His right hand hung lifelessly by his body. With his left hand he touched her thick, light-brown hair, each strand kept in place by a black silk bow edged with real pearls, and whispered in her ear: “Irka, I’m dying.”
Oh, so you’re dying, she thought; you died for me long ago. But a sharp blade twisted in the pit of her stomach, and she felt the pain running along the cut through to her spine. Maika stood nearby, watching her.
“Let’s go back to my place,” Alik said.
“I’m with my daughter. I don’t know if she’ll want to,” Irina said, looking over at her.
Her little girl generally refused to go anywhere with her; she had barely managed to persuade her to come today.
“You want to come to my artist friend’s studio?” she asked her now, convinced that she would refuse.
But Maika merely said, “The red-haired guy? Okay.”
So they went. His new paintings reminded Irina of his old ones. A few days later they happened to be passing and called in again. At some point Irina was called to an urgent meeting and left Maika in the studio with Alik for a couple of hours. She returned to find them screeching at each other like two angry birds. Alik kept bobbing up and down, flapping his left arm; the right one was wasted and almost useless.
“Why can’t you get it into your head that it’s about asymmetry! That’s all there is to it! Symmetry’s death! A dead end! A short circuit!”
“Stop yelling!” shouted Maika blushing, every freckle on her face standing out, her American accent more pronounced than ever. “Maybe I just like symmetry! What are you going to do about it anyway? Why do adults always have to be right?”
Alik dropped his arm. “Well, you know …”
Irina almost passed out by the lift. Alik, without knowing it, had effortlessly dispelled the strange autism that had afflicted her daughter since she was five. An old flame of anger flickered inside her, then died down: why take Maika to psychotherapists, when she could offer her this human contact she so obviously needed?
TWO
A short, immensely fat old woman seated herself breathlessly in a low armchair and planted a bulging cloth shopping-bag between her feet. She was crimson and steaming, her cheeks gleamed like a samovar.
“Maria Ignatevna, over two days I’ve been waiting for you!”
The old woman sat on the edge of the chair spreading wide her pink feet in little slipper-socks of a kind not found on this continent. “I didn’t forget you, dear, I’ve been working with Alik all this time. He was in my thoughts yesterday from six in the evening.” She held up before Nina’s face her crooked, distrophied hands with their greenish fingernails. “It’s hypertension, dear, my blood pressure’s up, I can barely walk. This wretched heat. Never mind, here’s the last of them.”
She fished out of her bag three large dark bottles containing a thick liquid. “I’ve mixed him these new oils for rubbing and inhaling. This one’s for his feet. Put some on a cloth and wrap it round his feet, then tie a plastic bag on top and leave it for a couple of hours. Never mind if bits of skin peel off, just give him a good wash the minute you take it off.”
Nina gazed raptly at this human scarecrow and her collection of remedies. Taking the smallest bottle she pressed it to her cheek to cool it, then carried them all into the bedroom, drew the blinds and set them on the narrow window-sill, where a battery of them already stood waiting.
Maria Ignatevna busied herself in the kitchen making tea; she was the only one of them who could drink it in this heat, not iced American tea, but hot Russian tea with jam and sugar.
Nina shook her long hair, whose gilt was wearing away to reveal a deeper silver underneath, and started putting compresses on Alik’s feet. Then she covered his body with a thin bedspread of some fake, clanless Scottish tartan.
Maria Ignatevna was chatting with Fima, who wanted to know about her results.
She peered at him with benign contempt. “Results? Efim Isakich! Fima! What results! They smell of the earth. It’s all in God’s hands, that’s what I say. I’ve seen it for myself—someone’s going, they’re just about to go, but no, He won’t let them. There’s power in those plants, they can go through rock. It’s the top bit you need. I only use the top bit, even with the roots. A person’s bent right down to the ground, next minute they’re standing up right as rain! You must have faith in God, Fima. Without God even the plants won’t grow!”
“I expect you’re right,” Fima said lightly, rubbing his left cheek, still pitted with the traces of hormonal battles of his youth.
In his fifth year of botany he had studied positive phototaxis, about which this woman with a face like a dishcloth uttered her vague and enigmatic pronouncements. But whatever skills he possessed as a doctor told him there was no hope for Alik and his cursed illness; his last working muscle, in his diaphragm, was already packing up. In the next few days death from asphyxiation would surely follow. The question for Americans in these cases—when to switch off the machine—had been settled ahead of time by Alik himself: he had left the hospital just before the end, and in so doing had refused the pathetic makeweight of an artificially prolonged life.
It depressed Fima to think that at some point he would probably be the one to administer to Alik the sedative which would ease the torment of asphyxiation, depressing his respiratory system as a side effect, and thereby killing him. But there was nothing to be done about it; calling for an ambulance to take him to the hospital, as they had done twice before, was out of the question now, and finding more false papers for him would be both risky and difficult.
“Good luck to you,” he said softly to Maria Ignatevna, grabbing his bag and hurrying out without saying goodbye.
Maybe he was cross about something, Maria Ignatevna thought. She had little understanding of life in this country. She had been summoned from Byelorussia a year ago by a sick relative, but by the time she had filled in the forms and was ready to leave there was no one left to cure, so she crossed the ocean with her magic powers and contraband herbs for nothing. Not for nothing, in fact, because here too she found admirers of her craft, and she practised her unlawful and unlicensed healing activities without fear of the consequences. No one could tell her anything about taxes or licences, she was amazed by the way things were done here; she treated people, she snatched them from the other world—what did she have to fear?
When Nina first met her in the small Orthodox church in Manhattan, she knew immediately that God had sent this wisewoman to her for Alik. She had turned to the Church a year or two earlier, before he fell ill, thus dealing a severe blow to superstition, and deciding that her beloved Tarot cards were a sin, she had given them to Gioia.
Maria Ignatevna was now beckoning to her from the kitchen. She hurried in, poured orange juice into a glass, topped it up with vodka and threw in a handful of ice-cubes. She always drank the American way now: weak, sweet and ceaseless. She mixed it with a swizzle stick and took a gulp. Maria Ignatevna stirred her tea and laid the spoon on the table.
“Now you listen to me,” she said sternly. “He must be baptized or nothing will work. I mean it.”
“He doesn’t want it, Maria Ignatevna, how many times do I have to tell you, he doesn’t want it!” Nina flared up.