THE CEDAR AND THE HAMMER
“Who’s going for a smoke?” the nurse called down the hallway of the psychiatric ward. Of all the patients who had been wandering about aimlessly after supper in the segregated area of the closed ward, only two men put up their hands.
One was Doctor Kraus, a biologist from the hospital laboratory, who had landed here again after a drinking spree that had lasted several months. This was his second time here, and he was full of self-reproach because of that. After his first stay, he went away with a kind of hope, and even something approaching expectation. Now, that world on the other side of these white walls appeared as something even more inhospitable than the wasteland that remained in his breast. Doctor Kraus looked forward to the cigarette in and of itself. He
