Orlóff and His Wife: Tales of the Barefoot Brigade. Maksim Gorky
A kalátch—a delicious and favorite form of bread, particularly good in Moscow.—Translator.
Prónin's calm voice and leisurely gait had a sobering effect upon Grigóry.
"Only don't let your spirits sink, my good fellow-you'll get used to it. We're well off here. Victuals, treatment and all the rest—everything is just as it should be. We shall all be corpses, my boy; it's the commonest thing in life. And, in the meanwhile, brisk up, you know, and only don't get scared—that's the chief thing! Do you drink vódka?"
"Yes," replied Orlóff.
"Well then. Yonder in the ditch I have a little bottle, in case of need. Come and let's swallow a little of it." They went to the pit, round the corner of the barracks, took a drink, and Prónin, pouring some drops of mint on sugar, gave it to Orlóff, with the words:
"Eat that, otherwise you'll smell of vódka. They're strict here about vódka. For it's injurious to drink it, they say."
"And have you got used to things here?" Grigóry asked him.
"I should think so! I've been here from the start. A lot of folks have died here since I've been here—hundreds, to speak plainly. It's an uneasy life, but a good life here, to tell the truth. It's a pious work. Like the ambulance-corps in time of war … you've heard about the ambulance-corps and the sisters of mercy? I watched them during the Turkish campaign. I was at Adragan and Kars. Well, my boy, they're purer than we are, we soldiers and people in general. We fight, we have guns, bullets, bayonets; but they—they walk about without any weapons, as though they were in a green garden. They pick up our men, or a Turk, and carry them to the field-hospital. And around them … zh-zhee! ti-in! fi-it! Sometimes the poor ambulance man gets it in the neck—tchik! … and that's the end of him! … "
After this conversation, and a good swallow of vódka, Orlóff plucked up a little courage.
"You've put your hand to the rope, don't say it's too thick,"—he exhorted himself, as he rubbed a sick man's legs. Someone behind him entreated piteously, in a moaning voice:
"A dri-ink! Oï, my dear fellow!"
And someone gabbled:
"Oho-ho-ho! Hotter! Mis-mister doctor, it relieves me! Christ reward you—I can feel! Permit him to pour in some more boiling water!"
"Give him some wine!" shouted Doctor Váshtchenko.
Orlóff worked away, lending an attentive ear to what went on around him, and found that, as a matter of fact, everything was not so nasty and strange as it had seemed to him a little while before, and that chaos did not reign, but a great and intelligent power was acting regularly. But he shuddered, nevertheless, when he recalled the policeman, and cast a furtive glance through the window of the barracks into the yard. He believed that the policeman was dead, but still there was an element of wavering in this belief. Wouldn't the man suddenly spring up and shout? And he remembered that he seemed to have heard someone tell: that one day, somewhere or other, people who had died of the cholera leaped out of their coffins and ran away.
As Orlóff ran to and fro in the barracks, now rubbing one patient, now placing another in the bath-tub, he felt exactly as though gruel were boiling in his brain. He recalled his wife: how was she getting on yonder? Sometimes with this recollection mingled a transitory desire to steal a minute to have a look at Matréna. But after this, Orlóff felt, somehow, disconcerted at his desire, and exclaimed to himself:
"Come, bustle about, you fatmeated woman! You'll dry up, never fear. … You'll get rid of your intentions. … "
He had always suspected that his wife cherished, in her heart of hearts, intentions very insulting to him as a husband, and now and then, when he rose in his suspicions to a sort of objectiveness, he even admitted that there was some foundation for these intentions. Her life, also, was tinged with yellow, and all sorts of trash creeps into one's head with such a life. This objectiveness was generally converted into certainty during the period of his suspicions. Then he would ask himself: why had he found it necessary to crawl out of his cellar into this boiling cauldron?—and he wondered at himself. But all these thoughts worked round and round, somewhere deep within him, and were fenced off, as it were, from the direct line of his work by the strained attention which he devoted to the actions of the medical staff. Never, in any sort of labor, had he beheld men wear themselves out, as the men did here, and he reflected, more than once, as he surveyed the exhausted faces of the doctors and students, that all these men really did not get paid for doing nothing!
When relieved from duty, hardly able to stand on his feet, Orlóff went out into the court-yard of the barracks, and lay down against its wall, under the window of the apothecary's shop. There was a ringing in his head, there was a pain under his shoulder-blades, and his legs ached with the gnawing pangs of fatigue. He no longer thought of anything, or wanted anything, he simply stretched himself out on the sod, stared at the sky, in which hung magnificent clouds, richly adorned with the rays of sunset, and fell into a sleep like death.
He dreamed that he and his wife were the guests of Doctor Váshtchenko in a huge room, with rows of Vienna chairs ranged around the walls. On the chairs all the patients from the barracks were sitting. The doctor and Matréna were executing the "Russian Dance" in the middle of the hall, while he himself was playing the accordeon and laughing heartily, because the doctor's long legs would not bend at all, and the doctor, a very grave and pompous man, was stalking about the hall after Matréna exactly as a heron stalks over a marsh.
All at once the policeman made his appearance in the doorway.
"Aha!" he exclaimed saturninely and menacingly.—"Did you think, Gríshka, that I was completely dead? You're playing the accordeon, but you dragged me out to the dead-house! Come along with me, now! Get up!" Seized with a fit of trembling, all bathed in perspiration, Orlóff raised himself quickly and sat on the ground. Opposite, was squatting Doctor Váshtchenko, who said to him reproachfully:
"What sort of an ambulance nurse are you, my friend, if you go to sleep on the ground, and lie down on it upon your belly, to boot, hey? Now, you'll take cold in your bowels—you'll take to your cot, and the first you know, you'll die. … It's not right, my friend—you have a place in the barracks to sleep. Why didn't they tell you so? Besides, you are in a perspiration, and have a chill. Come along with me, now, I'll give you something."
"I was so tired, … " muttered Orlóff.
"So much the worse. You must take care of your-self—it is a dangerous time, and you are a valuable man."
Orlóff followed the doctor in silence along the corridor of the barracks, in silence drank some sort of medicine out of a wine-glass, drank something more out of another, frowned and spat.
"Come, go and have a sleep now. … Farewell for a while!" and the doctor began to move his long, slender feet over the floor of the corridor.
Orlóff looked after him, and suddenly ran after him, with a broad smile.
"I thank you humbly, doctor."
"What for?" and the doctor halted.
"For the work. Now I shall try with all my might to please you! Because your anxiety is agreeable to me … and … you said I was a valuable man … and, altogether, I'm most si-sincerely grateful to you!" The doctor gazed intently and in surprise at the agitated face of his hospital orderly, and smiled also.
"You're a queer fellow! However, never mind—you'll turn out splendidly … genuine. Go ahead, and do your best; it will not be for me, but for the patients. We must wrest a man from the disease, tear him out of its paws—do you understand me? Well, then, go ahead and try your best to conquer the disease. And, in the mean-while—go and sleep!"
Orlóff was soon lying on his cot, and fell asleep with a pleasing sensation of warmth in his bowels. He felt joyful, and was proud of his very simple conversation with the doctor.
But he sank into slumber regretting that his wife had not heard that conversation. He must tell her to-morrow. … That devil's pepper-pot would not believe it, in all probability.