The students who now accompanied him everywhere were unfailingly polite and spoke little. This modest reticence, which was moving to the point of tears, touched him more than anything, because these students were no match for their impertinent, talkative predecessors, who were ready to express their point of view on the tiniest question or enter an argument for the paltriest of reasons. Their businesslike concentration struck him, too. The students hurried along marble stairs and long corridors so energetically, even desperately, that it was as if they were ready to explode from the craving for knowledge that overflowed in them. It turned out that green student uniform jackets had been exchanged for gray jackets with horizontal patches on the chest and broad collar tabs where the students wore distinguishing badges, apparently in accordance with their course of study or achievements. Professors’ uniforms were now gray, too. Nobody, however, reproached Volf Karlovich for his dark blue uniform of the old design, which made him very grateful to the new leadership.
Leibe met the rector that day. A certain Butylkin, whose appearance was rather simple and who was overly direct in conversation but charming, you couldn’t take that away from him. Beyond that, he turned out to be quite a Germanophile, holding lengthy conversations with Leibe about German politics and economics. They became fairly close on that basis and Leibe was sincerely sorry to leave the hospitable walls of his alma mater when duty called him to head up a large military hospital.
They drove him along Voskresenskaya Street to a hospital situated right by the kremlin and the descent toward Black Lake, and the edge of his building flashed through the automobile window on the way. Leibe sighed yet again about his good fortune to have Grunya. She’d look after the apartment while he worked on matters of state importance.
During a lengthy excursion through endless hospital corridors, the quartermaster announced that the hospital entrusted to him had huge, even strategic, significance. “I ask that you not worry, gentleman officer,” Leibe assured him. “I will do everything within my power.” And he kept his promise, taking up residence right away in one of the hospital departments so as not to waste time on trips home, since he would disappear into the operating room for days at a time. He didn’t ask himself who was now fighting whom; that was of little interest to him. His concern was to operate, to pull patients from the deadly abyss and not allow life to abandon weak bodies mangled by gunshots. Volf Karlovich fought on the side of life.
Not one to bear open admiration and flattery, the professor was forced to endure the ecstatic gazes of one of the medical nurses who often watched him with a long, wide-eyed stare – he could clearly see the black pupils dilate in the depths of her green eyes. It’s possible she was in love with him. There would not have been anything unusual in that, since female assistants and nurses often fall in love with surgeons during operations. Lengthy stints alongside one another, practically forehead-to-forehead, and the maximal exertion of physical and mental energies all cause strong, uncontrollable flares of vivid emotions that a young, inexperienced heart can easily take for deep feelings among team members who operate together.
Shortly thereafter, the command decided to transport the hospital to the rear and appoint Leibe the director of the special train. Trembling with emotion and pride, he agreed. Fourteen railroad cars were entrusted to his care. Five of them held the seriously wounded, six had people with wounds of moderate and light severity, one contained an operation room and triage, and one was a pharmacy combined with a utility area. The train’s staff and guards were located in a separate car. Leibe was rarely in his own compartment, sleeping there only in fits and starts, collapsing on a mattress and dropping into a deep slumber. His work required twenty-four hours a day. He was working like the devil. He lived for his work.
The special train hurtled through blazing forests and steppes burned to the ground, and over tempestuous rivers, crossing bridges that smoked and exploded behind it. His face black with soot and his hair disheveled, Leibe raced through the railroad cars like a winged demon, giving commands, scolding negligent male nurses, offering advice to the general practitioners, and cheering up patients. He would pop into the operation room like a whirlwind, like a flash of lightning, and then the doctors would sigh with relief, the orderlies would smile, the patients would stop yelling, and the green-eyed nurse’s timid doe-like eyes would look up at him.
He’d noticed long ago that she was pregnant. The despicable little bell’s offensive ring had called him to the real world one time and, based on the nurse’s appearance, the professor’s experienced eye had picked up special signs of future motherhood that were thus far elusive for the rest. Leibe even announced this to his negligent student, Chernov, who came to visit one time, catching up with the special train to retake a medical school examination. The conversation with Chernov brought Leibe no pleasure since the professor didn’t like students whose eyes showed no readiness to give themselves over to medicine as passionately and selflessly as he himself.
One time, the special train was captured by the enemy army and the professor’s fatherly, work-weary hand blessed several dozen passengers’ escape from captivity to search for their people and deliver a message written in Leibe’s hand requesting the train’s liberation. The operation was successful and the train was soon taken back from the enemy. Leibe even spilled a solitary tear when the liberated train set off to run the rails again, headed toward danger and adventure.
This was when he noticed that during his glorious journey the egg had begun growing at a speed hitherto unprecedented. Its walls had thickened and strengthened so much that they could probably withstand a strong strike. Their transparency had taken on a much stronger iridescent tinge that slightly distorted his peripheral vision, though their luminescence had become bright and powerful. The egg already nearly touched the floor, fully covering Leibe to his toes, so it had become extremely challenging to peer out from underneath it when the little bell called. Each night before bed, the professor thought with a soulful tingle about the morning he would awaken to discover the egg’s walls had joined underneath the soles of his feet.
Meanwhile, the war was picking up speed. At the front, the heroic professor was steeped in deserved glory and then sent on a new assignment, commanding a naval flotilla in the murky yellow waters of eastern seas.
“I am not an admiral, I am merely a professor of medicine,” he said, listlessly resisting and chilled at the presentiment of grandiose assignments, which he simultaneously feared and desired. “I don’t even know how to shoot.”
“Nobody but you can handle it,” the adjutant answered confidently, narrowing his gray eyes in respect and pointing a firm hand at the shining gangway.
A gangway gleaming with a thousand scrubbed cleats soared up to a huge snow-white liner bristling with the steel muzzles of weapons. At the swing of the adjutant’s glove, a brass band of one hundred instruments festively struck up a tune on shore. A chorus of three hundred select dogs joined in with the melody, barking with such feeling and harmony that Leibe’s soul trembled. He made his decision, stepped onto the gangway, and began walking up, to the deafening applause of the crowd remaining on dry land. After climbing up to the liner, he suddenly realized that they needed to shoot from onboard the ship at those very people, the ones making the rapturous ovation.
“Hold on,” he muttered to the adjutant, who followed unceasingly at his heels, “this is happening very hastily, as if everything’s on fire.”