Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

In the eighteen hours that had passed between Chevanin’s leaving the Tortsov household and his rounding the corner of the hospital on his way to work, those doubts had hardened into certainties. He had been rude, he told himself. Worse: he had been gauche. Although Yeliena Mihailovna had waived his apologies, the rebuke had remained in her eyes. However she had regarded him in the past, she must now think him a boor. There would be little reason to keep her from informing her husband of the fact that his assistant had addressed her in such terms of gross familiarity. At the very best he could expect not to be invited back into their house if there was the slightest risk that she might find herself alone with him. At the worst, his employer might tell him to pack his bags and send him home in disgrace or even take a horsewhip to him as Chevanin’s father had once done to an insolent groom. In the young man’s fearful imaginings, there seemed no doubt that he would – indeed, should – suffer punishment at the hands of Madame Tortsova’s outraged husband for his discourtesy. Recalling how the Doctor had often damned the bestiality of the Ostyaks, he wondered how much worse he would consider his own assistant’s unbecoming conduct.

He had lain awake for most of the night haunted by Madame Tortsova’s words. She had spoken of trust and with his next breath he had, in all likelihood, destroyed her trust in him forever. At any moment he had expected to hear his employer’s fists hammering on his door and the Doctor’s voice angrily demanding that he should come out and face him. Now trudging wearily through the snow, he felt each step taking him nearer the inevitable confrontation. Hot with anxiety despite the coldness of the morning air, he made his unwilling way along Hospital Street. All around him there was movement. Shop doors were opening and people hurried past him on their way to the morning market in the Square. The town was coming alive but, in the depths of his despair, he felt alone.

Reaching the outer door of the surgery he pulled the keys out of his pocket, fumbling with them, his hands made clumsy by the bulk of his gloves. Against his better judgement he removed one glove and instantly the cold metal of the key bonded itself to his skin, so that he had to constantly move his fingers as he inserted the key into the keyhole. Quickly putting the glove back on, he tried to turn the key, but it would not move. Removing it, he breathed heavily on it and then tried again. The lock seemed frozen solid. Stamping his feet in an effort to keep his toes warm, he jerked the key rapidly in and out of the hole for about ten seconds then tried a third time. This time he felt the lock give slightly. Inserting the small spike that acted as a key-fob into the head of the key, he used it to add extra leverage to the lock’s cylinders. The lock gave with a rasping click and he pushed the door open with his shoulder and entered.

The surgery consisted of three modestly sized rooms, of which he was now standing in the waiting room. Beyond, connected by a door and a hatchway, lay the Doctor’s consulting room where Chevanin also had his desk and, beyond that, a small dispensary which also doubled as Dr. Tortsov’s private office. (It was to this third room which Chevanin was expected to remove himself when bashful patients refused to be examined in his presence.) These three rooms were the sole medical facility for the treatment of outpatients in the District of Berezovo. To ensure their efficient running the Doctor had drilled into his assistant a systematic procedure so well regulated that the young man was able to complete it almost without thought.

After unlocking the consulting room door and lighting a lamp, Anton Ivanovich’s first task was to clear out the ashes in the small stove that heated the surgery and lay a new fire. A network of pipes ran from behind the stove and warmed, in order of importance and heat, the consulting room, the dispensary and the waiting room; the last being by far the coldest of the three. It was an old joke amongst the Doctor’s patients that a visit to the surgery was never wasted: if you didn’t have something the matter with you when first you entered the waiting room then you would have by the time you saw the Doctor. Dr. Tortsov regarded such complaints as mere kibbitsching, claiming that if the waiting room was any warmer it would become a shelter for malingerers, a petri dish for germs and too crowded for deserving patients. Furthermore, if the flow of warmth were reversed to heat the waiting room first, the patients would be even worse off, having to be examined half naked in temperatures only marginally higher than the street outside.