He bent his right elbow, lifted his hand to his bandaged head, began picking at the bandages where they covered his eyes. But carefully; he only needed a peephole, nothing more than that. A narrow gap between strips of bandage. He wanted to see without being seen.
In a little while he believed he’d succeeded. It was hard to tell with any degree of certainty. The snow was still there, but if he narrowed his eyes to slits the light (there wasn’t a lot of it) became more nearly natural. It was like when he was a child: he’d used to lie in bed with his eyes slitted, simulating the slow, regular breathing of sleep. His mother would come in and put the light on, stand there looking at him, and she was never quite sure if he was asleep or awake. But now, with these bandages swathing his face, it should be so much easier.
He straightened his arm again, found his button and pressed it. Now his nurse would know he was still awake, but the principle would be the same: when she came in he’d be able to look at her and she wouldn’t know it. He hoped!
In a little while soft, unhurried footsteps sounded. Jazz pressed his head back into his pillows, waited in the near-darkness of his room. Around him the air-conditioning hummed faintly; the air had a mildly antiseptic smell; his sheets felt somehow coarse to those parts of his body which were exposed. And he thought:
It doesn’t feel like a room in a hospital. Hospitals feel artificial, unreal, at best. But this one feels like fake artificial . . .
Then the door opened and the light came on.
Jazz squinted straight up; only the fact that his eyes were shuttered saved them from dazzle from the naked light-bulb where it hung on its flex from the ceiling. As for that ceiling itself: that was of dark grey stone, pocked from blasting and patterned with folded, tightly-packed strata. Jazz’s hospital room was a man-made cave, or at least it was part of one!
Too stunned to move, he lay there frozen as his nurse came to the side of his bed. Then, fighting the anger and revulsion he felt welling inside, he slowly turned his head to look at her. She scarcely glanced at him, merely reached down to feel his pulse. She was short and fat, wore her hair straight and short-cropped, like a medieval knight, also wore the uniform and starched cap of a nurse. But not a British nurse. A Soviet nurse. And all of Jazz’s worst fears were realized.
He felt her fingers on his wrist, at once snatched his hand away. She gasped, took a pace to the rear, and the heel of one of her square black shoes came down hard on something that crunched. She stood still, glanced at the floor, looked hard at Jazz and frowned. Her green eyes narrowed where they tried to penetrate the slit in his bandages. Maybe she saw the steely glint of his grey eyes in there; anyway, she gasped a second time and her hand flew to her mouth.
Then she went down on her knees, gathered up fragments of tablet, came upright with fury written right across her pudgy face. She glared at Jazz, turned on her heel and headed for the door. He let her get there, then called out: ‘Comrade?’
She paused instinctively, whirled and thrust out her jaw, glowered her hatred of the spy, then rushed out and slammed the door behind her. She had left the light on in her hurry to go and report all of this.
/ have about two minutes before things start to warm up, Jazz thought. / suppose I’d better put them to some use.
He looked to his left, his alleged ‘dead’ side, and saw a deep saucer of pale yellow fluid standing on a bedside table. Inclining his head and stretching his neck as far as he could in that direction, he inhaled deeply, smelled a strong antiseptic odour. How easy it was to create a hospital atmosphere: rubber tiles on the floor to deaden footfalls, a saucer of TCP for the too-clean smell, and a constant flow of sterile, temperate air. Simple as that.