the most final
concluding work

The morning, contrary to the forecast from the radio romances, was bright and sunny, and pretty soon I found the psychiatric hospital. I left the cellophane packet in the snowdrift on the lawn under a bared big tree and, without any luggage, entered the open gates keeping my hands visible.

When the guards got it that I was not visiting anyone but wanted to stay there myself, I was taken to a small office. A young man, who looked like a militia lieutenant, except for a white doctor’s smock, asked about the reason for my coming.

"I want a certificate that I am not crazy." I knew perfectly well that by those words I had burned down all the ships and blown up all the bridges behind me, and now they would lock me up for sure.

"And who says you were crazy?"

"Well, in a streetcar, for instance."

His animation grew exponentially. He started inquiring what kind of a seal I wanted on the certificate – round, or triangle?

"It does not matter as long as it's signed."

So, he called a young doctor and an elderly nurse to take me to the shower, and then to the fifth unit. Before the shower, the nurse sheared off the hair in my groin with a hairdresser's hand-machine. I felt embarrassed, but I did not resist – a strange monastery is not the right place to barge into a-preaching your doctrine.

After the shower, the doctor took me to an interview. In order to consolidate the success, I drove a couple of fools, she only moaned lustfully while scribbling post-haste in a thick notebook. When we went out into the yard, I said that I had left a cellophane packet outside the gate. The nurse refused to believe me, but then she went off and with amazement brought it.

The doctor frisked the cellophane and allowed me to keep it together with its contents: a copybook, a pen, and a book in English with a close-up of a woman in a wide-brimmed slouch hat in the front cover…

The fifth unit at the Romny psychiatric hospital was located on the third floor of the building constructed by the blueprints from the Stalinist times when the installed flights of steps formed a wide stairwell. Halfway up, there was an iron mesh across the well to surprise a would-be suicide with the failure of his shifty schemes. The stairs ended on the wide landing in front of the locked door in between the two long wooden benches by the sidewalls.

Behind the door, as you would normally anticipate, there started a corridor stretching to the right. It started from the window with vertical grates and, past the closed office door tableted "Head Doctor", went away to its other—blind and murky because of the distance—end with a tap and sink in the sealing wall.

In both sidewalls of the long corridor, there gaped rectangular doorways to the wardrooms, that at the first, unaccustomed, sight looked like passages to caves because of lacking any door. The light from the outside world reached the corridor after creeping transversely thru the wardrooms whose grated windows considerably decimated it. That's why, in cloudy weather, the bulbs in the corridor were turned on all day long. That dim illumination served rather to emphasize than disperse the twilight.

Halfway to the far-off end wall, one wardroom on the left was missing, substituted with a small hall of two barred windows. In the hall corner next to the right window, a tall pier-mirror stood atop its empty cabinet, and the partition returning to the corridor from that corner had a white door with the tablet "Manipulation Room" on it. The hall’s left window was blocked by a tall box, like, pedestal for a turned-off TV. The lofty pyramid was abutted by a hospital couch alongside the partition wall with the other white door in the hall, tableted "Senior Nurse", exactly opposite the manipulation room.

The floor in the corridor was paved with middle-sized ceramic tiles of a dark brownish hue conforming to the general gamma in the all-pervading twilight. The floor-tiles gleamed moistly since the privileged shut-ins washed it twice a day with wet cloths on wooden mops…

For a starter, to check how dangerous I was, they placed me to the observation wardroom, opposite the hall with the pier-mirror. At the jamb of the door-less doorway to the wardroom, there stood an armchair whose carcass of nickel-plated pipes, upholstered in brown leatherette, leaned its back against the corridor wall. The slender pipes of legs supported an elderly but sturdy mujik in the seat—a paramedic—rigged out in a white smock and a small white capulet. With one ear turned to the observation wardroom, he faced the distant parts of the corridor where another paramedic sat at another wardroom in the exactly same chair, yakking idly with a young man in the pajamas and army high boots, who squatted with his arms hung over his knees, in front of the sitter.

The paramedic took me into the wardroom, chinking on the way the bunch of keys tied to the rope-like strip of his belt against the back of the bed nearest to the doorway, where a young blonde in bright red pajamas lay with his unswerving stare stuck into the crevices in the whitewashed ceiling while hastily beating off under his sheet. The clang was upheld by a burst of sardonic laughter out of the opposite corner, but it choked abruptly.

The third bed from the window was pointed at by the paramedic's stubby finger and I humbly lay down. The bed between me and the window was occupied by a supine young man clutching the collar of his blue hospital gown tightly wrapped around his stuck out neck with closely cropped head on it, whose eyes were intensely peering upward, absorbed in watching transition of stains in the ceiling, one into another.

Soon, he turned to me an inquisitive stare from the bluish circles around his eyes and asked whether my brother's name was Sasha and if I had a sister as well. Not waiting for my response, he squeezed his head between his hands to report that he had been studying with them at the technical school before one evening his father sent him to collect cows when the hoary fog was drifting thru Podlipnoye which instilled a cold into his hatless, unprotected, head and ever since the poor nob aches regularly.

A couple of times he left his story off to holler at a nuts who approached the siderails of my bed mumbling some poorly articulated questions. Then he said that his name was also Sasha, turned away, and fell asleep.

A pair of patients without speech problems exacted from the blond in red a song, and he whined and wheezed out the latest hit from the "Mayak" radio station:

"Save, please, save, please, save, please, save my broken heart,

Find, please, find, please, find, please, find her for me…"

Two hours later, I was classified a not violent case, the senior nurse called me out from the corridor and led to Wardroom 9, closer to the office with the tablet "Head Doctor".

The 9th looked more cozy accommodating just ten beds. It's only that the white desk partly jutted from the left corner across the entrance, but since there was no door it felt like a minor inconvenience. Wildlife shrieks from neighboring wardrooms gradually grew more habitual and ceased to stir upsurges of funk by their primeval jungle force.

In the evening, along the corridor there sounded a cry "to the kitchen!" and then a group of privileged shut-ins, led by a nurse, marched to the exit. A half-hour later they returned in a hurried pace, precipitated by the weight of two huge thermos pots schlepped over in the counter direction. A few minutes later, from the remote end of the corridor, they hollered, "Workmen to dinner!"

Workmen were always called first to the dining room. Instead of pajamas, they wore black spetzovkas and after breakfast and midday meal, they were convoyed away somewhere.

When the workmen left the dining room, in the corridor sounded the next call, "The second party, to dinner!" And, after a corresponding period of time, the concluding call was shouted out, "The third party, to dinner!"

The left sidewall in the far end of the corridor had three locked doors: to the shower, to the dispenser, and to the dining room. Neither of them had any tablet, but everyone knew where was what.

In the shower room, they kept tin pails and wooden mops for washing the floor. Its door was opened by a nurse or a paramedic for the privileged to take their pastime instruments and locked again at once. However, despite so close control one of the fifth unit shut-ins managed to hang himself in the shower room, although not at the first go.