Morphine by Mikhail Afanasevich Bulgakov

Author:Mikhail Afanasevich Bulgakov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2013-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

8th April 1917.

It’s agony.

9th April.

The spring is dreadful.

The Devil in a bottle. Cocaine is the Devil in a bottle.

This is its effect:

Almost instantly after injecting one syringeful of two-per cent solution, a state of calm sets in which turns straight away into delight and bliss. But this continues for only one or two minutes. And then it’s all lost without trace, as if it had never been. Pain, dread, darkness set in. The spring roars, black birds fly from bare branch to bare branch, while in the distance the forest reaches towards the sky like bristles, broken and black, and beyond it, encompassing a quarter of the sky, there burns the first sunset of spring.

I pace the big, lonely, empty room in the doctor’s apartment diagonally, from the doors to the window and from the window to the doors. How many such walks can I take? Fifteen or sixteen — no more. And then I have to turn and go into the bedroom. The syringe is lying on some gauze next to the bottle. I pick it up and, carelessly rubbing some iodine onto my thigh, which is covered in needle marks, I plunge the needle into my skin. There’s no pain. Oh, on the contrary: I’m anticipating the euphoria that will soon be coming. And then it does come. I know of it because the sounds of the accordion which Vlas the watchman, rejoicing at spring, is playing on the porch, the ragged, hoarse sounds of the accordion, which come flying

to me, muffled, through the window pane, become angelic voices, and the rough basses in billowing furs hum like a heavenly choir. But then, after an instant, obeying some mysterious law which isn’t described in a single one of the pharmacology books, the cocaine in the blood is transformed into something new. I know: it’s a mixture of the Devil and my blood. And on the porch Vlas flags, and I hate him, while the sunset, with an uneasy rumbling, scorches my innards. And that’s how it is several times running in the course of an evening until I realize that I’m poisoned. My heart starts thumping such that I can feel it in my arms, in my temples . . . and then it sinks into an abyss, and there are sometimes moments when I think that Dr Polyakov won’t come back to life again . . .

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