12 : Tag

Zoya Masurov: a body like petrified smoke in her black sweater and black thigh-boots, her hair blackest of all and drawn away from her pale ivory face, her eyes smouldering in the charred silk of their brows and lashes, taking you in and giving you nothing back, reminding me of Helda, last seen at the edge of a minefield on the East German border, though this woman was harder and would have no mercy, would kill you if you were an enemy and kill for you if you were a friend. But she held most of it in, and it was only when you went close to her that you sensed the undercurrents and felt their pull. 'There is no need to bring a doctor here,' she'd told Bracken. 'I'm a doctor.' She worked on me when Bracken had gone, taking a small black cauldron of boiling water up to the room on the top floor, the one right at the end like the one at Gorsky's place, because we're safest there: it's the required location. 'What should I look for?' she asked me, 'splinters, metal, glass?' 'Glass.' 'What contaminants? What was in the glass?' 'Nothing. It was a car crash. Are you the upravdom here?' 'Yes.' There wasn't much light from the bulb overhead and she was using a big hand lamp that must have come out of a railway sale, her black eyes narrowed as she looked for the glint of glass, swabbing and exploring and swabbing again, never looking at me, looking always at the wound, 'I am the upravdom, yes, but also a doctor, though no longer in the registry, of course, since they removed my name after nearly thirteen years,' the fragments cutting sometimes as she moved the steel probe, her body held perfectly still and only her hands working, the small veins in her temple thrown into relief by the backwash of the enormous lamp, the sweep of one eyelash sending shadow across her brow, 'that was at the hospital in Smolensk, the big new one they built after the war. It was there that they found me doing something unforgivable.' The room was warm and this woman was healing me and Bracken had given me his guarantee, no one but himself in the field with me, so I was slowly coming down from the nervous high of the aftershock and beginning to think I had a chance of doing some work in this city and getting out of it alive. But I still didn't know how I could have asked him what I had, to keep it from Croder that I'd needed persuasion. Croder meant nothing to me. 'They found me using American antibiotics,' she said. 'We didn't have anything at the time for sickle cell anaemia, and they wouldn't allow the import of GH3 because Romania isn't loyal to the master state. But I had a friend at the consulate and he got me the drugs from Sloan Kittering - Kettering, is it? - and I was found using them, and so here I am, the upravdom of an apartment block in Moscow with instructions to report on the residents here if they commit any infraction of the rules.' She threw the swab into a metal-lined box and prodded again. I winced and she laughed and said, 'You can feel it better than I can see it, that's just what I want.' 'And a happy Christmas to you too,' I said and she laughed again and had to hold the probe away for a minute. She had sharp white teeth like an animal's, and it occurred to me that if I ever introduced her to the blue-eyed fair-haired Natalya Fyodorova this woman would eat her alive. 'It amuses me,' she said deep in her throat, 'the way men can't stand pain.' 'It's to get sympathy, even when we know there isn't a dog's chance. Did you appeal?' She broke her laugh halfway. 'Appeal?' 'Against the medical brass.' 'I didn't know you were listening.' 'Oh yes, I was listening.' The place was reeking of alcohol by the time she'd finished, and I stood at the other side of the room from the mirror and took a look; she'd put in a row of new sutures and covered the wound with a long strip of elastic dressing and it didn't look too bad in here, though it wouldn't do for the street. 'Will it start bleeding again?' 'No.' She was packing her things together in the big medical bag. 'Not unless you open it again as you did last time.' There was a bloodied swab on the linoleum and I dropped it into the wood-stove. 'What did they tell you about me?' 'You are for safe keeping,' she said.