slightly at the spectacle of my vodka-smelling guest rolling and tumbling with the dog on the carpet.
“Don’t tell me,” he said, putting his hands in the pockets of his suit jacket. “This would be—?”
“Exactly.”
vii.
WE DIDN’T STAY LONG—Hobie had heard a lot about Boris over the years, let’s go have a drink! and Boris was just as interested, and curious, as I might have been if Judy from Karmeywallag or some other mythical person of his past had turned up—but we were drunk and too boisterous and I felt that we might be upsetting Mrs. DeFrees, who though smiling politely was sitting rather still in a hall chair with her tiny beringed hands folded in her lap and not saying much.
So we left—Popchik in tow, paddling along excitedly with us, Boris shouting and delighted, waving at the car to go round the block and pick us up: “Yes, poustyshka, yes!”—to Popper—“That’s us! We have a car!”
Then all of a sudden it seemed that Boris’s driver spoke English as well as Boris did, and we were all three of us pals—four of us, counting Popper, who was standing on his hind legs with his paws propped on the window glass and staring out very seriously at the lights of the West Side Highway as Boris gabbled to him and cuddled him and kissed him on the back of the neck while—simultaneously—explaining to Gyuri (the driver) in both English and Russian how wonderful I was, friend of his youth and blood of his heart! (Gyuri reaching around his body and across the seat with his left hand, to shake my hand solemnly in the rear) and how precious was life that two such friends, in so big world, should find each other again after so great separation?
“Yes,” said Gyuri gloomily as he made the turn onto Houston Street so hard and sharp I slid into the door, “it was the same with me and Vadim. Daily I grieve him—I grieve him so hard I wake in the night to grieve. Vadim was my brother—” glancing back at me; pedestrians scattering as he plowed into the crosswalk, startled faces outside tinted windows—“my more-than-brother. Like Borya and me. But Vadim—”
“This was a terrible thing,” Boris said quietly to me, and then, to Gyuri:—“yes, yes, terrible—”
“—we have seen Vadim go too soon in the ground. Is true, the radio song, you know it? Piano Man singer? ‘Only the good die young.’ ”
“He will be waiting for us there,” said Boris consolingly, reaching across the seat to pat Gyuri on the shoulder.
“Yes, that just is what I instructed him to do,” Gyuri muttered, cutting in front of a car so suddenly that I fell against my seat belt and Popchyk went flying. “These things are deep—they cannot be honored in words. Human tongue cannot express. But at the end—putting him to bed with the shovel—I spoke to him with my soul. ‘So long, Vadim. Hold the gates open for me, brother. Save me a seat up there where you at.’ Only God—” please, I thought, trying to keep a composed expression while gathering Popchyk in my lap, for fuck’s sake look at the road—“Fyodor, please help me, I have two big questions about God. You are college professor” (what?) “so perhaps you can answer for me. First question—” eyes meeting mine in the rear view mirror, holding up pointed finger—“does God have sense of humor? Second question: does God have cruel sense of humor? Such as: does God toy with us and torture us for His own amusement, like vicious child with garden insect?”
“Uh,” I said, alarmed at the intense way he was looking at me and not his upcoming turn, “well, maybe, I don’t know, I sure hope not.”
“This is not the right man to ask these questions,” Boris said, offering me a cigarette and then passing one to Gyuri across the front seat. “God has tortured Theo plenty. If suffering makes noble, then he is a prince. Now Gyuri—” reclining in clouds of smoke—“a favor.”
“Anything.”
“Will you look after the dog after you drop us off? Drive him around in back seat, wherever he wants to go?”
The club was out in Queens, I couldn’t have said where. In the red-carpeted front room, which felt like a room where you’d go to kiss your grandfather on the cheek after being freshly released from prison, large family-style gatherings of drinkers in Louis XVI–style chairs ate and smoked and shouted and pounded each other on the back around tables