Icebound

cancerous brain tumor.”

“Cancer,” Gorov said thickly.

“The tumor is too large to be operable, far too advanced for radiation treatments. When it became clear that Nikolai's condition was rapidly deteriorating, we broke your radio silence and called you back. It was the humane thing to do, even if it risked compromising your mission.” He paused and finally looked at Gorov. “In the old days, of course, no such risk would have been taken, but these are better times,” Okudzhava added with such patent insincerity that he might as well have been wearing the hammer and sickle, emblem of his true allegiance, on his chest.

Gorov didn't give a damn about Boris Okudzhava's nostalgia for the bloody past. He didn't give a damn about democracy, about the future, about himself — only about his Nikki. A cold sweat had sprung up along the back of his neck, as if Death had lightly touched him with icy fingers while on its way to or from the boy's bedside.

“Can't you drive faster?” he demanded of the young officer behind the wheel.

“We'll be there soon,” Okudzhava assured him.

“He's only eight years old,” Gorov said more to himself than to either of the men with whom he shared the car.

Neither replied.

Gorov saw the driver's eyes in the rearview mirror, regarding him with what might have been pity. “How long does he have to live?” he asked, though he almost preferred not to be answered.

Okudzhava hesitated. Then: “He could go at any time.”

Since he had read that decoded message in his quarters aboard the Ilya Pogodin thirty-seven hours ago, Gorov had known that Nikki must be dying. The Admiralty was not cruel, but on the other hand it would not have interrupted an important espionage mission on the Mediterranean route unless the situation was quite hopeless. He had carefully prepared himself for this news.

At the hospital, the elevators were out of order. Boris Okudzhava led Gorov to the service stairs, which were dirty and poorly lighted. Flies buzzed at the small, dust opaqued windows at each landing.

Gorov climbed to the seventh floor. He paused twice when it seemed that his knees might buckle, then each time hurried upward again after only a brief hesitation.

Nikki was in an eight-patient ward with four other dying children, in a small bed under stained and tattered sheet. No EKG monitor or other equipment surrounded him. Deemed incurable, he had been brought to a terminal ward to suffer through the last of his time in this world. The government was still in charge of the medical system, and its resources were stretched to the limit, which meant that doctors triaged the ill and injured according to a ruthless standard of treatability. No heroic effort was made to save the patient if there was less than a fifty percent chance that he would recover.

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.

Although no longer as light-hearted as she had always been, Anya appeared to recover from the loss more quickly and more completely than did Nikita. For one thing, she was thirty-four, ten years younger than he. Her spirit was more resilient than his. Furthermore, she was not burdened with the guilt that he bore like a leaden yoke. He knew that Nikki had asked for him repeatedly during the last weeks of life and especially during the final few hours. Although aware that he was being foolish and irrational, Gorov felt as if he had deserted the boy, as if he had failed his only son. In spite of uncharacteristic long, thoughtful silences and a new solemnity in her eyes, Anya gradually regained a healthy glow and at least a measure of her former spirit. But Nikita only feigned recovery.

By the first week of September, Anya was back at her job full time. She was a research botanist at a large field laboratory in the deep pine forests twenty miles outside Moscow. Her work soon became one more avenue to