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print anything you can get hold of. And I'd advise you to start off with
Zargaryan. He's easier, more approachable. Just the fellow you want...."
I thanked him and hung up the receiver. The information wasn't beyond
Zoya's level. An anti-world, telepathy.... Should phone Galya for more
accurate information.
"Hello, this is me - the sleepwalker. Are you up already?"
"I get up at six in the morning," Galya cut me off. "I'm interested in
one little detail of your Odyssey. Why did you tell Lena you'd left your
wife?"
"I can't answer for Hyde's doings. I want to explain them. Listen hard,
Galya. What's the essence of the idea of a neutrino generator, and how is it
connected with the condensing of biological currents?"
"Nikodimov and Zargaryan?" laughed Galya.
"As you see, I found something out, at least."
"You found out rubbish, and you're talking rubbish. Nikodimov renounced
the idea of the neutrino generator long ago, that is, the way it was
formulated by Zemlicka. Now he's working on the fixation of the power field
set up by the activity of the brain ... something like a single complex of
the electro-magnetic field that arises in the brain cells. You see, I also
discovered something."
"Zargaryan is a physiologist. What's his tie-up with Nikodimov?"
"Their work is top secret. I don't know the inside story, nor if
there's any future in what they're doing," admitted Galya. "But one way or
another, it's connected with codifying the physiological neuronal state of
the brain."
"What?" I asked blankly.
"The brain," Galya stressed, "the brain, my dear. Your Hyde connected
these names with the Brain Institute, and not by chance. Though ... from
what aspect to view all this.... Perhaps, it's even a problem of pure
physics."
She was thinking hard: the membrane in the receiver carried her heavy
breathing.
"The key is here, Sergei," she concluded. "The more I think about it,
the surer I am. Find the scientists, and you'll find the key."
The scientific research over, there was still the ordinary search. We
began it with Zoya.
She answered the call at once. Yes, she knew both Zargaryan and
Nikodimov. The latter only by name: he was like a ground-hog who never came
near receptions. But she was personally acquainted with Zargaryan. Had even
danced with him at an evening social. He was very interested in dreams.
"He's interested in dreams," repeated Olga to me, putting her hand over
the mouthpiece.
"What??" I cried, and reached for the telephone. "Zoya darling. It's
me. Right you are, in person, your secret worshipper. What were you saying
just now about dreams? Who's interested? It's very important."
"I told Zargaryan about a strange dream I had," responded Zoya, "and he
was terribly interested, asked all about the details. And what details -
frightful, but utterly. And he listened, and told me I should come to him
every week and be sure to relate all my dreams. He needed it for his work.
But you know yourself, I'm no fool. I know what kind of work he meant."
"Zoya," I groaned, "beg him to give me an appointment."
"Are you mad?" cried Zoya, terrified. "He can't stand reporters."
"But you won't tell him I'm from a paper. Simply say that a man who
sees strange dreams wants to see him. And the strangest thing of all is that
these dreams are repeated, as if tape-recorded. Repeated year after year.
Zoya, try to tell him all that. If you fail, I'll try to contact him
myself."
She rang back in ten minutes.
"Just imagine, it worked. He'll see you today after nine o'clock. Don't
be late. He doesn't like it," she chattered on without a break, just as she
usually did in her office at the institute. "He was interested right away,
and immediately asked how clear the dreams were, what was the degree of
recall, and so on. I said you would tell him about the clarity yourself. I
also told him you worked with me. Don't give me away."
Zargaryan lived in the south-west of town in a new apartment building.
He opened the door himself, silently listened to my explanation, and just as
silently led the way into his office. Tall and lithe, black hair bristling
in a crew-cut, he reminded me of the hero in an Italian neo-realistic novel.
To look at, he wasn't more than thirty.
"Do you mind my asking what led you to me?" His eyes pierced right
through me. "Yes, of course, I know it was strange dreams and so on ... but
why did you particularly ask for a consultation with me?"
"When I tell you everything, the answer to that won't be necessary," I
said.
"Do you know anything about me?"
"Until last night, I'd no idea you existed."
He thought a moment and asked: "Exactly what happened last night?"
"I'm sincerely glad that we begin our talk with that," I said
decisively. "I did not come to you because I was worried by dreams, nor
because you are a Martin Zadeka as, for instance, you are regarded by Zoya
at the Institute of Information. By the way, I don't work there, I'm a
journalist."
I immediately noticed a grimace of dissatisfaction on Agrarian's face,
and continued.
"But I didn't come to you for an interview. I'm not interested in your
work. To be more exact, I wasn't interested. And I repeat once more that
until last night I had never even heard your name, but none the less I wrote
it down in my small notebook while in a state of unconsciousness. "
"What do you mean by a state of unconsciousness?" interrupted
Zargaryan.
"That's not exactly the right term. I was fully conscious, yet I
remember nothing - what I did or what I said. I simply wasn't there,
somebody else acted in my place. It was he who wrote this in my notebook."
I opened the notebook and passed it to Zargaryan. He read it and looked
at me rather strangely, peering from frowning brows.
"Why is it written twice?"
"I wrote it the second time, to compare the handwriting. As you see,
the first was not written by me, that is, it's not my handwriting. And it's
not the handwriting of a sleepwalker, or a lunatic, or of somebody with
amnesia."
"Does your wife live on Griboyedov street?"
"My wife lives with me on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. And there is no house on
Griboyedov street with that number. And the woman mentioned in the note is
not my wife, but simply an acquaintance, a school friend. Besides, she
doesn't live on Griboyedov."
Once more he read the note and pondered.
"And did you never hear of Professor Nikodimov either?"
"No more than I heard of you. Even now I only know that he's a
physicist, something like a ground-hog who is never to be found at
receptions. That detail, I'll have you note, is from the Institute of
Information."
Zargaryan smiled, and I immediately noticed that he wasn't a severe man
at all, but a good-hearted and perhaps even a gay fellow.
"Along general lines the portrait bears a certain resemblance," he
said. "Keep shooting."
And I talked. I can tell a good story, even with a dash of humour, but
he listened without any outward show of interest. However, when I reached
the place about the plurality of worlds, he raised his brows.
"Did you read that anywhere?" he asked quickly.
"I don't remember. In passing, somewhere."
"Go on, if you don't mind."
I concluded my story by reminding him of Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde.
"The queerest thing is that this mystical-phantom business explains
everything, and I can find nothing else that makes sense."
"You think that's the queerest?" he asked vaguely, once again reading
the lines in the notebook. "They refused to let us bring up this problem at
the Brain Institute, but it was raised all the same."
I looked at him blankly.
"Have you been precise in everything you have told me?" he suddenly
asked, with another piercing glance. "Two worlds like similar triangles,
right? With a Moscow in both, differing only in ornamentation. And hero and
there you and your friends. Is that it?"
"Exactly."
"There you are married to a different woman, live on a different
street, and in some way or other are connected with a Zargaryan and a
Nikodimov, of whose existence here you were completely unaware. Right?"
I nodded.
He stood up and walked around the room, as if to hide his excitement.
But I saw how wrought up he was.
"Now tell me about your dreams. I think there's a connection between
all this."
I described my dreams. This time he stared with unconcealed interest.
"That means another life, eh? A certain street, a road down to a river,
a shopping arcade. And all very clear-cut, like in a photograph?" He spoke
slowly, weighing every word, as if thinking aloud. "And you remember
everything afterwards. Clearly, including all details?"
"I even remember the mosaic on the pavement."
"And it is all uncannily familiar, even to trivial things? It seems
you've been there a hundred times and probably lived there, but in real life
there was nothing of the kind?"
"In real life, nothing of the kind," I repeated.
"What do the doctors say? You must have sought advice."
It seemed to me that he said this with a shade of cunning.
"What do the doctors say..." I spoke scornfully. "Stimulation ...
inhibition. Any fool knows that. In the daytime the cortex is in a state of
excitation, at night an inhibition process sets in. Irregular, with islands.
These islands keep working, paste together dreams from day-time impressions,
like in a cutting room." Zargaryan laughed.
"Or staging a series of attractions, like in the circus."
"But I don't believe it!" I grew angry. "The devil they are! There's no
staging about it, everything is unchangeably fixed down to minute trifles,
to the leaf on a certain tree, to the screw in a window-frame. And all this
is repeated, like showings in a cinema. Once a week I'm sure to see
something I dreamed before. Yet they still insist that you dream only of
what you've seen or experienced during your waking hours. And nothing else!"
"Even Sechenov wrote about that. He even examined the blind, and it
turned out that they dream only of what they saw when they had their sight."
"But I never saw them," I repeated stubbornly. "Not in real life, nor
in the cinema or in paintings. Nowhere! Is that clear? I never saw them!"
"But what if you did?" laughed Zargaryan.
"Where?" I cried.
He did not answer. He silently took out a cigarette, lit it, and
suddenly recollected me.
"Oh, excuse me. I didn't offer one to you. Do you smoke?"
"You haven't answered me," I said.
"I will answer you. We have ahead of us a long, interesting talk. You
can't even imagine what a find this meeting is for Nikodimov and me.
Scientists wait for years for such moments. But I'm lucky: I only waited
four years. Can you give me another couple of hours?"
"Of course," I agreed, confused and still in the dark.
A sudden change came over Zargaryan. His excited, undisguised interest
slightly embarrassed me. What was there special in what I had told him?
Perhaps Galya was right, and the key to the puzzle of all that had happened
was right here?
But Zargaryan was already telephoning somebody.
"Pavel Nikitich? It's me. Do you intend staying much longer at the
institute? Wonderful. I'm going to bring a certain person over, right away.
He's with me now. Who? You'd never guess. The one we've been dreaming about
all these years. What he's told me confirms all our ideas. And I stress
that. Everything! And even more. It's hard to take it all in - my head
spins. No, I'm not drunk, but a drink is called for. Later on. We're on our
way, so wait for us."
He hung up and turned to me.
"D'you realize what a refractor is for an astronomer? Or an electronic
microscope for a virologist? And for me, that's the kind of valuable
instrument you are. For Nikodimov and me. I'll give Zoya a royal present for
this.... After all, it was she who gave you to me. Let's go."
I was as much in the dark as before.
"I hope you're not going to give mo injections or cut me up? Will it
hurt?" I asked, sounding like a patient on his way to see a surgeon.
Zargaryan burst into laughter, as pleased as punch.
"Why should it hurt, my dear man?" ho said, adopting the accent of an
oriental trader. "You'll sit in a chair, fall asleep for half an hour or so,
look at dreams. Like in the cinema." Dropping the accent, he added: "Come,
Sergei Nikolaevich, I'll drive you to the institute."
FAUST'S LABORATORY
The institute was off the highway in an oak grove which, in the dark of
this starless night, looked to me like an enchanted wood out of a fairy
tale. The gnome-like hushes, trees with clawing branches, black tree-stumps
peering out of the grass like wild animals from across the roadside ditch -
all seemed to be luring me into a romantic yet sinister gloom. But in place
of the tumbledown hut perched on chicken-legs - the typical witch's abode in
Russian fairy tales - there rose at the end of the alley a round ten-storey
building with the occasional lighted window. Some of them blinked, flashing
in spurts as if gigantic Jupiter lights in a film studio were being switched
on and off.
"Valery Mlechin casting spells over wireless light-transmission," said
Zargaryan, catching my glance. "You think that's us up there? No. Our labs
are up under the very roof on the opposite side."
An express lift whisked us to the tenth floor, and we stepped out into
a circular corridor with a moving passage that carried us with it. It moved
softly, soundlessly, at about escalator-speed.
"It works automatically as soon as you step on it," explained
Zargaryan, "and is stopped by putting your foot on one of these frosted,
illuminated regulators."
Slightly convex milky-white transparent tiles were set every two
metres, one after another, along the plastic ribbon of the corridor. We
floated past white, sliding doors bearing large numbers. Opposite room 220,
Zargaryan stepped on the regulator.
We stopped, and the door slid open instantly revealing the entrance to
a large, brightly lit room. Zargaryan nudged me towards a chair.
"Amuse yourself for ten minutes while I talk with Nikodimov. First, it
will save you from repeating your story; second, I can put it more
professionally."
He approached the opposite wall: it slid open and immediately closed
behind him. "Photoelectric cell," I thought to myself. The equipment in this
institute answered the most up-to-date demands of scientific design for
working comfort. A description of the corridor alone would have sent Klenov
into ecstasy: it wasn't for nothing he had promised to back me 'soul and
body'.
However, except for the sliding walls, the room where I waited held
nothing very remarkable. A modern desk of clear plexiglas on nickel-plated
steel legs; an open wall safe resembling an electric oven; concealed
lighting, and a foam-rubber sofa-bed with cushions. Here you could spend the
night in comfort if you were delayed. Along one wall I saw a monstrous pile
of yellow, semi-transparent tape-ribbons along which thick, jagged lines
ran: something like those on cardiograms. The coloured plastic floor, with
its extravagant designs, made the room seem elegant, but the ascetic
book-stands and the wall diagrams, also of plastic, returned it to the realm
of the strictly serious. There was one diagram of the cortex of both
cerebral hemispheres, marked with metal arrows crowned with coded
inscriptions in Greek and Latin letters. Another that hit the eye had only a
mass of strange metallic lines flanked by a handwritten inscription:
Biocurrents of Sleeping Brain. Sheets of paper were pinned up bearing the
typed text: Length and Depth of Sleep - laboratory observations at Chicago
University.
The books on the stands were in complete disorder, piled on top of one
another, lying open on telescopic shelves. These, apparently, were in
constant use. I picked one up: it was a work by Sorokhtin on the atony of
the nerve centre. There were piles of books and brochures in foreign
languages and, it seemed to me, they all dealt with some kind of irradiation
following stimulation or inhibition. I found one book by Nikodimov, in an
English edition, whose title was The Principles of Codifying Impulses
Distributed Through the Cortex and Subcortex of the Brain. Whether I got it
right or not, I don't know, but I immediately regretted that we journalists
lacked the training necessary to at least come close to understanding the
processes taking place on the peaks of modern science.
At this moment the wall slid open, and Zargaryan called me: "You can
come in now."
The room I found myself in was the acme of laboratories, gleaming with
stainless steel and nickel plating. But I had no chance to get a good look
at it. Zargaryan was already introducing me to an elderly man with a
chestnut-coloured beard touched with silver, and hair to match worn longer
than was usual among scientists - more suitable for a professor of music.
His aquiline nose related him to the hawk, but somehow he reminded me of the
Faust I had seen during my youth in an opera staged by a company on tour
from some remote country district.
"Nikodimov," he said, smiling as he caught my roving eye. "There's no
use looking. You won't understand anything in any case, and explanations
would be lengthy. Besides, there's nothing very remarkable here - anything
of interest is in the floor beneath us: the condenser and operational
controls. And here is a screen by which we fixate the fields, in various
phases, of course. As you see, an elementary jumble of electric plugs,
switches and levers. Like something out of Mayakovsky, right?"
I cast a sidelong glance at the chair behind the screen, over which
hung a helmet resembling an astronaut's but with coloured wires attached to
it.
"He's scared," said Nikodimov, winking at Zargaryan. "What's so
terrifying about it? Surely a chair...."
"Wait," interrupted Zargaryan cheerfully. "Don't explain: let him guess
for himself. See, old fellow, it's like a barber's chair, but no mirror. Or
maybe a dentist's chair? But no drill. Where can you find such a chair? In
the theatre, the cinema? No again. Perhaps in the pilot's cabin of an
aeroplane? Then where's the joystick or wheel?"
"Looks more like an electric chair," I said.
"Naturally. An exact copy."
"And you'll put the helmet on me, too?"
"What do you think? Death in two minutes!" His eyes twinkled. "Clinical
death. Then we resurrect you."
"Don't frighten him," laughed Nikodimov, and turned to me. "You're a
journalist?"
I nodded.
"Then I beg you ... no write-ups. Everything you'll find out here is
not ripe for printing yet. Besides, the experiment might prove a failure.
You might see nothing and we'll have to write it off as a loss. Well ... but
when it is ready, the story will certainly be yours. I promise you that."
Poor Klenov. His hopes for an article vanished like a dream.
"Do your experiments have a direct relation to my story?" I dared to
ask.
"Geometrically direct," interrupted Zargaryan. "That's only Pavel
Nikodimov's cautiousness, but I tell you straight: there's no possibility of
failure. The proofs are too clear."
"Ye-es," drawled Nikodimov, thoughtfully. "Pretty good proofs. So
Stevenson's story happened to you? Is that how you explain it? Jekyll and
Hyde?"
"Of course not. I don't believe in reincarnation, or transformed
bodies."
"But even so?"
"I don't know. I'm looking for an explanation. From you."
"Wise of you."
"So there is an explanation?"
"That's right."
I jumped to my feet.
"Sit down," said Zargaryan. "No, go and sit in the chair you're so
scared of. Believe me, it's much more comfortable than Voltaire's."
To put it mildly, I was rather hesitant. That devilish chair positively
terrified me.
"All explanations only after the experiment," continued Zargaryan. "Sit
here. Come, where's your nerve gone? We won't pull any teeth."
I sank deep into the chair, as if in a feather bed. A feeling of
special lightness came over me, almost like weightlessness.
"Put out your feet," said Zargaryan. Apparently he was the one
directing the experiment.
The soles of my feet rested on rubber clamps. On my head I felt the
soundlessly lowered helmet. It gripped my forehead lightly, and was
unexpectedly comfortable, like a soft, felt hat.
"Is it too loose?"
"Yes, a bit."
"Make yourself comfortable. We shall now regulate it."
The helmet became tighter. But I felt no pressure: its supple lining
seemed to fuse with my skin. I had the feeling that an evening breeze had
stolen through the window and was pleasantly cooling my forehead and
ruffling my hair. Yet I knew the window was closed and my head was enveloped
in the helmet.
Suddenly the light went out. I was surrounded by a warm, impenetrable
darkness.
"What's up?" I asked.
"It's all right. We are isolating you from light."
How were they isolating me? With a wall, a cowling, a hood of some
kind? I touched my eyelids: the helmet did not cover my eyes. Stretching out
my hand, I could feel nothing.
"Drop your arm. Sit still. You will sleep now."
I settled more easily in the chair, relaxed my muscles. And truly, I
felt sleep coming over me, an imminent Nirvana drowning all my thoughts,
recollections, intruding words. For some reason, I remembered a four-line
stanza:
But sleep is only a shadow-creation,
An unstable dissimulation,
Illusion of live animation -
Yet not a bad prevarication.
What kind of illusory dreams would sleep bring me this time, good ones
or evil? The thought flashed and died away. There was a slight ringing in my
ears, as if a mosquito were buzzing on a very high note somewhere close by.
Now voices, very clear, reached my ears, though I could not place their
whereabouts.
"Is anything coming through?"
"There's some interference."
"And now?"
"The same."
"Try the second scale."
"Got it."
"And brightness?"
"Excellent."
"I'll turn it on full power."
The voices disappeared. I fell into a soundless, untroubled state of
non-existence, pregnant with unusual expectancy.
I half opened my eyes and blinked. Everything swirled round in a rosy
mist. The lights of the chandelier on the ceiling were arched out in a
shining parabola. I was surrounded by a circle of women all in matching
black dresses, all with matching washed-out faces. They cried out to me in
Olga's voice.
"What's the matter? Are you ill?"
I forced open my eyelids as wide as I could. The mist melted away. The
chandelier was at first tripled, then doubled, and finally became its normal
self. The women shrank into a single figure with Olga's voice and smile.
"Where are we?" I asked.
"At the reception."
"What reception?"
"Can you have forgotten? At the Hungarian Embassy's reception. At the
Metropole Hotel."
"What are we doing here?"
"Good lord, the tickets were sent to us this morning! I just managed to
get my dress from the dressmaker. You seem to have forgotten everything! "
I was certain no tickets had been sent to us that morning. Perhaps
they'd come the evening before, on my return from Nikodimov? Did this mean
I'd lost my memory again?
"But what happened to me?"
"The reception room was terribly stuffy and you suggested we go out for
some fresh air. When we got to the foyer here, you suddenly felt bad."
"Strange."
"Nothing strange about it. It was impossible to breathe in there, and
your heart isn't too good. Would you like something to drink?"
"I really don't know."
Olga seemed almost like a stranger to me in the new dress she had
mentioned. It was the first time I'd heard about it. When did she go to the
dressmaker's if I'd been home all day?
"Wait a minute, I'll go and bring you some Narzan mineral water."
She disappeared into the reception room, and I continued to look
vaguely about at the familiar foyer of the restaurant. I recognized it, but
that didn't ease my position. I couldn't at all understand when the
Hungarians had sent the tickets, arid why they'd sent them. I had no title
of honour, I wasn't an academician or a master of sport. Yet Olga accepted
it as a matter of course, as something quite usual in our way of life.
I was still standing there motionless when Olga returned with the
Narzan. I got the impression that she wanted to return to the reception.
"Have you met anyone you know?"
"All the chiefs are there," said Olga, brightening. "Fedor Ivanovich
and Raisa, even the deputy minister."
I was not acquainted with either a Fedor Ivanovich or a Raisa, let
alone a deputy minister. But I didn't want to risk admitting it, and merely
asked: "Why the deputy minister?"
"It was he who fixed it so we could all come. After all, our clinic is
attached to the ministry. He gave the tickets to Fedor, who passed some on
to Raisa. Probably there were a few extra tickets."
Olga did not work at a ministerial clinic, but at a very ordinary
district polyclinic. I knew that for a fact. Once she had actually been
invited to work at the clinic for the Ministry of Communications, but she
had refused.
"You go on back," I said. "I'll take a little stroll for a breath of
fresh air."
I went outside, stood at the entrance and lit a cigarette. The yellow
light from the street lamps was swimming in the wet asphalt pavement.
Two-decker buses, as red as those in London, splashed by me. I had never
seen such buses before. Between the upper and lower deck windows ran an
advertising strip with the painted sign:
SEE THE NEW FRENCH FILM CHILD OF MONTPARNASSE.
I'd never heard of it. What was wrong with my memory? It was full of
gaps. In the distance, to the left of the Bolshoi Theatre, a gigantic neon
oblong burned against the sky.
Flickering letters raced round it: 'Earthquake in Delhi.... Soviet
doctors flew to India.' The latest news in lights. I couldn't recall when it
was put up.
"Getting some air?"
I heard a well-known voice, turned, and saw Klenov. He had just come
out of the restaurant.
"I'm leaving," he said. "There's lots of liquor, but I don't drink.
Ulcers. I've paid my respects, and now for home."
"Between ourselves, how come you're paying respects?"
"Well, d'you see, Kemenes invited us. He's press-attache now."
Tibor Kemenes, a Russian-speaking Hungarian student, had been our guide
in Budapest. I was just out of hospital, and we had wandered for hours
around the city, so new to us. But when had Kemenes become press-attache at
their embassy in Moscow? And how was it I only found out now?
"Yes, people go up the ladder. But you and I got stuck somehow, old
fellow. We are the ones who keep the wheels turning."
"Speaking of turning the wheels, there won't be any article,
incidentally," I told him.
"What article?" asked Klenov in surprise.
"About Zargaryan and Nikodimov."
He laughed so hard, passers-by turned back to stare.
"You certainly picked an eccentric for a subject. That Nikodimov keeps
a panther on a chain at his cottage instead of a dog. And in Moscow he drops
reporters down the waste chute."
"You already told me that."
"When?"
"This morning."
Klenov gripped my shoulders and looked me in the eye.
"What have you been drinking, Tokay or palinka?"
"I've not taken a drop."
"That's easy to see. Why, Saturday night I went to my cottage at
Zhavoronki, and only returned today at five in the afternoon. You must have
been talking with me in your dreams."
Klenov waved good-bye and went off, but I stood there, deeply shaken by
his last words: 'talking with me in your dreams'. No, it was now I was
talking with him in a dream. In a dream too real to be true.
Immediately I recalled the conversation in Faust's laboratory, the
chair with the various lead-in wires. And Zargaryan's warning from the
darkness: 'Sit still. You will sleep now.' Some kind of electronic sleep
with artificially aroused dreams. It all seemed as if I were awake, only
this real life for some reason was turned upside down. Then why should I be
surprised? It was as plain as day.
I went back inside. A turbid haze of smoke hung over the tables, like
steam, mixing with the electric light. People were dancing. I searched in
vain for Olga, then entered the adjoining room. The long tables, littered
with half-demolished food and drink, were witnesses that the guests had
recently been feasting here. They had been served European buffet style, and
ate standing holding their plates, or sat on the window-sills covered with
folds of the draperies. Now only the latecomers remained, searching the
tables for drinks and snacks still untouched. Somebody, who was playing a
lone hand at the end of a large table, turned and called out to me.
"Over here, Sergei. Tuck in. Palinka, just like in Budapest."
It was Mikhail Sichuk who, according to another version I knew, had
already managed to skip the country. Perhaps in this dream he'd managed to
return. Through a hole in space or on a flying-carpet. I didn't bother my
head over it, nor did I react to the miracle. I simply poured myself a glass
of palinka from Mikhail's bottle, and drank. I was beginning to like dreams
that contained even real sensations of taste.
"To our friends and comrades," toasted Mikhail, also drinking.
"How did you get here?" I asked, diplomatically.
"The same as you. As a hero of the liberation of Hungary."
"Oh, you're a hero?"
"We're all heroes." Mikhail drained his glass and grunted. "It's
heroism to have survived such a war!"
I grew angry. "Only to be a traitor, afterwards?"
Mikhail put his glass down and pricked up his ears.
"What are you getting at?"
I realized, of course, that I wasn't being logical, that it was
senseless to accuse under the circumstances, but I got carried away.
"You went off on the Ukraine in real style. On a Soviet
excursion-voucher, you scum!"
"How did you guess?" asked Mikhail in a whisper.
"That you skipped?"
"That I wanted to travel, and went to a lot of trouble to get a
voucher...."
"If they'd known, you wouldn't have got it."
"But they didn't give it to me."
As chairman of the trade-union committee, I myself had arranged for
Mikhail's voucher. But in this dream everything was topsy-turvy. Perhaps I
had gone in his place? I had also wanted to go, but there hadn't been an
extra voucher. But what if there had been? My dream tossed me around like a
chip of wood in the ocean.
"Sit down, Sergei. Are you avoiding me?"
Somebody caught my arm as I was threading my way between the tables in
the banquet room. I looked into his face and was frozen dumb. And I was
really scared.
"Sit down, won't you? Let's drink Tokay. After all, it's the best in
Europe."
My legs gave way and I fell, rather than sat, in a chair by the table.
Sad eyes that I knew so well stared at me. The last time I'd seen them - not
both, but one - was in '44 on the Danube highway. Oleg lay on his back, his
face covered with blood trickling down from where his right eye had been a
moment earlier. Fright and grief had frozen in the other.
Now they both looked at me. A curved, reddish scar stretched from the
right eye up across the temple.
"What are you staring like that for, Sergei? Do I look so much older?"
"I was remembering forty-four. When you ... you...."
"When I what?"
"When you were killed, Oleg." He smiled. "Bullet was a bit off. Only
the scar's left. Had it hit a fraction more to the right - curtains. Neither
my eyes nor I would be here." He sighed. "Funny. I wasn't afraid then, but I
am now."
"Of what?"
"The operation. A splinter was left somewhere in my chest, memorial of
one other wound. So far I've lived with that splinter all right, but now
they say I mustn't any longer. Have to have an operation."
His familiar eyes with the long, almost feminine lashes were smiling.
The forehead angled back into the receding hairline at the temples, so that
it looked higher than before. Deep lines nestled close to the corners of his
lips. And yet there was something about this dear and familiar face that
struck me as strange. The imprint of time, perhaps. So Oleg would have
looked, if he had lived. But in this artificial world of dreams be was
alive. If Faust had created this model, then he was a god, and I was already
beginning to doubt which of the two worlds was real. A treacherous thought
struck me: what if something broke down in Faust's laboratory and I was
stuck here for good! Should I be sorry? I didn't know.
I pinched my arm hard.
"What for?" Oleg looked his surprise.
"For a minute I thought this was a dream."
Oleg laughed, and suddenly faded away into a lilac mist. That familiar
mist. It lapped up everything, and went black. Zargaryan's voice asked me
out of the dark: "Are you alive?"
"Of course, I am."
"Raise your arm. Can you move it freely?"
I moved my arm in the dark.
"Roll up your sleeve and loosen your collar."
He pressed something cold to my chest, then to my wrist.
"Don't be frightened. It's only a stethoscope. We'll check your heart.
Don't talk."
How could he see in the dark through which not one speck of light
penetrated? But he saw.
"All right," he pronounced in a satisfied voice. "Only the pulse is a
bit fast."
"Maybe we'll break off the test?" The voice of an invisible Nikodimov
came from somewhere.
"Whatever for? Sergei Nikolaevich has the nerves of an athlete. Now
we'll show him another dream."
"So it was a dream?" I asked, feeling relief.
"Who knows?" Zargaryan slyly called out of the dark. "And if not?"
I didn't have time to answer. The darkness swallowed me up like the
sea.
Out of the darkness burst a stream of light, flooding a white operating
theatre. On the table lay a prostrate body covered to the waist with a white
sheet. The dissected chest exposed to view the scarlet, bleeding inner
tissues and the pearly whiteness of ribs. The patient's eyes were closed,
his face bloodless and still. There was something familiar about the face:
it seemed I'd seen only recently those deep lines at the lips and the
curving, rosy scar on the right temple.
My hands were holding a probe buried in the open chest. I was in an
operating gown and white linen cap, my nose and mouth covered with a
surgical mask. The people opposite me were dressed as I was. I knew none of
them, but seemed to recognize the eyes of a woman standing at the patient's
head. Her eyes were riveted to my hands, and were so full of alarming
tension that it seemed as if a taut string were stretched between us. It
rang thinly the deeper the probe went into the opening.
Suddenly I remembered all that had occurred up to this moment. The
squeal of brakes from the car stopping at the entrance, the granite steps
wet with rain, the well-known vista of a street I had often dreamed about,
and then the respectful smile of the cloakroom attendant catching my coat on
the fly as I went by, the slow rise of the lift and the shining whiteness of
the operating theatre where I put on my gown and scrubbed hands and arms a
dreadfully long time. I remembered perfectly that it was I - yes, I - who
began the operation, opening the chest with a scalpel along the line of the
scar while my hands with professional, habitual skill cut, split and probed.
All this flashed into my conscious mind with the speed of sound, and
disappeared. I had forgotten everything. The habitual skill of my hands
turned into a frightened tremble and with sudden terror I realized that I
didn't know what to do next, or how to do it. Any further delay would mean
murder.
Without realizing what I did or why, I withdrew the probe from the
wound and dropped it. It gave out a hollow tinkle. In the eyes above the
muslin masks, I read one and the same question: 'What's happened?'
"I can't," I almost groaned. "I'm ill."
Walking on strangely cottony legs, I went to the door. Half turning
round, I saw somebody's back bent over the patient in my place, and a quiet
bass voice gave a command to the head nurse: "Probe!"
"Run!" my thoughts raced. So that nobody would see, so that I would see
nobody. No longer to read what I had managed to read in all those wide-open,
surprised and accusing eyes. I could not feel my legs under me. I ran like a
storm through the scrubbing surgery and into the hallway between two
right-angled corridors, flinging myself down on white, shining enamelled
seat.
"Just now, with these very hands, I killed Oleg," I told myself. I
gripped my temples with icy hands, groaned and perhaps even cried aloud.
"What's wrong ... Sergei Nikolaevich?" I heard a frightened voice.
The man who addressed me wore an operating gown like myself, but
without the cap, revealing a bald, naked skull and he asked uneasily:
"What's wrong? How did the operation go?"
"I don't know," I said.
"How's that?"
"I threw it up ... left...." I scarcely opened my mouth. "I came over
ill."
"Who's operating then? Asafyev?"
"No idea."
"That's not possible!"
"I know nothing. I don't even know who you are! Who are you, what's
your name, where am I, for heaven's sake?" I screamed.
He shuffled from foot to foot, staring at me with amazed eyes, empty of
comprehension. Then he ran to the door through which I had just stormed.
I looked after him and stood up. I tore off my gown, ripping the ties,
wiped my hands and threw the gown on the floor. The cap followed. In the
depths of the corridor stretching before me I saw a flash of white - a
doctor or nurse-in high heels that tapped on the parquetry. She disappeared
in one of the rooms. I mechanically headed in her direction, passing
identically white doors. They led into consulting rooms of doctors, whose
names were printed on cards framed in white plastic. 'Dr. Gromov, S. N.' I
read. My office. Well then, in you go!
Klenov sat by a wide Italian window behind my desk, reading a
newspaper.
"So soon?" he asked with restraint, but a restraint that rang with
alarm and fear.
I was silent.
"He's alive?"
"Why are you here?" I countered.
"You told me to wait here, yourself!" burst out Klenov. "What's
happened to Oleg?"
"I don't know."
He leaped up. "Why not?"
"I felt bad ... almost lost consciousness."
"During the operation?"
"That's right."
"Who is operating then?"
"Don't know." I tried not to look at him.
"But why are you here now? Why aren't you in the operating room at
least?" screamed Klenov.
"Because I'm not a surgeon, Klenov."
"You're mad."
He didn't push me aside, he charged me with his shoulder like a
hockey-player and ran into the corridor. And I sat inanely on a chair in the
middle of the room, couldn't even drag myself as far as my desk. "I'm not a
surgeon," I had told Klenov. Then how could I have started the operation and
conducted it to the critical moment without arousing anybody's doubts? So
that was possible in dreams. Then where did the fear come from, this near
terror of what had occurred? You see, Oleg, the operation, Klenov and I
myself were only shades in a world of dreams, and I knew it. "And if not?"
Zargaryan had asked. And if we're not!
Then the desk telephone rang, but I turned away. It went on ringing.
Finally I grew tired of it.
"Sergei, is that, you?" came a voice. "How was it?"
"Who's speaking?" I barked.
"Don't yell. As if you didn't know me."
"I don't. Who is this?"
"But it's me, Galya! Who else?"
Galya is excited, and quite rightly so, I thought. But why is she
phoning? If anyone should be waiting here, she should be. Instead of Klenov.
"Why are you silent?" she asked, surprised. "Was it a failure?"
"Look...." I faltered. "I can't tell you anything definite. I felt bad
during the operation. An assistant is finishing...."
"Asafyev?"
Again that Asafyev, I thought. How do I know whether it's him or not?
And does it matter, since this is only a dream?
"Probably," I said aloud. "I couldn't tell. They're all in masks."
"But you don't trust Asafyev. Even this morning you said he's a surgeon
for convalescents."
"When did I say that?"
"When we were having breakfast. Before the car came for you."
I knew perfectly well that I hadn't had breakfast with Galya. I had
been at home. I had no car. But why argue, if it was all a dream?
"And what happened to you?" she continued. "What do you mean ... you
felt bad?"
"Weakness. Dizziness. Loss of memory."
"And now?"
"What about now? Are you asking about Oleg?"
"No, about you!"
I even marvelled. Where did Galya get such callousness from? Oleg lying
on the operating table, and she asks what's wrong with me!
"Complete atrophy of the memory," I said angrily. "I've forgotten
everything. Where I was this morning and where I am now, who you are, who I
am, and why I'm a surgeon if one look at a scalpel makes my flesh creep."
Silence from the receiver.
"Are you listening?"
"I'll come to the hospital at once," said Galya, and hung up.
Let her come. Did it matter when, where or why? Dreams are always
illogical, yet for some reason I was able to think logically even in dreams.
The resolve to run away, ripening from the moment I left the operating room,
was finally taken. "I'll leave a note of some kind for decency's sake, and
go away," I thought.
On the top sheet of the pad lying on the desk above some papers I read
the heading: 'Professor Sergei Nikolaevich Groinov, D. Sc. (Med.)'. This
brought to mind my sheet from the notebook on which my hypothetical Mr. Hyde
had scribbled the mysterious, cluo-like inscription. It had turned out to be
the key to the puzzle. True, I hadn't yet solved the puzzle itself, but the
key was in the lock. 'And if not?' Zargaryan had answered in reply to my
query whether it was a dream. What if I were just as much of an unseen
aggressor to Prof. Sergei Gromov as my Hyde of yesterday had been to me?
Shouldn't I follow his example and leave a similar kind of clue or
explanatory note?
I was already writing on the professor's pad:
You and I are doubles, though we live in different worlds, and perhaps
even in different times. Unluckily, our 'meeting' happened during an
operation. I couldn't finish it: in my world I have a different profession.
Find the scientists in Moscow: Nikodimov and Zargaryan. They, probably, can
explain to you what happened at the hospital.
Without reading over what I had written, I went to the door, caught by
a single impulse - to go anywhere at all, so long as it was out of this
Hoffman-like devilry. Too late: the devilry was already at the door.
Before I could open it, Lena entered. She was still wearing the cap and
gown she had worn in the operating room, but no mask. I retreated a step and
asked in the trembling tone others had applied to me: "Well, how was it?"
She had scarcely aged at all since the last time I saw her after the
war: that must have been ten years ago. But I was more tightly connected
with the Lena of this dream, for our professions joined us.
"We removed the splinter," she said, barely moving her lips.
"And Oleg?"
"He'll live." After a moment's silence, she added: "You counted on
something different?"
"Lena!"
"Why did you do it?"
"Because a terrible thing happened. Loss of memory. I suddenly forgot
all I knew, everything I had learned. And even professional skills that were
part of me. I couldn't, I didn't have the right to continue the operation."
"You're lying!" Her lips were clamped together so tightly they were
white.
"I'm not."
"You're lying. Are you improvising this on the spot or did you think it
up earlier? Do you think anybody will believe your story? I shall demand a
special commission of experts."
"Go ahead," I answered with a sigh.
"I've already talked with Klenov. We'll write a letter to the papers."
Zargaryan. He's easier, more approachable. Just the fellow you want...."
I thanked him and hung up the receiver. The information wasn't beyond
Zoya's level. An anti-world, telepathy.... Should phone Galya for more
accurate information.
"Hello, this is me - the sleepwalker. Are you up already?"
"I get up at six in the morning," Galya cut me off. "I'm interested in
one little detail of your Odyssey. Why did you tell Lena you'd left your
wife?"
"I can't answer for Hyde's doings. I want to explain them. Listen hard,
Galya. What's the essence of the idea of a neutrino generator, and how is it
connected with the condensing of biological currents?"
"Nikodimov and Zargaryan?" laughed Galya.
"As you see, I found something out, at least."
"You found out rubbish, and you're talking rubbish. Nikodimov renounced
the idea of the neutrino generator long ago, that is, the way it was
formulated by Zemlicka. Now he's working on the fixation of the power field
set up by the activity of the brain ... something like a single complex of
the electro-magnetic field that arises in the brain cells. You see, I also
discovered something."
"Zargaryan is a physiologist. What's his tie-up with Nikodimov?"
"Their work is top secret. I don't know the inside story, nor if
there's any future in what they're doing," admitted Galya. "But one way or
another, it's connected with codifying the physiological neuronal state of
the brain."
"What?" I asked blankly.
"The brain," Galya stressed, "the brain, my dear. Your Hyde connected
these names with the Brain Institute, and not by chance. Though ... from
what aspect to view all this.... Perhaps, it's even a problem of pure
physics."
She was thinking hard: the membrane in the receiver carried her heavy
breathing.
"The key is here, Sergei," she concluded. "The more I think about it,
the surer I am. Find the scientists, and you'll find the key."
The scientific research over, there was still the ordinary search. We
began it with Zoya.
She answered the call at once. Yes, she knew both Zargaryan and
Nikodimov. The latter only by name: he was like a ground-hog who never came
near receptions. But she was personally acquainted with Zargaryan. Had even
danced with him at an evening social. He was very interested in dreams.
"He's interested in dreams," repeated Olga to me, putting her hand over
the mouthpiece.
"What??" I cried, and reached for the telephone. "Zoya darling. It's
me. Right you are, in person, your secret worshipper. What were you saying
just now about dreams? Who's interested? It's very important."
"I told Zargaryan about a strange dream I had," responded Zoya, "and he
was terribly interested, asked all about the details. And what details -
frightful, but utterly. And he listened, and told me I should come to him
every week and be sure to relate all my dreams. He needed it for his work.
But you know yourself, I'm no fool. I know what kind of work he meant."
"Zoya," I groaned, "beg him to give me an appointment."
"Are you mad?" cried Zoya, terrified. "He can't stand reporters."
"But you won't tell him I'm from a paper. Simply say that a man who
sees strange dreams wants to see him. And the strangest thing of all is that
these dreams are repeated, as if tape-recorded. Repeated year after year.
Zoya, try to tell him all that. If you fail, I'll try to contact him
myself."
She rang back in ten minutes.
"Just imagine, it worked. He'll see you today after nine o'clock. Don't
be late. He doesn't like it," she chattered on without a break, just as she
usually did in her office at the institute. "He was interested right away,
and immediately asked how clear the dreams were, what was the degree of
recall, and so on. I said you would tell him about the clarity yourself. I
also told him you worked with me. Don't give me away."
Zargaryan lived in the south-west of town in a new apartment building.
He opened the door himself, silently listened to my explanation, and just as
silently led the way into his office. Tall and lithe, black hair bristling
in a crew-cut, he reminded me of the hero in an Italian neo-realistic novel.
To look at, he wasn't more than thirty.
"Do you mind my asking what led you to me?" His eyes pierced right
through me. "Yes, of course, I know it was strange dreams and so on ... but
why did you particularly ask for a consultation with me?"
"When I tell you everything, the answer to that won't be necessary," I
said.
"Do you know anything about me?"
"Until last night, I'd no idea you existed."
He thought a moment and asked: "Exactly what happened last night?"
"I'm sincerely glad that we begin our talk with that," I said
decisively. "I did not come to you because I was worried by dreams, nor
because you are a Martin Zadeka as, for instance, you are regarded by Zoya
at the Institute of Information. By the way, I don't work there, I'm a
journalist."
I immediately noticed a grimace of dissatisfaction on Agrarian's face,
and continued.
"But I didn't come to you for an interview. I'm not interested in your
work. To be more exact, I wasn't interested. And I repeat once more that
until last night I had never even heard your name, but none the less I wrote
it down in my small notebook while in a state of unconsciousness. "
"What do you mean by a state of unconsciousness?" interrupted
Zargaryan.
"That's not exactly the right term. I was fully conscious, yet I
remember nothing - what I did or what I said. I simply wasn't there,
somebody else acted in my place. It was he who wrote this in my notebook."
I opened the notebook and passed it to Zargaryan. He read it and looked
at me rather strangely, peering from frowning brows.
"Why is it written twice?"
"I wrote it the second time, to compare the handwriting. As you see,
the first was not written by me, that is, it's not my handwriting. And it's
not the handwriting of a sleepwalker, or a lunatic, or of somebody with
amnesia."
"Does your wife live on Griboyedov street?"
"My wife lives with me on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. And there is no house on
Griboyedov street with that number. And the woman mentioned in the note is
not my wife, but simply an acquaintance, a school friend. Besides, she
doesn't live on Griboyedov."
Once more he read the note and pondered.
"And did you never hear of Professor Nikodimov either?"
"No more than I heard of you. Even now I only know that he's a
physicist, something like a ground-hog who is never to be found at
receptions. That detail, I'll have you note, is from the Institute of
Information."
Zargaryan smiled, and I immediately noticed that he wasn't a severe man
at all, but a good-hearted and perhaps even a gay fellow.
"Along general lines the portrait bears a certain resemblance," he
said. "Keep shooting."
And I talked. I can tell a good story, even with a dash of humour, but
he listened without any outward show of interest. However, when I reached
the place about the plurality of worlds, he raised his brows.
"Did you read that anywhere?" he asked quickly.
"I don't remember. In passing, somewhere."
"Go on, if you don't mind."
I concluded my story by reminding him of Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde.
"The queerest thing is that this mystical-phantom business explains
everything, and I can find nothing else that makes sense."
"You think that's the queerest?" he asked vaguely, once again reading
the lines in the notebook. "They refused to let us bring up this problem at
the Brain Institute, but it was raised all the same."
I looked at him blankly.
"Have you been precise in everything you have told me?" he suddenly
asked, with another piercing glance. "Two worlds like similar triangles,
right? With a Moscow in both, differing only in ornamentation. And hero and
there you and your friends. Is that it?"
"Exactly."
"There you are married to a different woman, live on a different
street, and in some way or other are connected with a Zargaryan and a
Nikodimov, of whose existence here you were completely unaware. Right?"
I nodded.
He stood up and walked around the room, as if to hide his excitement.
But I saw how wrought up he was.
"Now tell me about your dreams. I think there's a connection between
all this."
I described my dreams. This time he stared with unconcealed interest.
"That means another life, eh? A certain street, a road down to a river,
a shopping arcade. And all very clear-cut, like in a photograph?" He spoke
slowly, weighing every word, as if thinking aloud. "And you remember
everything afterwards. Clearly, including all details?"
"I even remember the mosaic on the pavement."
"And it is all uncannily familiar, even to trivial things? It seems
you've been there a hundred times and probably lived there, but in real life
there was nothing of the kind?"
"In real life, nothing of the kind," I repeated.
"What do the doctors say? You must have sought advice."
It seemed to me that he said this with a shade of cunning.
"What do the doctors say..." I spoke scornfully. "Stimulation ...
inhibition. Any fool knows that. In the daytime the cortex is in a state of
excitation, at night an inhibition process sets in. Irregular, with islands.
These islands keep working, paste together dreams from day-time impressions,
like in a cutting room." Zargaryan laughed.
"Or staging a series of attractions, like in the circus."
"But I don't believe it!" I grew angry. "The devil they are! There's no
staging about it, everything is unchangeably fixed down to minute trifles,
to the leaf on a certain tree, to the screw in a window-frame. And all this
is repeated, like showings in a cinema. Once a week I'm sure to see
something I dreamed before. Yet they still insist that you dream only of
what you've seen or experienced during your waking hours. And nothing else!"
"Even Sechenov wrote about that. He even examined the blind, and it
turned out that they dream only of what they saw when they had their sight."
"But I never saw them," I repeated stubbornly. "Not in real life, nor
in the cinema or in paintings. Nowhere! Is that clear? I never saw them!"
"But what if you did?" laughed Zargaryan.
"Where?" I cried.
He did not answer. He silently took out a cigarette, lit it, and
suddenly recollected me.
"Oh, excuse me. I didn't offer one to you. Do you smoke?"
"You haven't answered me," I said.
"I will answer you. We have ahead of us a long, interesting talk. You
can't even imagine what a find this meeting is for Nikodimov and me.
Scientists wait for years for such moments. But I'm lucky: I only waited
four years. Can you give me another couple of hours?"
"Of course," I agreed, confused and still in the dark.
A sudden change came over Zargaryan. His excited, undisguised interest
slightly embarrassed me. What was there special in what I had told him?
Perhaps Galya was right, and the key to the puzzle of all that had happened
was right here?
But Zargaryan was already telephoning somebody.
"Pavel Nikitich? It's me. Do you intend staying much longer at the
institute? Wonderful. I'm going to bring a certain person over, right away.
He's with me now. Who? You'd never guess. The one we've been dreaming about
all these years. What he's told me confirms all our ideas. And I stress
that. Everything! And even more. It's hard to take it all in - my head
spins. No, I'm not drunk, but a drink is called for. Later on. We're on our
way, so wait for us."
He hung up and turned to me.
"D'you realize what a refractor is for an astronomer? Or an electronic
microscope for a virologist? And for me, that's the kind of valuable
instrument you are. For Nikodimov and me. I'll give Zoya a royal present for
this.... After all, it was she who gave you to me. Let's go."
I was as much in the dark as before.
"I hope you're not going to give mo injections or cut me up? Will it
hurt?" I asked, sounding like a patient on his way to see a surgeon.
Zargaryan burst into laughter, as pleased as punch.
"Why should it hurt, my dear man?" ho said, adopting the accent of an
oriental trader. "You'll sit in a chair, fall asleep for half an hour or so,
look at dreams. Like in the cinema." Dropping the accent, he added: "Come,
Sergei Nikolaevich, I'll drive you to the institute."
FAUST'S LABORATORY
The institute was off the highway in an oak grove which, in the dark of
this starless night, looked to me like an enchanted wood out of a fairy
tale. The gnome-like hushes, trees with clawing branches, black tree-stumps
peering out of the grass like wild animals from across the roadside ditch -
all seemed to be luring me into a romantic yet sinister gloom. But in place
of the tumbledown hut perched on chicken-legs - the typical witch's abode in
Russian fairy tales - there rose at the end of the alley a round ten-storey
building with the occasional lighted window. Some of them blinked, flashing
in spurts as if gigantic Jupiter lights in a film studio were being switched
on and off.
"Valery Mlechin casting spells over wireless light-transmission," said
Zargaryan, catching my glance. "You think that's us up there? No. Our labs
are up under the very roof on the opposite side."
An express lift whisked us to the tenth floor, and we stepped out into
a circular corridor with a moving passage that carried us with it. It moved
softly, soundlessly, at about escalator-speed.
"It works automatically as soon as you step on it," explained
Zargaryan, "and is stopped by putting your foot on one of these frosted,
illuminated regulators."
Slightly convex milky-white transparent tiles were set every two
metres, one after another, along the plastic ribbon of the corridor. We
floated past white, sliding doors bearing large numbers. Opposite room 220,
Zargaryan stepped on the regulator.
We stopped, and the door slid open instantly revealing the entrance to
a large, brightly lit room. Zargaryan nudged me towards a chair.
"Amuse yourself for ten minutes while I talk with Nikodimov. First, it
will save you from repeating your story; second, I can put it more
professionally."
He approached the opposite wall: it slid open and immediately closed
behind him. "Photoelectric cell," I thought to myself. The equipment in this
institute answered the most up-to-date demands of scientific design for
working comfort. A description of the corridor alone would have sent Klenov
into ecstasy: it wasn't for nothing he had promised to back me 'soul and
body'.
However, except for the sliding walls, the room where I waited held
nothing very remarkable. A modern desk of clear plexiglas on nickel-plated
steel legs; an open wall safe resembling an electric oven; concealed
lighting, and a foam-rubber sofa-bed with cushions. Here you could spend the
night in comfort if you were delayed. Along one wall I saw a monstrous pile
of yellow, semi-transparent tape-ribbons along which thick, jagged lines
ran: something like those on cardiograms. The coloured plastic floor, with
its extravagant designs, made the room seem elegant, but the ascetic
book-stands and the wall diagrams, also of plastic, returned it to the realm
of the strictly serious. There was one diagram of the cortex of both
cerebral hemispheres, marked with metal arrows crowned with coded
inscriptions in Greek and Latin letters. Another that hit the eye had only a
mass of strange metallic lines flanked by a handwritten inscription:
Biocurrents of Sleeping Brain. Sheets of paper were pinned up bearing the
typed text: Length and Depth of Sleep - laboratory observations at Chicago
University.
The books on the stands were in complete disorder, piled on top of one
another, lying open on telescopic shelves. These, apparently, were in
constant use. I picked one up: it was a work by Sorokhtin on the atony of
the nerve centre. There were piles of books and brochures in foreign
languages and, it seemed to me, they all dealt with some kind of irradiation
following stimulation or inhibition. I found one book by Nikodimov, in an
English edition, whose title was The Principles of Codifying Impulses
Distributed Through the Cortex and Subcortex of the Brain. Whether I got it
right or not, I don't know, but I immediately regretted that we journalists
lacked the training necessary to at least come close to understanding the
processes taking place on the peaks of modern science.
At this moment the wall slid open, and Zargaryan called me: "You can
come in now."
The room I found myself in was the acme of laboratories, gleaming with
stainless steel and nickel plating. But I had no chance to get a good look
at it. Zargaryan was already introducing me to an elderly man with a
chestnut-coloured beard touched with silver, and hair to match worn longer
than was usual among scientists - more suitable for a professor of music.
His aquiline nose related him to the hawk, but somehow he reminded me of the
Faust I had seen during my youth in an opera staged by a company on tour
from some remote country district.
"Nikodimov," he said, smiling as he caught my roving eye. "There's no
use looking. You won't understand anything in any case, and explanations
would be lengthy. Besides, there's nothing very remarkable here - anything
of interest is in the floor beneath us: the condenser and operational
controls. And here is a screen by which we fixate the fields, in various
phases, of course. As you see, an elementary jumble of electric plugs,
switches and levers. Like something out of Mayakovsky, right?"
I cast a sidelong glance at the chair behind the screen, over which
hung a helmet resembling an astronaut's but with coloured wires attached to
it.
"He's scared," said Nikodimov, winking at Zargaryan. "What's so
terrifying about it? Surely a chair...."
"Wait," interrupted Zargaryan cheerfully. "Don't explain: let him guess
for himself. See, old fellow, it's like a barber's chair, but no mirror. Or
maybe a dentist's chair? But no drill. Where can you find such a chair? In
the theatre, the cinema? No again. Perhaps in the pilot's cabin of an
aeroplane? Then where's the joystick or wheel?"
"Looks more like an electric chair," I said.
"Naturally. An exact copy."
"And you'll put the helmet on me, too?"
"What do you think? Death in two minutes!" His eyes twinkled. "Clinical
death. Then we resurrect you."
"Don't frighten him," laughed Nikodimov, and turned to me. "You're a
journalist?"
I nodded.
"Then I beg you ... no write-ups. Everything you'll find out here is
not ripe for printing yet. Besides, the experiment might prove a failure.
You might see nothing and we'll have to write it off as a loss. Well ... but
when it is ready, the story will certainly be yours. I promise you that."
Poor Klenov. His hopes for an article vanished like a dream.
"Do your experiments have a direct relation to my story?" I dared to
ask.
"Geometrically direct," interrupted Zargaryan. "That's only Pavel
Nikodimov's cautiousness, but I tell you straight: there's no possibility of
failure. The proofs are too clear."
"Ye-es," drawled Nikodimov, thoughtfully. "Pretty good proofs. So
Stevenson's story happened to you? Is that how you explain it? Jekyll and
Hyde?"
"Of course not. I don't believe in reincarnation, or transformed
bodies."
"But even so?"
"I don't know. I'm looking for an explanation. From you."
"Wise of you."
"So there is an explanation?"
"That's right."
I jumped to my feet.
"Sit down," said Zargaryan. "No, go and sit in the chair you're so
scared of. Believe me, it's much more comfortable than Voltaire's."
To put it mildly, I was rather hesitant. That devilish chair positively
terrified me.
"All explanations only after the experiment," continued Zargaryan. "Sit
here. Come, where's your nerve gone? We won't pull any teeth."
I sank deep into the chair, as if in a feather bed. A feeling of
special lightness came over me, almost like weightlessness.
"Put out your feet," said Zargaryan. Apparently he was the one
directing the experiment.
The soles of my feet rested on rubber clamps. On my head I felt the
soundlessly lowered helmet. It gripped my forehead lightly, and was
unexpectedly comfortable, like a soft, felt hat.
"Is it too loose?"
"Yes, a bit."
"Make yourself comfortable. We shall now regulate it."
The helmet became tighter. But I felt no pressure: its supple lining
seemed to fuse with my skin. I had the feeling that an evening breeze had
stolen through the window and was pleasantly cooling my forehead and
ruffling my hair. Yet I knew the window was closed and my head was enveloped
in the helmet.
Suddenly the light went out. I was surrounded by a warm, impenetrable
darkness.
"What's up?" I asked.
"It's all right. We are isolating you from light."
How were they isolating me? With a wall, a cowling, a hood of some
kind? I touched my eyelids: the helmet did not cover my eyes. Stretching out
my hand, I could feel nothing.
"Drop your arm. Sit still. You will sleep now."
I settled more easily in the chair, relaxed my muscles. And truly, I
felt sleep coming over me, an imminent Nirvana drowning all my thoughts,
recollections, intruding words. For some reason, I remembered a four-line
stanza:
But sleep is only a shadow-creation,
An unstable dissimulation,
Illusion of live animation -
Yet not a bad prevarication.
What kind of illusory dreams would sleep bring me this time, good ones
or evil? The thought flashed and died away. There was a slight ringing in my
ears, as if a mosquito were buzzing on a very high note somewhere close by.
Now voices, very clear, reached my ears, though I could not place their
whereabouts.
"Is anything coming through?"
"There's some interference."
"And now?"
"The same."
"Try the second scale."
"Got it."
"And brightness?"
"Excellent."
"I'll turn it on full power."
The voices disappeared. I fell into a soundless, untroubled state of
non-existence, pregnant with unusual expectancy.
I half opened my eyes and blinked. Everything swirled round in a rosy
mist. The lights of the chandelier on the ceiling were arched out in a
shining parabola. I was surrounded by a circle of women all in matching
black dresses, all with matching washed-out faces. They cried out to me in
Olga's voice.
"What's the matter? Are you ill?"
I forced open my eyelids as wide as I could. The mist melted away. The
chandelier was at first tripled, then doubled, and finally became its normal
self. The women shrank into a single figure with Olga's voice and smile.
"Where are we?" I asked.
"At the reception."
"What reception?"
"Can you have forgotten? At the Hungarian Embassy's reception. At the
Metropole Hotel."
"What are we doing here?"
"Good lord, the tickets were sent to us this morning! I just managed to
get my dress from the dressmaker. You seem to have forgotten everything! "
I was certain no tickets had been sent to us that morning. Perhaps
they'd come the evening before, on my return from Nikodimov? Did this mean
I'd lost my memory again?
"But what happened to me?"
"The reception room was terribly stuffy and you suggested we go out for
some fresh air. When we got to the foyer here, you suddenly felt bad."
"Strange."
"Nothing strange about it. It was impossible to breathe in there, and
your heart isn't too good. Would you like something to drink?"
"I really don't know."
Olga seemed almost like a stranger to me in the new dress she had
mentioned. It was the first time I'd heard about it. When did she go to the
dressmaker's if I'd been home all day?
"Wait a minute, I'll go and bring you some Narzan mineral water."
She disappeared into the reception room, and I continued to look
vaguely about at the familiar foyer of the restaurant. I recognized it, but
that didn't ease my position. I couldn't at all understand when the
Hungarians had sent the tickets, arid why they'd sent them. I had no title
of honour, I wasn't an academician or a master of sport. Yet Olga accepted
it as a matter of course, as something quite usual in our way of life.
I was still standing there motionless when Olga returned with the
Narzan. I got the impression that she wanted to return to the reception.
"Have you met anyone you know?"
"All the chiefs are there," said Olga, brightening. "Fedor Ivanovich
and Raisa, even the deputy minister."
I was not acquainted with either a Fedor Ivanovich or a Raisa, let
alone a deputy minister. But I didn't want to risk admitting it, and merely
asked: "Why the deputy minister?"
"It was he who fixed it so we could all come. After all, our clinic is
attached to the ministry. He gave the tickets to Fedor, who passed some on
to Raisa. Probably there were a few extra tickets."
Olga did not work at a ministerial clinic, but at a very ordinary
district polyclinic. I knew that for a fact. Once she had actually been
invited to work at the clinic for the Ministry of Communications, but she
had refused.
"You go on back," I said. "I'll take a little stroll for a breath of
fresh air."
I went outside, stood at the entrance and lit a cigarette. The yellow
light from the street lamps was swimming in the wet asphalt pavement.
Two-decker buses, as red as those in London, splashed by me. I had never
seen such buses before. Between the upper and lower deck windows ran an
advertising strip with the painted sign:
SEE THE NEW FRENCH FILM CHILD OF MONTPARNASSE.
I'd never heard of it. What was wrong with my memory? It was full of
gaps. In the distance, to the left of the Bolshoi Theatre, a gigantic neon
oblong burned against the sky.
Flickering letters raced round it: 'Earthquake in Delhi.... Soviet
doctors flew to India.' The latest news in lights. I couldn't recall when it
was put up.
"Getting some air?"
I heard a well-known voice, turned, and saw Klenov. He had just come
out of the restaurant.
"I'm leaving," he said. "There's lots of liquor, but I don't drink.
Ulcers. I've paid my respects, and now for home."
"Between ourselves, how come you're paying respects?"
"Well, d'you see, Kemenes invited us. He's press-attache now."
Tibor Kemenes, a Russian-speaking Hungarian student, had been our guide
in Budapest. I was just out of hospital, and we had wandered for hours
around the city, so new to us. But when had Kemenes become press-attache at
their embassy in Moscow? And how was it I only found out now?
"Yes, people go up the ladder. But you and I got stuck somehow, old
fellow. We are the ones who keep the wheels turning."
"Speaking of turning the wheels, there won't be any article,
incidentally," I told him.
"What article?" asked Klenov in surprise.
"About Zargaryan and Nikodimov."
He laughed so hard, passers-by turned back to stare.
"You certainly picked an eccentric for a subject. That Nikodimov keeps
a panther on a chain at his cottage instead of a dog. And in Moscow he drops
reporters down the waste chute."
"You already told me that."
"When?"
"This morning."
Klenov gripped my shoulders and looked me in the eye.
"What have you been drinking, Tokay or palinka?"
"I've not taken a drop."
"That's easy to see. Why, Saturday night I went to my cottage at
Zhavoronki, and only returned today at five in the afternoon. You must have
been talking with me in your dreams."
Klenov waved good-bye and went off, but I stood there, deeply shaken by
his last words: 'talking with me in your dreams'. No, it was now I was
talking with him in a dream. In a dream too real to be true.
Immediately I recalled the conversation in Faust's laboratory, the
chair with the various lead-in wires. And Zargaryan's warning from the
darkness: 'Sit still. You will sleep now.' Some kind of electronic sleep
with artificially aroused dreams. It all seemed as if I were awake, only
this real life for some reason was turned upside down. Then why should I be
surprised? It was as plain as day.
I went back inside. A turbid haze of smoke hung over the tables, like
steam, mixing with the electric light. People were dancing. I searched in
vain for Olga, then entered the adjoining room. The long tables, littered
with half-demolished food and drink, were witnesses that the guests had
recently been feasting here. They had been served European buffet style, and
ate standing holding their plates, or sat on the window-sills covered with
folds of the draperies. Now only the latecomers remained, searching the
tables for drinks and snacks still untouched. Somebody, who was playing a
lone hand at the end of a large table, turned and called out to me.
"Over here, Sergei. Tuck in. Palinka, just like in Budapest."
It was Mikhail Sichuk who, according to another version I knew, had
already managed to skip the country. Perhaps in this dream he'd managed to
return. Through a hole in space or on a flying-carpet. I didn't bother my
head over it, nor did I react to the miracle. I simply poured myself a glass
of palinka from Mikhail's bottle, and drank. I was beginning to like dreams
that contained even real sensations of taste.
"To our friends and comrades," toasted Mikhail, also drinking.
"How did you get here?" I asked, diplomatically.
"The same as you. As a hero of the liberation of Hungary."
"Oh, you're a hero?"
"We're all heroes." Mikhail drained his glass and grunted. "It's
heroism to have survived such a war!"
I grew angry. "Only to be a traitor, afterwards?"
Mikhail put his glass down and pricked up his ears.
"What are you getting at?"
I realized, of course, that I wasn't being logical, that it was
senseless to accuse under the circumstances, but I got carried away.
"You went off on the Ukraine in real style. On a Soviet
excursion-voucher, you scum!"
"How did you guess?" asked Mikhail in a whisper.
"That you skipped?"
"That I wanted to travel, and went to a lot of trouble to get a
voucher...."
"If they'd known, you wouldn't have got it."
"But they didn't give it to me."
As chairman of the trade-union committee, I myself had arranged for
Mikhail's voucher. But in this dream everything was topsy-turvy. Perhaps I
had gone in his place? I had also wanted to go, but there hadn't been an
extra voucher. But what if there had been? My dream tossed me around like a
chip of wood in the ocean.
"Sit down, Sergei. Are you avoiding me?"
Somebody caught my arm as I was threading my way between the tables in
the banquet room. I looked into his face and was frozen dumb. And I was
really scared.
"Sit down, won't you? Let's drink Tokay. After all, it's the best in
Europe."
My legs gave way and I fell, rather than sat, in a chair by the table.
Sad eyes that I knew so well stared at me. The last time I'd seen them - not
both, but one - was in '44 on the Danube highway. Oleg lay on his back, his
face covered with blood trickling down from where his right eye had been a
moment earlier. Fright and grief had frozen in the other.
Now they both looked at me. A curved, reddish scar stretched from the
right eye up across the temple.
"What are you staring like that for, Sergei? Do I look so much older?"
"I was remembering forty-four. When you ... you...."
"When I what?"
"When you were killed, Oleg." He smiled. "Bullet was a bit off. Only
the scar's left. Had it hit a fraction more to the right - curtains. Neither
my eyes nor I would be here." He sighed. "Funny. I wasn't afraid then, but I
am now."
"Of what?"
"The operation. A splinter was left somewhere in my chest, memorial of
one other wound. So far I've lived with that splinter all right, but now
they say I mustn't any longer. Have to have an operation."
His familiar eyes with the long, almost feminine lashes were smiling.
The forehead angled back into the receding hairline at the temples, so that
it looked higher than before. Deep lines nestled close to the corners of his
lips. And yet there was something about this dear and familiar face that
struck me as strange. The imprint of time, perhaps. So Oleg would have
looked, if he had lived. But in this artificial world of dreams be was
alive. If Faust had created this model, then he was a god, and I was already
beginning to doubt which of the two worlds was real. A treacherous thought
struck me: what if something broke down in Faust's laboratory and I was
stuck here for good! Should I be sorry? I didn't know.
I pinched my arm hard.
"What for?" Oleg looked his surprise.
"For a minute I thought this was a dream."
Oleg laughed, and suddenly faded away into a lilac mist. That familiar
mist. It lapped up everything, and went black. Zargaryan's voice asked me
out of the dark: "Are you alive?"
"Of course, I am."
"Raise your arm. Can you move it freely?"
I moved my arm in the dark.
"Roll up your sleeve and loosen your collar."
He pressed something cold to my chest, then to my wrist.
"Don't be frightened. It's only a stethoscope. We'll check your heart.
Don't talk."
How could he see in the dark through which not one speck of light
penetrated? But he saw.
"All right," he pronounced in a satisfied voice. "Only the pulse is a
bit fast."
"Maybe we'll break off the test?" The voice of an invisible Nikodimov
came from somewhere.
"Whatever for? Sergei Nikolaevich has the nerves of an athlete. Now
we'll show him another dream."
"So it was a dream?" I asked, feeling relief.
"Who knows?" Zargaryan slyly called out of the dark. "And if not?"
I didn't have time to answer. The darkness swallowed me up like the
sea.
Out of the darkness burst a stream of light, flooding a white operating
theatre. On the table lay a prostrate body covered to the waist with a white
sheet. The dissected chest exposed to view the scarlet, bleeding inner
tissues and the pearly whiteness of ribs. The patient's eyes were closed,
his face bloodless and still. There was something familiar about the face:
it seemed I'd seen only recently those deep lines at the lips and the
curving, rosy scar on the right temple.
My hands were holding a probe buried in the open chest. I was in an
operating gown and white linen cap, my nose and mouth covered with a
surgical mask. The people opposite me were dressed as I was. I knew none of
them, but seemed to recognize the eyes of a woman standing at the patient's
head. Her eyes were riveted to my hands, and were so full of alarming
tension that it seemed as if a taut string were stretched between us. It
rang thinly the deeper the probe went into the opening.
Suddenly I remembered all that had occurred up to this moment. The
squeal of brakes from the car stopping at the entrance, the granite steps
wet with rain, the well-known vista of a street I had often dreamed about,
and then the respectful smile of the cloakroom attendant catching my coat on
the fly as I went by, the slow rise of the lift and the shining whiteness of
the operating theatre where I put on my gown and scrubbed hands and arms a
dreadfully long time. I remembered perfectly that it was I - yes, I - who
began the operation, opening the chest with a scalpel along the line of the
scar while my hands with professional, habitual skill cut, split and probed.
All this flashed into my conscious mind with the speed of sound, and
disappeared. I had forgotten everything. The habitual skill of my hands
turned into a frightened tremble and with sudden terror I realized that I
didn't know what to do next, or how to do it. Any further delay would mean
murder.
Without realizing what I did or why, I withdrew the probe from the
wound and dropped it. It gave out a hollow tinkle. In the eyes above the
muslin masks, I read one and the same question: 'What's happened?'
"I can't," I almost groaned. "I'm ill."
Walking on strangely cottony legs, I went to the door. Half turning
round, I saw somebody's back bent over the patient in my place, and a quiet
bass voice gave a command to the head nurse: "Probe!"
"Run!" my thoughts raced. So that nobody would see, so that I would see
nobody. No longer to read what I had managed to read in all those wide-open,
surprised and accusing eyes. I could not feel my legs under me. I ran like a
storm through the scrubbing surgery and into the hallway between two
right-angled corridors, flinging myself down on white, shining enamelled
seat.
"Just now, with these very hands, I killed Oleg," I told myself. I
gripped my temples with icy hands, groaned and perhaps even cried aloud.
"What's wrong ... Sergei Nikolaevich?" I heard a frightened voice.
The man who addressed me wore an operating gown like myself, but
without the cap, revealing a bald, naked skull and he asked uneasily:
"What's wrong? How did the operation go?"
"I don't know," I said.
"How's that?"
"I threw it up ... left...." I scarcely opened my mouth. "I came over
ill."
"Who's operating then? Asafyev?"
"No idea."
"That's not possible!"
"I know nothing. I don't even know who you are! Who are you, what's
your name, where am I, for heaven's sake?" I screamed.
He shuffled from foot to foot, staring at me with amazed eyes, empty of
comprehension. Then he ran to the door through which I had just stormed.
I looked after him and stood up. I tore off my gown, ripping the ties,
wiped my hands and threw the gown on the floor. The cap followed. In the
depths of the corridor stretching before me I saw a flash of white - a
doctor or nurse-in high heels that tapped on the parquetry. She disappeared
in one of the rooms. I mechanically headed in her direction, passing
identically white doors. They led into consulting rooms of doctors, whose
names were printed on cards framed in white plastic. 'Dr. Gromov, S. N.' I
read. My office. Well then, in you go!
Klenov sat by a wide Italian window behind my desk, reading a
newspaper.
"So soon?" he asked with restraint, but a restraint that rang with
alarm and fear.
I was silent.
"He's alive?"
"Why are you here?" I countered.
"You told me to wait here, yourself!" burst out Klenov. "What's
happened to Oleg?"
"I don't know."
He leaped up. "Why not?"
"I felt bad ... almost lost consciousness."
"During the operation?"
"That's right."
"Who is operating then?"
"Don't know." I tried not to look at him.
"But why are you here now? Why aren't you in the operating room at
least?" screamed Klenov.
"Because I'm not a surgeon, Klenov."
"You're mad."
He didn't push me aside, he charged me with his shoulder like a
hockey-player and ran into the corridor. And I sat inanely on a chair in the
middle of the room, couldn't even drag myself as far as my desk. "I'm not a
surgeon," I had told Klenov. Then how could I have started the operation and
conducted it to the critical moment without arousing anybody's doubts? So
that was possible in dreams. Then where did the fear come from, this near
terror of what had occurred? You see, Oleg, the operation, Klenov and I
myself were only shades in a world of dreams, and I knew it. "And if not?"
Zargaryan had asked. And if we're not!
Then the desk telephone rang, but I turned away. It went on ringing.
Finally I grew tired of it.
"Sergei, is that, you?" came a voice. "How was it?"
"Who's speaking?" I barked.
"Don't yell. As if you didn't know me."
"I don't. Who is this?"
"But it's me, Galya! Who else?"
Galya is excited, and quite rightly so, I thought. But why is she
phoning? If anyone should be waiting here, she should be. Instead of Klenov.
"Why are you silent?" she asked, surprised. "Was it a failure?"
"Look...." I faltered. "I can't tell you anything definite. I felt bad
during the operation. An assistant is finishing...."
"Asafyev?"
Again that Asafyev, I thought. How do I know whether it's him or not?
And does it matter, since this is only a dream?
"Probably," I said aloud. "I couldn't tell. They're all in masks."
"But you don't trust Asafyev. Even this morning you said he's a surgeon
for convalescents."
"When did I say that?"
"When we were having breakfast. Before the car came for you."
I knew perfectly well that I hadn't had breakfast with Galya. I had
been at home. I had no car. But why argue, if it was all a dream?
"And what happened to you?" she continued. "What do you mean ... you
felt bad?"
"Weakness. Dizziness. Loss of memory."
"And now?"
"What about now? Are you asking about Oleg?"
"No, about you!"
I even marvelled. Where did Galya get such callousness from? Oleg lying
on the operating table, and she asks what's wrong with me!
"Complete atrophy of the memory," I said angrily. "I've forgotten
everything. Where I was this morning and where I am now, who you are, who I
am, and why I'm a surgeon if one look at a scalpel makes my flesh creep."
Silence from the receiver.
"Are you listening?"
"I'll come to the hospital at once," said Galya, and hung up.
Let her come. Did it matter when, where or why? Dreams are always
illogical, yet for some reason I was able to think logically even in dreams.
The resolve to run away, ripening from the moment I left the operating room,
was finally taken. "I'll leave a note of some kind for decency's sake, and
go away," I thought.
On the top sheet of the pad lying on the desk above some papers I read
the heading: 'Professor Sergei Nikolaevich Groinov, D. Sc. (Med.)'. This
brought to mind my sheet from the notebook on which my hypothetical Mr. Hyde
had scribbled the mysterious, cluo-like inscription. It had turned out to be
the key to the puzzle. True, I hadn't yet solved the puzzle itself, but the
key was in the lock. 'And if not?' Zargaryan had answered in reply to my
query whether it was a dream. What if I were just as much of an unseen
aggressor to Prof. Sergei Gromov as my Hyde of yesterday had been to me?
Shouldn't I follow his example and leave a similar kind of clue or
explanatory note?
I was already writing on the professor's pad:
You and I are doubles, though we live in different worlds, and perhaps
even in different times. Unluckily, our 'meeting' happened during an
operation. I couldn't finish it: in my world I have a different profession.
Find the scientists in Moscow: Nikodimov and Zargaryan. They, probably, can
explain to you what happened at the hospital.
Without reading over what I had written, I went to the door, caught by
a single impulse - to go anywhere at all, so long as it was out of this
Hoffman-like devilry. Too late: the devilry was already at the door.
Before I could open it, Lena entered. She was still wearing the cap and
gown she had worn in the operating room, but no mask. I retreated a step and
asked in the trembling tone others had applied to me: "Well, how was it?"
She had scarcely aged at all since the last time I saw her after the
war: that must have been ten years ago. But I was more tightly connected
with the Lena of this dream, for our professions joined us.
"We removed the splinter," she said, barely moving her lips.
"And Oleg?"
"He'll live." After a moment's silence, she added: "You counted on
something different?"
"Lena!"
"Why did you do it?"
"Because a terrible thing happened. Loss of memory. I suddenly forgot
all I knew, everything I had learned. And even professional skills that were
part of me. I couldn't, I didn't have the right to continue the operation."
"You're lying!" Her lips were clamped together so tightly they were
white.
"I'm not."
"You're lying. Are you improvising this on the spot or did you think it
up earlier? Do you think anybody will believe your story? I shall demand a
special commission of experts."
"Go ahead," I answered with a sigh.
"I've already talked with Klenov. We'll write a letter to the papers."