The bright, sunny interns’ room with its white painted walls was flooded with the cream-colored sunlight of golden autumn, which distinguishes the days following the Dormition,9 when the first morning frosts set in, and winter chickadees and magpies flit among the motley and bright colors of the thinning woods. On such days the sky rises to its utmost height and a dark blue, icy clarity breathes from the north through the transparent column of air between it and the earth. The visibility and audibility of everything in the world are enhanced. Distances transmit sounds in a frozen ringing, distinctly and separately. What is far away becomes clear, as if opening out a view through all of life for many years ahead. This rarefaction would be impossible to bear if it were not so short-termed and did not come at the end of a short autumn day on the threshold of early twilight.
Such light bathed the interns’ room, the light of the early-setting autumn sun, juicy, glassy, and watery, like a ripe golden apple.
The doctor sat at the desk, dipping his pen in the ink, pondering and writing, and some quiet birds flew close by the big windows, casting soundless shadows into the room, over the doctor’s moving hands, the table with its ruled paper, the floor and walls, and just as soundlessly disappeared.
“The maple’s losing its leaves,” said the prosector, coming in. Once a stout man, his skin had become baggy from loss of weight. “The rain poured down on it, the wind tore at it, and they couldn’t defeat it. But see what one morning frost has done!”
The doctor raised his head. Indeed, the mysterious birds flitting past the window turned out to be the wine and flame leaves of the maple, which flew off, floated smoothly through the air, and, like convex orange stars, settled away from the tree on the grass of the hospital lawn.
“Have you sealed the windows?” asked the prosector.
“No,” said Yuri Andreevich, and he went on writing.
“Why not? It’s time.”
Yuri Andreevich did not reply, absorbed in writing.
“Eh, no Tarasiuk,” the prosector went on. “He was solid gold. Could mend boots. And watches. And do everything. And supply anything in the world. It’s time to seal them. Have to do it yourself.”
“There’s no putty.”
“Make some. Here’s the recipe.” And the prosector explained how to prepare putty from linseed oil and chalk. “Well, forget it. I’m bothering you.”
He went to the other window and busied himself with his vials and preparations. It was getting dark. After a minute, he said:
“You’ll ruin your eyes. It’s dark. And they won’t give us any light. Let’s go home.”
“I’ll work a little longer. Twenty minutes or so.”
“His wife’s here as a nurse’s aide.”
“Whose?”
“Tarasiuk’s.”
“I know.”
“But where he is, nobody knows. He roams the wide earth. Came to visit a couple of times in the summer. Stopped by the hospital. Now he’s somewhere in the country. Founding the new life. He’s one of those Bolshevik soldiers you meet on the boulevards and on trains. And do you want to know the answer? To Tarasiuk’s riddle, for instance? Listen. He’s a jack-of-all-trades. Can’t do a bad piece of work. Whatever he turns his hand to goes without a hitch. The same thing happened to him in the war. He studied it like any other trade. Turned out to be a crack shot. In the trenches, at a listening post. His eye, his hand—first class! He got all his decorations, not for bravery, but for never missing. Well. Every job becomes a passion for him. He fell in love with military things. He sees that a weapon is power, that he can use it. He wanted to become power himself. An armed man is no longer simply a man. In the old days his kind went from the sharpshooters to the robbers. Try taking his rifle from him now. And suddenly there comes the calclass="underline" ‘Bayonets, about face!’ and so on. And he about-faced. That’s the whole story for you. And the whole of Marxism.”
“And the most genuine besides, straight from life. What do you think?”
The prosector stepped over to his window, pottered a little with his vials. Then asked:
“Well, how’s the stove man?”
“Thanks for recommending him. A very interesting man. We spent around an hour talking about Hegel and Benedetto Croce.”10
“Well, what else! He has a doctorate in philosophy from Heidelberg University. And the stove?”
“Don’t talk about it.”
“Smokes?”
“Nothing but trouble.”
“He installed the pipe wrong. He should have built it into the Dutch stove, but he probably stuck it through the vent window.”
“No, he set it into the stove. But it smokes.”
“That means he didn’t find the smokestack and put it through the ventilation duct. Or into the airway. Eh, no Tarasiuk! But be patient. Moscow wasn’t built in a day. Using a stove isn’t like playing piano. It takes learning. Laid in firewood?”
“Where can I get it?”
“I’ll send you the churchwarden. He’s a firewood thief. Takes fences apart for fuel. But I warn you. You’ve got to haggle. He asks a lot. Or there’s the exterminator woman.”
They went down to the porter’s lodge, put their coats on, went out.
“Why the exterminator?” asked the doctor. “We don’t have bedbugs.”
“What have bedbugs got to do with it? I’m talking apples and you’re talking oranges. Not bedbugs, but firewood. The woman’s set it all up on a commercial footing. Buys up houses and framing for firewood. A serious supplier. Watch out, don’t stumble, it’s really dark. Once I could have gone through this neighborhood blindfolded. I knew every little stone. I was born in Prechistenka. But they started taking down the fences, and even with open eyes I don’t recognize anything, like in a foreign city. What little corners they’ve uncovered, though! Little Empire houses in the bushes, round garden tables, half-rotten benches. The other day I walked past a little vacant lot like that, at the intersection of three lanes. I see a hundred-year-old woman poking the ground with her stick. ‘God help you, granny,’ I say. ‘Digging worms for fishing?’ As a joke, of course. And she says very seriously: ‘No, dearie—champignons.’ And it’s true, the city’s getting to be the same as a forest. Smells of rotten leaves, mushrooms.”
“I know that place. It’s between Serebryany and Molchanovka, isn’t it? Unexpected things keep happening to me when I pass it. Either I meet somebody I haven’t seen for twenty years, or I find something. And they say there have been robberies at the corner. Well, no wonder. It’s a crossroads. There’s a whole network of passages to thieves’ dens that are still there around the Smolensky market. You’re robbed, stripped, and, poof, go chase the wind.”
“And the streetlights shine so weakly. It’s not for nothing they call a black eye a shiner. You’re bound to get one.”
6
Indeed, all sorts of chance things happened to the doctor at the above-mentioned place. Late in the fall, not long before the October fighting,11 on a dark, cold evening, at that corner, he ran into a man lying unconscious across the sidewalk. The man lay with his arms spread, his head leaning on a hitching post, and his legs hanging into the roadway. Every now and then he moaned weakly. In response to the loud questions of the doctor, who was trying to bring him back to consciousness, he murmured something incoherent and again passed out for a time. His head was bruised and bloody, but on cursory examination, the bones of the skull turned out to be intact. The fallen man was undoubtedly the victim of an armed robbery. “Briefcase. Briefcase,” he whispered two or three times.
Using the telephone of a pharmacy nearby on the Arbat, the doctor sent for an old cabby attached to the Krestovozdvizhensky Hospital and took the unknown man there.