A Country Doctor's Notebook (15 page)

I turned the sheet over. On the reverse side was a letter, written in small spidery handwriting:

‘Maria! Go down to casualty at once and fetch me the nurse on duty. What's her name? I forget … I mean the one who gave me this letter just now. Hurry.'

‘Very good, doctor.'

A few minutes later the nurse was standing in front of me, wet snow on the moulting cat fur that had been used for the collar of her coat.

‘Who brought this letter?'

‘I don't know who he was. A man with a beard. Said he worked for the co-op and was in town on business.'

‘Hmm … all right, you can go now. No, wait. I'll just write a note to the Medical Superintendent. Would you take it to him, please, and bring his answer back?'

The Medical Superintendent replied:

I spent that evening poring over the railway timetable. The way to reach Gorelovo was as follows: to catch the Moscow mail train at 2 p.m. the following afternoon, travel twenty miles by rail, get off at N. station, and then cover the remaining sixteen miles to Gorelovo hospital by sleigh.

‘With luck I should be in Gorelovo tomorrow night,' I reflected as I lay in bed. ‘What's the matter with him, I wonder? Typhus? Pneumonia? Neither, I should think … because if so, he would simply have written: “I have caught
pneumonia”. His letter was too vague, even faintly evasive. “Seriously ill … something unpleasant …”

‘What could that mean? Syphilis? Yes, no doubt about it, syphilis. He's appalled, he's concealing it, and he's afraid. But who, I'd like to know, am I going to find to drive me to Gorelovo? It would be just my luck to get to the station at nightfall and find there's no one to take me. No, no, I'll find a way. I'll find someone at the station who has some horses. Should I send him a telegram asking to be met at the station? No use. The telegram won't reach him until the day after I get there. It can't fly to Gorelovo. It would sit at the station until someone was driving out that way. I know that place. What a godforsaken hole!'

The letter on the prescription form lay on my bedside table in the circle of light shed by the lamp, beside it an ashtray bristling with cigarette ends, the outward sign of nagging insomnia. As I tossed about on the crumpled sheet, irritation began to get the better of me, and I started to resent the letter.

After all, if it was nothing worse than, say, syphilis, why didn't he come here himself? Why must I dash through a blizzard to go and see him? Was I supposed to cure him of syphilis or cancer of the aesophagus in one evening? Anyway how could he have cancer? He was two years younger than myself. He was 24 … ‘Seriously ill'. Sarcoma? It was an absurd, hysterical letter, enough to give the recipient migraine. There, it was starting: the nerve on my temple was starting to twitch; I would wake up in the morning to find that the tension in that nerve had moved to the crown of my head, half my head would feel as if it were clamped in a vice, and I would have to take pyramidon and caffeine. And where would I find pyramidon on a sleigh journey? I
should have to borrow one of the hospital's travelling fur coats; I would freeze to death in my own overcoat. What can be the matter with him? ‘… still a ray of hope', indeed! People write that sort of thing in novels, not in sober doctors' letters! Must get to sleep … stop thinking about it. It will all be clear tomorrow … tomorrow.

I turned the switch and darkness instantly engulfed my room. Sleep … that nerve was twitching. But I had no right to be angry with the man for his stupid letter without knowing what the matter was. The man was suffering and he had written to someone else in the way he thought best. And it was unkind to slander him, even mentally, simply because one was worried or suffering from migraine. Perhaps his letter wasn't dishonest or overdramatic at all. I had not seen Sergei Polyakov for two years, but I remembered him perfectly. He was always a very reasonable man. Yes, obviously some disaster had befallen him … And that nerve of mine was giving less trouble. Clearly I would be asleep soon. What was the mechanism of sleep? I had read about it once during my physiology course, but I had found it obscure. I didn't really know what sleep was. How did the brain cells fall asleep? To be honest, I had no idea. And I was almost certain that the man who wrote that textbook wasn't really very sure either. One theory is as good as another. There was Sergei Polyakov standing in his green medical student's uniform tunic with brass buttons, bending over a zinc-topped table, and there was a corpse on the table.

Hmm, I must be dreaming …

TAP, TAP … BANG, BANG, BANG … AHA … Who's that? What is it? … Someone's knocking—hell … Where am I? What's going on? Ah, yes, I'm lying in my bed … Why are they waking me up? They're allowed to because I'm on call tonight. Wake up, Doctor Bomgard. Maria has just shuffled across the lobby to open the door. What's the time? Half past midnight. That means I've only been asleep for an hour. How's the migraine? Yes, it's there all right.

A gentle knock at the door.

‘What is it?'

I slightly opened the door into the dining-room. A nurse's face was looking at me from the dark and I could see at once that it was pale, her eyes wide open with anxiety.

‘Who's been brought in?'

‘The doctor from the Gorelovo clinic,' the nurse replied in a loud, hoarse voice. ‘He's shot himself.'

‘
Polyakov?
Impossible! Polyakov?'

‘I don't know his name.'

‘I see … all right, I'll come at once. Run to the Medical Superintendent and wake him up this minute. Tell him I want him urgently in Casualty.'

The nurse rushed off, disappearing in a flash of white.

Two minutes later on the porch a wicked blizzard, dry and stinging, was lashing at my cheeks, lifting the skirts of my coat and freezing my startled body. An unsteady white light was flickering in Casualty Reception. In a swirl of snow on the porch I bumped into the Medical Superintendent, who was hastening in the same direction.

‘Is this your friend Polyakov?' he asked, coughing.

‘Apparently so. I don't understand it,' I replied as we both hurried inside.

A woman, warmly wrapped up, rose from a bench to meet us. Her eyes, familiar but now tear-stained, gazed at me from under the edge of a red-brown shawl. I recognised her as Marya Vlasievna, a midwife from Gorelovo and my devoted assistant in the labour ward of the Gorelovo hospital.

‘Is it Polyakov?' I asked.

‘Yes,' Marya Vlasievna answered. ‘It was so awful, doctor. I was shaking with terror all the way in case I might not get here in time.'

‘When …?'

‘This morning at dawn,' Marya Vlasievna muttered. ‘The night watchman came running and said he'd heard a shot from the doctor's quarters.'

Under the flickering, inadequate light of the lamp lay Doctor Polyakov. As soon as I caught sight of the stonelike rigidity of his feet I instinctively winced.

They took off his hat, to reveal his hair sticking damply to his scalp. The nurse, Marya Vlasievna, and I set to work on Polyakov and a white gauze bandage, with its spreading yellow and red stains, was revealed beneath his overcoat. His chest rose and fell feebly. I felt his pulse and shivered: the pulse was fading beneath my touch, slowing to a mere flicker and breaking off, then reviving in a cluster of fast, unsteady beats. The surgeon's hand had already reached for his shoulder and was pinching up a fold of pale skin to make a camphor injection. At that moment the wounded man unglued his mouth, revealing a pinkish trickle of blood on it, and with a faint movement of his bluish lips he said in a dry, weak voice:

‘To hell with camphor. Forget it.'

‘Shut up,' the surgeon retorted, injecting the yellow oil beneath the skin.

The pericardium seems to be damaged,' Marya Vlasievna whispered, clutching the edge of the table and staring at the wounded man's smooth eyelids (his eyes were shut). Greyish-violet shadows, like the shadows cast at sunset, showed more and more clearly in the hollows around his nostrils, and a fine sweat, like droplets of mercury, was forming in the shadows.

‘Revolver?' the surgeon asked, his cheek twitching.

‘Automatic.' Marya Vlasievna mouthed the word.

‘Hell …' the surgeon barked as if in angry frustration, made a brusque gesture and strode away.

I turned to him in alarm, not understanding. Another man's eyes appeared for a moment behind the patient's shoulder—a second doctor had come.

Suddenly Polyakov's mouth twisted into a feeble grimace, like a sleepy person trying to blow a fly off his nose, and then his lower jaw began to move as though he was choking on a lump of food and was trying to swallow it. Anyone who has seen fatal gunshot wounds will be familiar with this movement. Marya Vlasievna frowned painfully and sighed.

‘I want … Doctor Bomgard,' Polyakov said, almost inaudibly.

‘I'm here,' I whispered softly, close to his lips.

‘The notebook's for you …' Polyakov muttered hoarsely and even more faintly.

With this he opened his eyes and raised them to the gloomy, shadowy ceiling. His dark pupils were lit by an inner light, the whites of his eyes seemed to grow translucent,
bluish. His eyes turned upwards, then a film came over them and their momentary brightness faded.

Doctor Polyakov was dead.

NIGHT. NEARLY DAWN. THE LAMP IS BURNING very brightly because the town is asleep and there is only a light load on the electricity supply. Everything is silent. Polyakov's body is lying in the chapel. Night.

My eyes are reddened from reading, and on the table in front of me lie an open envelope and a sheet of paper. The letter reads:

There was a postscript in block capitals:

Alongside the suicide note was an ordinary school exercise book in a black oilcloth cover. The first half of the pages had been torn out. In the remaining half was a series of jottings; at first they were in ink or pencil in small neat handwriting, then towards the end of the notebook they changed to indelible pencil or red crayon in an untidy, jerky hand and with many of the words abbreviated.

20th January 1917
 … and a good thing too. The more remote the better, thank God. I don't want to see people and here I shall see no one, apart from sick peasants, and I don't suppose they are likely to open up my wound. The others, incidentally, have been assigned to practices quite as remote as mine. Our graduating year, not being liable for active service (second-line reservists of the 1916 class), has been posted to local government clinics all over the country. But who cares, anyway? Of my friends, I have only had news of Ivanov and Bomgard. Ivanov chose to go to Archangel Province (de gustibus …) and Bomgard, so my woman
feldsher
tells me, is in some godforsaken spot three districts away from here, at Gorelovo. I thought of writing to him, but changed my mind. I don't want to have anything to do with people.

21st January
Blizzard. Nothing else.

25th January
Brilliant sunset. Slight attack of migraine—mixture of
aminopyrine, caffeine and citric acid, 1.0 gramme in powder form. Is it all right to take one gramme? Of course it is.

3rd February
Today I received last week's newspapers. I didn't read them, but couldn't help looking at the theatre page all the same.
Aida
was on last week. That means she was walking on stage and singing: ‘Oh, my beloved, come to me …'

She has an extraordinary voice. How strange it is that such a clear powerful voice should belong to a woman with such a mean little soul …

(
here there is a gap, where two or three pages have been torn out
)

 … of course, you're being unreasonable, Doctor Polyakov. And what schoolboyish idiocy to use so much filthy language on a woman because she left you! She didn't want to go on living with you, so she went. That's all. Very simple, really. An opera singer fell for a young doctor, lived with him for a year and then walked out.