To Kill a Tsar by Andrew Williams Page B

imposing yellow and white frontage creeping year by year down Slonovaya Street. In the few months Hadfield had spent there he had formed the impression that it was well run, clean and surprisingly progressive. Most of his patients were on the general wards, but his departmental superior was familiar with a paper he had written on public health and the pathology of diseases, and he had been asked to carry out a discreet review of general practices in parts of the hospital. It was his duty that day to visit the department for the treatment of mental diseases forthe first time. The Nikolaevsky was an unforgiving place and although he asked for directions more than once he was still wandering its maze of broad white corridors half an hour later. Finally losing patience, he pressganged a porter into service as a guide. From the main buildings, he was led along a path through a rough garden to the hospital’s boiler house. Two low workmen’s huts had been built against its high wall, their roofs of rusty iron, their rough timber walls weathered and bare but for a few sloughs of green paint, their windows partly boarded.
    The porter pointed to the door of the first hut.
    ‘That’s Department 10? Are you sure?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Hadfield knew a little of its reputation from a Russian colleague who had threatened him in jest with exile to Siberia or worse – Department 10. Knocking at the first hut, he was greeted by an oath then the scraping of a key in the lock. The door was opened by a ruddy-faced man in his early sixties with the broken veins and bloodshot eyes of a heavy drinker. He was wearing a faded green army uniform, the jacket stained with food and unbuttoned to the waist. He took Hadfield in at a glance.
    ‘Ryabovsky, Your Honour. Fyodor Ivanovich.’ He made a low insincere bow. ‘Warder, porter, nurse and general dogsbody.’
    There was an insolence in his manner that made Hadfield’s hackles rise. ‘Where are the patients?’ he snapped.
    Ryabovsky turned to the inner door behind him and unlocked it with a key that was hanging from the chain on his belt. Even before it was fully open, Hadfield was revolted by the overpowering smell of stale urine. Reaching for his handkerchief, he stood in the doorway, his eyes slowly adjusting to the gloom. By the light of a single oil lamp he could see the hut was laid out as a ward, but in place of beds the floor was strewn with rough straw mattresses. And it was heaving with bodies, young men for the most part, military coats fastened over dirty hospitalgowns. The plank walls were caked in soot and smoke hung thick about the hut, although the two primitive stoves that were the only source of heat were unlit.
    ‘Who are these men?’ he asked, turning again to Ryabovksy.
    ‘The war with Turkey. They’re sick in the head.’
    ‘Why don’t these men have proper beds?’ It was a sordid unsanitary scene that brought to his mind an engraving of the hospital at Scutari twenty-five years before.
    Ryabovsky gave a careless shrug: ‘Perhaps no one knows what to do with them, Your Honour.’
    Frightened faces, empty faces, hollow faces, half-dressed, bare chilblained feet, some with dirty bandages or undressed bed sores, some curled tightly into whimpering balls like children, others defiant. Hadfield stepped among them, stopping to examine those with symptoms of a condition he was qualified to treat, but most were beyond his help. Perhaps they were lucky not to have been shot. He had read enough of these strange war injuries to know there was precious little sympathy in the army for casualties like these. He knew what Anna and Evgenia would say: ‘Fool! See how the tsar treats his most loyal servants.’
    ‘And is it the same in the other hut?’
    ‘A few less, Your Honour.’
    ‘This is a disgrace!’ Hadfield spat the words at Ryabovsky. But the old man merely shrugged again.
    Hadfield was still shaking with rage five minutes later as he stood among the brambles in the