Vdovin took the egg and fingered it, and the old man started oohing and aahing again, and gasping and clucking, and in between all that managed to talk, in starts and stops:
“Sergei Sergeyevich, my dear, OOH, do something, I beg you! What is... AAH... happening to me?! This thing – once it starts, ain’t nothing can stop it! Argh!” he gasped and pulled another egg from under himself, still warm. And he made it look so natural – with his head moving side to side, cheeks puffed out, eyes rolled – you could charge admission.
Vdovin, however, was not impressed.
“Thank you for the eggs, Mitryunchev,” he said. “But do pack your stuff, you’ve been here long enough. Tell me honestly – why’d you drink that vodka yesterday?”
But Mitryunchev’s also an old hand at these games, so he didn’t give up so easily either.
“Oh, oh, doctor, please, it’s coming again! Another one! Oh, it’ll kill me, please – you don’t believe me, then feel for yourself!” he grabbed the surgeon’s hand and pulled him closer, and all with such desperation in his eyes it’d melt a stone. Vdovin went along with it and stuck his hand under the blanket – he must’ve wanted to pinch the clown from under there – and that’s when Mitryunchev dropped the bombshelclass="underline" he tensed for an instant, then ripped one – loud enough to rattle the windows.
The room just fell over laughing. The guy with the ulcers slid off his bed, he was laughing so hard, and the paralyzed dudes just made one high-pitched whine – “eee-eee-ee!” with tears coming out of the their eyes. Vdovin froze for a second, then cursed and fled.
The next day he came back as if nothing had happened – meaning, he’d forgiven the old man. Vdovin pulled up a stool, and told us that Semyonych had no more than a few days left to live, and that was a miracle in itself, given that his lungs were worn to threads. So, really, the vodka only cut his suffering short by a bit. Still, the doctor promised to catch Mitryunchev red-handed the next time he tried to pull something, and to throw him out no matter what – even if the eggs he laid were golden.
Gramps perked up after that; strutted around all proud.
“Vdovin,” he informed me, “is always like that: he keeps threatening to kick me out of here, but he doesn’t really mean it – he knows my situation.”
The victory kept the old man in good spirits for the day, then wore off. At night he sulked; his heart ached – he remembered Semyonych. He grabbed me by the shoulder:
“Olezhek, you say we should all fight and live, but what have I ever seen in this life? I only got out of Stargorod during the war,” he lamented.
He started telling me about his life, his childhood and stuff, and I’m an orphan myself – I don’t need stories to know about hunger. I grabbed my grandpa and carried him to the bathroom, gave him a bath, took his mind off his blues, and brought him back to bed. Only it was scary to look at his body – it’s all holes. It sort of made me gasp, and gramps perked up: he’s a hero compared to me! I said, you’re full of it, gramps – people only fought in the penal battalion to first blood. And he goes, oh yeah? How about second? Or third? They sent me right back into the meat grinder five times – from the hospitals.
I really don’t know what part of what he said was true and what was lies, but there wasn’t an inch of him that hadn’t been mangled, and that’s a fact.
So there we were, the two of us – clean (I took a shower too, while we were at it), warm in our beds and not the least bit sleepy (you do nothing but sit around all day) – and that’s when Mitryunchev confessed to me that he only pretends to be sick.
“How should I put it, Olezhek? At nights, sometimes I get so sad – it just comes over me, like goo, this sadness, like it crawls in through the window and under the door. I started dreaming of dead people – there were days I used to sleep on top of them, you’d be so tired in the trenches, you fell where you stood, right onto the dead. This must be their payback for me now: they come and talk to me, but I can’t understand what they are saying. Probably, they want to take me with them, but what the heck do they want with me – I saw worse things in the war, they’ve nothing new to show me. Sometimes, to be honest, I do wonder if I’m losing it, but then again, I don’t think so, the wheels seem to keep spinning. That was a long time ago, in the war, when I was wild. I’m quiet now. So, you see, in winters, I run away from them, the dead, here, to the hospital. I’ve a whole stack of maladies – I just never had time to pay them any mind before, but now they come in handy: I’d dig around in my magical bag of tricks and pull out something shiny for Vdovin. He can’t do anything about me: I’m a veteran, and disabled to boot, and I’ve got heart trouble, and hypertension, and what not. He lets me in. I usually spend about three months here. They can’t really fix anything, but I get three meals a day, and that, if you ask me, is a good start. Vdovin’s a kind man, not like Pankratov. Vdovin – he, if he doesn’t understand why something does what it does will cut you open, dig around in there for appearances’ sake, and put everything back the way it was – he’ll never do any harm. Pankratov, on the other hand, is a pure Nazi: he likes experimenting on his patients, you know how many he’s dispatched to the next world already? All for his dissertation.”
He was a funny old geezer, my Mitryunchev. We got to be friends. Whenever he’d sulk, I’d yell at him and find him a chore. Meanwhile, one of our paralyzed dudes kicked the bucket, and so did the guy with the ulcers after Pankratov’s surgery. That happened in the ICU, not in our own room, but still. They brought in some new people, but the gramps and I didn’t take to them, and mostly kept to ourselves. We had nothing to do all day, so he nagged me to play cards with him. All right. I was bored too, so I started beating him. Little by little, I won all his clothes and all his medals too (he always came to the hospital decked out as if for a parade). This got him perked up again: I could see the old gleam in his eyes – he’s gotten into the heat of it, but he had nothing left to gamble. So he was stuck.
I saw him trying to figure something out; he paced the room, and I pretended I was sleeping – in fact, my back hurt and I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer, came to my bed and perched on the edge:
“Is it hurting bad today, Olezhek?” he asked, all concerned-like.
“Go away, you mooch, I don’t give on Tuesdays.”
He saw he wouldn’t get far on kindness alone, and decided to be bold:
“Son, give me my suit-coat back, I need to go to town.”
“What suit-coat?”
“What do you mean, what? This one right here.”
“And did you, Gramps, forget that it’s now mine? Here, I was just about to grab me some scissors and cut it up into a nice big pile to put under my back. It hurts, you know.”
“You can’t do that! What’ll you do with all the medals on it?”
“I’ll take them to Leningrad, trade them in for booze.”
“Oh-hoh-ho!” he sighed, like a horse, and shook his head. “Are you sure you won’t give it back to me?”
“Nope. Be strong, Gramps, you got what was coming – you shouldn’t have gambled it.”
“Oh, come on, Olezhek. You always think of something.”
By this point, the whole room is watching this show – they want to know how he’ll trick the coat out of me. Except Mitryunchev is really worked up about it: he’s already pictured his coat cut into pieces, and he doesn’t see or hear the room around him. I’m sorry for him, but I know better: if I just give him the coat back for nothing, he’ll have had no fun. He might even get mad at me.
Then it came to me:
“Gramps,” I said, “I bet you couldn’t stick your naked ass out into the hallway and sing a couplet.”
“Would you give me the coat back if I did?”