The train car taking Eugene to Moscow was cold, crowded, and smelled insufferably sour. The red-haired Shurka had taken the young man to Sudogda. He was visibly sick with a terrible hangover, but still as suspicious as a dachshund chained up in front of its master’s house and expected to guard it like a German shepherd.
“How exactly are you related to Alice?” the coachman asked. The interrogation had commenced.
“Is that a horse?” Eugene inquired, ignoring the question.
“Sure is! A mare. You a city boy? Never seen a horse before?”
“She’s old,” the young man concluded.
“She’s still got a little more in her,” the coachman reassured his fellow traveler. “Since when does Alice have relatives in the city?”
“She has relatives in America, too.”
“Come on, you’re pulling my leg!”
“Way back in the late nineteenth century, one of Alice’s ancestors moved to Texas, where he would later invent the television, the automobile, and the locomotive. He patented everything and became a billionaire. Every generation of his descendants multiplied his capital, but his great-great-great-granddaughter Jackie Kennedy was childless, so Alice might have some serious money coming her way. After Jackie dies, of course.”
“This city boy’s fucking with me,” Shurka thought, suddenly tense, his nasty hangover forgotten. “What if he ain’t, though? If he ain’t, then I’ve gotta go make Ksenia sweet on me, so’s she’ll let me rent out a younger horse from her after this Jackie lady dies … I won’t pay those village capitalists, of course. They got more money than a dog’s got fleas. Maybe I could borrow some money from Ksenia, like fifty thousand rubles, and not give it back?” Shurka wondered what would be better for him—if the city boy was telling the truth about the relatives in America or if he was lying. Sure, he’d have a new horse and lots of money, but on the other hand, Ksenia and Alice would be up in the kingdom of heaven, throwing money around at the store in Stepachevo. Did they deserve that kind of wealth? What made those dames better than Shurka? “No way! I’d rather have this city boy be lying,” he decided. “To hell with it, the new horse, the millions, everything’s fine the way it is! We don’t need any upheavals around here! We won’t stand for a capitalist revolution! We’ll drop the bomb on America! I’m a man who means what he says!”
“So who exactly are ya?”
“I told you, I’m her relative.” Eugene hopped off the sleigh and started walking beside it, rubbing the old mare’s croup. She happily swished her tail, welcoming the good treatment of horses.
“I mean what do you do for a living?”
“I’m a student.”
“And what are you studying to be, Mr. Student?”
“A scholar.”
“Scholars are dirt-poor these days.”
“There’s no changing your vocation …”
Shurka didn’t want to jaw with Alice’s guest anymore. He got off the sleigh, too, and turned away from the wind. He loosened his pants and began to rid himself of excess fluid, but then he screamed at the top of his lungs.
“Oooooow! I’m never buying a stranger’s moonshine again! That crap was fake, fudge pudge! I’ve got the frickin’ DTs, I’m dyyyyyyyyin’! Frig me sideways!” Then he suddenly fell silent and ran to catch up to the sleigh, holding up his pants with both hands. “Hey, Mr. Student!”
“What do you want?” Eugene asked, turning toward the coachman. “What are you yelling for?”
“You’re a scholar—”
“Still just a student.”
“Wait up, Mr. Student!” Shurka stopped, unclenched his shaking hands, and let his pants fall right on to his felt boots, baring everything below his stomach. “Well?”
“What?”
“Go on, look!”
“I am.” Eugene looked at the coachman’s white pelvic area.
“Did my dick really disappear, or is it the DTs?”
“It’s gone,” the young man said and began to climb the hill toward the bus stop. Shurka ran to catch up to the horse, which had managed to turn around and start heading home.
“I can’t stop drinking,” he said in a voice that hardly sounded human. “I’m an addict!” he shouted into the woods.
“Dick … dick … dick …” answered the echo.
Eugene started feeling poorly on the train. There wasn’t enough oxygen. It reeked intolerably of unwashed human bodies. One man was eating hardboiled eggs, another was chewing mint gum to cover up the alcohol on his breath. Little tykes were hollering, and one of the young mommies was unabashedly feeding her spawn from her giant red breast.
Eugene was afraid he’d lose consciousness, especially in a place like this. He was holding it together, but there was still a hellish hour and a half to go until Moscow. The train jerked, people bumped into him from every direction, and his nose started bleeding.
“Hey, snot-nose, get the hell outta here! Go between the cars!” commanded some thug with a mug like a pit bull. “You’ll bleed all over everyone! Make way, citizens!”
The compliant crowd squeezed Eugene into the vestibule, where he wiped the blood away with the sleeve of his coat. That was of no interest to the smokers standing out there. His innards twisted from the cigarette smoke, like someone was turning them on a spit, and his vision blurred, but a small, short man grabbed his arm to support him and drew him into the vestibule of the next car.
“Go ahead and barf, kid,” he suggested as he rifled through Eugene’s pockets. “Go on, let it up.”
Eugene vomited a green substance and almost instantly felt better. He took a deep breath of brisk air and the clattering of the wheels cleared his head. Meanwhile, all the little guy found were coins amounting to about two hundred rubles, if that. No ID, no wad, not even a set of keys … He cursed his bad luck. Somebody had already cleaned this sucker out! He nailed him in the back of the head with his set of lead knuckles and went back inside to look for his next victim.
Eugene was unconscious when he arrived in Moscow, Russia’s capital city. Somebody called the police on their way off the train, and his insensate body was dragged off to the nearby precinct, where Kipa, the senior duty officer, with all of fifty-eight years to his name, chewed out the two sergeants for bringing in another drunk.
“Nah, don’t think he’s drunk,” the junior sergeant said with a shrug. “Doesn’t smell like booze.”
“Doped?”
“Damned if I know!” the senior sergeant replied. “His mug’s all bloody. Maybe somebody popped him one in the nose?”
“Then why in holy hell didn’t ya call an ambulance? What’m I supposed to do with him here?”
“Alright, Kipa, call an ambulance then. He woulda frozen to death out on the platform …”
Potap Kipa had been working at the Kursk Station precinct for thirty-eight years. They’d made him a cop after he finished his military service. That was a peaceful time: no organized crime, just pickpockets, muggers, and card sharks operating on the trains. The pay was decent, too, so Kipa hunkered down in the warm station and spent almost four decades there. Once he’d risen to the rank of staff sergeant, he married the lady that ran the pharmacy right there at the station, and they had two children. Not too long ago, Staff Sergeant Kipa became a grandfather for the fourth time. He had a calm disposition and avoided the lawless practices favored by the next generation of cops, yet he never interfered or moralized, so they viewed him as a father figure and would slip him some of their takings. Kipa didn’t turn his nose up at that money; he invested it in his grandkids and his fishing trips.
“Sure, sure,” said the staff sergeant. “I’ll call the ambulance. Stick him in the holding tank for now. Give him a bunk, too—toss those brown guys on the floor. What are they, Tajiks? Who cares? Make sure you elevate his head, too.”
“You got it!” one of the sergeants replied.
The ambulance arrived two hours later, and it was determined that the young man had suffered head trauma. Eugene was immediately loaded on to a stretcher, carried into the mobile ICU, and taken to the 1st City Hospital with the sirens wailing. In the admissions area, they moved him to a gurney, brought him up to the second floor, and put him in the queue for the MRI machine. Two hours after that, Eugene’s brain was scanned. Nothing critical was found, just a minor concussion, and even that was doubtful.
“So how come he’s unconscious?” asked the physician’s assistant.
“Stick some ammonia under his nose!”
Physician’s Assistant Lilia Zolotova had only been working in the ICU for a little over two months and had already seen things far worse than any horror movie. The previous week, they’d brought in a lady who worked in a big factory that made dumplings. She had fallen into the rapidly rotating blades of a giant meat grinder. What they delivered to the hospital was a bloody hunk of meat with open eyes. All of her bones had been ground up, and her head was crushed, like she’d been run over by a steamroller. Her ribcage had been cut open, yet her exposed heart was pristine, beating like she was perfectly healthy. The doctors performed their duties in silence, injecting something into the ground beef, stitching up veins and arteries, draining away the blood. They kept working to the end. Zero brain activity—there wasn’t really a brain, just gray mush—but they kept working for two hours, and the heart just kept ticking away rhythmically—sixty beats a minute. There was no way to measure blood pressure—no arms or legs. They kept stitching and stitching, all in silence—seven hours straight. Finally, the inexplicable phenomenon came to an end. The beautiful heart fluttered like a tulip in the wind, changed color from red to lilac—and stopped. They tried to restart it with electric shocks, but their efforts proved futile.
It was only after the surgeon had announced the time of death that the operating room heard a chorus of choice profanity more magnificent than any that had ever graced it before. The surgeons had done seven hours of pointless work, knowing full well that there was nothing they could do. The heart just kept beating! But why?!
The surgeon informed her husband that she was dead. He broke down crying, but not because of his own grief; he was thinking about their four daughters, aged five to fourteen.
“What will they do with no mother?!”
“That was why the heart was beating,” the surgeon thought. “For her children.” Then he went to a birthday party for the cute, chubby resident from unit 3.
Physician’s Assistant Zolotova walked up to the patient and stuck some cotton soaked with ammonia inhalant under his nose. The young man’s nostrils twitched, his face twisted, and his eyes opened. He pushed Lilia’s hand away.
“Can you hear me?” she asked, looking right into his pupils.
“Yes,” Eugene answered weakly, casting his eyes about, trying to figure out where he was.
“You’re in the hospital,” Lilia said reassuringly. “You were struck on the head with a heavy object. Can you understand me?” He nodded. “But you’ll be fine! Fortunately, you have not suffered any serious trauma.”
A moment later, Lilia was examining the patient, his remarkably handsome face, his humongous eyes that drew her in like black holes in space that consume everything and all things, without exception. This mysterious cosmos drew Lilia in, too. She instantly felt a flood of amorous chemicals, and, if they had been there alone, she would have kissed the youth right on the lips—or bitten him. Wholly consumed by tenderness, she announced that she would escort the patient to the ward herself and transfer him to the care of the head of the relevant department. The physician’s assistant rolled the gurney into the freight elevator and pressed the button.
“Thank you for being so kind, dear,” Eugene said gratefully.
Lilia smelled the uncanny aroma of his breath—it was somehow like incense, but mixed with some other elements that drove her mad. She, too, was reeling, but she held it together.
“‘Dear,’ huh?” The young woman wanted to purse her lips into an aggrieved grimace and furrow her brow, but she just couldn’t. Instead, she smiled indulgently. “Well, ‘dear’ is nice, but you can call me Lilia, too. What’s your name?”
“Eugene.” He took care of himself just fine, moving from the gurney to the bed, taking off his black garments, and putting on the hospital gown, but Lilia sat on the edge of the mattress and cheered the young man up, promising that his strength would soon return and she would visit him in the meantime.
“If you don’t mind, of course?”
“Could I perhaps have something to eat? Or some tea?”
“Of course! I’ll be right back!”
She walked out of the ward at a businesslike clip and had a tête-à-tête with Petya Savushkin, the resident on duty. They had been in the same premed class, and he’d even tried courting her, but nothing came of it, and then a future psychiatrist got Petya wrapped around her finger, and they later married. He’d resembled a psychiatric patient ever since.
“Listen, Petya,” Lilia said firmly, “he needs to be fed!”
“Dinner is at seven,” Savushkin answered nasally.
“I’ll be back soon with some food. Keep an eye on him, please!”
“Why? Is he special or something? And since when do you give the orders around here?”
“He’s special.”
“More special than me?” Petya’s eyes filled with disappointment, and then he sneezed.
“He is to me. And you’re married to that psychiatrist. And you should wear a mask, you’ve got a full caseload today!”
“Those bastards gave it to me!”
“Do you get me, Petya? Come on, take care of him, sweetie!”
“Is he a relative?” Savushkin had softened at the word “sweetie.”
“Yeah … I gotta go, alright?”
“Run along now, Zolotova!”
The assistant scurried off to the staircase, and Petya Savushkin, suddenly remembering his wife and comparing her to his classmate, heaved a sad sigh and shuffled off to check on Lilia’s relative. He stood at the ward doors for a moment, surveyed the patients harshly, and gave a formidable cough so that they would know he was the boss around here. Only then did he stride sedately into the room and approach the newly admitted patient’s bed.
“How are you doing, good sir?”
Savushkin himself found that “good sir” slightly off. After all, they weren’t living back in Chekhov’s day! On the other hand, the face of Lilia’s protégé, pale, with an enfeebled gleam about the eyes, looked like something unearthed from that era.
“My head hurts a little,” Eugene admitted.
“You have sustained no particular trauma,” Petya reassured him. “This pill will help you. Meanwhile, we can fill out the admissions form. Last name, please.”
The young man started thinking hard, his brow furrowing with tension, and his nose began bleeding again. The doctor took a piece of clean gauze out of his pocket. Once it was all soaked with blood, he instructed the patient to tilt his head back.
“Please repeat your question,” Eugene requested.
“Don’t strain yourself. We can forgo the questions for now and just take your blood pressure.” Savushkin turned on the machine and cinched the cuff over the patient’s forearm.
“My name is Eugene.”
“No talking yet, please. Breathe normally. Come on, just relax.” He quickly filled the rubber bulb with air, extended the stethoscope, and listened to his patient’s pulse. “Well, everything seems normal. 120 over 80. Your heart rate is somewhat elevated, though. The bleeding was caused by dystonia. Do you eat fruit?”
“No …”
“Meat? Cheese?”
“No.”
“Well, what do you eat?”
Eugene thought for a moment.
“Potatoes … and milk …”
“Are you a student or something?”
“Yes.”
“I was a student once too,” Savushkin said with a cheerful laugh. “I was poor too—but poverty is no vice, as they say! Lilia’s gonna feed you soon. Boy, she can cook!” Petya said dreamily. “Her cutlets, her rollups, her casseroles! Why did she decide to study medicine anyway? She should’ve stayed home. She’d make a fine wife …”
The conversation’s turn to this culinary theme made the patient go visibly pale, and he nearly swooned clean away once again. At that very moment, though, Lilia came back with a bag, dismissed the now superfluous and supernumerary Savushkin to the staff room, and laid out the foil-wrapped food on the table.
“Eat up!” she commanded.
Eugene ate with such rapidity that one would have thought his life depended on it. He bit off half a cutlet, nodding approvingly at Lilia, chewed it briefly, and swallowed. Then he moved on to a piece of the egg and gribenes casserole Savushkin had praised so highly, plus little salads, assembled with the most exquisite taste; it all got packed away at lightning speed.
“Do you like it?” Lilia asked.
“This casserole smells like you.”
“Like … what do you mean?” she asked, blushing.
“Molecules of your body wind up in the food you prepare, and then in me,” Eugene explained, now nearly sated. “I can feel every one of them. I think that may well be the origin of the saying ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.’ When a man swallows the food his wife prepares, he also swallows her—in minute doses—and then he can’t quit her. She has become his drug. On the other hand, men rarely love their wives. They just have to swallow them whole!”
“Hold on, what are you majoring in?” Lilia asked, somewhat surprised to hear him fantasizing about acts of cannibalism. “And how old are you?”
“I’m studying engineering, and I’m as old as you want me to be.”
She didn’t know what he meant by that, but she spontaneously decided to sign up for the night shift. She watched Eugene’s face gradually growing flush, his cheeks taking on the color of a crimson sunset, his lips swelling, now exuding not incense but something utterly unknown. Lilia steadied herself and analyzed the barely perceptible processes going on in her nose like a medical professional. She arrived at a logical conclusion.
“It’s pheromones.”
“What?”
“Are you full?” she asked, feeling that the bra under her medical gown was unexpectedly too small for her. The under-garment’s cups were sticking out a little, revealing their blue lace to the young man.
“Thank you.”
“You can thank me later, when you get your strength back,” Lilia said with a sly smile, openly adjusted her bra, and walked out of the ward, tormented by the energetic fluttering of butter-flies in her stomach.
All medical professionals are rather callous people. It’s a defense mechanism they pick up from their instructors. It’s impossible to empathize with every sick and dying person. No heart or brain could withstand it; your soul will just burn out completely. You can only empathize with your family and close friends; that’s all your body is designed to handle. Furthermore, empathy is an emotion of the heart, and when you think with your heart, you should expect disaster. Human reason, untainted by emotion, almost always arrives at the right decision, for reason is the only thing that separates us from all other living things. But once your profession has made you callous, you start to see everything around you that way.
Lilia was a product of her medical instruction; she had ended her love affair with romance once and for all, learned to dispense with the palavering, and become accustomed to expressing her desires harshly and clearly. As she rode the elevator down to the general surgical area, she concluded that she definitively wanted to enjoy physical love with that young man, despite his philosophical eccentricities. She recalled the aroma of his pheromones, juggled them on her tongue … and her vision blurred again.
She went to get him a little after eleven, woke him up by stroking his cheek with the back of her hand, then put her finger to his lips. She leaned close to his ear, so close her button nose brushed it, and whispered torridly.
“Let’s go!” Without asking where or why, Eugene rose from his bed and followed her, his steps rapid.
She had been making exacting preparations for this meeting ever since she’d demanded to be assigned to the night shift. She’d put sheets on the cot in the staff room, set out sweet champagne and fruit on the bedside table—she’d had an orderly run to the store for them—then spent half an hour in the shower, shaving her legs with a scalpel, checked her armpits, neatened up the butterfly below her waist a little, then applied a French cream with the barely perceptible scent of Japanese cherry blossoms. Only then did she put on her medical gown, dispensing with undergarments this time. She was all hot and bothered, since she assumed her chosen lover was inexperienced and guileless. She wanted to teach him everything she knew, and Lilia fancied that she knew an awful lot.
When she despairingly shed her gown, baring her charms to him, he didn’t just leap on her, like young men are wont to do, but he didn’t fall into a stupor either. Eugene calmly drew closer to Lilia and unhurriedly examined her nude form, beginning with her slight knees and ending with her delicate neck.
For a second, Lilia felt like she was undergoing a medical examination, but in that same second, Eugene took her head in his hand and kissed her on the lips so skillfully, then so sweetly, so penetratingly moved his caramel tongue that the young woman’s body instantly turned hot, like a fiery river of molten lava was oozing out of her. It was only afterward, when she had collected her thoughts, that she realized this strange young man had made her feel like an inexperienced yet lustful virgin. He played her body like a virtuoso playing a piano, the tips of his fingers hitting all the right keys and striking the most challenging chords that made Lilia’s throat sing mezzo-soprano. Then he moved down to the bass part of his instrument and penetrated its essence. An instant later, the musician made assertive additions to his improvised score, and Lilia sang again, her voice as low as a woman’s can be. The whole hospital heard her contralto, and everyone—at least everyone who could feel—felt the culmination, the apotheosis of the performance, in that moment. There was even a miracle in the intensive care unit; two men emerged from comas, and the monitors indicated that they weren’t planning on going back anytime soon.
Later, lying next to him on a mangled sofa, she felt that she was spent to the absolute limit, beyond which there was only death. The young woman felt that he had been inside every one of her cells, taking her body captive like a cancerous tumor, an abundant shower of dizzying morphine. At the same time, Lilia, her skin wet with passion, realized that she had bitten into her partner heedlessly and boundlessly, like she had to fill up for later, drink him endlessly, like a diabetic drinks water at death’s door.
After a while, when dawn had announced its arrival, when strength gradually began to return to her body, she suddenly realized that from that minute on, she would be the unhappiest woman on earth, that nothing like this would ever happen to her again, that she was never again to taste such epic pleasure! Her hips felt his now cool skin, and she was absolutely sure—he was a demon!
“I was with a demon tonight!” she thought.
He adopted an unexpectedly dry tone with her, asked her what time it was, listened to her answer, got dressed, and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to get back to the ward.”
“There’s a few minutes left …”
“For you, not me. I’ll be discharged at nine.”
As he was leaving, she wanted to shout that they wouldn’t just discharge him, that the police had to question him first … But she didn’t. She just whispered.
“And you don’t have any ID, you little demon!”
Naked, shamelessly dangling a leg that now smelled like sex over the side of the sofa—that was how Savushkin found her when he showed up for his shift. Thinking that this dish had been prepared for him, he leapt on her naked body like an animal, sneezing twice, and then face-planted as he tried to take his pants and underwear off at the same time.
“You’re such a prick, Savushkin!” Lilia said, reaching toward the bedside table and downing the last of the champagne straight from the bottle.
The naked Petya, who was in the manly state and utterly beside himself, insulted yet aroused, didn’t hesitate. He firmly threw his classmate on her back. He took her—like a victorious knight, he thought—and she suddenly stopped trying to resist. She relaxed.
“Just don’t come in me.”
“Uh-huh.”
She felt nothing: not Savushkin’s pinches, not his snotty kisses, not even him inside her. Lilia’s indifference to what was happening made Petya finish quickly, like he was running a 100-meter dash.
Ten seconds, and the gong announced his victory. Visibly upset, Petya dressed quickly.
“You’re frigid, Lilia! You’re a wrapper with no candy!”
“You’re right, Savushkin. I’m frigid!” The trauma specialist made her get dressed, showered her with lewd insults, and ordered her out. He tidied up the staff room himself and found many traces of passion not left by him … this was not the work of his hands. He suddenly realized whom the physician’s assistant had spent her energy on and experienced a fit of rage. He called his wife, told her how stressed he was, and asked her for a psychotherapeutic session on the spot. Fuming, he told her how many bad people he had around him, how nasty and two-faced they were, how it was making him lose faith in himself, question whether there was anything special about him, and undermining his masculinity … His wise wife offered her support, but she suspected that something fishy was going on, so she tried to ascertain the actual sequence of events. Savushkin muttered something about how Lilia was crazy, how she’d tried to seduce him when he came into the staff room and found her naked. But, he, faithful husband that he was, stoically rebuffed her advances. Petya’s wife was a highly intelligent professional, and she instantly figured out what had really happened. Her significant other was no stoic. He’d been pining after Lilia since his college days, but when he finally got to sleep with her, something had gone awry during their intimate encounter and made him hysterical. She had a rough idea of what it was, too: she knew Savushkin and his physical capabilities, his tendency to shoot fast and miss the target. It had probably happened again that morning. She didn’t dig any deeper, though, just pretended she was entirely on her husband’s side, then told him that he was the best and that work was the best sedative. Savushkin was immeasurably grateful to his wife, since he really had calmed down almost immediately. The trauma specialist made a vow of love and devotion to her and began preparing for his morning rounds. There was only one thing dampening his mood, and that was the fact that his inspection would compel him to come into contact with the patient they admitted yesterday, the one with whom Lilia had apparently spent quite the wild night …
“Trash!” our dear little Petya grumbled huffily.
Meanwhile, Eugene, now arrayed in the black garments bestowed on him by Alice, was at the free phone booth in the hospital’s entry hall. He inquired if Mr. Iratov could come to the phone, and, when asked what his business was, he replied that it was personal and was told that they could not connect him without knowing what it was regarding, so the best they could do was put him through to Vitya, Iratov’s assistant. Seasoned aide that he was, Vitya instantly realized that this was no mere petitioner and could even be someone important to his boss.
“Personal business?” he asked.
“Precisely …”
“Mr. Iratov is not in the office at the moment.”
“Well, why didn’t you say that to begin with?”
“Not to worry, I will connect you to Mr. Iratov’s mobile phone …”