The house was in Grosvenor Street—tall and pale, with every window lit. A butler took her shawl as though she were a lady. A footman carried a lamp ahead of them, not up the grand stair, but down a narrower one, toward the back of the house, to a warm, plain room beside the housekeeper's parlor.
The fire had been built high. A physician in a snuff-colored coat stood by the bed with his arms folded, and he looked at Anna, at her pinned-up sleeves and her rough hands, with open doubt.
The man in the bed was old. That was her first thought, and a moment later she saw that she was wrong. He was not so very old; he was worn down to the frame the way a coat is worn through at the elbows, until there was nothing left of him but the shape of what had held it up. 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 four days. He is not afraid of dying; he is afraid of dying before he has done what he came to do."