It was hard to bear. And what was worse, her husband had left her alone with the interloper. The creak of the window opening in the next room reminded her forcefully of his presence. She sat up and turned her head, to indulge in the second of her consolations, which in this instance meant gazing across at the ormolu clock she had retrieved from the living room, now placed on her rococo dressing table.
It was almost six o’clock. Kirill Kirillovich should be home soon. Varvara Alexeevna rose from her bed and crossed to the window to look out for him. As she reached the window, she noticed a paper dart drift down towards the courtyard. She instinctively pulled back. A man was standing near the entrance to the courtyard. At first, there seemed to be no connection between this man and the paper dart, which he seemed determined to ignore. Indeed, it was his insistence on not looking at the dart, or at the window from which it had been thrown, that convinced her he was linked to it in some way. At last, the man began to walk casually across the muddy space, pausing only to pick up the paper dart, which he pocketed without reading.
‘The ruse’
Porfiry Petrovich was sitting up in bed, a selection of newspapers spread out over him, as if the hospital had run out of linen and had resorted to these grubby paper sheets instead. He seemed unusually chipper, particularly for someone who had apparently been shot at close range. A small gauze dressing was fixed to his cheek with adhesive tape. His face around the dressing appeared tender and swollen. The room, of which he was the sole occupant, smelt of carbolic acid.
A polizyeisky positioned outside his door had been authorised to admit only Nikodim Fomich and Dr Pervoyedov. Indeed, the polizyeisky himself had been forbidden from entering the room, although there was nothing to prevent him, other than his unquestioning instinct for obedience. The man had been chosen for his singular lack of imagination and curiosity.
Porfiry looked up as the door opened and Dr Pervoyedov came in. The doctor’s expression had settled over the past day or so into one of determined, seemingly unshakeable resentment. The raw, heart-punching fear he had felt the day before, when he had first walked into Porfiry’s chambers to see his friend leaching blood from a chest wound, was still with him, a spur to his anger now. Confused and alarmed by Zamyotov’s panic, by his garbled talk of gunshot and blood, it had at first been impossible for Dr Pervoyedov to take in what Porfiry was saying to him: that there was no need to worry; that he was not hurt; that Virginsky had not really shot him. That it was all a ruse.
‘A ruse?’
‘Yes, a ruse!’ How infuriatingly pleased with himself Porfiry Petrovich seemed when he shared his secret. Only just released from the anxiety of thinking his friend injured, Dr Pervoyedov felt a powerful urge to inflict the pain he had imagined Porfiry to be suffering. In the event, his adherence to the Hippocratic Oath prevailed. That was when he first noticed the nick on Porfiry’s cheek.
‘Pavel Pavlovich discharged a blank cartridge!’ hissed Porfiry, between delighted wheezing gasps of laughter.
‘He did what?’
‘We plugged the cartridge with a wad of paper. This,’ said Porfiry, holding up the hand that had apparently been staunching his wound, ‘is pig’s blood!’
Dr Pervoyedov’s face contorted into an expression of distaste at the memory, though all the pig’s blood had by now been cleaned up. His distaste was at the part he had been forced to play in the deception. It was all very well for Porfiry Petrovich to indulge in these pranks, but to involve others, such as himself and Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky — well, that was going too far.
Of course, Porfiry Petrovich had insisted that it was not a prank. He preferred the word ‘ruse’, and had asserted that it was entirely necessary, if Virginsky was to be accepted as a committed revolutionist.
At that point, Dr Pervoyedov had given vent to his feelings by indulging in a spate of unscientific language, briefly summarised by the question, ‘Have you any idea of the danger to which you are exposing that boy?’
‘But the whole thing was Pavel Pavlovich’s idea!’ declared Porfiry, as if that justified everything.
Dr Pervoyedov had shaken his head in exasperation. His anger at Porfiry’s recklessness — how could an intelligent man be so stupid? — distracted him from whatever duty of professional care he might have owed as a doctor. For although he had noticed the nick, and realised it was a genuine abrasion, he did nothing about it. In his defence, it appeared extremely minor. (But was there a desire to punish Porfiry in this trivial act of neglect? If so, the doctor never admitted it.) He ought perhaps to have intervened when Porfiry carelessly rubbed the graze with the hand that was stained with pig’s blood, but at the time he had been in full abusive flow. He had scarcely noticed the movement. Furthermore, he had been so caught up with Porfiry’s definition of the event as a ‘ruse’, which implied something harmless and even amusing, that it was almost as if he had developed a professional blind-spot.
It was only later, when Porfiry was installed in the room at the Obukhovksy Hospital, that Dr Pervoyedov had remembered, and attended to, the cut on his face, at last cleaning away the blood, a mixture of Porfiry’s own and that of the unknown pig. He had rinsed the wound with a solution of carbolic acid, in keeping with the best advice of the renowned Edinburgh surgeon, Joseph Lister. ‘There must have been something lodged in the barrel, or perhaps it was a piece of the cartridge shell that broke off.’ He could find nothing of the kind in the wound now. Whatever had caused the injury was long gone.
‘It’s nothing,’ Porfiry had protested.
‘Tell me, did he really point the gun at your head?’
‘But it was loaded with a blank cartridge. There was no danger.’
‘Could he not just as easily have fired into the air?’
‘He had to make it convincing.’
‘But there was no one else in the room with you at the time. And your door was closed. Who was there to be convinced?’
‘Someone might have come in just as he was firing the gun.’
‘In which case, your ruse most certainly would have backfired. Pavel Pavlovich would have been detained.’
Porfiry had pursed his lips as he thought about Dr Pervoyedov’s objections. ‘Perhaps he needed to convince himself.’
Now, a day after ‘the ruse’, Dr Pervoyedov was less than happy with what that graze was turning into. The skin around the wound was red, the flesh swollen, and sore, judging by Porfiry’s winces when Dr Pervoyedov probed it. The wound itself was tiny. But it was moist and gaping, like the mouth of a small bloodthirsty fish.
Porfiry himself, however, seemed little troubled by it, and so the doctor affected to be equally unconcerned. ‘I’ll just take a look at that cut,’ he said, avoiding Porfiry’s eyes, and still maintaining his pinched, resentful expression.
‘Stop fussing. It’s nothing, I tell you. It’s the way you keep pulling off that dressing that’s made it sore.’
At Dr Pervoyedov’s smile as he studied the minuscule wound, Porfiry wondered if he had at last been forgiven. But the smile was a mask. The truth was that Dr Pervoyedov did not like what he saw at all. The flesh was angry and more inflamed than ever. And in the lips of the little fish, he saw morsels of yellow pus.
The doctor felt a weight of shame and grief, his conscience pounding his memory with the sight of Porfiry’s pig-bloodied hand touching his face. He knew very well what they might expect if the infection took hold in earnest.
And so his resentment vanished — what a trifling thing it turned out to be, after all! — and he was restored to Porfiry as the smiling friend of old. If Porfiry was suspicious at the speed of this transformation, he kept it to himself.