“You should see a doctor,” Arkady said. Kostich spat blood into a handkerchief. “What would the doctors tell me? That I have tuberculosis and they have to retire me early at half pay? They’d love to do that. They’d get a bonus. Fuck the doctors.” Arkady almost sympathized with the warden. Tuberculosis stalked the guards as well as the prisoners. The prison was a place where bodies crawled over each other and mixed their sputum and bacilli, and it occurred to Arkady that the warden was as much a prisoner as Aba Makhmud.
