Then, too, why prevent people from dying, if death is the normal and natural end of every man? So what if some dealer or clerk lives for an extra five or ten years? If the purpose of medical science is seen as the alleviation of suffering by medication, then, willy-nilly, the question arises: why alleviate it? First, they say that suffering leads man to perfection, and, second, if mankind really learns to alleviate its suffering with pills and drops, it will completely abandon religion and philosophy, in which it has hitherto found not only a defense against all calamities, but even happiness. Pushkin suffered terribly before death, poor Heine lay paralyzed for many years: why should there be no illness for some Andrei Yefimych or Matryona Savishna, whose life is insipid and would be completely empty and similar to the life of an amoeba were it not for suffering?
Oppressed by such reasoning, Andrei Yefimych threw up his hands and stopped going to the hospital every day.
VI
His life goes like this. Ordinarily he gets up in the morning at around eight, dresses and has tea. Then he sits in his study and reads or goes to the hospital. There, in the hospital, in a dark, narrow corridor, the outpatients sit waiting to be received. Peasants and nurses rush past them, their boots stomping on the brick floor, skinny patients in robes pass by, dead bodies and pots of excrement are carried out, children cry, a drafty wind blows. Andrei Yefimych knows that for the feverish, the consumptive, and the impressionable sick in general, such an atmosphere is torture, but what can he do? In the receiving room he is met by his assistant, Sergei Sergeich, a small, fat man with a clean-shaven, well-scrubbed, plump face, with soft, smooth manners, wearing a roomy new suit and looking more like a senator than an assistant doctor. He has an enormous practice in town, wears a white tie, and considers himself more knowledgeable than the doctor, who has no practice at all. In the corner of the receiving room stands a big icon in a case, with a heavy icon lamp, beside it a candle stand under a white cover; on the walls hang portraits of bishops, a view of the Svyatogorsk monastery, and wreaths of dried cornflowers. Sergei Sergeich is religious and a lover of the beauteous. The icon was installed at his expense; on Sundays one of the patients, on his orders, reads an akathist5 aloud in the receiving room, and after the reading Sergei Sergeich himself makes the rounds of all the wards carrying a censer and censing everybody.
The patients are many, but time is short, and so the business is confined to a brief questioning and the dispensing of some sort of medicine like camphor ointment or castor oil. Andrei Yefimych sits with his cheek propped on his fist, deep in thought, and asks questions mechanically. Sergei Sergeich also sits rubbing his little hands and occasionally mixes in.
“We get sick and suffer want,” he says, “because we don’t pray properly to the merciful Lord. Yes!”
Andrei Yefimych does not do any surgery during receiving hours; he got out of the habit long ago, and the sight of blood upsets him unpleasantly. When he has to open a child’s mouth to look down his throat, and the child shouts and resists with his little hands, the noise in his ears makes him giddy and tears come to his eyes. He hastens to prescribe some medicine and waves his arms, so that the peasant mother will quickly take the child away.
While receiving, he quickly becomes bored with the patients’ timidity, their witlessness, the proximity of the beauteous Sergei Sergeich, the portraits on the walls, and his own questions, which he has been asking unvaryingly for twenty years now. And he leaves after receiving five or six patients. The assistant doctor receives the rest without him.
With the agreeable thought that, thank God, he has had no private practice for a long time, and that no one will bother him, Andrei Yefimych goes home, sits down immediately at the desk in his study, and begins to read. He reads a lot, and always with great pleasure. Half of his salary goes on books, and of the six rooms of his apartment, three are heaped with books and old magazines. He likes writings on history and philosophy most of all; in the field of medicine, he subscribes to The Doctor, which he always starts reading from the back. Each time the reading goes on uninterruptedly for several hours without tiring him. He does not read quickly and impulsively, as Ivan Dmitrich used to, but slowly, sensitively, often lingering over places that please or puzzle him. Beside the book there always stands a little carafe of vodka, and a pickled cucumber or apple lies directly on the baize, without a plate. Every half hour, without taking his eyes off the book, he pours himself a glass of vodka and drinks it, then, without looking, feels for the pickle and takes a bite.
At three o’clock he warily approaches the kitchen door, coughs, and says:
“Daryushka, how about some dinner …”
After dinner, rather poor and slovenly, Andrei Yefimych paces about his rooms, his arms folded on his chest, and thinks. It strikes four, then five, and still he paces and thinks. Occasionally the kitchen door creaks, and Daryushka’s red, sleepy face peeks out.
“Andrei Yefimych, isn’t it time you had your beer?” she asks worriedly.
“No, not yet …” he replies. “I’ll wait a bit … wait a bit …”
Towards evening the postmaster, Mikhail Averyanych, usually comes, the only man in town whose company Andrei Yefimych does not find burdensome. Mikhail Averyanych was once a very rich landowner and served in the cavalry, but he was ruined and, out of need, joined the postal service in his old age. He has a hale and hearty look, magnificent gray side-whiskers, well-bred manners, and a loud, pleasant voice. He is kind and sensitive, but hot-tempered. When a client at the post office protests, disagrees, or simply begins to argue, Mikhail Averyanych turns purple, shakes all over, and in a thundering voice shouts: “Silence!” so that the post office has long since acquired the reputation of an institution one fears to visit. Mikhail Averyanych respects and loves Andrei Yefimych for his education and nobility of soul, but to the rest of the townspeople he behaves haughtily, as to his own subordinates.
“And here I am!” he says, coming in to Andrei Yefimych’s. “Good evening, my dear! You must be tired of me by now, eh?”
“On the contrary, I’m very glad,” the doctor replies. “I’m always glad to see you.”
The friends sit down on the sofa in the study and smoke silently for a time.
“Daryushka, how about some beer!” says Andrei Yefimych.
The first bottle is also drunk silently—the doctor deep in thought, and Mikhail Averyanych with a merry, animated air, like a man who has something very interesting to tell. It is always the doctor who begins the conversation.
“What a pity,” he says slowly and softly, shaking his head and not looking his interlocutor in the eye (he never looks anyone in the eye), “what a great pity, my esteemed Mikhail Averyanych, that our town is totally lacking in people who enjoy and are capable of carrying on an intelligent and interesting conversation. That is an enormous privation for us. Even the intelligentsia is not above banality; the level of its development, I assure you, is no whit higher than in the lower estates.”
“Quite right. I agree.”