Igor Eliseev - One-Two

I nodded affirmatively. What else could I do? You have never asked me to share my thoughts with you, never wanted to know what I really felt deep down. You sped directly towards your goal, not mine. Telling you that the way you had chosen was wrong would be perceived as provocation. You were so passionate about it and really made us nearly fly to the other end of the city to find that hospital. Snow squeaked complainingly under the obstinacy of our feet.

“You can see the general practitioner without a preliminary appointment,” another receptionist said dryly, filling in a form in fidgety handwriting. She didn’t request our documents.

We left our overcoats in the cloakroom and, not parting with our blanket for a single second, went to the general practitioner’s office. After waiting for a while in the line, we entered a quite close, intensely heated premise and saw a middle-aged woman in a white robe with a wrinkled nose and small eyes. On her desk there was a vase with one rose and plenty of papers and pens. She took her eyes off the perishing flower and started to study us hastily.

“Why are you coming in together? Come in one at a time.”

Again this awkward situation! How might we explain briefly our predicament? Instead of arguing, we just took off our blanket.

Our deformity made the most painful impression on her. First she was surprised, then frightened; her small eyes became unexpectedly huge, expanding to fill half her face. For a long minute she plunged into painful reverie, then asked us to fill in a medical form, and went out of the office, but soon she returned in the company of a very short and scrawny man, the surgeon. Smiling and friendly, he at once suggested following him into his office. Well, considering all the circumstances, we took our folded blanket and followed him along the corridor.

Watching us closely, in our natural condition , some patients were immensely embarrassed while others stared without blinking, as if we were exotic animals, and spoke in a loud whisper that could be overheard.

“You are quite an extraordinary event in some ways,” the surgeon said thoughtfully, attentively examining us in his office, “so rare as if we put two green beans into a bag with red beans, shook it well, poured out all the contents on to a table, and found the two green beans lying next to each other. What an interesting case.”

Expressing this deep thought, he screwed up his eyes catlike, stretched, straightened and only afterwards looked at the form we had completed.

“Oh, my goodness, we share the same last name.” He twitched his eyebrows several times and continued a bit less pompously. “It is a really extraordinary case. May I ask where such special people as yourselves are from?”

“It’s a long story we’ve told too many times,” you answered unwillingly.

“To cut a long story short, we came from a foster home,” I said, blurting out the truth.

“You are extremely different, like me and my wife, but at the same time have much in common.” He clicked his tongue, gave a whistle and continued to speak. “So, did you leave or escape? Actually, you don’t have to answer that. Times have changed, but formerly I would have been obliged to inform the relevant authorities and you would have been sent back in the twinkle of an eye.”

However, he didn’t sound aggressive; his voice was calm and steady as if he was talking to an old friend.

“Now then, what do you count on?” he asked very dispassionately, moving some strange, cold smoothing iron along our stomachs.

“We want to be like everybody else, each of us by herself,” you explained in a strange voice.

“Oh, really?” he smiled again. “And you decided it is easy to cut you in half just like a watermelon, didn’t you?”

He went up to the window, stood there for a while, thoughtfully examining the roofs of the neighboring buildings, and seeming to address himself, said:

“Weather is just wonderful today. The sun’s shining, soft snow lying everywhere; I like winter. But there are things that upset me: people keep coming in crowds to the hospital, medicine is scarce, personnel works in two shifts and gets angrier and angrier with the situation. A patient died yesterday and we didn’t manage to save him. It’s a really bad time for all of us. Besides, you have one liver, one for two. I am afraid we won’t be able to perform such an operation in this hospital. I am a surgeon, not a wizard.”

Then he distractedly approached the lonely chair, sat on it and lit a cigarette, repeating:

“You must understand. I am a surgeon, not a wizard.”

The same thing, but in different words! Pyotr Ilyich had told us this in the foster home. However, not trusting anyone but ourselves, we had kept on poisoning ourselves with senseless illusions for many months like a revengeful wife who poisons her unfaithful husband with arsenic. We did not expect to face such reality, did we?

That’s how we finally perceived our situation. Everything we did, the whole dangerous way we went through things, was in vain. Having run away from one place specially arranged for us and people similar to ourselves, we found ourselves in a place where we did not belong at all. We were undesirables, unplanned in this grass-roots system, and once it noticed us, it started rejecting us in every way. Only in our dreams could things happen the way we wished, but in reality the distance between what we wanted and what we got was so huge that it could never be overcome. We left that hospital a completely different person, two completely different people.

All night long we roamed the lifeless streets and snow-covered yards; doors of basements were equipped with heavy locks, attics were nailed up and garages closed. Choking and gasping with frosty air, getting stuck and drowning in snow drifts, exhausted, frozen and ridiculous, we represented a genuine caricature of mankind. In order to save myself from going mad with desperation, I imagined us as the heroines of a book, assuring myself that whoever the author was, he wouldn’t let us die before the final scene, and when all our hardships became insufferable, he would replace them with a happy ending. However, it did not really help. Passing the shining windows, I quietly envied other people’s warm homes, safety and carelessness… and so the “advantages” of our union became more and more doubtful, illusive and fierce.

Our senseless wandering lasted till the frosty and cloudy dawn; snow resumed falling again. Wild and inhuman fatigue overwhelmed me, my strength ebbing away. I longed to sit down and fall asleep, but instead you continued quickening the pace desperately, as if running away from someone – perhaps from me? Of course, I’m a ballast, an animated anchor hardly shuffling my disobedient feet. Houses, streets and cars were rushing before us like a rapid, dizzy whirlwind; blood was flowing through my head, echoing in the nape of my neck with a dull pain; I felt terribly nauseous from our hurried walking. “I mustn’t fall.” The only thing I could do was to keep saying that to myself. “I mustn’t fall, otherwise I’m dead – we are dead. ”

Having given up counting time, I didn’t know how many hours or days we had been recklessly rambling about the ice-cold city. Time got washed away and lost its meaning and sense. But we persistently kept moving forward, for there was no way back; I was convinced it would be better to die than start everything over again. Suddenly you pulled my head to yourself and almost cried in my ear:

“Faith, come round. We’re there!”

“Where is there?” I was perplexed. How could we possibly get somewhere if we were going nowhere?

“Look that way. Can’t you see?” We were the only ones out there, but you kept crying, making it more and more difficult to focus. “The house is empty; nobody lives there. Let’s go inside. Hurry up.”