Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (6 page)

           
“Good,” said the man, still in that
barbaric English. (Grigor knew he himself was at any rate not
that
bad, at least not in
pronunciation.) “You may call me Mikhail. You will come with me.”

           
“But... who are you?”

           
“KGB, of course,” said the man, who
might or might not be really named Mikhail. lie tossed the fact off carelessly,
with a shrug, then said,
^cc
Which you will tell no one.”

           
“Of course.”

           
“Now you will come with me. There
are two Americans talking. I must speak with the man by himself. You will speak
with the woman, so that I can take the man away.”

           
“But—why me?”

           
“Because I have requisitioned you,”
the KGB man said, his thick lips working like rubber around the long strange
English word. “Now come along.
⁵⁵
Then, an obvious afterthought, as
they pressed through the crowd, the KGB man holding a drink in each hand, he
looked over his shoulder and said, “What is your name?”

           
“Grigor Basmyonov.”

           
“And how do you earn your living,
Grigor Basmyonov?”

           
“I write for the television.”
Finding the English words, placing them, took all Grigor’s concentration.

           
“Good.”

           
The two Americans were chattering
together at a great clip, the words tumbling together, fuzzing at their edges,
completely incomprehensible. Grigor thought, I can’t understand a word! Not
when they talk that fast. Is this what I left: the clinic for? To be harassed
by a KGB man and humiliated by Americans?

*
 
*
 
*

           
Mikhail the urbane economist said,
“I have brought along a compatriot who would love the chance to improve his
English,” while Mikhail the burly KGB man said, “Dis is a Russian man who
speaks English as good as me. Maybe better.”

           
“I have just a little English,”
Grigor said, smiling at the Americans, feeling suddenly shy and awkward,
beginning to regret having come here at all. What did he know about foreigners,
and how to act with them? Except for a few Western doctors in the first year
after
Chernobyl
, with all of whom he’d spoken only through
a translator, he had never met any foreigners in his life. I am a simple
fireman from
Kiev
, he thought. This second life is a mistake.

           
“This is Miss Susan Carrigan, from
New York City
,” both Mikhails said, except that the KGB
man left out “Miss.”

           
“She won
Moscow
in a contest.” Mikhail the economist smiled
with amusement, while Mikhail the KGB man smiled as though angry, obscurely
insulted.

           
“A
visit
to
Moscow
,” Susan corrected, smiling at this new Russian man, holding her hand
out to shake. His hand, when he took hers, was surprisingly thin and bony, and
the grip tentative. He looked as though he might be suffering from flu or
something, as though it might have been a mistake for him to get out of his
sickbed to come to the party.

           
“Grigor Basmyonov,” both Mikhails
finished the introduction. “Grigor works for our
Moscow
television.”

           
“Oh, really?” Susan released
Grigor’s frail hand, and accepted her fresh glass of wine from Mikhail. “What
do you do there?”

           
“I write jokes for a comedian,”
Grigor told her, the words coming slowly, one at a time. Shaking his head, he
said, “Not a comedian you have heard of.”

           
“I might have,” Jack Fielding said,
and stuck his hand out, saying, “Jack Fielding. I’m with the embassy here, we
watch TV a lot, believe me. Who’s your comedian?”

           
Shaking Fielding’s hand, Grigor
said, “Boris Boris,” and was pleased at the grunt of unhappy surprise from
Mikhail the KGB man. (Mikhail the economist gave a chuckle of remembered
pleasure.)

           
Fielding was impressed: “No kidding!
He’s an outrageous man, your guy.”

           
“Yes, he is,” Grigor agreed,
relaxing, basking in Boris Boris’s glory.

           
“Just a few years ago, say what he
says now,” Fielding added, shaking his head, “and he’d go straight to
Siberia
.”

           
“Well, at least he’d have me with
him,” Grigor assured the American. “If Boris Boris catches cold,
I
sneeze.” And then he was astonished at
how easily English was coming to him, once he had himself started. So it might
be possible after all.

           
“I tried looking at television
here,” Susan said, “but it was so frustrating. It
looks
like TV at home, the news shows and the exercise shows and
the game shows, but of course I don’t understand a word anybody says. And when
they put some kind of notice on, I don’t even know the
letters
!” And she laughed at her own helplessness.

           
“I have seen your American
television, of course,” Grigor told her. He liked the way she looked, and the
ease of her self-assurance; she made him want to keep the conversation going,
no matter how difficult.
^cc
We receive the satellite transmissions at
the station. Sometimes I watch the CNN news. Do you know the program?”

           
“Oh, sure,” Susan said, “Cable news.
It must look very different from your point of view.”

           
“Such positivism,” Grigor told her,
smiling, hoping that was a word in English. “The announcers are so certain
about everything. We haven’t had anyone that certain about everything since
Stalin died.”

           
Susan laughed, surprised to be
laughing, and said, “Is that one of your jokes for whatsisname?”

           
“Beg pardon?”

           
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, and as
she gave him a rough definition of “whatsisname,” economist Mikhail gendy
turned Jack Fielding away, saying, “Now, about this free market of yours.
Surely, with
Japan
breathing down your necks, you don’t advocate a return to hill
laissez-faire.” (Simultaneously, the other Mikhail said toward Fielding, “I got
to talk wid you about dis embassy of yours. We still got some problems to work
out.”)

           
“Well, you know, we all have to
adapt to changing reality,” said Fielding, obediendy moving off in Mikhail’s
wake, leaving Susan and Grigor alone, Grigor now trying to explain why the
stage name
Boris Boris
was itself
comic to a Russian audience, an explanation that turned out not to be at all
easy, nor entirely satisfactory for either of them. Still, the conversation was
under way, and Susan next described how she happened to be in
Moscow
as the result of winning an American vodka
company’s contest, an explanation that also proved to be rather difficult, and
less than satisfactory.

           
They’d been talking for quite a
while, mostly about the sights of
Moscow
and the nearby countryside, when Grigor
became aware that the crowd had thinned somewhat, and, starded, looked at his
watch. Almost ten minutes past eight. “Oh, no,” he said, “I am late for my
pill. Would you, please, hold my drink? Thank you.”

           
She stood holding both near-empty
glasses as he took a small cardboard matchbox from his suitcoat pocket and
removed from it a large green capsule. Smiling, shrugging his shoulders, he
said, “I have never taken this with vodka before. Perhaps it will work better.”
And he took back his glass and drained it, with the pill.

           
“Do you have the flu?” Susan asked.
Then, because his English seemed so spotty, with sudden surprising lapses, she
amplified, saying, “Some kind of cold or something?”

           
“No, nothing like that,” he told
her. “I am not at all contagious.” Looking over at the bar, he said, “Have they
stopped serving drinks?”

           
“I’m afraid so.” Then Susan took the
plunge: “I’m supposed to have dinner in the hotel with a group of people,
American tourists and a couple of Intourist guides and a Russian man from some
sort of trade commission. Why not come with us? I’m sure it would be all
right.”

           
Grigor thought: An adventure!
Perhaps my last. “I accept with happiness,” he said.

*
 
*
 
*

           
It was over dessert, and the dessert
wine, that Grigor finally told Susan the truth about his medical condition, and
its causes.

           
“
Chernobyl
?”

           
“Yes.”

           
He was by then so full of vodka and
wine and good food and good feelings that he wasn’t even self-conscious, not
about his slippery English and not about his illness and not about his being a
country bumpkin from Kiev and not about anything. He just told her, to tell
someone.

           
All around them, up and down the
long table, other desultory conversations continued, but Grigor ignored them
all, because it felt so good at last to tell someone, just say the words to
someone, someone away from the clinic. Yes, and to have it be someone who would
then take the knowledge and go halfway around the world with it, totally away
and gone, permitting Grigor to go quiedy and peaceably back to his normal
round. His normal spiral.

           
Susan was shocked. “Cancer?
Radiation disease? Well, what
is
it?
And there’s no hope at all? Grigor, listen! I have this cousin,

           
I don’t know, third cousin, fourth
cousin, I hardly ever see him, once or twice a year, well, that isn’t the
point”—because she’d been drinking, too, and the hour was late—“the point is,
he’s a doctor, he’s in research, he’s very important in AIDS research at NYU,
I’m going to call him—”

           
“Too fast,” Grigor mumbled, eyes
blurry, hand waving ineffectually, trying to slow down the flood of words. “Too
fast, too fast. Do not understand,” he said.

           
“My cousin,” she said, slowly and
clearly, “might know something, might be able to help. I will phone him. Could
you go to
New
York
,
if it might help? Do you have enough money? Could you borrow it? Would they let
you go away?”

           
He laughed, self-mockingly. “Oh, I
have money,” he said. “And the doctors would let me go, if a good thing could
come of it. But there is no good thing, Susan. Not for me. The switch is down.
It is already down.”

           
^cc
Well, you don’t have to
give
up”
she told him, reminding him
of the positive news announcers on CNN, “you certainly shouldn’t give
up.
I’ll call my cousin. Before he was
on this AIDS research he was—” She broke off, frowned, leaned closer over the
table toward him, gazing into his eyes as she said, “Grigor, do they have AIDS
in
Russia
?”

           
“Oh, yes,” he said, nodding
solemnly. “A very great problem, you know, in the hospitals.”

           
“Hospitals?”

           
“The needles. We do not have enough
needles in Soviet,” he explained. “So they get used, what do you say, many
times.”

           
“Over and over.”

           
“Yes, over and over. Many mothers
and babies are... oh ... infected. Over and over.” His eyes looked more
deep-set and stricken than ever. “Many deaths,” he said. “Death all around us.
Oh, Susan. Everything is dying, you know, Susan. Everything is dying.”

           
Vodka is no longer made anywhere
from potatoes. I know that. I know whatever I need to know to complete His
plan. But would Mikhail know it? Very well, but would Mikhail think that Susan
knew it? Well, it doesn’t matter.

           
What matters is to recruit the
actors—as in
doers,
those who will
perform the necessary actions—and bring them together. And to do so with a
certain degree of haste, which is why I had to hurry the Grigor-Susan meeting,
appearing to each of them as the person appropriate to that moment; for her,
someone to be comfortable with, and for him, someone to believe. I would have
brought them together in a way much more elegant, more subde, if it weren’t
that this task must be completed as rapidly as possible.

           
Rapidly. Why rapidly? I wondered
that myself. When first I was shown His plan, when I had absorbed it, I
expressed surprise at such haste. After all, when He had created this world
He’d spent millions of Earth years to do it, step by careful step, until every
element was perfect. And when, during His most recent irritation with this
corner of His universe, He had chosen to save the world rather than destroy it,
He had taken, from conception to crucifixion, thirty-four of their years. So
why such hurry now?

           
The reason, I was given to
understand, was that He hadn’t been bored the other two times.