Birds

The building is made in the shape of a Russian letter P (П) and there is a tree with a crow nest in the garden. Several times a day the windows of the wards open and people throw their uneaten dinner. It's extra food for the local birds. There are a lot of them. The birds feel very comfortable on the territory of the hospital. There are only a few patients who eat the hospital food; that's why almost everything is given to the birds. The pigeons which have grown fat and become like a medium sized chicken don't fly but fall down from the roofs heavily and straighten their wings only near the ground. Sometimes black bodies of fat pigeons can be seen through the windows. Sometimes the birds roll heads over heels to the window-sill and look through the windows to see whether there is something more to eat.

The white sterilized ward is too empty. Lesha has cut a picture of a big rook from a magazine, has stuck it to some cardboard and fixed it to the TV antenna. The bird sat as in a cage and its black silhouette stood out on the background of the window light. It has enlivened the interior but it frightened the staff. Doctors and hospital nurses rushed to the window to drive the bird away. Some of them couldn't get accustomed to it even a month later and wanted to take a cloth to throw it to the window. A bird in the ward of a patient with agranulocytos is a catastrophe (agranulocytos is a condition of lack of leukocytes in the blood which causes the immune system to basically disappear; it is a consequence of the chemotherapy). In the department of chemotherapy for leukemia there is a sheet of paper on almost every door: "Agranulocytos. Don't enter without a mask".