Stalin’s Ghost

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.”

“Do you carry a mirror on you?”

“Not on my rounds, no. Did you sleep well?” she asked.

Arkady mentioned a tapping he had heard half the night, an irregular tap that seemed to emanate from one side of his bed and then the other. The doctor said it was in his head. He had to admit, she should know.

“I need a phone.”

“Later. With your throat I don’t want you talking overly much or turning this into an office.”

“I’d still like a mirror.”

“Tomorrow.”

“You said that yesterday.”

“Tomorrow.”

He exercised his memory by reading a page in a magazine, Men’s Health or Russian Baby, whatever was available, waiting five minutes and testing his recall, when he remembered to. Or recollecting telephone numbers and connecting them to names. The oldest numbers came to the fore, reestablishing their precedence: passport, army service, phone numbers for faces he hadn’t seen for years. More recent numbers like Eva’s cell phone were wisps of fog.

Time nibbled at the afternoon. Motes rose and sank in steady circulation.

The man in the opposite bed died. His neighbor, a tracheotomy, urgently squeezed a call button. In the corner of Arkady’s eye, further down the floor, doctors made their rounds, always asking about the liver; care of the liver was paramount in the land of vodka.

He continued to wrestle with his memory. Some telephone numbers emerged whole, some in part: 33-31-33, for example, was most of a phone number or a complete combination to a safe.

Whose phone?

Whose safe?

“We checked your incision and white blood cell count and determined that you have excellent healing and no infection. You want to chance all that for a walk?”

“I need a stroll, Elena Ilyichnina. A little exercise.”

“I wouldn’t have taken you for an exercise fanatic. Let me tell you about exercise. We are concerned about your balance and, God forbid, a fall. So your first ‘stroll,’ when you are detached from your IV, will be in a wheelchair. Then a perambulation indoors with someone ready to catch you if you trip. Then short walks in your neighborhood with friends.”

“And then?”

“Stay away from the Metro, don’t drive, don’t drink, don’t swim, don’t run, don’t play football, don’t get strangled, don’t get hit on the head. Perhaps you should consider a different line of work. For someone in your condition I can hardly think of a worse one. The problem is that you don’t know who you are. You will encounter unexpected gaps and changes in different faculties. Mood swings. Changes in your sense of smell or taste. Limits in problem solving. You don’t know yet what you don’t have. The bullet sent a shock wave through the entire brain. You have to let it mend.”

“I’ll hardly use it.”

Elena Ilyichnina was not impressed.

“Did I ask about depression?”

“No. Aren’t things bad enough?”

“Is there any history of depression in the family?”

“The normal.”

“Any suicide?”

“The usual.”

“Attitude has a great deal to do with your recuperation.”

“I will recuperate if no one else shoots me.”

At night the ward slipped into a narcotic torpor. Nurses on duty rubbed their eyes and rustled through paperwork. A microwave tone announced that something was warm.

Arkady raised himself as slowly as a deep-sea diver rising to the surface of the water. The bed hardly spun at all and when the nausea was manageable he slid to a standing position on the floor, from which he laid his ring-shaped pillow on the bed and let his head become accustomed to the altitude. He pulled the IV from his arm and, except for a few drops, stemmed the blood with his thumb. For quiet he set out without slippers, although he slid his feet as much as walked. The distance to the toilet was an endless void. His legs shook. Who knew that staying upright was such a feat?

By the time he reached the toilet door the paper envelope that was his hospital gown had adhered to the sweat on his body. First he was afraid a light might come on automatically when he opened the door and then he was afraid of the pitch black when he closed the door behind him. He felt his way with both hands until he found a switch.

The room had a toilet stall, sink and mirror. He urinated and on the way out noticed a creature with a shaved scalp of blue and a violet ring around his neck. Arkady turned enough to show the tip of a black suture and the clown displayed one just the same. Together, Arkady and the clown peeled off the bandages on their foreheads to reveal an eyelash row of sutures.

Arkady staggered away from the mirror and through the door, one hand against the wall of the corridor for balance. He went some distance before he realized he had gone the wrong direction, that he wasn’t in the ward but in some totally different area of the floor. He wasn’t even clear which way he had come.

What were his choices? Left, right or stay where he was in a paper gown for the rest of the night until there was enough light to find his way back. Wouldn’t a nurse notice his empty bed before then? If this was the best his new brain could do he was badly disappointed.

He listened for the sound of an elevator; elevator bays were always lit and gave directions. Or of a floor being mopped; the cleaning person might be a kindly soul who would point the way. Instead, he heard tapping, the sound that had slipped in and out of his consciousness for the better part of a week.

Arkady followed the sound two more doors. The knob turned easily and opened to a room with an examining table, sink and charts of the human digestive system. Zhenya was on the floor in a nest of hospital blankets playing chess on a plastic computerized board by the light of a desk lamp he had carried down with him. He stared up at Arkady. Another boy might have screamed.

“Go ahead.” Arkady settled into a wheelchair. “Finish. I have to sit.”

Playing black, Zhenya was down to an endgame. White had more pieces but they were scattered, while Zhenya’s knight drove white’s king into a panic. Zhenya finished with a pinned rook, a swindled pawn, and a series of rapid checks, each move quickly accompanied by the simulated tap of a game clock, click-click, click-click, click-click. Mate.

Zhenya’s face hovered over the small pool of light cast by the lamp. His eyes were wide and lit from below. He was still in his anorak.

“What are you doing here?” Arkady asked.

“Visiting.”

“At night?”

“I’m here at the hospital, I might as well stay. It’s easy. I just go from one waiting room to another. They have Coke machines.”

That was a speech coming from Zhenya.

“Next time visit me during visiting hours, when I’m awake.”

“Are you angry?”

“Because of the…” Arkady gestured to the general mess that was his head. “Not at you.”

“I ran. My father shot you and I ran.”

“I’ve done worse.”

Arkady’s eye fell on a telephone. When he picked up the receiver he heard a dial tone.

“Who are you calling?” Zhenya asked. “It’s pretty late.”

“It’s not just late, it’s the hour when men with heads like eggplants walk the earth.” Arkady punched in 33-31-33, waited, and hung up. He was exhausted.

“Like Baba Yaga.”

“The witch who ate small children? Sure.”

“Like my father.”

Baba Yaga lived in the woods in a house that stood on chicken legs in a yard surrounded by a fence of human bones. Zhenya used to say nothing at all and Arkady would make up adventures about the children who escaped.

“What do you mean? Every weekend we used to go looking for your father.”

Zhenya said nothing.

The mute routine. Zhenya could play that like an artist; it might be a week before he said another word.

“Your father tried to kill me and he would have killed you, but you had us search for him every weekend. Why?”

Zhenya shrugged.

“Did you know what he was going to do?”

Zhenya dropped the chess pieces into a chamois sack in order of value starting with black pawns, another of his rituals. Arkady remembered how in Gorky Park the younger Zhenya would walk around the fountain a magical four times.

“You take good care of your pieces.”

Zhenya placed the rook in the bag.

“It’s like they’re alive, isn’t it?” Arkady said. “You’re not just playing them, you’re helping them. And it’s not just you thinking, it’s them too. They’re your friends.” Zhenya’s eyes shot up, although Arkady was simply using the key that Zhenya had given him. “You said your father was Baba Yaga? Is that who your friends are fighting?”

It was two o’clock in the morning by the digital watch on Zhenya’s thin wrist. An hour suspended in the dark.

“They’re not alive,” Zhenya said. “They’re just plastic.”

Arkady waited.

“But I take care of them,” Zhenya added.

“How do you do that?”

“By not losing.”

“What happened if you lost?”

“I didn’t get supper.”

“Did that happen often?”

“In the beginning.”

“He was pretty good?”

“So-so.”

“How old were you when you beat him in chess for real?”

“Nine. He said he was proud. I broke a dish and he whipped me with a belt. He said it was on account of the dish, but I knew.” Zhenya allowed himself a tiny smile.

“Where was your mother?”

The smile disappeared.

“I don’t know.”

“I understand your father liked to ride trains. He must have been gone a lot of the time.”

“He took us with him.”

“Did you play chess on the train?”

No answer.

“Did you play chess with other passengers?”

“My father wanted me to bring them down a peg or two. That’s what he always said, bring them down a peg or two.”

“Did anyone ever ask why you weren’t in school?”

“On a train? No.”

“Or why you didn’t have a little color in your cheeks?”

“No.”

“Did you ever lose?”

“A few times.”

“What did your father do?”

No answer.

“Finally some gold miners recognized you.”

“They beat my father and threw my chess set under the wheels.”

“Of a train?”

“Yeah.”

“Your father retrieved the set?”

“He sent me. I would have gone anyway.”

“So, you spent a year going back and forth from Moscow to Vladivostok playing chess in a train compartment? A year of your life?”

Zhenya looked away.

“Did you and your father ever have a holiday, go to the beach, run on the grass?” Arkady asked.

Zhenya said nothing, as if such a childhood was a fantasy. But Arkady felt that there was something else missing.

“When I first asked about your father traveling, you said, ‘He took us.’ Who besides you?”

Zhenya said nothing and showed no expression at all.

“Was it your mother?”

Zhenya shook his head.

“Who?”

Zhenya maintained his silence but his eyes grew alarmed as Arkady took the white king from the chamois sack. Arkady turned the piece over in his fingers and hid it in his fist, opened his hand and let the boy snatch the piece back.

“Dora.”

“Who was Dora?”

“My little sister. She wasn’t good at chess. She tried but she lost.”

“What happened?”

“She didn’t get her supper.”

Clarity descended on Arkady and clarity was crushing. For a year he thought he had been helping Zhenya search for a loving father, and all that time Zhenya had been stalking a monster.

“So all those times we were searching for your father, what did you want me along for?”

“To kill him.”

Arkady had to rethink everything.