She balanced the orange on his chest. “Practice.”
Victor asked, “Did Elena Ilyichnina tell you about the other night? I was like El Cid, dead, strapped to my saddle, riding out to face the Moors one last time.”
Arkady wrote, “Shitfaced?”
“Yeah. But it worked. Whoever it was took off.”
“Dead man,” Arkady wrote. The man who shot me.
“The assailant at the casino was Osip Igorivich Lysenko. Recently out of incarceration, eighteen months for dealing methamphetamine. His first employment on getting out was road repair. Worked all over the city. I interviewed the women on his crew. They said that they were doing a patch on your block when Lysenko started to act strangely, as if he was in charge. He was weird to begin with, believe me. I went to his digs, a filthy rat hole with plates of garbage and stacks of books on chess by Kasparov, Karpov, Fischer, all the champions. Scribbled in all the books? Better moves. At least, he thought so. He was a meth-head, though, so he might have thought a lot of things.”
“Zhenya.”
“There was a picture of the two of them playing chess, what else? That was the family scam, the Trans- Siberian scam. Osip Lysenko used to take little Zhenya on the train. You know what a long train trip is like. You get bored of looking out the window. You get bored of reading. Two days down and four more to go and you’re bored. Then you notice the door to one compartment is open and inside a father and son are playing chess. It’s a cute scene and you stop for a second to watch.
“The kid wins and the father informs you and everyone else around that the kid never loses. You’re amused. You’re a hydrologist or an engineer or a gold miner from Kamchatka. The father says, ‘If you don’t believe me, play him yourself.’ The kid’s eight, nine, looks younger. And he fucking hands you your head. You, a man of science or a rugged outdoorsman, have your ass kicked in public by a boy because by now the corridor is crowded. This is entertainment, the only entertainment for thousands of kilometers. Lysenko must have made an arrangement with the carriage attendant to stay by her samovar and out of the way.
“Now you’re serious. The first game doesn’t count. How would the kid perform with money on the line? He whips you a second time, which leads to double or nothing. Soon that’s what you’ve got, nothing, and the next sucker steps up. The father warns them that the kid never loses. They’re forewarned and that just draws them in.
“The Lysenkos did two round-trips a month for a year. They hardly touched the ground. The scam only ended when they tried it on the same miners two trips running. Unhappy miners. They messed Osip up pretty bad. That’s when he started dealing meth.”
“Mother?”
“Nothing. I had the feeling she was long gone. Of course, we’re not going to get any information from Zhenya because he’s disappeared. Don’t ask me why or where. The kid could hole up a hundred places.”
“Yesterday. Drunk?”
“Oh, not just drunk, fantastically drunk, drunk on a new level. I have your friend Platonov to thank. We took his five hundred dollars and went straight to the Aragvi. Georgian cuisine, blini, caviar, vintage champagne, hysterical women. It was a beautiful gesture.” Victor hiccupped. “We drank to you.”
Like being prayed for, Arkady thought.
He fell asleep in the middle of Victor’s visit and when he awoke it was four in the afternoon and each bed was an aerodrome of flies. They circled, dove, tied knots in the air while patients moldered. Some men moldered with family members behind discreetly drawn curtains, others moldered flagrantly out in the open in negligent one- size-fits-all hospital gowns. Without vodka and cigarettes, life had lost its purpose. Their last pleasure and solace had been taken away and with a certain grim determination they moldered and considered how to make life for the nurses more difficult. The nurses, in turn, lowered the volume of the overhead television to an unintelligible murmur and raised the volume of the radio at the nurses’ station. Walking was allowed only along a central corridor that connected with other wards. Patients stumbled along, pushing their IV stands. He heard the squeal of a gurney as it went by the door. Elena Ilyichnina had warned him that irritability was a side effect of the medication. How could anyone not be irritable after being shot in the head?
There was more to it than that. The brain was outer space; a billion galaxies, poetry, passion, memory, imagination, the world and more dwelt there. Then a surgeon with good intentions comes along and drills the skull like a bucket holding a pulpy pink-gray mass. Arkady felt curiously undressed and at the same time wanted to shout, that’s not me!
He took up the pad and pencil to make notes on everything Victor had told him. Spassky…Karpov…Fischer… chess. That was all he remembered.
There was an orange on his nightstand.
What was its color?
When he woke it was evening. A plastic cup and straw of lukewarm broth had joined the orange. He lifted his head a millimeter at a time, reached and delicately felt the bandage in back. Elena Ilyichnina had said that if fluid gathered he would hear it move, so he did remember some things.
He had his blood pressure taken and dressings changed by a young nurse who couldn’t keep her eyes off his forehead and he decided that it was probably just as well not to have a mirror. When she left, his eyes strayed to the television, where a cartoon was followed by the news: improved conditions in Chechnya, fraternal solidarity with Byelorussia, sober reassessment in Ukraine. Internationally there was relief that Russia had reassumed its traditional leading role and returned balance to the world order. In Russia itself, polls showed public confidence growing and that the people were united against terrorists. Nikolai Isakov spoke at an outdoor rally of ultranational Russian Patriots.
“Tver again.” Elena Ilyichnina returned to Arkady’s bedside.
“How do you know?” All he saw on the screen was a crowd.
“I’m from Tver.”
The city of Tver was on the route from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Beyond that, Arkady knew nothing about Tver.
“Do you go there often?”
“I take the train every Friday after work.”
“That’s a slow train in the middle of the night. Why not drive up Saturday morning?”
“If I had a car I would. It sounds luxurious.”
“You have a friend there?”
“No. My mother is in the hospital, not quite dying but on her way. I work there on weekends to be sure the staff treats her well. That’s enough about me.” She redirected his attention to the television, where a corps of boys was dressed in army camouflage. “Tver is very patriotic.”
Banners waved, a colorful display, although Arkady couldn’t name the colors.
15
The ring-shaped pillow that protected the incision in the back of Arkady’s head allowed one position only.
Into that restricted view loomed Elena Ilyichnina.
“I understand from the nurses that you are asking about going home. After all, it’s been four whole days since brain surgery, four days since you arrived here half strangled and shot in the head. No wonder you want to get back into the swing of things.”
He whispered, “I want a mirror.”
“Not yet. When you can walk there is a mirror in the men’s room.”
“Put me in a chair and roll me over.”
“You’re all hooked up.”
