‘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.
4
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:
My dear friend,
I shall not wait for you. I have decided against treatment. It’s hopeless. And I don’t want to torment myself any longer. I have tried it long enough. I warn others to beware of the white crystals dissolved in 25 parts water. I relied on them too much and they have destroyed me. I bequeath you my diary. You have always struck me as a person of an enquiring nature and a connoisseur of human documents. If you are interested, read the story of my illness.
Farewell.
Ever yours, Sergei Polyakov.
There was a postscript in block capitals:
NO ONE IS TO BE BLAMED FOR MY DEATH.
Doctor S. Polyakov.
13th February, 1918.
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.
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 i
mmediately 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.