CHAPTER 10. EVERYTHING TURNS YELLOW AROUND, SUMMER DEPARTS — WE’LL WEATHER THIS UNPLEASANTNESS

The hospital turned out to be a mansion somewhere in the wilderness, fenced in to boot. The care was excellent. The ward even had a television and a decent computer.

A day later they announced he had blood cancer. Early-stage cancer, they said. Highly treatable—with care, with silence, with obedience. He was prescribed chemotherapy. They warned there would be weakness and he’d have to lie down a lot. This “lying down” was to happen while embracing a small-caliber rifle on the shooting range floor. They taught him to look, to wait, and most importantly—to breathe. He was even allowed to zone out or sleep, but without breaking any rules. The training was about hitting the target without damaging obstacles. He had to wait for a truly opportune moment. There was plenty of time, and he learned to wait.

A song spun in his head—about needing to learn to wait, to be calm and stubborn. He remembered the words about a moment vast as a gulp of water in summer heat. It occurred to him the song wasn’t about reconnaissance at all, but about a sniper’s patience. What rotten luck that he, with vision far from perfect, ended up in such training!

Language lessons, it turned out, hadn’t been cancelled. He still couldn’t believe Merkel wouldn’t spot the difference between him and the original. The instructor insisted that patience and hard work would grind down anything. Languages, he said, would eventually fall silent—and only love would remain, but that would be at the very end.

Political science was added, starting with Aristotle. The Greeks, politically speaking, proved an amazing case study: their city-states were independent and diverse in governance, and the flow from one form to another had been observed over thousands of years.

Chemistry classes began too: what and how to poison, what a poisoned person should do to survive, and what safety measures to take to avoid being poisoned. This vile subject was especially revolting during chemotherapy.

On his own initiative, he began reading another Gospel—this time, Matthew’s. It was no longer about how eternal life could solve any conceivable problem, but about the laws that govern this life. The Kingdom of the Heavens, according to the commentaries, was not a place where good souls relocate after death, but the sphere of God’s rule in human society here on earth.