Attempting to fight the stench at its origin, the nursing assistants frequently didn’t feed the especially messy patients adequately. The only thing that the old women were not denied was food for thought; they were always given newspapers, the magazines Health and Working Woman, or the books that were in the library.
Mokhova rapidly found her feet in her new job and, what’s more, she resolved the problem of the overpowering smells far more humanely than her colleagues. Her professional knowledge prompted the answer. Mokhova made up a binding medicine that the nursing assistants added to the old women’s food, and after that even the worst “poopers” relieved themselves in goat’s pellets, and no more frequently than once a week.
The decisive milestone in Mokhova’s life was the day when the extremely rare Book of Strength, known to the outside world as The Proletarian Way, came into the hands of eighty-year-old Polina Vasilyevna Gorn.
It was more than a year since Gorn had lapsed into senile dementia. She didn’t talk much, having lost the skill of speech, but her memory retained the ability to read. She didn’t understand the words very well, but was still able to construct graphic symbols out of them—she no longer needed the meaning. Because of her insomnia Gorn read the entire Book of Strength in a single session, satisfying the two Conditions, and arose like Lazarus. For a while the Book gave her back her pep and part of her mind.
Mokhova glanced into the ward at the noise and saw a bizarre scene.
Gorn, who always lay there in a filthy, soiled nightshirt, was dashing about between the beds with a rapid, mincing gait, grabbing at everything that came within reach. Suddenly halting in the middle of the ward, Gorn gave an agonized cry, as if she had forced a cork out of her dumb throat—“Ilya Ehrenburg!”—and burst into violent laughter. After that the words came tumbling out one after another, like grains of hail falling on a tin roof: “So long ago! It worked! Soldier, soldier! Lady’s! Raw! Lady’s! I forgot, you know!” Gorn tried to name the objects she came across, but her memory couldn’t manage that, and she described their qualities out loud. Grabbing the cushion out from under the head of the woman next to her, she growled: “Lopill? Wollyp? Soft, comfy! Sleepy time!” Or, when she knocked over a box of sewing accessories, she cried out: “Fumble, thumble. Mustn’t prickly! Jab-jab!”
The other old women started falling asleep and Mokhova got ready to tie Gorn down and give her a sedative injection.
Gorn saw the syringe of cloudy liquid in Mokhova’s hand and her eyes flashed spitefully. But she didn’t dare to attack Mokhova and chose a tactical retreat instead. Gorn skipped lightly over lockers and beds, like a goat. Mokhova, who was fifty years younger than her, simply couldn’t keep up. She felt ashamed of her slowness and vented her spite on the women who had now woken up, all popping up on their beds like little roly-poly dolls and following the chase. Mokhova dealt out stinging slaps left and right, knowing that the unfortunate old women’s sclerosis would never let the truth be known.
Mokhova pursued the nimble Gorn with the syringe for a long time, dreaming of jabbing her with the medicine that would freeze her high spirits just as soon as possible. Eventually Mokhova drove Gorn into a corner and tumbled her over onto a bedside locker. Gorn tried furiously to fight Mokhova off, kicking off her slippers and scratching furiously like an animal with all four limbs at once. She wheezed out words that almost made sense: “You’ll dirty! Prostitute! Infect me! Whore! How old are you?” And her hooked nails, which looked like excrescences of amber, ripped Mokhova’s white coat.
After her night-time injection Gorn lay without moving for two days, then she revived slightly and, early on the third evening, reached out her hand for the book. Mokhova didn’t bother Gorn, but as she walked through the ward occasionally, she heard intermittent muttering—Gorn was monotonously reading the book aloud.
At about midnight a racket broke out in the ward again. The same story was repeated, with the difference that Gorn had grown even stronger now and didn’t run away, but joined full-blooded battle.
Soon Gorn was lying strapped down on a bed, tossing her head about wildly, with a crimson bump swelling up on it.
Mokhova had been mauled as badly as Lermontov’s novice in his battle with the badger: her neck, face, breasts and arms were covered with deep, bloody scratches. She was very finicky about her appearance, and the wounds made her absolutely furious.
Mokhova darted across to the bed, swung her hand and punched Gorn hard on the jaw. Her fist felt the crack of the dental plate as it broke.
The old woman pushed the two fragments out with her swollen tongue and suddenly said quite lucidly: “Don’t hit me, Lizka!”
Mokhova had just raised her hand for a second punch… The old woman started squirming about and added resolutely, building sentences out of the growling words: “I’ll. Do. What. I’m. Told. Read. The. Book. There’s. Strength. In. It.”
Gorn told Mokhova everything that she’d understood about the Book. At first Mokhova didn’t believe what Gorn said, but she wiped away Gorn’s blood and applied a cold compress to the bump. Mokhova spent all the next day pondering something, then she volunteered to take a night shift out of turn. The nursing assistant who was supposed to help Mokhova was allowed to go home.
Mokhova hadn’t been intending to read the book herself; she was expecting Gorn to do that, and she was planning to observe her. But the bump on the head affected Gorn’s health badly: after the effect of the Book of Strength wore off, she didn’t even return to her former feeble, semi-demented state; she just slept, groaning intermittently.
Mokhova sat down not far from Gorn, in order to follow her reactions, and started reading aloud. It wasn’t easy; her voice gradually became hoarse and her attention faded. But Mokhova had completed courses in a training college and a higher institute, and she knew how to cram.
Early in the night Mokhova completed the Book. Silence reigned in the ward. Mokhova looked at Polina Gorn and shuddered in surprise. The old woman was already sitting up on the bed with her legs dangling over the side like black branches.
“Lizka!” Gorn barked, but in a perfectly amicable manner, and started darting about the ward, working off her excess strength.
Suddenly the other old women started getting up. A cold shudder ran down Mokhova’s spine. The Book hadn’t started to affect her yet. Reading aloud, directing the words outward, not into herself, had retarded the effect. Slipping out into the corridor, Mokhova locked the door of the ward and set a chair against it, in order to observe what was going on through the window above it.
What she saw was both terrifying and amusing. The old women were making extremely strong, sweeping movements with their arms, making it look as if they were hugging themselves, and jerking their legs out forward like the soldiers who guarded Lenin’s mausoleum. At the same time the expressions on their faces were a succession of every possible contortion and grimace. Sometimes the old women blurted out words—“intestine”, “health”, “labour merit”—or else they simply laughed.
Like Gorn on that first night, they tried to name the objects around them. “Spenil, Pilsen!” an old woman with tangled hair shouted out, looking at a ballpoint pen. “Make letters!”
“Plamp!” howled another, staring at the ceiling.
A third one chanted: “Kittle! With warm water!”
A fourth one grabbed hold of an alarm clock and wheezed intensely: “Lome! Lome! Tefelome! Don’t remember!” And she growled furiously: “Tame!”