'If it hadn't been for you,' Alexei went on, 'I would certainly have been killed.'
'Of course,' she replied, 'of course you would . . . After all you did kill one of them.'
'I killed one of them?' he asked, feeling a new weakness as his head began to spin.
'M'hm.' She nodded approvingly and looked at Alexei with a mixture of fear and curiosity. 'Oh, it was terrible . . . they almost shot me too.' She shuddered.
'How did I kill him?'
'Well, they leaped round the corner, you began shooting and the man in front fell down . . . Perhaps you just wounded him. Anyway you were brave ... I thought I was going to faint. You were running, turned round and shot at them, then ran on again . . . What are you - a captain?'
'What made you think I was an officer? Why did you shout "officer" at me?'
Her eyes shone.
'I decided you must be an officer when I saw your badge in your fur cap. Why did you have to take such a risk by wearing your badge?'
'Badge? Oh my God, of course ... I see now ...' He remembered the shop bell ringing . . . the dusty mirror ... 'I ripped off everything else - but had to go and forget my badge! I'm not an officer,' he said, 'I'm just an army doctor. My name is Alexei Vasilievich Turbin . . . Please tell me - what is your name?'
'I am Julia Alexandrovna Reiss.'
'Why are you alone?'
Her answer was somehow strained and she looked away as she said:
'My husband's not here at the moment. He went away. And his mother too. I'm alone . . .' After a pause she added: 'It's cold in here. Brrr . . . I'll light the stove.'
#
As the logs burned up in the stove his head ached with growing violence. His wound had stopped hurting him, all the pain was concentrated in his head. It began in his left temple, then spread to the crown of his head and the back of his neck. Some little vein under his left eyebrow tautened and radiated waves of desperate pain in all directions. Julia Reiss knelt down at the stove and raked the fire with a poker. Alternately opening and closing his eyes in pain, Alexei watched her as she turned her head aside from the heat, screening it with her pale wrist. Her hair seemed to be an indefinite color which at one moment looked ash-blond shot with flame, at the next almost gold; but her eyebrows were as coal-black as her eyes. He could not decide whether that irregular profile with its aquiline nose was beautiful or not. The look in her eyes was a riddle. There was fear, anxiety and perhaps - sensuality . . . Yes, sensuality.
As she sat there lapped in a wave of heat she was miraculously attractive. She had saved his life.
#
For hours that night, when the heat of the stove had long since died down and burned instead in his head and arm, someone was twisting a red-hot nail into the top of his head and destroying his brain. 'I've got a fever', Alexei repeated drily and soundlessly, and tried to instil into his mind that he must get up in the morning and somehow make his way home. As the nail bored into his brain it finally drove out his thoughts of Elena, of Nikolka, of home and of Petlyura. Nothing mattered. Peturra... Peturra... He could only long for one thing - for the pain to stop.
Deep in the night Julia Reiss came in wearing soft fur-trimmed slippers, and sat beside him and again, his arm weakly hooked around her neck, he passed through the two small rooms. Before this she had gathered her strength and said to him:
'Get up, if only you can. Don't pay any attention to me. I'll help you. Then lie right down . . . Well, if you can't . . .'
He replied:
'No, I'll go . . . only help me . . .'
She led him to the little door of that mysterious house and then helped him back. As he lay down, his teeth chattering from the cold, he felt some lessening and respite from his headache and said:
'I swear I won't forget what you've done. Go to bed . . .'
'Be quiet, I'll soothe your head', she replied.
Then the dull, angry pain flowed out of his head, flowed away from his temples into her soft hands, through them and through her body into the floor, covered with a dusty, fluffy carpet, and there it expired. Instead of the pain a delicious even heat spread all over his body. His arm had gone numb and felt as heavy as cast-iron, so he did not move it but merely closed his eyes and gave himself up to the fever. How long he lay there he could not have said: perhaps five minutes, perhaps hours. But he felt that he could have lain like that, bathed in heat, for ever. Whenever he opened his eyes, gently so as not to alarm the woman sitting beside him, he saw the same picture: the little lamp burning weakly but steadily under its red shade giving out a peaceful light, and the woman's unsleeping profile beside him. Her lips pouting like an unhappy child, she sat staring out of the window. Basking in the heat of fever, Alexei stirred and edged towards her . . .
'Bend over me', he said. His voice had become dry, weak and high-pitched. She turned to him, her eyes took on a frightened guarded look and the shadows around them deepened. Alexei put his right arm around her neck, pulled her to him and kissed her on the lips. It seemed to him that he was touching something sweet-tasting and cold. The woman was not surprised by what Alexei did, but only gazed more searchingly into his face. Then she said:
'God, how hot you. are. What are we going to do? We ought to call a doctor, but how are we going to do it?'
'No need', Alexei replied gently. 'I don't need a doctor. Tomorrow I'll get up and go home.'
'I'm so afraid,' she whispered, 'that you'll get worse. Then how can I help you? It's not bleeding any more, is it?' She touched his bandaged arm so lightly that he did not feel it.
'Don't worry, nothing's going to happen to me. Lie down and sleep.'
'I'm not going to leave you', she answered, caressing his hand. 'You have such a fever.'
He could not stop himself from embracing her again and drawing her to him. She did not resist. He drew her until she was leaning right over him. Then, as she lay down beside him he sensed through his own sickly heat the clear live warmth of her body.
'Lie down and don't move,' she whispered, 'and I'll soothe your head.'
She stretched out alongside him and he felt the touch of her knees. She began to smooth back his hair from his temples. He felt such pleasure that he could only think of how to prevent himself from falling asleep.
But he did fall asleep, and slept long, peacefully and well. When he awoke he felt that he was floating in a boat on a river of warmth, that all his pain had gone, and that outside the night was turning gradually paler and paler. Not only the little house but the City and the whole world were full of silence. A glassy, limpid blue light was pouring through the gaps in the blinds. The woman, warm from his body, but with her face set in a look of unhappiness, was asleep beside him. And he went to sleep again.
#
In the morning, around nine o'clock, one of the rare cab-drivers took on two passengers on the deserted Malo-Provalnaya Street -a man in a black civilian overcoat, looking very pale, and a woman. Carefully supporting the man by the arm, the woman drove him to St Alexei's Hill. There was no traffic on the hill, except for a cab outside No. 13 which had just brought a strange visitor with a trunk, a bundle and a cage.
Fourteen
That evening all the habitues of No. 13 began to converge on the house of their own accord. None of them had been cut off or driven away.
'It's him', echoed the cry in Anyuta's breast, and her heart fluttered like Lariosik's bird. There had come a cautious tap at the little snow-covered window of the Turbins' kitchen. Anyuta pressed her face to the window to make out the face. It was him, but without his moustache . . . Him . . . With both hands Anyuta smoothed down her black hair, opened the door into the porch, then from the porch into the snow-covered yard and Myshlaevsky was standing unbelievably close to her. A student's overcoat with a beaver collar and a student's peaked cap . . . his moustache was gone . . . but there was no mistaking his eyes, even in the half-darkness of the porch. The right one flecked with green sparks, like a Urals gemstone, and the left one dark and languorous . . . And he seemed to be shorter.