I was overcome with anguish.

‘Well, what is it? Speak!’ I cried irritably.

He stopped. His eyes went blank and he whispered, as if telling me a secret:

‘She fell into the brake.’

‘Brake … brake? What’s that?’

‘Flax, they were braking flax, doctor,’ Aksinya whispered in explanation, ‘you know, brake, flax braking …’

‘Here’s a fine beginning. This is it. Oh why did I ever come?’ I said to myself in horror.

‘Who?’

‘My daughter,’ he answered in a whisper, and then shouted, ‘Help me!’ Once again he threw himself to the floor and his hair, cut like a mop in peasant fashion, fell into his eyes.

The pressure-lamp with its lopsided tin shade burned with hot beams of light. She lay on the operating table, on white, fresh-smelling oilcloth and when I saw her all thoughts of hernia vanished from my mind.

Her fair, almost reddish hair hung down from the table in a matted clump. She had a gigantic plait which reached to the floor.

Her calico skirt was torn and stained with blood in various shades from brown to oily scarlet. The light of the kerosene lamp was a lively yellow in comparison with her paper-white face, and her nose was beginning to sharpen. On her white face, motionless as a plaster cast, a truly rare beauty was fading away before my eyes. Seldom in life does one see such a face.

The operating theatre was completely silent for about ten seconds, but from behind the closed doors came the muffled sounds of someone shouting and banging his head over and over again.

‘Gone out of his mind,’ I thought. ‘The nurses must be seeing to him. Why is she so beautiful? Though he does have good bone structure; the mother must have been a beautiful woman. He’s a widower.…’

‘Is he a widower?’ I whispered automatically.

‘Yes, he is,’ Pelagea Ivanovna answered quietly.

Then Demyan Lukich, almost as if in anger, ripped the skirt from hem to waist, baring her instantly. I looked, and what I saw was even worse than I had expected. Strictly speaking there was no left leg. From the smashed knee down there were just bloody shreds, battered red flesh and splinters of white bone protruding in all directions. The right leg was fractured at the shin so that the tips of both bones had punctured the skin and her foot lay lifelessly on its side, as though disconnected.

‘Yes …’ the feldsher pronounced softly and that was all he said.

Thereupon I regained my wits and started feeling her pulse. Her cold wrist registered nothing. Only after a few seconds did I detect a barely perceptible, irregular ripple. It passed and was followed by a pause during which I had time to glance at her white lips and nostrils, which were turning blue. I already felt like saying ‘It’s all over’, but fortunately controlled myself … there was another hint of a beat.

‘The end of a mangled human being,’ I said to myself. ‘There’s really nothing more to be done.’

But suddenly I said sternly, in a voice that I did not recognise:

‘Camphor.’

Anna Nikolaevna bent over to my ear and whispered:

‘What for, doctor? Don’t torture her. What’s the point of smashing her up any more? She’ll die any minute now … you won’t save her.’

I gave her an angry look and said:

‘I asked for camphor …’ in such a way that she flushed, marched resentfully to the little table and broke an ampoule. The feldsher obviously did not approve of the camphor either. Nonetheless he deftly and swiftly took hold of a syringe and the yellow oil went under the skin of her shoulder.

‘Die. Die quickly,’ I said to myself. ‘Die. Otherwise what am I to do with you?’

‘She’ll die now,’ whispered the feldsher as if guessing my thoughts. He glanced meaningfully at the sheet but apparently changed his mind. It seemed a pity to stain it with blood. But a few seconds later he had to cover her.