6. Sleep.
Had Tatiana cut off his nose?
He pulled back the window curtain, almost expecting the sky to be red, the street to be dust – a nuclear holocaust took his nose! But everything was as usual. Todd Elkin, who had been first his American colleague and counterpart, then his sponsor at Paine, and was now simply his landlord, was pulling out of the driveway in his vintage Corvette.
Todd was a man not easily satisfied. It wasn’t enough for him to be a professor of nineteenth-century American literature. Todd was also a painter! A skier! A sailor! The lover of an athletic little lady from the registrar’s office!
And six years ago, Todd had been the only member of that American delegatory cabal who had done more than stare, as if through a glass, brightly, at the sorry smoking Russians from Leningrad State University. This was the man who, in a moment when the escorts weren’t watching, had pulled out a dictionary and fiercely pointed to the words, ya pomogu tebe, I’ll help you. Todd had gotten him out, had rented him the garage, had gotten him his first, and Aleksey was beginning to fear his last, professorial job in the US.
Soon, too soon, after their customary fifteen minutes, Tatiana would come a-knocking on his door and he would have to say, “Who’s there?” but knowing all the time that here she was, the woman who expected a real man, a full man, hairy and bearded and bellied, and who would find instead a nozentity, a nostrato.
What to do? He rushed on wobbly legs around the apartment, furiously straightening it up, sweeping vodka and glasses and shirt into his kitchen cabinets. When had his nose gone? When? When?
A knock on the door. “It’s not a good time...”
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