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By Root 337 0

white garden, but now at a much higher level and mercifully far away from Malo-Provalnaya Street. He felt the woman pulling him, felt that his left side and arm were very hot while the rest of his body was cold and his icy heart scarcely beating. 'She might have saved me, but this is the end now . . . legs getting weaker . . .' He dimly saw what looked like some lilac bushes under the snow, a door, a lantern hanging outside an old-fashioned porch covered in snow. There was the sound of a key. The woman was still there at his right side and was straining with the last of her strength to drag Alexei toward the lantern. Then after the sound of a second key, into the gloom of a place with an old, lived-in smell. Overhead a dim little light flared, the floor skidded sideways to the left under his feet . . . Some unfamiliar poison-green blobs with fiery edges flashed past his eyes, and in the darkness that followed he felt a great relief . . .

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A row of tarnished brass knobs in the dim, flickering light. Something cold was running down his open shirt-front, enabling him to breathe more easily, but his left sleeve was full of a damp, ominous,

lifeless warmth. 'That's it. I'm wounded.' Alexei realised that he was lying on the floor, his head leaning painfully against something hard and uncomfortable. The brass knobs in front of him belonged to a trunk. The cold, so great that it took his breath away, was her throwing water over him.

'For God's sake,' said a faint, husky voice over his head, 'drink this. Are you breathing? What am I to do now?'

A glass clattered against his teeth and Alexei noisily gulped down some icy cold water. Now, very close, he could see her fair curls and her dark, dark eyes. Squatting on her haunches the woman put down the glass on the floor and gently putting her arm behind his neck she began to lift Alexei up.

'How's my heart?' he wondered. 'Seem to be coming round . . . maybe I haven't lost too much blood . . . must fight.' His heart was beating, but fast, unevenly and in sudden jerks and Alexei said weakly:

'Cut my clothes off if necessary, but whatever you do put on a tourniquet at once . . .'

Her eyes widened as she strained to hear him, then as she understood she jumped up and ran to a closet, and pulled out heaps of material.

Biting his lip, Alexei thought: 'At least there's no bloodstain on the floor, with luck I may not have been bleeding too hard.' With the woman's help he wriggled out of his coat and sat up, trying to ignore the dizziness. She began to take off his tunic.

'Scissors', said Alexei.

He was short of breath and it was hard to talk. The woman disappeared, sweeping the floor with the silk hem of her dress, and wrenched off her hat and fur coat in the lobby. Then she came back and squatted down again. With the scissors she sliced clumsily and painfully into the sleeve, already wet and sticky with blood, ripped it open and freed Alexei's arm. The shirt was quickly dealt with. The whole left sleeve and side was dark red and soaking. Blood started to drip on to the floor.

'Don't worry, cut away . . .'

The shirt fell away in tatters and Alexei, white-faced, naked and

yellow to the waist, blood-stained, determined to live and not to faint a second time, clenched his teeth and prodded his left shoulder with his right hand.

'Thank God . . . bone's not broken. Tear off a square or a long strip.'

'I have a bandage', she said weakly, but happily. She disappeared, returned, tearing open the wrapping of a bandage and saying: 'There's no one else here . . . I'm alone . . .'

Again she sat down beside him. Alexei saw the wound. It was a small hole in the upper arm, near the inner surface at the point where the arm lies closest to the body. A thin stream of blood was seeping out of it.

'Wound on the other side?' he asked jerkily and laconically, instinctively conserving the breath of life.

'Yes, there is', she said with horror.

'Tie the tourniquet above it . . . yes, there . . . right.'

There came a new, violent pain, green rings danced before his eyes. Alexei bit his lower lip.