Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 by Humans (v1.1) Read Free Book Online Page A

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