Nina propped the icon against the bowl, gazed at Alik and thought for a moment. Something troubled her—his name. His name was a problem: although people always called him Alik, he had been registered as Abraham in honour of his dead grandfather. Before his parents divorced, they had quarrelled about whose idea it had been to give their child this stupid, provocative name; even some of his closest friends didn’t know his real name, particularly since he had put it down as Alik on his American papers.
Whatever the name, the man destined to bear it hadn’t much longer to live. He gasped convulsively from time to time. Nina rushed to the bookshelf, looking for a church calendar. At random, she pulled out the right volume from behind a jumble of books. For 22 August she read: “Martyrs Fotii and Anikita, Pamphil and Kapiton. Holy Martyr Alexander.” Everything was right again, the name was right; everything was coming out to meet her again. She smiled.
“Alik!” she cried. “Please don’t be angry or offended, I’m going to baptize you.”
She took from her long neck the gold cross that used to belong to her grandmother, a Ters cossack. Maria Ignatevna had told her what to do. Any Christian could do it if someone was dying; just a cross made with water or sand, a gold cross, or even some matches tied in a cross. Now she just had to say a few simple words she had memorized. She crossed herself, dipped the cross in the water and said in a hoarse voice: “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost …” She made the sign of the cross in the water, dipped her hand in, scooped up a handful of water and sprinkled it over her husband’s face. “… I baptize thee, Alik, servant of God.”
At the critical moment she didn’t notice that the truly suitable name of Alexander had flown out of her head.
She was unsure what to do next. With the cross in one hand she sat beside him rubbing the baptismal water over his face and chest. One of the candles bent over the rim of the bowl and, in defiance of the laws of physics, fell inside the now holy vessel. It spluttered and went out. Nina laid the cross on his neck. “Alik, Alik!” she called.
He didn’t respond, just gave a throaty snore and fell silent.
“Fima!” she shouted.
Fima walked in.
“Look what I’ve done. I’ve baptized him.”
Fima retained his professionalism. “Well, fine. He certainly can’t get any worse.”
The marvellous feeling of certainty she had had earlier suddenly deserted her. Moving the stool back to the corner, she lay down beside Alik and gabbled something Fima couldn’t understand.
The door opened slightly and Kipling the dog walked in. For the past three days he had lain by the door waiting for his master to return. He laid his head on the bed. I should take him out, Fima thought; it’s time for me to go to work. Gioia had gone off offended. Lyuda too had left in the night. Fima roused the sleeping man in the corner, who turned out to be Shmuel, not Libin, as Fima had supposed, which was just as well, since Shmuel was in no hurry to go anywhere; he had spent his entire ten years in America on welfare. Fima hastily explained to him the emergency procedures and left his telephone number at work. Now he would take Kipling out, who was waiting patiently by the door wagging his tail. After that he must go to work.
SIXTEEN
He was in an oblivious state, drawing the occasional wheezing breath. He could hear everything that was going on around him but as though from a great distance, and he wanted to tell people that everything was all right; but the scarf was tied more tightly now, and he couldn’t dislodge it.
At the same time he was assailed by new sensations. He felt light and insubstantial like a cloud, as though he were moving in a black-and-white film, only the black wasn’t black and the white wasn’t white, rather everything consisted of shades of grey because the film was old and grainy. There was nothing unpleasant about it. This movement, which he had longed for all these months, felt blissful, almost drug-induced. Familiar shadows were glimpsed on the edges of a washed-out road. Some resembled wooden silhouettes, others had human form. Once again he saw his old teacher Nikolai Vasilevich, the Galosh, and he noted with satisfaction that the appearance of this man, a mathematician of sober and severe intellect, proved that what was happening was real and released him from a vague unease that this might be a dream, or an hallucination. Nikolai Vasilevich clearly recognized him and made a welcoming gesture, and Alik saw that he was coming towards him.
Nina was jingling her bottles again, but there was something pleasant and musical about the sound. Pouring the dregs of some bitter infusion into her hands she whispered something inaudible, but it didn’t bother him. The Galosh was beside him now, silently smacking his lips as he used to at school; Alik had forgotten this habit of his, and he remembered it now with a feeling of tenderness. It was all terribly convincing: no, it wasn’t a dream, it was really happening.
In the middle of the day a plumber arrived to install the new air-conditioner. An incurious mulatto festooned with gold chains, he was accompanied by an unhealthy-looking young assistant (one of Alik’s friends was paying). Nina let them into the bedroom. They worked quickly without so much as glancing at the dying man, and the heat in the room was replaced by a dusty cool. Soon Valentina arrived. Nina wouldn’t let her into the bedroom, so she sat in the studio beside the tear-stained Gioia.
In a corner Maika lay on the grimy white carpet with a blanket folded under her head, reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying in English. She dreamed of reading it in the original. Since yesterday she had regretted that she hadn’t been born a man and couldn’t go to a Tibetan monastery, and had even asked her mother that morning if she could have an operation to make her bust smaller, thus bringing her closer to the beautiful life of a Buddhist monk.
Nina pushed some pillows beneath Alik’s back, raising him in the bed so that he was almost sitting up. She moistened his parched, dark lips and tried to blow a little water through them with a straw, but it leaked out of the corners.
“Alik, Alik!” she called him, touched him, stroked him. She put her lips to his iliac crest and drew her tongue across to his navel, along the line which divides the human body in two. The smell of him was strange, his skin tasted bitter; she had been marinating him in this bitterness for two months now.
She buried her face in the red tendrils of his pubic hair; his hair didn’t change, she thought.
She finally stopped bothering him, and Alik suddenly said very clearly: “Nina, I’m completely better now.”
At eight o’clock in the evening when Fima returned from work, he saw a strange sight: Nina was sitting naked on her black kimono facing Alik, wiping her fine arms with the thick residue from one of the bottles and saying: “See how it’s helping, it’s such a good herb.”
Dreamily she raised her shining eyes to Fima and said solemnly, “Alik told me he’s better now.”
“He’s dead,” Fima thought. He touched Alik’s hand; it was empty, the drumbeats had gone out of it.
Going out of the bedroom, he poured himself half a glass of cheap vodka from a large bottle with a handle, gulped it down, then walked to the other end of the studio and back again. At this time of day there weren’t many people around, they tended to come later. No one looked at Fima. Valentina and Libin were playing with Alik’s backgammon. Gioia was laying out the Tarot as Nina had taught her, trying to bring some clarity into her already clear and solitary life. Faika was eating fried eggs with mayonnaise on them; she ate everything with mayonnaise. Moscow Lyuda had long since washed all the dishes and was sitting with her son by the television waiting for news from home.