His heart beat furiously with the effort.
GoldMedal^417
Bastard's exhalation into the receiver on the afternoon I dashed to the dormitory to change clothes disabused me of my notion that he had stopped calling out of consideration.
"And I've got something else imperative for a week or so. Some of your countrymen keep me busy, heh. But we'll catch up on everything when I return."
Somehow, his threats were less real and he himself seemed less disgusting. But it was Providence that drew him away just now. Distracted by this thought, I heard myself wishing him a good trip.
"What?"
He demanded an explanation of my levity.
When the resident who visited him every other day on her ambulance rounds saw the agony was intolerable, she prescribed morphine, instructing me how to inject and leaving supplies enough to last until her next visit. Bastard was still working his blackmail and elsewhere the bureaucracy remained as stupidly rigid as ever; but as a member of the little medical family caring for Alyosha, I was trusted with narcotic drugs.
He had been looking forward to this stage as a man with a broken leg awaits removal of his cast. Happy to be spending his last days "in modern comfort," he perked up enough to hatch final schemes. To pay part of his debt to Nina, he wanted her to inherit residence rights to the apartment—which could happen only if she married him.
"Use your stubborn brain, Ninochka. What's good for you is the only way I can do something good for me, can't you see?"
But she believed that since the healthy him hadn't needed her, marriage now would be collusion in his death. She beseeched him to retract his wish.
He turned to me. "Thank God you don't need a boost," he said, oblivious of our old icon talk. I'd make my own way, he assured me—to the top. But Maxi should ride with me. On American hamburger, she'd live a good twenty years, a living symbol of our friendship.
Notarizing his bequest wasn't enough; he wanted to see with his own eyes a document certifying that she could leave the
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country with me. In his dozing hours, I coaxed the Volga—dying too without his repairs—to half a dozen offices that, each according to the previous ones, were empowered to sanction the emigration of a Soviet pet. I hurriedly filled out forms, composed affidavits, told the story at the Central Canine Breeders' Association, Central Customs Bureau, Ministry of Sport. Alyosha awoke and pointed to the gold medal as proof I'd eventually succeed.
There was no regulation against Maxi leaving; it was simply impossible to obtain permission. Never having heard of such a case, everyone spontaneously said no. One minion observed that Maxi was a medalist of an official body that was simultaneously a sporting association and a volunteer auxiliary corps. In other words, she might be needed in a state emergency, and in this sense was the People's property. Finally, a senior customs officer demanded a three hundred per cent duty on her estimated value: naked extortion of five hundred rubles for the Soviet treasury. Before I could deliver it, a Ministry of Foreign Trade official vetoed the deal.
Such benighted patriotic obstinacy brought back all Alyosha's old talk about a "normal" country. I cursed Russia for denying a dying man his last wish of willing his dog. Its fulfillment soon seemed as important as his recovery had once been. The more time I wasted away from him, the more compelled I felt to succeed. I rushed from one hulking building to another, pushing past the supplicating public, shouting at torpid faces behind petitioning windows. I had to snatch this final victory—and reassure Alyosha that I had the stuff to carry on alone.
I touched his eggshell of a forehead, assuring him we'd win. But his interest expired as my determination grew. Maxi was beginning to annoy him. Tail wagging and talk about walking her was too much for his system; he asked me to find her another home. I darkened the room with blankets to ease the stress on his eyes. Anastasia came again, but he did not acknowledge her.
He now cared only about his morphine, which I was injecting every three hours—into his arms, despite all the previous punctures, because of the open stew of flesh elsewhere on his body. The doctor supplied two supplementary pain killers; I used all three together, steadily increasing the dose to his more and
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more hopeless imploring. Laced with drugs, mouth open like a geriatrics patient, he descended into oblivion.
We stared at the bump under the quilt. It had stirred. "Not gone, still thinking." An hour later, another move. "Had so few friends ... we met so late." The next day, he tried to pull himself back. "Always feel good when thinking of you. Inasmuch as this is often, I'm usually happy. . . ."
Nina stayed home from work and stretched out on the divan. I used the Black Sea mattress. He barely looked at us with his drugged eyes, sometimes as if we were strangers.
He took a spoonful of egg one day, a glass of tea the next. A few sips of tea the day after that, then he couldn't swallow. Thirty-six hours passed with four words from him: "bitter" and "crazy, still here." Each breath was drawn with a noise like a death rattle past parched lips and a desiccated throat. Unable to stand this sound any longer, Nina put a teaspoon of water into his mouth. It remained there, swishing back and forth until it dribbled away.
The doctor said nothing could be done. Alyosha fell into what passed for sleep and I convinced Nina, who had been eating hardly more than he, to go out for bread. The dark wobbliness of the room was like a submarine stranded without power. When he awoke, I saw he had suffered a further drop, even from his previous level. The least possible quotient of life still flickered in him. I took his hand and words rushed past my lips.
I said that whatever happened to me, wherever I would be, I'd never have a friend like him, with whom I was so deeply happy just to be with. Just to sit and talk—or not to talk, like now.
My grief gushed out as if it stood for all the feelings I too often suppressed. "Dearest Alyosha, why are there so few good people? So little genuine friendship? I'll think of you always. Of the man who changed so much for me. . . . Alyoshinka mine, you're the rare presence that makes other things glad to live. The gift you have, the gift you give."
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He summoned all his strength to look at me. I think he understood.
Immediately, I felt guilty about tiring him, and urged him to relax. But my words began haunting me even before the sentence ended. To my horror, my injunction to sleep tranquilly came out as the punch line of our old joke about the factory director's funeral.
"Dearest friend, rest in peace."
The faintest wince crossed his face. It might have expressed either hurt for my indiscretion or appreciation of the black irony. I longed to explain that it had been unintentional and return to the spirit of my eulogy, but it would have been asking too much of him to listen to more from me. Clearing myself was not the most important consideration now, nor even what he thought of me. I had to live with the inexplicable burden that my last words to him—the last he would understand from anyone—had been a slip of the tongue. The gap between us was unbridgeable. The world was as meaningless as the floorboards. I knelt on them because this night I couldn't stand the use of a chair. . . .
After midnight his breathing became a ghastly convulsive rasp. I called the ambulance service again. A young doctor gave him a mercifully quick examination and an injection. I looked hard at him, trying to establish contact. Surely he knew these were the last minutes. But there was nothing but blankness and decay. An hour later, he drew a breath that gashed my ears. Then the room was silent. Perhaps the unimaginable would not come if I did not move. Alyosha was no more; Alyosha would never be.
The lifelessness of the aged rag doll on the bed added fear to paralyzing sorrow. Nina spoke to it as to a younger Alyosha. She told it about her fresh bread and rearranged the blankets. Suddenly she threw herself to the floor and banged her forehead against a leg of the bed.