to the hospital and former clients with caps in their hands, like peasants at Tolstoy's funeral. When Alyosha recognized them, he was happy to pronounce their names.
At the beginning, I cherished a hope that Anastasia would come one day, like Nina, to help me nurse him. But when her blanched face appeared, I was very tired. The last time she was in this room, she stroked my hands while I sniveled about my heart. I thought more about her first time, when she succumbed to her inventive suitor, now the sack on the bed. All the genuine pain endured since then made even my conviction about our future irrelevant.
She sat down beside him, without tears or poses. I went out to leave them alone. She emerged later with the expression of what she had learned showing on her face and joined me on the courtyard bench. We watched the afternoon turn dark and talked.
"He's totally dependent on you. You're his son, and his parents—that must be some comfort to you in this madness."
"Six months, can it be true? If he lives to New Year's Eve, it will be seven. And he knew he was finished from the first."
"You've changed. He needs you when it's roughest. You're different, do you know?"
I remembered how I had longed for these words from her. Then recognized life's trick: the very change, if that was what to call it, had diluted their importance.
She said the winter was empty of everything. She had less interest than ever in medicine and a feeling that nothing was going to work out for her. She was talking of switching to an institute of literature when I realized what I owed her.
416^MOSCOW FAREWELL
"If you ever want to leave here, I'll do it for you," I interrupted. "You know what I mean."
"And I can count on you now?" But she pronounced this more as a declaration than a question, while her eyes thanked me for my offer.
"What a pity," she said matter-of-factly, "if you marry someone else." She squeezed my hand and left.
"Please, Alyoshinka, what harm can it do? Try a little corner."
Nina was pressing him, as she had been for days, to partake of a specially consecrated monastery hardtack reputedly able to absolve a dying person of unconfessed sins. Although this worked only on the eve of Easter, she had convinced a sympathetic priest to make an exception for a good man who might not last.
"You'll feel much better; a weight will be lifted."
Shivering in pain, he dropped his exception to the "black magic" and took a bite.
"Well?" she asked tremblingly.
"It's true. I feel better already."
His whisper was too feeble to tell whether it indeed had some psychological effect, or whether he was trying to comfort her.
"Hard to make sense of nature. Bestows perception upon Homo sapiens and forces him to contemplate his nonexistence the whole of his life. One way or another, we all wait for the appointed hour, knowing we're doomed." . . .
"Maybe that's the source of the excess anger in human nature. Evolution should have stopped a level or two earlier."
Later: "We'd enjoy life far more that way, because we wouldn't know the implications of time. I've been working it out: you're a wildcat; Nina's a llama. A platypus for me—they choose the right climate. And Anastasia's also from the lynx family, so your brood won't sprout tails where they should have ears."
That evening: "My biggest mistake: not to have children. I miss my girl and boy. . . . Remember my mother looking down at me the night before she left. Very tender, incredibly beautiful; she thought I was asleep. The forbidden sweet of my life. Don't even know whether I remember or dreamed that scene. ..."