Roman Ivanovich felt a gust of cold in his mouth and a dull tingling in his coated forearms. Asik was pinching him. Tears streamed down her blotchy cheeks. They should both be crying, mourning their innocence. Yet he was bellowingly happy. He couldn’t understand how up to now he had managed to carry this feeling inside, like water in a sieve. He kissed her again, holding on with his lips, his teeth, his claws. Ah, how she tasted, of salt and metal.
Summer Medicine, 1993
All my life I’ve been healthy, too healthy to ever go to a real hospital, naturally. But this summer break, I had finally hit on a perfect plan and I carried it out masterfully. First, while undergoing my annual physical at Baba Olya’s Polyclinika in Syktyvkar, I told the gastroenterologist, Dr. Osip, that I had chronic epigastric pain. I had saved up raw mushrooms from a recent picking trip to the forest with Baba Olya and had been eating them every few days. I only had to throw up three times (with accompanying moans and shrieks) for Baba Olya to arrange an overnight diagnostic stay at the Big Hospital. She was in charge of me for the summer: I knew she’d take no chances with my health.
Compared to the two-storied wooden Polyclinika with lazy polyclinikanese cats warming themselves on the porch and lilac trees throwing sleepy shadows into the doctors’ offices, the Big Hospital seemed like a whole different city. It was gleaming white and as enormous as an ocean liner — with columns, marble steps, and two wings extending into the green waves of the park. Patients in faded pajamas shuffled along the flower-lined alleys, holding on to walking sticks or the elbows of their visitors. Ambulances buzzed by, their sirens wailing. Doctors hurried in and out of doors like white cranes. All the chambers of my heart were aflutter. Helping out at the Polyclinika no longer satisfied my thirst for a bloodcurdling, bone-protruding emergency, but here I was sure to finally observe real medicine.
As Baba Olya and I walked down the hallway, I looked out for my summer friend Alina, whom I still hadn’t seen this year. She had already been to the Big Hospital several times because of her migraines and didn’t like it. But it was different for her — she was just a patient, while I was going to be the chief doctor, like Baba Olya.
Instead of with Alina, Baba Olya set me up in a room with two older girls named Liza and Natasha. Liza was small like me, with a sparse ponytail and long blunt bangs. Natasha was a chubby redhead. Likely prediabetic, I noted. They sat on their beds and watched me unpack the purple Beauty and the Beast backpack Papa had sent me from Alaska. I’d also brought a pink American sweatshirt, a box of Mr. Sketch fruit-smelling markers, and two books: Robinson Crusoe in Russian and The Little Mermaid picture book in English, which I was studying back home at the English Lyceum.
“Your grandma’s so fat,” Natasha said when Baba Olya had left. “Where does she work? The cake factory?”
Liza nodded, the corner of her lip twisted up.
Oh, yes. It was a sad and medically troubling truth. Baba Olya was so overweight, she could no longer work as a dentist and now dedicated all her time to running the Polyclinika. That’s why, when the time had come for my annual dental exam two weeks ago, instead of going to her, I was escorted straight into the chair of the new dentist. Dr. Pasha. He was very young, too young to already be a doctor. Also, he looked like the American actor Kevin Costner.
I liked showing off my “textbook teeth” at the dental wing, which was the loudest and most exciting place in the whole Polyclinika. (I loved the bed chairs, with drills and vacuums attached to cords like tentacles with claws. I loved the orchestra of drilling and buzzing, and the endless supply of snow-white cotton rolls in the tall glass jars.) This time, however, the exam was dreadful. First, the office was stuffed with howling children in various states of dental distress. I couldn’t believe I’d been scheduled for the “Happy Teeth Day” again, as though I were still a child. I was already ten years old. And second, the young Dr. Pasha had found a cavity (on tooth number 29) — the first cavity in my life.
“She is chief doctor of Polyclinika Number Twenty-Five,” I said to my roommates, wishing Baba Olya had worn her doctor’s overcoat.
The girls giggled. “She doesn’t look like a doctor. Too fat,” Natasha said.
“Never heard of it,” Liza said.
“It’s by the Komsomolskaya bus station,” I said. “And you don’t have to look like a doctor.”
“Foo. It’s dumpy up there.”
“It is not dumpy. They have good doctors,” I said, then remembered with a shiver the way Dr. Pasha took off his special glasses, the ones with a miniature telescope attached to one lens (which I was dying to try on), and announced to the entire office: “What do you know, Sophia Anatolyevna! A dentist’s granddaughter and with a cavity.” And Baba Olya said, in her voice for men, “Here’s your chance to prove yourself, Pavel Dmitrievich. One cavity — one chance.”
“Then why are you here?” Liza said.
She had a point. While I was deciding on my answer, she pulled her knees up to her chest and started rocking side to side. “Do you throw up every month? Ooooh, I like that special time of the month when I go bah—”
Natasha jumped off her bed and ran at me with her mouth open. I covered my face with my hands. She returned to her bed, laughing.
“You throw up all the time?” I said. “I know how you feel.”
“It’s because she eats garbage.” Natasha stuck her finger down her throat.
“Shut up,” Liza yelled.
“Only stray dogs would eat the macaroni your mama cooks.”
“What macaroni?” I said. If these were the kinds of roommates poor Alina had to cope with, I could understand why she wasn’t the biggest fan of the Big Hospital. These girls would only aggravate her headache.
“Your fat grandma should ask Yeltsin,” Natasha said.
I tried to stay focused. As a doctor I’d have to deal with hysterical patients often.
“Is the pain sharp, dull, cramp-like, knife-like, twisting, or piercing? And where did you first feel the pain?” I asked as calmly as I could. I’d read the diagnostics chapter in Baba Olya’s old pathology textbook just the other week. “Oh, oh, and does vomiting alleviate the pain? Or, you know, vomiting … is just vomiting? Unpleasant.”
Natasha looked at me like I was the crazy one. “Axe-like and saw-like,” she said impassively. “Also knife-like.”
“Oh, knife-like?!” I cried out. “That means gastritis! Or it could mean an ulcer. Or gallbladder stones!”
I had almost asked her whether she had blood in her stool when I realized I probably sounded too excited for her real illness. Like Dr. Pasha announcing my cavity.
It was painful to think back to the dental appointment, but I couldn’t stop myself. I kept rewinding it in my head over and over. As Dr. Pasha had stuffed my mouth with cotton balls, I had tried to remember what I had for breakfast. Chyort! Oatmeal. I was about to clean my teeth with my finger when he stabbed my gum with a needle, a little unsympathetically.
“Lee-ghno-kaeen?” I had mumbled through the cotton balls. I knew of several types of dental anesthesia and wanted to know which one he planned to use.
Dr. Pasha chuckled. “Open wide!” It felt icky to have so much rubber in my mouth. Baba Olya said it was the new technique taught in medical schools, but the older doctors, including Baba Olya, couldn’t feel the teeth properly in rubber gloves. They needed live contact. Dr. Pasha dressed differently, too: instead of the white coat and cap, he wore green scrubs, a white T-shirt, and a red bandana.