Snow in May: Stories

Summer Medicine, 1993

All my life I’ve been healthy, too healthy to ever go to a real hospital, naturally. But this summer break, I had finally hit on a perfect plan and I carried it out masterfully. First, while undergoing my annual physical at Baba Olya’s Polyclinika in Syktyvkar, I told the gastroenterologist, Dr. Osip, that I had chronic epigastric pain. I had saved up raw mushrooms from a recent picking trip to the forest with Baba Olya and had been eating them every few days. I only had to throw up three times (with accompanying moans and shrieks) for Baba Olya to arrange an overnight diagnostic stay at the Big Hospital. She was in charge of me for the summer: I knew she’d take no chances with my health.

Compared to the two-storied wooden Polyclinika with lazy polyclinikanese cats warming themselves on the porch and lilac trees throwing sleepy shadows into the doctors’ offices, the Big Hospital seemed like a whole different city. It was gleaming white and as enormous as an ocean liner — with columns, marble steps, and two wings extending into the green waves of the park. Patients in faded pajamas shuffled along the flower-lined alleys, holding on to walking sticks or the elbows of their visitors. Ambulances buzzed by, their sirens wailing. Doctors hurried in and out of doors like white cranes. All the chambers of my heart were aflutter. Helping out at the Polyclinika no longer satisfied my thirst for a bloodcurdling, bone-protruding emergency, but here I was sure to finally observe real medicine.

As Baba Olya and I walked down the hallway, I looked out for my summer friend Alina, whom I still hadn’t seen this year. She had already been to the Big Hospital several times because of her migraines and didn’t like it. But it was different for her — she was just a patient, while I was going to be the chief doctor, like Baba Olya.

Instead of with Alina, Baba Olya set me up in a room with two older girls named Liza and Natasha. Liza was small like me, with a sparse ponytail and long blunt bangs. Natasha was a chubby redhead. Likely prediabetic, I noted. They sat on their beds and watched me unpack the purple Beauty and the Beast backpack Papa had sent me from Alaska. I’d also brought a pink American sweatshirt, a box of Mr. Sketch fruit-smelling markers, and two books: Robinson Crusoe in Russian and The Little Mermaid picture book in English, which I was studying back home at the English Lyceum.

“Your grandma’s so fat,” Natasha said when Baba Olya had left. “Where does she work? The cake factory?”

Liza nodded, the corner of her lip twisted up.

Oh, yes. It was a sad and medically troubling truth. Baba Olya was so overweight, she could no longer work as a dentist and now dedicated all her time to running the Polyclinika. That’s why, when the time had come for my annual dental exam two weeks ago, instead of going to her, I was escorted straight into the chair of the new dentist. Dr. Pasha. He was very young, too young to already be a doctor. Also, he looked like the American actor Kevin Costner.

I liked showing off my “textbook teeth” at the dental wing, which was the loudest and most exciting place in the whole Polyclinika. (I loved the bed chairs, with drills and vacuums attached to cords like tentacles with claws. I loved the orchestra of drilling and buzzing, and the endless supply of snow-white cotton rolls in the tall glass jars.) This time, however, the exam was dreadful. First, the office was stuffed with howling children in various states of dental distress. I couldn’t believe I’d been scheduled for the “Happy Teeth Day” again, as though I were still a child. I was already ten years old. And second, the young Dr. Pasha had found a cavity (on tooth number 29) — the first cavity in my life.

“She is chief doctor of Polyclinika Number Twenty-Five,” I said to my roommates, wishing Baba Olya had worn her doctor’s overcoat.

The girls giggled. “She doesn’t look like a doctor. Too fat,” Natasha said.

“Never heard of it,” Liza said.

“It’s by the Komsomolskaya bus station,” I said. “And you don’t have to look like a doctor.”

“Foo. It’s dumpy up there.”

“It is not dumpy. They have good doctors,” I said, then remembered with a shiver the way Dr. Pasha took off his special glasses, the ones with a miniature telescope attached to one lens (which I was dying to try on), and announced to the entire office: “What do you know, Sophia Anatolyevna! A dentist’s granddaughter and with a cavity.” And Baba Olya said, in her voice for men, “Here’s your chance to prove yourself, Pavel Dmitrievich. One cavity — one chance.”

“Then why are you here?” Liza said.

She had a point. While I was deciding on my answer, she pulled her knees up to her chest and started rocking side to side. “Do you throw up every month? Ooooh, I like that special time of the month when I go bah—”

Natasha jumped off her bed and ran at me with her mouth open. I covered my face with my hands. She returned to her bed, laughing.

“You throw up all the time?” I said. “I know how you feel.”

“It’s because she eats garbage.” Natasha stuck her finger down her throat.

“Shut up,” Liza yelled.

“Only stray dogs would eat the macaroni your mama cooks.”

“What macaroni?” I said. If these were the kinds of roommates poor Alina had to cope with, I could understand why she wasn’t the biggest fan of the Big Hospital. These girls would only aggravate her headache.

“Your fat grandma should ask Yeltsin,” Natasha said.

I tried to stay focused. As a doctor I’d have to deal with hysterical patients often.

“Is the pain sharp, dull, cramp-like, knife-like, twisting, or piercing? And where did you first feel the pain?” I asked as calmly as I could. I’d read the diagnostics chapter in Baba Olya’s old pathology textbook just the other week. “Oh, oh, and does vomiting alleviate the pain? Or, you know, vomiting … is just vomiting? Unpleasant.”

Natasha looked at me like I was the crazy one. “Axe-like and saw-like,” she said impassively. “Also knife-like.”

“Oh, knife-like?!” I cried out. “That means gastritis! Or it could mean an ulcer. Or gallbladder stones!”

I had almost asked her whether she had blood in her stool when I realized I probably sounded too excited for her real illness. Like Dr. Pasha announcing my cavity.

It was painful to think back to the dental appointment, but I couldn’t stop myself. I kept rewinding it in my head over and over. As Dr. Pasha had stuffed my mouth with cotton balls, I had tried to remember what I had for breakfast. Chyort! Oatmeal. I was about to clean my teeth with my finger when he stabbed my gum with a needle, a little unsympathetically.

“Lee-ghno-kaeen?” I had mumbled through the cotton balls. I knew of several types of dental anesthesia and wanted to know which one he planned to use.

Dr. Pasha chuckled. “Open wide!” It felt icky to have so much rubber in my mouth. Baba Olya said it was the new technique taught in medical schools, but the older doctors, including Baba Olya, couldn’t feel the teeth properly in rubber gloves. They needed live contact. Dr. Pasha dressed differently, too: instead of the white coat and cap, he wore green scrubs, a white T-shirt, and a red bandana.

“You know what’s unpleasant?” Natasha said. She eyed my backpack. “You. Where’d you get all those things anyway?”

“From my father. He lives in America,” I said and immediately regretted it. I was not allowed to tell anyone about America. Or that I was from Magadan. People could think we were rich and rob us.

“And he left you in some dumpy Polyclinika Number Twenty-six.”

“Twenty-five. When I finish—”

“Oh, sure—”

Our consultation was interrupted by Dr. Osip, who walked into the room with a young nurse.

“Hello, girls. Sonechka.” He brushed Liza and Natasha with a quick acknowledgment and concentrated his warm, grandfatherly smile on me. “This is Nurse Larissa. She’ll take care of you during your stay.”

The girls stared at Nurse Larissa. Nurse Larissa stared into space. Her features were exotic: wide-spaced, almost Asian eyes, a beaklike nose, a small mouth. A horseshoe pendant hung between her clavicles. When Dr. Osip left, she gave me a cotton gown.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said and ran out.

The gown was diaphanous, like dead skin peeling after a sunburn. How many truly sick children had worn it before me? I bunched up a piece of the fabric and pressed the knot to my chest, praying for the health of all the people on earth — especially Alina — and to become a good doctor. Then I yanked off my yellow sundress, folded it over the cracked sink, and changed into the gown.

Back in the room, Nurse Larissa lay on my bed, her pale legs dangling off the side, her face wedged into my pillow. I don’t know why, but seeing her like this made me paranoid that all the young medics in town were friends, including Nurse Larissa and Dr. Pasha. I imagined them laughing together about my snot attack during the dental exam, and about my spying on Dr. Pasha after. Yes, I had watched him, a little, but for a totally normal reason.

He often brought branches of lilacs to the receptionists. Hiding behind the shelves of medcartas, I listened to them talk about how lucky Dr. Pasha’s wife was, although, they said, she was “neither fish nor meat.” I wasn’t sure what that meant. Dr. Pasha often had lunch with the gynecologist, Anna Vasilievna. According to the receptionists’ gossip, she had left her husband for a younger lover and had two illegitimate children with him before kicking him out. Tall, with a long, black ponytail and green eyes underlined with green, she stood out among the other women like an Amazon warrior.

Doctor Pasha left the Polyclinika at five fifteen every day and caught bus number 67.

I watched him because I was waiting for the right moment to show him that I did know a lot about medicine. Whenever he walked by the reception, I pulled out a medcarta at random and stared at the pages — they were stained with yellow rings and smelled of iodine — pretending to understand the doctors’ jumbled notes. I walked underneath the dental office’s windows on my way to house calls with Dr. Borisovna and always carried with me one of Dr. Vera’s special sticks. I often helped her with eye exams by pointing at the letters on the chart. I am pretty sure he’d seen me at least once.

Nurse Larissa sat up and looked around. “Time to sail,” she said wearily, and we left.

The ceilings were three times higher in the Big Hospital than in the Polyclinika, and it smelled of laundry detergent. Cartoon murals covered the hallway walls. Goldfish, woven from old IV tubes, hung from window frames, afternoon sunlight streaming through their translucent fins. We passed several rooms, where older children watched TV and younger children drew and played with toys. So far, I noted with disappointment, the Big Hospital seemed like playtime at a kindergarten.

“So, why did you decide to become a nurse and not a doctor?” I said.

Nurse Larissa seemed not to hear me; she was biting the nails on her right hand, then left hand, then right again. She stopped abruptly in front of an office door. “First station: cardiology.”

While I lay on a cot, connected to the EKG machine, the cardiologist sat with Nurse Larissa and held her hands. They whispered, and again I became suspicious that they were discussing Dr. Pasha and me. Afterward, Nurse Larissa and I went to see the neurologist and the radiologist. All the doctors asked after Baba Olya, and no one showed serious concern about my stomach. Was swallowing a probe for gastric juice analysis on the schedule? It was unpleasant, I’d read, but essential for someone with my abdominal complaints.

I shivered in the hospital gown, regretting that I’d left my warm American sweatshirt back in the room. Nurse Larissa floated next to me in a daze. Several times she almost crashed into other doctors and children. When she tripped on the stairs, it occurred to me that I should’ve just broken my leg. At least then I would have been able to observe how they laid the cast instead of getting all these silly X-rays. Although, if the bones grew back crooked, like Papa’s after his skiing accident, it would ruin my ballroom dancing. And I was just starting to get good.

There was no sign of Alina anywhere.

“So, what’s wrong with you?” Nurse Larissa said as we entered yet another examination room. I couldn’t diagnose her tone.

“That’s what they’re trying to find out.”

I was about to start on the stomachache and the throwing up when she said, “I can tell it’s nothing serious. Just a mild case of inanemia curiosa.”

“What?” Iminoglycinuria? Anorexia nervosa? I’d never heard of that one.

“I said, you probably have a mild case of anemia. Happens with kids often enough,” she said.

There it was, “with kids” again. When will people learn to tell the difference? “How do you know?” I said.

“It’s in the eyes.”

My stomach went cold.

“Doctors can tell,” she said.

But she wasn’t a doctor. Though, if she was right, could Baba Olya and Dr. Osip tell I’d been faking?

On the other hand, mind reading would be an awesome power to have as a doctor, if it was true. It could be true. It would be particularly useful for the kind of specialty I wanted to do — trauma surgery or emergency medicine. Something dangerous and heroic. Which wasn’t my answer when Dr. Pasha had asked me after he was done with my teeth.

“A dentist,” I had said, wiping my drooling mouth. I guess I was startled he asked me at all, after he had spent the whole exam staring at my snotty nose and smirking.

“I will be waiting for you, Sophia Anatolyevna. I have no doubt you’ll make a fantastic dentist. With teeth like yours! We will work together at the Polyclinika, eh?”

“But I had a—”

“Ah, don’t even, Pavel Dmitrievich,” Baba Olya said. She’d been observing his work the entire time and possibly grading him. “Let me warn you, children grow up fast.”

“Children grow up, yet you stay young, Olga Nestorovna,” Dr. Pasha said and flashed her a smile. His teeth were as textbook as mine — or, as mine used to be.

“Okay, let’s take your blood,” Nurse Larissa said. “Sit down.” She wasn’t wearing rubber gloves.

She tied my upper arm with a rubber band, soaked a cotton ball in alcohol, and disinfected a spot on my anterior forearm. I closed my eyes and braced myself for the prick. After a short while, I heard sobbing and opened my eyes. The syringe was on the desk, its needle resting against a grimy red telephone.

For a long time I didn’t know what to say, so I stared at her face. Nurse Larissa had an honest, ugly cry, not like in the movies where the actress’s tears ran down expressive, curvy paths on the cheeks. The stay at the Big Hospital was turning into a real practicum. I searched her face for symptoms that would give me a clue to the root of her distress. Guttural wails broke so sharply out of her chest — as though someone were flicking her throat — I became nervous she would choke on her own sobs.

I found a roll of bandage in a cabinet and gave Nurse Larissa a length. She continued to cry. I took the hand of hers that was holding the bandage and brought it up to her face, covertly measuring her pulse. Her hand was hot.

“Are you sick?” I said. “Your heart rate is elevated. I think you’re also running a fever.”

Nurse Larissa looked at me through her tears as if I were an alien. “Da, they weren’t kidding about you. I am fine, Sonya.”

“You can tell me. I can keep confidentiality.”

“You can, can you? Well, that’s a relief,” she said, I think sarcastically. She had stopped crying. “It’s not about me.”

“Did your boyfriend leave you?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

She wiped her face with the bandage. “My friend died.”

“Was she sick?” I said. I was acutely aware of the cardiovascular dangers of grief. My other grandma, Baba Mila, had died of cancer of the bladder when I was eight. Also my cousin died, of ventricular septal defect. She was a year old. I was four, and I cried all day, though I barely remembered what the baby had looked like. I had only seen her once. I was in Magadan and they were in Ukraine, and even with all that distance between us I had felt the loud heart murmurs from my sadness. I would have had a heart attack if we were closer.

“She wasn’t sick. She was a nurse here, too.”

“A car accident?”

“A fire. In her apartment.” Nurse Larissa fumbled with the phone’s dial.

“Did she suffocate?”

We sat in silence. I noticed an ornate cuckoo clock on the wall. Somebody must’ve brought it from home, somebody who’d spent a lot of time in this office.

“Or burn alive?”

She gave me a hard look. “Yes, she burned alive.”

“Honestly? That’s terrible,” I said. I wanted to show her real sympathy. To do it right, I first had to feel what she felt. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know anyone who had died in a fire.

“You’re a bit weird, you know that, Sonya?”

“Why?”

“You have morbid interests,” Nurse Larissa said more softly. “Ask too many questions.”

“No, no, no. I want to be a doctor so I have to know everything. Are you part Mongolian?”

“You know the proverb ‘He who knows too much, doesn’t sleep well’?”

“Yes, I know, but I don’t believe in it.”

She chuckled. “Proverbs are not for believing. They just are.” Her eyes were two small slits.

I took Nurse Larissa’s hands, like the cardiologist had done, and whispered, “What happened?”

“Tatar.”

“What?”

“I’m part Tatar, Sonya … My friend had this boyfriend, a criminal. Half a year ago she decided to leave him, after a fight.” Nurse Larissa’s voice became husky. “He and his gang set fire to her apartment and barricaded the door. Maybe she knew too much, or he was just angry.”

“He killed her? But why?” I said.

“I told you why.” She looked at the cuckoo clock and waited several seconds. “The neighbors were afraid to call the police. They could hear her screaming. Can you imagine?”

I tried imagining. I tried hard and just couldn’t. The only thing I’d heard that might be close to a scream like that was in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” “I would’ve called the police,” I said.

“What gets me the most is that it happened in this shitty nowhere town. This is not Moscow. Things like that happen there every day.”

I patted Nurse Larissa’s arm, though I didn’t like her calling Baba Olya’s Syktyvkar shitty. “I think you have post-traumatic stress disorder. People get it after war, too. You need to go to a sanatorium on the sea for a whole summer and you’ll feel better. Do you have some valerianka to take for calmness?”

Again, Nurse Larissa narrowed her swollen Tatar eyes at me. Her nose was still red from crying. “Not a bad idea, Dr. Sonya.” I felt uncontrollably excited when she called me that. She combed through the desk drawers and the supply cabinets. “Don’t have it here.” Then she found a metal cup, poured some ethyl alcohol in it, and added water from the sink in the corner.

“Never do this.” She poured the mixture down her throat. Her face lemon-squished and so did mine. “Let’s go. I have to report for my rounds.”

“Where?”

“Infectious diseases.”

“Oh.” Wasn’t I sick enough to get admitted there?

We made several wrong turns and detours before reaching my room. The Big Hospital was a real labyrinth, or maybe Nurse Larissa was now intoxicated. I held her hand just in case. Before letting her go, I asked whether she’d heard of a patient named Alina being treated at the hospital for migraines this summer, and Nurse Larissa said no, no one by that name.

The room was empty when I returned. I climbed into bed and opened Robinson Crusoe. How would I escape from a burning apartment? I could break the windows in Baba Olya’s glassed-in balcony using one of the flowerpots, then tie the clotheslines together to make a ladder. I thought about Nurse Larissa’s friend, about the flames and the screams. I imagined her pushing against the door so hard she broke her nails, but my tears were still not coming.

The girls came back before dinner. Natasha pulled out a box of Bird’s Milk candies from under her bed and offered some to me. Only up close did I notice how dull and yellow her sclera was, like eggplant flesh.

“I’m not supposed to eat candy because of my stomach,” I said. I liked Bird’s Milk, but I had to maintain my cover.

“Cho, mad at us or something?” Liza said.

“No.”

“Forget about it already. We were kidding before, right?” Natasha said.

“Yeah. You’re too young to get the joke.”

“At least I don’t pretend to throw up,” I lied — in the name of medicine.

“Come to the cafeteria with us. Or are you gonna eat your stinky markers?”

I tried to concentrate on my book; the letters trembled on the page. “My grandma’s bringing me a homemade dinner. She has a car with a driver, and her friends at the Ministry of Health give her smoked sturgeon and black caviar for free. She has eleven Lenin honorary awards, and I’m moving to America in the fall to live with my father.”

As soon as those words escaped my mouth, I heard Baba Olya’s reproachful voice in my head: a doctor must walk a kilometer in her patient’s shoes.

“Hope you choke on your caviar and the little fishes hatch in your stomach and eat you from inside out.”

They banged the door hard when they left.

I put on my sweatshirt, which hadn’t been washed yet, and inhaled the bright, clean smell of America. I hadn’t noticed earlier how hideous the sickroom was — sinusitis-yellow walls, a constellation of brown spots splattered in the ceiling’s far corner like bacterial growth in a petri dish. The paint on the heating pipe had peeled in so many places that the pipe looked like a wet cat’s tail. Outside, the hospital park was sinking into darkness. Patients and nurses in white flashed ghost-like between the trees.

I had seen a ghost once, the ghost of Baba Mila. On the fortieth day after she died, when her soul finished visiting all the places she had loved on earth one last time, I saw her back in Magadan, standing behind our living room curtains. I wasn’t scared. In her last months, when she didn’t leave the bed, Deda Misha fed her soup and pureed apples, and gave her birch juice to drink. I liked birch juice, too, but I held back from drinking it for fear there wouldn’t be enough left for Baba Mila. On some days, some very hot days, I couldn’t resist. I didn’t understand anything about medicine back then. The day I saw Baba Mila’s ghost, I had whispered “I am sorry” and promised her I would become a doctor.

I turned on the night lamp on the shelf next to my bed, waited for a few minutes, and put my finger on the lightbulb. I closed my eyes and let it burn. One. Two. Three. Four. I wanted to scream. How long did it take Nurse Larissa’s friend to feel her skin begin to peel off? How long did it take her to die?

Suddenly, I remembered what Natasha said about the markers. I pulled away my finger. The tip was red, and my first thought was: I will never play piano again. I could be free! But of course I couldn’t, of course Mama would make me practice just the same. I opened the box of Mr. Sketch. Purple-Grape, Orange-Orange, and Blue-Blueberry were missing their caps. I looked under all three beds and every nightstand. The scent of Orange-Orange was already fading. Why, why did I bring the markers when I knew I’d be too busy with patients?

Soon Baba Olya brought me dinner — barley soup, hard-boiled eggs, and bread. Nothing new had happened at the Polyclinika, she reported. Thank God. She said everyone missed me and sent hellos. I wondered whether that included Dr. Pasha, whether he even knew that I was in the hospital.

“What are you having for dinner, Babushka?”

Baba Olya knew as well as I did that aside from her already rampant hypertension, her obesity could cause everything from diabetes to cancer.

“Chicken and rice, Sonechka,” she said. I didn’t believe her.

“Just without the skin, please.” It was painful to watch her eat, even as she reminded me that she and her sisters had a hungry childhood because of the war, and it was immoral not to eat well when food was available and one could afford to.

After I ate, we went to the lounge to watch the evening installment of Felicidade.

“Is it true that one of the nurses here burned alive? Her boyfriend started the fire because he’s a gangster?” I asked Baba Olya during a commercial break.

“Who told you this?”

Maybe the fire was a secret because the secret police were investigating the gangster ring. I didn’t want to give away Nurse Larissa. “I don’t remember. Is it true?”

The shadow from Baba Olya’s painted lashes made her dark blue eyes look violet. I’d always wished my eyes were like hers. “Yes. It’s such a pity. She was a beautiful girl.”

“Why do you say this, Baba? What’s the difference if she was beautiful or ugly? Are you saying she deserved it or didn’t deserve it?”

“I’m not saying either way, Sonya.” She held me tight against her warm side as though I were a fractured limb and she a splint. “No one deserves to die in a fire. But you, you should always be careful around people. Not everyone wishes you well for free. Most people are petty, unkind, jealous. Especially men. Choose well which men you trust. And better yet, don’t trust any.”

I hated when Baba Olya talked like that about men. Like they were carriers of some deadly virus. It made me feel bad for Papa and his papa, Deda Misha.

“By the way, how are you feeling?” Baba Olya said.

“Good.”

“Stomach?”

“Oh.” My stomach felt like a locked elevator with all of them inside — Natasha, Liza, Dr. Pasha, Nurse Larissa, and her dead friend — plummeting down through the earth. “Nauseous.” If I thought about them enough, I could probably make myself sick. For real this time.

Later, when Baba Olya tucked me into bed, I noticed Liza and Natasha glaring at her crisp white doctor’s coat. I felt safe in the proximity of her warm, powdered neck as she kissed me good night, proud to be her granddaughter, though so far I was nothing of interest myself. Not even to the doctors.

“Sweet dreams, girls,” Baba Olya said and turned off the lights.

About a half hour after she left, Natasha and Liza began whispering in the dark. One of them turned on the lights. I kept my eyes closed. Somebody yanked my hair.

“Get up, stinky.” Natasha was pulling me out of bed.

I scrambled out.

“Go stand by the wall,” Liza commanded from her bed and wrapped the blanket tighter around herself.

“What happened?” I said. The wall was icy cold.

Natasha marched to my nightstand and took out the Mr. Sketch box. She examined the markers for a while, sniffing them like a babushka at a fish market. The night snuck in through the windowpane cracks and poked me with its chilly fingers. Natasha settled on Pink-Melon, Magenta-Raspberry, Yellow-Lemon, and Dark-Green-Apple.

She drew feverishly, virulently, shifting my gown around for better reach. Red contusions appeared on my arms and chest, pink scars veined my legs. My thighs and shoulders were covered with lemon liver spots. Dark green flecks, resembling zelyonka—the green iodine used to treat chicken pox — dotted my whole body. On my forehead she drew a raspberry medical cross.

“That’s better.” Natasha looked me over with satisfaction. “At least now you don’t reek so much.” She opened the window, threw out the caps, and turned off the lights.

“And remember, it’ll hurt to lie down because of your rash and burns. So you better be standing there in the morning,” one of them added.

And I stood. My sinuses were stuffed, my skin goose-bumped. I was a little hungry, too. Part of me wanted to cry, yet another part realized that, in a way, I’d gotten what I’d asked for: I was finally a true patient. I now deserved to be in the Big Hospital.

How late was it? Baba Olya would be reading a book in bed, her white fluffy cat, Kelly, purring next to her. I missed my bed, set up in the glassed-in balcony among the cucumber and tomato pots. I liked so many things about Baba Olya’s apartment. The vanity dressing table in her bedroom with a multitude of little boxes in the drawers, each containing gold jewelry and treasures she’d collected on her travels. Also the medical instruments she used for everything. She raked the soil in the pots with curved dental picks, decorated cakes (which she shouldn’t have been eating) by pushing the cream through a syringe without a needle, opened letters with a scalpel, and plucked her eyebrows with a pair of surgical pincers. The first thing I always did when I arrived for the summer was to comb the apartment for new medical tools in whatever novel use they had found. This year, her bedroom curtains were held back with towel clamps. I suddenly missed all of it.

What time was it in Alaska? I’d heard that in the summer the sun never set there, and moose roamed the streets. I imagined Papa lying in bed on a daylight night, unable to fall asleep and thinking of me. I thought of Mama, too, alone in rainy Magadan and without hot water, playing piano in the empty arts college.

I was about to climb back under the covers when a sharp moan came from Liza’s bed. I held my breath. Another moan. Liza thrashed on her side and curled into a ball. I waited. Then Natasha moaned.

I tiptoed to Liza’s bed and bent to her: her breath smelled like spoiled peaches. Was she in pain or pretending? Then I saw a dark liquid spreading all over her sheets. I turned on the lights. The sheets were streaked with red and pink. Blood! I saw clumps of blood cells here and there, congregating in little pools.

“Are you okay?” I said. I tried to lift the sheet to look for a possible wound, but Liza was wrapped in a tight ball, her eyes shut, her knees clutched to her stomach. I could not move or unclasp her.

She cried out again, and I jumped back. Somewhere a door banged. Light footsteps tapped by our room. Maybe it was Nurse Larissa, or someone else who would know what to do.

I opened the door. A figure in white stood by the window at the end of the dark, empty hallway.

“Nurse Larissa,” I yelled.

Without turning around, the figure disappeared through the side door. I ran barefoot on the cold floor. Bed creaks and coughs emanated from other sickrooms. The TV in the empty nurses’ station reported the news in angry monotone.

Where were all the nurses, the doctors? The hospital seemed abandoned.

Another bang, this time from above. I darted through the side door and up the stairs to a deserted hallway with stacks of chairs lining the walls. No sign of Nurse Larissa. I ran back down. The door I’d come through moments ago was locked.

I hurried back up the stairs and farther down this particularly freezing hallway. There were no nurses’ stations here, and the windows in the doors were painted over with white. This was very odd. I’d imagined the hospital would be bustling with activity even at night. Especially at night. I opened one of the doors. In the dark room I thought I saw high metal shelves with large plastic bags. And inside those bags something white — bodies?

I banged the door and took off. I ripped through empty hallways, up and down stairs and around corners, afraid to look back, half believing that rotting bodies were chasing after me. I ran ran ran. I rubbed my burned finger and ran faster. I had to save Liza before it was too late.

I burst through yet another door and found myself in a brightly lit, noisy reception area. A doctor and a nurse stood talking in the hallway. Somewhere down a concealed hallway a baby was crying. On one of the chairs by the open window sat Dr. Pasha, dressed in jeans and a blue plaid shirt. No red bandana.

I knew I had no history of sleep-onset hallucinations, yet I had to be dreaming.

Dr. Pasha was hunched over, his head in his hands. First, I thought he might be sleeping; then he began to tap his foot. I came up to him and touched his curly hair. It was much coarser than I’d imagined.

“Sonya?” He looked at me with irritation, but he didn’t seem surprised to see me. I started to back away.

“Are those marker stains?” Amusement loosened his face.

“Pavel Dmitrievch, please come with me. A girl in my room is bleeding. At the other end of the hospital. There’s nobody there. No doctors, no nurses. We have to call someone. She’s having gastritis. Or ulcers.” I thought for a moment, then added, “Or gallbladder stones.”

“Cover yourself or you’ll catch a cold. A real cold.” He picked up his jacket from the next chair and threw it at me.

“We must run, please. There was blood on her sheets, lots and lots of blood!”

“That does sound serious, Sophia Anatolyevna.” Dr. Pasha grabbed my arm and twisted it back and forth to get a better look at the red marker contusions. “What are you doing here anyway?”

“Oh, well, I’m here for some diagnostic tests, for my stomach, but Liza—”

“I know that part.”

“What part?”

“Your grandma told us — your mushroom recipe was very original, I must say — but drawing the cross and the rash is overdoing it a bit, baby.”

So everybody knew … And everybody had played along. I could never go back to the Polyclinika now. I wiped my eyes with the backs of my hands.

“The things we do to get attention. The stupid things I did as a boy, still do.”

“Dr. Pasha, you don’t understand,” I said in a shaky voice. I wished for instant death or at least humiliation-induced coma. “You have to help me find someone for Liza. We don’t have time to lose. She’ll bleed to death!”

“I’m too busy to play your and your friends’ idiot games.”

“This is not a game!” I hollered and tried to pull him off the chair.

“Sonya, are you insane? Don’t scream here. This is a maternity ward. My son was just born.”

A son. Blood beat against my eardrums.

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Well, a big thank-you.”

What if he was right, I thought, and Liza was trying to fool me. Maybe it wasn’t blood but tomato juice — something I would have probably used for blood. No, a good doctor couldn’t think like that.

“Do you know about the get-up test?” Dr. Pasha said.

The what?

“I think so,” I lied.

“A pregnant woman sits down on the floor and, depending on which arm she instinctively uses first to help herself up, that’s how you know the gender of the baby,” he said with a dead-serious expression. “Right arm — girl, left arm — boy.”

“Really?” I hadn’t spent much time in the gynecology office. Almost anything was possible in medicine.

“Really. The test is ninety percent accurate, as long as the pregnant woman doesn’t eat any mushrooms beforehand.”

“I didn’t eat the mushrooms to—” I burst out sobbing. I let it all go. I fell on my knees in front of Dr. Pasha. “Pavel Dmitrievich, please help me find a doctor. Please. I am not lying, I am not pretending this time.”

He snapped me on my forehead cross and smelled his fingers. “Raspberry — berry, you beckoned us,” he sang out in a surprisingly squeaky voice. “Promise me you’ll never grow up, Sonya.”

I got up from my knees and yanked Dr. Pasha’s hand with all my might.

“What are you doing? I told you, I’m waiting for the baby.” He looked terrified. And terrifying, too. I knew that he wouldn’t help. I tried to free my hand, but now he wouldn’t let go.

“There’s your baby!” I pointed toward the double doors with my free hand. As he slackened his clammy grip, I ran out of the reception room. The darkness swallowed me back like a swamp.

Again I stumbled through empty hallways, up and down stairs, looking for somebody, anybody. I was so tired. The hospital was endless, sprouting and shedding new hallways and stairs. Maybe I was going psychotic. Maybe I had hallucinated them all — Natasha, Liza, and this Dr. Pasha. I wished I could talk to Alina; she knew all about hallucinations.

At last, I arrived in a hallway that wasn’t so dark. I looked into one of the rooms: six patients with dark faces snored sonorously. They were alive — that was a good sign. I lay down on a cold faux-leather bench in the hallway and pulled Dr. Pasha’s jacket over my head. I closed my eyes. It was all over now. My medical career was ruined. Liza was probably dead. Baba Olya had betrayed me. I wanted to be sick with something curable only in America, then Papa would have no choice but to take me with him right away, and everyone would be helpless and sorry. I lay there, in tears, not knowing which plague to wish upon myself. I scoured my body for pain — after all I had gone through today, it had to be somewhere … I couldn’t be the same. Something was pressing against my stomach, I think. I think I was already sleeping.