in firewood?”
“Where can I get it?”
“I’ll send you the churchwarden. He’s a firewood thief. Takes fences apart for fuel. But I warn you. You’ve got to haggle. He asks a lot. Or there’s the exterminator woman.”
They went down to the porter’s lodge, put their coats on, went out.
“Why the exterminator?” asked the doctor. “We don’t have bedbugs.”
“What have bedbugs got to do with it? I’m talking apples and you’re talking oranges. Not bedbugs, but firewood. The woman’s set it all up on a commercial footing. Buys up houses and framing for firewood. A serious supplier. Watch out, don’t stumble, it’s really dark. Once I could have gone through this neighborhood blindfolded. I knew every little stone. I was born in Prechistenka. But they started taking down the fences, and even with open eyes I don’t recognize anything, like in a foreign city. What little corners they’ve uncovered, though! Little Empire houses in the bushes, round garden tables, half-rotten benches. The other day I walked past a little vacant lot like that, at the intersection of three lanes. I see a hundred-year-old woman poking the ground with her stick. ‘God help you, granny,’ I say. ‘Digging worms for fishing?’ As a joke, of course. And she says very seriously: ‘No, dearie— champignons.’ And it’s true, the city’s getting to be the same as a forest. Smells of rotten leaves, mushrooms.”
“I know that place. It’s between Serebryany and Molchanovka, isn’t it? Unexpected things keep happening to me when I pass it. Either I meet somebody I haven’t seen for twenty years, or I find something. And they say there have been robberies at the corner. Well, no wonder. It’s a crossroads. There’s a whole network of passages to thieves’ dens that are still there around the Smolensky market. You’re robbed, stripped, and, poof, go chase the wind.”
“And the streetlights shine so weakly. It’s not for nothing they call a black eye a shiner. You’re bound to get one.”
6
Indeed, all sorts of chance things happened to the doctor at the above-mentioned place. Late in the fall, not long before the October fighting,11 on a dark, cold evening, at that corner, he ran into a man lying unconscious across the sidewalk. The man lay with his arms spread, his head leaning on a hitching post, and his legs hanging into the roadway. Every now and then he moaned weakly. In response to the loud questions of the doctor, who was trying to bring him back to consciousness, he murmured something incoherent and again passed out for a time. His head was bruised and bloody, but on cursory examination, the bones of the skull turned out to be intact. The fallen man was undoubtedly the victim of an armed robbery. “Briefcase. Briefcase,” he whispered two or three times.
Using the telephone of a pharmacy nearby on the Arbat, the doctor sent for an old cabby attached to the Krestovozdvizhensky Hospital and took the unknown man there.
The victim turned out to be a prominent politician. The doctor treated him and in his person acquired a protector for long years to come, who saved him in that time filled with suspicion and distrust from many misunderstandings.
7
It was Sunday. The doctor was free. He did not have to go to work. In their house in Sivtsev, they had already settled in three rooms for the winter, as Antonina Alexandrovna had proposed.
It was a cold, windy day with low snow clouds, dark, very dark.
They lit the stove in the morning. It began to smoke. Antonina Alexandrovna, who knew nothing about stoves, gave confused and harmful advice to Nyusha, who was struggling with the damp wood that refused to burn. The doctor, seeing it and understanding what needed to be done, tried to intervene, but his wife gently took him by the shoulders and sent him away with the words:
“Go to your room. You have a habit of butting in with your advice, when my head’s in a whirl without that and everything’s jumbled up. How can you not understand that your remarks only pour oil on the fire.”
“Oh, Tonechka, that would be excellent—oil! The stove would blaze up in an instant. The trouble is that I don’t see either oil or fire.”
“This is no time for puns. There are moments, you understand, when they simply won’t do.”
The failure with the stove ruined their Sunday plans. They had all hoped to finish the necessary tasks before dark and be free by evening, but now that was out of the question. Dinner had to be put off, as did someone’s wish to wash their hair with hot water, and other such intentions.
Soon it became so smoky that it was impossible to breathe. A strong wind blew the smoke back into the room. A cloud of black soot hung in it like a fairy-tale monster in the midst of a dense pine forest.
Yuri Andreevich drove them all to the other rooms and opened the vent window. He took half the wood out of the stove and made space among the rest for little chips and birch-bark kindling.
Fresh air burst through the vent window. The curtain swayed and billowed up. A few papers flew off the desk. The wind slammed some far-off door and, whirling in all the corners, began, like a cat after a mouse, to chase what was left of the smoke.
The wood caught fire, blazed up, and began to crackle. The little stove choked on the flames. Red-hot circles glowed on its iron body like the rosy spots on a consumptive’s cheeks. The smoke in the room thinned out and then disappeared altogether.
The room became brighter. The windows, which Yuri Andreevich had recently sealed on the prosector’s instructions, began to weep. The putty gave off a wave of warm, greasy smell. The firewood sawed into small pieces and drying around the stove also gave off a smell: of bitter, throat-chafing, tarry fir bark, and damp, fresh aspen, fragrant as toilet water.
Just then, as impetuously as the wind through the vent, Nikolai Nikolaevich burst into the room with news:
“There’s fighting in the streets. Military action is going on between the junkers who support the Provisional Government and the garrison soldiers who are for the Bolsheviks. There are skirmishes at almost every step, there’s no counting the centers of the uprising. I fell into scraps two or three times on my way here, once at the corner of Bolshaya Dmitrovka, and again by the Nikitsky Gate. There’s no direct route anymore, you have to go roundabout. Hurry, Yura! Get dressed and let’s go. You’ve got to see this. It’s history. It happens once in a lifetime.”
But he himself went on babbling for about two hours, then they sat down to dinner, and when he got ready to go home and was dragging Yuri Andreevich with him, Gordon’s arrival prevented them. He came flying in just as
