Part.1
For a long time it has been noted by clever people that happiness is like health: when it is available, you do not notice it. But when the years pass - as you remember happiness, oh, as you remember!
As for me, as it turned out now, I was happy in 1917, in winter. An unforgettable, frightening, fast-paced year!
The blizzard that began took me up like a piece of a torn newspaper and moved me from a deaf section to a county town[1]. The county town is big, isn't it, county town? But if someone, like me, sat in the snow in winter, in the strict and poor forests in summer, for a year and a half, without going away for a day or a half, if someone was tearing up a parcel on a newspaper from the last week with such a heartbeat, it is as if a happy lover of blue envelope, if someone went to childbirth for eighteen miles in a goose-carried sleigh, the one, I suppose, will understand me.
The coziest thing is a kerosene lamp, but I'm for electricity!
And so I saw them again, finally, seductive electric bulbs! The main street of the town, well rolled up with peasant sleds, a street on which a sign with boots, a golden pretzel, red flags, an image of a young man with pork and arrogant eyes and a completely unnatural hairstyle, meant that behind the glass doors there is a local Basil, for thirty kopecks to shave you at any time, except for the days of festivities, which abounds with my fatherland.
I still remember Basil's napkins, the napkins that made me think of that page in the German textbook of skin diseases, which shows with convincing clarity a hard chin chin chin chin chin of a citizen.
But these napkins will not darken my memories!
A live policeman stood at the crossroads, in a dusty window one could vaguely see iron sheets with close rows of cakes with red cream, the hay paved the square, walked and rode and talked, in a booth selling yesterday's Moscow newspapers containing amazing news[2], and Moscow trains whistled nearby. In short, it was civilization, Babylon, Nevsky Prospect.
There is no need to talk about the hospital. There was a surgical department, therapeutic, infectious, obstetric. There was an operating room in the hospital, where the autoclave shone, taps were silver, tables opened their cunning paws, teeth, screws. The hospital had a senior doctor, three residents (except me), a paramedic, a midwife, a nurse, a pharmacy and a laboratory. The lab, think about it! With a Tseisovskiy microscope, a great stock of paints.
I was shudder and cold, I was pressured by impressions. Many days passed until I got used to the fact that the one-storey buildings of the hospital in the twilight of December, as if on command, lit up with electric light.
He made me up. Water raged and rattled in the bathtubs, and wooden, bathed thermometers dived and swam in them. In the infectious ward of the children's ward moaning all day, a subtle pitiful crying, a hoarse gurgle was heard...
Nurses were running, running, running...
A heavy burden slipped from my soul. I no longer bore the fatal responsibility for anything that happened in the world. I wasn't to blame for a pinched hernia, and I didn't shudder when the sled came and brought in a woman with a transverse position, I wasn't touched by purulent pleurisy that required surgery... I felt for the first time that I was a man whose responsibility was limited to a certain framework. Childbirth? - Please, out - the low body, out - the extreme window, hanging white gauze. There's an obstetrician there, cute and fat, with red mustache and baldish. This is his business. Sani, turn to the window with gauze! Complicated fracture - chief surgeon. Inflammation of the lungs? - In the therapeutic department to Pavel Vladimirovich.
Oh, a majestic car of a large hospital on the adjusted, precisely greased stroke! As a new screw by a priori taken measure, and I entered the machine and took the children's department. Both diphtheria and scarlet fever swallowed me, took my days. But only days. I began to sleep at night, because I could no longer hear the ominous knocking of the night under my windows, which could lift me up and draw me into darkness in danger and inevitability. In the evenings, I began to read (about diphtheria and scarlet fever, of course, in the first head, and then for some reason with a strange interest of Fenimore Cooper) and appreciated the lamp over the table, and gray corners on a tray of samovar, and chilling tea, and sleep after sleepless one and a half years ...
So I was happy in the 17th year of winter, having received a transfer to the county town from a deaf plot.