He had no time, he was hurrying to his own hospital, and before that had to make house calls on two patients, and here he was wasting precious moments gazing out the window at the oblique hatching of the rain, broken and deflected by a gusty autumnal wind, as wheat in a field is blown over and tangled by a storm.
It was not very dark yet. Yuri Andreevich’s eyes made out the backyard of the clinic, the glassed-in terraces of the mansions on Devichye Field, the line of the electric tramway that led to the rear entrance of one of the hospital buildings.
The rain poured down most disconsolately, not intensifying and not letting up, despite the fury of the wind, which seemed aggravated by the imperturbability of the water being dashed on the earth. Gusts of wind tore at the shoots of the wild grape vine that twined around one of the terraces. The wind seemed to want to tear up the whole plant, raised it into the air, shook it about, and threw it down disdainfully like a tattered rag.
A motorized wagon with two trailers came past the terrace to the clinic. Wounded men were taken out of it.
In the Moscow hospitals, filled to the utmost, especially after the Lutsk operation,6 the wounded were now being put on the landings and in the corridors. The general overcrowding of the city’s hospitals began to tell on the situation in the women’s sections.
Yuri Andreevich turned his back to the window and yawned from fatigue. He had nothing to think about. Suddenly he remembered. In the surgical section of the Krestovozdvizhensky Hospital,7 where he worked, a woman patient had died a couple of days ago. Yuri Andreevich had insisted that she had echinococcus of the liver. Everyone had disagreed with him. Today there would be an autopsy. The autopsy would establish the truth. But the prosector of their clinic was a hardened drunkard. God knows how he would go about it.
It quickly grew dark. It was now impossible to see anything outside the window. As if by the stroke of a magic wand, electricity lit up in all the windows.
From Tonya’s room, through a small vestibule that separated the ward from the corridor, the head doctor of the section came out, a mastodon of a gynecologist, who always responded to all questions by raising his eyes to the ceiling and shrugging his shoulders. These gestures of his mimic language meant that, however great the successes of knowledge, there are riddles, friend Horatio,8 before which science folds.
He walked past Yuri Andreevich, bowing to him with a smile, performed several swimming movements with the fat palms of his plump hands, implying that one had to wait and be humble, and went down the corridor to smoke in the waiting room.
Then the assistant of the reticent gynecologist came out to Yuri Andreevich, in her garrulousness the total opposite of her superior.
“If I were you, I’d go home. I’ll phone you tomorrow at the Krestovozdvizhensky. It will hardly begin before then. I’m sure the delivery will be natural, without artificial interference. But, on the other hand, the somewhat narrow pelvis, the occipito-posterior position of the fetus, the absence of pain, and the insignificance of the contractions are cause for some apprehension. However, it’s too early to tell. It all depends on how she responds to the contractions once the delivery begins. And that the future will show.”
The next day, in answer to his telephone call, the hospital porter who took the phone told him not to hang up, went to find out, left him hanging for some ten minutes, and brought the following information in a crude and incompetent form: “They told me to tell you, tell him, they said, you brought your wife too early, you have to take her back.” Furious, Yuri Andreevich demanded that someone better informed take the phone. “Symptoms can be deceptive,” a nurse told him. “The doctor shouldn’t be alarmed, he’ll have to wait a day or two.”
On the third day he learned that the delivery had begun during the night, the water had broken at dawn, and strong contractions had continued uninterruptedly since morning.
He rushed headlong to the clinic, and as he walked down the corridor, he heard, through the accidentally half-open door, Tonya’s screams, like the screams of accident victims with severed limbs when they are pulled from under the wheels of a train.
He was not allowed to go to her. Biting his bent finger till it bled, he went to the window, outside which oblique rain poured down, the same as yesterday and the day before.
A hospital nurse came out of the ward. The squealing of a newborn could be heard from there.
“Safe, safe,” Yuri Andreevich repeated joyfully to himself.
“A little son. A boy. Congratulations on the successful delivery,” the nurse said in a singsong voice. “You can’t go in now. We’ll show him to you in due time. Then you’ll have to loosen your purse strings for the new mother. She suffered all right. It’s her first. They always suffer with the first one.”
“Safe, safe,” Yuri Andreevich rejoiced, not understanding what the nurse was saying and that with her words she was including him as a participant in what had happened, though what did he have to do with it? Father, son—he saw no pride in this gratuitously obtained fatherhood, he felt nothing at this sonhood fallen from the sky. It all lay outside his consciousness. The main thing was Tonya, Tonya who had been exposed to mortal danger and had happily escaped it.
He had a patient who lived not far from the clinic. He went to see him and came back in half an hour. Both doors, from the corridor to the vestibule, and further on, from the vestibule to the ward, were again slightly open. Himself not knowing what he was doing, Yuri Andreevich slipped into the vestibule.
Spreading his arms, the mastodon-gynecologist in his white smock rose up before him as if from under the earth.
“Where are you going?” he stopped him in a breathless whisper, so that the new mother would not hear him. “Are you out of your mind? Lesions, blood, antiseptics, not to mention the psychological shock. A good one you are! And a doctor at that.”
“But I didn’t … I only wanted a little peek. From here. Through the chink.”
“Ah, that’s a different matter. All right, then. But don’t you … ! Watch out! If she sees you, you’re dead, I won’t leave an ounce of life in you!”
In the ward, their backs to the door, stood two women in white smocks, the midwife and the nurse. On the nurse’s hand squirmed a squealing and tender human offspring, contracting and stretching like a piece of dark red rubber. The midwife was putting a ligature on the umbilical cord, to separate the baby from the placenta. Tonya lay in the middle of the ward on a surgical bed with an adjustable mattress. She lay rather high. Yuri Andreevich, who in his excitement exaggerated everything, thought she was lying approximately on the level of those desks one can write at standing up.
Raised higher towards the ceiling than happens with ordinary mortals, Tonya was floating in the vapors of what she had suffered, she was as if steaming from exhaustion. She rose up in the middle of the ward, as a bark just moored and unloaded rides high in a bay, a bark that crosses the sea of death to the land of life with new souls, migrating here from no one knows where. She had just carried out the landing of one of these souls and now stood at anchor, resting with all the emptiness of her lightened hull. Along with her rested her broken and toil-worn rigging and planking, and her forgetfulness, her extinguished memory of where she had recently been, what she had crossed, and how she had moored.
And just as no one knew the geography of the country under whose flag she had dropped anchor, so no one knew in what language to address her.
At work they all vied with each other in congratulating him. “How quickly they found out!” Yuri Andreevich thought in surprise.
He went to the interns’ room, which was known as the pot-house and the garbage dump, because, owing to the crowdedness of the overburdened hospital, people now took their coats off there, came from outside in galoshes, forgot all sorts of things brought from elsewhere, littered it with cigarette butts and paper.