With an open heart

Explanatory note to readers of Novaya

When I found out that I was about to have a cardiological operation, I did what I could and called Paramonov, an experienced and in hospital affairs.

“What book,” I asked, “should I take to the hospital?”

- None.

- And Dovlatov took Dostoevsky with him. Another doctor asked him if it was the Bible, and he replied that it was no worse: "Idiot."

- Your Dovlatov lied.

But I myself did not believe Boris and loaded the iPad with Victorian prose, the iPod with Bach's uplifting preludes and, just in case, the Requiem. Armed to the teeth with Steve Jobs, I stopped being afraid of the near future and surrendered to the doctors.

In the operating room it was like in the wheelhouse of a military ship, where, however, I had not been before either. The detachment was commanded by an old Jew with a Slavic surname and a strong accent.

— Are you related to Ukraine? — Suspecting my own, I asked the surgeon.

- Undoubtedly, - he agreed, - even before the revolution, our family fled from the pogroms from Kyiv to Argentina. Hence the Spanish accent.

When assistants surrounded me, the anesthetist asked if I knew what they were doing.

— Tattoos?

“Joker,” the doctor reassured himself and put anesthesia into a vein.

When a day later I came to my senses in a dark basement, at first I thought that I was in the dungeons.

— Donetsk? Gestapo? Inquisition? guesses flared up, interspersed with pain. "I'll tell them everything, or rather, I've already told them."

I firmly understood one thing: they would not torture in an American hospital.

“It’s from youth,” the paramedic explained. “The old people don’t care anymore, but you’re still a man anyway, so the body resists violence.

How can you not understand him? I croaked.

“And the posture of the patient,” added the talkative interlocutor, “is important. From the outside, open-heart surgery resembles a crucifixion procedure.

— I feel His pain.

“Like all of us are on the way to correction,” he praised me and crossed himself.

I was left alone with pure and soulless suffering. Jobs did not help me, all the books in the world turned out to be superfluous, and Mozart had to be postponed until the wake.

On the second day, I was able to sit and talk on the phone.

- How do you look like? the wife asked, apparently afraid of not knowing.

Do you remember Rembrandt's Anatomy of Doctor Tulp? And I'm not Dr. Tulp on it.

The doctor intercepted the phone to prepare his wife for the worst.

- The consequence of the operation is increased irritability, sarcasm, malice, it may seem to you that the husband has been replaced.

“Well, it’s unlikely,” the wife sighed.

Meanwhile, hospital routine was back to normal. At night, my sisters hovered around me. Pretty and bloodthirsty, like vampires from the series, they took tests every hour.

Our closest contact was with a nurse, a Buddhist from the Urals, and with a black-skinned steward in a bow tie, who was taking a voluminous order for dinner.

“We have,” he boasted, “seven varieties of bread, tea empty and with lemon, chicken in assortment. All, of course, without salt, the rest - without sugar.

In parting, he asked what I liked best.

“An enema,” I admitted honestly.

“It’s hard for me to speak,” I complained to my sister who came to the house.

“Nothing,” she smiled, “shut up.” Where do you work?

“On the radio,” I managed.

— Well.

Reading returned the slowest.

“God,” the subconscious hissed, “well, who cares where the Moonstone went?”

Attributing the frightening change to the severe consequences of anesthesia, I moved to Facebook, which seems to be intended for the weak of mind, because it requires little and gives a little, but about everything in the world. As I jumped along the friends’ feed, I felt the vague presence of a second self. It seemed to me that I even recognized him: a retiree in underpants with an indispensable newspaper, from which he fishes out typos and sends each one to the editor with an angry letter in the style of “How long, Catiline.” Surrendering to him, I happily got into every quarrel, which I had previously ignored, considering squabbles unproductive.

“Perhaps so,” agreed the retiree, “but what a pleasure.

I acrimoniously pointed out to one friend a mistake in the transcription of Li Bo, another I reproached for exaggerating the role of Trump, a third for understatement, for the fourth I suspected “Krymnasha”, a fifth for neglecting Joyce, a sixth for snobbery, a seventh for having nothing to do. But then Savchenko was released, and I began to kick out everyone who was not happy about this.

I have always dreamed of sharing pleasure, but only because I had not yet discovered the grumbling joys of misanthropy.

“Listen, myndra,” I gladdened my wife, “in the hospital I found myself a new hobby.