‘Get up! You’re being spoken to!’ he said, waking me up with his melodious tenor voice, peering into the soap dish and removing a hair from the soap with his fingernail.
‘A… a… a… good morning, Dr Screwy!’ I yawned when I spotted him bending over the washstand. ‘It’s been ages since Hast saw you!’
The whole district teased the doctor by calling him ‘Screwy’ on account of his habit of constantly screwing up his eyes. And I too teased him with that nickname. When he saw that I was awake, Voznesensky came over to me, sat on the edge of the bed and immediately raised a matchbox to his screwed-up eyes.
‘Only idlers or those with a clear conscience sleep like you do,’ he said. ‘And as you’re neither one nor the other, it might be more becoming if you got up a bit earlier, dear chap.’
‘What’s the time?’
‘Just gone eleven.’
‘To hell with you, silly old Screwy! No one asked you to wake me so early! Do you know, it was after five when I got to bed and if it hadn’t been for you I’d have slept until this evening.’
‘That’s right!’ came Polikarp’s deep voice from the next room. ‘As if he hasn’t slept enough! It’s the second day he’s been sleeping, but it’s still not enough! Do you know what day it is?’ Polikarp asked, entering the bedroom and looking at me the way clever people look at fools.
‘It’s Wednesday,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, of course it is! They’ve arranged for a week to have two Wednesdays, specially for you!’
‘Today’s Thursday!’ said the doctor. ‘So, my dear chap, you managed to sleep through the whole of Wednesday! Very nice! Very nice! And how much did you have to drink, may I ask?’
‘I hadn’t slept for two days and I drank – I just can’t remember how much I drank.’
After I had dismissed Polikarp I started dressing and describing to the doctor those recently experienced ‘nights of madness, wild words’ that are so fine, so touching in songs but so ugly in reality. In my description I tried not to overstep the limits of the ‘light genre’, to keep to the facts and not to lapse into moralizing, although all this was alien to the nature of one with a passion for summarizing and making deductions. As I spoke I pretended to be talking about trifles that didn’t worry me in the least. Respecting Pavel Ivanovich’s chaste ears and conscious of his revulsion for the Count, I concealed a great deal, touched on many things only superficially – but for all that, despite my playful tone and grotesque turn of phrase, the doctor looked me gravely in the eye throughout my narrative, constantly shaking his head and impatiently jerking his shoulders. Not once did he smile. Evidently my ‘light genre’ made a far from light impression on him.
‘Why aren’t you laughing, Screwy?’ I asked after I’d finished my description.
‘If it weren’t you who was telling me all this, and if it hadn’t been for a certain incident, I’d never have believed a word of it. But it’s absolutely shocking, old man!’
‘What incident are you talking about?’
‘The peasant whom you so indelicately treated to a taste of the oar called on me yesterday evening… Ivan Osipov…’
‘Ivan Osipov?’ I said, shrugging my shoulders. ‘It’s the first I’ve heard of him.’
‘He’s tall, red-haired, with freckles. Try to remember! You hit him on the head with an oar.’
‘I’m really at a complete loss… I don’t know any Osipov. I never hit anyone with an oar. You must have been dreaming, old boy!’
‘If only it were a dream! He came to me with an official letter from the Karneyev district authorities and asked for a medical certificate. In the letter it states – and he’s not telling any lies – that it was you who inflicted the wound. Still don’t remember? You bruised him above the forehead, just at the hairline – went right down to the bone, dear chap!’
‘I can’t remember,’ I whispered. ‘Who is he? What does he do?’
‘He’s just an ordinary peasant from the Karneyev estate. He was one of the oarsmen when you were making merry on the lake.’
‘Hm… it’s possible… I can’t remember. I was probably drunk… and then, somehow, by accident…’
‘No sir, it wasn’t by accident. He says that you lost your temper with him for some reason, kept swearing at him – and then you became really furious, leapt over and struck him in front of witnesses. What’s more, you shouted: “I’ll kill you, you rotten bastard!” ’
I went red and paced from corner to corner.
‘For the life of me I can’t remember,’ I said, making a great effort of memory. ‘I can’t remember! You say I lost my temper – when I’m drunk I’m usually unforgivably loathsome!’
‘So, what more need I say!?’
‘That peasant obviously wants to create a scandal, but that’s not what’s important… what’s important is the fact itself, the blow I inflicted. Surely you don’t think I’m capable of fighting? And why should I strike a miserable peasant?’
‘Well, my dear sir… Of course, I couldn’t refuse him a medical certificate, but I didn’t forget to advise him to come and see you about it. You’ll sort it all out with him one way or the other. It’s only a slight bruise, but from an official point of view any head wound penetrating the skull is a serious matter. You frequently come across cases where apparently the most trivial head wound that had been considered relatively minor led to necrosis of the skull bones and therefore a journey ad patres.’29
Carried away, Screwy stood up, paced the room close to the walls, waved his arms and started expounding his knowledge of surgical pathology for my benefit. Necrosis of the skull bones, inflammation of the brain, death and other horrors, simply poured from his lips, together with interminable explanations of the macroscopic and microscopic processes that are normally to be found in that hazy terra incognita30 which was of no interest to me.
‘That’s enough, you old windbag!’ I said, putting an end to his medical chatter. ‘Don’t you realize how boring all this stuff is for me!’
‘Boring or not – that isn’t the point. You must listen and show a little remorse. Perhaps you’ll be more careful another time and not do such stupid, unnecessary, things. You could lose your job because of that oaf Osipov – if you don’t patch things up with him. For one of the high priests of Themis31 to be taken to court for common assault would be simply scandalous!’
Pavel Ivanovich is the only person whose pronouncements I can listen to with a light heart, without frowning, whom I can allow to peer into my eyes questioningly and to lower his probing hand into the convolutions of my soul. We’re friends in the very best sense of the word and we respect one another, although there do exist between us grievances of an unpleasant, rather ticklish nature. Like a black cat, a woman had come between us. This eternal casus belli32 had given rise to many conflicts, but it didn’t make us fall out and we continued to live in peace. Screwy is a very fine fellow… I love his simple and far from supple face with its big nose, screwed-up eyes and thin, small, reddish beard. I love his tall, slim, narrow-shouldered figure from which his frock-coat and overcoat dangle as if from a clothes peg.
His badly made trousers hang in ugly folds at the knees and his boots are shamelessly down at heel. His white tie is never in the right place. But please don’t think he’s slovenly. One look at his kind, serious face is enough to tell you that he has no time to bother about his appearance – and he wouldn’t know how to, anyway. He’s young, honest, unpretentious and he loves medicine. He’s always on the go – that suffices to explain in his favour all the shortcomings of his unpretentious attire. Like an artist, he doesn’t know the value of money: without turning a hair he sacrifices his own comfort and life’s blessings to some trivial vices of his own, and as a result he gives the impression of a man without means, of someone who can barely make ends meet. He neither smokes nor drinks; he doesn’t spend money on women. All the same, the two thousand he earns from hospital work and private practice passes through his hands as quickly as my own money does when I’m on a drinking spree. Two passions drain his resources: one is lending money, the other is ordering items from newspaper advertisements. He’ll lend money to anyone who asks, without a murmur, without any mention of repayment. No tool could ever root out his reckless faith in people’s conscientiousness and this faith is even more blatantly obvious in his perpetual ordering of items extolled in newspaper advertisements. He orders everything, whether he needs it or not. He writes away for books, telescopes, humorous magazines, hundred-piece dinner services, chronometers. And it’s not surprising that patients who call on Pavel Ivanovich take his room for an arsenal or a museum. He’s always been cheated and is still being cheated, but his faith remains as firm and rocklike as ever. He’s really a splendid fellow and we shall meet him more than once in the pages of this novel.