But whatever. They put me in bed and tucked me in with a warm blanket. To the right was an asthmatic guy with bronchitis, to the left – one with arthritis, up by the wall – a dude with ulcers, desiccated as a mummy, and up by the other wall a couple of half-paralyzed folks with strokes who had their own stroke talk to pass the time. And there I was – with whatever I had – in the middle. A circus! You, my dear Oleg Petrovich, Doctor Vdovin said, have podagra, the disease of kings. That’s what he called it. But I hurt like hell after the exam, so I told him to go kiss an Eskimo’s ass, milk a walrus, make some ice-cream and feed it to baby penguins, so he left without saying anything more.
Things are looking rotten: scream – no one will hear you. The paralyzed dudes pee on themselves, the ulcer guy’s mute as a log and just keeps checking his tongue in the mirror, and the guy with asthma sounds like he’s about ready to go pay St. Peter a visit. The gramps to my right is all I’ve got: he seems to have a sense of humor – when he heard me send Vdovin to hell, he chuckled and I glimpsed this mischievous glint in his eyes. Aha, I thought, you’re my guy; you won’t let me rot here – and my back’s on fire, Vdovin’s made it all worse with his poking and prodding.
I could see gramps was bored, but with me being the new guy, he was hanging back for the time being. Instead, he went to work on the guy to my right.
“Semyonych, you sound like a steam-train pushing uphill – are you fixing to die or something?”
And Semyonych, of course, can only lie there and gasp for air like a fish out of the water – he’s got asthma. Mitryunchev (that was the old dude’s name) won’t let go:
“Semyonych, I tell you what – you oughtta’ ask for a different bed. That one you got’s cursed – no one lasts longer than two days on it, trust me.”
The poor Semyonych went into a bit of contortion then, coughing and wheezing, so I had to throw my slipper at Mitryunchev – it hit the top of his head, and he vanished.
A bit later, he came back, with tea for Semyonych: of course, he wasn’t nagging him out of meanness, he was just bored. He helped him drink his tea, like a nurse, fluffed his pillow, and got him talking. Old dudes, they only have one thing to talk about: the war, and who fought where. Turns out, they both stormed Budapest. Well, you should’ve seen the uproar: they jumped up and waved their arms, and went hugging and kissing each other – obviously, they were going to want a drink. Sure enough, five minutes later, Semyonych turns to me (Mitryunchev got him turned around in a blink):
“Olezhek, help us out here – we’ve got to celebrate.”
Why shouldn’t I help – that’s about the only joy those geezers got left in their lives, and Semyonych sat there glowing like a marine’s belt buckle, all his asthma disappeared. He pulled his wallet out of his bedside table, found a 10-ruble note in there, and handed it to me (Mitryunchev, of course, was broke – his whole life he’d never had much). I called a guy I knew, asked him to run over a bottle for us – my old connections worked like a charm for stuff like that – and handed the bottle over to my veterans. I didn’t drink.
They finished it in a flash. Old Mitryunchev only looked fragile, and when it came to business, turned out he was in the penal battalion: he could tie that bottle into knots and squeeze it dry.17 He threw them back in six seconds each – I saw it with my own eyes, and his pal Semyonych wasn’t far behind.
Finally, they called lights out. In the glow of the night-light, I could see Semyonych was feeling good: his eyes glistened, he even got up from his bed.
“Guys! Guys, why did I listen to them, I should’ve done this a long time ago – I’m breathing now. I’m breathing!” he said, glowing like a first-grader. He held his pillow in his hands and dabbed his face with it: tears were running down his cheeks. It must have really been a long time since he felt so good.
He spent about an hour in this bliss; then the blood-vessels must have contracted again, and he turned for the worse: he couldn’t stay lying down, but he couldn’t stay sitting up either, his breath went in and out quick and shallow with this small sort of whimper:
“Nadya, Nadya, Nadenka...”
He was trying to call the nurse. As soon as I’d get up – “Semyonych, do you want me to go get her?” – Mitryunchev would hiss from his back: “Just go ahead and croak, you old bastard! Croak but don’t give us up!” And Semyonych shook his head, he was hard as a flint, too.
After a while, he got up and walked around a bit, then came and sat at the edge of my bed, leaned against my head rail and whimpered his “Nadya, Nadya, Nadenka...” as if raving. Mitryunchev stuck to his guns:
“Croak already, you bastard! You’ve got nothing left, but don’t you dare give us up.”
I looked into Semyonych’s eyes – his pupils were wide with fear, huge, but he still wouldn’t let me go get the nurse. At some point, he felt ever so slightly better and begged me:
“Oleg, please, can I rest on top of you just for a bit? If I can have something hard under my chest, it helps.”
What could I say? He lay down across my chest, and he was heavy as hell, so my back cramped right away, but not too badly, I could live with it. So there we lay. Semyonych started gasping again, but in a different way: he could inhale, but couldn’t let the air out – it was like he was choking. The choking made him shake. He lay on me, twitching, for another ten minutes or so, then went to get up, but keeled to his right and went down on the floor. Like a sack.
Mitryunchev jumped up, felt for the pulse, then closed Semyonych’s eyes and folded his hands on his chest.
“End of the line,” he said. “Go fetch the nurse,” he ordered, and ran out, ostensibly to smoke in the bathroom where no one would find him. I believed him on the spot; he’d seen more than his fair share of dead people, I figured, so he knew what he was looking at. And I was right: later he told me some stories that would make your hair stand up; he doesn’t see death the way you or I do.
Of course it was I who had to go to the nurse station. Mitryunchev wouldn’t show his face: he was afraid someone’d smell the alcohol on him. It was also I who helped Nadezhda carry Semyonych to the morgue on a stretcher – you try finding anyone else in the hospital in the middle of the night.
In the morning, at breakfast, I saw Mitryunchev put his boiled egg in his pocket and then reach for the one that was meant for Semyonych. I thought, whatever, let him eat for two, but the old weasel had something else in mind.
At noon, Vdovin entered our room and headed straight for the two of us. Gramps was ready though: he was already squatting on his mattress, under his blanket draped on him like a tent. He made small clucking noises like a chicken in the roost. Vdovin, of course, has seen enough of the old man’s tricks and was not going to be taken in.
“Mitryunchev!” he thundered. “You drank with Semyonych, rest his soul, didn’t you? Pack up and get the hell out of here back to your village!”
Gramps looked as if he hadn’t heard the doctor; he stared into the middle distance and mumbled:
“Yes, yes, Sergei Sergeyevich, just a second, I will, right away, just as soon as I lay this egg.”
Vdovin couldn’t help it – he chuckled, and, of course, that’s exactly what the old man was waiting for: he flailed his arms, and twitched all over, exactly like a hen, and then pulled the egg from under himself and offered it to Vdovin with an absolutely innocent face.
“Here, Sergei Sergeyevich, send it to the Academy of Sciences to be studied, I swear I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’ve been laying eggs for two days now. Here, ask Oleg, he won’t let me lie,” he said pitifully and made such a grimace that Vdovin burst out laughing in earnest.