Михаил Булгаков - A Country Doctor's Notebook

However, this did not happen at once. I went into my bedroom and had a look: there was a very little left in the bottom of the phial. I drew it into the syringe, and it only filled a quarter of it. I threw the syringe away, almost breaking it, and shuddered. Carefully, I picked it up and examined it—not a single crack. I sat in the bedroom for twenty minutes. When I came out, she was gone.

Imagine—I couldn’t bear it and went to look for her. I knocked on the lighted window of her quarters. Wrapped in a scarf, she came out on to the porch. The night was silent, the snow powdery and dry. Far away in the sky was a hint of coming spring.

‘Please, Anna Kirillovna, give me the keys to the dispensary.’

She whispered: ‘No, I won’t.’

‘Kindly give me the keys to the dispensary. I’m speaking as a doctor.’

In the twilight I saw her expression change. She turned very white, her eyes seemed to sink into her head and they darkened. She replied in a voice which stirred me to pity. But at once my anger surged up again.

She said: ‘Why, why must you talk like this? Oh Sergei Vasilievich—I pity you.’

Just then she drew her hands from under her shawl and I saw that she was holding the keys. She had obviously gone over to my consulting room and removed them.

‘Give me the keys!’ I said roughly.

And I snatched them out of her hand.

I set off towards the white-painted hospital building, picking my way along the rotten, swaying duckboards. Rage was boiling inside me, chiefly because I had not the slightest idea how to make up a morphine solution for hypodermic injection. I’m a doctor, not an assistant! I trembled as I went.

I could hear her walking behind me like a faithful dog. Tenderness welled up inside me, but I suppressed it. I turned round, bared my teeth and said:

‘Are you going to do it or not?’

She gave a despairing gesture as much as to say ‘What does it matter?’ and answered quietly:

‘All right, I’ll do it.’

An hour later I was myself again, and I naturally asked her to forgive me for my absurd rudeness. I don’t know what happened to me: I was always polite before.

Then she did something extraordinary. She fell to her knees, clasped my hands and said:

‘I’m not angry with you. I know now that you’re lost. I know it now. And I curse myself for giving you that first injection.’

I calmed her down as best I could, assuring her that none of this was her doing, that I was responsible for my own behaviour. I promised her that the very next day I would make a serious start on breaking the habit and would reduce the dosage.

‘How much did you inject just now?’

‘Not much. Three syringes of a 1% solution.’

She clasped her head and said nothing.

‘There’s no cause for you to worry.’

In my heart of hearts I understood her concern. The fact is that hydrochloric morphium is terrifying stuff. You can very quickly get used to it. But surely mild habituation is not the same as becoming an addict?

To tell the truth, this woman is the only person I can really trust. She ought really to be my wife. I’ve forgotten the other woman, quite forgotten her. However, I have morphine to thank for that.

8th April 1917

This is torture.

9th April

This horrible spring weather.

The devil is in this phial. Cocaine—the devil in a phial!

This is its effect: on injecting one syringe of a 2% solution, you feel almost immediately a state of calm, which quickly grows into a delightful euphoria. This lasts for only a minute or two, then it vanishes without a trace as though it had never been. Then comes pain, horror, darkness.

Outside, the spring thaw is in noisy spate, blackbirds fly from branch to bare branch and in the distance the forest pierces the sky like a jagged row of black bristles; behind the trees, colouring a quarter of the sky, glows the first spring sunset.

I pace diagonally across the big, empty, lonely room in my quarters, from the door to the window and back again. How many times can I cover that stretch of floor? Fifteen or sixteen times, not more; then I have to turn round and go into the bedroom. Lying on a piece of gauze beside a phial is the syringe. I pick it up and after giving my puncture-riddled thigh a careless smear of iodine, I dig the needle into the skin. Far from feeling any pain, I have a foretaste of the euphoria which will overtake me in a moment. And here it comes. I am aware of its onset, for as Vlas the night watchman sits in the porch playing the accordion, the faint, muffled snatches of music sound like angelic voices, and the harsh bass chords wheezing from the bellows ring out like a celestial choir. But now comes the moment when, by some mysterious law that is not to be found in any book on pharmacology, the cocaine inside me turns into something different. I know what it is: it is a mixture of my blood and the devil himself. The sound of Vlas’ accordion music falters and I hate the man, while the sunset growls restlessly and burns my entrails. This feeling comes over me several times in the course of the evening, until I realise that I have poisoned myself. My heart begins to beat so hard that I can feel it thumping when I put my hands to my temples … Then my whole being sinks into the abyss and there are moments when I wonder whether Doctor Polyakov will ever come back to life.

13th April

I, the unfortunate Doctor Polyakov, who became addicted to morphine in February of this year, warn anyone who may suffer the same fate not to attempt to replace morphine with cocaine. Cocaine is a most foul and insidious poison. Yesterday Anna barely managed to revive me with camphor injections and today I am half dead.

6th May 1917

It is a long time since I last wrote anything in my diary. A pity, because in fact this is not a diary but a pathological history. Not only do I have a natural professional interest in it, but it is my only friend in the world (if one doesn’t count my sad and often tearful mistress Anna). So if I am to record the progress of my disease, here it is: I inject myself with morphine twice every twenty-four hours—at five o’clock in the afternoon (after supper) and at midnight before going to bed. Two syringes of a 3% solution; my dose is thus 50 milligrammes. A fair amount!

My previous notes must sound somewhat hysterical. In fact there is nothing particularly unusual or alarming about my condition. It does not in the least affect my capacity to work. On the contrary, I live through the day on the previous night’s injection. I cope splendidly with operations, I am irreproachably careful when prescribing, and I give my professional oath that my addiction causes no harm to my patients. I pray that it never will. But something else does worry me: I keep thinking that other people may find out about my vice. During consultation hours I am disturbed by the thought of my assistant’s grim, searching look behind my back.

Nonsense! He’ll never guess. There’s nothing to give me away. The pupils of my eyes can only betray me in the evening, and I never see him in the evening.

To make up for the terrible drain on the stock of morphine in our dispensary, I drove into the local town. There, too, I went through a nasty few minutes. I had taken care to fill out my order with all kinds of stuff such as caffeine (of which we had plenty), but as the storekeeper took it he said dubiously:

‘Forty grammes of morphine?’

I did not know where to look, and felt myself blushing like a guilty schoolboy. He said:

‘We haven’t got that much. I can give you ten grammes.’

He really did not have that quantity, but I had the impression that he had discovered my secret; his probing eyes were boring into me and this made me nervous and jumpy.