Where I'm Calling From

painful for Chekhov to move: his legs ached continually and his insides hurt. The disease had attacked his intestines and spinal cord. At this point he had less than a month to live. When Chekhov spoke of his condition now, it was, according to Olga, “with an almost reckless indifference.”
    Dr. Schwohrer was one of the many Badenweiler physicians who earned a good living by treating the well-to-do who came to the spa seeking relief from various maladies. Some of his patients were ill and infirm, others simply old and hypochondriacal. But Chekhov’s was a special case: he was clearly beyond help and in his last days. He was also very famous. Even Dr. Schwohrer knew his name: he’d read some of Chekhov’s stories in a German magazine. When he examined the writer early in June, he voiced his appreciation of Chekhov’s art but kept his medical opinions to himself. Instead, he prescribed a diet of cocoa, oatmeal drenched in butter, and strawberry tea. This last was supposed to help Chekhov sleep at night. On June 13, less than three weeks before he died, Chekhov wrote a letter to his mother in which he told her his health was on the mend. In it he said, “It’s likely that I’ll be completely cured in a week.”
    Who knows why he said this? What could he have been thinking? He was a doctor himself, and he knew better. He was dying, it was as simple and as unavoidable as that. Nevertheless, he sat out on the balcony of his hotel room and read railway timetables. He asked for information on sailings of boats bound for Odessa from Marseilles. But he knew. At this stage he had to have known. Yet in one of the last letters he ever wrote he told his sister he was growing stronger by the day.
    He no longer had any appetite for literary work, and hadn’t for a long time. In fact, he had very nearly failed to complete The Cherry Orchard the year before. Writing that play was the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life. Toward the end, he was able to manage only six or seven lines a day. “I’ve started losing heart,” he wrote Olga. “I feel I’m finished as a writer, and every sentence strikes me as worthless and of no use whatever.” But he didn’t stop. He finished his play in October, 1903. It was the last thing he ever wrote, except for letters and a few entries in his notebook.
    A little after midnight on July 2, 1904, Olga sent someone to fetch Dr. Schwohrer. It was an emergency: Chekhov was delirious. Two young Russians on holiday happened to have the adjacent room, and Olga hurried next door to explain what was happening. One of the youths was in his bed asleep, but the other was still awake, smoking and reading. He left the hotel at a run to find Dr. Schwohrer. “I can still hear the sound of the gravel under his shoes in the silence of that stifling July night,” Olga wrote later on in her memoirs. Chekhov was hallucinating, talking about sailors, and there were snatches of something about the Japanese. “You don’t put ice on an empty stomach,” he said when she tried to place an ice pack on his chest.
    Dr. Schwohrer arrived and unpacked his bag, all the while keeping his gaze fastened on Chekhov, who lay gasping in the bed. The sick man’s pupils were dilated and his temples glistened with sweat. Dr. Schwohrer’s face didn’t register anything. He was not an emotional man, but he knew Chekhov’s end was near. Still, he was a doctor, sworn to do his utmost, and Chekhov held on to life, however tenuously. Dr. Schwohrer prepared a hypodermic and administered an injection of camphor, something that was supposed to speed up the heart. But the injection didn’t help— nothing, of course, could have helped.
    Nevertheless, the doctor made known to Olga his intention of sending for oxygen. Suddenly, Chekhov roused himself, became lucid, and said quietly, “What’s the use? Before it arrives I’ll be a corpse.”
    Dr. Schwohrer pulled on his big moustache and stared at Chekhov. The writer’-s cheeks were sunken and gray, his complexion waxen; his breath was raspy. Dr. Schwohrer knew the time could be reckoned in minutes. Without a word, without conferring with Olga, he went over to an alcove where there was a telephone on the wall. He read the instructions for using the device. If he activated it by holding his finger on a button and turning a handle on the side of the phone, he could reach the lower regions of the hotel—the kitchen. He picked up the receiver, held it to his ear, and