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Nadezhda Nelidova
The Pit
SHOCK. That is the first thing you experience on reading Nadezhda Nelidova’s book “The Pit”.
Two strikingly realistic stories are unveiled before our eyes. Two people related to the author preferred to leave this life voluntarily rather than suffer unbearable pain and loneliness.
A girl suffering from cancer, left alone face to face with pain and fear, dreams of euthanasia.
The clergy oppose it. “By suffering, we are cleansed.” So how are they any better than the inquisitors who “cleansed” witches by burning them at the stake??”
The second story, “Crystal World” is about a young boy hounded to death. Throughout the entire book, the author is tortured by doubts. Does she have the right to be so merciless and frank in reproducing every last detail of these tragedies? She comes to this conclusion:
“There is no such thing as ‘suicide’ — it is always homicide of the victim by those around him, it is simply more subtle. cynical and devilishly refined.”
The author is grateful to the experienced British linguist and translator JACK DOUGHTY for his cooperation.
The Pit
“You’re in deep trouble, young lady. You’re in deep trouble.”
The phrase goes round and round in my head. Where is it from, from which book? It’s of no significance. Nothing has any significance now. It’s like running madly at full tilt into a brick wall.
It’s not that I totally refuse to admit that this misfortune can happen to me. I’m a sensible person, after all. But the possibility had seemed so negligible. How likely is it, for example, that a meteorite will fall on your head? That is the sort of likelihood with which this disease with the deadly little name might threaten me.
How did I find out about it?
There was an operation. We have the most complex post-operative ward, and also the noisiest and merriest. We chuckle at trifles, so that the nurses look at each other and say: “That must be Ward Six…” We lay on our beds, dying, doubled up with laughter and holding our stomachs in case the stitches break.
The whole ward is called for physiology exercises, but they forget me every time. Why? The surgeon who operated on me explained: “We are awaiting the results of the histology study. There are some doubts, let’s be extra careful…”
* * *
Since getting back home, I had been going in for post-operative inspections, but the results were not in yet. Then the decisive day arrived. I took the bus to the hospital, it was dragging along like a tortoise. I wanted to jump out and give the driver a good kick in the ass. After getting off the bus, I walked quickly, almost running. Then I couldn’t stop myself, I ran at full pelt.
I had prepared a sentence to say to the doctor when it became clear that everything was all right. I would say: “Oh, what a relief! I was already gripping the table so that I wouldn’t fall down in a faint.” That was what I would say, and the doctor would shake his head and say: “Oh, these nervous patients!”
The nurse rummaged around like a zombie looking for the card. The doctor took an unbearably long time to read her own scrawled handwriting. Then, addressing me formally by forename and patronymic, she said: “It will have to be rechecked in the central laboratory, I can’t understand the histology.”
Seeing my face, the doctor hastened to add a whole lot of empty, slimy, misleading words. “It’s only a query, why have you gone so pale? Take the data to the Republican Center, they have different apparatus and specialists there. It’s a different level.”
Even if, God forbid, it were confirmed, it would be nothing to worry about. Seventy per cent of sufferers are cured. Anyone going out into the street might have a brick fall on their head, and my risk was no greater than that.
But why did I so passionately want to be in the place of those at risk from a brick?
* * *
When I got home, I didn’t take my coat off, I went through into the room and sat down on the sofa. I couldn’t think of any more useful occupation than wringing my hands and sobbing. I lay down, curled up in a ball, like a frozen little animal. How long did I lie there? There was nothing to get up for. Or to lie down for. There was no longer any point in anything.
It was as if I’d had an anesthetic injection, but leaving me a clear head. I ought to think it all over. Who should I leave my schoolboy son with? Who should get Kerry, the sheepdog? And tomorrow, when I would go to the Center, and…?
I live a terribly scatterbrained, disorderly life. But suddenly it was as if an organizer had taken me over. I thought out in my head precisely all I would do in the coming hours, tomorrow, a week and a month ahead. I wouldn’t look further than that. I’d have to ring some people, give instructions to some, work out how much to leave in my will and for what purposes. And I was as calm as a millpond. Not a single tear. Though when I was on my way home, I thought I would flood the street with tears.
* * *
By an irony of fate, a year ago I had been in the same hospital where I would go tomorrow for the test. I had an interview with the chief oncologist of the Republic. My friend Katya had passed away — agonizingly, painfully. Questions arose.
It was the diagnosis that killed my sweet sensitive Katya, I was sure. Couldn’t they have told her relatives, who could have hidden the truth from her in some way? A lie to spare her distress, to give her a few more months of untroubled life. The chance to see the sun and the sky, to hear the birds, to be with those dear to her.
“The patient must be given complete information about the disease, in an understandable form”, explained the doctor in charge. “We are allowed to notify relatives only with the written agreement of the patient. That’s the law.”
You propose giving the diagnosis in a softer, veiled manner, to avoid upsetting and scaring the patient. But — can you imagine? This does not concern him or put him out in any way.
You tell him: “Oh, nonsense, you have a blind spot there”, and he will just turn and go away. Also, it is not permitted to deprive a patient in the final stage of the opportunity to make appropriate dispositions and solve problems of inheritance, morals and finance. It’s the same worldwide. If you don’t like the law, write to Putin. Ask him to change the constitution.
* * *
How had it been with Katya? They gave her the analysis, then ran off and forgot about her. At only 35, she was the deputy manager of a large factory. She got a call from the local nurse.
“We have your result. It’s not good. Can you come in today?”
“What is it?”
“The doctor will tell…”
“Cancer??”
A ringing in the ears. Katya fell down on the spot, the receiver lying on her breast like a cross. A funeral ahead of schedule. How long did she lie there?
Here’s a New Year photo with Katya sitting between us: the prettiest golden-haired blonde with eyes shining like stars. Everything ahead of her: new happiness, flourishing youth, all her youthful hopes.
Meanwhile the creeping disease is already spreading, taking her over. Poking around blindly. feeling her out. Seeing where it can plant its foul roots. Finding a place for the next vileness to emerge in her pure flourishing girl’s body.
Very soon the doomed Katya places her palm into someone’s firm experienced hand. She is led like a child through the road to Calvary, covered in dust, trampled by millions of pairs of feet before hers.
She has undergone chemotherapy, with no success. The fourth stage, inoperable. She was rated with a Class One disability and sent home with the optimistic instruction: “Get some rest. The main thing you have to do is put on weight”.
Here she is a few months later. She had given up the struggle by this time. She is scared. Like a bird keeping its wings folded. She has become skinny, perspiring from stress, her mouth half-open like a bird’s beak, little drops of perspiration above her lip.
She has difficulty getting up to us on the third floor, out of breath and stopping on the way. She apologizes for her straggly sagging dull hair which was once so golden. “I don’t want to do anything, girls, not even take a bath”.
When she first sat, then lay, on the sofa (while we made an excessive fuss about pushing cushions under her), she suddenly smelt like an old woman — an acidic smell. This from her — always so well groomed, always with silky hair, in a cloud of fine expensive perfume.
So Katya was sent home as a terminal patient. Then came the extrasensory sessions. The faith healer charged her 3700 roubles a session. There were ten sessions altogether. Then five thousand from another bioenergetic specialist. Patients had to sign a non-disclosure agreement about the secret of the treatment.
The secret was this. The specialist passed his spread hands over the patient, “collecting” piles of disease. He had the patient’s things in front of him: a scarf, gloves, maybe slippers, a spoon, the dish she ate from and the cup she drank from. Hair cuttings (not hair fallen out, they had to be cuttings!), small coins, cheap candies. The alleged “dirty energy” of the disease was “collected” and “shaken out”, to the accompaniment of appropriate words.
After these manipulations, the clothes had to be hung out, say on the sides of garbage bins. The cheap crockery had to be set out somewhere on a window sill in the porch, and the hair carefully laid in library books. In the book store, too, while apparently glancing through a book, you could slyly drop the “bewitched” hair between the pages.
Nail clippings were valuable for the wealth of information they contained about the disease. Little crescent clippings could be left under doors and under skirting-boards in apartments — those of acquaintances, naturally, we wouldn’t enter anyone else’s. They wouldn’t work in official institutions — it had been tried.
The small change and candies were thrown on paths. Whoever picked up this trash would pick up the disease with it. All the more so for children, their protective shell is as flimsy as the film on an egg. But on the other hand, you will live, live, live!
Katya fled in disgust from all this extrasensory nonsense.
* * *
The months of chemotherapy were behind her.
Now, from morn till night, her days were devoted to dieting. She squeezed vegetable juices — she cleaned out the cellars of all those she knew in the village.
She would lie down to gather her strength and take deep breaths, then back to the cooker again, quietly cooking vegetable jelly and rubbing burdock root into it (Ugh! It tastes horrible, girls!”).
Buckwheat was left on the window sill to swell up. She kept spring nettles in a jar — they improve immunity tremendously. There were bunches of grass hanging everywhere in the kitchen and the hall. Round her neck she wore some miraculous root sent from the other end of the country kept in a finger stall cut from a glove and hung on a cord.
“They say a dessert spoonful of paraffin with vegetable oil can help…”
Katya sighed.
“I’ve drunk paraffin too.”
* * *
I forced myself to get up. I went over to the mirror. Instead of a face, just a hazy spot, as flat and pale as the mirror itself — distorted, as if floating out from the facial bones and muscles. My son will be home from school shortly, he mustn’t see me like this. Nor should anyone else. I’d better take a hot shower. No, not a hot one, a mildly warm one… And I’ll ring Raisa, my dear busy unfailing helper. When I’m not here, she’ll look after the house, wipe and vacuum the floors, and she won’t leave my son or the dog hungry either…
Last night I honestly, earnestly tried to seek out the logic, the train of events, the guiding thread. If I could find the end of the thread, get hold of it and wind it up, I could try to get back to my former life, before the fatal parting of the ways. When and where did I first draw back and stumble, without noticing the secret sign, the hints of fate?
Not long ago, something strange, almost mystical, happened. The oldest person in out editorial office had passed away. They gave me the job of writing the obituary. I picked out the text, swinging my leg and munching an apple. A dropped apple seed stuck between the shift key and the next key, the backslash. The key got stuck.
“I was typing without looking and the screen and when I did I was stupefied. After the heading ‘Obituary’ the whole page consisted of the letter Ya [which in Russian means ‘I, myself’]. I automatically typed again, to finish off, and the same letter jumped up again: ‘Ya’.
Oh, really, I’m not supposed to believe in all this mysticism, how did this nonsense get into my head?
* * *
By morning I realized it was not worth uselessly striving to get back to some turning point, It’s fruitless to beat your brains out looking for answers, so why do it? There may not be much time anyway. I ought to have time to think about other questions, more necessary, important, urgent.
Questions, questions.
Why did it have to be me?
Is my disease a punishment for my sins?
Is other people’s good health a reward for the good they do?
What will I feel at the moment I depart this life? Will everything instantly become amazingly clear? Will there be a blazing carousel in my head? A blinding white flash in my eyes? A cosmic black hole inside, rushing to draw me into itself?
And finally, the most important: What comes after that?
* * *
From my interview with the doctor in charge:
So, the patient has realized she is incurable. When a prisoner is sentenced, they watch him carefully, they almost go as far as having a first aid team on hand. Does your department have a duty psychotherapist for such cases? Are there efficient tranquillizers for patients and relatives?
Oh, God! We don’t even have provision for a duty therapist! Although in oncological practice there was a time when they were frantically trying to introduce the specialty of psychotherapist. “But a good doctor, particularly a good oncologist, is himself the best psychotherapist”, the doctor assured me. “Without special knowledge, it is not possible to discuss the course of the disease, and the problems, and to instill hope. It is enough for the patient simply to have psychological help from the doctor on the case. He knows what words to choose, he can observe the problem professionally from every angle. Why, if a psychotherapist were to see these catheters sticking out of the body and this awful swelling, he would need urgent psychiatric help himself.
“It’s another matter”, he continued, gesturing, “if the doctor is physically unable to hold long explanatory, comforting, hope-inspiring conversations with the patient. When an oncologist is dealing with 40 patients a day, no psychotherapy will help. It can happen in our offices here that two doctors receive two patients at the same time. The Oncology Center has been under construction for ten years! That’s how they treat us, those are the conditions we work under. And you are talking about a particular reverential attitude to patients.”
The doctor tapped the table thoughtfully.
“Another problem stems from boredom and overcrowding, Not all those sitting in the crowd in reception are cancer sufferers. We find four thousand of them a year, whereas about 70,000 people pass through the surgery in that time. They come as “possible” sufferers, or for cancer to be ruled out. And there they are, sitting next to each other, chatting, exchanging negative information. And the nervous ones discover similar symptoms in themselves and begin to panic. They infect those around them with fear, causing a chain reaction which is quite harmful in a hospital atmosphere.”
* * *
Before Katya’s illness, I had been naïvely confident. “Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.” They have a duty psychologist in hospitals like this. Why, to hear a diagnosis like that could blow your mind.
But Katya had told me, with a wry smile: “Oh yes, everything is ‘there’. A team of psychologists and psychotherapists, who hastened to comfort me and treat me with valerian. And a special bath too. Dream on!”
Coming out of the doctor’s, Katya hid herself in the bathroom. There was a yellow pool of urine from the broken toilet bowl on the tiled floor under a rag. She slumped down exhausted on the filthy trampled toilet seat with footprints from the soles of someone’s shoes on it. Seeking consolation, she pressed her hot forehead to the cold tank. She had a toilet instead of a psychologist.
* * *
To be honest, that summer I had raced about the hospital at a gallop, tapping my high heels. Noting down interviews, pulling my frivolous skirt down over my knees, looking at my watch.
That was then, in the former life. But now circumstances forced me to get to know the hospital thoroughly from the inside. I had thought everything would be different in such a hospital. Speaking in lowered voices. Doctors and nurses, discretion itself, Kind encouraging looks, Sympathetic supportive contacts. Empty of people, calm, silence, pictures on the walls, flowers. Feet sinking in soft carpets as if walking on a cloud.
But what was it really? A dark gloomy vestibule with cracked tiles underfoot. Dismayingly long queues, lots of country people. In the buffets, greasy pies as hard as rock, awful even to look at. Enough to send a healthy patient to the next world.
A cleaner in cut-down galoshes brushing pools over the gray floor, hitting your feet with a mop. The cloakroom attendant dipping a boiled egg in salt, drinking tea from a thermos flask. A bespectacled nurse short of sleep saying “No admittance today”.
Even someone dying has a last wish. Heads should involuntarily bow before him, people should look away and voices become muffled of their own accord. All around should be a suite of security guards, doctors, priests, lawyers — abashed, recognizing the terrible grandeur of the moment. In the deadened air itself there should be hushed whispers. respect, superstitious fear of the mystery about to happen…
Nothing of the sort! Life mockingly shows its ugly contorted mug and kicks you with a varicose foot in a filthy galosh. The universe will not collapse, finding your departure unbearable, that’s not hard to imagine, is it? Your disease is strictly your own business, so just behave accordingly.
* * *
So Katya was sent home as a terminal patient. Then came the extrasensory sessions.
From my interview with the doctor in charge:
When she was told the chemotherapy was not effective, she went in for extrasensory treatment. On the quiet, we condemned her for it. How could such a clever woman believe in all that macabre nonsense? Mind you, we can all be clever about it till we ourselves are affected… You can wash your hands of someone else’s problem. And anyway, after she’d been with the face healers, her eyes brightened up a bit, if only for a few hours.
“When you came here yourself, did you read the advertisements on the pillars about the sale of ‘miracle’ herbs?” asked the doctor, answering one question with another. “Did you see the herb sellers with their sacks of hay? Those charlatans ought to be cleared out regularly, by the police if necessary. To sell their trash, they passionately assure you that they cure everything in the world.”
The doctor went over to the window and pointed to the people lined up along the fence.
“I’ve been working in oncology for about twenty years, in medicine for almost forty. And I have never once seen anyone cured by know-alls and magicians. At conferences of oncologists, before the first break the request is invariably heard: tell us if anyone has any observations or information about miracle cures. No-one ever stood up and reported anything. Not once. But as many cases as you like of health being harmed and people dying from “treatment” with shark’s gristle, urine, all kinds of betocaratene and the like. A waste of precious time.
“It’s pure ignorance, not at the medical level but at the sanitation level. Strange as it may seen, they include a large number of people with higher education, from the arts, well-read, eminent. They are seeking special non-traditional methods. Simple people trust doctors by tradition.”
* * *
Katya, in heart-to-heart talks with us, did not rule out her death. It isn’t to be feared when you no longer exist — what’s left here is no longer you. Physical pain frightened her (all we women are sickeningly afraid of it). Not even pain, but how it makes you behave, Would she pass away worthily, bravely, with a bright smile, with a prayer on her lips? As God wills it.
Sickness involves trying a series of agonizing spasms, turning you inside out like a stocking. Worse than any pain. And pain, where can that take you? It creeps up on you, beginning with a hypocritical kiss-like suction inside. And towards the end it winds up tightly in a spiral, like squeezing out the washing, but it’s living flesh. It fades and then comes back, increasing all the time…
Clergymen who condemn euthanasia (some don’t even approve of anesthetics) explain: “By suffering, we are cleansed”. So how are they any better than the inquisitors who “cleansed” witches by burning them at the stake? All sins come from the body. But then, O Lord, why did you give man a body?? Why does it take so long, why is it so painful, for the body to separate from the soul? It was you, O Lord, who made us this way!!
It was not long ago that Katya loved her body and took pride in it. She fed it tenderly and dressed it fashionably. Then the hangman came and turned her body from a source of enjoyment into a source of suffering… And she clumsily, awkwardly pressed her skinny hands to her breast: “All-merciful Lord, give me the strength to live through what awaits me!”
Apathetic indifference dressed in a starched and ironed medical coat. Pain has the face and voice of the local doctor, a woman. She looks at Katya, doubled up with pain on the chair. Katya and her mother are waiting in a long queue of people similarly doubled up. The doctor says:
“The surgery’s license for remedies including drugs has not been renewed.”
Or:
“The limit on pain-killers has been used up till the end of the month.”
Or:
“Klavdia Afanasyeva is on vacation, I can’t do anything without her signature, I could end up in court because of you. What do you mean, unbearable? Take tramadol or baralgin. Inject yourself with ketorolac.”
She peers over her thick spectacle lenses, which enlarge her eyes. making them look cozy and amusingly kind, like a velvet rabbit. She asks with simple-minded suspicion:
“Could she be a drug addict?”
Then Katya’s quiet, timid mother shouts that ketorolac was no help even at the beginning of the disease. And shouts: “Be damned, the lot of you!”
“You rude woman, don’t make a scene here, don’t behave like a lout, or I’ll call the police!”
But a cellphone rings in the ample pocket of her robe, and she burbles tenderly into it, calling someone “darling” and “bunny”, telling the caller not to catch cold, to wrap a scarf round her neck, making a kissing sound into the phone. Katya is sickened by the scene she has witnessed. So she’s clearly not a sadist or a maniac, she is not a vampire feeding on the suffering of others, or a machine in a white coat… She is a lively, warm, tender auntie to someone. She loves someone. What a terrible thought!
* * *
From my interview with the doctor:
“In Russia, medical practice, after finding someone is doomed, steps aside. It leaves you alone with your pain, fear, loneliness and despair. Are the simplest pain-killers really enough?
“I can say with full responsibility and objectivity that we have plenty of all medication: pain-killing, chemical-therapeutic and concomitant. Everything depends on whether they are taken correctly, regularly and at the right interval. The strongest pain-killers are narcotics. The patient becomes a drug addict. However, these same narcotics relieve a headache by disengaging the head. But, let me put it this way, the memory of the pain remains. The sufferer, independently of his own will, remembers it, seeks for it and finds it. Have you read ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ by Tolstoy?
“What strange and ‘touching’ concern for the dying! God forbid he should become a drug addict!”
* * *
At our last meeting, Katya asked me not to visit her again. She admitted it was better to choose a knot in the floor or a crack in the wall to look at rather than having to see people. And that included me.
Her only friend and comforter up to the end was the television remote control, which she pressed with her limp weak hand to switch channels. Sometimes she feebly cast the remote onto the blanket, leaning back despairingly on her high pillows. She would say: “Fools!” Or “Why, O Lord?” Sometimes she fell asleep from weakness during a movie, and wept, talked nonsense and mumbled in her sleep.
“Every time, I’m afraid I won’t wake up… There’s a song that goes: ‘Summer is a little life’. Yes, and sleep is a little death”, she said, choosing her words unwillingly and with effort. “Every time, I scramble out, I am drawn out of something, like an enveloping pit. It suffocates, presses in, moves about… “
“A pit?”
Katya remained silent for a long time. Then she said, almost with conviction:
“It — is alive.”
“Death is alive??”
Katya turned her face to the wall.
* * *
“A pond in July, steaming after a downpour. Butterflies, yellow, pink and lilac, are idly playing in the grass, flattened by the dew and rain. The warm exultant, deafeningly ringing, strident pond is full of life, love and blossom. But in the pond so full of life and sounds, death is already hiding. Very soon it will be a dead field with withered grass covered in snow. In spring it will come back to life, but that will be a different field with different flowers. God is merciful, wise and far-seeing,” cooed Mother Yevgenyushka.
“From the very beginning”, expostulated the nun, “life and death should no have been separated. Actually they are one whole. Worldly, empty, useless people did a lot to bring this about. They were the ones who raised the artificial boundary, They thought up beautiful words: ‘on the brink of death’, ‘between life and death’. But there isn’t any ‘between’”, said Mother Yevgenyushka. “They lied about death, they made it a bogeyman. They presented it as an abnormal, unnatural event.”
* * *
Katya’s mom and the nurse bend over to inject a dose of ketorolac. Gigantic shadows move on the ceiling. As soon as it is morning, on comes the electric light, they melt into tears and pain. The window glass melts in the streams of rain as if in tears. “It’s September”, says the nurse. “It’s getting dark in the mornings.”
Mother Yeevgenyushka again. She is kind. Her words are like a feather wetting cracked lips with cool water. You could listen to her on and on. But how well thought through the leaving is! Pain tortures the body, wastes it away, exhausts it. And at the same time pain softens, anesthetizes, analgizes the thought of death itself. It resigns you to the inescapable leaving.
It compassionately leads away from questions to which there is no answer anyway. Or which only God knows, and that amounts to the same thing. Pain mercifully switches your attention and remaining strength to yourself. It distracts, clouds over, drowns out. Pain shortens the hours of waiting, it leads to drowsiness, patiently teaches you and prepares you for the inevitable. For one who is tired and ill, the leaving becomes rest, the desired end…
Rounded, sated, affectionate, in a black hood, smelling of rolls and coffee… But it remains what it is.
“Take it away, somebody, oh Lord… Mom??”
Mom’s embarrassed self-excusing voice in the corridor. The rustle of paper money disappearing under the heavy multi-layer skirts of Mother Yevgenyshka… And there is no chink of light. And everything is in vain.
* * *
At the beginning of the disease (a thousand years ago, in another life), the TV news in the hospital hall had showed the destruction of heroin found by Customs. Black smoke curled above a heap of bags tightly packed with something white, like flour from grain.
“No grain, but pain, that we have”, commented the patients. “They’re idiots! Why burn heroin?”
“What now? The smoke’s awfully black!”
“They’ve poured diesel oil on it.”
“Oh dear”, sighed a woman in a dressing gown. “How many people suffer before death without narcotics. The torture they go through! Lord have mercy! And here they are burning narcotics. They’re monsters, inhuman!” And she angrily left the ward.
“Liza”, said Katya quickly to the nurse, The pain had faded for now. The continuous groan “Ugh! Ugh!” from the bitten, chewed, saliva-dampened pillow ceased for a moment. “Liza, please do what I ask… There’s a young man in the entrance, he injects… Liza. I have money for the apartment in my purse. You understand? Take it all. Liza, I can’t go on any more…”
* * *
Snorter (Nikolai) was the most wretched, disgusting and contemptible creature that had ever lived on Earth. He was called Snorter because he could snort a line of heroin so that the fuzz would never find it. Snorter knew he had to look out for himself in this world. Either stool pigeons, without counting the consequences, would kick him in the guts with hobnailed boots; or he would kick the bucket himself: he already had blackening and decomposing knots in his armpits and crotch; or his own people would nail him (he worked for the fuzz as an informant, so that his own place, known in the district, would not be touched).
From time to time Snorter would be thrown into a cell and be given the third degree almost till it killed him. Then after keeping him cold turkey, they’d put a full rig on the table in front of him. Snorter, shaking like a paralytic, looking sidelong at the syringe, would rap out names, secret meeting places, clientele. A dry green foam appears in the corners of his mouth from the effort. Drug-runners were caught and searched, bent over, and condoms full of “China white” and “coke” would be carefully pulled out of all possible orifices.
The box was ticked, the month’s plan for the Narcotics Department was fulfilled. Gratitude of the management, promotion, a salary increase, extra vacations and other benefits. Snorter had long eagerly been asking the cops for “a pension”, but where would they be without Snorter and his dopeheads? He was their meal ticket, he had to be kept that way.
* * *
“It must be the real thing, pure”, said Liza, snappily like in a store.
“God will punish those who cheat the sick. What’s the matter?” Snorter said, or rather mumbled, due to having had teeth knocked out. “Is Katya really in a bad way?” He wanted to put a touch of sympathy into his voice, but he had not had sympathy for anyone in this life for a long time.
All the same, he did give Liza a wrap of almost uncut heroin (which he later bitterly regretted. He could have got several more portions out of it).
“And another thing. Don’t come to me again. It’s not safe, you might get caught. I’ll warn Old Codger, he has access to drugs. Warn him in advance if it’s a suicide dose.”
“I’ll warn him”, muttered Liza.
* * *
The first thing Katya noticed when she woke was the breeze. Light and tender, it blew the curtain aside and played with the hair on Katya’s moist forehead. Then the sounds started. She heard children’s cries and the dull thud of a bouncing ball. A yellow triangle of sunlight lay on the pillow. He cheek felt warm from it.
Katya rolled her head over to the warmed spot. She squinted for a long time at the blown-back curtain and the dry foliage rustling loudly in the window. And without noticing, she fell into an indifferent and pleasant drowsiness.
The nurse was sitting ready alongside, watching out for the pain so as to relieve it with an injection. Mom was there instead of Liza. They talked about all sorts of things. They recalled her childhood, and at Katya’s request looked through photographs. They planned the future of Katya’s son. They wept. During the conversation Katya often rested, turning her gaze to the window. The bed had been moved over to it.
“How nice”, she whispered, still half asleep. “A whole week of sun… I’ve never seen the sky so blue…”
“That is God’s gift, for your sake, Katya… Are you in pain, dear?”
“So-so… Not as bad as it used to be. The worst of it, here” — she touched her forehead with a weak hand- “ has receded. And the pit has receded. Just this terrible weakness. I would like to sleep. And I want to cry all the time… Mom, when you go to church, light a candle for God’s servant Nikolai, OK? You know who I mean.”
The suffocating clothes have been thrown off. And a speck of dust is inexorably giddily drawn into a huge blinding column where myriads of other dust specks are also spinning. There is freedom there. There is no suffering there, nor doubt, nor loneliness. And Katya, unmistakably enlightened, surrounded by her dear relatives, light and transparent, floats into eternity.
* * *
I was shown where to take the samples — a dark little hut with two plywood doors painted in a lively style opposite each other. So this is where human fates are decided. They told me to wait an hour or so. A long silent queue in the vestibule can be seen from here. It’s a strange sort of queue. No-one is complaining or pushing or trying to get to the reception window. There’s time for everyone.
I think to myself: if the tests turn out positive (positive means badly), I will hardly have time to get to the right doctor today. I’ll have to spend the night here. I leaf through my book of phone numbers. There are no relatives in this town, but plenty of work colleagues. I’m sure no-one will refuse, even if I have to stay a day or two, perhaps a week.
No, to sit and wait a whole hour is more than I can manage. I pass through the silent self-absorbed people out onto the street. It’s cold, late fall. The asphalt is dirty, the trees in the hospital garden are bare and black. Big transparent drops of water fall from the branches as if from a drip flask. They look like bitter medicine from a dosimeter.
Sullen-looking quack healers line the fence. Even the rain has not driven them away They have bags with price tags and instructions on them: how to be taken, doses. They stand in a dignified manner, with suitably mournful faces. You can’t get away from their “services”. The time will come, the right time for those who need them, and they’ll come of their own accord. Like spiders, they quietly confidently and patiently await their victims. Weeds that can’t be removed by weed killers.
I return past the same stonily patient queue — they’ve kindly been injected with an anesthetic by someone. I look into the office where they are getting their little boxes and bottles. I’m given a piece of paper with numbers and squiggles on it. That is my encoded future. My fate. Questions are waved away: everything will be explained behind the door opposite.
In the small office, although it is daytime, the blinds are drawn, a table lamp is switched on and the screen of an ancient computer can be seen. Behind the table there sits, looking into a microscope, a skinny little man with a beard, in a white coat crumpled like a concertina. The Great Giver of Life or Initiator of Grief.
He looks up from the microscope and wearily wipes his eye behind his spectacles. He glances for a second at a sheet of paper.
“Everything is all right with you.”
“A-a-ah!” I shouted out loud. The whole floor of the hospital might now be lying in ruins and clouds of settling dust from my cry.
“Dear doctor, may I kiss you?”
He has no objection. He laughs and presents his cheek. The nurse laughs.
“We’ve never had such an emotional patient as you!”
With the paper in my hand, I rush past the queue, biting my lips. but it is still more than I can do to hide the treacherous smile and suppress the egotistical joy reverberating from me: I’ve gotten out of here! Dull eyes watch me on my way. I know what is in those eyes.
But I return to the other, previous way of looking at the world. On the threshold, I take a deep breath of the clear transparent air, as sweet as spring water. It is only like that in the late fall: amazingly pure in spite of the uninterrupted flow of hurrying traffic and the smoke from bonfires of dead leaves.
And the sky! Never in my life have I seen such an unattainably high sky, deep blue with a shade of aquamarine. As if it has gathered, concentrated and then fired the whole summer blue of the sky like a salute.
Skipping along like a little girl, I run to the trolleybus. How much lies ahead! Not only today, but altogether? I am God, I am the Tsar, and what else besides? Beyond that it is not important. All those tasks which up to now seemed so difficult and insurmountable now look like child’s play. I can move mountains.
Quarreling with a loved one, which had been spoiling my life in recent months: which of us would be more stubborn than the other, would act on principle, would not be the first to telephone, would not overcome selfishness… Lord, how insignificant, stupid, childish it all was! Now everything will change, everything will work out for me! (And indeed, it has).
Sometimes people need a good shaking, to pull out of the usual routine, from hanging over the terrifying emptiness, the pit underfoot. I’d been given the opportunity to look down on it all from above
, to tell the difference between the shell of vanity, fuss and paltriness on the one hand, and everything real on the other.
Just to have everything as it was before: to continue to run, fall, get up, be joyful, be sad; to quarrel, to make up. Even, alas, to forget the lessons learned, again to do foolish things and make mistakes… to live!
Forgive me, you people in the queue. Forgive me, Katya.
* * *
Russia holds first place in the world for oncological diseases. The number of sufferers is approaching three million. Every year this army recruits more than 455,000 more. Eighty per cent of them are suffering from the most serious syndromes.
In the West, 30–50 kilograms of narcotics are prescribed for each million oncology sufferers. In Russia it is 500 grams, far from all of which reaches the patients.
Three hundred thousand people a year die of cancer. In the opinion of foreign scientists, medicine in the Russian provinces is at 19th century level. Out in the regions, only one to two per cent of patients receive the full amount of supportive and anesthetizing medicaments.
The way Russian cancer patients are treated in practice is kept strictly secret.
In the Declaration of Lisbon on the Rights of the Patient it is written:
The patient has the right to receive medical assistance and to die with dignity. While you were reading this text, 12 people died of cancer in this country. Twenty “newbies” were diagnosed with it.
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