My legs were ossified with cold, so much so that as I stood there bemused, I mentally leafed through the textbook pages in an inane attempt to remember whether there was such a complaint as ossification of the muscles or whether it was an illness I had dreamed up while asleep the night before in the village of Grabilovka. What the devil was it in Latin? Every single muscle ached unbearably, like toothache. There is nothing I can say about my toes—they lay immobile in my boots, as rigid as wooden stumps. I confess that in a burst of cowardice I pronounced a whispered curse on the medical profession and on the application form I had handed in five years earlier to the rector of the university. All the time a fine rain was drizzling down as through a sieve. My coat had swelled like a sponge. I vainly tried to grasp my suitcase with the fingers of my right hand, but in the end spat on the wet grass in disgust. My fingers were incapable of gripping anything. It was then, stuffed as I was with all sorts of knowledge from fascinating medical books, that I suddenly remembered the name of the illness—palsy. ‘Paralysis’, I said to myself in despair, God knows why.

‘Your roads take some getting used to,’ I muttered through stony, blue lips, staring resentfully at the driver, although the state of the road was hardly his fault.

‘Ah, comrade doctor,’ he answered, with lips equally stiff under their fair moustache, ‘I’ve been driving fifteen years and I still can’t get used to them.’

I shuddered and glanced round miserably at the peeling, white, two-storey hospital building, at the bare log walls of my assistant’s house, and at my own future residence, a neat, two-storey house with mysterious windows blank as gravestones. I gave a long sigh. Suddenly instead of Latin words a faraway memory flashed through my head, a sweet phrase which a lusty tenor in blue stockings sang in my numbed and shaken head: Salut, demeure chaste et pure … Farewell, farewell, it will be a long time before I see you again, oh golden-red Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, shop windows … ah, farewell.

‘Next time, I’ll wear a sheepskin coat,’ I said to myself in angry desperation, tugging at the suitcase by its straps with my inflexible hands. ‘I’ll … though next time it’ll be mid-October, I’ll have to wear two sheepskin coats. I certainly shan’t be going to Grachyovka for a month yet. Just think … I actually had to put up for the night en route! When we had only driven fifteen miles and it was as black as the tomb … it was night … we had to stop in Grabilovka, a school teacher put us up. This morning we set off at seven in the morning, and here we are … God, it’s been slower driving here than if we’d come on foot. One wheel got stuck in a ditch, the other swung up into the air, my case fell on to my feet with a crash, we slithered from side to side, lurching forward one moment, backward the next. And all the time a fine rain drizzling down and my bones turning to ice. Who’d believe you can freeze as easily in the middle of a grey, miserable September as in the depth of winter? Ah well, it seems you can. And as you die a slow death there’s nothing to look at except the same endless monotony. On the right the bare, undulating fields and on the left a stunted copse, flanked by five or six grey, dilapidated shacks. Not a living soul in them, it seems, and not a sound to be heard.’

In the end the suitcase yielded. The driver lay on his stomach and shoved it down on top of me. I tried to catch it by the strap but my hand refused to perform and the beastly thing, crammed with books and all sorts of rubbish, flopped down on to the grass, crashing against my legs.

‘Oh Lor …’ the driver began fearfully, but I did not complain. My legs were no more sensitive than two sticks of wood.

‘Hey, anybody at home? Hey!’ the driver cried out and flapped his arms like a rooster flapping its wings. ‘Hey, I’ve brought the doctor!’

At once faces appeared, pressed against the dark windows of the assistant’s house. A door banged and I saw a man hobbling towards me in a ragged coat and worn old boots. He hurriedly and respectfully doffed his cap, ran up and stopped two paces short of me, then smiling somewhat bashfully he welcomed me in a hoarse voice:

‘Good day, comrade doctor.’

‘And who might you be?’ I asked.

‘I’m Yegorich,’ he introduced himself, ‘the watchman here. We’ve been expecting you.’

Without wasting a moment he grabbed the suitcase, swung it over his shoulder and carried it in. I limped after him, trying unsuccessfully to thrust my hand into my trouser pocket to get out my purse.

Man’s basic needs are few.