The door opened behind me and I heard quiet footsteps, then gentle woman’s hands grasped me by the shoulder and I felt the small cold sting of a needle piercing my skin through the cloth of the strait-jacket.
‘By the way.’ said Timur Timurovich, rubbing his hands as though to warm them, ‘one small comment; in madhouse slang the term «final shot» isn’t used for what we’re injecting you with, that is, an ordinary mixture of aminazine and perevitine. It’s reserved for the so-called sulphazine cross, that is, four injections in… But then, I hope we’re never going to reach that stage.’
I did not turn my head to look at the woman who had given me the injection. I looked at the dismembered red-white-and-blue man on the poster, and when he began looking back at me, smiling and winking, I heard Timur Timurovich’s voice coming from somewhere very far away:
‘Yes, straight to the ward. No, he won’t cause any problems. There may be at least some effect… He’ll be going through the same procedure himself soon enough.’
Somebody’s hands (I think they belonged to Zherbunov and Barbolin again) pulled the shirt off my body, picked me up by the arms and dumped me like a sack of sand on to some kind of stretcher. Then the door-frame flashed past my eyes and we
My unfeeling body floated past tall white doors with numbers on them, and behind me I could hear the distorted voices and laughter of the sailors in doctors’ coats, who appeared to be conducting a scurrilous conversation about women. Then I saw Timur Timurovich’s face peering down at me - apparently he had been walking along beside me.
‘We’ve decided to put you back in the Third Section,’ he said. ‘At present there are four others in there, so you’ll make five. Do you know anything about Kanashnikov group therapy? My group therapy, that is?’
‘No,’ I mumbled with difficulty.
The flickering of the doors as they passed me had become quite unbearable, and I closed my eyes.
‘To put it simply, it means patients pooling their efforts in the struggle for recovery. Imagine that for a time your problems become the collective problems, that for a certain time everyone taking part in a session shares your condition. They all identify with you, so to speak. What do you think the result of that would be?’ I did not answer.
‘It’s very simple,’ Timur Timurovich went on. ‘When the session comes to an end, a reaction sets in as the participants withdraw from the state that they have been experiencing as reality; you could call it exploiting man’s innate herd instinct in the service of medicine. Your ideas and your mood might infect the others taking part in the session for a certain time, but as soon as the session comes to an end, they return to their own manic obsessions, leaving you isolated. And at that moment - provided the pathological psychic material has been driven up to the surface by the process of catharsis - the patient can become aware of the arbitrary subjectivity of his own morbid notions and can cease to identify with them. And from that point recovery is only a short step away.’
I did not follow the meaning of his words very clearly, assuming, that is, that there was any. But nonetheless, something stuck in my mind. The effect of the injection was growing stronger and stronger. I could no longer see anything around me, my body had become almost totally insensitive, and my spirit was immersed in a dull, heavy indifference. The most unpleasant thing about this mood was that it did not seem to have taken possession of me, but of some other person - the person into whom the injected substance had transformed me. I was horrified to sense that this other person actually could be cured.
‘Of course you can recover,’ Timur Timurovich confirmed. ‘And we will cure you, have no doubt about it. Just forget the very notion of a madhouse. Treat it all as an interesting adventure. Especially since you’re a literary man. I sometimes encounter things here that are just begging to be written down. What’s coming up now, for instance - we’re due for an absolutely fascinating event in your ward, a group session with Maria. You do remember who I’m talking about?’
I shook my head.
‘No, of course not, of course not. But it’s an extremely interesting case. I’d call it a psychodrama of genuinely Shakespearean proportions, the clash of such apparently diverse objects of consciousness as a Mexican soap opera, a Hollywood blockbuster and our own young, rootless Russian democracy. Do you know the Mexican television serial Just Maria? So you don’t remember that either. I see. Well, in a word, the patient has taken on the role of the heroine, Maria herself. It would be a quite banal case, if not for the subconscious identification with Russia, plus the Agamemnon complex with the anal dynamics. In short, it’s exactly my field, a split false identity.’
Oh, God, I thought, how long the corridors here are.
‘Of course, you won’t be in any fit state to take a proper part in the proceedings,’ Timur Timurovich’s voice continued, ‘so you can sleep. But don’t forget that soon it will be your turn to tell your own story.’
I think we must have entered a room - a door squeaked and I caught a fragment of interrupted conversation. Timur Timurovich spoke a word of greeting to the surrounding darkness and several voices answered him. Meanwhile I was transferred to an invisible bed, a pillow was tucked under my head and a blanket thrown over me. For a while I paid attention to the disembodied phrases that reached my ears -Timur Timurovich was explaining to somebody why I had been absent for so long; then I lost contact with what was happening, being visited instead by a quite momentous hallucination of an intimately personal character.
1 do not know quite how long I spent alone with my conscience, but at some point my attention was caught again by the monotonous voice of Timur Timurovich.
‘Watch the ball closely, Maria. You are quite calm. If your mouth feels dry, it’s only because of the injection you were given - it will soon pass. Can you hear me?’
‘Yes,’ came the reply, in what seemed to me more like a high male voice than a low female one.
‘Who are you?’
‘Maria,’ answered the voice.
‘What’s your surname?’
‘Just Maria,’
‘How old are you?’
‘They say I look eighteen.’ replied the voice.
‘Do you know where you are?’
‘Yes. In a hospital.’
‘And what brought you here?’
‘It was the crash, what else? I don’t understand how I survived at all. I couldn’t possibly have guessed he was that kind of man.’
‘What did you crash into?’
‘The Ostankino television tower.’
‘I see. And how did it happen?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘That’s all right.’ Timur Timurovich said kindly, ‘we’re not in any hurry, we have time to listen. How did it all begin?’
‘It began when I went for a walk along the embankment.’
‘And where were you before that?’
‘I wasn’t anywhere before that.’
‘All right, carry on.’
‘Well then, I’m walking, you know, just walking along, and all around me there’s some kind of smoke. And the further I go, the more there is…’
I suddenly realized that the longer I tried to listen to the words, the harder it was to make out their meaning. It felt as though the meaning were attached to them by pieces of string, which kept getting longer and longer. I found myself unable to keep up with the conversation, but that was not important, because at the same time I began to see the wavering outline of a picture - a river embankment enveloped in clouds of smoke and a woman with broad muscular shoulders walking along it, looking more like a man dressed in women’s clothes. I knew that she was called Maria and I could see her, and see the world through her eyes at the same time. A moment later I realized that in some way I was perceiving everything that she was thinking and feeling: she was thinking that however hard she tried, this walk was never going to lead to anything; the sunny morning at the beginning of which she had arrived in this world of suffering had given way to this unholy mess, and it had happened so smoothly that she had not even noticed.