In early May, at night, I began to be beaten with a violent cough. 

A month later I gave in to the doctors. They enlightened my body along and across and identified tuberculosis, and I was very happy.  I thought lung cancer was prepared for the worst. Heavy illnesses are sent to us to avoid even more serious diseases. 

Troubles, problems, cataclysms, and wars including, are sent to avoid even bigger problems, cataclysms and wars.  About two years before everything started, I had a sign. I suddenly began to feel the fear of infection. 

I never had such fears, I drank all my life from dirty glasses, I finished smoking cigarettes, exchanged shaking hands with AIDS patients. My circle of friends has always been half and still consists of scum, killers, hucksters and drug addicts, many were in prisons and camps, many are infected with hepatitis, meningitis, tuberculosis and the devil knows what.

It is foolish to be afraid of infection, living in the lower stratum of society. But I suddenly became afraid. In the subway I caught myself trying to move away from people, especially from poorly dressed Asians. He turned his face away.  

Winter and autumn did not remove gloves. He began to pay attention to how many around coughing, sneezing and simply spreading the stench.  This phobia - fear of infection - then appeared, then disappeared and never interfered with me. It was not fear even, but a sudden fantasy, it was not himself that mattered, but that he never existed - and now he appeared.  And came true two years later. 

Now I had to collect manat and surrender to the hospital for the rest of the hospital.  The conversation took place the day before; It took several days of waiting before the bed was empty; I was offered a choice of a new hospital on the outskirts or an old one in the city center, I chose the center and did not lose it.  A two-story, fat red brick hospital was built more than a hundred years ago, and at first there was an almshouse, the old ladies and old men ruffled with rheumatic legs. 

Now there was not a trace left of them, and on the echoing corridors under the high ceilings puffed people in different directions languid people in sports pants, with faces of the color of the old asphalt - tuberculosis patients. About the old times reminded only the architecture itself, semicircular windows, and another chapel on the second floor, opposite the main entrance. In the chapel now arranged a dining room. Eating a morning porridge without salt and sugar, I had the opportunity to raise my eyes and read on the wall some phrase, like "Save Our Souls."  

The situation was unpleasant, but it did not make a big drama for me; on the contrary, getting on a bunk meant symbolic bottom, end of one important period and the beginning of another.  

To go up, you need to sink to the bottom and push off.

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