Nina plucked up her spirit and said, “Look, the conditions are awful here! Can we transfer him to another hospital?”
The doctor glanced at her in surprise. “You can if you mean to kill him.”
Lydia Grigorievna pushed Nina aside.
“We’re begging you, doctor, – please, do everything possible,” she said lowering her voice. “We will be very grateful. For now, please, accept this.”
She stepped right up to the doctor and slipped some banknotes wrapped up in paper into the pocket of his surgical coat.
“Well, with my salary, I have to accept whatever I am offered,” the man said without much enthusiasm. “But to be honest, it’s not me but your patient’s system that calls the tune now.”
He left, and they settled down to wait.
The nurse was displeased. “What’s the use of your sitting it out here? Go home and come back in the morning.” But going home was out of the question for them.
A clock on the wall counted time silently – five o’clock, six o’clock, seven o’clock in the evening. Nina and Lydia Grigorievna were fidgeting uneasily on the uncomfortable benches. Immersed each in their own thoughts, they hardly talked. Nina was trying to take in what was happening. Papa has had a stroke? He can die? But it’s impossible! As once her mind had been unable to accept her mother’s death, it was now unable to accept the danger that her father faced. Blocking the unthinkable, her brain brought up all sorts of rubbish – that the quarterly reports were soon due in her bank, and without Ignatiy Savelievich around, she was in for a rough spell; that she was hardly going to attend the driving classes which she had subscribed to; and that she needed different shoes for that dress.
When midnight was close, the nurse asked them again, “You are what – going to stick out here the whole night?” They assured her that they were. The nurse shook her head and sighed, “All right, then, come along.” She led them to the nurses’ room where she offered them some tea and biscuits. Then she pointed at two empty cots, “You can lie down here,” and gave them some pillows and blankets. “The roster says three nurses in each shift, see?” she said with vexation. “But one is off sick while another is having a baby. And I’m here, sweating my guts out for the whole bunch!”
Nina thought that she would not be able to have a wink of sleep, but the moment she laid her head down on the pillow she flaked out.
She was woken up by Lydia Grigorievna, “Ninochka, the doctor is coming any minute now.”
Nina jumped up. It was six in the morning. She had barely freshened up at a sink when the doctor came in. At the end of his shift, he looked even less attractive.
“Everything’s all right,” he said without any emotion. “The worst part is over. He is going to live, and there is hope that the main functions will be restored. It’s going to take time, of course.”
Nina and Lydia Grigorievna listened to that, clasping each other’s hands. Nina felt weak in the knees. Only now she realized how strong her fear for her father had been.
Afterwards, when Yevgeniy Borisovich was taken to expensive clinics and shown to luminaries of medicine, it became clear that the shabby doctor from the public hospital had done his job well, and it was due to him that Nina’s father retained speech and control of his body.
It was not until several days later that Nina and Lydia Grigorievna learned what had happened at the ill-fated session of the project acceptance committee. On the day after the stroke Yevgeniy Borisovich came around, and they were allowed short visits, but the doctor ordered that they avoid any topics that might agitate the patient. Finally, Nina’s father told them everything himself.
The review procedure started auspiciously. It had been the fear of Nina’s father that the head of the technical inspection would not let him present his project in full brilliance by finding faults and interfering with his presentation. But the chief technical inspector was absent, and his proxy was as silent as a fish. The other members of the committee seemed to be in a benevolent mood.
Yevgeniy Borisovich got carried away and gave them a whole lecture. He was especially glad that he was able to draw the committee’s attention to some ingenious technical solutions which were his brainchildren. Thanks to those solutions, the object was built to higher standards of safety and at the same time, some economy was obtained.
After the presentation, a field review of the object was scheduled. On the site, though, the members of the committee behaved in an indolent and disinterested way – viewed everything quite formally, without prying, clearly impatient to wind up and go to lunch.
The meal took place in a modest café in the municipal administrative building. In former times, it had been a canteen where the staff of the district Soviet administration had had their lunches, and the establishment had not changed much since. Grey-haired female cooks served the same cabbage salads, borsch and meat rissoles as twenty five years before. Nina’s father was glad to see the members of the committee eat with appetite. He could not eat anything himself, the food sticking in his throat. He was watching the others closely trying to figure out whether everything was going well or whether somebody was bearing some kind of grudge against the project or himself personally.
In that same café, he had once drunk vodka with the chairman of the committee – they had ‘washed down’ a closed contract. Now, emboldened, Nina’s father mentioned that episode to the man, “Do you remember you and me landing here for a…” He checked himself and bit his tongue realizing suddenly that it was indiscrete of him to bring up memories like that, and the chairman might not like it. However, the chairman did not seem to mind – he smiled and said, “Yeah, that was a nice little session we had here.”
A bomb went off after the lunch. The committee gathered in the conference room.
“Well, my dear colleagues, go ahead, have your say,” said the chairman.
The technical inspection man took the floor and asked some questions. The questions were not of a dangerous kind – Yevgeniy Borisovich had anticipated them, and answered each with confidence.
A pause followed.
The chairman prompted, “So? … No more questions?”
Everyone kept silent. Then the chairman took the floor himself.
“Well… Isn’t it sad, my dear colleagues? It’s really sad. None of you seems to see that the project is almost completely failed.”
Nina’s father who had already prepared to hear a favorable conclusion which was the chairman’s business to make took some time to grasp what the man was saying. And the chairman was saying that the company of Yevgeniy Borisovich had messed up all the works and failed to deliver on the contract it had made with the city.
The members of the committee were motionless and speechless. The chairman took out a note-book and opened a file containing the documents on the project. While leafing through one and the other, he started pouring down charges. It appeared that the company had violated certain regulations that were in force in the construction industry, and failed to observe the environmental law. The technological solutions which Nina’s father was so proud of had not gone through proper certification, and thus, implementing them could be classified as arbitrary practice in breach of the law. And so on, and so forth – over two dozen points.
All that was total rubbish. The regulations, adopted forty years ago, had nothing to do with the modern realities. They were universally violated, as it was impossible to build anything otherwise. In contrast, the environmental law was brand new, but it was also universally violated because of its being totally unrealistic. In fact, the object built by Nina’s father was more environment-friendly than most objects of the same category. It was true that his inventions had not been formally certified, but their merits were obvious to any specialist, and the necessary certificates could be tagged on post factum, as was common practice.