Opening paragraphs..................

On top of everything, the cancer ward was Number 13.  Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov had never been and could never be a superstitious person, but his heart sank when they wrote "Wing 13" on his admission card.  They should have had the ingenuity to assign number 13 to some kind of prosthetic or intestinal department.

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward