'Don't worry, cut away . . .'
The shirt fell away in tatters and Alexei, white-faced, naked and
yellow to the waist, blood-stained, determined to live and not to faint a second time, clenched his teeth and prodded his left shoulder with his right hand.
'Thank God . . . bone's not broken. Tear off a square or a long strip.'
'I have a bandage', she said weakly, but happily. She disappeared, returned, tearing open the wrapping of a bandage and saying: 'There's no one else here . . . I'm alone . . .'
Again she sat down beside him. Alexei saw the wound. It was a small hole in the upper arm, near the inner surface at the point where the arm lies closest to the body. A thin stream of blood was seeping out of it.
'Wound on the other side?' he asked jerkily and laconically, instinctively conserving the breath of life.
'Yes, there is', she said with horror.
'Tie the tourniquet above it . . . yes, there . . . right.'
There came a new, violent pain, green rings danced before his eyes. Alexei bit his lower lip.
She pulled from one side, he helped from the other end with his teeth and his right hand, until the burningly painful knot encircled his arm above the wound. At once the bleeding stopped.
#
The woman moved him thus: he got to his knees and put his right arm round her shoulder while she helped him to stand up on his weak, trembling legs, and led him into the next room, supporting him with her whole body. Around him in the twilight he saw deep, dark shadows in a very low, old-fashioned room. When she had sat him down on something soft and dusty, she turned aside and turned up the light in a cerise-shaded lamp. He made out a velvet fringe, part of a double-breasted frock-coat and a yellowish-gold epaulette in a frame on the wall. Stretching out her arms to Alexei and breathing heavily from excitement and exertion, she said:
'I have some brandy . . . Perhaps you should have some? . . . Brandy?'
He replied:
'Yes, right away . . .'
And collapsed on to his right elbow.
The brandy seemed to help, at least Alexei began to feel he might not die and might survive the pain which was gnawing and cutting into his shoulder. Kneeling, the woman bandaged his wounded arm, then sidled down to his feet and pulled off his felt boots. This done she brought him a pillow and a long Japanese robe that smelled faintly of a sweet, long-faded perfume and was embroidered with exotic sprays of flowers.
'Lie down', she said.
Obediently he lay down, she spread the robe over him and then a blanket, and stood beside the narrow ottoman looking in to his face.
He said:
'You . . . you're a remarkable woman.' After a silence: 'I'll lie down for a bit until I get my strength back, then I'll get up and go home . . . Just put up with me for a little longer.'
Fear and despair came over him. 'What's happened to Elena? Oh God, and Nikolka. Why did Nikolka have to die? He's dead, for sure . . .'
She pointed silently at a little window, covered by a ruched blind with pompoms. Far away he clearly heard the crack of rifle-fire.
'They'll kill you at once if you try and go now', she said.
'I wouldn't like to drag you into it. .. They may come suddenly, they'll see a revolver, blood . . . there in my greatcoat pocket . . .' He licked his dry lips. He was feeling slightly light-headed from the loss of blood and the brandy. The woman's face looked frightened, then thoughtful.
'No,' she said resolutely, 'no, if they had been going to find you they would already be here by now. This place is such a labyrinth that no one could find our tracks. We crossed through three gardens. But all the same I must clear up at once . . .'
He heard the splash of water, rustle of material, the sound of things being rearranged in closets. She returned holding his
Browning automatic by the butt with two fingers as though it werered hot and asked:
'Is it loaded?'
Pulling out his sound arm from under the blanket, Alexei tested the safety catch and said:
'It won't harm you, but only hold it by the butt.'
She came back again and said in embarrassment:
'Just in case they do come ... I shall have to take off your breeches . . . Then you can lie there and I'll say you're my husband and you're sick . . .'
Frowning and grimacing Alexei began to unbutton his breeches. She walked firmly up to the ottoman and knelt down, then put her hands under the blanket and having pulled off his breeches by the footstraps, folded them up and took them away. In the short time that she was away he noticed that the apartment was divided into two rooms by an arch. The ceilings were so low that if a grown man had stood on tiptoe he could have touched the ceiling with his hand. In the far room beyond the arch it was dark, but the varnished side of an old piano gleamed, there was something else shining and what looked like a flowering cactus. Nearby the wall was dominated by the portrait of the man in gold epaulettes.
God, the place was so full of antiques, it was like a museum! The epaulettes in the portrait fascinated him. A tallow candle in a candlestick gave a gentle light. There had once been peace and now peace was dead. Those years could not be brought back. Behind him were two small, low windows and another at his side. What was this funny little house? She lived alone. Who was she? She had saved him ... no peace . . . shooting out on the streets . . .
#
She came in, laden with a pile of firewood and dropped it noisily in the corner by the stove.
'What are you doing? Why bother?' he asked irritably.
'I had to light the stove anyway', she answered with a hint of a smile in her eyes. 'I can manage . . .'
'Come here', Alexei asked her quietly. 'Look, I haven't thanked
you for everything you've . . . done . . . And I don't know how to . . .' He stretched out his hand and took her fingers. As she obediently drew nearer he kissed her thin wrist twice. Her face softened as though a shadow of anxiety had been lifted from it and in that moment her eyes looked extraordinarily beautiful.
'If it hadn't been for you,' Alexei went on, 'I would certainly have been killed.'
'Of course,' she replied, 'of course you would . . . After all you did kill one of them.'
'I killed one of them?' he asked, feeling a new weakness as his head began to spin.
'M'hm.' She nodded approvingly and looked at Alexei with a mixture of fear and curiosity. 'Oh, it was terrible . . . they almost shot me too.' She shuddered.
'How did I kill him?'
'Well, they leaped round the corner, you began shooting and the man in front fell down . . . Perhaps you just wounded him. Anyway you were brave ... I thought I was going to faint. You were running, turned round and shot at them, then ran on again . . . What are you - a captain?'
'What made you think I was an officer? Why did you shout "officer" at me?'
Her eyes shone.
'I decided you must be an officer when I saw your badge in your fur cap. Why did you have to take such a risk by wearing your badge?'
'Badge? Oh my God, of course ... I see now ...' He remembered the shop bell ringing . . . the dusty mirror ... 'I ripped off everything else - but had to go and forget my badge! I'm not an officer,' he said, 'I'm just an army doctor. My name is Alexei Vasilievich Turbin . . . Please tell me - what is your name?'
'I am Julia Alexandrovna Reiss.'
'Why are you alone?'
Her answer was somehow strained and she looked away as she said:
'My husband's not here at the moment. He went away. And his mother too. I'm alone . . .' After a pause she added: 'It's cold in here. Brrr . . . I'll light the stove.'
#
As the logs burned up in the stove his head ached with growing violence. His wound had stopped hurting him, all the pain was concentrated in his head. It began in his left temple, then spread to the crown of his head and the back of his neck. Some
little vein under his left eyebrow tautened and radiated waves of desperate pain in all directions. Julia Reiss knelt down at the stove and raked the fire with a poker. Alternately opening and closing his eyes in pain, Alexei watched her as she turned her head aside from the heat, screening it with her pale wrist. Her hair seemed to be an indefinite color which at one moment looked ash-blond shot with flame, at the next almost gold; but her eyebrows were as coal-black as her eyes. He could not decide whether that irregular profile with its aquiline nose was beautiful or not. The look in her eyes was a riddle. There was fear, anxiety and perhaps - sensuality . . . Yes, sensuality.
As she sat there lapped in a wave of heat she was miraculously attractive. She had saved his life.
#
For hours that night, when the heat of the stove had long since died down and burned instead in his head and arm, someone was twisting a red-hot nail into the top of his head and destroying his brain. 'I've got a fever', Alexei repeated drily and soundlessly, and tried to instil into his mind that he must get up in the morning and somehow make his way home. As the nail bored into his brain it finally drove out his thoughts of Elena, of Nikolka, of home and of Petlyura. Nothing mattered. Peturra... Peturra... He could only long for one thing - for the pain to stop.
Deep in the night Julia Reiss came in wearing soft fur-trimmed slippers, and sat beside him and again, his arm weakly hooked around her neck, he passed through the two small rooms. Before this she had gathered her strength and said to him:
'Get up, if only you can. Don't pay any attention to me. I'll help you. Then lie right down . . . Well, if you can't . . .'
He replied:
'No, I'll go . . . only help me . . .'
She led him to the little door of that mysterious house and then helped him back. As he lay down, his teeth chattering from the cold, he felt some lessening and respite from his headache and said:
'I swear I won't forget what you've done. Go to bed . . .'
'Be quiet, I'll soothe your head', she replied.
Then the dull, angry pain flowed out of his head, flowed away from his temples into her soft hands, through them and through her body into the floor, covered with a dusty, fluffy carpet, and there it expired. Instead of the pain a delicious even heat spread all over his body. His arm had gone numb and felt as heavy as cast-iron, so he did not move it but merely closed his eyes and gave himself up to the fever. How long he lay there he could not have said: perhaps five minutes, perhaps hours. But he felt that he could have lain like that, bathed in heat, for ever. Whenever he opened his eyes, gently so as not to alarm the woman sitting beside him, he saw the same picture: the little lamp burning weakly but steadily under its red shade giving out a peaceful light, and the woman's unsleeping profile beside him. Her lips pouting like an unhappy child, she sat staring out of the window. Basking in the heat of fever, Alexei stirred and edged towards her . . .
'Bend over me', he said. His voice had become dry, weak and high-pitched. She turned to him, her eyes took on a frightened guarded look and the shadows around them deepened. Alexei put his right arm around her neck, pulled her to him and kissed her on the lips. It seemed to him that he was touching something sweet-tasting and cold. The woman was not surprised by what Alexei did, but only gazed more searchingly into his face. Then she said:
'God, how hot you. are. What are we going to do? We ought to call a doctor, but how are we going to do it?'
'No need', Alexei replied gently. 'I don't need a doctor. Tomorrow I'll get up and go home.'
'I'm so afraid,' she whispered, 'that you'll get worse. Then how can I help you? It's not bleeding any more, is it?' She touched his bandaged arm so lightly that he did not feel it.
'Don't worry, nothing's going to happen to me. Lie down and sleep.'
'I'm not going to leave you', she answered, caressing his hand. 'You have such a fever.'
He could not stop himself from embracing her again and drawing her to him. She did not resist. He drew her until she was leaning right over him. Then, as she lay down beside him he sensed through his own sickly heat the clear live warmth of her body.
'Lie down and don't move,' she whispered, 'and I'll soothe your head.'
She stretched out alongside him and he felt the touch of her knees. She began to smooth back his hair from his temples. He felt such pleasure that he could only think of how to prevent himself from falling asleep.
But he did fall asleep, and slept long, peacefully and well. When he awoke he felt that he was floating in a boat on a river of warmth, that all his pain had gone, and that outside the night was turning gradually paler and paler. Not only the little house but the City and the whole world were full of silence. A glassy, limpid blue light was pouring through the gaps in the blinds. The woman, warm from his body, but with her face set in a look of unhappiness, was asleep beside him. And he went to sleep again.
#
In the morning, around nine o'clock, one of the rare cab-drivers took on two passengers on the deserted Malo-Provalnaya Street -a man in a black civilian overcoat, looking very pale, and a woman. Carefully supporting the man by the arm, the woman drove him to St Alexei's Hill. There was no traffic on the hill, except for a cab outside No. 13 which had just brought a strange visitor with a trunk, a bundle and a cage.
Fourteen
That evening all the habitues of No. 13 began to converge on the house of their own accord. None of them had been cut off or driven away.
'It's him', echoed the cry in Anyuta's breast, and her heart fluttered like Lariosik's bird. There had come a cautious tap at the little snow-covered window of the Turbins' kitchen. Anyuta pressed her face to the window to make out the face. It was him, but without his moustache . . . Him . . . With both hands Anyuta smoothed down her black hair, opened the door into the porch, then from the porch into the snow-covered yard and Myshlaevsky was standing unbelievably close to her. A student's overcoat with a beaver collar and a student's peaked cap . . . his moustache was gone . . . but there was no mistaking his eyes, even in the half-darkness of the porch. The right one flecked with green sparks, like a Urals gemstone, and the left one dark and languorous . . . And he seemed to be shorter.
With a trembling hand Anyuta unfastened the latch, then the courtyard vanished and the patch of light from the open kitchen door vanished too, because Myshlaevsky's coat had enveloped Anyuta and a very familiar voice whispered:
'Hallo, Anyutochka . . . You'll catch cold ... Is there anyone in the kitchen, Anyuta?"
'No one', answered Anyuta, not knowing what she was saying, and also whispering for some reason. 'How sweet his lips have become . . .' she thought blissfully and whispered: 'Viktor Viktororich ... let me go . . . Elena . . .'
'What's Elena to do with it', whispered the voice reproachfully, a voice smelling of eau-de-cologne and tobacco. 'What's the matter with you, Anyutochka . . .'
'Let me go, I'll scream, honestly I will', said Anyuta passionately
as she embraced Myshlaevsky round the neck. 'Something terrible's happened - Alexei Vasilievich's wounded . . .'
The boa-constrictor instantly released her.
'What - wounded? And Nikolka?'
'Nikolka's safe and well, but Alexei Vasilievich has been wounded.'
The strip of light from the kitchen, then through more doors . . .
In the dining-room Elena burst into tears when she saw Myshlaevsky and said:
'Vitka, you're alive . . . Thank God . . . But we're not so lucky . . .' She sobbed and pointed to the door of Alexei's room. 'His temperature's forty . . . badly wounded . . .'
'Holy Mother', said Myshlaevsky, pushing his cap to the back of his head. 'How did he get caught?'
He turned to the figure at the table bending over a bottle and some shining metal boxes.
'Are you a doctor, may I ask?'
'No, unfortunately', answered a sad, muffled voice. 'Allow me to introduce myself: Larion Surzhansky.
'
#
The drawing-room. The door into the lobby was shut and the portiere drawn to prevent the noise and the sound of voices from reaching Alexei. Three men had just left his bedroom and driven away - one with a pointed beard and gold pince-nez, another clean shaven, young, and finally one who was gray and old and wise, wearing a heavy fur coat and a tall fur hat, a professor, Alexei's old teacher. Elena had seen them out, her face stony. She had pretended that Alexei had typhus, and now he had it.
'Apart from the wound - typhus . . .'
The column of mercury showed forty and . . . 'Julia' ... A feverish flush, silence, and in the silence mutterings about a staircase and a telephone bell ringing . . .
#
'Good day, sir', Myshlaevsky whispered maliciously in Ukrainian, straddling his legs wide. Red-faced, Shervinsky avoided his look.
His black suit fitted immaculately; an impeccable shirt and a bow tie; patent-leather boots on his feet. 'Artiste of Kramsky's Opera Studio.' There was a new identity-card in his pocket to prove it. 'Why aren't you wearing epaulettes, sir? Myshlaevsky went on. ' "The imperial Russian flag is waving on Vladimirskaya Street . . . Two divisions of Senegalese in the port of Odessa and Serbian billeting officers . . . Go to the Ukraine, gentlemen, and raise your regiments" . . . Remember all that, Shervinsky? Why, you mother- .. .'
'What's the matter with you?' asked Shervinsky. 'It's not my fault is it? What did I have to do with it? I was nearly shot myself. I was the last to leave headquarters, exactly at noon, when the enemy's troops appeared in Pechorsk.'
'You're a hero', said Myshlaevsky, 'but I hope that his excellency, the commander-in-chief managed to get away sooner. Just like his highness, the Hetman of the Ukraine . . . the son of a bitch ... I trust that he is in safety. The country needs men like him. Yes - perhaps you can tell me exactly where they are?'