A Country Doctor's Notebook (11 page)

‘I'm bound to end up with pneumonia after a trip like this. In any case, what am I going to do with her? I can
tell from his note that this doctor is even less experienced than I am. I know absolutely nothing except the few tips I've managed to pick up in six months' practice, and he knows even less. He's obviously only just qualified. And he thinks I'm an experienced man …'

Preoccupied with these thoughts, I was not even aware of getting dressed, which was no simple matter: trousers and shirt, felt boots, over my shirt a leather jerkin, then an overcoat topped by a sheepskin, fur hat, and my bag containing caffeine, camphor, morphine, adrenalin, clamps, sterile dressings, hypodermic, probe, a Browning automatic, cigarettes, matches, watch, stethoscope.

The weather was no longer so alarming, although the daylight was fading and darkness drawing in as we drove through the outskirts of the village. The snowfall seemed to have eased, and was falling diagonally in only one direction against my right cheek. The fireman's bulk completely hid the rear horse's rump from my view. The animals set off at a cracking pace, got into their stride, and the sleigh began flying over the bumpy track. I sank down into the seat and at once started to warm up; I thought of pneumonia and wondered whether a fragment of bone had broken off from inside the girl's skull and penetrated the brain.

‘Are these fire brigade horses?' I asked through my sheepskin collar.

‘Oh-huh … huh …' grunted the driver without turning round.

‘What has the doctor done to her?'

‘Well, sir, he … huh … trouble is, he's only studied venereal diseases.'

The blizzard moaned through a copse, then lashed out, whistling, as we drove past the shelter of the trees. I felt I
was swaying, swaying, swaying … until I found myself in the changing-room of Sandunov's steam baths in Moscow—fully dressed, wearing my fur coat, and bathed in sweat. Then a torch flared up, the baths filled with cold water, I opened my eyes and saw a helmet shimmering in a blood-red glow. I thought there was a fire … then I blinked and realised that we had arrived. I was outside a white colonnaded building in the neo-classical style of Nicholas I. All around was pitch darkness, I was surrounded by firemen and a flame was flickering above their heads. There-upon I dragged out my watch through a chink in my fur coat: it was five o'clock. The drive had taken not one hour but two and a half.

‘Make sure at once that I have some horses to take me back,' I said.

‘Very good,' the driver replied.

Half asleep and feeling as damp under my leather jerkin as though I had been in a hot compress, I went into the hallway. Lamplight struck me from one side, throwing shadows on the varnished floor. A fair-haired young man with a haunted look came running out wearing trousers that had a freshly ironed crease. His white tie with black polka dots was askew, his starched shirt-front had come loose and was bulging out, but his jacket looked fresh from the tailors, brand new, with creases so crisp that they might have been cut out of metal.

The man waved his arms, clutched my fur coat and shook me as he pressed against me, moaning softly:

‘Oh, doctor … my dear fellow … quickly … she's dying. I'm a murderer.' He glanced aside, opened his eyes in a wild, tragic stare and said to someone: ‘I'm a murderer, that's what I am.'

Then he broke into sobs, clutched at his thin, straggling hair and began pulling at it. I could see from the strands sticking to his fingers that he was literally tearing out his hair.

‘Stop it,' I said and pushed his arm aside.

He was led away, and some women came running towards me.

My coat was removed, I was led over gleaming floors and into a room with a white bed. A very young doctor rose from a chair to greet me. His expression was agonised and distraught. For a second I caught a look of astonishment in his eyes as he saw that I was as young as he was. We were, in fact, as alike as two portraits of the same person; we were even the same age. Then he was so overcome with delight at seeing me that he even gulped for breath.

‘I'm so glad … my dear colleague … you see, her pulse is failing. The fact is I'm a venereologist. Thank God you came.'

Lying on a piece of gauze on the table was a hypodermic syringe and several ampoules of yellow oil. The sound of the clerk weeping could be heard through the door, which then closed as the figure of a woman in white materialised at my shoulder. The bedroom was in semi-darkness, a piece of green material having been draped half over the lamp. A face the colour of paper lay on the pillow amid the greenish gloom. The nose had begun to look pinched and sharp, and the nostrils were plugged with cotton wool that was pink with blood.

‘Her pulse …' the doctor whispered to me.

I took the lifeless arm, applied my fingers with a now habitual gesture and shuddered. I could feel a thin, rapid
flutter which broke off and picked up again as a mere faint thread. I felt the customary stab of cold in the pit of my stomach as I always do when I see death face to face. I hate it. I managed to break off the end of a capsule and draw the yellow oil into the syringe, but the injection was only a mechanical gesture and forcing the liquid under the skin of the girl's arm was a waste of time.

Her lower jaw began to twitch as though she were choking, slackened and hung down; the body tensed under the blanket as though hunching with cold, then went limp. And the last trickle of her pulse faded away beneath my fingers.

‘She's dead,' I whispered into the doctor's ear.

The white figure with grey hair collapsed on to the smooth blanket and fell across the body, shaking convulsively.

‘Hush, hush,' I said softly to the woman in white. The doctor grimaced uneasily towards the door.

‘He has been tormenting me,' he said in a very low voice.

Between us we arranged to leave the weeping mother in the bedroom, to tell nothing to anyone else, and to remove the clerk to a distant room. There I said to him:

‘If you won't allow us to inject you with a sedative, we can't do anything. You are distracting us and preventing us from working.'

Finally he agreed. Weeping quietly, he took off his jacket, we rolled up the sleeve of the smart new shirt he had bought specially for his engagement party and gave him a morphine injection. The other doctor returned to the dead girl on the pretext of attending to her, while I stayed with the clerk. The morphine worked sooner than
I had expected. Within a quarter of an hour his maudlin laments became more and more incoherent, he grew drowsy, then laid his tear-stained face on his arm and fell asleep, oblivious at last to the weeping, the movement, the rustling and muffled sobs around us.

‘Look, my dear fellow, it's dangerous to try and go back now. You could easily lose your way,' the doctor whispered to me in the hallway. ‘Stay and spend the night here.'

‘No, I can't. I must go at all costs. The driver promised that I would be taken back at once.'

‘They can certainly take you back, but you must realise …'

‘I have three typhus patients whom I can't leave. I have to see them every night.'

‘Well, if that's the case …'

As we stood there in the hall he diluted some spirit with water and gave it to me to drink, which I immediately followed by eating a piece of ham. I felt a warm glow in my stomach and my sense of depression was dulled a little. I went back into the bedroom for a last look at the dead girl, glanced once more at the clerk, left the doctor a capsule of morphine, wrapped myself up and went out on to the porch.

The horses stood hanging their heads as the storm whistled and snow lashed at their flanks. A torch flickered.

‘Do you know the way?' I enquired as I wound a muffler across my mouth.

‘We know the way all right,' the driver replied gloomily (he was no longer wearing his helmet), ‘but you ought to stop here for the night …'

The very earflaps of his hat told me that he would almost rather die than go.

‘You ought to stay, sir,' added another man, who was holding the guttering torch. ‘It's bad out there.'

‘Eight miles …' I grumbled. ‘We'll make it. I have patients who are seriously ill …' And I climbed into the sleigh.

I confess I omitted to say that the mere thought of staying in that house of misfortune, where I was impotent and useless, was intolerable.

Hopelessly, the coachman sat down heavily on the driver's seat, straightened up and gave a jerk as we moved off through the gateway at a smart pace. The torch went out as though it had vanished or been doused. A minute later, though, something else caught my attention: turning round with difficulty, I noticed that not only was the torch no more to be seen but Shalometyevo itself and all its buildings had disappeared as if in a dream. This gave me an unpleasant shock.

‘That's pretty odd,' I half-thought, half-mumbled to myself. I stuck my nose out for a moment, but the weather was so terrible that I stuck it in again. The whole world had been rolled into one bundle that was being buffeted in every direction at once.

For a moment I wondered whether to turn back, but I rejected the idea, burrowed deeper into the hay at the bottom of the sledge as though in a boat, hunched myself up and closed my eyes. At once the scrap of green material on the lamp and a white face floated before my inner eye, immediately followed by a flash of realisation: ‘It's a fracture of the base of the skull … Yes, of course … that's it!' In a burst of confidence I felt that this must be the correct diagnosis. A brainwave—but what good was it? It was as useless now as it would have been earlier; there was
nothing to be done about it. What a ghastly thing to happen! What absurdly precarious lives we lead! What must be happening now in that house? It was too sickening even to contemplate. Then I began to feel sorry for myself: mine was a hard life. Everyone else was asleep now, their stoves a-glow, and once more I had been prevented from taking a proper bath. The blizzard was tossing me about like a leaf. Even when I did reach home, the chances were that I would be called out somewhere else. Or I would catch pneumonia and die out here … In this mood of self-pity I sank into the dark of oblivion, though I have no idea how long I spent in that state: this time I did not dream of being in a bath-house, because I was too cold. And it grew colder and colder.

When I opened my eyes a black back loomed in front of me, and I realised that we were not moving any longer.

‘Have we arrived?' I asked, blinking as I gazed blearily around me.

The black-coated driver shifted gloomily in his seat, then suddenly jumped down, and I had the impression that he was being whirled around. Without a trace of deference he said:

‘No we haven't … ought to listen to what people say … What did I tell you? It'll be the death of us and the horses too.'

‘Don't tell me you've lost the road?' A cold shiver went down my spine.

‘Road? What road?' the driver echoed in a despairing voice. ‘The road might be anywhere for all I can see now. There's not a sign of it … We've been driving for four hours, but God knows where we've been going. That's what comes of …'

Four hours. I stirred myself, felt for my watch and extracted my matches. Why did I bother? It was useless; not one match would light. I struck them, they sparked and were instantly blown out.

‘Four hours, I tell you,' said the driver in a funereal voice. ‘What are we going to do now?'

‘Where are we?'

The question was so stupid that the driver did not even feel obliged to reply. He turned to peer in various directions, and there were moments when I felt that he was standing still and the sleigh was swivelling round with me in it. I clambered out, to discover at once that I sank into snow up to my knees right beside the sleigh-runner. The rear horse was stuck up to its belly in a snowdrift, its mane hanging down to one side like a woman who has let down her hair.

‘Did the horses stop of their own accord?'

‘Yes. The wretched beasts are worn out.'

I suddenly remembered a short story I had read and for some reason felt a burst of resentment at Leo Tolstoy.

‘It was all right for him, living comfortably at Yasnaya Polyana,' I thought, ‘I bet he was never called out to people who were dying …'

I felt sorry for the fireman and myself. Then came another stab of wild fear, which I suppressed.

‘Don't be a coward,' I muttered to myself through clenched teeth.

At once came a surge of fiery energy.

‘Look,' I said, feeling my teeth freeze as I spoke, ‘we mustn't let ourselves get despondent in a situation like this, or we really shall be done for. The horses have had a bit of a rest by now, and we must get on the move again. You
go on ahead, get hold of the lead horse by the bridle and I'll drive. Unless we get out of this drift we'll be snowed up.'

Despite the utter dejection signalled by his earflaps, the driver floundered forward. Stumbling and falling, he made his way to the lead horse. Getting ourselves out of that drift seemed interminable. The figure of the driver was blotted from sight as the dry, stinging snow drove into my eyes.

‘Giddap!' groaned the driver.

‘Giddap! Giddap!' I shouted, slapping at the horses with the reins.

Little by little the horses dragged themselves forward, churning up the snow. The sleigh began to rock like a boat at sea. The driver seemed to shrink and then to grow again as he struggled painfully ahead.

For about a quarter of an hour we moved in this fashion, until I began at last to feel from the creak of the runners that we were on more even ground. With a surge of joy I noticed the steady flicker of the horses' hind hooves as they broke into a trot.

‘The snow's thinner here—we must be back on the road!' I shouted.

‘Uh-huh,' replied the driver. He stumbled back towards me and straightened up to his full height.