“This can’t be. How did I get to the bush in the first place?!”
The doctor remembered that he had gone around the bush to the right the first time. Moving away from the stone, he headed left. But there were no tracks leading to the bush. He spit and walked straight on. He soon ran into another bush, most unpleasantly. Its branches painfully snatched the pince-nez from his face.
“Damnation…” The pince-nez dangled from its cord; he grabbed it, went around the bush, and continued on.
Ahead was darkness, wind, and snow. There was no end to the deep snow underfoot. There was no road, nor any trace of people. He trudged through the snow a bit longer, and stopped. He could feel that his boots had filled with snow and his feet were very cold. He didn’t want to return to that damned bush. He took a deep breath and shouted at the top of his lungs:
“Kozzz-maaaa!”
The only reply was the howl of the blizzard.
He shouted again. To the right he heard something that could have been an answering shout. The doctor headed toward the voice. The snow was now so deep that he was literally climbing over it, wallowing about, backstepping, and sinking down again. Exhausted and breathless, he finally came to the sled. Motionless and covered with snow, it looked rather like a large snowdrift in the dark. A snow-dusted Crouper sat in it, shivering. He didn’t react to the doctor’s appearance.
The doctor almost collapsed from exhaustion.
“Didn’t find a damned thing…,” he exhaled, grabbing on to the sled.
“Well, I found somefin,” Crouper said, his voice barely audible.
“Where?”
“Over there…,” Crouper replied, without moving.
“Why are you sitting here?”
Crouper said nothing.
“Why are you sitting here?!” shouted the doctor.
“Just waitin’ fer ye.”
“Why aren’t you moving, you fool! Let’s go!”
But Crouper didn’t move; it was like he’d turned into a snowman. The doctor pushed his shoulder. Crouper swayed and snow fell off him in pieces.
“Let’s go!” the doctor shouted in his ear.
“Froze through, I am, yur ’onor.”
The doctor grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him; Crouper’s hat slipped down on his face.
“Let’s go!”
“Wait a bit, I’ll warm up a little…”
“What do I need to do, crack your head open? Decided to kick the bucket, have you, you idiot?”
Under the hood the roan whickered, apparently worried about his master. The other horses began to whicker as well.
“Let’s go, you dimwit! Quick now!” said the doctor, shaking the driver.
“Sir, we shud get a fire goin’, warm us up a little. And then go.”
Quite unexpectedly, this statement had a completely calming effect on the doctor. He imagined the flames of a fire and immediately realized how cold he felt after crawling around in the snow.
“The temperature has dropped…,” he thought in passing.
He softened right away, let go of Crouper, wiped his frozen nose, and turned his head:
“Where would you start a fire?”
“Right here’s where we’ll start it,” said Crouper, nodding vaguely to the side. He slid off the seat and straightened his hat. “There’s bushes here, lotta bushes. I’ll go and see what I c’n find.”
Crouper disappeared into the whirling snow before the doctor had a chance to answer.
“Where’s he going, the fool?” the doctor thought irritably, staring into the darkness; but he suddenly relaxed and felt overcome with exhaustion.
He climbed up on the seat, wrapped himself in the rug, and sat down, shivering. Everything swirled and howled around him. The doctor just wanted to sit still, without moving, or hurrying anywhere, or doing anything, even talking. His wet feet were cold. But he didn’t have the strength to take off his boots and shake out the snow.
“I have alcohol,” he remembered, but just as quickly remembered something else: “Drunks freeze more quickly. Mustn’t drink, not a drop…”
He dozed off.
He began to dream of his ex-wife, Irina: she sat with her knitting on the spacious, sun-filled porch of the dacha they had rented on the Pakhra River. He had just come from town on the three-o’clock train. It was a short day, Friday. The weekend was ahead: he’d brought her favorite strawberry cake from town, but it was too big—huge, in fact; the size of the couch. He set the cake down on the green, sun-warmed floor of the veranda, walked around it along the wall hung with living photographs, and was headed toward his wife, when he suddenly noticed that she was pregnant. Obviously in the seventh or eighth month, for that matter—her belly filled his favorite dress, the one with little blue flowers; she was knitting something quickly, and smiling at her husband.
“What’s this?!” He fell on his knees in front of her and embraced her tightly.
He cried with joy, he was so happy, so impossibly happy; he would have a son, he knew for certain that it was a boy, and his son would be there very soon; he kissed his wife’s hands, those gentle, weak, helpless hands, and they kept on knitting, knitting, knitting, not reacting to his kisses; he cried with joy, tears were streaming onto her hands, her dress, her knitting. He touched Irina’s belly, and suddenly understood that her belly … was a copper cauldron. He touched the pleasant copper surface, pressed his ear to the copper belly, and heard something gurgling inside, something beginning to hiss and burble pleasantly. The belly warmed up. He pressed his cheek to the warm belly and suddenly realized that oil was beginning to boil inside it, and that little horses would be cooking in that oil, and that when they were done, they’d be like fried partridges, and that he and his wife would set them out on Mama’s silver serving dish and feed the horses to their long-since-grown son, who, it turned out, was sleeping in the attic at that very moment, and they could hear his loud, mighty snore, which made the dacha shake and the wood planks of the veranda tremble, tremble, tremble ever so slightly.
“Look, Platosha,” said his wife, showing him her knitting.
It was a pretty, intricately knit horse blanket for a little horse.
“We’re having fifty children!” his wife said joyfully and gave a happy laugh.
The dream fell apart from a sharp blow.
Platon Ilich had trouble opening his eyelids. The snowy dark continued to swirl around him.
There was a repeat blow. Crouper was cutting chips off the rounded edges of the seat back with an axe.
The doctor began to turn around and was immediately seized by the shivers, which made their way from his feet to his head. During the short nap his immobile body had stiffened from the cold. The doctor shook so hard that his teeth chattered.
“Just a sec…,” Crouper muttered, fussing about somewhere nearby.
The doctor moaned and shook as he gradually awoke. Crouper had hollowed out the snow next to the sled and started a fire.
“Come on, yur ’onor,” he called.
Platon Ilich barely managed to slide down from the seat. He was shaking. Teeth chattering, picking up one leg and then the other with tremendous difficulty, he walked over and sat down in the snow ditch, almost in the fire. While he was sleeping, Crouper had found and chopped up a dry bush. After setting fire to the twigs and pieces of the seat back, he broke off deadwood and stuck it in the fire, covering it from the snowstorm with his own body. Gradually the fire grew to a blaze between the two squatting men. The blizzard tried to put out the flame, but Crouper wouldn’t let it.
The wood caught fire, and the doctor stretched his gloved hands into the flames. Crouper pulled off his mittens and stretched out his large, ungainly hands as well. They sat like that, immobile, silent, squinting when the smoke got in their eyes. The doctor’s gloves warmed up, his fingers got hot, painfully so. The doctor pulled the gloves off. That pain and the fire conquered the shivers. The doctor felt like himself again. He retrieved his watch and glanced at it: a quarter to eight.