The Consultation
The chair was cold through the wool of his trousers. Maxim Rusu had noticed this at ten, when he sat down, and again at eleven, and by now it was simply the temperature of the morning. The chairs were molded industrial-orange plastic, bolted in rows of four to a black tubular rail running the length of the wall. Whenever anyone shifted down the line, the whole row gave a small, metallic rattle from the bolts.
He held his overcoat folded across his knees, gray wool, pressed the evening before. On top of the coat lay his referral slip, and on top of the slip lay his hands. The slip read: *Rusu, Maxim, 32, chronic pharyngeal irritation*, and beneath it, in a hurried hand: *Consult Dr. F. Muraru, Tues. 10:00*.
The corridor was long, high, and lit by fluorescent tubes that hummed with a low electric buzz. It smelled of damp wool, slush melting off boots, and carbolic acid from a mop bucket left by the stairs, layered over with the smell of cigarette smoke drifting from the staff landing.
Above the chairs, the wall was covered by a monumental socialist-realist mosaic. Thousands of rough glass and ceramic tiles rose nearly to the ceiling, depicting a stylized doctor in a white coat with hands twice the size of his head, held out over a bed where an industrial worker lay. Behind them, yellow sunbeams fanned out in sharp, geometric rays. Along the baseboard, a few tiles had chipped away, showing patches of dry gray cement at the height of a shoe.
Maxim looked up at the giant tile hands for a moment. Then the tickle caught his throat.
It came from high up, dry and persistent. He turned toward the wall, brought a clean cotton handkerchief to his mouth, and coughed into it three times, quietly. He folded the cloth back along its creases and tucked it into his breast pocket.
His watch was a mechanical one with a scratched steel crystal. It said eleven-fifteen.
***
Two rows down, a pensioner in a quilted jacket slapped his cap against his knee.
“Since seven,” he announced to the floorboards. “I have been sitting on this plastic since seven in the morning. Two hours for a man to look at a throat.”
Nobody argued with him. A few people looked down at their boots.
A side door swung open and Nurse Rodica emerged with three cardboard folders tucked under her arm. She wore a starched white apron and rubber clogs that made a brisk, flat slap on the linoleum. She stopped in front of the pensioner, completely unimpressed.
“If you want speed,” she said, “go down to the district clinic in the valley. If you want the Chief, you sit on the plastic and wait your turn.”
“I have an appointment slip—”
“There are twenty people on my list this morning,” she said, turning toward the corridor, “and every one of them has an appointment slip.”
From the end of the row, an elderly woman with a dyed rabbit-fur collar leaned forward, her handbag clasped firmly in her lap.
“Last autumn he did the vocal cords of the director from the ministry,” she told the hallway with firm authority. “The man couldn’t produce a whisper. Two weeks later he was giving speeches on the radio. Two weeks. That is why you wait.”
A few heads nodded. Maxim kept his eyes on the floor ahead. He knew how public clinics worked: you either sat through the morning for the department chief, or you took your chances with a novice who had to check a textbook twice. He settled his coat across his knees and waited.
At eleven thirty-five, the double doors at the end of the hall clicked open.
***
They were heavy doors, padded in dark brown leatherette and buttoned down with brass upholstery studs into deep diamond patterns. Built to keep the corridor out and the clinic in, they insulated the Chief’s office in absolute silence.
A patient in a sheepskin vest stepped through, buttoning his collar, nodding respectfully to the empty doorway before hurrying toward the stairs.
Nurse Rodica checked her list.
“Rusu,” she called out. “Maxim Rusu.”
Maxim stood. He shook the creases from his trousers, tucked his overcoat over his arm, and collected his referral slip. He walked the length of the corridor beneath the mosaic, past the giant tile hands, and stepped through the padded doorway.
The door shut behind him with a soft, heavy thud.
The noise of the corridor cut off instantly. The office was an oven: beneath the tall window, a massive cast-iron radiator painted cream hissed at full pressure, drying the air until it felt warm in the nostrils. The room smelled of heated mahogany, paper files, strong coffee, and a thick, lingering blue haze of cigarette smoke that hung in clean layers beneath the ceiling.
Behind an expansive oak desk sat Dr. Filip Muraru in a high-backed leather swivel chair.
He was thirty-nine, broad-shouldered, looking like a cinema lead who had dressed up as a physician. He wore a dark three-piece suit beneath an unbuttoned white doctor’s coat, his dark hair swept back with silver wings at the temples. On the little finger of his left hand, a gold signet ring caught the yellow light of the desk lamp.
Beside an open Western atlas of the larynx and pharynx lay an open, soft yellow pack of Camel Filters. In the heavy glass ashtray next to it, a cigarette burned down with a thin thread of smoke.
Muraru didn’t look up right away. He finished signing a discharge paper with a black fountain pen, his hand unhurried and fluid. He blotted the ink, picked up the cigarette, took a slow, measured drag, and exhaled two streams of smoke through his nose. He set the filter back on the glass, lifted two fingers, and indicated the leather armchair opposite him.
Maxim sat down. The leather was warm. He placed his referral slip neatly on the edge of the mahogany.
Muraru looked at him then. His dark eyes were steady, taking Maxim in with clinical economy: the quiet posture, the clean brown suit, the knitted tie, the cadence of his breath. It was the calm look of a man who measured people for a living.
***
Muraru drew the slip toward him with one finger.
“What seems to be the trouble, Mr. Rusu?”
His voice was a deep, cultured baritone, completely relaxed, carrying the effortless authority of someone who never had to raise his voice in a room.
“A burning irritation in the throat, Doctor,” Maxim said. “Three weeks now. Raw, at the back. And a dry cough in the mornings that produces nothing, worse when the weather is damp.”
He gave it in order, without adjectives: the burning, the three weeks, the morning cough, the damp. Muraru listened with his head slightly tilted, his expression entirely focused. When Maxim finished, the doctor nodded once.
He rose from the chair. He took the cigarette with him in his left hand, the signet ring catching the brass lamp, smoke curling past his white coat. He came around the desk, stopping at a stainless-steel jar on the credenza to draw out a wooden tongue depressor, peeling the paper sleeve off with his thumb.
He stepped in front of Maxim, his height and broad frame filling the space.
“Head back, please. Open. Say ah.”
Maxim tilted his head against the leather. The desk lamp was swung around, throwing warm light across his face. He opened his mouth. The wooden stick was flat and dry against his tongue, pressing down with firm, practiced leverage.
“Ah.”
Muraru leaned in. Up close he smelled of starch, cologne, and dry tobacco. His eyes swept across the pharynx, checking the red, irritated mucosal tissue behind the uvula. The cigarette was held casually beside Maxim’s cheek, its faint heat perceptible against his skin. Three seconds passed.
The stick came out. Muraru tossed it into the pedal bin, the metal lid shutting with a dry *clack*. He took another drag from his Camel, walked back around the desk, and sat down.
***
He settled into the leather chair, resting his forearms on the blotter, the cigarette held between his fingers. He looked at Maxim with the calm certainty of someone delivering a straightforward calculation.
“Mucosal irritation in the T-Zone, Mr. Rusu,” he said. “Throat and taste. It is an issue of mildness.” He paused, tapping the desk lightly. “You are smoking the wrong brand.”
The radiator hissed softly.
Maxim considered the sentence for a moment. Then he said, “Doctor, I don’t smoke.”
There was no change in the doctor’s face. He didn’t blink, smile, or glance at the chart. He looked at Maxim with the exact same patient, professional attention, reached out, and tapped the soft yellow pack on the desk with his gold signet ring.
“Then start with the right ones, Mr. Rusu.”
He said it gently, with the absolute, unshakeable confidence of a man telling a patient to take a flight of stairs slowly.
“The throat requires a mild leaf to lubricate the passage. It is not complicated. In clinical surveys, more doctors smoke Camels than any other brand. The throat needs mildness.” He turned the pack slightly on the blotter, so the yellow dromedary faced Maxim. “One pack after lunch. One pack after dinner. Smoke Camels for thirty days, and then come back and see me.”
He took another unhurried drag from his cigarette, letting the blue smoke rise toward the ceiling.
Maxim looked at the yellow pack, then at the doctor’s face. There was no irony in it anywhere. He had the distinct impression that something in the sentence had gone wrong, though he could not have said where. He did not say so. The radiator ticked.
Muraru pulled a sheet of hospital letterhead from a drawer, uncapped his fountain pen, and scrawled a swift, illegible signature across the bottom. He reached for his rubber stamp, pressed it into the red ink pad, and brought it down on the paper with a single, firm strike. He slid the prescription across the mahogany with two fingers, Maxim’s referral slip following right behind it.
“Next patient, Rodica,” he called toward the door, his voice barely raised.
***
Maxim folded the paper along its existing crease and slid it into his folder. He stood, took his overcoat, and said, “Thank you, Doctor.” Muraru was already turning a page in the larynx atlas.
The padded door shut behind him with that same soft thud, cutting off the heat at once.
The corridor was just as drafty and noisy as he’d left it—the fluorescent tubes buzzing, the orange chairs shifting on their rails, Nurse Rodica calling the next name from her clipboard. The pensioner in the quilted jacket didn’t even look up as Maxim passed.
Maxim pulled his overcoat on as he reached the landing, coughed once into his handkerchief, and took the stairs down to the street, carrying an official medical prescription to smoke two packs of Camels a day.
