Just then Helena and I were invited to the home of our foremost pediatrician, Dr. Josef Švejcar. During the visit, I mentioned that I would have to find some sort of employment to avoid any trouble with the authorities, but I wanted a job that required absolutely no qualifications. Could he find something for me in the hospital?
The professor was naturally surprised, and when I explained that I wouldn’t be accepted anyplace else, he told me there were jobs at the hospital for orderlies, cleaners, maybe some work in the kitchen, but those positions were so badly paid that no one stayed for long. If I really wanted something like that, he would let me know when there was an opening.
The next day someone called to inform me that an orderly position was available.
*
At the personnel department, I had to fill out all sorts of questionnaires. As my last job and place of employment, I wrote: professor in the Slavic department of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and gleefully imagined them writing to the university for my cadre file.
The personnel woman saw that I was asking for only part-time work and sent me for a medical examination.
The following Tuesday I reported to the nurse on duty. She’d apparently been given preliminary information and didn’t ask me anything, just told me my responsibilities. There were not many. In the morning I was to take the trash out to the furnace and burn everything, deliver containers of blood and urine samples to the laboratory, pick up the daily allotment of medicine from the pharmacy; in case of an emergency, I was to hurry immediately to the laboratory or the pharmacy. According to what was needed, I was to ferry patients in their wheelchairs to other exams or transfer them to another ward. Of course, I was to be available during the entire time of my shift.
I could have a twelve-hour shift, which, at part time, would be two days a week. Then the nurse showed me the orderlies’ room where I could stay if I didn’t have any work, even though, she was required to inform me, it was disallowed during work hours.
Thus I once again fell into the labor force, which is what such activity is called in a Socialist country. Each workday, as I soon learned, was divided into two parts of equal length. During the first, work took place; during the second, everyone pretended that work took place. Everyone simply killed time.
Socialist health care was free, and looked like it. In the morning, shortly before six o’clock, the merry-go-round of duties began for the nurses and orderlies. The ill were mercilessly awakened to have their temperature taken and their beds made up. Then the cleaning women burst in, and the nurses distributed medication and took blood and urine samples. Then came the doctors’ visits. In the meantime, I would take the trash out to the incinerator. Besides ordinary refuse, the trash contained, as is usual for a hospital, medicine packaging and lots of bloody bandages, broken casts, and, every now and then, a finger or an amputated leg, but I never had to remove any human limbs. I also often helped change the elderly who couldn’t control their bowels. Then I completed the rest of my duties and around ten o’clock went back to the orderlies’ room, pulled out a book, and devoted myself to reading. In the afternoon, there was practically nothing in the ward that required my attention. In a short time I read three volumes of Chekhov’s short stories (well suited for this place), a pocket edition of Kafka’s Amerika, Kierkegaard in the same format, and the memoirs of Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, in an English translation.
After their rounds, the nurses also gathered in a room that served as the medicine disposal site and as a room for the deceased. The nurses smoked, drank coffee, and chatted. If I ever joined them, they would ask me why I was there. If a patient kept buzzing, trying to get their attention, they would usually wait for him to stop; if he didn’t, one of them would go see what was the matter and then come back to continue their amusements. The pay corresponded to our essentially part-time work. Even had I been working full time, I’d never be able to support my family, let alone drive to work, which I did once when it was pouring rain and another time when I’d overslept.
A hospital is, of course, a place where people die. If a patient died during my shift, one of my duties was to transport the body to the morgue after an hour had passed (all the patients who died had to remain in the ward for at least an hour, probably in case they woke up — something that never happened during the three months I was there). If he died during the afternoon or night shift, an orderly specially entrusted with carting away the dead from the various hospital wards would come for him. If someone died toward the end of a shift, the nurses would hold on to the body for a bit and save “their” orderly from the unpleasant journey to that gloomy place containing refrigerators filled with the deceased. During my three months as an orderly, I had to go to the morgue only once.
I didn’t get very close to the other orderlies; only one of them had been doing this work for more than two years. He was a powerfully built man who worked in surgery, that is, during operations, where he brought the patients and then afterward transported them back to the intensive care unit. Because he actually did support himself with this job, he worked thirty-two-hour shifts, which were not difficult because most of the time he could sleep. My other colleague was a gangly asthenic with the movements and thoughts of a felon. If I overheard correctly, he had come here immediately after being released from prison. Both men were distinctive, and since I had decided to follow Gorky’s advice to go among the people, I tried to take firsthand notes as much as I could.
Directly across from the orderlies’ room was the intensive care unit where, of course, the work was much more accountable, and the best nurses worked there. One of them was Soňa, and sometimes when she stepped out to have a smoke, we chatted a bit. She didn’t strike me as belonging to this environment; although it was certainly not professional, she always shared some of her patients’ pain. Once during a downpour, I drove her home to Kobylisy. Then I sat for more than an hour in her little room. She put on a piano concert by Paderewski and then told me the story of her life. She’d been in love with a doctor and fled with him to Germany after the Soviet occupation. She had come back, but he had stayed and told her that she would join him in Germany when he obtained a job. Perhaps they would have allowed her to go, but even if they didn’t, at least she would have known that some higher power had kept her from her great love. But she never heard from him again, and now she was alone, living with her father and a stepmother who hated her.
She started asking about my writing and wanted to know if I’d write about things that were not supposed to be written or talked about. I assured her that if I thought there was something that needed to be discussed, I would not remain silent. The difficulty was that I wasn’t allowed to publish a line. She was surprised and almost in a whisper confided to me — I was sworn to secrecy (and I couldn’t mention her name if I wrote about it) — that upstairs, when they received a patient they assumed wouldn’t make it, they mixed a special cocktail of barbiturates. No one ever woke up afterward. “While down below,” she concluded, “we fuss to keep them from the worst.”
I wanted to know if this sort of thing happened often. She refused to say anything more on the subject but added that it took place without the knowledge of the doctors.
I realized that this was a Socialist version of euthanasia — it was done in the interests not of the suffering patient but of those who were assigned to him and who, at least according to the letter of the law, ruled the country.