The staff here are very sympathetic and are themselves urging me to take sick leave.
Outward appearance: thin, pale with a waxen pallor.
I took a bath and afterwards weighed myself on the hospital scales. Last year I weighed 148 lbs (67 kgs); now I weigh 120 lbs (54 kgs). I had a fright as I watched the needle on the dial, but the shock soon passed.
My forearms and thighs are a mass of unhealed abscesses. I don’t know how to prepare sterile solutions, besides which I have injected myself with an unsterilised syringe on about three occasions when I was in a great hurry to go out on my rounds.
This can’t be allowed to go on.
18th January
I had the following hallucination:
I was sitting in front of a blank, dark window expecting some kind of pale figures to appear. The suspense was intolerable. Yet there was nothing there except the blind. I fetched some gauze from the hospital and draped it over the window. I was unable to think of a rational excuse for my action.
Hell, why should I have to find a pretext for every single thing I do? What I am living is not a normal existence, but torture.
Do I express my thoughts lucidly?
I think I do.
What is my life? An absurdity.
19th January
Today during the break in consulting hours, when we were relaxing and having a smoke in the dispensary, the feldsher started to tell a story as he wrapped powders in little screws of paper. Laughing for some reason, he described how a woman feldsher had become a morphine addict; unable to get the drug, she had swallowed half a tumbler full of an infusion of opium. I did not not know where to look during this painful story. Why on earth did he find it amusing? Why?
I slunk furtively out of the dispensary.
I wanted to say: ‘What’s so funny about that affliction?’ But I restrained myself.
In my position I cannot afford to be too rude to people.
That feldsher is as cruel as those psychiatrists who are so utterly, completely incapable of helping their patients.
Totally incapable.
I wrote the last entry during a period of abstinence and much of what I said was unfair.
A moonlit night. I am lying down, feeling weak after a fit of vomiting. I can hardly lift my hands, so am scribbling my thoughts in pencil. My mind is calm and serene. For a few hours I am happy. Soon I shall sleep. Overhead is the moon, surrounded by a halo. Nothing upsets me after an injection.
1st February
Anna has arrived. She looks sallow and ill.
I have driven her to the end of her tether. This terrible wrong weighs on my conscience.
I have given her my oath that I will leave here in mid-February.
Will I do as I have promised?
Yes, I will.
Provided I am still alive.
3rd February
So now I am poised at the top of a slope. It is icy, slippery and as endlessly long as the hill down which Kaj’s sledge ran in Hans Andersen’s fairy tale. This is my last ride down this slope, and I know what is waiting for me at the bottom. Oh Anna, terrible grief will soon be your reward for having loved me …
11th February
I have decided to appeal to Bomgard. Why to him? Because he is not a psychiatrist; because he’s young and we were friends at university. He is healthy and tough yet kind-hearted, if I have gauged his character right. Perhaps he will be reli … sympathetic. He will think of some solution. He can take me to Moscow if he wants to. I can’t go to him. My sick leave has been approved. I am not going to work in the hospital, but am lying in bed.
I swore at the feldsher. He just laughed … It doesn’t matter. He had come to report to me, and offered to sound my respiration and heartbeat.
I refused to let him. Must I go on finding excuses for refusing? I am sick of inventing pretexts.
The note has been sent off to Bomgard.
People! Won’t anyone help me?
I am lapsing into outbursts of self-pity. If anybody were to read this they would find it maudlin and insincere. But no one will read it.
Before writing to Bomgard, all my memories came back to me. I had a particular recollection of a Moscow railway station in November, when I was running away from the clinic. What an appalling evening that was. I had gone to a lavatory in the station to inject my stolen morphine. It was a nightmare. People were banging on the door, shouting and swearing at me for spending too long in there, my hands were shaking and the doorhandle was rattling so violently that I thought the door would burst open at any moment.
This was when I started to develop abscesses.
I wept the night that I remembered that incident.
12th Night
I wept again. Why does this disgusting weakness come over me at night?
13th February 1918. Dawn, Gorelovo
I can congratulate myself: I have not had an injection for fourteen hours! Fourteen! An unbelievable number. Murky yellowish light of dawn. Soon I shall be quite cured.
On mature reflection I don’t need Bomgard, or anyone else for that matter. It would be shameful to prolong my life a minute more. Certainly not a life like mine. The remedy is right beside me. Why didn’t I think of it before?
Well, let’s get it over with. I owe nothing to anyone. I have destroyed only myself. And Anna. What else can I do?
Time will heal all, as Amneris sang. It’s easy and simple enough for her.
This notebook is for Bomgard. That’s all …
5
I read Sergei Polyakov’s notes at dawn on the 14th February 1918 in that faraway little country town. They are reproduced here in full, without the slightest alteration. Not being a psychiatrist, I cannot say with certainty whether or not they are instructive or useful though I believe they are.
Now that ten years have passed, the pity and terror evoked by this diary have, of course, faded. This is natural, but on rereading the jottings, now, when Polyakov’s body has long since decayed and the memory of him vanished for ever, I still find them interesting. Are they of value? I shall not presume to make a firm judgement on that point. Anna K. died of typhus in 1922 in the same country practice where she had always worked. Amneris—Polyakov’s first mistress—has gone abroad and will not return.
Should I publish the diary which was entrusted to me?
I should. Here it is.
Doctor Bomgard.
THE MURDERER
DOCTOR YASHVIN GAVE A CURIOUSLY WRY, ironic grin and asked: ‘May I tear the leaf off the calendar? It’s exactly midnight, so now it’s the second of the month.’
‘Go ahead, by all means,’ I answered.
Yashvin took hold of a corner of the topmost leaf with his slender white fingers and carefully tore it off, revealing another cheap, nasty sheet of paper printed with the figure ‘2’ and the word ‘Friday’. But something on that greyish page seemed to seize his interest. He narrowed his eyes as he looked at it, then raised his glance and gazed into the distance; he was evidently seeing some mysterious scene visible only to himself, somewhere beyond the wall of my room—or perhaps far beyond the Moscow night and the raw grip of a February frost.
‘What’s on his mind?’ I wondered, glancing at him. I had always been intrigued by Doctor Yashvin. Somehow his appearance did not match his profession. Strangers always took him for an actor. He had dark hair but a very white skin, and this made him both conspicuous and attractive. He was very smoothly shaven, he dressed impeccably, was extremely fond of the theatre and could discuss it with great taste and knowledge. But what really distinguished him from our interns and from my other guests that evening were his shoes. There were five of us in the room and four were wearing cheap box-calf boots with clumsy, rounded toes, but Doctor Yashvin wore pointed patent leather shoes and yellow spats. I must add, though, that Yashvin’s dandyish appearance was never exactly offensive and, to give him his due, he was a very good doctor. He was bold, successful, and most important, he found time to keep up
his reading, in spite of regular visits to The Valkyrie and The Barber of Seville.
His shoes, however, were not the most interesting thing about him. What fascinated me was one remarkable characteristic: his gift, which he would occasionally display, of being a marvellous raconteur, even though he was usually a quiet and decidedly withdrawn man. He spoke very deliberately without striving for effect, without the average man’s redundant verbiage and humming and hawing, and always on very interesting topics. The reserved, elegant doctor seemed to light up, his pale right hand making occasional short, smooth, economical gestures as if he were punctuating his account with little milestones in the air; he never smiled when telling something funny, and his similes were sometimes so apt and colourful that as I listened to him I was always disturbed by one thought:
‘You are a very good doctor, but you’ve chosen the wrong career. You should have been a writer.’
Now, too, this thought flashed through my head, even though Yashvin was not talking but screwing up his eyes at the figure ‘2’ and at some imaginary object in the distance.
‘What is he looking at? Maybe there’s a picture.’ I looked over my shoulder and saw that the picture was totally uninteresting. It depicted an improbable-looking horse with an exaggerated chest and next to it an engine. The caption read: ‘Comparative size of horse (one horsepower) and engine (500 horsepower).’
‘This is all nonsense,’ I said, continuing the conversation. ‘Banal prejudice. People are most unfair to doctors and to us surgeons in particular. Just think: a man does a hundred appendectomies and the hundred and first patient expires on the operating table. Is that murder?’
‘They’re bound to say it is,’ Doctor Gips replied.
‘And if the patient is a married woman, the husband will come to the surgery and throw a chair at you,’ Doctor Plonsky affirmed confidently; he even smiled, and we all smiled, although there is nothing very funny about people hurling chairs around the surgery.
‘I can’t bear it, because it rings so false, when someone says penitentially: “I have killed, ah me, I’m a murderer” ’ I continued. ‘No doctor murders anyone, and if someone dies on you, then it’s just bad luck. No, really, it’s simply a joke! Murder is not part of our profession. How can it be? I call murder the premeditated killing of a person, or if you insist, the desire to kill him. A surgeon with a pistol in his hand—that, I’ll admit, might be murder. But I’ve never met any such surgeon in my life, nor am I likely to.’
As Doctor Yashvin suddenly turned his head towards me, I noticed that his expression had become grim. He said:
‘I am at your service.’
At the same time he tugged at his tie and once again gave a crooked grin with one corner of his mouth, though not with his eyes.
We looked at him in astonishment.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘I have killed a man,’ he explained.
‘When?’ I asked absurdly.
Yashvin pointed to the number ‘2’ and answered:
‘It’s an extraordinary coincidence. As soon as you started talking about death, I noticed the calendar and saw that it was the second. But in any case I remember this night every year. You see, seven years ago to the very night, and even, indeed …’ Yashvin pulled out his black watch and glanced at it, ‘… yes, almost to the very hour, on the night of the 1st and 2nd of February, I killed him.’
‘A patient?’ Gips asked.
‘Yes, a patient.’
‘But not deliberately?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I can guess,’ Plonsky, the sceptic, remarked through clenched teeth. ‘He probably had cancer and was dying in torment, and you gave him ten times the normal dose of morphine.’
‘No, morphine had nothing to do with it. Nor did he have any sort of cancer. The weather was frosty—I remember it perfectly—about fifteen degrees below zero, and there were stars in the sky. Ah, what stars there are in the Ukraine. I’ve been living in Moscow almost seven years, but I still feel drawn to my homeland. My heart aches, I get a terrible urge to board a train and be off. To see the cliffs covered in snow, the Dnieper … there’s no more beautiful city in the world than Kiev.’
Yashvin put the calendar page in his wallet, curled himself up in the armchair and went on:
‘It was a grim city, at a grim time … and I saw terrible things, such as you in Moscow never saw. This was in 1919, on the first of February as it happens. It was twilight, about six o’clock in the evening. I found myself doing something rather strange in that twilight. A lamp was burning on the desk in my study, the room was warm and cosy, but I was sitting on the floor bending over a small suitcase, cramming it with all sorts of rubbish, and whispering to myself:
‘ “Must get away, must get away …”
‘I would put in a shirt and take it out again—the damn thing wouldn’t fit in. The case was tiny, my underpants took up so much space, then there were hundreds of cigarettes and my stethoscope, all of which were bulging out of the bag. I flung the shirt away and pricked up my ears. The windowframes were sealed with putty for the winter, so the sound was deadened, but you could still hear it … far, far away there was a low rumble, like something being dragged along—boo-oom, boo-oom … Heavy guns. The echo would die away, and then silence. I looked out of the window—I lived on a steep slope, at the top of St Aleksei’s Hill, and I could see the whole of Podol, the Lower City. Night was drawing in from the west, the direction of the Dnieper, enveloping the houses, and rows of windows were lighting up. Then followed another salvo. And each time a rumble came from the far side of the Dnieper, I would whisper:
‘ “Go on, keep it up.”
‘This was the situation: the whole city knew that Petlyura was just about to abandon it—if not that night, then the next night. The Bolsheviks were advancing from the west bank of the Dnieper and rumour had it that they were in great strength. I must admit that the whole city was not merely impatient but even enthusiastic for their arrival. The atrocities committed by Petlyura’s men in Kiev for the last month that they held it were beyond anything you can imagine. Pogroms were whipped up every minute and people were murdered daily, especially Jews of course. Whenever they wanted to requisition something, cars would hurtle through the city manned by troops wearing fur hats with tassels of red braid, and there had been ceaseless gunfire in the distance for the last few days. Night and day. Everyone was in a state of something like exhaustion, with a frightened, hunted look. Only the day before, two corpses had been lying in the snow under my windows for half a day. One was wearing a grey overcoat and the other a black peasant shirt; neither had boots. Passers-by either shied away or gathered in crowds to stare, and a few bareheaded peasant women darted out of gateways, shook their fists at the sky and shouted:
‘ “Just you wait till the Bolsheviks come.”
‘The sight of these two wretched men, killed for some unknown reason, was sickening, and so in the end I too started looking forward to the Bolsheviks’ arrival. They were coming nearer and nearer. Darkness was falling, and from the distance came rumblings, as if in the very bowels of the earth. So with my lamp giving out a light that was both reassuring and yet disturbing, I was completely alone in the flat; my books were scattered everywhere (for in all this chaos I had cherished the insane hope of studying for a higher degree) and I myself was crouched over a suitcase.
‘To tell you the truth, events had seized me by the hair and dragged me along with them: everything had been happening as though in some hellish nightmare. I had come back that evening from a workers’ hospital in the suburbs where I was an intern in the female surgery department, and on my arrival I had found an envelope stuck in the letter-box with an unpleasantly official look. I tore it open there and then on the landing, read the contents and sat down on the top stair.
‘The note, typed in blue-black ink, was in Ukrainian. Translated into Russian it read:
‘ “On receipt of this you are to report to the Army Medical Directorate w
ithin two hours to await instructions …”
‘This was a summons from that same gallant army, led by “Boss” Petlyura, which left corpses in the street and indulged in pogroms. And I, with a red cross armband, was to join that company.
‘I did not waste much time day-dreaming on the staircase. I leaped up like a jack-in-the-box and went into my flat; this is where my suitcase came on the scene. I quickly worked out a plan: I would leave the flat, taking a change of underwear, and make my way to a feldsher friend of mine who lived on the outskirts, a man of doleful aspect and manifest Bolshevik sympathies. I would stay with him until Petlyura was thrown out, for there could be no doubt that he was going to be defeated. Or maybe the long-awaited Bolsheviks were a myth? Where were the guns? Silence had fallen. No, there was the rumbling again.
‘I threw the shirt away angrily, snapped the lock of the suitcase, put an automatic and a spare magazine into my pocket, and donned my greatcoat with its red cross armband. Then I looked around miserably, put out the lamp and groped my way through the shadowy twilight into the hall. There I turned on the light, fastened the hood on to my greatcoat and opened the door to the landing.
‘That instant I heard a cough, and two figures with short cavalry carbines slung over their shoulders stepped into my hall. One was wearing spurs, the other was not, and both had tall fur hats with blue tassels which dangled jauntily down to theircheeks.
‘My heart missed a beat.
‘ “Are you Doctor Yashvin?” the first trooper asked in Ukrainian.
‘ “Yes, I am,” I answered tonelessly.
‘ “You’re coming with us,” he said.