... in which Veksel meets an old friend, becomes disillusioned with domestic medicine, and rethinks family values
A tense silence reigned in the small but richly furnished apartment. A short time ago, there had been a persistent knock on the thick iron door. Hearing a familiar voice, Roman Sergeyevich hurriedly unlocked the numerous locks and let the guest in. In the dim light of the unlit hallway, Veksel appeared, his face partly agitated, partly frightened. Without wasting time on explanations, he silently carried a petite girl in his arms, dragged her inside past expensive vases and paintings, and laid her on the sofa.
Now tied up, Marina whimpered and writhed, trying to bite the expensive upholstery with her teeth, and seemed completely oblivious to the two men standing over her. But the longer Roman Sergeyevich looked at her, the gloomier he became.
"Why did you bring her here?" Without taking his eyes off Marina, he finally said with such reproach in his voice as if something completely unusual and unacceptable was happening. For many years, far more formidable visitors could appear in this apartment at any time of the day or night. Mostly thugs in leather jackets and Adidas sneakers, covered in blood, riddled with bullets, with broken skulls. Roman Sergeyevich ended up patching up and putting most of them back on their feet, for which he enjoyed well-deserved respect in the relevant circles. And this work was always generously rewarded. Of course. The salary of a city hospital surgeon would hardly have been enough to furnish all these interiors filled with antiques. So now the doctor's indignation seemed rather incomprehensible.
"What do you mean, why?" Veksel was surprised. "Here... Treat her..."
"Do you even understand what's wrong with her?"
"You are the Sculptor. So tell me"
"Will it help you if I tell you?" the doctor said with a kind of doomed anger in his voice. "Dead man's rage. Are you satisfied with that diagnosis?"
"What?" Veksel didn't understand.
"Me comprenez - vous? Very well..." Roman Sergeyevich leaned over the patient, who was convulsing, and began to examine her mechanically, as parents usually do when checking on their children's health. "Her forehead is cold. Her temperature is below room temperature, which is understandable, since you brought her in from the street. No pulse. None at all. There are no external signs of decomposition, but tissue necrosis is already evident. Any more questions, Oleg?
Veksel stood staring at one spot, as if digesting the doctor's words, which seemed to make him even more cynical than usual, because he summed it up like this:
"She's dead. Dead. And you can tell me to 'treat her' thirty times over. I don't know what to do with her! Even lead pills won't help her now. Believe me, I've checked.
"What should I do?" muttered Veksel, who now no longer resembled a confident criminal authority, but had turned into an ordinary concerned father who, despite his best intentions, was unable to help his child.
"In my experience, it's best to cut her up and bury her somewhere nearby. So you don't have to carry her away. The cops don't give a damn about that now..."
"I'll bury you rather!" Veksel snapped, grabbing the doctor by the chest. "What the hell are you talking about?!"
Roman Sergeyevich, a large man, a head taller than the angry thief, didn't even change his expression when the thief hung on him, clutching his collar with his dry, old man's fingers. He just looked silently and with some kind of understanding pity at this helpless elderly man.
Could the old recluse Veksel, who had retired from business, understand anything? Only now had he encountered the hell that was unfolding around him. And even this hell, common to all, was experienced differently by each person. Feeling the desperate thief's hands weaken and let go of him, Roman Sergeyevich softened.
"Let's go. We'll have some vodka," he said conciliatorily, and then, sighing, added, "Maybe we'll think of something..."
Veksel obediently followed his host into the kitchen. Only once more, at the door, did he turn to look at Marina writhing on the sofa and immediately looked away.
Sitting down on an elegant kitchen chair with a soft seat embroidered with some kind of oriental pattern and watching the doctor pour vodka from a decanter into miniature glasses with gold rims, Veksel noticed that there was no one else in the apartment.
"Where are yours?" he asked cautiously.
"Where... Where... They're still there," Roman Sergeyevich replied in the same unperturbed tone, but the old thief's keen eye immediately noticed how the doctor's hand trembled as he spoke.
At the end of the "wild nineties," Sculptor met Tamara and almost immediately turned away from his glorious deeds. His relationship with the young Tomka, who was just turning nineteen at the time, turned out to be, oddly enough, a great and sincere love for the nearly forty-year-old doctor. Fearing the old-fashioned gossip and frankly embarrassed by the twenty-year age difference, Roman Sergeyevich officially married his chosen one. Needless to say, the provincial medical school student could not believe her luck. But, having drawn such a lucky ticket, she, silly girl, did not even think to take advantage of all the opportunities offered by such an advantageous union. Instead of building a career or creating a private clinic under her husband's patronage, she hastily curtailed her studies and threw herself headlong into family life. Roman Sergeyevich did not stand in her way and, for the first time in ages, began to come to work in neatly ironed shirts. And in the evening, he would return home to hot, freshly cooked borscht. The accumulated funds went towards furnishing the family nest, which shocked Toma, who was not spoiled by expensive things, with its luxury. The quiet life of semi-provincial intellectuals finally engulfed this strange couple. Only occasionally was it interrupted by "calls" from the past, such as today's unplanned visit from Veksel. But gradually, even those stopped. And the age difference, which once seemed insurmountable, dissolved in the fifteen years they had lived together.
The only thing that clouded the family's quiet happiness, which now seemed irreversible, was the absence of children. Veksel did not know the medical details of who was more to blame for this. But he, the last guest from the past, knew for sure that both suffered equally. Neither medical examinations, nor sanatoriums, nor trips to foreign resorts, which Veksel arranged for his doctor almost for free out of old friendship, helped. After another failure, already on the verge of her fortieth birthday, Tamara decided on artificial insemination. Alone. Alone. For some reason, it was important to her. Probably to feel complete. But there was no time to wait. And science proved stronger than nature this time too. A late child, a healthy boy weighing 4.5 kilograms, filled the doctor's family with belated happiness. Sincerely happy for his friend, Veksel nevertheless delicately declined to be the godfather, even though he was touched by the mafia romanticism of it all. That year, he had just buried his wife and had a final falling out with his daughter, so the idyllic images of someone else's family happiness made the old thief uncomfortable. This whole story had unfolded before Veksel's eyes, so now he was surprised by the unusual emptiness of the doctor's wealthy apartment.
"Did something happen to you?" Veksel asked cautiously.
"Something happened..."
Roman Sergeyevich wanted to put the decanter of vodka back in the refrigerator, but then hesitated and left it on the table after all. How could he answer his friend's simple question? What could he say? He had to tell it like it was. With all his characteristic directness and cynicism. That was his only salvation. In just a few days, his life had been turned upside down several times. Turned inside out. First, he saw with his own eyes how, contrary to all laws of nature and common sense, the dead began to rise by themselves in the hospital morgue. How they threw themselves at the staff and patients, quickly and relentlessly swelling their ranks. How the security forces, called in but unable to comprehend what was happening, tried in vain to stop the crowd of enraged zombies. How, in the commotion, the doctor miraculously managed to break free from the crowd and rushed home with only one thought in mind — to get to his wife and child as quickly as possible, hide them, protect them, lock himself away from this spreading plague, from the whole world. In his haste, he paid no attention to the unusually unsteady elderly people at the entrance, nor to the homeless-looking janitor in a cap, who was sitting tiredly on the stairs leading to the basement, his eyes rolled back. Roman Sergeyevich thought he had made it. But the doctor was wrong.
This became clear when he found himself in front of the wide-open door of his apartment. At that moment, he did not think about burglary, the safety of his valuable antiques, or his substantial savings. The doctor simply took a few steps along the natural carpet with long fluffy pile and froze in front of the open nursery. In the middle of the bright room, against the backdrop of pastel wallpaper with small blue ships, sat Tamara. Her beige house dress with golden Chinese characters on the hem was covered in blood. On her hands, literally burying his face in his mother's knees, lay little three-year-old Kiryusha. The boy's hair, wet and matted with blood, now stuck out like the needles of a hedgehog.
"My God, Toma... What's going on?" said the doctor, already moving toward his wife, but at that moment she looked up at him. Her empty, expressionless gaze stopped Roman Sergeyevich. Only now did he notice that the child's body was bent in a completely unnatural position. It looked like the boy's neck had been broken. Tamara calmly turned her dead son over, and the doctor was horrified to see that the front part of his abdomen was practically missing. Bloodied entrails spilled out onto the light-colored carpet. Tamara stopped looking at her husband, apparently having lost interest in him for the moment. Instead, she clutched the child's bloody arm, which was hanging by a single tendon, tore it off his torso with force, and began to gnaw on it with relish, tearing the flesh from the bone with her teeth.
Roman Sergeyevich was not very good with weapons. He almost never fired a gun, although the pistol, which, incidentally, had been given to him by Veksel, was kept in a metal box in his desk drawer. Only a couple of times at the dacha did the doctor try to shoot at aluminum beer cans with dubious results. Now, with trembling hands, he unlocked the box, took out the pistol, and, returning to the nursery, shot his beloved Toma three times in the head. There were no more bullets in the magazine. Surprisingly, this did not stop the woman. She slowly got to her feet, stared at her husband with her eye, which had been gouged out by a bullet, and moved towards him. The doctor remembered the rest of the events as if in a fog. He rushed into the kitchen and pulled a massive meat cleaver out of the drawer under the sink. Then he pushed Tamara back into the nursery with all his weight and began to chop. He hardly looked. First at her head, until he turned it into a solid mess. Then at her torso, chopping off her arms and legs. It was all over fairly quickly, but the doctor continued to strike. It seemed to him that Tamara was still moving. Finally, he stopped, dropped the axe from his weakened hand, and staggered into the bathroom.
Roman Sergeyevich sat over the sink for a long time, no longer washing away the blood, but simply staring meaninglessly at the water. Trying not to even look in the direction of the nursery, he returned to the kitchen with the firm intention of getting drunk, but in the end he drank only one glass and then sat for a long time again, staring at the decanter.
He only regained his composure late in the evening. Wincing at the haunting smell of blood, the doctor went back into the nursery. The bodies fit into four large bags made of thick black cellophane. Three for Tamara, one for Kiryusha. On the street, shrouded in a strange yellowish haze, Roman Sergeyevich had to make two trips to the nearest trash containers. He wanted to throw the rolled-up carpet there too, but at the last moment he changed his mind, leaning it against the entrance, next to the basement door, where residents often left large items of rubbish.
The doctor went up to his apartment, carefully locked all the locks behind him, and realized for the first time that he was now completely alone.
"It's not her anymore... It's not her. Do you understand?" Roman Sergeyevich summed up, either still talking about his Toma or already talking about Marina.
Veksel, who had been listening to his friend in silence, nodded in agreement and suddenly asked:
"Didn't you throw away the axe?"
The doctor shook his head, then waved his hand vaguely toward the kitchen sink.
Veksel stood up. The axe was indeed lying inside, right under the tap. The thief gripped the wet wooden handle tightly and listened. The room, from which Marina's fussing and wheezing had been heard before, was now completely silent. Leaving his friend in the kitchen, Veksel slowly walked down the hallway and suddenly heard a muffled but distinct moan:
"Dad..."