Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 Read online

  Most of the firemen who were first to reach the Chernobyl nuclear plant that night, the local ones, were already dead. Some became quite sick, but survived, and a very few seemed not to be harmed at all by the experience, except for the temporary loss of their hair. Among the later fire companies to arrive, those who had at least received some warning of the dangers, deaths were fewer but illness more widespread. Why some people died while others lived, why some were terribly ill but others were not, was a primary concern of the doctors at the Bone Disease Research Clinic. Grigor, a survivor thus far but among the doomed, a young and healthy bachelor willing to be experimented on, was the perfect specimen for their purposes.

  It was while signing the release papers at the hospital in Kiev that Grigor made his first joke: “Well, at least now I’ll be able to read in bed without turning on the light.”

  The doctor and nurse in attendance on him, to help him fill out the forms, were both shocked. The doctor, as young as Grigor with some Asiatic flatness in his face—Uzbek, perhaps— frowned down at the papers and muttered, “Hardly something to make jokes about.”

  “For you, no,” Grigor told him. “But for me, yes. I am permitted.” And he suddenly smiled, an honest joyful sunny smile. “I am the only one permitted,” he told them, and felt some great tight-clenched muscle deep inside himself relax, a muscle he’d never known was there until it released its clamp on his guts. The only one permitted.

  At first his jokes were concerned exclusively with himself— “The best thing about all this is, I can no longer find my bald spot”—but once he’d settled into the routine at the clinic and started taking an interest in the television news (so much more news than there used to be), his subject matter broadened and the people around him began to respond more comfortably to his jokes.

  It was a doctor at the clinic, one who had an old classmate with a girlfriend at Moskva Film, who encouraged Grigor to write down the jokes and comments that came to him with such increasing frequency. The girlfriend at Moskva Film turned out to be the wrong person, but she knew someone who knew someone, and by a frail web of relationships two pages of badly typed Grigor Basmyonov jokes eventually found their way to Boris Boris, who said, “I’ll buy this one, this one, this one, and that one. The rest I spit on. Who does this person think he is?” And so their relationship began.

  The first time Grigor and Boris Boris met, when Grigor was made a staff writer rather than a mere contributor, they became friends at once, because it turned out Boris Boris was permitted as well; the only other person permitted. Grigor walked into the sunny office in his neatly pressed suit and gleaming round bald head, and Boris Boris looked at him and said, “If I had a crystal ball like that head, I could see into the future.”

  “I can see into the future,” Grigor told him. “I’m not there.” Boris Boris laughed and clapped his hands together and said they should have a drink, which they did.

  Grigor himself was not a television personality, nor would he ever become one. His name was on the program’s credits, that was all. In the first place, the government would never permit such public acknowledgment that this gallows humor rose from its own most egregious attack on the Russian people. And in the second place Boris Boris would never permit it: “Nobody tugs at heartstrings around here but me. I keep that to fall back on in case these miserable jokes of yours fail to do the job.” But the jokes did their job, most of them, and roubles accumulated in a bank account with Grigor’s name on it, pointless roubles he would never have the time or the inclination to spend nor a person to will them to; as though he were a hungry cat locked in a cabbage field.

  The work, however, was its own pleasure, and all in all Grigor’s only objection to his life was its anticipated brevity. He made up jokes, he edited the jokes of others, he drank sometimes with Boris Boris, and he enjoyed watching Boris Boris use the material on television. “You make it all sound much funnier than I do,” he told Boris Boris once, early in their friendship, and Boris Boris replied, “That’s my genius, to make something out of something. Tour genius is to make something out of nothing, or I’ll kick you downstairs.”

  That was the work. For the rest of it, life was uncomplicated and fairly content. He took his medicine every four hours, not with any anticipation of a cure, but because it would assist the doctors in their researches. He was their field of study, just as the array of news programs and the minute shifts and adjustments in the social order was his field of study. One of his fields of study.

  The other was Chernobyl. He knew what had been done to him, but now he wanted to know how it had been possible. As the months and years went by, more and more was generally known about what had happened there, and more and more was publicly acknowledged. Grigor studied the magazine articles and books, watched the television programs, and learned so much about the plant he could almost have run it himself. Except that he wouldn’t have run it; he’d have shut it down.

  There were flaws in the design, that was finally admitted. Beyond that, there were flaws in the maintenance of the plant, flaws in the administration, flaws in the ordinary everyday procedures of running the place. Ultimately, Chernobyl had been operated as though nothing could ever possibly go wrong, no matter how sloppy or ignorant its servants became. Nothing could go wrong because nothing ever had gone wrong. And that was another fine joke: a nuclear plant, the most modern sort of enterprise on the planet, run by superstition and magic.

  Was there a way to make a joke out of that, Merlin at the helm of the nuclear plant? No. It was old hat, for one thing, stale news, no longer of interest to anybody except a few leftovers like Grigor and their attentive doctors. Boris Boris would reject such a joke out of hand, and he’d be right.

  Grigor was just easing back into sleep, comforted by this thought (that the world goes on, the world goes on), when the knocking sounded at the door. Surprised—the patients’ sleep was never disturbed—Grigor sat up and switched on the bedside light, and the time was six minutes past four. They’ve discovered a miracle cure! Couldn’t wait another second to tell me! Smiling at his own manic optimism—like a thirteen-year- old’s cock, it rose at the most inconvenient moments—Grigor got out of bed and padded across the room to see what this really was.

  Opening the door, Grigor saw a fellow patient, a man in the striped pajamas and green robe of the clinic, with heavy brown wool socks on his feet and a square pale envelope in his hand. “Grigor,” he said, voice hushed because of the hour, “I won’t come in. I just wanted to give you this.” And he extended the envelope.

  Automatically taking it, trying to remember which of his fellow patients this was, Grigor said, ccWhat are you doing up so late, uhhhh?” Trailing off because he was unable to remember the man’s name. The corridor night-lights offered very little illumination, and his own body blocked the faint gleam from his bedside lamp; the man was familiar, of course, but Grigor couldn’t quite make out which particular fellow guinea pig this was. “Very late,” he repeated, hoping for a clue from the man’s voice.

  “We must be on the same medicine,” the man answered, in a perfectly ordinary and non-specific voice. “I heard your alarm just after mine, and thought you’d be the perfect person for this invitation. I can’t go, you see.”

  “Invitation?” Grigor half turned, to put the envelope in the light, and saw it was nearly square, made of heavy cream-toned paper, and blank. An exterior envelope with stamps and name and address must have been discarded. Inside this envelope was a card of nearly the same size, which made it hard for Grigor to slide it out. When he did, he saw it was indeed an invitation, printed in flowery script, addressed to no one in particular— “You are invited.. —and done in two languages: next to the familiar Cyrillic script, the same sentiments appeared in Roman script, in English.

  The invitation was to a soiree (“cocktail party” in the English) tomorrow evening—well, no, this evening—at the Hotel Savoy, one of the two or three first-class hotels in this classless city. (They acc
epted foreign hard currency only, no roubles.) The group extending the invitation was the International Society for Cultural Preservation.

  Grigor frowned at this document. “I don’t understand.”

  “They sent it to me,” the man said, with a sad smile, “because of what I used to do.”

  Ah. Everyone here at the clinic used to do something, of course, all different kinds of somethings; not all were former firemen. And not all had found a new career, like Grigor’s joke-writing, to take the place of the old. Because so many of the residents found it painful to be reminded that they could no longer do whatever it was that used to occupy their minds and their days, the subject was informally agreed to be taboo. No one would ever ask a fellow resident about his or her former occupation. So Grigor couldn’t pursue that topic, but had to say instead, “Then why don’t you go yourself?”

  “I’ve been a little low lately,” the man said.

  Another forbidden subject. Every resident of the clinic was doomed to die, and soon rather than late, but not all of them at the same pace or in the same way or to the same final date. Complaining about one’s lot or describing one’s horrible symptoms to other residents would be the height of insensitivity; the person you’re talking to could very easily be in worse shape than you. So euphemisms had developed, and were generally understood, and they served to make conversation more palatable, even more possible. “I’ve been a little low lately,” was universally taken to mean that one’s particular illness had just moved into a further and more debilitating phase, that another step on one’s own staircase down into the dark had just been reached, and that the victim had not yet adapted.

  So once again Grigor couldn’t pursue a topic. Frowning at the invitation—the International Society for Cultural Preservation—he said, “Who are these people?”

  “They try to raise money,” the man said, “to restore and preserve great works of art. Around the world, you know, the accomplishments of civilization are being destroyed, mosdy by man. Acid rain, deliberate destruction by builders, changes in the quality of our sunlight, in many ways human art is being made to disappear. Stone statues melt in this air, motion pictures fade, paintings rot, books crumble, archaeological sites are plundered for trinkets to sell to the nouveau riche—” Grigor laughed; he couldn’t help himself. “All right, all right, I get the idea. These are do-gooders.”

  “They try.” The man shrugged.

  Grigor looked again at the invitation. “Raise money,” he echoed. “From me?”

  “Oh, no, no. This is a promotional party, that’s all. These people are trying to get our government interested in their work”

  ‘They’re Americans?”

  “English, I think, at first. They have members all over the world now.” Again the man shrugged. “For what good it does.”

  Surprised, Grigor said, “You don’t believe they’re doing any good?”

  “Oh, some,” the man said. “Some small victories, here and there. But you know it’s said, ‘Rust never sleeps.’” Then, more forcefully, he said, “And why try at all to save anything? It’s coming to an end, anyway, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?”

  “Of course! We’re doing our best to destroy ourselves and our history and even our planet! Grigor, look at all of us in here. Why are we here?”

  Now it was Grigor’s turn to shrug. He’d gone past that question a long time ago. “Mistakes were made,” he said.

  “We’re moving into a world of mistakes,” the man told him, then waved his hand in a dismissing gesture. “Let it all go. It’s spoiled anyway.”

  Ah, well; Grigor knew that attitude intimately. Why should the rest of the world go on as though nothing had happened, when I am in here, with this? The ones like Grigor without strong family ties were the most subject to this sort of feeling, but it reached everyone from time to time. There was no answering that attitude, of course, no particular reason why life should go on without Grigor, or any of the other residents; one simply waited for the feeling to go away, and it almost always did. But no one talked about it; that this man expressed it in words showed just how badly he’d been affected by the “low” he’d mentioned.

  In any event, the issue was this invitation. Shaking his head, Grigor said “I don’t see what this has to do with me. Why should I go to this thing?”

  “Because you’d enjoy it,” the man said. “And you’d get ideas for jokes there, I know you would. And you speak English.”

  “Oh, well, not really.” Grigor dismissed that by waving the hand with the invitation in it. “I studied English in school, I can read it, but to talk.. .”

  “Then this is a chance to improve your English,” the man said.

  “For what?” Grigor smiled at the thought. “To make up jokes for Americans?”

  “For its own sake,” the man said, and gestured at the invitation. “Take it, Grigor. Go or don’t go, it’s up to you. Excuse me, I don’t like to stand this long.”

  “Yes, of course,” Grigor said, awkward as they all were when brought face-to-face with each other’s infirmities. Grigor was still much stronger than this man, which was a source of embarrassment. He nodded, and the man shuffled away down the hall, and Grigor shut the door.

  Sitting on his bed, putting the invitation on the bedside table, Grigor suddenly yawned, massive and uncontrollable. The clock read four-fourteen, and Grigor was all at once so sleepy that the first time he reached for the button to switch off the light he missed. But then he got it, and in the darkness lay back on his pillow, his mind swirling with thoughts, none of them truly coherent.

  Would he go to the do-gooders’ party? Which one of his fellow residents was that guy? And, since the rooms were deliberately soundproofed, how had he heard Grigor’s quiet alarm?

  Grigor slept, and when he next awoke, for his eight A.M. pill, he remembered all those questions except the last one.

  4

  Approaching the broad steps leading up to the entrance to the Savoy Hotel, Grigor was almost painfully aware of how he looked. A thin man in his early thirties, with a gaunt face made even more lean by the loss of a few back teeth (they’d become too loose in their gums to be saved), with dry brown hair that had grown back more spottily than before, and with a measured slowness to his pace caused by the steady draining away of his vigor, he knew his appearance was gloomy and boring, like some sort of country bumpkin. The good suit, the silk tie, the heavy expensive well-shined shoes, all bought with Boris Boris’s money, were like a hasty disguise, as though he were a prisoner on the run. But above all, approaching the refurbished and highly polished Savoy entrance, aware of the cool calculation in the eyes of the doorman up there watching him slowly mount the steps, above all else Grigor knew he looked Russian. And the wrong sort of Russian to be coming to the Savoy Hotel.

  The doorman knew it also. Proud inside his overly ornate uniform, like a comic opera admiral, he moved just enough to block Grigor’s path, saying “What can I do for you?”

  “You can go back to your fleet,” Grigor told him, reasonably sure the doorman would have no idea what he was talking about, and then, before the process of hurrying him along could begin, he produced the invitation. “You can direct me,” he said smoothly, “to the International Room.”

  The doorman didn’t like having to change his evaluation. “You’re late,” he said grumpily.

  “It’s still going on,” Grigor said, with assurance. The invitation had specified “five until eight,” and it was now just after seven. It was only at the last possible minute that Grigor had decided he might come to the damn thing after all, reserving the right to change his mind at any step along the way, and it wasn’t until this snobbish doorman had looked down his Slavic nose as though at a peasant or worse that Grigor had finally decided he definitely would attend the soiree (“cocktail party”), that he did indeed belong here.

  Was he not, after all, the power behind a television throne? Was he not the author of half the words to come out
of Boris Boris’s mouth? Wasn’t he the next best thing to a celebrity; which is to say, a celebrity’s ventriloquist? Be off with you, my man, Grigor thought, I have Romanov blood in my veins. (Hardly.)

  Conviction is all. The doorman saw the cold look in Grigor’s deep-set eyes, the firmness of his fleshless jaw, the set of his narrow shoulders, and recognized the prince within the pauper. Returning the invitation, gesturing with a (small) flourish, “Straight through the lobby,” he said, “and second on the right.” “Thank you.” And Grigor was amused to notice the doorman’s heels come together—silendy, it’s true, but nevertheless—as he passed the man and went on into the plush-and-marble lobby.

  Sound billowed from the International Room like pungent steam from a country inn’s kitchen. Cocktail party chitchat is the same the world over, bright and encompassing, creating its own environment, separating the world into participants and non-invitees. Cheered suddenly at the idea of being among the blessed this time around, Grigor moved forward into that cloud of noise, which for him was not rejecting but welcoming, and was barely aware of the person at the door who took his invitation and ushered him through the wide archway into a large, high-ceilinged room that had been deliberately restored to remind people as much as possible of the pomp and privilege of the tsars. Gold and white were everywhere, with pouter pigeons of color in the Empire chairs discreedy placed against the walls. Two chandeliers signaled to one another across the room, above the heads of the partygoers in their drab mufti; not a red uniform in the place. It was as though, Grigor thought, the nobles had permitted the villagers one annual event of their own in the chateau’s grand ballroom.

  Was there a joke in that? Well, there was, of course, but was it usable? Now that the proletariat had been shown to have made a mess of things, there was a great embarrassed ambivalence about the aristocratic baby that had been thrown out with 1917’s bathwater. Both Grigor and Boris Boris had been trying for months to fit references to the tsars and their families and their world into the stand-up routines, but everything they’d come up with was too flat, too wishy-washy.