CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The only thing that interested the militia lieutenant who stuck to Sidelnikov at the casualty ward of the City Hospital Number One, was which of the fighters was drunk and which wasn’t. Sidelnikov, who had been brought in by ambulance, answered reluctantly. By the end of the interrogation, he attempted to use the “comrade major” as a looking glass in order to find out the exact location of his broken nose.

‘Precisely under your left eye,’ replied the raised in rank.

For the rest of the night, Sidelnikov was being sent around: from the first floor to the fourth (‘Go to X-ray’), from the fourth floor to the first (‘Wait downstairs’) and then back to X-ray (‘Go get the image’). At first, the negative was bad, the next one was good but some important card was missing, and so on, and so forth.

During yet another ascent, somewhere between the first and the fourth floors, Sidelnikov nestled his temple against the cool wooden banisters and tried to go to sleep. But then a girl in white came flying from the darkness and shouted, ‘Patient, why are you walking around! You aren’t allowed to walk at all!’ He was knocked down onto a trolley and taken into the operating theatre. The last that he remembered of that night was a heart-to-heart conversation with the surgeon who asked him a strange question:

‘Well, shall we tie you up?’

‘What for?’

‘It’s going to hurt a lot, and there’ll be no anaesthetic.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Set your nose straight.’

‘No need to tie me.’

…He was put in the corridor, in everybody’s way, where he woke up six hours later because the bandage on his face was soaked through with blood. The following half of the day he had to spend close on the nurse’s heels humbly begging her for a new bandage, in order to replace the bloodstained muzzle with a clean one. It was as if he was rehearsing for the role of the Beast from “Beauty and the Beast”, trying to woo the timorous Beauty. ‘Can’t you see, I’m busy,’ exclaimed the maiden, running away from his monstrous deformity.

In the evening, Beslan, the prosecutor’s son, paid an unexpected visit to the hospital.

‘Shtraus is offering to pay you. Four hundred roubles.’

‘What for?’

‘He’s scared that you’re going to get him locked up. For example, we in the mountains…’

‘Tell him to go to hell!’

On the next day, the offer rose up to fifteen hundred.

Beslan’s eyes were shining.

‘Just think about it – and five hundred up front!’

Sidelnikov made an attempt at a rude curse but stumbled because he forgot the order of words needed for the occasion.

‘What shall I tell him? How much do you want?’

‘Let him find me another room, I won’t share with him anymore.’

He wrote a short letter to his mother, which took him a whole hour (“All is fine with me, I’m studying. I’m well…”). Afterwards, he lay in bed for a couple of hours, staring at the ceiling embellished with stucco mouldings and perceiving a devious connection between the ceiling’s formidable extravagance and the wrongs of his own life. It was clear to Sidelnikov that at some stage his life had gone awry but, much as he tried, he was unable to detect any trace of the fault itself.

Having rested enough, he set off to explore the hospital where he was to spend more than a week. Everything in it was oppressive on account of its huge size and lack of comfort – the flights of stairs, corridors, corners and dusty plants in tubs, window openings and draft. Here, people were not living, but waiting out in pain for the gap in time to close, like in prison or at a railway station, which also could turn into a final destination. Everybody was waiting for the “rounds”, “visits” and “parcels” – those were the most exciting words. Perspiring visitors were crowding the little bay on the ground floor in poses of seeing off or meeting, with plastic carriers, jars or string bags at the ready in order to shove them at a propitious moment to a random courier from amongst the departing, who were scurrying around in pyjamas and bed slippers on bare feet (‘Excuse me, which floor are you from? Would you please…’).

Nobody came to visit Sidelnikov. But he regularly went downstairs to the bay and peered at the faces in the crowd, pretending he was looking for someone – and would leave with parcels to take to someone else.

The hugeness of the hospital was partly concealed by a great quantity of partitions intended to hide certain unsightly contents. From behind doors, screens and sheets, from under gowns and bandages, fragments of pale nakedness and blood clots were peeping out, fusty odours and moans were escaping, breaking the sterile decorum. A red-and-black wad of cotton wool dropped by someone in the corner of a bathroom reduced the stern significance of the hospital gospel to its basic elements.

One evening before supper Sidelnikov explored a narrow passage in the recess under the staircase that he had never noticed before. Behind the inconspicuous door, a low, dark little corridor started, panelled with boards. In the gradient of the wooden floor, there was a discernible even slope. Sidelnikov walked at least forty metres and the underground passage was still continuing. After another one hundred and fifty uncertain steps, he suddenly realised that he was already quite far from the hospital and tried to look at himself with the eyes of a stranger: a soiled bandage in place of the face, the prisoner’s pyjamas and tattered institutional slippers. He looked liked an escaped convict ready for anything.

The underground passage came to an unexpected dead-end, a dirty streaked wall that Sidelnikov spotted from about ten metres away. To the left of the wall a dim doorway was visible. Despite the timid circumspection of his final twenty steps, he nearly stumbled upon the bare foot of a woman. Right in front of him, on the floor, a young woman was lying spread-eagled in a revealing position, stark naked with a gory gap in her underbelly. Sidelnikov jumped back, took a strained breath, and looked behind the doorjamb again. The dead body seemed languorous and warm, as if just out of bed. At the back of the larder-like room, there was another dead body, of a teenage girl that looked like a little skeleton covered with bluish goose-skin.

On his way back he was almost running, scared of meeting anyone alive. The visitors were still hanging about in the bay suspecting nothing. In the canteen, there was a rattle of dishes and the listless eating up of the watery porridge. The most astonishing thing was the simultaneousness of the events observed: these people were sitting here, while those were lying down there. The castle of the hospital was towering prim and proper over its putrid crypt, resting upon it like the only possible valid foundation.

The nights arrived at a snail’s pace, struggling through the endless interval between supper, no more appetising than the intake of dispensed medicines, and the collective shutting down in compulsory hibernation, which started as if by command as soon as the white lights in wards and corridors were switched off centrally. However, the lamp with a yellow lampshade that was lit up on the desk of the duty nurse left a feeble hope that private life could still be lingering somewhere. The mornings were brought by force at six a.m. sharp, the lights and the radio – with the national anthem – were turned on everywhere possible. Sidelnikov, who had only managed to fall asleep a couple of hours before the anthem, was drawing his head in under the covers and making superhuman mental efforts to somehow approximate everything that “the great Russia united forever and ever” to his own fate, which appeared especially cumbersome and absurd in the mornings.

The women who shared the corridor with him brought the latest news items from everywhere and chewed them over to their hearts’ content. The chief doctor’s brother has left for Israel of his own accord; he’s a traitor, now she might be sacked. Last night, a retired elderly lady was brought in, a hole in her head; her husband had an affair with his boss, the wife found out and phoned to complain and he hit her with something and was scared to call an ambulance, and now she is brought in, only she isn’t breathing anymore, so there you are.

After some hesitation, for want of anything better to do, Sidelnikov decided to go down to the underground passage once again. The sense of danger stayed but was not as acute as before. The retired lady with the gash in her head, monumentally large, and with a garish manicure, was lying there, almost draped around a skinny hairy fellow tattooed from head to toe. The woman he saw before was not there. The goose-skin girl was still lying about, wanted by no one.

On the way back, he was straining to reconstruct the tragedy of the retired lady from the gleaned fragments: the future victim, stately as a monument to conjugal devotion, inserts a polished claw into the telephone dial while a heavy blunt object is biding its time, presumably somewhere in the kitchen. In the meantime, elsewhere, an unfamiliar hirsute criminal, with a fag between his teeth, is squandering the last day of his life before sprawling in profane post-mortem proximity to the noble corpse through the negligence of the hospital attendants.

...

There was almost no chance of any privacy in the hospital and therefore Sidelnikov became fond of daytime napping, into which he departed as if into an unoccupied territory, free from superfluous words and glances. He even developed a theory about why a human being actually needs sleep – at the very least, in order to be alone on a regular basis, to hear yourself out and to save yourself up. Without it, you could be simply pulled apart into pieces by mundane impressions and conversations.

‘You’ve got a visitor. I think an actress!’ For the very first time, curiosity shone through in the nurse’s eyes.

Finding the “actress” in the crowded corridor was easy. Nadia was strolling to and fro as if on a catwalk, demonstrating her peerless legs, the short homemade manteau and outrageous make-up. She was immediately entranced by Sidelnikov’s mask of a bandage.

‘Wow! Mister X!’ Nadia exclaimed attracting everybody’s attention. ‘My fate’s to wear this mask forever! Where could you smoke around here?’

Sidelnikov was not aware of a single place where it was allowed to smoke except the men’s toilet, and so he decided to take his guest to the vault without showing her the mortuary. The mysterious darkness instantly inspired Nadia to strong actions such as a kiss on the neck, a show of lacy underwear and some free-style wrestling with the hospital pyjamas. By the by, Sidelnikov was informed that there was a new room found for him, and that both he and Shtrausenko were being summoned by the militia and that the Duchess of Alba had more to offer than just her armpits, please be fair, and that she admired him and missed him and that she was at present living in the flat of a friend who was away and the situation being as such, he was invited to come and see her, here’s the address.

After Nadia’s visit, the women he was sharing the corridor with started to cast meaningful glances at Sidelnikov. He was lying under the covers, apathetic in the midst of a bustling day, and repeating to himself like a child, ‘I want to go home,’ realising to his gradual consternation that there was nothing of the sort and the closest he had ever had to a “home” was Rosa’s room in the communal flat in Shkiryatov Street.

It was already early November. It was time he got out of the hospital castle from where they were in no hurry to release him. During the rounds, the doctor would look from side to side absent-mindedly and repeat, ‘It’s a bit early yet,’ without giving him even a rough date for discharge. Having found a good reason, Sidelnikov ambushed the doctor by his room:

‘I can’t afford to stay here for too long. I’m missing my classes.’

The doctor was silent for a little while and then laid down unexpected conditions:

‘I’ll discharge you, if you help us. As you know, we’ve got the celebrations coming up…’

‘What celebrations?’

‘How do you mean “What celebrations”? The Great October Revolution, of course. We need a wall newspaper done. Can you draw? There’s paint and drawing paper in the doctor’s room.’

The real challenge was inventing a title for the newspaper, which the doctor wanted to be both revolutionary and medical.

‘Don’t make it long,’ he specified, ‘it has to be brief, but celebratory.’

The creative process required no less than one and a half days, during which Sidelnikov pondered over about forty options. The pathos of revolutionary struggle clearly contradicted health care concerns, while medical practice had absolutely no need of victorious red banners.

At last, at daybreak of the fifth of November, just before the anthem, Sidelnikov was inspired. As soon as the lights were switched on centrally, he dashed to the doctor’s room. The half-dried paint was the colour of cranberries. The dusty drawing paper did not want to unroll and strove to regain its cylindrical shape. However, already after breakfast, on a good one third of the sheet stretched out flat, his idea was splendidly displayed in bold and powerful words, “THE URGE”. Unfortunately – or luckily – Sidelnikov’s creation was either unnoticed or taken for granted, so that on the next day, the editor of “The Urge” was set free without further ado.