The bell is on the table. My arm does not reach the table. The hand opens and closes against the rug and does not travel. The mouth shapes a word. What comes out is not a word. The throat produces a sound the room does not recognise as an order. The bell is the means by which the guard is called. The bell is not rung.
The door does not open. The men outside it hold a standing instruction, repeated to them as it was repeated to the men they replaced, that this room is not entered without the bell or without a spoken summons from inside. A guard who acts on his own reading of a silence is a guard who has chosen to make a decision, and a guard who has chosen to make a decision is a problem for the next shift. They wait at their posts.
The doctor who took the pressure of this body in the summer is not coming. He is in a cell at the Lubyanka where his interrogation is in its fourteenth week. He has confessed, on paper produced by other hands and signed by his, to a plan to murder by treatment, the medicines on his prescription pad reread as poisons and the records of his consultations reread as a campaign. The cardiologist who would have ordered the leech for this kind of stroke is in a cell two corridors from him. The professor of pharmacology whose textbook the country's hospitals use is on another floor. His wife is in Butyrka. His son has been taken out of his school. The denunciation that placed them there was published in Pravda nine weeks ago. The interrogations that produced those confessions are continuing tonight, in the building where the doctors are held, in rooms with their own lamps and their own paper.
The telephone on the table is the other instrument. It is closer to the hand than the bell and it is still beyond the hand. The line goes to the secretariat downstairs, where a duty officer would lift the receiver and would then have to decide whom he was permitted to telephone in turn, the order of precedence among the men who must be informed being itself an order issued from this room and not at this moment issuable. If the duty officer were rung from elsewhere about the silence here, he would not act on the report without ringing further, and the further ringing would take hours, because each man rung would weigh whether being the first to arrive at the door of this room exposed him more than being late to it.
The mind continues to form sentences. The sentences are precise. They give the duty officer his instruction. They give the guard the words that would bring him without alarming the household. The throat does not produce the sentences. The lips move and the breath does not carry. The doctor in the Lubyanka cell could name what is happening in three syllables. No one in this house is qualified to name it aloud.
The men who will eventually be telephoned will not come singly. None of them will agree to be alone in the doorway. They will arrange among themselves who arrives with whom, and the arranging will take further hours, because to arrive first is to be the man in this room with the records and the keys and with no other witness, and a man in this room without a witness is a man who can later be said to have done anything. They will not enter, when they enter, until two of them are at the door together. The duty officer has not yet been rung.
The pharmacology professor's son is fifteen. He was taken out of his class on a Tuesday by two men who did not tell him where his father was. The cardiologist's wife is sleeping in a room she shares with eleven other women and has not been told what her husband is alleged to have done. The doctor from the Lubyanka cell was struck again this evening before being returned to his cell, and the bruise on the left side of his face is the same colour as the bruise on the right side of his face. None of them know that the body in this room is on the floor. None of them would refuse, if asked, to treat it. The asking will not be made. The apparatus that would convey the asking has put the qualified mouths into the cells and the guards at this door.
The lamp on the desk is the lamp that was left on. The carafe of water is in its place on the tray. The rug is cold against the side that is not moving. Outside the door the two guards are at their posts. Downstairs the duty officer has not been rung. In the cells the interrogations are continuing. The arm has not reached the bell. The throat has not formed the word. The door has not opened. The hours pass.
