Rock, Paper, Scissors

by Maxim Osipov

  He’s happy to take a look—a quick one. Where is she? In the corridor.

  The nurse says, quietly: “A Gypsy.”

  He’d treated a Gypsy about two months ago. An odd woman. The nurses had warned him: Be careful with her. She undressed silently, to the waist, as he’d instructed, and didn’t ask the usual questions: “Do I take off my bra?” Utter solemnity and contempt. She turned to the left when necessary, also in silence. None of the usual rustling, the feminine chatter, no “Oh, is that my heart making those bubbling sounds?” She took the report on the chin. As he remembers it, she just said: “Thank you.” You could feel it: she hated them, all the—the word that came to mind was wardens. Well, if they’re in uniform, even if it’s a lab coat or scrubs, who are they but wardens? Why was she in such a hurry? The nurse explained: She’s well known in the neighborhood, sells drugs. The nurses know everything, because they live around here; it’s convenient to work near home. So that’s why the woman was in a hurry: she had a job to do. And it turned out that her son—a grown boy, nineteen—had died, but not on his watch. This would explain the solemnity. All right, so that was that. She’s not a real Gypsy, either. Skinny, short-haired, with an inauthentic name—something Russian sounding. Married, he wondered? The nurses knew that too: the first husband hanged himself, the current one has no legs, begs for change in the street. Truth be told, he was getting fed up with all these hard-luck stories. Of course, a doctor shouldn’t think such thoughts, let alone express them.

  Today it was a different Gypsy. The other one was relatively young; this one was old.

  “What’s the deal with Guber and the Gypsies?” the nurse wondered. “We’ll never get the whole story.”

  “Call her in, let’s make it quick.”

  A fussy old dame, mumbling indistinctly. Red hair—a bad dye job—rough hands, swollen fingers, face, and legs. Garish clothing—our old women don’t dress like that.

  The nurse growls, You’re wrapped up tight!

  “It’s warm these days, Grandmother, April!”

  So what if it’s April? She’s always cold.

  All right, what’s the trouble? They’re in a hurry.

  The Gypsy mumbles; it’s impossible to understand her. How old is she? She can’t even tell him her age.

  “Granny, this ain’t the Gestapo,” the nurse explodes, “talk!”

  You can’t treat patients that way—especially paying patients, from Guber.

  They need her year of birth.

  “Write 1920 . . .”

  “Why not tell us the truth?”

  “Write 1928 . . . 1930.”

  Her papers actually list the year as 1920, but the woman doesn’t look seventy-nine. Someone dropped the ball. “Dropped the balls,” as Guber puts it. He’s from Moldova. No one corrects him; they just laugh behind his back.

  Let’s ask how old she was when the war broke out. She doesn’t remember. “Which war?” She missed the war? Where was she in the forties, under a rock?

  She answers: “In the woods.”

  “In the woods? What were you doing in the woods?”

  The nurse looks at him: Doesn’t he know what Gypsies do?

  The woman says: “Singing songs.”

  Songs? In the woods? Come on, let’s get her undressed.

  The nurse is clearly ill at ease.

  “Gimme the little pills, the good ones,” the woman says.

  Come on now, undress. A suffocating smell fills the room.

  “We’ve got to treat the intertrigo,” the nurse says, angrily. “What a stench.”

  Wipe that off. Put some talcum on it. A filthy old woman, what can he say.

  He does an ultrasound—the heart is big, clearly visible. She’s sick, all right. Probably shouldn’t leave. He’ll get her a bed. The nurse objects: You just watch—something will go missing. Who’s gonna answer for that?

  The woman doesn’t want to stay, either: “Just gimme the good pills . . .”

  Ah, well, he can spare another fifteen minutes. He’ll need iodine, alcohol, a catheter, sterile gloves, anesthetic. He marks her back with a felt-tip pen: “You’ve got fluid in your lungs. We’ll drain it.”

  The nurse shakes her head: Guber asked you to take a look, nothing more. He won’t like this. “But we won’t tell your Guber a thing. No need to touch the cash register.”

  What’s she muttering? “She’s not Russian, can’t stand the pain.” She won’t have to—just a prick and it’s all over.

  Let the fluid flow. He’ll fill out the papers.

  A liter and a half, in total.

  “Breathing easier?”

  See? She should have trusted him. He finishes up the paperwork. “Gimme the good pills,” the Gypsy says, all dressed now. “It’ll bring you happiness.”

  “Happiness?” The nurse frowns.

  He knows what she wants to say: There’s no happiness with Gypsies. No, he won’t frown—not out of superstition, just because.

  “The pills,” the woman repeats, “that go together, you understand?” She bares gold teeth.

  Go together with what? Hashish? Or something stronger? The woman is taken aback: Why talk that way? She likes to have a nip is all, with dinner. “Ah, a nip . . . Yes, great pills. They go together.”

  Happiness, he thinks. What a world . . .

  The Gypsy woman tries to shove some crumpled bills into his hand. All tens. He pushes her hand away—she’s a strong one—and thinks: It all comes down to denomination; if the bills were thousands, he might have taken them. So his anger is false, and everyone knows it, except, he hopes, the nurse.

  “How can you come to see a doctor, smelling like that?” the nurse asks indignantly, escorting the Gypsy out of the room.

  His nurse is a sensitive “Western” type. She throws open the windows, sprays the room with an air freshener. All right, he’s off.

  “You’ll forgive me,” the nurse says, “but, to be frank, I don’t feel sorry for people like that—not one bit. They don’t deserve treatment.”

  Now she’ll say that she doesn’t approve of Hitler, in principle, but on certain matters . . . She’s no Western type—she’s just a fool. Coming out of the hospital, he overtakes the Gypsy. She grabs him by the sleeve: Let me read your fortune. “No, thanks.” He already knows what awaits him: a long journey, and all that.

  •

  He always takes his car to Sheremetyevo—it’s wasteful and takes longer, but he’s used to it, and he likes to have all his things at hand: the doctor’s bag, a book, a shirt, underwear, and socks. Today he’s forgotten everything except the bag, almost intentionally: he never did decide what to read, and his Boston friends will make sure he has a change of clothes. His wardrobe always improves after his visits to Boston. He won’t read, he’ll listen to music; he has a lot of it, suitable for any state of mind.

  Hardships await him at Sheremetyevo. First—and this isn’t so terrible, really—the patient is a difficult one: a blind old woman with no feet and a urinary catheter. A diabetic. He’ll have to poke her with insulin, pour out urine, order wheelchairs. But she has a husband, who seems to be fairly together—so we’ll make it. The second hardship is much worse—he had mixed up his Portlands. The ticket isn’t for Portland, Maine, which is less than two hours by car from Boston, but for the other Portland, in Oregon, on the opposite side of the continent.

  How could he have missed the mark so badly? He tells the people from the mysterious organization—who were responsible for tickets—and they laugh in response: his misfortune doesn’t elicit much sympathy. He should warn his friends, he thinks—they’re bound to be disappointed. He’ll call them from the layover in New York. It’s not a disaster, of course, but it’s a shitty situation.

  The “security” guys know him well by now—they don’t hassle him, don’t pat him down, just raise and lower their hands a few inches away from his body: “Carrying explosives, weapons?” they ask with a smile. He tells them about the Portland mess too. “Portland,�
� they say, “that’s nothing. There’s an Oakland in New Zealand, not in—what’s it called?” He chimes in: California. “Yeah, that’s it—so this one fella . . .” They’re simple guys, but charming, in their way. He likes to stand around with them for a while, chat. Again, their uniforms seem to have an effect.

  Now he’ll hear—for the nth time—their story about an American girl who was traveling with a kitty cat—they put them in special carriers, for the belly of the plane—and the kitty cat died. The baggage handlers at Sheremetyevo didn’t want any trouble, so they threw the carcass in the trash and replaced it with some cat they caught near the airport. The American girl got into a huff and insisted it wasn’t her kitty—because her kitty had been dead, and she was taking her home to bury her. She was returning from some town, maybe Chelyabinsk. Last time the story was different: the American with the dead cat had flown in from Philadelphia. Today’s version was more believable, but it was still a lie, of course. The “security” guys call Americans “Americunts” and “Amerifucks”—ridiculous words, and they’ve never been to America—but he still laughs every time. All right, time to board.

  As he walks away, one of the guys says dreamily, “Doc, would I like to trade places with you and take a gander at those skyscrapers they got over there.”

  Not a chance, my friend—medicine is a calling.

  •

  “Farewell, unwashed Russia!” a young man intones from across the aisle.

  Lermontov’s poem seems to be the standard text for those departing Russia—he’s heard it more than once. At first, when he had just started working for the company, he expected to see the full range of human emotions; emigration was a major step, after all. But he soon realized that this was no different from working in a crematorium or at the registry office: there was a limited set of reactions.

  The plane takes off and he crosses himself—discreetly, so that other passengers don’t think he’s scared, so that they don’t get scared themselves. Indeed, nothing up here depends on his actions. Behind the wheel, on a slippery road, in the dark—that’s much worse.

  The plane isn’t full, but it isn’t empty, either. He has two seats to himself, near a window. Two days in transit. Two days of his life in exchange for six hundred dollars. A friend of his father, a former political prisoner, once told him: It’s harder to spend one year in confinement than fifteen. You spend the whole year waiting for your release; you don’t actually live. So imagine a two-day trip . . .

  He should probably get up and check on the patient. Maybe it can wait. Not that he’s lazy—it’s just professional immobility, which he had always despised in ICU docs.

  This strange work also affords opportunities for little scams. For example, you can pretend you’re just another passenger, minding your own business. Oh, a fellow passenger isn’t feeling well? Well, here you are, a Russian doctor, with medicine and everything. A miracle! Stewardesses give such doctors champagne, do other little favors, help any way they can. And if the truth comes out—so what? A little awkwardness never killed anyone. They’re foreigners to him, and he’s a foreigner to them. If his ward’s health allowed it, he could even skip the trip to Portland, put the woman on the plane—bon voyage, have a good flight!—and then hang around New York for an extra day. In truth, he envied those who dared to do such things, but he himself would never pull those tricks: Who knows what might happen? No, there’s no shaking the legless old woman. And he was supposed to escort some Baptists to Portland, too. Baptists are easy: they don’t complain about anything, don’t take pills, somehow don’t even get sick. Only they’re not too bright, and they have whole broods of children—there they are, near the tail. One group even lost a little one at the airport in New York. Didn’t faze them in the least: good people would find him, send him home.

  “How do you feel?” He takes the old woman’s blood pressure, pulse.

  She’s half asleep. The husband answers: “How do you put it in these cases? ‘Considering the seriousness of the procedure . . .’ ”

  What procedure?

  “Fifteen hours by train from Yoshkar-Ola.”

  The husband’s name is Anatoly. No patronymic.

  “They don’t use patronymics in America.”

  It’s true, they don’t. It’s the country of forgetting your father’s name, as Garibaldi might have said.2 And the plane is, for all intents and purposes, American territory.

  He’d like to know what drove them from their home—he’s interested in people—but he’s trying to break the habit of asking these extraneous questions that doctors supposedly have the right to ask: Why have you moved here or there? What do your children do? What does your name mean? He’s also afraid he’ll get the typical story. We were living just fine, going about our business, but then the wife’s sister, say, or some cousin, tells us: Send an application to the embassy, just in case. So we sent the application and forgot all about it, and when we received permission to emigrate, we just ignored it. But then we get that letter in the mail: Now or never. That word always has an effect: never.

  But Anatoly’s story is different: His wife developed renal failure. She’ll need dialysis. What else is there to say? Their son, an engineer, is in America.

  “The medical care in Yoshkar-Ola—it’s terrible. There just isn’t any.”

  He nods and thinks: You should have left sooner . . . Now the old woman will die with the help of the finest medical technology. There’s no helping her. But he says: “You made the right decision.”

  “Is Portland a real backwater?” asks Anatoly. He has a nice smile.

  “Well . . . In comparison with Yoshkar-Ola . . .”

  “Have you been to Yoshkar-Ola?”

  He shakes his head no.

  “And to Portland?”

  “Not this Portland, no.”

  “There are twenty-one Portlands in America. I looked it up. Ours is the biggest.”

  Anatoly strikes up conversations with the stewardesses, trying out his English. It’s not so bad. A little old-fashioned, sure, but pretty impressive.

  “Thank you. I’m flattered.” Turns out he taught English at a university for forty years.

  Time for the insulin? No, don’t you worry, Anatoly will take care of it himself. He’ll handle the insulin, empty the urine-drainage bag. Excellent. If they need him, they know where to find him.

  He can see land down below. Canada? He looks at his watch: No, Greenland. Food, a little sleep, some dumb flick about nothing. How are the Baptists back there? Said their prayers, ate—now they’re sleeping. That’s the life.

  At last. The first ten hours are behind him. The plane begins its descent.

  •

  New York: a wait for the wheelchair, fussing with the papers, a minor misunderstanding with the immigration officer.

  “How long have you been a doctor?” the officer asks.

  “Ten years. Since I was twenty-two. No, twenty-three.”

  “Bullshit,” says the officer. He really dropped the balls on that. Would’ve been too busy at that age. All Russians serve in the Red Army.

  He shrugs his shoulders. Some kind of nutjob, clearly. Can he go now?

  Anatoly catches up to him in the vestibule: He explained everything to the officer—about military training at medical school, and so on. The officer asked him to pass along an apology. Amazing: an apologetic border guard. Clearly a nutjob.

  The rest of it goes smoothly. They retrieve their bags—Anatoly’s, the old woman’s, the Baptists’—and check them for the next flight, to Portland. It’s a three-hour layover. Let them sit for a while; he’ll be back—he has to call his friends, change tickets.

  It’s getting harder and harder to find a pay phone these days. Many Americans, even decent-looking people, have cell phones. Back home, they’re still a tasteless luxury, an affectation of wheeler-dealers. Guber has one . . . All right, he’s called his friends, let them down; needless to say, they won’t be driving down to New York just to say hello.
When will they see him next? In a month’s time, as usual. He won’t disappoint them again.

  Now to change his ticket, so that he can sleep on the plane. In the morning he’ll take a walk around New York, sit in Central Park, and, if he’s not too tired, visit the Met and buy some gifts for his family. He knows from experience that he won’t actually make it to the Met.

  The two men at the ticket window—one tall, the other very pale—work in shifts; the other doctors who work for the company have taken to calling them Longfellow and Whitman. Longfellow isn’t too swift, always screws things up—but today, thank God, he gets Whitman. Easy as pie, and no surcharge: his return flight takes off fifteen minutes after he arrives in Portland. And he doesn’t have to worry about missing it: it’s the same plane there and back. Lucky. Even better: Whitman can upgrade him to first class, one way, thanks to his frequent-flyer miles. Would he like that? “Sure.”

  •

  The plane to Portland is almost completely empty. He’s the only customer in first class. A male stewardess—is it steward? Anatoly suggests: flight attendant—welcomes them at the entrance. A handsome fellow, with an earring in his left ear—does that rule apply in America? He smells strongly of cologne. Sure, flight attendant. He’s a fragrant steward.

  “You know what,” the steward offers, “let’s seat the lady and her husband next to you.”

  Great idea.

  “You see the treatment we get?” He wants Anatoly to like America.

  The steward helps the old woman into her seat—more symbolically than practically, with two fingers, but still. He praises her headscarf: a beautiful color. Things are different at home. If a legless old woman decided to take a plane somewhere, they probably wouldn’t let her board: Where is she flying off to? In any case, she wouldn’t be able to get on the plane. And first class? Forget about it. That’s strictly for spoiled brats.