‘Let’s continue,’ the doctor said.
‘It’s cold,’ I answered quietly. The food I had eaten had ceased to warm me.
‘Sit down next to the stove. Where did you work before prison?’
I spread my lips and moved my jaw – my intention was to produce a smile. The doctor understood and smiled in reply.
‘My name is Andrei Mihailovich,’ he said. ‘You don’t need any treatment.’
I felt a sucking sensation in the pit of my stomach.
‘That’s right,’ he repeated in a loud voice. ‘You don’t need any treatment. You need to be fed and washed. You have to lie still and eat. I know our mattresses aren’t feather-beds, but they’re better than nothing. Just don’t lie in one position for too long, and you won’t get bedsores. You’ll be in the hospital about two months. And then spring will be here.’
The doctor smiled. I was, of course, elated. An entire two months! But I was too weak to express this joy. I gripped the stool with both hands and said nothing. The doctor wrote something into my case history.
‘You can go now.’
I returned to the ward, slept and ate. In a week I was already walking shakily around the ward, the corridor, and the other wards. I looked for people who were chewing, swallowing. I stared at their mouths, for the more I rested, the more I wanted to eat.
In the hospital, as in camp, no spoons were issued. We had learned to get along without knives and forks while we were still in prison under investigation, and we had long since learned to slurp up our food without a spoon; neither the soup nor the porridge was ever thick enough to require a spoon. A finger, a crust of bread, and one’s own tongue were enough to clean the bottom of a pot or bowl.
I searched out mouths in the process of chewing. It was an insistent demand of my body, and Andrei Mihailovich was familiar with the feeling.
One night the orderly woke me up. The ward was filled with the usual nocturnal hospital sounds: snoring, wheezing, groans, someone talking in his sleep, coughing. It all blended into a single peculiar symphony of sound – if a symphony can be composed of such sounds. Take me to such a place, blindfolded, and I will always recognize a camp hospital.
On the window-sill was a lamp – a tin saucer with some sort of oil (but not fish oil this time!) and a smoking wick twisted from cotton wool. It couldn’t have been very late. Lights went out at nine o’clock, and somehow we would fall asleep right away – just as soon as our hands and feet warmed up.
‘Andrei Mihailovich wants you,’ the orderly said. ‘Kozlik will show you the way.’
The patient called Kozlik was standing in front of me.
I walked up to the tin basin, washed my hands and face, and returned to the ward to dry them on the pillowcase. There was a single towel for the entire ward, an enormous thing made from an old striped mattress, and it was available only in the mornings. Andrei Mihailovich lived in the hospital, in one of the small far rooms normally reserved for post-operative patients. I knocked at the door and went in.
A heap of books was pushed to the side on the table. The books were alien, hostile, superfluous. Next to the books stood a teapot, two tin mugs, a bowl full of some sort of kasha…
‘Feel like playing dominoes?’ Andrei Mihailovich asked, peering at me in a friendly fashion. ‘If you have the time…’
I hate dominoes. Of all games, it is the most stupid, senseless, and boring. Even a card game like lotto is more interesting. For that matter, any card game is better. Best of all would have been checkers or chess. I squinted at the cupboard to see if there wasn’t a chessboard there, but there wasn’t. I just couldn’t offend Andrei Mihailovich with a refusal. I had to amuse him, to pay back good with good. I had never played dominoes in my life, but I was convinced that no great wisdom was required to learn this art.
‘Let’s have some tea,’ Andrei Mihailovich said. ‘Here’s the sugar. Don’t be embarrassed; take as much as you like. Help yourself to the kasha and tell me about anything you like. But then I guess you can’t do both things at the same time.’
I ate the kasha and the bread and drank three mugs of tea with sugar. I had not seen sugar for several years. I felt warm.
Andrei Mihailovich mixed the dominoes. I knew that the one who had the double six began the game. Andrei Mihailovich had it. Then, in turns, the players had to attach pieces with the matching number of dots. That was all there was to it, and I began to play without hesitation, sweating and constantly hiccuping from fullness.
We played on Andrei Mihailovich’s bed, and I got pleasure from looking at the blindingly white pillowcase on the down pillow. It was a physical pleasure to look at the clean pillow, to see another man rumple it with his hand.
‘Our game,’ I said, ‘is lacking its main appeal. Domino players are supposed to smack their pieces down on the table when they play.’ I was not joking. It was this particular aspect of the game that struck me as the most crucial.
‘Let’s switch to the table,’ Andrei Mihailovich said affably.
‘No, that’s all right. I’m just recalling all the various pleasures of the game.’
The game continued slowly. We were more concerned with telling each other our life histories. As a doctor, Andrei Mihailovich had never been in the general work gang at the mines and had only seen the mines as they were reflected in their human waste, cast out from the hospital or the morgue. I too was a by-product of the mine.
‘So you won,’ Andrei Mihailovich said. ‘Congratulations! For a prize I present you with – this.’ He took from the night table a plastic cigarette case. ‘You probably haven’t smoked for a long time?’
He tore off a piece of newspaper and rolled a cigarette. There’s nothing better than newspaper for home-grown tobacco. The traces of typographic ink not only don’t spoil the bouquet of the home-grown tobacco but even heighten it in the best fashion. I touched a piece of paper to the glowing coals in the stove and lit up, greedily inhaling the nauseatingly sweet smoke.
It was really tough to lay your hands on tobacco, and I should have quit smoking long ago. But even though conditions were what might be called ‘appropriate’, I never did quit. It was terrible even to imagine that I could lose this single great convict joy.
‘Good night,’ Andrei Mihailovich said, smiling. ‘I was going to go to bed, but I so wanted to play a game. I really appreciate it.’
I walked out of his room into the dark corridor and found someone standing in my path near the wall. I recognized Kozlik’s silhouette.
‘It’s you. What are you doing here?’
‘I wanted a smoke. Did he give you any?’
I was ashamed of my greed, ashamed that I had not thought of Kozlik or anyone else in the ward, that I had not brought them a butt, or a crust of bread, a little kasha.
Kozlik had waited several hours in the dark corridor.
Shock Therapy
During one blissful period in his life Merzlakov had worked as a stable-hand and used a home-made huller – a large tin can with a perforated bottom – to turn oats intended for the horses into human food. When boiled, the bitter mixture could satisfy hunger. Large workhorses from the mainland were given twice as much oats as the stocky, shaggy Yakut horses, although all the horses were worked an equally small amount of time. Enough oats were dumped in the trough of the monstrous Percheron, Thunder, to feed five Yakut horses. This was the practice everywhere, and it struck Merzlakov as being only fair. What he could not understand was the camp’s rationing system for people. The mysterious charts of proteins, fats, vitamins, and calories intended for the convicts’ table did not take a person’s weight into consideration. If human beings were to be equated with livestock, then one ought to be more consistent and not hold to some arithmetical average invented by the office. This terrible ‘mean’ benefited only the lightweight convicts who, in fact, survived longer than the others. The enormous Merzlakov – a sort of human analogue to the Percheron, Thunder – felt only a greater gnawing hunger from the three spoons of porridge given out for breakfast. A member of a work gang had no way of supplementing his food supply, and furthermore, all the most important foodstuffs – butter, sugar, meat – never made it to the camp kettle in the quantities provided for by the instructions.