“Did he give you his name?” Taubman bored on.
“Loretta. Loretta took it. Loretta?”
The clerk was a black woman with a wide face and a deep Southern accent that at times comically counterpointed her serious demeanor. The Visa Secretary had often thought that Loretta looked like the face of Aunt Jemima on the empty boxes of pancake mix they found in the refugee camps. “H’yall says he’s Lee Turney, h’yall says he wants to see the Ambassador.”
“Lee Turney,” said Victor Taubman. “Well, someone should take care of him.”
“Lee Turrrrrrney,” corrected Loretta and she handed him a copy of the name written on one of her cards.
It was the final coincidence of the morning. Though Victor Taubman was an old Asia hand now, perhaps the name might not have meant anything to him if he had merely heard it; after all, it had been a long time. But the mispronunciation by the clerk had exaggerated the name in his mind as though it were a clue to a puzzle he could not quite understand. And then the sight of the name, written neatly on the piece of paper, made a connection in his memory, jogging awake a long dormant chip of recollection.
Leo Tunney.
Taubman glanced across the rows of desks that separated him from the old man with white hair sitting on the backless bench in the foyer.
Taubman understood in that moment. It was Leo Tunney. But that was impossible. How long had it been? Leo Tunney was dead.
Victor Taubman stood at the low wooden railing separating Leo Tunney from the rest of the office. Taubman looked down at the thin face, gazed at the blue eyes turning toward him. He spoke the name aloud.
The blue eyes seemed to ignite.
“Yes.”
The voice struggled on, soft, nearly inaudible: “I am him,” he said.
“Leo Tunney,” Taubman repeated, as though the name had become an incantation that would recall the past. “But you were dead.”
Slowly, a smile crossed the darkness of the face, opening the mouth of white teeth. The eyes were alive now, shining in the darkness of the weathered skin.
“No. As you see.” Another pause and then the voice came from a distance: “I thought that too. Sometimes. I suppose I expected they would have to think that, that I was dead. Not dead.”
“More than twenty years,” Taubman said, scarcely moving his lips. “You must have been—” But he could not speak for a moment. Behind him, the Visa Secretary and the clerks crowded around, not making a sound, witnessing the strange, broken dialogue but not understanding it.
“Father Tunney,” Taubman said at last.
“Yes.”
“But how could you have lived all this time?”
“By the grace of God. Or His curse.”
“My God, man,” Taubman said, pushing open the little gate on the railing and entering the foyer, reaching down to him and touching the old man to make certain he was not an apparition. He felt a bone in the arm of the old man beneath the white cloth.
“But who is he?” the Visa Secretary asked.
“Father Tunney. Leo Tunney,” Victor Taubman said, repeating the name idiotically; they must know that name, the name told everything. But the Visa Secretary stared back at him and Taubman realized that none of them knew, they were too young; twenty years was not the mere past but ancient history to them.
“He came back like a ghost,” Taubman said.
And he touched Leo Tunney on the arm again, to make certain the dream was real.
2
Arctic wind blew all morning; even for Moscow in October, it was extremely cold. The sky was bright and blue in the dry cold; puffs of steam rose from the nostrils and mouths of passersby on the half-empty streets, while smoke curled from chimneys in the vast housing blocks around the old capital. This was a day to be indoors, to spend luxuriating in the silences of the muted city in the first really cold weather of the season. And that is what Denisov intended to do.
He poured a tall glass of vodka, flavored with lemon peels, and mixed the clear liquor with an equally large measure of apple juice. It was his favorite drink. He sipped it judiciously in the kitchen, to make certain the ingredients were in the correct proportion, and then took the drink to the small living room and put it down on a low bookcase beside the large, worn couch. The bookcase served many functions other than the one it was built for. So did most of the furniture in the crowded apartment. The couch was a bed as well, for instance, and the bookcase was also the repository of Denisov’s thin and precious collection of Western recordings.
The moment was delicious, he thought.
He stretched as he sat down, relishing the sheer silence like a connoisseur sitting down to caviar and champagne. Everything was in the expectation of the moment, not in the consumption, and he wanted to prolong the afternoon of rare solitude by contemplating it for a moment.
The luxury of solitude had come to him as his first thought when he awoke that morning in the darkened bedroom and realized the apartment was empty. His wife, his sister, his son, and his wife’s old mother — who all shared the place — had gone to Gorki for the funeral. Denisov was an important man inside the Committee and it was not impossible for his family to make such a train trip, though they considered it a rare luxury as well. No, he could not accompany them; yes, they should extend his sorrow; yes, they could stay an extra day. He had driven them to the railroad terminal and watched the train steam off with all of them aboard. And when he had returned to the apartment last night, he had suddenly felt so tired that he accomplished a very unusual thing: He slept.
Denisov did not sleep well or often.
Five years before, he had undergone extensive examination at the Lenin Institute, where the doctors and experimental scientists were delighted to receive him. They had probed his body and put electrodes on his scalp and given him medications to see what this would do to alter his state of chronic insomnia. After it was all done, they concluded that though Denisov might be doomed to continue in his condition, nevertheless he had learned to function well on one or two hours of sleep a night. He even became the subject of a paper submitted to the Journal of Soviet Medicine and Technology. How flattering, he had said to his wife.
Denisov had read the article and had been depressed for days by its conclusions and by the flat, jargon-ridden scientific description of him and his malady (though it did not name him). He did not sleep, the article pointed out, but he was quite healthy for a man in his early forties. Some work along similar lines — sleep research — had been done in the West, the article noted. Dr. Bosboroff had joked with Denisov that “perhaps you should go to the Mayo Clinic.” None of this amused Denisov but he accepted the joke, because it was expected of him, as he accepted all things, or seemed to, with a mild countenance and a round face and the eyes of a saint twinkling from behind his rimless glasses. People felt at their ease with Denisov, which was part of his art; he did not threaten; he was as familiar as an old icon.
Dr. Bosboroff had concluded that men did not need as much sleep as they got. That the need for sleep was an animal need, that the animal slept to rest the instincts for survival, to set aside threats from the real world while dealing with the same threats in a satisfactory psychological way in dreams. In a sense then, the doctor had said in his pompous way, Denisov might be a fully evolved man, able to deal with the psychological problems of life by triggering the unconscious mind even while fully awake.