crying. "Doctor, ear!"
He looked at me closely, probably thinking that I was still delirious.
"Hen, saddle, box, snow, drink, Abraham," I said, feeling the tears
pouring right down into my mouth. "It's me, Doctor. I'm Sanya. Don't
you remember, that village, Doctor? We hid you. You taught me."
He looked at me closely again, then blew out his cheeks and let the air
out noisily.
"Oho!" he said, and laughed. "Do I remember! Where's your sister?
Fancy that! All you could say then was 'ear' and that sounded like a
bark. So you've learnt to speak, eh? And moved to Moscow too? Took it
into your head to die?"
I wanted to tell him that I wasn't thinking of dying at all, just the
opposite, when he suddenly put his hand over my mouth, whipped out a
handkerchief with the other and wiped my face and nose.
"Lie still, old chap," he said. "You mustn't talk yet. Who knows what
you'll be up to next—you've been dying so many times. One word too
many and you may pop off."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A SERIOUS TALK
If you think that, having come round, I was on the road to recovery,
you are mistaken. Hardly had I pulled through the Spanish 'flu than I
went down with meningitis. And again it was Ivan Ivanovich who
refused to acknowledge that my game was up.
He sat for hours at my bedside, studying the strange movements
which I made with my eyes and hands. In the end I came to again, and
though I lay for a long time with my eyes rolled up to the sky, I was no
longer in.
"No longer in danger of dying," as Ivan Ivanovich put it, "but in
danger of remaining an idiot for the rest of your life."
75
I was lucky. I did not remain an idiot, and after my illness I even felt
somehow more sensible than I was before. It was a fact, though the
illness had nothing to do with it.
Be that as it may, I spent all of six months in hospital. During that
time Ivan Ivanovich and I saw each other almost every other day. We
talked together about old times. It appears that he had been in exile. In
1914, for being a member of the Bolshevik Party, he had been sentenced
to penal servitude and then to exile for life. I don't know where he
served his sentence, but his place of exile was somewhere far away, by
the Barents Sea.
"I escaped from there," he said laughing, "and came running straight
to your village and nearly froze to death on the way."
That's when I learnt why he had stayed awake nights in our cottage.
He had left the black tube—the stethoscope-with me and my sister as a
keepsake. One word leading to another, I told him the story of when and
why I had run away from the Children's Home.
He heard me out attentively, and for some reason kept looking
straight in my mouth.
"Yes, wonderful," he said thoughtfully. "A rare case indeed."
I thought he meant my running away from the Home being a rare case
and was about to tell him it wasn't such a rare thing as he thought, when
he said again:
"Not deaf and dumb, but dumb without being deaf. Stummheit ohne
Taubheir. To think that he couldn't say 'Mummy'! And now, a regular
orator!"
And he began telling the other doctors about me.
I was a bit disappointed that the doctor had not said a word about the
affair that had made me leave the Home, and if anything, had seemed to
let it drift past his ears. But I was mistaken, for one fine day the door of
our ward opened and the nurse said: "A visitor for Grigoriev."
And in came Korablev.
"Hullo, Sanya!"
"Hullo, Ivan Pavlovich!"
The whole ward stared at us with curiosity.
Perhaps that was why he started by only talking about my illness. But
when all had switched their attention back to their own affairs, he began
to scold me. And a good piece of his mind did he give me! He told me,
word for word, exactly what I had thought about him and said it was my
duty to go to him and tell him: "Ivan Pavlovich, you're a cad" if I
thought he was one. But I had not done this, because I was a typical
individualist. He relented a bit when, completely crushed,. I asked:
"Ivan Pavlovich, what's an idividualist?"
In short, he kept going at me until visiting time was over. In taking his
leave, however, he shook my hand warmly and said he would come
again.
"When?"
"In a day or two. I'm going to have a serious talk with you."
The next visiting day Valya Zhukov came to see me and for two
blessed hours talked about his hedgehog. On leaving he reminded
himself that Korablev sent me his regards and said he would call on me
one of these days.
I twigged at once that this was going to be the serious conversation.
Very interesting! Going to give me some more of his mind, I thought.
76
The talk started with Korablev asking me what I wanted to be.
"I don't know," I said. "An artist, perhaps."
His eyebrows went up and he said:
"No good."
Truth to tell, I had never thought of what I wanted to be. In my heart
of hearts I wanted to be somebody like Vasco Nufiez de Balboa. But Ivan
Pavlovich's "no good" had been so positive that it put my back up.
"Why not?"
"For many reasons," Korablev said firmly. "For one thing because you
haven't enough character."
I was dumbfounded. It had never occurred to me that I had no
character.
"Nothing of the sort," I said sulkily. "I have a strong character."
"No you haven't. How can a man have a character when he doesn't
know what he'll be doing the next hour. If you had any character you'd
be doing better at school. But you were studying poorly."
"Ivan Pavlovich," I cried in despair, "I only had one 'unsatisfactory'
mark."
"But you could study very well if you wanted to."
He paused, waiting for me to say something, but I was silent.
"You have more imagination than intelligence."
He paused again.
"And generally, it's high time you figured out what you're going to
make of your life and what you are in this world for. Now you say, 'I
want to be an artist.' But to become that, my dear boy, you'd have to
become quite a different person."
CHAPTER TWELVE
I START THINKING
It's all very well to say you've got to become quite a different person.
But how are you to do it? I didn't agree that I had done so badly in my
studies. Only one "unsatisfactory", and in arithmetic at that, and only
because one day I had cleaned my boots and Ruzhichek had called me
out and said:
"What do you polish your boots with, Grigoriev? Bad eggs in paraffin
oil?"
I had answered him back, and from that day on he had kept giving me
"unsatisfactory" marks. Nevertheless, I felt that Korablev was right and
that I had to become quite a different person. Did I really lack
character? I'd have to check that. I must make a resolution to do
something and do it. For a start I resolved to read A Hunter's Sketches,
which I had started to read the year before and given up because I found
it very dull.
Strange! I took the book again from the hospital library, and after
some five pages I found it duller than ever. More than anything else in