The crowd was already tearing past, shouting incessantly, so Volf Karlovich didn’t manage to duck back under the cover of the university walls. The woman in the turban suddenly cried out and raised her hands theatrically, embracing one of the columns, slowly sliding down it. She was so close that Leibe could have touched her with his hand. He sensed an astringent aroma of perfume blended with the light, slightly bitter smell of sweat. The crowd and the horsemen in pursuit hurtled on, toward the kremlin, but the woman kept sinking slowly downward, leaving a long, glistening red trail on a column that had once been snow-white but was now covered in a web of cracks and speckled with shots.
The professor rushed to her and turned her face upward. He recognized her as a patient he’d recently operated on, gallbladder removal. He hurried to take her pulse, though he knew from her glassy pupils that she was dead. Have mercy, how could she be dead? What about the complex five-hour operation? The sixth cholecystectomy in his life and so successful, no complications. This woman still wanted to have children, certainly boys. And her husband wanted that. After she’d been released from the university clinic, her husband sent a ridiculously large bouquet of lilies as thanks; Leibe had to put them out on the balcony so their scent wouldn’t intoxicate the department. And now here she was herself: lying there, smelling like lilies. And dead.
Volf Karlovich pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and started rubbing the long red stain on the column. The stain didn’t wipe off, it only spread under the rough motions of his strong surgeon’s hands. People soon appeared, carried off bodies scattered on the road, and led the professor away. And he kept thinking that the woman had died, granted, and you couldn’t return her to life, but couldn’t this stain at least be wiped away?
As he approached the university the next morning, he wondered if they’d managed to wash it off. It turned out there had been other things to do. The stain gaped on the white column like an open, bleeding wound. The next day, too. And the day after.
He changed his route and started making a big detour so as to approach the university from the other side, by walking via Rybnoryadskaya Street. The stain taunted the professor, though. It was as if it crept around the column and leapt into his eyes, throwing its arms wide open for an embrace no matter how he approached the building. The stain smelled of blood and death, screaming, “I’m still here!”
Leibe attempted to convince the university steward to whitewash the column. The steward just smirked unkindly and shook his head because war isn’t the best time for repairs. Leibe went to the rector and argued that blood on the snow-white face of a cathedral of knowledge profanes the lofty idea of education. Dormidontov half-listened, nodding absentmindedly. The next day, the university’s main entrance was locked and a sign greeted professors and students: “The university is closed temporarily, until further notice.” Volf Karlovich never saw the rector himself again. And the stain remained.
Unable to bear it, one night Leibe went to the closed building with a wet rag and bucket he’d stolen from Grunya and attempted to scrub the column with soap and water. But during the time that had passed, the blood had indelibly eaten into the whitewash. The stain had faded slightly but hadn’t gone away. Utterly enraged, Volf Karlovich hurled the heavy bucket at the column in a fit of desperate powerlessness. The bucket’s sharp rim struck the column’s smooth shaft, knocking out a piece of plaster about the size of a hand and lining its white surface with a sharp-toothed lightning bolt of cracks.
It was at that moment that it appeared for the first time. It started shining gently and iridescently over the professor like a thin hemisphere the size of Grunya’s little bowl for straining tvorog. Bright, lightweight, and exceptionally comfortable-looking, it was only asking to be tried on like a hat. Intrigued, Leibe was not against that. When he permitted himself to extend his neck ever so slightly, the egg sensed that, neared, and lowered itself on the top of his head. A soft warmth spilled from his crown down to his cheeks, chin, and the back of his head, then further, along his neck and over his chest and his legs. And then everything suddenly began to feel piercingly calm and bright for the professor, as if he’d returned to his mother’s womb. As if there weren’t a war, either next to him on the street, in his country, or anywhere else in the world. There was no fear. There wasn’t even sorrow.
The egg was almost transparent, with a touch of light iridescence. Through its shining walls, which reached to chin level, Leibe saw the square in front of the university gleaming with cleanliness under golden sunbeams, leisurely students smiling deferentially at him, and absolutely smooth columns glimmering with unsullied whitewash. There was no bloodstain.
“Mein Gott,” Volf Karlovich whispered from gratitude, and headed home, cautiously carrying the egg on his head.
The egg nearly blew away a couple of times but little by little the professor learned to control it. Each time a gust of wind swooped in, Leibe applied his will and the egg remained on the top of his head by reading his thoughts and obeying his wishes.
It turned out that the egg was extraordinarily intelligent. It let in sounds and images that were pleasant for the professor and tightly blocked everything that might cause him even the slightest anxiety. So life all of a sudden became good.
“You’re in a cheery mood,” panted Grunya as she polished the floors in the hallway with thick wax from her old prerevolutionary supplies.
“It’s spring!” The professor smiled significantly and flirtatiously, holding back from swatting her haunch, which was hoisted up steeply. He had never permitted himself this sort of thing with the servants but now his blood was suddenly racing.
“They knifed another three at the lake, you hear about that? Gracious Lord, all is at Your will,” said Grunya, crossing herself without raising her flushed face, as she focused on floorboards that gleamed with a heavy, oily sheen.
“Yes, yes, a wonderful day,” muttered Leibe, retiring to his office.
Neighbors who’d gone mad from fear, incessant rallies on the streets, endless detachments of servicemen in the city, gunfights, nighttime fires, more frequent murders at Black Lake, Red Guardsmen and Czechs in the White Army giving ground to one another multiple times in the city, riffraff and poverty spilling out of every crevice, and frenzied profiteers who’d occupied the Tatar capital – all this had ceased frightening or annoying Leibe. Because he didn’t see them.
The professor wasn’t perturbed in the slightest when, under a decree from the Council of People’s Commissars that was approved in August 1918 “On the rights of acceptance to institutions of higher learning,” it wasn’t impertinent and haughty students in dandyish green uniform jackets who surged to the university (which was finally re-opened) but rather peasants and workers of both genders who were young and not very young. Most of them had no elementary or secondary education and were, simply put, illiterate. Leibe walked into a lecture hall stuffed full of newly minted students who were loudly blowing their noses and scratching themselves. He shoved his way to the front, stepping on people’s boots, bast shoes, bare feet, baskets of food, bundles, and peaked caps. He stood at the blackboard, smiled meekly, and began speaking of the cyclical changes of the endometrium of the human uterus.
Leibe didn’t raise an eyebrow when a new method of assessment was established in place of traditional individual exams (which the Red student body weren’t unaccustomed to). He obligingly received the confused and blushing representative of a student group who held out a heap of examination papers and mumbled an unintelligible answer to each question, confusing “adenosis” and “atheism,” sincerely attributing “hirsutism” to a little-known offshoot of Christianity, and, with spirited indignation, pushing “menarche” into the same family of words as “monarchy,” something contrary to the representative’s proletarian consciousness. Each time, the professor would nod approval and mark a grade of “satisfactory” in all the exam papers. This “rotational method” assumed one test taker and one collective grade for all.