The White Guard - Mikhail Bulgakov [97]
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She came in, laden with a pile of firewood and dropped it noisily in the corner by the stove.
'What are you doing? Why bother?' he asked irritably.
'I had to light the stove anyway', she answered with a hint of a smile in her eyes. 'I can manage . . .'
'Come here', Alexei asked her quietly. 'Look, I haven't thanked
you for everything you've . . . done . . . And I don't know how to . . .' He stretched out his hand and took her fingers. As she obediently drew nearer he kissed her thin wrist twice. Her face softened as though a shadow of anxiety had been lifted from it and in that moment her eyes looked extraordinarily beautiful.
'If it hadn't been for you,' Alexei went on, 'I would certainly have been killed.'
'Of course,' she replied, 'of course you would . . . After all you did kill one of them.'
'I killed one of them?' he asked, feeling a new weakness as his head began to spin.
'M'hm.' She nodded approvingly and looked at Alexei with a mixture of fear and curiosity. 'Oh, it was terrible . . . they almost shot me too.' She shuddered.
'How did I kill him?'
'Well, they leaped round the corner, you began shooting and the man in front fell down . . . Perhaps you just wounded him. Anyway you were brave ... I thought I was going to faint. You were running, turned round and shot at them, then ran on again . . . What are you - a captain?'
'What made you think I was an officer? Why did you shout "officer" at me?'
Her eyes shone.
'I decided you must be an officer when I saw your badge in your fur cap. Why did you have to take such a risk by wearing your badge?'
'Badge? Oh my God, of course ... I see now ...' He remembered the shop bell ringing . . . the dusty mirror ... 'I ripped off everything else - but had to go and forget my badge! I'm not an officer,' he said, 'I'm just an army doctor. My name is Alexei Vasilievich Turbin . . . Please tell me - what is your name?'
'I am Julia Alexandrovna Reiss.'
'Why are you alone?'
Her answer was somehow strained and she looked away as she said:
'My husband's not here at the moment. He went away. And his mother too. I'm alone . . .' After a pause she added: 'It's cold in here. Brrr . . . I'll light the stove.'
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As the logs burned up in the stove his head ached with growing violence. His wound had stopped hurting him, all the pain was concentrated in his head. It began in his left temple, then spread to the crown of his head and the back of his neck. Some little vein under his left eyebrow tautened and radiated waves of desperate pain in all directions. Julia Reiss knelt down at the stove and raked the fire with a poker. Alternately opening and closing his eyes in pain, Alexei watched her as she turned her head aside from the heat, screening it with her pale wrist. Her hair seemed to be an indefinite color which at one moment looked ash-blond shot with flame, at the next almost gold; but her eyebrows were as coal-black as her eyes. He could not decide whether that irregular profile with its aquiline nose was beautiful or not. The look in her eyes was a riddle. There was fear, anxiety and perhaps - sensuality . . . Yes, sensuality.
As she sat there lapped in a wave of heat she was miraculously attractive. She had saved his life.
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For hours that night, when the heat of the stove had long since died down and burned instead in his head and arm, someone was twisting a red-hot nail into the top of his head and destroying his brain. 'I've got a fever', Alexei repeated drily and soundlessly, and tried to instil into his mind that he must get up in the morning and somehow make his way home. As the nail bored into his brain it finally drove out his thoughts of Elena, of Nikolka, of home and of Petlyura. Nothing mattered. Peturra... Peturra... He could only long for one thing - for the pain to stop.
Deep in the night