A Country Doctor's Notebook (16 page)

Did I really want to kill her?
Kill
her? How stupid and pointless. Hopeless. I don't want to think about it any more.

11th February
Perpetual blizzards … I'm sick of it. Alone every evening. I light the lamp and sit down. Of course I see people in the daytime, but I do my work mechanically. I've got used to the job, though. It's not as bad as I thought it would be.
And having worked in a military hospital has proved to be very useful, because it meant that I wasn't totally incompetent when I came to this place.

Today for the first time I performed the operation of turning a baby in the womb.

There are three of us here, buried under the snow: Anna Kirillovna,
feldsher
and midwife; the male
feldsher
, who is married; and myself. They live in an annexe. And I am on my own.

15th February
Last night an interesting thing happened. I was just going to bed when I suddenly felt pain in the region of my stomach. And what pain! I came out in a cold sweat. I must say that medicine as we know it is a most dubious science. Why, when someone has absolutely nothing wrong with his stomach or gut (such as appendicitis), when his liver and kidneys are in perfect shape, and his bowels are functioning perfectly normally, why should he be stricken one night with such pain that he starts to writhe all over the bed?

Groaning, I reached the kitchen, where the cook and her husband Vlas sleep. I sent Vlas for Anna Kirillovna. She came to my room and had to give me a morphine injection. She said I had turned quite green. From what?

I don't like our
feldsher
. He's unsociable, but Anna Kirillovna is very kind and intelligent. I am amazed that a woman like her, who is still young, can live completely alone in this snowbound tomb. Her husband is a prisoner of war in Germany.

I must give due praise to the man who first extracted
morphine from poppyheads. He was a true benefactor of mankind. The pain stopped seven minutes after the injection. Interesting: the pain passed over me in ceaseless waves, so that I had to gasp for breath, as though a red-hot crowbar were being thrust into my stomach and rotated. Four minutes after the injection I was able to distinguish the wave-like nature of the pain.

It would be a good thing if a doctor were able to test many more drugs on himself. He would then have a completely different understanding of their effect. After the injection I slept soundly and well for the first time in months—and I forgot completely about the woman who deceived me.

16th February
During surgery today Anna Kirillovna enquired how I felt and said that this was the first time she had seen me without a frown on my face.

‘Do I frown?'

‘Very much,' she replied firmly, adding that she had been struck by how taciturn I always was.

‘I'm that sort of person.'

But that was a lie. I had always been very cheerful before my disastrous love affair.

Dusk has set in early. I am alone in my quarters. The pain came again this evening, but it was not acute—a mere shadow of yesterday's pain. I felt it somewhere behind my breast bone. Fearing a recurrence of yesterday's attack, I injected myself in the thigh with one centigramme. The pain ceased almost instantaneously. A good thing Anna Kirillovna left the phial behind.

18th
Four injections. No harm in that.

21st February
Anna Kirillovna is behaving very oddly—just as though I weren't a doctor at all! 1½ syringes = 0.015 grammes morph.? Yes.

1st March
Take care, Doctor Polyakov!

Nonsense.

Twilight.
It is two weeks now since I last thought about the woman who deceived me. I no longer have the tune of her aria as Amneris on the brain. I am very proud of that. I am a man. Anna Kirillovna has become my mistress. It was inevitable. We are imprisoned on a desert island.

A change has come over the snow; it seems to have turned greyer. There are no more savage frosts, but snowstorms still blow up from time to time.

For the first minute there is a sensation of being touched on my neck. The touch grows warmer and spreads. In the second minute there is a sudden surge of cold in the pit of my stomach, after which I start to think with unusual clarity and experience a burst of mental energy. All unpleasant sensations stop completely. Man's inner powers are manifested at their absolute peak. And if I had not been spoiled
by my medical training, I would say that a man can only work normally after an injection of morphine. After all, what good is a man when the slightest attack of neuralgia can knock him completely off balance?

Anna K. is frightened. Calmed her, saying that since childhood I have been remarkable for having tremendous willpower.

2nd March
Rumours of great events. It seems that Nicholas II has been deposed.

I shall go to bed very early—about nine o'clock.

And my sleep will be sweet.

10th March
A revolution is going on ‘up there'.

The days are getting longer, the twilight seems faintly tinged with blue.

Never before have I had such dreams at dawn. They are double dreams. The main one, I would say, is made of glass. It is transparent.

This is what happens: I see a lighted lamp, fearfully bright, from which blazes a stream of many-coloured light. Amneris, swaying like a green feather, is singing. An unearthly orchestra is playing with a full, rich sound—although I cannot really convey this in words. In short, in a normal dream music is soundless (in a normal dream? What dream, may one ask, is ever normal! But I'm joking) … soundless, but in my dream the music sounds quite
heavenly. And best of all I can make the music louder or softer at will. It reminds me of a passage in
War and Peace
in which Petya Rostov experiences the same phenomenon when half asleep. Leo Tolstoy is a remarkable writer!

As to the dream's transparency, what happens is that through the iridescent colours of
Aida
the edge of my desk shows through with complete reality, through the study door I can see the lamp, the gleaming floor, and behind the wave of sound from the Bolshoi Theatre orchestra I can clearly hear the welcome tread of footsteps like muffled castanets.

That means it is eight o'clock, Anna K. is coming to tell me what is happening in the surgery.

She doesn't realise that I don't need waking, that I can hear everything and can talk to her.

I tried the following experiment yesterday:

Anna:
Sergei Vasilievich …
Myself:
I'm listening … (to the music, sotto voce: ‘Louder!')

The music: a powerful chord of D sharp.

Anna:
Twenty patients on the register.

Amneris sings …

But it can't be conveyed on paper.

Is there any harm in these dreams? Not at all. When they are over I get up, feel wide awake and cheerful. I've even started to take an interest in the work, which I never did before—not surprisingly, since I could never think of anything but my former mistress.

Whereas now I don't worry any more.

19th March
Last night I had a quarrel with Anna K.

‘I'm not going to make up the solution any more.'

I started to try and persuade her.

‘Don't be silly, my dear. I'm not a little boy, am I?'

‘I won't do it. It'll kill you.'

‘All right, please yourself. Don't you realise, though, that I've got pains in my chest?'

‘Get it treated.'

‘Where?'

‘Take a holiday. Morphine's not a cure.' Then after a moment's thought she added: ‘I can never forgive myself for having made up a second phial for you.'

‘What do you think I am—an addict?'

‘Yes, you're becoming an addict.'

‘So you won't?'

‘No, I won't.'

It was then that I first discovered in myself a nasty tendency to lose my temper and, worse, to shout at people when I am in the wrong.

However, this did not happen at once. I went into my bedroom and had a look: there was a very little left in the bottom of the phial. I drew it into the syringe, and it only filled a quarter of it. I threw the syringe away, almost breaking it, and shuddered. Carefully, I picked it up and examined it—not a single crack. I sat in the bedroom for twenty minutes. When I came out, she was gone.

Imagine—I couldn't bear it and went to look for her. I knocked on the lighted window of her quarters. Wrapped in a scarf, she came out on to the porch. The night was silent, the snow powdery and dry. Far away in the sky was a hint of coming spring.

‘Please, Anna Kirillovna, give me the keys to the dispensary.'

She whispered: ‘No, I won't.'

‘Kindly give me the keys to the dispensary. I'm speaking as a doctor.'

In the twilight I saw her expression change. She turned very white, her eyes seemed to sink into her head and they darkened. She replied in a voice which stirred me to pity. But at once my anger surged up again.

She said: ‘Why, why must you talk like this? Oh Sergei Vasilievich—I pity you.'

Just then she drew her hands from under her shawl and I saw that she was holding the keys. She had obviously gone over to my consulting room and removed them.

‘Give me the keys!' I said roughly.

And I snatched them out of her hand.

I set off towards the white-painted hospital building, picking my way along the rotten, swaying duckboards. Rage was boiling inside me, chiefly because I had not the slightest idea how to make up a morphine solution for hypodermic injection. I'm a doctor, not an assistant! I trembled as I went.

I could hear her walking behind me like a faithful dog. Tenderness welled up inside me, but I suppressed it. I turned round, bared my teeth and said:

‘Are you going to do it or not?'

She gave a despairing gesture as much as to say ‘What does it matter?' and answered quietly:

‘All right, I'll do it.'

An hour later I was myself again, and I naturally asked her to forgive me for my absurd rudeness. I don't know what happened to me: I was always polite before.

Then she did something extraordinary. She fell to her knees, clasped my hands and said:

‘I'm not angry with you. I know now that you're lost. I know it now. And I curse myself for giving you that first injection.'

I calmed her down as best I could, assuring her that none of this was her doing, that I was responsible for my own behaviour. I promised her that the very next day I would make a serious start on breaking the habit and would reduce the dosage.

‘How much did you inject just now?'

‘Not much. Three syringes of a 1% solution.'

She clasped her head and said nothing.

‘There's no cause for you to worry.'

In my heart of hearts I understood her concern. The fact is that hydrochloric morphium is terrifying stuff. You can very quickly get used to it. But surely mild habituation is not the same as becoming an addict?

To tell the truth, this woman is the only person I can really trust. She ought really to be my wife. I've forgotten the other woman, quite forgotten her. However, I have morphine to thank for that.

8th April 1917
This is torture.

9th April
This horrible spring weather.

The devil is in this phial. Cocaine—the devil in a phial!

This is its effect: on injecting one syringe of a 2% solution, you feel almost immediately a state of calm, which quickly grows into a delightful euphoria. This lasts for only a minute or two, then it vanishes without a trace as though it had never been. Then comes pain, horror, darkness.

Outside, the spring thaw is in noisy spate, blackbirds fly from branch to bare branch and in the distance the forest pierces the sky like a jagged row of black bristles; behind the trees, colouring a quarter of the sky, glows the first spring sunset.

I pace diagonally across the big, empty, lonely room in my quarters, from the door to the window and back again. How many times can I cover that stretch of floor? Fifteen or sixteen times, not more; then I have to turn round and go into the bedroom. Lying on a piece of gauze beside a phial is the syringe. I pick it up and after giving my puncture-riddled thigh a careless smear of iodine, I dig the needle into the skin. Far from feeling any pain, I have a foretaste of the euphoria which will overtake me in a moment. And here it comes. I am aware of its onset, for as Vlas the night watchman sits in the porch playing the accordion, the faint, muffled snatches of music sound like angelic voices, and the harsh bass chords wheezing from the bellows ring out like a celestial choir. But now comes the moment when, by some mysterious law that is not to be found in any book on pharmacology, the cocaine inside me turns into something different. I know what it is: it is a mixture of my blood and the devil himself. The sound of Vlas' accordion music falters and I hate the man, while the sunset growls restlessly and burns my entrails. This feeling comes over me several times in the course of the evening, until I realise that I have poisoned myself. My heart begins
to beat so hard that I can feel it thumping when I put my hands to my temples … Then my whole being sinks into the abyss and there are moments when I wonder whether Doctor Polyakov will ever come back to life.

13th April
I, the unfortunate Doctor Polyakov, who became addicted to morphine in February of this year, warn anyone who may suffer the same fate not to attempt to replace morphine with cocaine. Cocaine is a most foul and insidious poison. Yesterday Anna barely managed to revive me with camphor injections and today I am half dead.

6th May 1917
It is a long time since I last wrote anything in my diary. A pity, because in fact this is not a diary but a pathological history. Not only do I have a natural professional interest in it, but it is my only friend in the world (if one doesn't count my sad and often tearful mistress Anna). So if I am to record the progress of my disease, here it is: I inject myself with morphine twice every twenty-four hours—at five o'clock in the afternoon (after supper) and at midnight before going to bed. Two syringes of a 3% solution; my dose is thus 50 milligrammes. A fair amount!