I was reading a story from Bulgakov’s A Country Doctor’s Notebook last night, titled The Embroidered Towel. The stories in this collection are all somewhat autobiographical. Bulgakov was sent to a remote, yet well-provisioned, hospital immediately after graduating from medical school.
The Embroidered Towel is about a farmer’s daughter who is maimed in a threshing machine. The doctor (Bulgakov) is new, inexperienced and very unsure of himself. When the farmer brings his daughter to the hospital, she has bled out over six miles of nearly impassible roads. Nobody in the hospital thinks she’ll make it. The doctor only hopes that she dies in the ward, not on the operating table. The father is distraught in the adjacent room.
The being lying before the medics is now closer now to meat than a person. She doesn’t even bleed anymore. The doctor stops worrying about himself. He just does what seems right, relying on common sense more than anything. To the amazement of everyone, the daughter doesn’t die. When they lift her to the ward, one third of her body stays on the operating table. Yet, she makes it.
The young girl embroiders a hand-towel, “artlessly”, with a red cockerel as a thank-you gift for the doctor, who is too young to have the humility to accept it immediately. Bulgakov/The Doctor finally does accept it, nervously, at the insistence of her father. He uses the towel until it falls apart.
This is not a story about how a young man develops a doctor’s god-like self confidence. This is a story about how an educated man learns what is really important; how he gets over himself and learns humility. He drops his cosmopolitan pretensions and sees beauty where he doesn’t expect to: in the flock he’s been sent to shepherd.
I guess that this post is about being a good shepherd.
Bulgakov uses the same ‘misdirection’ tricks that Roald Dahl uses, I’ve written about those tricks here. For most of The Embroidered Towel, you’ll think the story is about how metro-man deals with the unsympathetic hicks around him. Instead, the doctor grows himself. (Natural ending, twisted to natural, smart ending.) Bulgakov throws a ‘golden apple’ in front of the reader: his dread of being presented with a hernia, which is something he feel singularly unable to cope with.
The character of The Doctor/Bulgakov is initially adversarial to every other character: his driver, the head nurse, his first patient. He has no patience, just an overriding fear of failure and a lot of pride. By the end of the story, it’s clear that the locals, for all their provincialism, have more wisdom and grace than the young doctor. However, The Embroidered Towel does not have a soul-deadening ending because the doctor begins to learn that grace himself.
Dahl wrote satire. Bulgakov wrote satire. They were both angry men. But Dahl’s writing has an impish wickedness. It revels in a kind of cosmopolitan darkness. There’s very little hope in Dahl’s writing (at least for adults), there’s just dark, sinister laughter. I imagine Dahl crawling out of his writing-shack after work and making a bee-line to the booze cabinet. Now that we’ve written it down, let us wash it away.
Bulgakov’s writing, on the other hand, is filled with sad laughter rather than spiteful laughter. His satire could be absolutely eviscerating, but it is delivered in a spirit of ‘tough love’ rather than mockery or despair. That’s why it’s invigorating, rather than perpetuating a feeling of hopelessness.
Dahl wrote for the applause; Bulgakov wrote because he couldn’t stand by and not say anything. That doesn’t mean that Bulgakov was a saint– in fact, Bulgakov sounds like he was a very difficult man– but it does mean that deep down he had love for the people around him.
Bulgakov was not a Dahl, nor a Boothe-Luce, nor a Stephenson. A good shepherd doesn’t have contempt for his sheep. He can recognize their weaknesses, he can get exasperated, but he never has contempt for them, because he knows that his fate is inexorably tied to theirs. At the end of the day, a good shepherd lives for his sheep, and doesn’t want to waste the sacrifices his sheep make.
Dahl, on the other hand, just wanted to shear people for the next goodie– then hide.
God help us all if a spirit like Dahl’s becomes a prerequisite for government service. And I hope that I never want to drink after I write.
