«Hey, you, out of the way!» He threw open the doors and stepped aside, letting the attendants go through. «Bring him in!»
The white-tiled bathroom looked like a mortuary. The sink leaked. There was a smell of medicines and bleach. Putting the stretcher on the floor, the attendants stripped off Savage's clothes, wincing at the stench.
«Christ! What on earth have you brought in?» said a plump female attendant, throwing up her arms at the sight of Savely. Embarrassed, he hastened to cover himself with his hands.
«Don't worry, Lyuska! He'll scrub up nicely when you wash him and warm him up!» said the attendant with a familiar laugh as he pinched her breast.
He set about shaving off Savage's beard and his matted hair. The woman took a pair of clippers from her pocket and went to work on his curved, yellow nails that were like bird's claws.
«Are you the one the whole town's been looking for?» she asked Savage. «You poor thing, you,» she said shaking her head. Then, turning to the attendants, she exclaimed, «Why have they been chasing him? You can tell he wouldn't hurt a fly!»
Lifting Savage by the armpits, the attendants put him in the bath and directed the shower hose at him. The woman rolled up her sleeves and scrubbed him with a rough cloth, delivering harsh little comments that made his nose sting.
They put Savage in pyjamas, the issue number marked in blue ink, sat him in a wheelchair and set off, pushing aside the curious patients who had gathered in the corridor to get a look at Savely Savage. He was put in a separate ward where the neatly made beds were empty and the door locked from the outside. Doctors and nurses fussed over him all night. Drips were replaced by tablets and nurses by policemen who crept up on tiptoe to study him with interest.
Savage had a fever. He went from hot to cold and, like busy nurses, ghosts huddled over him, holding hands and swaying like sleepwalkers. Antonov's lacerated throat was bleeding. The red-headed woman was spattered with soot and Savage felt himself dissolving on the bed like putty melting in the heat. He tried to sit up in bed to call for help but at that very moment he woke up and the nurses hushed him, settled him back down and tucked him in.
Unbeknownst to Savage, a nurse filled a syringe with a tranquilliser and gave him an injection like a wasp sting. Savage abandoned himself to a leaden sleep in which events and people were all mixed up, the past was no longer the past and blood turned into paint and only the voice of Coffin rang in his ears all night: «a little man in a little town…»
Everything in the ward was white: white walls, white curtains, white sheets, the milk-white skin of the nurses in their white gowns, white wraiths peering out from behind them. Savely jabbed a finger at them and the hallucinations vanished and the nurses rolled up his pyjama sleeves to give him another dose of tranquilliser. They waited until he was asleep to produce a greasy deck of cards and set up their game right on the bed. The tranquilliser made his dreams bitter and his waking hours as cloudy as misted glass and Savage couldn't tell one from the other as if the days and nights had been reshuffled and changed places like a deck of cards.
«You haven't overdone it with the meds, have you?» came a voice that sounded like it came from a funnel.
Savage tried but failed to unglue his eyelids and, pursing his lips into a straw, he tried to catch every word.
«He's not himself,» lisped the doctor. He swallowed his vowels like pills and talked in consonants. Savage knew who he was from this obscure way of talking. «Our j-b is to m-ke him b-tt-r!»
«Your job is to get him back to normal so that he's walking, talking and eating, not just lying in bed like a block of wood! Are you giving him psychotropics?»
«We are,» the doctor said innocently. «He's d-l-r-ous, hall-c-n-ting.»
«Sort it out!» The answer was barked back.
A few days later Savage was already out of bed and wandering around the ward. An auxiliary nurse treated him to a cigarette and he smoked it at an open window in secret from the doctors. Savely asked the girl to bring him local newspapers but she shook her head with a frown:
«That's not allowed!»
The corridor was packed with beds. It smelled of boiled cabbage, medicines and the ball of soiled sheets a nurse was dragging along the floor. Savage walked holding on to the wall and the patients whispered to one another as they looked him over. The toilet was full of smoke. A crowd of men in the passageway chatted about nothing in particular, blowing tiny smoke rings that they lowered onto a finger for want of something to do.
«Have you heard about the actor?» asked one patient, his head in bandages.
«The one who hanged himself?» asked another, nodding and adjusting his catheter. «What did he want for? Money, fame, women…»
«They say he played a suicide in his last film but they just couldn't get the scene right where he put the noose around his neck. The director was even threatening to tear up the contract and bring someone else in. He was so scared of someone else getting his part that he started rehearsing at home. He read up on the Internet how to make a noose, hooked it round the ceiling light, stood in front of a huge mirror and acted out the suicide. But he slipped on the chair and accidently hanged himself…»
«Good God! What about the film?»
«They had to do it with a different actor.»
They both fell silent, letting Savage through. Their eyes bored into his back as he stood at the urinal.
«Life's a disease,» drawled the man in bandages.
«No,» said the other, screwing up his face. «Death's the disease and the incubation period lasts a lifetime!»
Again they fell silent, drawing thoughtfully on their cigarettes.
«That one's not long for this world,» said the man in bandages, exhaling smoke through his nostrils and jabbing at a urine sample pot.
«And this one's like dew. Look at it! Whose is that?» the other nodded, peering short-sightedly. «Go on, can you read the name? Lucky bastard!»
«Kuznetsov,» read the man in bandages. «You're not Kuznetsov, are you?» he asked Savage.
Savely shook his head.
«So who are you?»
«I'm Savely Savage,» Savage mumbled keeping his voice low.
«The one who was found in the forest?»
The men lost interest in him and turned back to the samples.
«I wonder what ward that Kuznetsov's in? And how old is he? What do you reckon? The same as us?»
In the evening, the whole ward gathered around the TV. Those with broken legs tossed their crutches aside. Ulcer patients sat in one corner, hands folded on their stomachs. Plump heart cases were in another. A nurse pushed them aside and brought over a wrinkled old man in a wheelchair who never spoke but merely rolled his eyes from side to side.
«He can't understand anything anyway,» the patients shouted, pushing the old man into a corner where he spent the whole evening, staring at the paint peeling from the wall.
Savage, perched on the edge of a sofa, looked at the television and it seemed as if everything that had happened to him was just a film he had seen on the screen. He kept turning round as if something was breathing down his neck. He felt as if there was a crowd behind him, tossing a single phrase to one another like a hot potato: «It's Savely Savage!» But there was no-one there. The patients had soon lost interest in him and Savage himself couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. He drove away the thoughts that pursued him like hungry hounds and wept for joy at being back from the forest when he looked at the windows of the nearby blocks of flats, their residents peeping at the hospital windows from behind their curtains. His bedside table contained the documents he'd been given at the police station. He would cast superstitious glances at them but couldn't bring himself to read them.