The huge gray ledger’s appearance alone instills patients’ deep respect. Their respect turns to awe when Volf Karlovich leafs through the thick, stiff, brownish pages, written all over in his tiny floating hand. Semruk’s peasants deferentially call him “our doc.”
Leibe always receives patients. There are no infirmary office hours, weekends, or holidays. If something happens during the night, people knock on the window and the sleepy Leibe hurries to the examining room, pulling on the white lab coat that has recently appeared for him; Kuznets brought it in gratitude for strictly confidential treatment of a disease in his male parts. Volf Karlovich treats everything: typhus, dysentery, scurvy, venereal diseases, and horrible pellagra, which strips skin from patients’ bodies while they’re alive. He pulls teeth, cuts off feet and hands maimed at the logging site, repairs hernias, delivers babies, and performs abortions (not in secret at first, but more covertly after the resolution of 1936). There’s only one diagnosis he can’t deal with, the one most commonly encountered: severe malnutrition. It’s a diagnosis he’s forbidden to make, which he thus notes in the ledger with a vague “cardiovascular inefficiency.”
And here’s the seven-year-old Yuzuf, who’s tall but also as skinny as a pole, big-boned, and as long-legged as a compass, too. Volf Karlovich tries to feed him extra: grateful patients bring the doc a sack of berries or a handful of nuts or some fresh nettles for soup or dandelion root (which Leibe has long grown accustomed to brewing instead of coffee). But what’s the use? Yuzuf’s young body is growing and his arms and legs have remained as scrawny as before, like sticks.
One particular day, the boy is sitting quietly by the wooden screen, not stirring, as usual. He’s looking, unblinking, at the patient, a stooped old man with wrinkled, large-pored skin like dried orange peel. The man has disrobed to his underpants, displaying for Leibe knobbly joints like large lumps and fingers deformed by arthritis that look as if they’ve been broken. Leibe prescribes bilberries, stone bramble, and rowan berries to the old man, in any form and at maximum quantities, plus a glass of home brew for serious pain. What other options were there? Home brew, a time-tested painkiller, has to be used in many cases.
Then Leibe turns to Yuzuf:
“So, are you interested? This is arthritis, a disease of the bones and joints. Did you know, young man, that there are more than two hundred bones in the human body and each of them can become inflamed, change its contour or size, get infected…”
Yuzuf begins touching his own knees, ankles, and ribs; his entranced gaze doesn’t budge from the doctor.
“Right here,” says the doctor, taking Yuzuf by a skinny wrist, “is the ulna, which goes up to the elbow. And the one above, the humerus, going up to the shoulder. Then there’s the clavicula, costae…”
A sudden warmth rises to Leibe’s cheeks: for a moment he felt he was back at the university rostrum, in the crosshairs of hundreds of young, attentive eyes. Recovering from his self-consciousness, he continues his story. That evening he hurries off to the commandant to ask for several agitational posters “for the ideological decoration of places offering medical service to the population.” He returns to the infirmary after his request has been fulfilled and nervously spreads out on the table pictures of hale and hearty muscular athletes of both genders who proudly carry scarlet banners greeting the country’s leadership. Volf Karlovich toils over them all night, muttering in both Latin and German, and tracing his pencil along well-fed, tanned bodies unthreatened by either malnutrition or pellagra. The anatomical diagrams are ready in the morning. The athletes are still parading with flags but they’re also displaying for the world exactly four hundred and six bones – long, short, flat, and irregular – two hundred and three each.
Yuzuf appreciates the doctor’s work. His lips move diligently as he memorizes the tricky names in a week, searching on his own body along the way, which seems destined for this type of study, since he can touch many of the bones through his skin – from the sharp little os nasale to the barely perceptible os coccygis.
Volf Karlovich prepares a second set of educational materials in which the athletes’ trained bodies obediently demonstrate the musculoskeletal system: the sculpted vastus lateralis and gastrocnemius, the threateningly bulging pectoralis major. And Yuzuf memorizes all those quickly, too.
Inspired by his pedagogical success, Leibe proposes moving on to the structure of the internal organs, but Yuzuf unexpectedly refuses and asks permission to put the leftover posters to use as drawing paper. The disheartened Leibe agrees and Yuzuf relocates from the examination room to the wards to draw patients lying on bunks. To Volf Karlovich’s bitter disappointment, Yuzuf’s sudden fervent interest in medicine has ebbed and soon he’s disappearing again for days at a time at the clubhouse with Ikonnikov. The athletes, finely chopped into muscles and bones, and written on with Latin terms, remain hanging up in the infirmary, immeasurably strengthening the Semruk doc’s status, which is already colossal.
Ikonnikov has been painting his agitational art for exactly half a year. He has invited both Sumlinskys to the clubhouse for a “private view” before turning it over to the chiefs, who are out of patience. “Finally!” rejoices Izabella. “I haven’t been out in society for ages.”
The private view is imminent: tonight, under cover of darkness. Ikonnikov, who has become extremely emaciated of late and whose bloodshot eyes are surrounded by dark circles, has spent all day taking apart the scaffolding himself, leaving only one ladder by the wall. He locks the door, lies on his back on the floor, and begins waiting for his guests.
He lies and looks at the mural in dusky half-darkness. An orange square of light from the window creeps first along the floor, then along the wall, and later disappears entirely. Darkness comes. The lines on the ceiling disperse and dissolve in the dense night air but Ikonnikov sees them just as distinctly as during the afternoon, so he doesn’t light the lamp.
He’ll present the agitational art tomorrow. Kuznets will come, grope it with his predatory little eyes, estimate if there’s enough of an ideological message – meaning he’ll consider whether to leave it at the club or tear it the hell off to be burned and send the artist out of peaceable Semruk life, to the camps, or far beyond. Gorelov will tag along. He’ll sniff around hungrily, looking for anything he might find fault in, and he’ll surely find something. They’ll part tomorrow. He’ll leave behind this mural, a couple dozen city scenes (he’s grown bolder, hanging them on the club’s walls after the memorable night visit from the chiefs), a heap of leftover plywood scraps with pictures for Yuzuf, homemade brushes, palettes, painting knives made from the blades of one-handed saws, half-empty tubes of paints, and rags. He’ll leave behind nocturnal vigils, the smell of linseed oil and turpentine, conversations with little Yuzuf, spots of paint on his fingers, all his thoughts, and his very own self. And welcome back to the logging site: We’d grown tired waiting for you, citizen Ikonnikov.