She lay like a corpse, but did not die. Suddenly my head became quite clear, as if I were standing under the glass roof of the anatomy theatre in that faraway medical school.

‘Camphor again,’ I said hoarsely.

And once again the feldsher obediently injected the oil.

‘Is she really not going to die?’ I thought in despair. ‘Will I really have to …’

Everything lit up in my mind and I suddenly became aware without any textbooks, without any advice or help (and with unshakeable conviction), that now, for the first time in my life I had to perform an amputation on a dying person. And that that person would die under the knife. She was bound to die under the knife; after all, there was no blood left in her body. It had all drained out through her shattered legs over six miles and there was not even a sign that she was conscious. She was silent. Oh, why didn’t she die? What would her maddened father say to me?

‘Prepare for an amputation,’ I said to the assistant in a voice that was not my own.

The midwife gave me a fierce look but the feldsher showed a spark of sympathy in his eyes and began busying himself with the instruments. A primus-stove started to roar.

A quarter of an hour passed. I raised her cold eyelid and looked with superstitious fear at the expiring eye. It told me nothing. How could a semi-corpse stay alive? Drops of sweat ran uncontrollably down my forehead from under my white cap and Pelagea wiped away the salt sweat with gauze. What remained of the blood in the girl’s veins was now diluted with caffeine. Ought it to have been injected or not? Anna Nikolaevna was gently massaging the swellings caused by the saline solution. And the girl lived on.

I picked up the knife, trying to imitate the man I had once in my life seen perform an amputation, at university. I entreated fate not to let her die at least in the next half hour. ‘Let her die in the ward, when I’ve finished the operation …’

I had only common sense to rely on, and it was stimulated into action by the extraordinary situation. Like an experienced butcher, I made a neat circular incision in her thigh with the razor-sharp knife and the skin parted without exuding the smallest drop of blood. ‘What will I do if the vessels start bleeding?’ I thought, and without turning my head glanced at the row of forceps. I cut through a huge piece of female flesh together with one of the vessels—it looked like a little whitish pipe—but not a drop of blood emerged from it. I stopped it up with a pair of forceps and proceeded, clamping on forceps wherever I suspected the existence of a vessel. ‘Arteria … arteria … what the devil is it called?’ The operating theatre had begun to take on a thoroughly professional look. The forceps were hanging in clusters. My assistants drew them back with gauze, retracting the flesh, and I started sawing the round bone with a gleaming, fine-toothed saw. ‘Why isn’t she dying? It’s astonishing … God, how people cling to life!’

The bone fell away. Demyan Lukich was left with what had been a girl’s leg in his hands. Shreds of flesh and bone. This was all discarded and there remained on the table a young girl shortened, as it were, by a third, with a stump splayed out to one side. ‘Just a little bit more … Please don’t die,’ I wished ardently, ‘keep going till they take you to the ward, let me come out of this frightful episode with some credit.’

They tied the ligatures and then, knees knocking, I started sewing up the skin with widely-spaced stitches. Suddenly I stopped, brought to my senses by an inspired thought: I left a gap for drainage in which I inserted a gauze wick.