The Undiscovered Chekhov

AT

THE

PHARMACY

TT WAS LATE IN the evening. The private tutor Egor Alexeyitch Svoykin, so as not to waste time, went straight from the doctors to the pharmacy.

“Its like going from a cowshed into a courtesan’s boudoir!” he thought as he climbed the staircase, which was polished and covered with an expensive runner. “You’re afraid to put your foot down!”

As he entered, Svoykin was struck by the aroma one finds in every pharmacy in the world. Science and medicine may change over the years, but the fragrance of a pharmacy is as eternal as the atom. Our grandfathers smelled it, and our grandchildren will smell it too. As it was so late, there were no customers. Behind a polished yellow counter covered with labeled jars stood a tall gentleman, his head leaning sturdily back. He had a severe face and well-groomed side- whiskers—to all appearances, the pharmacist. From the small bald patch on his head to his long pink fingernails, everything was painstakingly starched, groomed, licked clean, as if he were standing at the altar. His haughty eyes were looking down at a newspaper lying on the counter. He was reading. A cashier sat to the side behind a wire grille, lazily counting change. On the far side of the counter two dim figures puttered about in the semidarkness, mixing a multitude of strange potions.

Svoykin went up to the counter and gave the starched gendeman the prescription. He took it without looking at it, continued reading the newspaper article to the end of the sentence, and muttered, turning his head slighdy: “Calomeli grana duo, sacchari albi grana quinque, numero decern!”

“Ja!” a sharp, metallic voice answered from the depths of the pharmacy.

The pharmacist gave directions for the drops in the same muffled, measured voice.

“Ja!” came from the other corner.

The pharmacist wrote something on the prescription, frowned, and leaning his head back, rested his eyes again on the newspaper.

“It will be ready in an hour,” he mumbled through his teeth, his eyes scanning for the sentence he had just finished reading.

“Can’t I get it any sooner?” Svoykin muttered. “I can’t possibly wait that long.”

The pharmacist did not answer. Svoykin sat down on the sofa and waited. The cashier finished counting the change, sighed deeply, and rattled his keys. One of the dark figures in the interior was pounding away with a marble pesde. The other figure shuffled about with a blue vial. Somewhere a clock stuck with rhythmic care.

Svoykin was ill. His mouth was on fire; there was a drawn- out pain in his arms and legs; foggy images tumbled about like clouds and shrouded human figures in his heavy head. He looked as if through a veil at the pharmacist, the shelves of jars, the gas burners, and the cabinets. The monotonous pounding in the marble mortar, and the slow ticking of the clock, seemed to him to be coming not from the outside but from inside his head. The disorientation and fogginess took over his whole body more and more, so that after a while, feeling that the pounding of the pestle was making him sick, he decided to get a hold on himself by striking up a conversation with the pharmacist.

“I think I’m getting a fever,” he said. “The doctor says it’s a bit soon to tell what I’m suffering from, but I’m already feeling quite weak. Thank God, though, I had the good fortune to fall sick here in the capital and not out in the village, where there’s neither doctor nor pharmacy!”

The pharmacist remained stock-still and, leaning his head farther back, kept on reading his newspaper. He didn’t respond to Svoykin with word or movement—it was as if he hadn’t heard him. The cashier yawned loudly and struck a match against his pants. The pounding of the pesde grew louder and more ringing. Seeing that no one was listening to him, Svoykin lifted his eyes to the shelf of jars and began reading the labels. At first all kinds of herbs shot before his eyes: Pimpinella, Tormentilla, Zedoari- an, Gentian, and so on. Behind the herbs, tinctures flashed, - oleums, -seeds, one name stranger and more antediluvian than the next.

“I wonder how much useless ballast there is on these shelves!” Svoykin thought. “How much stuff must be kept in these jars just for tradition’s sake, but how solid and impressive it all looks!”

Svoykin moved his eyes from the shelves to the glass cabinet next to him. He saw rubber rings, balls, syringes, jars of toothpaste, Pierrot drops, Adelheim drops, cosmetic soaps, hair-growth ointment.

A boy in a dirty apron entered the pharmacy and asked for ten kopecks worth of ox bile.

“Could you tell me what ox bile is used for?” Svoykin asked the pharmacist, thinking it might be a handy subject for striking up a conversation.

Not getting an answer, he stared at the severe and haughty face of the pharmacist.

“God, what strange people they are!” he thought. “Why do they have science stamped all over their faces? Looking at them, you’d think they were lofty scientists, but all they do is sell hair- growth ointment and fleece you. They write in Latin and speak to one another in German... they act as if they’re medieval or something. When you’re in good health you never notice their dry, stale faces, but the moment you get sick, like me, you’re horrified that a sacrosanct profession has fallen into the hands of such rigid, unfeeling characters.”

Looking at the pharmacist’s motionless face, Svoykin suddenly felt the uncontrollable urge to lie down somewhere in the dark, as far away as possible, away from these scientific faces and the pounding of the marble pesde. The exhaustion of illness took over his whole being. He went up to the counter and, with an imploring grimace, asked:

“Could you please be so kind as to hurry with my medicine! I’m... I’m ill...”

“It’ll be ready soon enough... excuse me, but there’s no leaning on the counter!”

Svoykin sat down again on the sofa and, chasing away the foggy images in his head, watched the cashier smoke.

“Only half an hour has passed,” he thought. “I’m only halfway through... this is unbearable!”

But finally the small dark chemist came up to the phar-macist and put down next to him a box with powders and a vial of pink liquid. The pharmacist read to the end of the sentence, slowly walked away from the counter, picked up the vial, and holding it up to his eyes, shook it. Then he put his signature on a label, tied it to the neck of the vial, and then reached for the seal.

“God, what are all these rituals for?” Svoykin thought. “What a waste of time, and they even charge you extra for it!”

The pharmacist turned round and, having finished with the liquid, went through the same procedure with the powder.

“Here you are!” he said finally, without looking up at Svoykin. “Pay the cashier one ruble and six kopecks!”

Svoykin put his hand in his pocket, took out a ruble, and then suddenly remembered that the ruble was all he had.

“One ruble and she kopecks?” he mumbled, embarrassed. “All I have is one ruble... I thought a ruble would be enough... what am I going to do?”

“I have no idea!” the pharmacist said, picking up his newspaper again.

“Under the circumstances... I would be grateful if you would let me bring you, or maybe send you, the six kopecks tomorrow...”

“I’m sorry, we don’t give credit here.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Go home, get the six kopecks, and then you can have your medicine.”

“But... I’m having difficulty walking, and I don’t have anyone I can send...”

“That’s your problem.”

“Well,” Svoykin thought. “Fine, I’ll go home.”

He left the pharmacy and set off home. To reach his apartment he had to sit down five or six times. He went inside, found some change on the table, and sat down on his bed to rest. A strange power pulled his head toward the pillow. He lay down for a few minutes. The foggy images, like clouds and shrouded figures, blurred his consciousness. For a long time he kept thinking he had to go back to the pharmacy, and for a long time he intended to get up. But the illness prevailed. The copper coins fell out of his hand, and the sick man dreamed that he had gone back to the pharmacy and was again chatting with the pharmacist.