His beard was gray and ragged. His face was burned dark by some wind she could not imagine. His eyes were open and bright with fever and they went from face to face around the room with the patient desperate look of a dog that has been left among strangers. On the blanket near his hand lay a silver watch with a dented case. Anna went to the bed and knelt beside it so that her face was level with his.
She had not decided to do that either. Her body remembered it from somewhere, from a painted wooden bed and a low voice in the dark. Good evening, Stepan, she said in Russian. My name is Anna. I have come to talk with you.
Tell me where it hurts. The effect of those few words was terrible to see. The man's whole face broke open. He made a sound in his throat that was not a word, and his cracked hand came off the blanket and caught hers and held it so hard that her knuckles ground together. Tears ran down into his beard.
He began to talk all at once and very fast in the broad, soft speech of the river villages, the speech of her nurse, and for a moment Anna could not follow any of it. Then she could. It came back to her like a tune. "He says God has not forgotten him after all," she said over her shoulder. And her voice was not quite steady.
He says he has not heard his own language spoken for the whole of the voyage. He thought he would die among people who could not even pray for him properly. She bent closer and listened. He says the pain is here under the ribs on the right side. It has been there since the ship.
He has not been able to keep down bread for 4 days. He is not afraid of dying. He's afraid of dying before he has done what he came to do. The physician unfolded his arms. After that, he stopped looking at her hands.
For the next hour, she was the only door between two men who could not otherwise reach each other. The physician asked, and she asked, and Stepan answered, and she gave the answers back exactly as they came, without softening them or tidying them. She told the physician about the saltfish on the ship and the bad water in the last week of the voyage. She told Stepan what the draft in the glass was for and why he must drink all of it. When he refused, she told him that her nurse would have held his nose, and the ghost of a laugh came out of him, and he drank.
And through the whole of that hour, the Duke of Rothley stood by the window with his back to the dark glass, and his hands behind him. He did not speak. He did not once take his eyes off the bed. When the physician had gone, the fever seemed to ease a little. Stepan lay back against the pillow and studied the Duke.