"Where have I seen that man before?" I thought, wracking my brains.
Paying no attention to Maremukha and me, the professor made a long and careful examination of the patient.
Elena Lukyanovna closed the windows looking out on to Hospital Square. The glass muffled the sounds coming from the Motor Factory that had just got going again after the war. I suddenly remembered how I had once lain in this hospital after being wounded by bandits. '
How trivial my old wound now seemed in comparison with what this lad had experienced. What courage it must have needed to crouch over a captured machine-gun at that loop-hole in the Archbishop Tower, watching the road and firing until a heavy shell struck the tower and threw him down among dust and rubble at the foot of the ruined tower!
"Well, old chap," the professor said when he had finished his examination. "We're going to operate on you. There are some pieces of bone and some small shell splinters pressing on your brain. That is what's depriving you of speech. I've called up the best surgeon in Leningrad. He'll be coming to Lvov on the first plane. So I'm going to take you with me to our clinic there. When we've removed those splinters, you'll be singing songs. Agree?"
We could not see Dima, he was concealed behind the tall figure of the professor. But apparently Dima nodded to him, for the professor gave a sigh of relief.
"Splendid! I knew you were a good lad."
When we called in at the office to see Elena Lukyanovna we found the professor pacing the polished parquet floor. He had removed his gown and I noticed two rows of medal ribbons on his grey suit.
The professor swept his hand down sharply, interrupting the conversation he had started before we came in. The gesture told me where I had first met him.
"I should like to introduce you, Professor," said Elena Lukyanovna. "This comrade is an engineer from Leningrad. . ." she motioned towards me.
"But we know each other already," I said smiling. "The professor's brief case brought me a lot of luck on one occasion. . ."..'.
"Do we know each other?..." the professor asked in a puzzled voice. "What brief case are you talking about?"
"Twenty years ago, in this very town, the pupils of the factory-training school elected a delegate to go to Kharkov. The delegate had to go there and save the school from being closed down by the Ukrainian Nationalist Zenon Pecheritsa. But the trouble was that the delegate had ho brief case to keep all his papers in. So a request was made to the head of the instructors' department Panchenko, and he gave the delegate to the Central Committee his brief case... You're Panchenko, aren't you?"
"Yes, I am," said the professor. "And you... Just a minute. . . You must be Vasily Mandzhura!"
And although a friend of mine had once advised me that if I wanted to keep healthy I should always avoid all contact with doctors, I threw myselfjoyfully on the broad chest of the professor...
It was some time since the yellow aeroplane had roared away over the town and turned in the direction of Lvov, taking with it the professor and his new patient, but I still could not get over my unexpected encounter. Who would have thought that our favourite speaker and perhaps the most active of all the Komsomol members, Dmitry Panchenko, would twenty years later become a professor of medicine!
In the short time we had spent together in the office, the professor had managed to tell me quite a lot about himself. At the end of the twenties he had left his post as Regional Komsomol Secretary in a town on the Volga and with a Komsomol authority in his pocket gone to Leningrad to study at the Army Medical Academy. It had been his good fortune to see Academician Pavlov. From Pavlov personally, after a lecture, he had heard the famous words that the great physiologist afterwards included in his behest-letter to the youth of the country: "Consistency, consistency, and still more consistency!"
... As Maremukha and I walked round Zarechye, I recalled yet another incident in my life—the argument I had had long ago with engineer Andrykhevich.
From my far-off youth, on that sunny post-war day, crowded with so many chance encounters, the angry, bitter face of the old engineer floated into my mind. Even then he had been connected with spies and counter-revolutionaries of the industrial party who were waiting for the collapse of the Revolution and hoping to trick Soviet rule. And again I seemed to hear his cunning question: "Where will you get your educated people from? Going to teach yourselves, are you? 'One, two—see how she goes!' I doubt it... I doubt it very much!..."
Petka and I walked to the Old Estate where he had spent his childhood. But there, too, we found only ruins. The little house where Petka's father and mother had lived before the war was a heap of reddish rubble. Goose-foot and thistles watched over the ruins. Evidently the house had been destroyed by artillery fire in the first year of the war, when Hitler's armies, after capturing Ternopol, had advanced through our town towards Proskurov.
And the tall gates outside Yuzik's cottage had gone too. How many times had we stood by those gates yelling: "Yuzik! Yuzik! Weasel!"
At last he would appear, our stern quick-footed ataman, tapping a long stick as he walked, and we would set out for a raid on the orchards of Podzamche or to bathe near Paradise Gate. Never again would he respond to our call, our dear Yuzik...
Where their cottage had once stood a grey enemy blockhouse, quite recently built, rose from a deep clay pit. Twisted wire protruded from the concrete. The narrow horizontal embrasure of the blockhouse looked out to the East.
Evidently it had been one of the strong points built by the enemy on the Volyno-Podelian plateau.
Neither this blockhouse, nor hundreds of others like it had been able to save the Nazis!
Maremukha climbed on to the roof of the blockhouse, glanced down the ventilator that stuck out of the top like a railway engine's whistle, spat down it, and tapping his heel on the concrete, said: "Our guns have blasted out bigger things than this. Ever seen tree stumps being stubbed in the woods? That's just about what they did with these blockhouses."
Depressed by the sight of the ruins that surrounded us, we wandered in silence back to the Old Fortress through the suburb of Tatariski. It was guarded by a tall watch-tower rising on the bank of the Smotrich.
In the purple light of the sunset the Old Fortress looked particularly impressive silhouetted against the evening sky. Half way across the bridge we stopped. Resting his elbows on the oak rail, Maremukha gazed down at Zarechye. From this high point the grey blockhouse looked quite small, like the turret of a tank buried in the earth.
"I say, Vasya," Petka said suddenly. "Do you remember our neighbour, the daughter of the chief engineer at the works? You were rather interested in her at one time... She went away to Leningrad, didn't she? You didn't see anything of her there, I suppose?"
"Of course I did, Petka!" I replied, " I don't mind admitting to you frankly that after I had got to know Angelika I did everything I could to help her become a new person. In the days when she broke with her family and went away to Leningrad against their will, I helped her. When H went into the army, we wrote to each other. In her letters she suggested I should come to Leningrad when my service was over. And that's what I did. I took a job at a plant there and' settled down. We met as friends. I remember it as if it were yesterday; we went to the Philharmonic Hall together and heard Chaikovsky's Sixth Symphony.
Angelika had nearly finished at the conservatoire at that time. She married just before the war."
"Is her father still alive?"
"You know he was transferred from our place to the Agricultural Machinery Works in Rostov. She told me he had been arrested in Rostov for having contact with the industrial party, but he was released soon afterwards. He atoned for his guilt towards the country by good work. When war broke out, he was evacuated with his plant to the Urals. All through the war he worked as an engineer in the mortar shop. He's a very old man now."