A cry from the bank. “Hey!”
He turns to see buildings foregrounded against the streaked indigo sky, passing cars sweeping their halogen light over the streets. The cry again, coming from a walkway along the bank. A figure emerges from the darting shadows, shrouded by trees, a woman with long dark hair, moonlight skimming over it, woven into the night.
He reels up the line and balances the rod on the stool and approaches her. As he nears he can hear a flurry of giggles as her hand rotates a small rectangular object. Closer now, he sees it to be a silver hipflask. The light separates her face into planes, each angle revealing its own beauty.
“Dr. Brovkin, you looked lonely and thirsty,” she says. “I thought I could help.”
She says this with a slight lilt in her voice, a subtle challenge. She’s wondering if he’ll recognize her, which he does. She’s a cleaner in the hospital, they’ve made eye contact in the lobby, excused themselves as they manoeuvred past each other in the canteen, both carrying laden trays. Of course he knows who she is. He imparts warm familiarity with his eyes, looking straight at her.
“With which part?” he asks, and she pauses, not understanding. “Are you offering to help with the loneliness or the thirst?”
“Oh.” She laughs, a flush to her cheeks, a softness around the eyes. “Maybe both.”
She wears a thick shawl over a long, grey dress, cut to her figure. She is returning from a party, which has left her not drained nor drunk but effervescent, radiating life and curiosity.
He takes a mouthful from the hipflask and feels a hot flash spread through his chest. His head judders with surprise.
“Whiskey? I was expecting vodka.”
“Well, it’s good to be surprised. Has it warmed your insides?”
“Yes. Yes it has.”
“So it has done its job.”
He nods, looks at her again.
“I have never fished,” she says. “It looks peaceful.”
He raises his palm gently to his waist, cupped, as if he is offering something. “Show me your shoes.”
Warily, she lays her foot into his hand and he cradles it for a moment, running his flattened fingers along the curve of her instep, then over the long stiletto heel, and lingering on her ankle, gripping it as though in greeting before replacing it gently on the ground, a blacksmith’s motion. He looks into her lean face, so twitchingly alive, a thoroughbred, and shakes his head with disappointment.
“Your heels are too sharp. How can you wear these shoes in weather like this?” he says.
“Women are well-balanced creatures. Didn’t you know this?”
She stands on one leg, then the other, and removes them, hanging them on her fingers. He laughs. A light chuckle, boyish, which surprises both of them.
“You can’t come out, you’ll freeze with no shoes.”
“I’ll be fine, there’s a doctor present.”
She stands expectantly. And so he scoops an arm underneath her legs and carries her onto the ice. He takes wide steps, bending his knees, keeping a stable base underneath them. If they fall in, there is no one around to help.
When they reach the stool she half kneels on it, tucking her legs beneath her. She places the shoes on the ice and then unfurls her shawl. For an instant it hangs horizontally in the air, swelling in the middle, just as when the nurses change beds in the wards, a suspended sheet gathering together everything in proximity.
She twirls the shawl as it descends, and its thickness falls across her entire body, no part of her distinguishable beneath shoulder level. When she is wrapped and seated, he stands behind her and places the rod in her hands, then unclasps the spinner and they listen to the mechanism rotate until he thinks the depth is adequate, then flips over the metal spur, causing the line to brake, and he encourages her to loosen her grip on the handle by gently pinching her fingers.
“Now what do we do?” she asks.
“Now we wait,” he says, and she feels his breath streaming over her neck and he sees the black stilettos lying askew on the white ice, giving off an air of bewilderment.
THE MEMORY CARRIED Grigory all the way into the hospital lobby. He glanced at the clock above the reception desk. There was work to be done and he was late. It was almost 9:00 a.m., a full hour and a half past the time he usually arrived. The place was already moving in the ways it always did. People were sitting, clutching their numbered tickets, waiting to be registered. The administrators were walking behind the counter pressing bundles of paper to their chests. Somewhere in the room a radio broadcast a combination of static and muffled conversation. He brushed through the double swing doors of the ward corridors and passed rooms with nurses handing out medication and saw patients sitting up expectantly, their arms linked to intravenous drips beside their beds. Usually he would turn inside one of the wards and have a word with a few of them, a reminder that the surgical staff didn’t just see them as skin and bone. He’d ask where they were from, read their medical charts and reassure them, tell them they’d be out of here before the weather changed or the hospital food became too much for them.
People looked up as he passed but he avoided all eye contact. He caught himself midpause gazing blankly at an empty wheelchair, still carrying this morning’s vision, the very unlikeliness of it turning inside him. He’d have to shake himself out of it.
An attendant crossed in front of him pushing an empty gurney. It shimmered noiselessly across the lime-green linoleum, a twig drifting on a river.
The smell. The place always had the same smell. It usually hit him as soon as he walked through the doors. Disinfectant and boiled vegetables. Earthy and sickly clean. He couldn’t smell it without thinking of his aunt, his father’s eldest sister. Walking into her house as a child. The stink of her old, unbathed body covered over with the perfumed powder she put on her face.
Family in everything. History bundled into the basic materials of who we are. His was a job where he could trace the origins of things. He often stood and looked at X-rays and saw lesions in a patient’s lung, opaque spots dotted around the chest, as if someone had spilled water onto the film. Or coronary arteries that had been whited out, the clotting looking like unthreatening, blank space. He saw the origins of illness. And in many cases he saw family here too, the hereditary nature of these conditions bearing a whisper of those who had gone before. History and family carrying on into the present, into the future, and he never failed to be fascinated, to reflect that our upbringing is apparent not just in our manners or mannerisms or our speech, it is there too on a cellular level, proving its presence on an acetate sheet, laid against a lightbox, fifty years after our birth.
Raisa, his secretary, heard the cartoon squeak of his approach and was already standing by her desk holding a bunch of notecards as he rounded the corner. He nodded his greeting and walked into his office, leaving open the door for her as she trailed him. She began reciting the messages as he took off his jacket and settled himself at his desk.
Some referrals. Replies to referrals. A message from the editor of the state medical journal. Requests for responses to new initiatives from the hospital management committee. Invitations for lecture slots.
He stopped listening after the first few.
He made some calls, dictated two or three of the most pressing letters and then left for the theatre.
His first task was an endoscopy on a young woman. She had come in the previous afternoon, certain that a chicken bone had lodged itself in her neck. Nothing had shown up on the X-ray but it was possible that a bone fragment had lodged itself in her trachea, obscuring itself from view. He had spoken to her the evening before. A young woman, full of certainty. A trainee dentist. Sharp-featured. Thin. Her bones discernible under her skin, her clavicles running a straight line under her shoulders, so distinct that when he had spoken to her he couldn’t help picturing an artist’s sketch of her body, the construction lines as prominent as those of her features.