Classic Reading | Chekhov's micro-novel "The False Patient"

Chekhov and His Wife

Fake patients

The general's wife, Malfa Petrovna Beguna, or as the peasants call it, the so-called Begunkin family, has been practicing a similar therapy for ten years, and on a Tuesday in May, she examined the sick in her room. On the table in front of her, there was a medicine box similar to therapy, a handbook similar to therapy, and an abacus similar to therapy. Hanging on the wall was a letter embedded in a gilded frame, a fellow therapist from Petersburg, the handiwork of a famous and simply great figure, according to Marfa Petrovna; and a portrait of Priest Aristel, the benefactor of the general's wife, who rejected the harmful symptomatic therapy and taught her the truth. In the living room waited for the sick, most of them farmers. All but two or three of them were barefoot, because the general's wife had instructed them to take off their foul-smelling boots outside.

Marfa Petrovna had already seen ten patients, so she called eleven: "Gevrila Kruciti!" ”

The door opened, and it was not Gevrila Kruciti who walked in, but the neighbor of the general's wife, the defeated landlord Samfresin, a small old man, dazed eyes, red-rimmed hat. He lowered his cane in the corner of the room, walked over to the general's wife, and knelt down without a sound.

"What's wrong with you!" What's wrong with you, Kusma Kusmidt! "The general's wife was flushed and trembling." Sinful! ”

"As long as I live, I won't stand up!" Samfresin kissed her on the hand and said, "Please see that I am kneeling before you, you bodhisattva who blesses me, you great benefactor of mankind!" Don't worry, this benevolent spirit, give me life, point me to the right path, and also break my suspicious bad wisdom, but kneel, I am even willing to jump into the fire, you our magical national hand, widowhood and lonely mother! I'm all right! I'm resurrected, living immortals! ”

"I... I am happy......! The general's wife blushed happily and said, "It was very pleasant to hear such a thing... Please sit down! Last Tuesday, you were very sick! ”

"Yes, it's heavy! Just the thought of it, I'm afraid! Samfresin said as he sat. My whole body was covered with rheumatic pain. I suffered for eight whole years, and there was no silence at all... Whether it's day or night, my benefactor! I have seen many doctors, consulted with university professors in Kazan, taken earth baths, drunk mineral springs, and tried everything! My furniture was spent on it, ma'am.

These doctors will only mess me up, they drive my illness inside! They are very capable of rushing in, but they are able to drive them out again - they cannot, their knowledge has not yet reached this point... They just like to ask for money, this class of robbers, as for the interests of human beings, they are not very careful. He opened a ghost drawing note, and I had to drink it. In a word, that's a murder. Without you, my bodhisattva, I would have been lying in the grave! Last Tuesday I came home from you, looked at the pill you had given me, and thought to myself, 'What's the use of this?' Is this grain of sand, which is so easy to see, heal my heavy old disease? I thought so, I didn't believe it, and I laughed; but I had just taken a small grain, and all my illness was gone. My wife looked at me and looked into her eyes suspiciously, 'Is this you, Kelly?' 'Yes, I am. So we both knelt before the icon and prayed to our benefactor, O Lord, give her all that we want from her! ”

Samfresin wiped his eyes with his sleeve and stood up from his chair as if he were about to kneel again, but the general's wife restrained him and made him sit down again.

"Don't thank me," she said, blushing with excitement, and glanced at Aristaf. "No, don't thank me! At this time, I was just a submissive machine... What a miracle! After eight years of rheumatic pain, as long as one fistula pill is broken! ”

"You're so nice, you gave me three. One was taken at noon and worked immediately! Don't take one in the evening, the third is the next day, and it's gone! Wherever it is, there is no pain at all! I already thought I was going to die, so I wrote to Moscow and told my son to come back! God has imparted such wisdom to you, you living bodhisattva! Now I feel like I'm going to heaven... When I came to you last Tuesday, I was still on my feet, and now I can jump like a rabbit... I'll live a hundred years. But there was one more thing that trapped me—my poverty. I am healthy, but if there is nothing good to live, what is the use of my health? Poor forced me, worse than the sick... Take something like this as an example... It's time to plant oats, but tell me how to plant it, if I don't have seeds? I had to buy it, but I asked for money... How can I have money? ”

"I can send you oats, Kusma Kusmid... Just sit back! You have given me such a great pleasure, you have given me such satisfaction, I should come to thank you, not you to thank me! ”

"You are our god of joy! Beloved God often puts such good men in the world! You're happy, ma'am, glad you've done a good job! We sinners have nothing to please ourselves... We are petty, stingy, useless people... ant...... We are merely self-proclaimed landlords, but in the material sense, we are just as bad as the peasants, and even worse... We did live in a stone house, but it was only a Fata Morgana, because the roof was broken, and it leaked when it rained... I didn't have the money to buy roof panels. ”

"I can give you the board, Kusma Kusmidge."

Samfresin asked for a cow, a letter of introduction, for his daughter, whom he wanted to send to a vocational school, and was touched by the generosity of the general's wife, so grateful that he sobbed, his mouth was crooked, and went to the bag to touch his handkerchief... The general's wife saw that the handkerchief had just been pulled out, and at the same time it seemed that there was a piece of red paper, which fell on the floor without a sound.

"I will never forget in my life..." he muttered, "I will tell my children, and my grandchildren... Generation after generation... The children, it's her, who saved me, she, the one..."

After the general's wife had sent the sick away, she looked at the image of Priest Aristelph with her tearful eyes for a while, and then with an intimate, awe-inspiring eyes, she shot at the medicine box, the preparation, the abacus, and the chair, where the person she had saved had just sat, but finally saw the piece of paper that the patient had dropped. The General's wife picked up the pieces of paper and found three pills of herb in it, exactly the same pill she had given to Samfresin last Tuesday.

"That's the one..." she said incredulously, "that's the piece of paper too... He didn't even open his bag! So, what did he eat? odd...... He may not be lying to me. ”

The general's wife's heart, between her ten years of practicing medicine, began to have doubts... She called in the second patient, and when she listened to them talk about their distress, she also felt that she had not paid attention to it before, and had heard it. Of all the patients, not a single one did not first compliment her god-like therapies, admired her knowledge of medicine, cursed the doctors of symptomatic therapy, and waited until she blushed with excitement, so she recounted their hardships. One wanted a little land, the other wanted some firewood, and the third asked for her permission to hunt in her woods. She looked up at the good, broad face of the priest Aristelph, who had revealed the truth to her, but a new truth began to bite her heart. It was an uncomfortable, dull truth.

Man is cunning.

Painted in 1885