Short Fiction Vsevolod Garshin (best e reader for epub .txt) 📖

The warders continued to hold him, although he had become quiet. The warm bath and the bag of ice placed on his head were having their effect. But when they took him, almost unconscious, out of the water and laid him on a bench in order to apply a blister, the balance of his strength and the fantastic ideas again returned.

“Why? Why?” he shouted. “I never wished anyone harm! Why kill me? O⁠—O⁠—O⁠—O Lord! Oh, you have already tormented me. I implore you! Spare me!”

The burning hot application to the back of his neck made him struggle desperately. The attendants, unable to cope with him, did not know what to do. “You can do nothing,” said the soldier who had performed the operation; “we must rub.”

These simple words sent the patient into convulsions of fear: “Rub! Rub what? Rub whom? Me!” he reflected, and in mortal terror he closed his eyes. The soldier, taking the two ends of a coarse towel and pressing heavily, quickly drew it across the nape of the patient’s neck, tearing from it both the blister and the outer layer of skin, and leaving an open red sore. The painfulness of this operation, almost unendurable even for a quiet and sane person, seemed to the patient the end of all things. He made a desperate effort with his whole body, wrenched himself free of the warders, and his naked body slid along the stone slabs. He thought they had cut off his head. He wished to cry out, but could not. They carried him to his cubicle in a state of unconsciousness, which passed into a profound, deathlike sleep.

It was night when he awoke. All was quiet. The heavy breathing of patients sleeping in the large room near was audible. A patient, placed for the night in the dark room, was talking to himself in a strange and monotonous voice. Above, in the women’s ward, a hoarse contralto was singing some wild song. The patient listened to these sounds. He felt a terrible weakness and lassitude in all his limbs. His neck was dreadfully painful.

“Where am I? What has happened to me?” came into his head. Then suddenly, with extraordinary vividness, his life during the last month came before him, and he understood that he was unwell, and in what way he was unwell. He recalled a series of absurd thoughts, words, and actions which made him shudder throughout his whole being. “But that is ended; thank God, it is ended!” he whispered to himself, and again fell asleep.

An opened window, but guarded with iron bars, looked out on a little corner between the big buildings and a stone wall. Into this corner no one ever went, and it was overgrown with some wild shrub and a lilac in gaudily full blossom at this time of the year. Behind these bushes directly opposite the window a high wall loomed, from behind which, in turn, glanced lofty tops of trees, and through their leafy branches pierced the moonlight, which was bathing all around, including the big garden from which these trees arose. On the right was the white building of the Asylum, with its iron-barred windows, through which the lights were visible. On the left, white and brilliant in the moonlight, was the blank wall of the mortuary. The moon’s rays, shining past the iron bars of the window into the room, fell on to the floor, and lighted up a part of the bed, bringing into relief the worn pallid face of its occupant lying with closed eyes. There was no trace of insanity in its features now. It was the deep, heavy sleep of an exhausted being, dreamless, motionless, and almost breathless. For a few seconds he awoke, fully conscious, and apparently sane, only to rise in the morning from his bed again bereft of reason.

“How do you feel?” asked the doctor of him the following morning.

The patient, having only just awakened, was still lying in bed.

“Splendid!” he replied, jumping out of bed, putting on his slippers, and wrapping himself up in his dressing-gown⁠—“first-rate! Except for one thing. Look!” He pointed to the nape of his neck. “I cannot turn my head without pain. But it is nothing. All is good if you understand it, and I understand.”

“You know where you are?”

“Of course, doctor! I am in an Asylum. But once you understand, it is absolutely all the same⁠—absolutely.”

The doctor looked him fixedly in the eyes. His handsome, attractive face, with its well-tended golden beard and the calm blue eyes which looked through gold-rimmed spectacles, was immovable and inscrutable. He was observing his patient.

“Why are you looking at me so fixedly? You will not read what is in my mind,” continued the sick man, “and I can clearly read what is in yours. Why do you do evil? Why have you collected this crowd of unfortunates here, and why do you keep them here? To me it is all the same. I understand everything, and am calm, but they! What is the purpose of all this torture? To one who has recognized that in his mind there exists a mighty idea⁠—to him it is a matter of indifference where he lives or does not live, and what he feels. It is a matter of indifference even whether he lives or dies. Is not that so?”

“Perhaps,” replied the doctor, seating himself on a chair in a corner of the room so as to watch the patient, who shuffled rapidly from corner to corner in a pair of huge, horsehide slippers, waving the folds of his dressing-gown, made of some cotton material on which was printed wide stripes and large flowers. The “dresser” and head warder, who had accompanied the doctor, remained standing to attention at the door.

“And I have this idea!” exclaimed the patient;