The Revenge of the Foxes by Ak Welsapar

Author:Ak Welsapar [Welsapar, Ak]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Glagoslav Publications

The Americans

I came to and saw I was lying in the centre of an L-shaped room by an antiquated high window generous of light and air. From the fortochka an autumnal freshness swept upon me. I saw the treatment trolley with medicines being wheeled towards me. Only ten or fifteen paces and the slanting rays of the morning sun separated me from the nurse in a light blue uniform and headscarf of the same colour. Together it all looked so angelically innocent: the sun, the branches of the trees, the rustling of variegated autumn leaves outside the window, but I already knew that any procedures would give me intolerable pain, and that the kindly nurse was my chief torturer. I roused up and braced myself, awaiting the start of the torments. Seconds began to split into still smaller moments, as the nurse implacably approached. She was almost alongside me, when suddenly the door of the ward opened and on the threshold appeared a group of strangers – tall, thick-set and stately. I was even able to discern the grey on the temples of some of them, so sharpened were all my sensations before the beginning of the unpleasant procedures.

The group was led by Podzolkov, also tall, and thin as a rake. He, as I learned later, had already managed to become head of the department in the time I had spent in resuscitation. Podzolkov started speaking, so softly that I could hardly make out his words, but the interpreter standing at his side enunciated each word clearly:

“Our Institute was founded in 1955.”

The young man escorting the foreigners had quiet dark eyes and a straight nose without a bridge (a Greek perhaps? – I thought). As he translated Podzolkov's words from the Russian into English, he seemed for a time to embody him, so proud he was of what was said, and one got the impression that it was not his first year working at the Institute of Cardiovascular Surgery and, like all his colleagues, he was naturally involved in its successes.

“Or better to say we laid a cornerstone of our future success several years after that.”

But while the interpreter was conveying his sentence to the foreigners who, I realized from their conversations, were Americans, Podzolkov looked expressively at the nurse and asked politely:

“Cover the medicines, please...”

But the nurse did not react. So Podzolkov, to avoid attracting the visitors' attention, repeated his request slightly more loudly:

“Yes, you... cover the medicines!”

Larisa, as the nurse was called, stared wide-eyed in fright, as if querying Podzolkov. Then the chief surgeon, speaking through his teeth, for the third time repeated his question, by now without much hope. At last the nurse understood the sense of what was said, and instantly covered the medicines with a snow-white cloth. I mentally thanked the doctor for his remark, because it was on the sterility of the medicines lying on the trolley that the life of post-operation patients depended – including mine.

But I realized how startled Larisa was by her own negligence from her cold fingers with which she fitfully grasped me by the shoulders.

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