The boy was fearfully pale. Waxy skin. A gray tint to his lips. Eyes closed. His golden hair was lank, damp with sweat.
Trembling as though he were an elderly man with palsy, finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a submariner’s traditional calm, Gorov stood beside the bed, gazing down at his son, his only child.
“Nikki,” he said, and his voice was unsteady, weak.
The boy didn’t answer or even open his eyes.
Gorov sat on the edge of the bed. He put one hand over his son’s hand. There was so little warmth in the boy’s flesh.
“Nikki, I’m here.”
Someone touched Gorov’s shoulder, and he looked up.
A white-coated physician stood beside the bed. He indicated a woman at the end of the room. “She’s the one who needs you now.”
It was Anya. Gorov had been so focused on Nikki that he hadn’t noticed her. She was standing at a window, pretending to watch the people down on the old Kalinin Prospekt.
Gradually Gorov became aware of the defeat in the slope of his wife’s shoulders and the subtle hint of grief in the tilt of her head, and he began to apprehend the full meaning of the doctor’s words. Nikki was already dead. Too late to say “I love you” one last time. Too late for one last kiss. Too late to look into his child’s eyes and say, “I was always so proud of you,” too late to say good-bye.
Although Anya needed him, he couldn’t bear to get up from the edge of the bed—as though to do so would ensure that Nikki’s death was permanent, while sheer stubborn denial might eventually cause a miraculous resurrection.
He spoke her name, and though it was only a whisper, she turned to him.
Her eyes shimmered with tears. She was biting her lip to keep from sobbing. She said, “I wish you’d been here.”
“They didn’t tell me until yesterday.”
“I’ve been so alone.”
“I know.”
“Frightened.”
“I know.”
“I would have gone in his place if I could,” she said. “But there was nothing … nothing I could do for him.”
At last he found the strength to leave the bed. He went to his wife and held her, and she held him so tightly. So tightly.
All but one of the other four dying children in the ward were comatose, sedated, or otherwise unaware of Gorov and Anya. The sole observer among them was a girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, with chestnut hair and huge solemn eyes. She lay in a bed nearby, propped up on pillows, as frail as an elderly woman who had seen a hundred years of life. “It’s okay,” she told Gorov. Her voice was musical and sweet in spite of how badly disease had ravaged and weakened her body. “You’ll see him again. He’s in heaven now. He’s waiting for you there.”
Nikita Gorov, the product of a strictly materialistic society that had for the better part of a century denied the existence of God, wished that he could find the strength in a faith as simple and strong as that revealed by the child’s words. He was no atheist. He had seen what monstrous acts the leaders of society would condone when they believed there was no God; he knew that there was no hope for justice in a world where the concepts of divine retribution and life after death had been abandoned. God must exist, for otherwise humankind couldn’t be prevented from destroying itself. Nevertheless, he lacked a tradition of belief in which to find the degree of hope and reassurance that comforted the dying girl.
Anya wept against his shoulder. He held her and stroked her golden hair.
The bruised sky suddenly ruptured, releasing torrents of rain. Fat droplets snapped against the window and streamed down the pane, blurring the traffic below.
During the remainder of that summer, they tried to find things to smile about. They went to the Taganka Theater, the ballet, the music hall, and the circus. They danced more than once at the big pavilion in Gorki Park and exhausted themselves as children might with the amusement at Sokolniki Park. Once a week they ate dinner at Aragvi, perhaps the best restaurant in the city, where Anya learned to smile again when eating the ice cream and jam, where Nikita developed a taste for the spicy chicken zatsivi smothered in walnut sauce, and where they both drank too much vodka with their caviar, too much wine with their sulguni and bread. They made love every night, urgent and explosive love, as though their passion were a refutation of suffering, cancer, and death.