Sheremetev nodded.
‘Who is he? Someone he knew? Someone he worked with?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘You could increase the dose if you want to,’ said Andreevsky. ‘His heart could take it.’
‘I thought you said it was improving!’ said Kalin.
Andreevsky shrugged. ‘Up to you, Vyacha.’
Kalin studied the charts again and rubbed at his nose. Andreevsky stole a glance at Sheremetev and grinned. Kalin had no idea what to do but couldn’t bear to show it in front of a colleague or a nurse. The nose-scratching was a sure sign. In the end, Andreevsky and Sheremetev both knew, he was going to do nothing, as he always did, and say that he would review things in a month.
‘Does he wander?’ asked Kalin suddenly.
‘Wander?’ said Sheremetev.
‘Vladimir Vladimirovich! Does he wander?’
‘No.’
‘At night?’
Sheremetev shook his head.
‘Do you keep his door locked?’
‘He never wanders.’
‘Never?’
‘Never.’
‘Still, you should lock his door, Nikolai Ilyich.’
Sheremetev had no intention of locking Vladimir’s door. He hated the idea of such a thing unless there was really no alternative. It was a momentous betrayal of trust, to confine someone like an infant. And it wasn’t necessary. First, Vladimir didn’t wander. And second, if he did, Sheremetev would surely hear him through the monitor.
Kalin gave his nose a final scratch. ‘In my opinion, it’s best to leave things as they are for now,’ he said sagely, handing back the charts. ‘I’ll review the situation next month.’
‘I agree,’ replied Andreevsky in his gravest, most professorial voice.
‘Be sure to make a note of every episode, Nikolai Ilyich,’ said Kalin, holding up an admonitory finger. ‘I’ll need to make a full assessment.’
‘Every episode,’ said Andreevsky.
The two professors walked to the stairs, Sheremetev following a step behind.
‘Does anyone come to see him?’ asked Kalin, glancing over his shoulder.
‘Not much,’ said Sheremetev. ‘Three days ago President Lebedev was here to take photos with him.’
‘I saw in the paper. How was he?’
Sheremetev shrugged. ‘He was what he was. They wanted him to give the president his blessing, but he refused to say anything.’
‘Did he say why?’
‘I got the feeling that he and President Lebedev didn’t like each other much.’
Professor Andreevksy laughed.
‘Do you think he knew what was going on?’ asked Kalin.
‘I think he knew more than you would think. At first he thought Lebedev had come to make a report to him, that he was still some kind of minister. Then I think he realised that something else was going on.’ Sheremetev smiled. ‘He liked the cameras. As soon as he walked in the room, you could see him stand taller.’
Kalin glanced at Andreevsky and chuckled. ‘Vanity. It’s like I always tell my students: the deepest part of a person’s character is the one that goes last.’
They went down the stairs. The security guard in the entrance hall stepped forward from his post and opened the door for the two professors. Outside, their car was waiting.
‘Do you still take him on his walk each day?’ Kalin asked Sheremetev.
‘Yes. Every morning. If not, in the afternoon. No matter how bad the weather, we try to go. Occasionally he resists, but not usually. He enjoys it.’
‘How long does he walk for?’
Sheremetev shrugged. ‘Half an hour. Longer if he wants. If he’s had a disturbed night, if he’s tired, it might be less. I have to watch that. We have problems if he gets too tired.’
‘And away from the dacha? Do you ever go out anywhere else?’
‘Not for a long time.’
‘Maybe you should take him out, Nikolai Ilyich.’
‘Do you think I should?’
‘Why not?’ said Kalin. ‘Have an outing. Somewhere different.’
Andreevsky nodded. ‘It’ll be good for him.’
The two professors headed for the door. ‘Shame his heart’s so strong,’ Sheremetev heard Andreevsky saying. ‘He could go on for years.’
THE VISIT OF THE doctors left Sheremetev feeling dejected. Andreevsky was right – it was a shame that Vladimir’s heart was so strong. Better to keel over with a heart attack and be gone than to linger in this twilight for so long, neglected, abandoned by family and friends, cared for only by strangers who were paid to do the job.
Over the years, Sheremetev had seen the visitors to the dacha slow from a flood to a stream to a trickle that by now had dried up almost entirely. The horde of parasites which had hummed around Vladimir when Sheremetev first arrived had flown off the moment they realised the ex-president no longer exercised any influence with his successor. At the start they had been everywhere – a year later not even their echoes were heard. Official visits from Russian politicians and foreign dignitaries who felt obliged to pay their respects lasted longer, but came to an end when Vladimir’s condition had become so obvious that the visits were an embarrassment to the government and word was discreetly put out that the former president had retired from all public duties to enjoy his richly deserved retirement. As for his private visitors, the old cronies who might have felt some loyalty to Vladimir, if not affection, were mostly themselves either ill or dead, and those who weren’t too frail to visit found little pleasure in coming to see a man who no longer recognised them. After a while, even a lingering sense of duty wasn’t sufficient to bring them out to the dacha. That left only Vladimir’s family. His first wife was dead, but the second one, the one Vladimir had married in secret, was very much alive, thirty years his junior and constantly linked with one billionaire or another. She had left him in reality, if not officially, even before he stepped down from the presidency. In earlier years, his children and grandchildren had come from abroad to visit at Christmas or Easter, but nowadays an excuse invariably arrived in their place. Thankfully, thought Sheremetev, Vladimir had no awareness of the feast days and didn’t know the extent to which he was neglected.
As for Sheremetev himself, he didn’t think that he was a stranger for Vladimir. He wasn’t a friend, he wasn’t family, but he felt sure that he was something more to the ex-president than a faceless nurse. He was certain that Vladimir knew him and was at ease with him, even if he couldn’t remember his name. He was the only one who could calm him before his agitation became too great. And when the look of confusion and fear came into Vladimir’s eyes, it was him that he looked for. Sheremetev, for his part, regarded the ex-president as more than a mere patient. How could he not, having looked after him so intimately for the last six years? They had been through Vladimir’s rages together, the slow, stuttering extinction of his insight into his condition, the eruption out of the remains of his mind of his delusions and hallucinations. Whatever was left of Vladimir’s consciousness on any given day, whatever world he lived in, he was still a person, still Vladimir Vladimirovich, still someone who could feel, shout, cry, question, laugh. You can’t live so closely for so long and go through such things with someone and not develop a relationship with them, a sense of concern and even affection, that goes beyond the merely professional, even if that person has no idea who you are.
But no one else in the dacha had such a relationship with Vladimir. Even those who came to the upper floor, the maids and house attendants who saw him each day, rarely exchanged a word with him, and were generally tentative, uncertain, tongue-tied, partly because dementia often has that effect on people unaccustomed to dealing with it, partly because of the aura of who Vladimir had been. The others who lived in the dacha saw him only by chance, in passing, when he was out for his daily walk. Other than Sheremetev, the ex-president was surrounded by people he didn’t know and who regarded him as unknowable, like some kind of living st
atue. It made the responsibility that Sheremetev felt as the only person in the dacha who knew and cared for Vladimir seem sometimes insupportable. At other times, when the second wife had waltzed in for the first time in six months and then waltzed out again twenty minutes later, as if fulfilling some kind of duty that was required to retain access to whatever funds financed her existence, it almost broke his heart.
As a nurse, Sheremetev had seen many people die over the years, some quickly, some slowly, some resigned to their fate, some raging against it, some peacefully, some in pain. But by far the worst death, in his opinion – apart from a death experienced with agony racking one’s bones – was to die alone. Surely it was at the foundation of civility that a man should have some comfort from those who had loved him when his time came to depart, and surely it was at the foundation of love that they would want to give it to him. What kind of civilisation, he wondered, would allow Vladimir to live out his final days like this? And if this is all that Vladimir could expect – after his years of public life and all that he had done for the motherland – then what could anyone else hope for?
Well, Sheremetev wouldn’t let the worst happen to him. He wouldn’t let him die with no one to comfort him. That much, at least, he could ensure.
The doctors had said he should take him for an outing. Why not? Both he and Vladimir could do with a change of scenery.
When he returned after seeing the doctors out, Vladimir was sitting where Sheremetev had left him, deep in conversation with an armchair.
‘Vladimir Vladimirovich,’ he said brightly, ‘let’s do something you’ll enjoy. Shall we go to the lake? We used to go, do you remember? It’s a nice day for a walk. Maybe we’ll get Stepanin to pack us a lunch.’
Vladimir looked out the window.
‘See? It’s sunny. I’ll find something nice for you to wear.’
Sheremetev went into the dressing room. It was lined on all sides by shelves, hanging rails and drawers, and was many times larger than the little room in which Sheremetev himself slept each night. On one set of rails were at least three dozen overcoats, some fur, some leather, some wool; on others must have hung sixty or eighty suits. Elsewhere were rails of jackets, blazers and bomber jackets, shelves of sweaters, shirts and shoes, drawers of underwear, socks, belts and cufflinks. Sheremetev selected a suit, a shirt, tie, belt and shoes, then he put the clothes down on a chair and opened a freestanding cabinet that stood in the middle of the room.
The cabinet was about a metre and a half in height and half a metre in width and depth. Made bespoke for Vladimir out of a polished hardwood, it had a pair of doors that opened to reveal a column of drawers, each only five centimetres in height. Sheremetev applied a slight pressure to the front of one of the drawers, which slid smoothly out. The drawer was lined in black velvet and had three rows of five niches. In each of the niches nestled a watch.
Sheremetev perused the watches in the tray, then pushed it back in and opened another, from which he selected a silver timepiece with a blue face.
He closed the cabinet, gathered up the clothes, and took everything into the bedroom.
‘Come on, Vladimir Vladimirovich, let’s get dressed.’
As much as was possible, it was good for Vladimir still to do things himself. This meant that simple activities took longer than they might have done, but Sheremetev was determined to help Vladimir preserve his capacities for as long as he could. He stood with the ex-president as Vladimir fumbled with his clothes, gently prompting him when he forgot what he was doing.
‘I wore this on election night,’ said Vladimir, as he slipped on the suit jacket.
‘This suit?’
‘Look, it’s got a spot.’ He raised his left arm and pointed at a place near the elbow.
Sheremetev saw a very faint darkening in the material. ‘Which election night?’ he asked. In the early years, Vladimir had often told him stories stimulated by items of clothing that he was wearing – meeting President Bush for the first time, hunting a Siberian tiger, flying into Chechnya at the height of the war, opening the Olympics, banqueting in Beijing with President Xi. The stories were endless, as one might expect from a man who had led such a life.
Vladimir frowned.
‘Well, doesn’t matter which election, Vladimir Vladimirovich. It’s a good suit.’
‘Seventy-two percent on a turnout of slightly over seventy!’ said Vladimir suddenly. ‘First round! What do you think of that?’
‘That’s good, Vladimir Vladimirovich.’
‘Good? It’s perfect! At the start we were naïve – the higher the vote the better. Now, of course, we know, a vote can look too high. Seventy and seventy, that’s what we want. Seventy turnout, seventy in favour, the perfect recipe – actually, just over, so you can say however many turned out, more than fifty percent in absolute terms voted in favour. Once in a while you throw in a lower result to make it look like anything can happen.’ He chuckled. ‘Of course, no matter how we do it, in the west they still say it’s rigged. Last month, in Vienna, some reporter told me that he followed a bus from one polling station to the next and said he saw everyone voting twice. Some Italian reporter. How the hell did he get in anyway? He confronted me at the press conference after the nuclear talks. Thought he was going to catch me out. Takes more than some journalist with a smart arse question to do that, I can tell you! Do you know what I said? “Who did they vote for, these people you say you saw in the bus? Did you ask them?” He said they said they voted for me. Then I said: “So how can you believe such people? They admit to voting twice. You can’t believe a word that comes out of their mouth. They’re self-confessed criminals!”’ Vladimir laughed. ‘What do you think? That shut him up alright!’
Sheremetev handed Vladimir his shoes and went to the phone that stood on a table in the dressing room. He called the security post in the hall and asked the guard to arrange for Eleyekov, the driver, to bring a car around. ‘Put your shoes on please, Vladimir Vladimirovich,’ he said as he waited for the guard to call back. When the phone rang, the guard told him that Eleyekov had said that the Mercedes in which Vladimir was supposed to travel, a bulletproof S class, had broken down and wouldn’t be ready for use until late the following day. Sheremetev told him to tell Eleyekov that they were only going to the lake and they could take the other car that was kept at the dacha, an armoured, bespoke Range Rover. The guard, sounding doubtful, said he’d call again and ask.
Vladimir sat gazing vacantly at the floor, one shoe on and the other in his hand.
Sheremetev prompted him, but Vladimir looked up at him in confusion.
Sheremetev eased the other shoe onto his foot and watched as Vladimir tried to tie the laces. He completed the bows for him. Then he handed Vladimir the watch that he had selected. Vladimir stared at it, a slight frown coming over his face.
‘What is it, Vladimir Vladimirovich?’ said Sheremetev. ‘Would you prefer another watch?’
Vladimir looked up at him. ‘What?’
‘Would you like me to help you with the watch?’
Vladimir looked at him as if he was an imbecile. ‘I can do it!’
The phone rang. The guard told him that the Range Rover was unavailable too.
‘They’re both broken down?’ said Sheremetev incredulously.
‘And Vadim Sergeyevich just told me that the Mercedes – you remember I said it would be available tomorrow afternoon – he just got a call and now it won’t be ready until the following morning.’
Sheremetev put the phone down in disbelief. Both cars broken down? What if they really needed them? There should be some emergency plan, he thought. Well, luckily, going to the lake wasn’t a matter of life or death.
‘No lake today,’ he said to Vladimir Vladimirovich. ‘Let’s go for a walk instead.’
‘Where?’ said Vladimir.
‘Wherever you like.’
‘The seafront.’
‘Well, let’s see how we go,’ said Sheremetev, and he took the watch, which V
ladimir was still holding, and fastened it on his wrist.
5
THE NOTION OF GOING to the seafront didn’t stick long in Vladimir’s mind, not long enough to make it down the stairs. Sheremetev took him outside. Immediately surrounding the dacha was an area of lawn, and beyond it, in one direction, some of the birch forest that had originally covered the land. When Sheremetev had first arrived at the dacha, the rest of the estate had been a stately, landscaped expanse of meadows, rockeries and arbours, with a stream and a pond and couple of ornamental bridges, but the land had since been dug up and flattened and then covered with ugly long sausages of plastic greenhouses in which grew fruit- and flower-bearing plants alien to any Russian field. The stream had been diverted into pipes to irrigate them. Every thirty metres or so along the tunnels stood a giant steel installation with a huge pipe that fed hot air inside the plastic. The heaters weren’t operating yet, but in the winter, if you walked between the tunnels, their low, vibrating thrum went straight to the stomach. Here and there amongst the tunnels stood a bench that survived from the time before the greenhouses had been erected, as if a reminder of what had been before.
Sheremetev usually left it up to Vladimir to decide which way they went. Today he marched straight up to one of the greenhouses. Inside, the air was warm and moist. Large-leafed plants were staked into the soil of raised beds on either side of the tunnel, thickly hung with dark, glossy aubergines ripening on the vine. A pair of labourers was working at each of the beds, weeding and picking off snails and slugs.
The workers stopped and stared as Vladimir approached.
Vladimir beamed at them, airily bidding them continue their work. The pickers smiled back at him uncertainly.
One of the dacha’s three gardeners was there as well. Arkady Maksimovich Goroviev, a man of about fifty with thick greying hair and somewhat pockmarked skin, walked with a slight limp. Sheremetev had heard talk that Goroviev had had some kind of problems with the authorities in the past, but in Sheremetev’s experience the gardener was a kind, gentle man, unfailingly restrained and polite. He was the only other person in the dacha who was uncowed by the ex-president and seemed able to see him as a fellow human being, rather than as some distant and awe-inspiring icon, and to speak to him normally. Whenever Goroviev encountered Vladimir, he always addressed him respectfully and inquired after his health in a fashion that suggested that he was genuinely interested in his condition from a human perspective, as one person ought to be interested in another. Today, after the demoralising visit from the doctors and the disappointment of his hopes of taking Vladimir on an outing from the dacha, Sheremetev was glad to have run into him.
The Senility of Vladimir P Page 5