Egyptian is the word for it.

‘Have another glass,’ I invited him. (Don’t be too hard on us; after all, we—a doctor, a feldsher and two midwives—are human too. For months on end we see no one apart from hundreds of sick peasants. We work away, entombed in snow. Surely we may be allowed to drink a couple of glasses of suitably diluted spirit and relish a few of the local sprats on the doctor’s birthday?)

‘Your health, doctor!’ said Demyan Lukich with heartfelt sincerity.

‘Here’s hoping you survive your stay with us!’ said Anna Nikolaevna as she clinked her glass and smoothed her flowered party dress.

Raising her glass, Pelagea Ivanovna took a sip and then squatted down on her haunches to poke the stove. The hot gleam lit up our faces and the vodka generated a warm inner glow.

‘I simply cannot imagine,’ I said indignantly as I watched the shower of sparks raised by the poker, ‘what that woman did with so much belladonna. The whole story sounds insane!’

Feldsher and midwives smiled as they remembered what had happened. At morning surgery that day a red-faced peasant woman of about thirty had elbowed her way into my consulting room. She had bowed to the gynaecological chair which stood behind me, then produced from the front of her dress a wide-necked medicine bottle and crooned ingratiatingly:

‘Thanks very much for the medicine, doctor. It did me so much good. Please may I have another bottle?’

I took the bottle from her, and as I glanced at the label a green film passed across my vision. On the label was written in Demyan Lukich’s sprawling hand: ‘Tinct. Belladonnae … etc. 16th December 1916’.

In other words, yesterday I had prescribed for this woman a hefty measure of belladonna and today, my birthday, 17 December, the woman had come back with an empty bottle and a request for more.

‘You … you … you mean to say you drank all this yesterday?’ I asked, appalled.

‘All of it, sir, all of it,’ said the woman in her comfortable, sing-song voice. ‘And God bless you for it … half the bottle when I got home and the other half when I went to bed. The pain just vanished …’

I steadied myself against the gynaecological chair.

‘What dose did I tell you?’ I croaked. ‘I told you five drops at a time … What have you done, woman? You’ve … you’ve …’

‘I took it, I swear I did!’ the woman insisted, thinking I did not believe she had taken my belladonna.

I seized both her ruddy cheeks and stared at her pupils. There as nothing wrong with them. They were rather beautiful and completely normal. Her pulse, too, was excellent. The woman exhibited no signs whatsoever of belladonna poisoning.

‘It’s impossible!’ I said, then shouted: ‘Demyan Lukich!’

Demyan Lukich in his white overall appeared from the passage leading to the dispensary.

‘Just look what this beauty has done, Demyan Lukich! I don’t understand it.’

The peasant woman looked round anxiously, realising that she had done something wrong. Demyan Lukich took the bottle, sniffed it, turned it round in his hands and said sternly:

‘You, my dear, are lying. You didn’t take this medicine!’

‘I swear …’ she began.

‘Don’t try and fool us, woman,’ Demyan Lukich scolded, pursing his lips. ‘We can see through all your little tricks. Own up now—who did you give this medicine to?’

The woman raised her thoroughly normal pupils towards the immaculately whitewashed ceiling and crossed herself.

‘May I be …’

‘Stop it,’ growled Demyan Lukich and turned to me: ‘This is what they do, doctor. A clever actress like this one here goes to the clinic, we prescribe her some medicine and she goes back home and shares it out among all the women in the village.’

‘Oh, sir, how could you …’

‘Shut up!’ the feldsher cut her off. ‘I’ve been here eight years and I know. Of course she’s been going round every farm and emptying the bottle a few drops at a time,’ he went on.

‘Give me some more of those drops,’ the woman begged in a wheedling tone.

‘No, we won’t,’ I replied as I wiped the sweat from my brow. ‘I’m not letting you have any more of this medicine. Is your stomach-ache better?’

‘Like I said—just vanished!’

‘Well, that’s good, anyway.