The Unpossessed City by Jon Fasman

Author:Jon Fasman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

IF CENTRAL MOSCOW projects state power, limitless and brutal, and impresses on its denizens just how small they are in comparison to this power, Vodniy Stadion is where the state’s power ends and nature’s begins. The area felt unfinished, vast, with a few industrial sites, a weighing station for trucks, and the usual array of game rooms, portable toilets, and food carts smacked haphazardly in the middle of scrub fields and some low-slung, half-finished or half-started cinder-block buildings in irregular rows a few hundred yards back from the streets. Unimpeded views down a few long streets showed threatening vistas of forest to the east, as if the trees were massing at the edges of this temporary encampment, waiting for the right moment to take back what they had lost.

The Moscow Infectious Disease Hospital Number 2 sat a few hundred yards back from Semyonovskaya Proezd, a good mile’s hike from the station. A driveway lined on both sides by decapitated pine trees wended its way up to the bleak, gray building. By the front doors, which flopped loosely in their frames, a quartet of haggard, hollow-cheeked men in slippers and tattered bathrobes smoked and shivered. As Jim walked past them, one bent double with a spoons-on-washboard cough and hacked up a quivering, reddish-yellow lump that landed on the threshold.

He started to walk through an immense entry foyer into the hospital when a guard—really just a tired, rheumy old man in a sweater with epaulets—whistled from a desk in the corner and beckoned him over. “Passport.” Jim complied.

“American,” he said, with bemused interest. “What is an American doing at this particular hospital on this particular morning?”

“I’m looking for Dr. David Faridian.”

“Faridian?” he asked, his eyes widening and cheeks puffing out. “Are you sick?”

“No, no, I’m just . . . I just would like to speak with him.”

“He’s expecting you?”

“Of course,” Jim said confidently. “I am here to discuss his purchase of some specialized medical equipment.”

“A capitalist in our hospital.” He chuckled. “And meeting with Faridian. Good luck to you. The doctor will probably be upstairs.”

“Excuse me, I don’t understand. Where upstairs?”

“Young man, how do you expect me to know where the doctor is at all times? He works in the surgery unit. The surgery unit is upstairs. Therefore, as I have just told you, you will find him upstairs. Straight down the long hall and up one story.”

“Thank you.”

The guard raised his eyebrows and pulled the corners of his mouth down, nodding, a Russian “You’re welcome,” an expression that said you received only what you asked for, and casting doubt on the wisdom of asking for it in the first place.

The hallway’s pale yellow walls looked less like the product of institutional paint than like some sort of architectural decay. Fewer than half of the fluorescent bulbs worked, and some of those flickered; patients in various states of distress lolled in the beds that lined the hallway. Some milky winter light trickled in through the hallway’s high windows. A powerful smell of ether, blood, and shit pervaded the hospital.

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