Vigil

The Voice and I sit in dining room chairs pulled over to the side of the living room, facing the bed where our hostess lies. I don't know her well, although we sang in the choir together for a few years, but she had asked for visitors. Now it's not clear that she knows anyone is in the room. On the wall behind the bed, icons held up with white strips of medical tape face pictures of her, photographs her husband took of her between treatments. He bustles around, gracious but distracted, adjusting her covers and then insisting that The Voice and I take some dried apricots. He disappears into the kitchen for a moment and returns with a box of dates, a tin of caramels, and a bag of layered wafer cookies, setting them next to the teapot and our cups. The tea is a flowery Russian blend, so fragrant that sugar would render it undrinkable. He urges us to eat and drink, asks whether perhaps we would prefer wine, or maybe something stronger, cognac or brandy. We tell him, truthfully, that we're happy with the tea, which is delicious. He runs a hand over thinning hair, shaking his head, then excuses himself to heat the soup that The Voice brought. She and I talk quietly about music, debating whether we should try to sing something; I haven't sung in years and was never very good except at finding the key of flat, while she is in practice and has a clear sweet soprano. We're both at a bit of a loss and don't know what to say to our host. His wife is quiet, maybe sleeping and maybe not.

After he finishes his soup, I ask how he and his wife met. He smiles crookedly and says that they were in a symphonic group together in the Soviet Union back in the 1960's. The group went on tour in buses. "I'm not a lucky man," he says. "If it's a bullet there, I will get it." His bus crashed into something on the road; he, sitting in the front row of seats, was thrown face-first into the plastic divider between the driver and the rest of the bus. He was badly cut and needed stitches all over his face, but the tour couldn't afford to stop. Every two days they were in a new town; every two days he had to find a new doctor. "And I had bandages everywhere, bruises, stitches, they have no anesthesia, can you believe? She made herself responsible for me. Helped me find clinics, keeps the dressings clean, does my bandages." He smiles again. "Three—no, two and a half. Two and a half years later, we got married. And now it's forty years."

When he steps out of the room, The Voice and I gather the nerve to stand and sing, wavering at first. Our hostess was an operatic soprano until cancer took one lung, an alto with the choir until a few months ago. Her eyes stay closed, but now she seems to breathe more easily, and her fretful movements and moaning stop as we sing. We don't have a servicebook, so we do only what we know by heart and can sing as a duet. It's a mixed bag, not entirely appropriate, and I'm as bad as I feared I would be, but we hope the intent will be clear. Her husband comes back in as we stop. "I liked the last one. Was it a folk song?" "A hymn for the bride," says The Voice, a little awkwardly. "Pretty," he says.

Other visitors arrive, one a nurse. We say our farewells and slip out, closing the door as our host carefully dribbles water into his wife's mouth and wipes away what spills. The day before our visit, she was awake enough to talk with visitors and to take Communion. The next morning, word of her death will spread, followed by long e-mail divvyings-up of the grocery list for the wake.