The Keeper of the Walls (37 page)

F
or Misha
, the days were continuing in defiance of the fact that the world had stopped moving, that every human process—feeling, acting, thinking—had ceased. By the time he arrived at the Hôpital Beaujon, his father had been transported to the emergency ward, and he was only able to glimpse him from a half-open door. He rushed out to telephone the physicians he knew: Lebovici, Fildermann, and Simkov. When they arrived, he didn't even see them. They were immediately whisked away into the operating room.

He waited outside, on a hard bench, gnawing on his cuticles. After one and a half hours, Dr. Basset, the chief of surgery, came out to tell him that his father had endured the operation quite well. They had put the patient under chloroform, and found eight intestinal wounds, three of them serious. One had to wait three or four days to be able to make a prognostication.

At eleven in the evening, exhausted and drenched with perspiration, Misha went home.

The next day the ground was frozen, and patterns of November frost had left designs on the windshield of Misha's car. He had always meant to exchange the De Dion-Bouton for a more modern car, but instead, a few years back, he'd merely had the engine replaced. As he drove to the hospital, his eyes hurting from a sleepless night, he wondered how much he might be able to obtain for a car that was ten years old. It was better to think about the car than about his father; Misha couldn't bear to imagine his pain—or, worse, what might happen in the days to come. One had to drum up something—
anything
—to fill the cavities of one's mind: anything
not
to think, not to live in the absurd, cruel, senseless present.

Faces out of nowhere ballooned out at him, disconnected from reality: Rochefort; Claire and Jacques Walter; old friends from Russia who still loved Prince Ivan. If it was any consolation, his father had bound the people in his life to him, by his wisdom and kindness. But, oddly enough, it didn't matter. Nothing at all mattered, it seemed.

He went into the postoperative room, which was large and white, and filled with iron cots where patients of all ages lay, some moaning, others so silent that they presaged death. At the back of the room, two cots lay hidden, each behind a screen. Misha was directed to one of them, and drew back the screen. His father's eyes were open, and when he took the limp hand on the coverlet, he saw that the eyes had recognized him. He sat holding his father's hand until the nurse gently removed it, so that she might check the patient's temperature. It wasn't good: 38.8 Celsius, with a pulse of one hundred twenty beats. She gave him water and told Misha that his tongue was dry.

A new doctor was on call, Marshak, a fellow Russian, and he told Misha that he was sorry, but that from now on, the patient would only be able to receive visitors between one and two in the afternoon. Also, one could go to the head nurse, and be taken to a door with two glass panes through which the patients could be observed.

Misha walked out like an automaton. Claire was standing, alone, holding a cup of dark tea. She laid a gloved hand on his arm. “Come,” she said. “Drink this. You must! For
him.
”

He turned his green eyes to her, and she saw the circles around them, the intensity of his look. “Do you know who lies on the other side of Papa?” he demanded. “Verlon! They've put the assassin next to him!”

Claire didn't reply. She simply held the cup up to his lips.

After a while Claire seemed to have vanished, and he smelled an incongruously familiar perfume. He felt a hand on his shoulder. Almost angry at the intrusion, at the necessity of acknowledging yet another well-meaning friend, he turned to look up. Varvara, wrapped in gray astrakhan, with a fur bonnet on her red hair, was simply standing there. He breathed out with relief, and bowed his head. She sat down beside him, took his hand and played with it, soft caresses on his palm.

“It's in all the papers,” she said softly.

He didn't answer. Then she said: “It's getting late. There's a café across the street, where we could get a bite to eat. Then you can return to see him through the glass panel.”

It would be his first meal in two days. Wearily, like a child being led by a wiser adult, he followed Varvara down the stairs and into the street. He could see some of the people he knew at the café, and felt, for a horrid moment, like running away in order not to face them. But Varvara's fingers were closed tightly over his elbow. She marched him through the tables, answering with a distant smile the worried questions that many pairs of eyes were addressing her. Then she sat down with Misha and ordered hot soup, and coffee.

“Speak to me,” he suddenly said, taking her hand and squeezing it in both of his. “Say something about—anything! The theater.”

“There's nothing to say about the theater. I'm an old hand at it now. Watch me: I'll be like Sarah Bernhardt, or Réjane. I'll grow old with my admirers. Although there's nothing sadder than an old beauty queen.”

Then Varvara sighed, and patted Misha's hand. “Oh, dear God,” she whispered. “We all need a cause, don't we? With you, it's fighting the Communists; with me? I suppose it's staving off poverty and obscurity. It's not that I love the theater: it's just that without it, who would I be? And there's a need to be somebody, isn't there?”

“I don't know anymore,” he replied, meeting her blue eyes with a strangely naked look.

They ate their soup, drank their coffee, and then she led him back up to the ward, where he peered at his father through a glass partition. This was all the life he could feel now: to touch the glass with his forehead and chin, and to observe a semiconscious figure lying immobile behind a screen, which, for the purpose of his eyes, had been partially turned aside. He felt Varvara's lips on the skin of his cheek, and then she was gone, only the warm scent of her perfume remaining. Varvara, Varvara. A woman like a river, ever changing yet forever constant.

He was conscious with a jolt that she was forty-seven, and that she had succeeded in warding off the cruelty of time. His father had had no such pretensions: he'd only wished to live, to eat, to speak, to read in the quiet of his study. And to hold in his lap his grandchildren, his tie to the future and to his past, another link to his beloved wife, dead in another land.

Misha thought, with so much pain that he had to turn away from the attendant: Where are these children now? And will I ever see them again? He'd lost, now, everything: his country, his mother, his wife, his children, his position and fortune . . . and, he felt with a peculiar intuitive certainty, his beloved father.

The next day the streets were covered with sheets of impenetrable ice. He realized, with shock, that he had let the days go by without keeping track of them, and that it was already Saturday, December 2. He was greeted in the hospital corridor by the head nurse, who told him that the night had been a difficult one, and that the patient was worse: his stomach was swollen like a hard balloon. Dr. Marshak came at eleven, and looked pessimistic. Claire came, and sat with him outside the ward, then took him to the café across the street, where they shared a sandwich. Dr. Simkov came to them there, with a slightly more optimistic prognostication. Claire returned inside with Misha and took up vigil with him until Dr. Marshak returned at six thirty. The patient had a temperature of 38.8 Celsius, and his pulse beat one hundred sixty times per minute. His stomach was still swollen.

Misha hadn't been allowed inside at all that day. In the evening the nurses purged Prince Ivan's stomach, and the temperature went down to 38.2, with the pulse at one hundred thirty. They told Misha that his father's tongue looked better than it had all day. He looked in through the glass panel, but nothing seemed changed.

At ten thirty, Dr. Marshak told him that Henri Verlon had died, and that it seemed as if the story had come out, through some of his daughter's testimony as well as that of a gunsmith in the Aisne Department. The day before the fatal incident, Verlon had talked happily of his little house, and of how pleased he had been with the arrangements. Then, the next day, he'd gone out and bought two guns. He'd come to Paris looking for Prince Mikhail, and, according to Rochefort, had appeared definitely deranged. And for no apparent reason, he'd shot Prince Ivan, whom he had never seen in his life, and then himself. The only conclusion that could be inferred was that he had become temporarily insane, and had lost all contact with reality.

But Henri Verlon's daughter had another idea. She knew that when the refinery project had been let go, her father had lost all hope of ever getting out from the problems of making ends meet. He'd examined his life, and realized that his one hope had lain in making a great deal of money with the Brasilovs, as manager of the refinery. Instead of a small house in the country, he might have had a lifetime of cruises left for his old age. So that, having brooded for months upon the breakdown of his hopes, he had lost his mind in a paroxysm of frustration, and decided to shoot Prince Mikhail, whom he considered to be responsible. And when the younger man had been absent from his office, he had shot the father.

Misha nodded, but Marshak's words told him absolutely nothing. He didn't care. It really didn't make any difference who had tried to kill his father, or why. He was drained of all emotion, and put his coat on and walked out of the hospital.

Outside, he ran into Varvara and a young girl about eighteen years old, whom he didn't remember. Varvara said: “Misha, this is Ida Chagall, the painter's daughter. I saw her at a benefit sale, and she particularly wanted to give you her sympathy.”

“Your father is a great man, Mikhail Ivanovitch,” the girl told him. He was staring at her blankly, not understanding. “All the Russians in Paris admire him.”

Finally the words seemed to penetrate. He answered, softly, “Thank you, Ida Markovna. But all the admiration in the world won't repair his intestine. Medicine hasn't found a way yet to mend such delicate organs. Today they refused to let me in to visit him.”

Ida Chagall turned her head aside, and Misha knew that she had meant well. He said, curtly: “I'm sorry, ladies, but I'm very tired. Good night.”

His footsteps crunched on the pavement, and he could almost feel Varvara's eyes boring holes into his back, trying to see inside his soul. She'd done the best she could; but still, she had her benefits to attend, her notoriety to uphold. Someone else's father was dying.

In the car, he thought: Even the Jews, then, admired Papa. And he felt strangely stirred, and touched.

In the morning the frost was less pronounced. Misha had gone to bed and been awakened by the telephone at midnight. Dr. Marshak told him things looked worse. At 2:00
a.m.
the telephone rang again, and again at four. Finally, at six, he washed and dressed and left the house. The night nurse and the head nurse both told him that the patient was extremely ill, and the screen had been put completely around the bed so that, when he tried to see his father, he saw only the wooden slats.

He tried to find Dr. Basset, and when he did, was told that it might last till nighttime. Misha went across the street to the café, and smoked half a pack of cigarettes. If this was the end, why then, good God, did it have to drag out this way?

At one, he was let into the ward, and led to the bed. Prince Ivan looked changed. His eyes were hollow, and his cheeks were like pale parchment dotted with unkempt points of gray where his beard had grown. What a proud man he'd always been! He would have felt ashamed to see his own appearance, now, on the edge of death. Misha held his hand, and thought that the lips began to move. He bent down, tried to hear the words, but no sound emerged. At two o'clock he was still sitting in the same position, holding his father's hand, trying to read his lips, and the strong nurse had to lift him half up before he realized that it was time to go.

He went into the hallway, and leaned wearily against the wall. It was always drafty there, and he could feel himself trembling with a sort of fever. He half opened his eyes. Coming toward him, at the far end of the hall, was a woman in a dark coat, walking quickly. He watched her grow larger and larger, made out the long, well-shaped legs and the dark head of hair. And then his body was seized in a sort of paroxysm, and the dam ruptured. He felt the start of his own tears at the same moment that he felt her arms go about him.

At 4:00
a.m.,
when Dr. Basset found him to tell him that this was the end, he found them sitting together, wordlessly, holding hands. They went in together, and sat on either side of Prince Ivan as he breathed his last agonizing moments. Then she bent down to close his eyes, and brushed his forehead with her lips. “Good night, Papa,” she whispered, and the room was still.

Outside the gray of early morning greeted them, aureoled with pink. They walked aimlessly, holding each other tight, mute against the sharp sounds of the waking birds. Finally they sat down on a bench, and she held his head against the warmth of her neck. He was afraid to ask her if she planned to go away, now that it was over. And she didn't want to say, because her own grief had been so small compared to his. The enormity of life and death swayed over them both.