“Yes, general anesthesia. We’ll remove it, clean it out, fill the canal.”
“Like a tooth,” thought Ignatiev. He felt a cowardly chill. What unpleasant words. Easy, easy. Be a man. What’s the problem. Easy. It’s not a tooth. No blood. Nothing.
The doctor selected the proper tray. Something jingled on it. With tweezers he selected and placed on a low table, onto a glass medical slide, a long, thin, disgustingly thin needle, thinner than a mosquito’s whine. Ignatiev squinted at it nervously. Knowing what those things were for was horrible, but not knowing was worse.
“What’s that?”
“The extractor.”
“So small? I wouldn’t have thought.”
“Do you think yours is big?” the Assyrian said irritatedly. And he stuck the X ray under his nose, but he could make out nothing but foggy spots. The doctor was already wearing rubber gloves fitted tightly over his hands and wrists, and with a bent tweezers he rummaged among the shiny bent needles and vilely narrowing probes and pulled something out: a parody of scissors with a pike’s jaws. The Assyrian scratched his beard with a rubber finger. Ignatiev thought that the doctor was ruining the sterility and meekly mentioned it aloud.
“What sterility?” The professor raised his eyelids. “I wear gloves to protect my hands.”
Ignatiev smiled weakly, understandingly. Of course, you never know, there are people with diseases—He suddenly realized that he didn’t know how they would drag it out: Through his mouth? His nose? Maybe they make an incision on the chest? Or in the hole between collarbones, where day and night the soft throb continues: sometimes hurrying, sometimes slowing its endless run?
“Doctor, how…”
“Quiet!” The Assyrian exclaimed. “Silence! Shut your mouth. Just listen to me. Look at the bridge of my nose. Count to twenty to yourself: one, two…”
His nose, mouth, and blue beard were firmly wrapped in white. Between the white mask and the striped tiara the abyss stared from his eyes. Between the two sockets, openings into nowhere, was the bridge of his nose: a tuft of blue hairs on a crumbling mountain range. Ignatiev began looking, turning to ice. The anesthesia hose was moving toward him from the side. A trunk; and from it, the sweet, sweet smell of death. It hung over his face; Ignatiev struggled, but gave up, tied down by rubber straps, stifled his last, too-late doubts—and they splashed in all directions. Out of the corner of his eye he saw depression, his loyal girlfriend, pressed against the window, bidding him farewell, weeping, blocking the white light, and almost voluntarily inhaled the piercing, sweet smell of blossoming nonexistence, once, twice, and more, without moving his eyes from the Assyrian emptiness.
And there, in the depths of the sockets, in the otherworldly crevasses, a light went on, a path appeared, stumps of black, charred branches grew, and with a soft jolt Ignatiev was sucked from the chair, forward and up, and was tossed there, on the path, and hurrying—seven, eight, nine, ten, I’m lost—he ran along the stones with his almost nonexistent legs. And Life gasped behind him, and the bars clanged, and Anastasia wailed bitterly, wildly…
And I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry for those left behind and I can’t stop and I’m running upward, and huddled low the dacha station flew past, and with Mama and me—a little boy, no, it’s Valerik—and they turn, mouths open, shouting; but I can’t hear them, Valerik raises his little hand, something in his fist, the wind ruffles their hair….
Ringing in the ears, darkness, ringing, oblivion.
Ignatiev—Ignatiev?—slowly floated up from the bottom, his head pushing aside the soft, dark rags—a lake of cloth.
He lay in the chair, the straps undone, his mouth dry, his head spinning. In his chest, a pleasant, calm warmth. It felt good.
The bearded man in the white coat was writing something on a medical chart. Ignatiev remembered why he was there— just a simple outpatient operation, he had to have the whatsit removed; what was that word. The hell with it. General anesthesia—that took pull. Not bad.
“Well, doc, can I split?” Ignatiev asked.
“Stay five minutes,” the bearded one said dryly. “So pushy all of a sudden.”
“Did you do it all, no tricks?”
“All.”
“Watch it, if you welshed on the deal, I’ll shake my bucks out of you real fast,” Ignatiev joked.
The doctor looked up from the papers. Well, that was the living end, a real knockout. Holes instead of eyes.
“What’s the matter, pal, lose your eyeballs?” Ignatiev laughed. He liked his new laugh—sort of a squealing bark. Fastlike. “Well, you’re really something, pal! I’m knocked out. Just don’t trip when you go pick up babes.”
He liked the dull spot in his solar plexus. It was boss.
“Hey, man, I’m off. Gimme five. Ciao.”
He slapped the doctor on the back. He bounded down the worn stairs with sturdy, springy steps, with whiplash turns on the landings. So much to do! And everything would work out. Ignatiev laughed. The sun was shining. Loads of babes on the street. Terrif. First off to Anastasia. Show her what’s what! But first, a few jokes, of course. He had made up a few jokes already, his brain was whizzing. “Gotta keep your shotgun clean,” he’d say. He thought that up. And when he left, he’d say, “Stay cool, suck ice.” He was so funny now: no joke, seriously, the life of the party.
Should I go home first or what? Home later, now I have to write to the right place and tell the right people that a doctor calling himself Ivanov takes bribes. Write it in full detail, with a lacing of humor: he has no eyes, but all he sees is money. Who’s keeping an eye on things, anyway?
And then home. I’ve had it keeping that preemie home. It’s not sanitary, you know. Arrange a bed in a home for him. If they give me trouble, I’ll have to slip them something. That’s the way the game is played. It’s normal.
Ignatiev pushed the post office door.
“What would you like?” the curly-haired girl asked.
“A clean sheet of paper,” Ignatiev said. “Just a clean sheet.”
FIRE AND DUST
Where is she now, that lunatic Svetlana, nicknamed Pipka, about whom some people, with the nonchalance of youth, used to say, “But I mean, is Pipka really human?” and others, exasperated: “Why do you let her in? Keep an eye on your books! She’ll walk off with everything!” No, they were wrong: the only things assignable to Pipka’s conscience are a light blue Simenon and a white wool sweater with knitted buttons, and it was already darned at the elbow anyway. And to hell with the sweater! Much more valuable things had vanished since that time: Rimma’s radiant youth; the childhood of her children; the freshness of her hopes, blue as the morning sky; the secret, joyful trust with which Rimma listened to the voice of the future whispering for her alone—what laurels, flowers, islands, and rainbows had not been promised to her, and where is it all? She didn’t begrudge the sweater; Rimma herself had forcibly thrust Svetlana into that little-needed sweater when she threw the insane girl, half dressed as always, out into the raging autumn one cold, branch-lashed Moscow midnight. Rimma, already in her nightgown, shifted impatiently from one foot to the other in the doorway, pressing her shivering legs together; she kept nodding, advancing, showing Svetlana the door, but Svetlana was trying to get something out, to finish what she had to say, with a nervous giggle, a quick shrug of the shoulders, and in her pretty white face black eyes burned like an insane abyss and the wet abyss of her mouth mumbled in a hurried dither—a hideous black mouth, where the stumps of the teeth made you think of old, charred ruins. Rimma advanced, gaining ground inch by inch, and Svetlana talked on and on and on, waving her hands all about as if she were doing exercises—nocturnal, night-owl, unbelievable exercises—and then, demonstrating the enormous size of something—but Rimma wasn’t listening—she gestured so expansively that she smashed her knuckles against the wall and in her surprise said nothing for a moment, pressing the salty joints to her lips, which seemed singed by her disconnected pronouncements. That was when the sweater was shoved at her—you’ll warm up in the taxi—the door was slammed shut, and Rimma, vexed and laughing, ran to Fedya under the warm blanket. “I barely managed to get rid of her.” The children tossed and turned in their sleep. Tomorrow was an early day. “You could have let her spend the night,” muttered Fedya through his sleep, through the warmth, and he was very handsome in the red glow of the night-light. Spend the night? Never! And where? In old man Ashkenazi’s room? The old man tossed and turned incessantly on his worn-out couch, smoked something thick and smelly, coughed, and in the middle of the night would get up and go to the kitchen for a drink of water from the tap, but all in all it wasn’t bad, he wasn’t a bother. When guests came he would loan chairs, get out a jar of marinated mushrooms, untangle rats’ nests of sticky tinned fruit drops for the children. They would seat him at one end of the table and he would chuckle, swing his legs, which didn’t reach the floor, and smoke into his sleeve: “Never mind, you young people, be patient—I’ll die soon and the whole apartment will be yours.” “May you live to be a hundred, David Danilich,” Rimma would reassure him, but still it was pleasant to dream about the time when she would be mistress of an entire apartment, not a communal one, but her own, when she would do major remodeling—cover the preposterous five-cornered kitchen from top to bottom in tile and get a new stove. Fedya would defend his dissertation, the children would go to school—English, music, figure skating.… What else could she imagine? A lot of people envied them in advance. But of course it was not tile, not well-rounded children that shone from the wide-open spaces of the future like a rainbow-colored fire, a sparkling arc of wild rapture (and Rimma honestly wished old man Ashkenazi long life —there’s time enough for everything); no, something greater, something completely different, important, overwhelming, and grand clamored and glittered up ahead, as though Rimma’s ship, sailing along a dark channel through blossoming reeds, were on the verge of coming into the green, happy, raging sea.