Four hours. I stirred myself, felt for my watch and extracted my matches. Why did I bother? It was useless; not one match would light. I struck them, they sparked and were instantly blown out.
‘Four hours, I tell you,’ said the driver in a funereal voice. ‘What are we going to do now?’
‘Where are we?’
The question was so stupid that the driver did not even feel obliged to reply. He turned to peer in various directions, and there were moments when I felt that he was standing still and the sleigh was swivelling round with me in it. I clambered out, to discover at once that I sank into snow up to my knees right beside the sleigh-runner. The rear horse was stuck up to its belly in a snowdrift, its mane hanging down to one side like a woman who has let down her hair.
‘Did the horses stop of their own accord?’
‘Yes. The wretched beasts are worn out.’
I suddenly remembered a short story I had read and for some reason felt a burst of resentment at Leo Tolstoy.
‘It was all right for him, living comfortably at Yasnaya Polyana,’ I thought, ‘I bet he was never called out to people who were dying …’
I felt sorry for the fireman and myself. Then came another stab of wild fear, which I suppressed.
‘Don’t be a coward,’ I muttered to myself through clenched teeth.
At once came a surge of fiery energy.
‘Look,’ I said, feeling my teeth freeze as I spoke, ‘we mustn’t let ourselves get despondent in a situation like this, or we really shall be done for. The horses have had a bit of a rest by now, and we must get on the move again. You go on ahead, get hold of the lead horse by the bridle and I’ll drive. Unless we get out of this drift we’ll be snowed up.’
Despite the utter dejection signalled by his earflaps, the driver floundered forward. Stumbling and falling, he made his way to the lead horse. Getting ourselves out of that drift seemed interminable. The figure of the driver was blotted from sight as the dry, stinging snow drove into my eyes.
‘Giddap!’ groaned the driver.
‘Giddap! Giddap!’ I shouted, slapping at the horses with the reins.
Little by little the horses dragged themselves forward, churning up the snow. The sleigh began to rock like a boat at sea. The driver seemed to shrink and then to grow again as he struggled painfully ahead.
For about a quarter of an hour we moved in this fashion, until I began at last to feel from the creak of the runners that we were on more even ground. With a surge of joy I noticed the steady flicker of the horses’ hind hooves as they broke into a trot.
‘The snow’s thinner here—we must be back on the road!’ I shouted.
‘Uh-huh,’ replied the driver. He stumbled back towards me and straightened up to his full height.
‘Seems like it’s the road,’ the fireman boomed, so excited that there was even a slight tremor in his voice. ‘As long as we don’t lose it again. Let’s hope for the best …’
We resumed our places. The horses began moving faster. The blizzard slackened and seemed to shrink. But above and all around there was still nothing but murk. I had already lost hope of reaching the hospital. I just wanted to arrive somewhere—after all, a road must lead to some kind of habitation.
Suddenly the horses gave a jerk and quickened their gait. I was delighted, not knowing the reason for it.
‘Perhaps they’ve sensed we’re near a village?’ I asked.
The driver did not reply. I stood up in the sleigh and began to peer about me. A strange sound, at once plaintive and menacing, arose somewhere in the dark but quickly died away. An uneasy feeling came over me and I was reminded of the thin whine uttered by the clerk as he had laid his head on his arms. Suddenly to my right I made out a dark blob which grew until it looked like a black cat, grew bigger still and came nearer. The fireman swung round to face me, I noticed that his jaw was quivering and he said:
‘Did you see them, doctor?’
One horse started tugging to the right, the other to the left, for a second the fireman fell back on to my knees, groaned, pulled himself upright again, leaned forward and began lashing with the reins. The horses snorted and picked up speed, kicking up lumps of snow behind them but quivering and moving unevenly.
Several times in succession a shudder went through my body. As I pulled myself up, thrust a hand under my coat and drew out my automatic I cursed myself for having left the spare magazine at home. Since I had refused to spend the night at Shalometyevo, why in hell hadn’t I had the sense to bring a torch with me? I had a mental vision of a brief report in the newspaper about myself and the unfortunate fireman.
The cat grew to the size of a dog, running a short distance away from the sleigh. I turned round and saw, even nearer to us, a second four-legged beast. I swear that it had pointed ears and was loping along behind the sleigh as easily as across a smooth parquet floor. There was something insolent and threatening about their persistence. ‘Is it a pack or are they only two?’ I wondered, and at the word ‘pack’ I felt doused in a wave of heat beneath my fur coat and even my toes ceased to feel cold.
‘Hold tight and stop for a moment, I’m going to shoot,’ I announced in a voice that I did not recognise as my own.
In reply the driver only groaned and drew his head into his shoulders. There was a flash and a deafening report, then a second and a third. After that I cannot remember how long I was tossed about on the floor of the sleigh. I could hear the wild, shrill snorting of the horses, I clutched the pistol, hit my head on something, tried to wriggle out of the hay. In mortal fear I imagined a huge, sinewy body suddenly landing on my chest. Mentally I could already see my own lacerated entrails …
At that moment the driver howled:
‘Hey—there it is … oh Lord, only a little further …’
Finally I succeeded in overcoming the embrace of the heavy sheepskin, freed my hands and pulled myself up. Behind and to either side there were no more black beasts. The snowfall was now thinner and quite tolerable, and through the thin veil flickered a gleaming eye, an entrancing eye which I would have recognised from a thousand and which I can see to this day: the light of my hospital. The dark mass of the building loomed behind it. ‘Home, sweet home …’ I thought, and suddenly in ecstasy I fired another two shots from the automatic towards where the wolves had vanished.
The fireman was standing half way up the staircase leading from the lower half of the curious two-storey layout of the doctor’s flat; I was at the top of the staircase, Aksinya at the bottom wearing a sheepskin jerkin.
‘Even if you gave me a gold medal,’ said the driver, ‘I wouldn’t make that journey again …’ He did not finish, but downed a glass of neat spirit at one gulp. Then wheezing horribly he turned to Aksinya and added, stretching his arms as wide as his build would allow: ‘Big as that, they were …’
‘Did she die? You couldn’t save her?’ Aksinya asked.
‘Yes, she died,’ I replied indifferently.
A quarter of an hour later all was silent. The light went out downstairs. I was alone upstairs. For some reason I gave a convulsive laugh, unbuttoned my shirt, then buttoned it up again, went to the bookcase and took out a manual of surgery, started to look up something about fractures of the base of the skull, threw the book aside.
When I had undressed and crept under the bedclothes, within half a minute a fit of shivering overcame me; then it stopped and warmth flooded all through my body.
‘Even if you gave me a gold medal …’ I mumbled as I began to doze. ‘I wouldn’t go again …’
‘You’ll go, you’ll go,’ said the blizzard in a mocking howl. It roared over the roof, then boomed in the chimney, flew out again, rustled past the window, vanished.
‘You’ll go, go, go, go,’ ticked the clock, but the sound was growing duller.
No more. Silence. Sleep.
THE VANISHING EYE
SO A YEAR HAS PASSED. IT IS EXACTLY A YEAR since I first drove up to this house. Then as now a veil of rain s
hrouded the windows and the last leaves drooped forlornly on the birch trees. All around, nothing seems to have changed. But I have changed a great deal. I shall celebrate the anniversary alone with my memories.
I cross the creaking floor of my bedroom and look into the mirror. Yes, the difference is enormous. A year ago this mirror, just unpacked from my trunk, reflected a shaven face. My twenty-four-year-old head was adorned with a parting. Now the parting has gone, my hair is brushed unceremoniously straight back. Who is there to impress with a neat parting anyway, when you are twenty miles from the railway line? The same has happened to my shaving: my upper lip now wears a solid growth rather like a harsh yellow toothbrush; my cheeks feel like a cheese-grater, so that if my forearm happens to start itching while I am at work I get relief by rubbing it against my cheek. It always gets like that when I shave only once a week instead of three times.
I once read somewhere—I forget where—about an Englishman who was cast away on a desert island. He was an interesting case. He was stranded on that island for so long that he suffered from hallucinations, and when a ship passed the island and a boatload of men came ashore to his rescue, he—the castaway—greeted them with a volley of revolver shots, being convinced that they were a mirage, an illusion produced by the vast, empty expanse of water. Yet he was clean shaven. He had shaved every day on a desert island. I remember the profound respect I felt for that proud son of Britannia. When I arrived here my luggage, too, contained a Gillette safety razor with a dozen blades, as well as a cut-throat razor and a shaving brush. And I finally determined to shave every other day, because this place was no better than a desert island.
But one bright April day, when I had laid out all these English treasures in the slanting, golden sunlight and had just shaved my right cheek to gleaming smoothness, in burst Yegorich, the watchman, his torn old boots clattering like a horse’s hooves, to report that a woman was giving birth in the bushes beside a stream in the nature reserve. I remember wiping my left cheek with a towel and flying out of the house with Yegorich. Three of us then ran to the stream, turbulent and swollen between fiery clumps of willow—the midwife with a pair of forceps, a roll of bandage and a bottle of iodine, myself with eyes popping out of my head, and Yegorich bringing up the rear. Every fifth pace or so he squatted down on the ground and swore as he tugged at his left boot: the sole had torn loose. The wind flew towards us, the sweet, wild wind of the Russian spring, the comb had fallen out of Pelagea Ivanovna’s hair, her knot of hair unwound itself and flapped against her shoulder.
‘Why the hell do you spend all your money on drink?’ I muttered to Yegorich as we ran. ‘It’s a disgrace. You’re a hospital watchman and you go around barefoot.’
‘What d’you expect on my pay?’ Yegorich grumbled irritably. ‘Twenty roubles a month and I’m supposed to sweat my guts out … Oh, damn the thing!’ He stamped his foot on the ground like an evil-tempered horse. ‘Can’t even keep body and soul together on the money I get, let alone buy a decent pair of boots.’
‘It all goes on drink with you,’ I panted breathlessly, ‘and that’s why you look like a tramp.’
From the little rotting bridge came a faint, pathetic cry which was carried across the rushing stream and faded away. As we ran up we saw a dishevelled woman, her face contorted into a grimace. Her headscarf had slipped off, her hair was clinging to her sweating forehead, she was rolling her eyes in pain and clawing at her sheepskin jerkin with her nails. Bright, fresh blood had stained the first thin, pale blades of grass which were just beginning to sprout on the muddy, waterlogged soil.
‘She didn’t make it in time, the poor thing,’ Pelagea Ivanovna said hurriedly as she unrolled the bandage, looking like a witch with her wild, floating hair.
And there, to the cheerful sound of roaring water as it swirled past the blackened timber supports of the bridge, Pelagea Ivanovna and I delivered a baby of the male sex. We delivered him alive and saved the mother. Then two nurses and Yegorich, his left foot bare after he had finally cast off the detested, torn sole, carried the mother back to the hospital on a stretcher.
Later, when she lay calm and pale under the bedclothes, when the baby had been put beside her in a cot and all was in order, I asked her:
‘Couldn’t you have found a better place than that bridge to have your baby, my dear? Why didn’t you come here on horseback?’
She replied:
‘My father-in-law wouldn’t give me a horse. It’s only three miles, he said, you’ll easily get there on your own. You’re a healthy woman. No point in tiring a horse for nothing …’
‘Your father-in-law’s a fool and a swine,’ I retorted.
‘Oh, what benighted people these are,’ Pelagea Ivanovna added pityingly, and then giggled at something.
I caught her look, which was fixed on my left cheek.
I went out and glanced at the mirror in the labour ward. The mirror showed what it usually showed: a warped physiognomy of clearly degenerate type with an apparently blackened left eye. But—and here the mirror was not to blame—the right cheek of this degenerate was as smooth as a dance-floor, while the left was covered by a dense, reddish growth. The chin formed the dividing line. I recalled a book in a yellow binding entitled The Penal Colony of Sakhalin, which contained photographs of various criminal types.
‘Murder, housebreaking, a bloodstained axe …’ I thought, ‘ten years’ hard … Yes, it’s a pretty weird life here on my desert island. I must go and finish shaving.’
Breathing the scent of April borne in from the dark plough-land, I listened to the rooks cawing in the tops of the birch trees, squinted in the spring sunlight and walked across the courtyard to complete my shave. That was about three o’clock in the afternoon. I finished shaving at nine o’clock that night. At Muryovo surprises like childbirth in the bushes, I have observed, never come singly. No sooner had I grasped the door handle on my porch then a horse’s muzzle appeared in the main gateway and a heavily mud-spattered cart rumbled in behind it. It was driven by a peasant woman, who shouted in a thin voice:
‘Whoa there, you devil!’
From the porch I could hear the whimpering of a little boy coming from a bundle of rags.
Of course he turned out to have a broken leg, and the feldsher and I worked for two hours setting the little boy’s leg in plaster, during which the child howled without cease. After that it was supper time, then I felt too lazy to shave and wanted to do some reading instead; after which twilight had begun to set in and the far distance grew blurred as I finished shaving, frowning miserably. But because the serrated Gillette had lain forgotten in the soapy water, it acquired a permanent little strip of rust as a memorial to that childbirth by the bridge in springtime.
There was really no point in shaving twice a week. At times we were completely snowed up, once there was an unearthly blizzard when we were imprisoned for two days in the Muryovo hospital without even sending anyone the six miles to Voznesensk to fetch newspapers; for many a long evening I paced up and down the length of my study, longing for newspapers with the same hunger that in childhood I had longed for Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. Even so, English customs were not wholly extinguished on the desert island of Muryovo, and from time to time I would take my gleaming toy out of its black case and languidly shave myself, emerging as smooth and clean as any proud member of the Island Race. It was only a pity that there was no one to admire me.
Oh yes, there was another occasion when, as I remember, I had taken out my razor and Aksinya had just brought a chipped jug of hot water into my study; at that moment there was a thunderous knocking at the door and I was called out. Pelagea Ivanovna and I set off into the terrifying distance, wrapped in sheepskin coats, and like a black phantom formed by the shape of the horses, the driver and ourselves, we struggled through the wild, white ocean. The blizzard whistled, howled, spat and screamed with laughter like a witch, everything was blotted from sight and I felt a familiar cold stab in the region of the solar plexu
s at the thought that we might lose our way in this diabolical, swirling haze and all perish: Pelagea Ivanovna, the driver, the horses and myself. I remember, too, having the idiotic notion that when we began to freeze to death and were half buried in snow, I would inject the midwife, myself and the driver with morphia … What for?… Well, to lessen the agony … ‘You will die of cold quite well enough, physician, without morphia,’ I remember the dry voice of common sense saying to me in reply, ‘so don’t bother …’ Ah-aahh! Ss-sss …! screeched the witch, as we were flung from side to side in the sleigh. Well, somewhere on the back page of a Moscow newspaper there would be a report of how Doctor So-and-So, Pelagea Ivanovna, a driver and a pair of horses had perished from the ‘rigours of the service’. Peace to their ashes, out there in the sea of snow. Dear me, what rubbish creeps into one’s head when called out on a journey in the so-called line of duty.
We did not perish, nor did we lose our way but reached the village of Grishchevo, where I set about performing the second podalic version of my career. The mother was the wife of the village schoolmaster, and while by the light of a lamp Pelagea Ivanovna and I struggled with the version, blood up to our elbows and sweat streaming into our eyes, through the plank door we could hear the husband moaning and pacing up and down in the back regions of the cottage. To the sound of his unbroken sobbing and the woman’s groans I managed, if the truth be known, to break the baby’s arm. The child was born dead. God, how the sweat ran down my back! For an instant I somehow imagined that some huge, grim, black figure would appear and burst into the cottage, saying in a stony voice: ‘Aha! Take away his degree!’
Exhausted, I gazed at the little yellow corpse and the wax-like mother lying motionless under anaesthesia. Snow-laden air streamed in through the small upper window, which we had opened for a moment to disperse the stifling reek of chloroform, and the stream of air was being transformed into a cloud of steam. Then I slammed the pane shut and turned again to stare at the helplessly dangling little arm cradled in the midwife’s embrace. I cannot describe the state of desperation in which I returned home—alone, as I had left Pelagea Ivanovna to take care of the mother. As I was rocked about on the sleigh journey through the dwindling snowstorm, the grim forest stared at me in hopeless, reproachful despair. I felt beaten, crushed, smothered by a cruel fate which had flung me into this wilderness to struggle single-handed, devoid of support or advice.