Nanowrimo Winner

22. The singers of Lavordin

I think that it was at Lavordin hospital that I first realised for sure that Larvartin was insane. I had known for a long time that he was a strange, cruel man, of course, but he had conducted his affairs with such ruthless but apparently rational cunning I had not realised that he was mad.

Of course, it all began with that undiplomatic report where the Italian said conditions at Lavordin were ‘Stone Age’. Larvartin always hated to be patronised or disparaged by foreigners, and he was especially sensitive about Italians; he had regarded them as especially arrogant ever since he had had a particularly vituperative interview with one of Mussolini’s agents just before the outbreak of the war. When he read the report, he was thrown into a state of complete rage, and he marched up and down his office shouting and throwing things at the walls. Finally he insisted that together with a detachment of the CPV we should go and see the place for ourselves.

I thought myself that although conditions were not literally those of the Stone Age, they were certainly not very good. In most wards the patients were crammed in two to a bed, one facing each way; most of them wore their normal outdoor clothes. We saw little use of any drugs apart from aspirin, and most of the staff were not qualified nurses or doctors but filthy servants dating back to the days when the place had been more or less a hotel, all of whom treated the patients with contempt and no doubt stole their belongings whenever they could. The place stank, and not of disinfectant. Larvartin stayed under control at first, although I could see the anger was building up inside him. We were shown round by a young doctor, haggard with fatigue, clearly at the lowest possible ebb; I found out afterwards that he had not slept for three days. He told the simple truth, quite frankly, whether from habit or because he didn’t care any more whether Larvartin killed him or not.

“The problem, Larvartin,” he said, “Is that this is not a real hospital at all. It was never a properly equipped hospital and now it’s just a stinking shed where the sick are shovelled in every day. Give it another few weeks and it will be a charnel house.”

“That will not happen, Comrade Doctor.” said Larvartin, with a menacing light in his eye, “But we must take steps. That patient – “ he pointed to a grey-faced man, “What is his illness and how can it be cured?”

The doctor raised his eyes momentarily.

“That patient has a serious heart problem,” he replied, “He will die soon. There is nothing we can do. We do not have an operating theatre of any kind, let alone one which could attempt heart surgery. We don’t even have any useful drugs beyond some basic analgesics. Frankly his only chance would have been to leave the country – abroad he could have been treated. Here, we can do nothing except leave him alone and let matters take their course. To tell the truth, we have other priorities.”

“Priorities? Yes, indeed. Prioritisation is the key here. I had not realised things had got so disorganised.” Larvartin said, pressing his lips together, “But we will change that. We will change it now”.

He called the hospital staff together. Some were depressed, unmoved, but I could see that others, the younger ones mostly, were in fear of their lives.

“We are going to manage our problem here,” he said to them all, “So that no-one can reproach us with inefficiency, you understand me? We cannot have people lying here day after day dying with nothing being done, it’s not acceptable. Our first step is address the priority cases. You – the doctor. I want you to go back to Ward One and pick out the ten sickest patients. Bring me a list of their names.”

Puzzled, but not without signs of hope, the young doctor left the room and came back after a few minutes with a clipboard, which he handed to Larvartin.

“This first patient has emphysema,” he began, “There isn’t much we can do, but if we had oxygen…”

“Enough: do you think I want his life story, really doctor, we have no time for gossip.” said Larvartin peremptorily, handing the clipboard to Captain Ventarin, the commanding officer of the CPV squad, “Here, Ventarin. See this list? Take these bastards outside and shoot them.”

For several moments no-one quite believed it; even I thought for a moment that it was a clumsy joke. Then Ventarin, who had enough experience of Larvartin to know that hesitation was dangerous, gathered his wits and left the room. Someone at the back let out a thin scream.

“Ward Two!” said Larvartin. Looking pleased with himself.

But now that he knew what was going to happen to them, the young doctor refused to identify further patients for liquidation. Larvartin ignored him and summoned another doctor, a grey-haired old consultant – but he would not help either. It was one thing to stand by and let murder happen, but to pick out the victims was more than any of the medical staff could stomach. In the end the job was deputed to the most brutish of the servants. Larvartin worked his way through the wards systematically. When it came to the children, however, not even the bestial servant would select the victims. There was an impasse for a few moments and I really thought Larvartin might have the entire hospital liquidated then and there, staff and all. But instead he finally smiled and stalked off to the children’s ward himself, with the CPV and the line of horrified staff trailing behind him.

“Alright,” said Larvartin to the sick children, as if it were a treat, “This is what we’re going to do, you’ll enjoy it. We’re going to have a singing competition. You must all sing as loud as you can. I’m going to walk round and listen. If anyone is too sick to sing really loudly, Ventarin here will give him his medicine, OK?”

The terrified children began singing at the top of their voices. Some, who were actually unconscious or genuinely too ill to sing, stood no chance, and others were paralysed by fear. Each of these, one by one, was pointed at by Larvartin and taken outside where they received a bullet in the head at point-blank range. Ventarin was forced to reload several times.

Larvartin was put into a good mood by the implementation of his plan; he seemed pleased with his own ingenuity in devising the singing test. He gave instructions that every morning all the patients must sing; the three weakest on each ward would die. I looked at him standing there with blood flecks on his suit, his eyes wide open, and I said to myself, this man, this man who clings to me like the Old Man of the Sea, his mind is gone. I thought someone would kill him: I thought Ventarin would finally sicken of slaughtering sick children and turn his gun on his master. But it did not happen. Instead Ventarin and his men seemed to be getting into their stride, getting used to the business. They began smiling again.

Now Larvartin applied himself to the building of a surgical ward. He had all the patients outside and forced them to attempt to dig foundations, whatever their illness or injury. There was no plan, and nothing worthwhile was accomplished that first day except the creation of a ghastly mud heap. On subsequent days, Larvartin send his men out to conscript people from nearby towns. It so happened that the young poet Georgi Versantin was caught up by one of these press-gangs. Brought to the chaotic scene of the building work, which now consisted of a series of irregular holes, not unlike rough graves, Georgi wiped his face with one hand and shouted in a trembling voice:

“Comrades; when Khrushchev said ‘we will bury you’, didn’t he mean the capitalists?”

No-one answered.

“You know, we should get Carl Mustin out here and make him show them how to dig.” said Larvartin with a grin, forgetting that Carl Mustin had been sent to the cellars of the Agraci Palace three weeks before and no longer had functioning limbs.

In the end, thank God, after staying near the hospital for a week, he grew bored and returned to Sescastri. The Minister of Health was able to restore some semblance of order and propriety at Lavordin, but he was not able to get rid of the CPV, who continued to arrange what they called singing practice every morning. They stopped shooting people, but they continued to check that the patients were in good voice.

The new surgery, by the way, was eventually constructed by a team of Italian workers brought in by the Minister of Health, who was terrified that Larvartin would come back to inspect progress. The cost was huge, and for the next three years Lavordin took up over 60% of the entire national hospital budget. The facilities and staffing really did improve in the end, albeit at the cost of plunging most of the other hospitals in Dubitania into crisis. We were even able to show the place to some international visitors, at Larvartin’s insistence. CPV men wearing white coats stood in every corridor, and the staff were effusively welcoming to their overseas colleagues, begging them to stay as long as they could: they knew that while the foreigners were there, no-one would be shot.

That was all bad enough, but it got much worse. My lasting memory of Lavordin Hospital is from many years later, when the Blumenite inoculation campaign was at its height and Larvartin and I undertook a visit. By then, I doubt whether there was a competent doctor in the place. Half the staff were Party placemen, half were Blumenite zealots, mostly with few genuine academic qualifications. If a handful of properly-qualified medical staff remained from the old days, they were so cowed and browbeaten that they were no longer of any use.

Most of the patients had begun by accepting the Blumenite injections as legitimate medicine, but as they gradually grew sicker, their doubts increased: then a new wave of patients appeared, people whose illness was solely a matter of the injections, victims of the workplace campaigns and ‘spontaneous’ street visits which the Blumenites had been running all over the country. There was no room for this new influx: they sat or lay wherever they could, and soon became as grey-faced and emaciated as the original inmates, whose beds they usurped as soon as the owners died, or indeed more often as soon as they weak enough to be thrown out on the floor.

I was told that some of the patients, at length, had tried to escape, though who knew where they could have gone. At any rate, they were easily intercepted and beaten back by the resident thugs, some of whom had spent nearly their whole careers at Lavordin by now. The miracle was that people still came to the hospital; but there was no longer any other hospital, however dysfunctional, in the whole of Puttonyi Province. I remembered the young doctor’s words from years ago and thought how much better an honest charnel house would be, compared to this horror.

Astonishingly, poor Sergi Scalapin, now well over ninety, was still there. Forced out of retirement at gunpoint to give the hospital some credibility, the old surgeon was no longer allowed to intervene in the care of any patient; he was kept locked in an office which served as his cell and marched round the hospital twice a day by the CPV men in a grotesque parody of a ward round. I tried to speak to him when Larvartin had left the room, but he would not raise his head or respond to me.

Larvartin, for his part, seemed delighted by everything, and when our visit was concluded by a ‘singing concert’ arranged by sniggering CPV thugs, he professed himself delighted at the progress which had been made.

“Comrade patients!” he said in a bizarre speech of thanks, “If anyone asks you who made Lavordin what it is, don’t tell them it was Marki Larvartin. Always remember that everything that happens here is your own doing!”

The CPV men laughed and applauded.

58,240. Two more chapters, but they won’t count towards the Nanowrimo total (not that it matters)