The White Guard - Mikhail Bulgakov [98]
'Get up, if only you can. Don't pay any attention to me. I'll help you. Then lie right down . . . Well, if you can't . . .'
He replied:
'No, I'll go . . . only help me . . .'
She led him to the little door of that mysterious house and then helped him back. As he lay down, his teeth chattering from the cold, he felt some lessening and respite from his headache and said:
'I swear I won't forget what you've done. Go to bed . . .'
'Be quiet, I'll soothe your head', she replied.
Then the dull, angry pain flowed out of his head, flowed away from his temples into her soft hands, through them and through her body into the floor, covered with a dusty, fluffy carpet, and there it expired. Instead of the pain a delicious even heat spread all over his body. His arm had gone numb and felt as heavy as cast-iron, so he did not move it but merely closed his eyes and gave himself up to the fever. How long he lay there he could not have said: perhaps five minutes, perhaps hours. But he felt that he could have lain like that, bathed in heat, for ever. Whenever he opened his eyes, gently so as not to alarm the woman sitting beside him, he saw the same picture: the little lamp burning weakly but steadily under its red shade giving out a peaceful light, and the woman's unsleeping profile beside him. Her lips pouting like an unhappy child, she sat staring out of the window. Basking in the heat of fever, Alexei stirred and edged towards her . . .
'Bend over me', he said. His voice had become dry, weak and high-pitched. She turned to him, her eyes took on a frightened guarded look and the shadows around them deepened. Alexei put his right arm around her neck, pulled her to him and kissed her on the lips. It seemed to him that he was touching something sweet-tasting and cold. The woman was not surprised by what Alexei did, but only gazed more searchingly into his face. Then she said:
'God, how hot you. are. What are we going to do? We ought to call a doctor, but how are we going to do it?'
'No need', Alexei replied gently. 'I don't need a doctor. Tomorrow I'll get up and go home.'
'I'm so afraid,' she whispered, 'that you'll get worse. Then how can I help you? It's not bleeding any more, is it?' She touched his bandaged arm so lightly that he did not feel it.
'Don't worry, nothing's going to happen to me. Lie down and sleep.'
'I'm not going to leave you', she answered, caressing his hand. 'You have such a fever.'
He could not stop himself from embracing her again and drawing her to him. She did not resist. He drew her until she was leaning right over him. Then, as she lay down beside him he sensed through his own sickly heat the clear live warmth of her body.
'Lie down and don't move,' she whispered, 'and I'll soothe your head.'
She stretched out alongside him and he felt the touch of her knees. She began to smooth back his hair from his temples. He felt such pleasure that he could only think of how to prevent himself from falling asleep.
But he did fall asleep, and slept long, peacefully and well. When he awoke he felt that he was floating in a boat on a river of warmth, that all his pain had gone, and that outside the night was turning gradually paler and paler. Not only the little house but the City and the whole world were full of silence. A glassy, limpid blue light was pouring through the gaps in the blinds. The woman, warm from his body, but with her face set in a look of unhappiness, was asleep beside him. And he went to sleep again.
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In the morning, around nine o'clock, one of the rare cab-drivers took on two passengers on the deserted Malo-Provalnaya Street -a man in a black civilian overcoat, looking very pale, and a woman. Carefully supporting the man by the arm, the woman drove him to St Alexei's Hill. There was no traffic on the hill, except for a cab outside No. 13 which had just brought a strange