“Forgive my shabby appearance,” Leibe’s voice babbles. “I usually receive patients after lunch. But since you’re already here – which I am glad about, sincerely glad! – let us speak now about your, ahem, question.”
Shameful, oh God, how shameful… Ilona swallows a gob of saliva and looks up. The luminary is settling in comfortably behind a large desk, placing his arms on the desktop’s light-gray velvet.
“I am listening with the utmost attention.”
The professor’s delicate-blue eyes are kindly. A hollow on his chest, with slender ribs radiating from it like sunbeams, shows out from under his wide-open robe. Ilona looks down. A luminary is permitted a lot, even possessing oddities and receiving patients while looking this outlandish.
“Hmm?” Leibe encourages her.
“I need to have a child,” she exhales. “No matter what it takes.”
The professor takes a silver spoon from a tray that’s standing on the desk and pensively rattles it a bit in an elegant coffee cup of thin, milk-white porcelain with smoothly curving sides and a flirty little handle. The jingling comes out sounding unexpectedly muted and cheap: dzin-dzin… dzin-dzin…
“How long have you wanted this?”
“I haven’t wanted it for so long… But I could have long ago… I mean, purely theoretically… or, rather, practically, too…” Ilona is thoroughly muddled and rests her chin against the ironed ruches on her collar. “Seven years.”
“And so over the course of seven years you have had relations with men but have not once been pregnant. Is that what you wanted to say?”
Ilona sinks her head deeper into her shoulders: Yes, exactly that. The upholstery nail on the chair is puncturing her leg hard, persistently. Ilona’s afraid to fidget: what if her dress tears?
“Well, for starters, you’ll need to be examined and fill out a medical questionnaire. After that it will be clear if I can help you. Or at least attempt to help.”
“I’m ready for an examination,” Ilona whispers to the ruches on her collar.
“But I’m not ready, my dear girl!” laughs the professor. “Where do you wish for me to receive you, on this desk? Yes, I run my practice at home but my apartment is undergoing renovations now. Horrible, never-ending renovations! The dining room, living room, bedroom, library, examination room, and waiting room are all occupied by unbearable workmen who ceaselessly make noise for days on end. They impede my thought, work, and life, after all. All I can do is steal some calm hours at night, when they stop their endless bothersomeness. I’m forced to work by lamplight, in my own home. Like a mouse!” He nods at a sheet of paper lying in front of him. “Fortunately, this nightmare will end soon. Grunya promised there’s not much longer at all to wait.”
“Grunya?” Ilona simply cannot grasp what’s happening. Is the luminary refusing to help?
The nail is stuck impossibly deep in her body. It’s as if she’s threaded on a skewer.
“Grunya knows everything,” the professor says, taking his cup from the table, drawing it to his mouth, and smacking his lips in anticipation. “She’s my guardian angel, I’d be lost without her. Ask her when this bedlam will end – maybe in a week or in a month – and come then.”
Ilona looks up, completely worn out from shame and incomprehension.
“I can’t wait, professor.”
“Then” – he waves his cup in the air, dismayed – “come see me at the clinic. I receive patients there on Thursdays… or maybe Fridays… Clarify that with Grunya.”
Ilona leaps up from the chair (from the nail, really) and falls to her knees in front of the professor’s desk.
“Don’t refuse me, professor! Help me! You’re my last hope!”
“No, no,” Leibe abruptly shouts, in an unexpectedly high-pitched voice. “I don’t know anything! Grunya knows! Go see Grunya!”
“Only you can save me! You’re a genius! A luminary!”
Ilona crawls up to the table on her knees and drops her arched hands on the desktop. A light-gray swirl rises out from under her hands and it’s becoming obvious that the covering under the layer of dust has a rich green color. Dust blankets everything: the desktop, inkstand, open ink bottle with a dried pool of ink at its depths, a virginally white sheet of paper, and a pen with a broken nib that’s lying on it.
Recoiling from fear, the professor places his coffee cup in front of himself as if for protection. The cup has a wide crack and is absolutely empty.
“Forgive me, in the name of God,” says Ilona, slowly crawling away.
The sun is beating through dirty splotches on the three-paned window, filling the fluffy, curly halo around the professor’s bald spot with a vivid golden hue. He places his cup on the tray and slows his rapid breathing. Then he makes his way out from behind the desk, all the while glancing warily at Ilona from time to time, and picks up a large tin watering can. Streams of water pour from its holey spout into a large wooden tub from which there protrudes a dry, gnarled stick bristling with the debris of dried-out branches. It’s the skeleton of a long-dead tree.
“Forgive me, for God’s sake, forgive me,” Ilona whispers, standing and brushing off her dress. “Forgive me, forgive me…”
“Nice, isn’t it?” The flustered professor smiles and draws a finger with a long, broken nail along the tree’s wrinkly trunk. He leans back, admiring. His flat hands caress nonexistent leaves.
“Good day,” says Ilona, backing toward the door.
“I’ll be expecting you at the clinic.” Leibe nods in parting, not shifting his gaze from the palm tree.
The door opens a second before Ilona pushes it. Grunya’s gigantic body is in the opening, offering coat and hat. Ilona realizes she’s been eavesdropping.
“Is it true that Professor Leibe receives patients at the clinic on Thursdays?” she asks in the dark hallway.
“Volf Karlovich hasn’t left his room for ten years now,” answers Grunya.
A genius.
Volf Karlovich shakes his head. It’s embarrassing for him whenever he hears rapturous epithets like that from patients and students.
A luminary.
Come now! A little boy standing at the ocean’s shore, that’s how he perceives his relationship to science. And he’s not ashamed to admit that from a rostrum, gazing into his students’ wide-open eyes.
Only you can save me.
Alas, that’s not true, either. The patient’s body saves itself on its own. The doctor only helps, directing the body’s strengths to take the proper course, sometimes removing something extra, unnecessary, and obsolete. The doctor and patient travel the road to recovery hand in hand, but the primary part – which is always the deciding factor – is played by the patient, with his will for life and the strengths of his body. Advanced students who’ve already become familiar with the secrets of pharmaceuticals and have a couple of elementary surgical operations behind them sometimes dare argue with him about that. Sweet fledglings standing on their own two feet…
Isn’t it time to go to the university? The ecstatic damsel’s visit disrupted the routine of his usual life and Volf Karlovich feels lost and confused. What time is his first lecture today? That depends on what day of the week it is.
What day is it, anyway?