I picked up the knife, trying to imitate the man I had once in my life seen perform an amputation, at university. I entreated fate not to let her die at least in the next half hour. ‘Let her die in the ward, when I’ve finished the operation …’
I had only common sense to rely on, and it was stimulated into action by the extraordinary situation. Like an experienced butcher, I made a neat circular incision in her thigh with the razor-sharp knife and the skin parted without exuding the smallest drop of blood. ‘What will I do if the vessels start bleeding?’ I thought, and without turning my head glanced at the row of forceps. I cut through a huge piece of female flesh together with one of the vessels—it looked like a little whitish pipe—but not a drop of blood emerged from it. I stopped it up with a pair of forceps and proceeded, clamping on forceps wherever I suspected the existence of a vessel. ‘Arteria … arteria … what the devil is it called?’ The operating theatre had begun to take on a thoroughly professional look. The forceps were hanging in clusters. My assistants drew them back with gauze, retracting the flesh, and I started sawing the round bone with a gleaming, fine-toothed saw. ‘Why isn’t she dying? It’s astonishing … God, how people cling to life!’
The bone fell away. Demyan Lukich was left with what had been a girl’s leg in his hands. Shreds of flesh and bone. This was all discarded and there remained on the table a young girl shortened, as it were, by a third, with a stump splayed out to one side. ‘Just a little bit more … Please don’t die,’ I wished ardently, ‘keep going till they take you to the ward, let me come out of this frightful episode with some credit.’
They tied the ligatures and then, knees knocking, I started sewing up the skin with widely-spaced stitches. Suddenly I stopped, brought to my senses by an inspired thought: I left a gap for drainage in which I inserted a gauze wick. My eyes were dimmed with sweat. I felt as if I were in a steam bath.
I heaved a sigh of relief. I looked wearily at the stump and at her waxen face and asked:
‘Is she alive?’
‘Yes, she’s alive,’ came the immediate and almost soundless echo as the feldsher and Anna Nikolaevna replied in unison.
‘She’ll last perhaps another minute or so,’ the feldsher mouthed voicelessly into my ear. Then he hesitated and suggested tentatively:
‘Perhaps you needn’t touch the other leg, doctor. We could just bandage it, you know … otherwise she won’t last till the ward … all right? Better if she doesn’t die in the theatre.’
‘Let’s have the plaster,’ I uttered hoarsely, urged on by some unknown force.
The floor was covered in white blobs of gypsum. We were all bathed in sweat. The body lay lifeless. Its right leg was encased in plaster and the shin showed through where in another inspired moment I had left a window to coincide with the fracture.
‘She’s alive,’ the assistant breathed in surprise.
Then we started lifting her and an enormous cavity could be seen under the sheet—we had left a third of her body on the operating table.
Shadows flitted down the passage, nurses darted to and fro and I saw a dishevelled male figure shuffle past along the wall and let out a muffled howl. But he was led away. Silence fell.
In the operating room I washed off the blood which had stained my arms up to the elbow.
‘I suppose you’ve done a lot of amputations, doctor?’ Anna Nikolaevna asked suddenly. ‘That was very good, no worse than Leopold.’
She invariably pronounced the name ‘Leopold’ as if she were talking about the dean of a medical school.
I glanced suspiciously at their faces and saw respect and astonishment in all of them, including Demyan Lukich and Pelagea Ivanovna.
‘Hm, well, the fact is I’ve done only two …’
Why did I lie? I cannot understand it to this day.
The hospital was utterly silent.
‘When she dies, be sure to send for me,’ I told the feldsher in an undertone, and for some reason instead of just answering ‘All right,’ he said deferentially:
‘Very good, sir.’
A few minutes later I was standing beside the green-shaded lamp in the study of the doctor’s quarters. There was not a sound to be heard.
A pale face was reflected in the pitch-dark window.
‘No, I don’t look like Dmitry the Pretender, and, do you know, I seem to have aged, there’s a furrow between my eyebrows … right now there’ll be a knock … and they’ll say, “She’s dead”.
‘Yes, I’ll go and have a last look, any minute now there’ll be a knock …’
There was a knock at the door. It was two and a half months later. One of the first bright days of winter was shining through the window.
He came in; only then did I really look at him. Yes, he definitely had good features. Forty-five years old. Sparkling eyes.
Then a rustling sound. A young girl of enchanting beauty came bounding in on crutches; she had only one leg and was dressed in a very wide skirt with a red border at the hem.
She looked at me and her cheeks flushed pink.
‘In Moscow … in Moscow,’ I said and started writing down an address, ‘they’ll fix you up with a prosthesis—an artificial leg.’
‘Kiss his hand,’ the father suddenly commanded her. I was so confused that I kissed her on the nose instead of the lips.
Then, hanging on her crutches, she undid a bundle and out fell a snow-white towel artlessly embroidered with a red cockerel. So that was what she’d been hiding under her pillow when I did my rounds in the ward! And indeed I remembered seeing some thread on her bedside table.
‘I can’t accept it,’ I said sternly, and even shook my head. But she gave me such a look that I took it.
It hung in my bedroom in Muryovo and then went with me on my travels. In the end it grew threadbare, faded, wore out and disappeared just as memories fade and disappear.
THE STEEL WINDPIPE
SO I WAS ALONE, SURROUNDED BY NOVEMBER gloom and whirling snow; the house was smothered in it and there was a moaning in the chimneys. I had spent all twenty-four years of my life in a huge city and thought that blizzards only howled in novels. It appeared that they howled in real life. The evenings here are unusually long, and I fell to daydreaming, staring at the reflection on the window of the lamp with its dark green shade. I dreamed of the nearest town, thirty-two miles away. I longed to leave my country clinic and go there. They had electricity, and there were four doctors whom I could consult. At all events it would be less frightening than this place. But there was no chance of running away, and at times I realised that it would be cowardly. It was for precisely this, after all, that I had been studying medicine.
‘Yes, but suppose they bring me a woman in labour and there are complications? Or, say, a patient with a strangulated hernia? What shall I do then? Kindly tell me that. Forty-eight days ago I qualified “with distinction”; but distinction is one thing and hernia is another. Once I watched a professor operating on a strangulated hernia. He did it, while I sat in the amphitheatre. And I only just managed to survive …’