Михаил Булгаков - A Country Doctor's Notebook

CLEVER PEOPLE HAVE LONG BEEN AWARE THAT happiness is like good health: when you have it, you don’t notice it. But as the years go by, oh, the memories, the memories of happiness past!

For myself I realise now that I was happy in that winter of 1917, that headlong, never-to-be-forgotten year of storm and blizzard.

The first blast of the snowstorm snatched me up like a scrap of torn newspaper and transported me from a practice in the depths of the countryside to the town. What, you may wonder, is so special about a country town? If like me you have ever spent the winters snowbound and the summers deep in a landscape of sparse, monotonous woodland, without a single day off in more than a year; if you have ever torn the wrapper off last week’s newspaper with your heart beating as though you were a lover joyfully ripping open a pale blue envelope; if you have ever driven twelve miles in a tandem-harnessed sleigh to a woman in labour, then you may realise what the town meant to me.

Kerosene lamps may be very cosy, but I prefer electricity.

And there they were again at last, those seductive little electric lights! The main street of the little town, the snow well flattened by the runners of peasants’ sleighs, was hung with red flags and shop signs that entranced the eye: a boot; a golden pretzel; a picture of a young man with insolent, pig-like eyes and a wholly unnatural haircut, signifying that behind those glass doors was the local Figaro, who for thirty kopecks was prepared to shave you at any hour of the day—except on holidays, in which this land of ours abounds.

To this day I shudder when I recall that Figaro’s towels, which reminded me forcibly of a page in my German textbook of skin diseases, illustrating with appalling clarity a growth of hard chancre on a man’s chin.

But even those towels cannot spoil my happy memories!

At the crossroads stood a real, live policeman, in a dusty shop window one could just make out tin trays packed with rows of cakes topped with orange cream. The square was carpeted with fresh straw, people were driving, walking about and chatting; there was a kiosk selling yesterday’s Moscow papers full of thrilling news, and from not far away came the sound of Moscow-bound trains hooting to one another. In short, this was civilisation, Babylon, the Nevsky Prospekt.

The hospital, I need hardly add, boasted separate surgical, medical, isolation and maternity departments. There was an operating theatre with a gleaming autoclave, plated taps and operating tables with ingeniously designed flaps, cogwheels and screws. It had a Medical Superintendent, three interns (beside myself), several feldshers , midwives, nurses, a dispensary and a laboratory. Just think—a laboratory, complete with a Zeiss microscope and a fine assortment of stains.

All this impressed me so much that I would shudder and turn cold. It took me several days to get used to it when, in the December twilight, the hospital’s single-storey wards would blaze with electric light as though at a word of command.

I was dazzled. Water splashed and roared in the bathtubs, and worn wooden-cased thermometers plunged or floated in them. All day long the children’s isolation ward reverberated with moans, thin plaintive weeping and hoarse gurgles. Nurses darted to and fro.

I had shed a heavy burden. I no longer bore the godlike responsibility for everything that happened in the world. It was not my fault if someone developed a strangulated hernia, and I did not shudder when a sleigh drove up bringing a woman with a transverse foetus, a case of epyema requiring operation was no longer my affair. For the first time I felt that there was a limit to my responsibilities. Childbirth? Over there, please, to that low building—the furthest window with the net curtains; there you’ll find our obstetrician, a charming, fat, balding man with a ginger moustache. That’s his business. The sleigh makes for the curtained window. A compound fracture? You want our chief surgeon. Inflammation of the lungs? Go and see Pavel Vladimirovich in the medical department.

Oh, what a splendid thing a large hospital is, with its smooth, well-oiled machinery! I fitted into the mechanism like a new screw dropping into its appointed slot and took over the children’s department; from then on my days were wholly taken up with diphtheria and scarlet fever. But only my days. I started sleeping at night, undisturbed by that ominous nocturnal tapping downstairs, which meant that I was likely to be roused and dragged out into the darkness to face danger or whatever fate had in store. I took to reading in the evenings (chiefly about diphtheria and scarlet fever, but I also developed an odd addiction to Fenimore Cooper). I appreciated to the full the electric light over my desk, the charred ash that dropped down on to the tray of my samovar, my cooling tea, and the chance to sleep after many sleepless months.

So I was happy in that winter of 1917, after my transfer to that town from a remote, snowswept country practice.

One month flew by, then another, and a third. 1917 receded and February 1918 began. I got used to my new life and gradually began to forget my far-off practice. The hissing, green-shaded kerosene lamp, the loneliness and the snowdrifts became just a blurred memory. Ungrateful as I am, I forgot about my front-line post, where alone and without the least support I had relied on my own resources to fight disease and extricate myself from the most hair-raising situations, like a Fenimore Cooper hero.

Now and again, I must admit, when I went to bed with the pleasant thought that I would shortly fall asleep, fragments of recollection would pass through my fading consciousness. A green flash, a flickering lantern, the creak of sleigh-runners … a moan and then darkness, the muffled howl of a snowstorm … then the memory would turn head over heels and vanish into oblivion.

‘I wonder who’s in that job now? A young man like me, I suppose. Ah well, I did my stint, Muryovo and then Gorelovo hospital … February, March, April and, let’s say, May as well—and I will have finished my probationary period. So I shall leave this splendid town at the end of May and return to Moscow. And if the revolution calls me to its service, I may yet have some more travelling to do … but at all events I shall never see my country practice again … Never again … Moscow … a clinic … asphalt, the bright lights …’

Such were my thoughts.

‘Still, it’s a good thing that I spent some time out there in the wilds. It taught me to be brave and nothing frightens me now … Is there anything I haven’t treated—literally anything? I didn’t have any psychiatric cases … or did I? No, that’s right … there was the farm manager who was drinking himself to death. I made rather a mess of treating him, though … delirium … Surely that’s a mental illness? I really ought to read up some psychiatry … still, what the hell … maybe later, in Moscow. Right now children’s diseases are my main concern, and especially the wearisome business of prescribing for children. Hell, if a child’s ten years old, for instance, how big a dose of aminopyrine can I give him? Is it 0.1 or 0.15 grammes? I’ve forgotten. And if he’s three? There are quite enough hideous, unforeseen problems in paediatrics alone, so it’s goodbye to my old general practice. But why does that place keep creeping back into my mind so insistently this evening? The green lamp … After all, I’m finished with it for the rest of my days … well, that’s enough of that … time for sleep.’

‘Letter for you. Someone who happened to come into town brought it.’

‘Let’s have it.’

The nurse was standing in my hallway. An overcoat with a moth-eaten collar was thrown over her white overall with its hospital badge. Snow was melting on the cheap blue envelope.