The doors of the operating room swung open with a soft, damp sigh, releasing him into the sterile cool of the corridor. Lev Vyshinsky staggered out, swaying like the last drunk at the edge of town. He leaned against the cold, rough wall, feeling his hands—bandaged in exhaustion—betray him with a tremble, and his legs turned to cotton after twelve hours of unimaginable strain. He could feel neither hands nor feet—only a dull, booming emptiness in his skull where, just minutes ago, a storm of focus, adrenaline, and cold, merciless calculation had raged.
He had brought him back. Twice. Twice the heart of the young man, mangled in the bloody meat grinder of a traffic accident, had stopped, and twice Lev forced it to beat again, cradling in his palms a hot, slippery knot of flesh, watching the merciless straight line on the monitors and shouting at the scalpel and at fate, “No!” He had won. But the price of victory was complete depletion. He wanted to collapse right here onto the battered linoleum stained with antiseptic, curl up, and plunge into a bottomless, black, dreamless sleep.
He pressed his back to the rough, cool wall and let his eyelids fall. Behind them flickered crimson spots, flashes of scalpels, and the steady, beckoning line of the cardiogram. It seemed he would never move from that spot. But the inner motor, trained for years to discipline, rumbled back to life a few minutes later. He pushed himself off the wall and, shuffling his feet, trudged to the doctors’ lounge, where a glass of bitter, scalding coffee—his only friend at that hour—was waiting.
A couple of hours later he walked out through the gates of the hospital campus. Two cups of coffee had done their work: the knife-edge fatigue receded, replaced by the familiar, background weariness—his constant companion. The air, no longer smelling of bleach and medicines but saturated with the scent of leaves warmed by the day and a far-off rain, struck him as intoxicating nectar.
Right from the gate, like a green, mysterious artery, a small alley ran into the neighborhood. Lev had never walked it—he always shot past in his car, headlong, forever late for something. But today something clicked inside him. The rays of the setting sun, low and long, pierced the dense foliage, laying a living, quivering pattern of light and shadow across the asphalt. It looked like a giant camouflage, like golden brocade thrown at his feet. And he suddenly wanted, like a boy, to walk along that pattern and feel the warmth of the waning day on his face. After all, only an empty, silent apartment was waiting for him, where even the dust motes had frozen in expectation that would never be met.
Lev sauntered down the alley, breathing deep, savoring the way summer languor seeped into every cell of his worn-out body. The poplar fluff had already blown through its snowstorms, giving way to the thick, honeyed scent of linden blossom. Summer had crossed its midpoint, and somewhere on the horizon vacation beckoned. And today he was a victor. He had wrested one more life from the hooded reaper.
On one of the benches, bathed in golden light, sat a girl. A silhouette in a pale, fluttering dress, bent over a book. Sunbeams set fire to the red strands of her hair, flaring on them into a thousand copper sparks. They fell onto the pages, veiling her face in a fiery curtain. And he felt, suddenly and almost physically, a need to see what lay behind that living blaze.
He came almost up to her. She was absorbed in reading, not noticing him. It seemed the whole world had narrowed for her to the lines on the paper.
“Is it a good book?” His voice came out hoarse, raw from hours of silence.
The girl didn’t raise her head until she finished the paragraph. Then slowly, with a kind of touching care, she closed the book, marking the page with her finger. Lev leaned to read the title upside down.
“‘My Dear Person,’” he read aloud.
Only then did she lift her eyes to him. And inwardly Lev gasped. A face sprinkled with golden freckles, as if someone had thrown a handful of tiny suns across it. Big, bottomless eyes the color of bitter chocolate, fringed with thick lashes. Full, bright lips parted in mild surprise. She wasn’t just pretty. She was freshness incarnate, youth, life itself—the very thing he had just been fighting for under the bright lights of the operating room. “Golden,” flashed through his mind.
“Are you into medicine, or do you just like the author?” he asked, trying to hide his sudden agitation behind a professional mask.
“I applied to medical school,” she said. Her voice was low, a little husky—unexpected for such a delicate figure.
“Then we’re almost colleagues.” Lev couldn’t suppress an approving smile and sat on the edge of the bench.
“Are you a doctor?” Her dark eyes lit with lively, genuine interest.
“A surgeon.”
“You?” She openly looked him up and down in surprise.
“What’s so surprising? Don’t I look the part? Or in your mind all surgeons are gray mammoths with a permanent sneer at the world?”
Her full lips twitched into a smile, and all the freckles on her nose bunched together comically.
“What kind of surgeon exactly?” she asked, and he realized he wasn’t dealing with a naïve simpleton.
“Commendable that you know the nuances. I’d like to say plastic. That sounds so much more prestigious and romantic. Alas, I’m an ordinary, down-to-earth surgeon. Somebody has to cut out appendixes and dig stones out of bile ducts.”
She laughed. Her laughter sounded like the tinkle of crystal bells, the burble of a stream—pure, sincere, contagious.
And for some reason he had an insane urge to show off for her, to appear not a tired laborer but a sort of knight of the scalpel, a lord of life and death. And Lev launched into stories. About workdays stripped of bookish romance, about the weight of responsibility pressing on your shoulders every second. About the operating table as a real battlefield with its tactics, strategy, and inevitable losses. He mentioned today’s case too, embellishing it, weaving into the tale the invented tears of the patient’s wife and children, their hope, their desperate pleas.
At first the girl listened with mild wariness, but gradually her gaze filled with unmistakable admiration. Under that gaze Lev really did feel like a hero, a demigod in a white coat. He knew he was spouting nonsense, getting carried away, but he couldn’t stop. He wanted desperately to please this golden girl who smelled of sun and hope.
“You saved a man’s life and you talk about it so… matter-of-factly?” she asked gravely.
“It’s my job. Every day is a risk. The simplest case can turn tragic in a second.” He caught himself looking straight into her eyes, drowning in them. “And you? What kind of doctor do you dream of becoming?”
“I haven’t decided yet. First I need to get in,” she glanced at the little watch on her thin wrist and suddenly jumped up. “Oh, I’m late!” Fear flickered in her eyes—childlike, unfeigned.
“My car is by the gate. Come on, I’ll take you wherever you need,” Lev offered, standing.
On the way she talked—hurriedly, stumbling. She lived with Aunt Tonya, her mother’s sister. Auntie had a dog—an old, decrepit spaniel named Vermouth. Her aunt’s late husband had named him. Auntie’s legs hurt; walking Vermouth was her—Stesha’s—job. And Vermouth was old and couldn’t stand it, and if you didn’t take him out on time—catastrophe. Which she would have to clean up.
“Is your aunt difficult?” Lev clarified.
“Aunt Tonya? Oh no! She’s the kindest soul. She took me in even though she herself has bad legs and her blood pressure jumps.”
“Where are you from? Out of town?”
“I’ve been here all my life. When I was in fifth grade, my mom died. Her stomach hurt; she kept putting off seeing a doctor. I came home from school and found her on the floor, unconscious. I called an ambulance. Her appendix had ruptured, peritonitis had started.” The girl spoke evenly, without a quiver in her voice, as if reciting a long-memorized, impersonal text. “After that my father took to drink. Six months later a bus hit him and killed him. Accident or not—I don’t know. So. I live with my aunt.”
Stesha fluttered out of the car and ran toward the entrance, glancing back as she went. Lev waved to her, and in the next moment she vanished into the dark maw of the entryway.
Left alone in the car, Lev instantly stopped feeling like a hero. He became just Lev Vyshinsky again, a tired, lonely surgeon with nothing to his name but a stack of hospital bills and silence in a three-room cage on the outskirts. He felt a fierce pity for her. A good girl. Solid. Strong. So young, and already she’d swallowed so much grief. He started the engine and drove off, carrying with him the image of her freckled face and the scent of freshness she had left in the car.
A month passed. Lev Gennadyevich Vyshinsky, back from a short vacation, walked down the hospital corridor, whistling something meaningless under his breath. Ahead of him a young orderly was mopping the floor, the mop moving in smooth, sweeping strokes. From under her white cap a rebellious lock of red hair had slipped and fallen onto her cheek. Something pricked at Lev’s heart—something familiar, long forgotten. A patient? A relative? He slowed his pace.
The girl straightened to move the bucket and lifted her head.
It was her.
“You? Hello!” Sparks of joy—and that same admiration he remembered so vividly—flashed in her bottomless dark eyes. He remembered her, though her name had slipped his mind.
“Hi. Weren’t you going to study, not mop floors?” he asked, surprised himself at how naturally he switched to the familiar “you.” “Or do you have someone here?” He recalled her story and mentally kicked himself for the tactlessness.
“I got in. I decided to earn a bit before classes start,” she said simply, unembarrassed.
“Well, that’s right. You need to learn medicine from the inside, from the very bottom. Maybe you’ll take a look at all this and change your mind about tying your life to doctoring. And what do you want to be? A surgeon, by any chance?”
“We’ll see,” she shrugged her thin shoulders, and suddenly Lev caught her name in his memory—Stesha.
“Glad to see you,” he nodded and walked on down the corridor, feeling her gaze on his back. His stride grew springy, a bit cocky, proprietorially sure.
From then on he found himself, walking through the ward, unconsciously searching for the red head under a snow-white cap. And when he found it, he always stopped to exchange a couple of meaningless words.
Once he saw her by the doctors’ lounge door. She was clearly waiting for him, shifting from foot to foot.
“Today’s my last day. In three days—my first lecture,” she said, flushing a deep red. The freckles on her nose and cheeks darkened, stood out even more, as if dusted with cinnamon.
“So you didn’t change your mind?” He smiled. “Let’s celebrate your last day at work. And your acceptance, too. Deal? Wait for me here—don’t go. All right?”
Stesha only nodded, smiling and blushing even harder.
When Lev came down to the lobby two hours later, she was sitting on a chair by the elevator and jumped up at his appearance, flushing again. They left together, and he didn’t care who saw them. She wasn’t an orderly anymore. She was a student. A colleague.
They had dinner in a small café that smelled of fried onions and herbs, then strolled along the embankment. The city lights trembled in the dark water like molten gold.
“In a hurry? What about your aunt?” Lev asked.
“Aunt went to a friend in Pskov. And Vermouth… Vermouth died a week ago. He was very old. Aunt left so she wouldn’t cry here. She keeps thinking she hears him bark,” Stesha sighed, and for a moment her face grew sad.
“Then let’s go to my place. Honestly, my legs are about to fall off. Have you ever had real French wine? No? We must fix that immediately,” he offered, and suddenly grew anxious, afraid she’d refuse.
But Stesha nodded silently.
“Sorry, I wasn’t expecting guests—it’s a bit… creatively messy,” he warned, letting her into the apartment. It smelled of the night city, orange-blossom perfume, and something else—elusively young and fresh. “Make yourself at home; I’ll hit the kitchen and contrive something.”
He took from the fridge the remains of roast beef from an expensive restaurant, vegetables for a salad, and a bottle of rosé with an elegant label.
“And where’s your wife? Out of town?” came her voice from the doorway—light, with a barely noticeable note of teasing.
Lev, rinsing a tomato, turned. She stood in the doorway, leaning on the jamb, looking at him with those bottomless eyes.
“My wife left me. She got tired of me never being home. Even on weekends. She would call the ward at night to check whether I was lying about being on call. We fought constantly. At first I agonized. I didn’t want to come back to this empty apartment, I spent days at the hospital, slept in the lounge. And then… I got used to it. Legally we’re not divorced yet.” He sighed. “Will you help? I’m hopeless in the kitchen.”
“And the meat?” She nodded at the restaurant container.
“From Gavroche,” he admitted honestly, though he’d first wanted to lie.
They set the table together, chopped the salad, their hands brushing again and again, and at every touch chills raced down Lev’s back. They laughed at his clumsiness, and the laughter covered their embarrassment. Then they drank the wine—cold, with a tart aftertaste—and talked over each other, afraid of awkward pauses, filling the space between them with words.
The sudden ring of his mobile sliced through the idyll like a knife. Lev went to the living room to take the call. He came back a few minutes later, pale, his face stone.
“They’re calling me in urgently. A mass-casualty crash. The whole surgical unit’s been put on alert.” He looked at her, at her bewildered, suddenly frightened face. “Go to bed. The linens are in the hall closet. Wait for me. All right?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, already shrugging on his jacket. The door slammed.
They took him to hell. Several mangled cars, a dozen ruined bodies. He operated all night, on autopilot—pure professionalism and will—shutting out thoughts of what awaited him at home. Of her.
Toward morning, when the worst was over, he slipped out of the hospital. For the first time in many months he hurried home. Not to an empty apartment, but to where he was expected. He was already picturing how he would open the door quietly, find Stesha asleep in the dim bedroom, see her red hair scattered across his pillow, breathe in her warm, sleepy scent. How he would touch her cheek, gently… His heart clenched in his chest with a piercing, almost painful anticipation of happiness.
He flew into the entryway, taking the stairs two at a time, unable to wait for the elevator. Carefully, trying not to make noise, he fitted the key into the lock and went in.
From the kitchen came familiar sounds: running water, clink of dishes. He smirked: making breakfast. Kicking off his shoes, he padded barefoot down the hall and froze in the doorway, his gaze colliding with a back in a painfully familiar pink, floral robe, with fair hair piled in a careless bun.
She turned, skillet in hand, and gave him a tired, matter-of-fact smile.
“Hi,” Kira said casually, as if they’d parted only the night before. “Pancakes. You must be starving. What happened? Another traffic pileup?”
Lev was struck dumb. His gaze darted around the kitchen, searching for signs of another presence—an extra cup, a forgotten hairpin, anything at all.
“Looking for someone?” she asked with feigned innocence, the same sly little devils dancing in her eyes.
“No, but… How did you get in?”
“She left,” Kira set down the skillet and looked at him directly, without a smile. “Don’t worry, I didn’t make a scene. Though, I must admit, your taste is… specific. Isn’t she a bit too young for you, Lev?”
“Why did you come?” He barely held back from shouting, from grabbing her by the shoulders and shoving her out.
“I came home. We’re still husband and wife—remember? I missed you. I realized I can’t live without you. I’ve been alone this whole time, honestly. And besides… a child needs a father. Let’s try to start over.”
“What child?” Lev felt an icy snake crawl down his spine, vertebra by vertebra—slow and inexorable. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m pregnant, Lev.” She didn’t look away, tracking every flicker of his face. “Almost four months.”
“You… you’re telling the truth? About being pregnant? Why didn’t you come right away? You’ve been gone three months!” Suddenly he felt crushed, as if a granite slab had been hoisted onto his shoulders, a burden he was doomed to carry for the rest of his life.
“At first I thought it was just a delay. I was afraid to jinx it, to be wrong. Then I was afraid of a miscarriage… so I came when the risk had passed. Aren’t you happy?” That pleading note in her voice—he hated it.
“What about morning sickness?” He grasped at a straw, trying to catch her in a lie. They’d been trying for four years without success. “You don’t look like you’ve been suffering.”
“I was terribly nauseous the first weeks; it’s passed now.” She spoke as if apologizing. “I wanted so much to tell you… I called the ward before I left; they told me you weren’t on call…”
“Nothing has changed, Kira. I’m still the same surgeon. I still vanish at work and crawl home at night dead on my feet. I spent all night cutting people. In a week you won’t stand it and you’ll start another fight about how I’m ruining your life…”
“And her?” Kira cut him off, her voice ringing. “That girl? She doesn’t make scenes? Or has she just not realized yet what it means to be a surgeon’s wife? To live in constant waiting? To be second, third, last on his list of priorities after work and other people?” Her voice broke, betraying fear and uncertainty.
“By the way, it’s tidy in here. Did she clean? You don’t even know how to dust,” she added, more calmly now.
“I’ve had a hellish night. I’m going to lie down,” Lev tossed over his shoulder and, without looking at her, went to the bedroom.
In the corner, on his side of the bed, lay a crumpled throw. He picked it up automatically to cover himself—and froze. From the throw came a faint but unmistakable scent. That same one—orange blossom and night city. Stesha’s scent. He pressed the fabric to his face, inhaled deeply, and went still, feeling icy gooseflesh race down his back and a lump of unshed tears lodge in his throat.
He wanted this child. He had waited. He had prayed. And now Kira had come back and brought him this news—this longed-for tidings. But instead of joy he felt only weight and bitterness. He had no choice. The choice had been made for him. There would be a child. He could not abandon it. He was a doctor; he knew Kira wouldn’t lie about something like that—it was too easy to check. And Stesha… the golden girl. An unrealized dream. She really was too young for him. For his life, his problems, his baggage. And still… the ache of it, the physical pain of pity.
He saw her one more time. During his shift the ambulance brought in an elderly woman with a strangulated hernia. The operation was simple, almost routine. When he came out of the OR, taking off his cap, a familiar red-haired girl in a student nurse’s uniform ran up to him. For a moment his heart leapt to his throat, ready to burst out in a cry of hope and joy. Then it plunged into the abyss, leaving in his chest an icy, absolute emptiness.
“You?” Stesha said. Whether on purpose or not, she addressed him formally again. “How is Aunt Tonya?” Her face was pale; even the freckles barely showed. Only her huge dark eyes burned like live coals, scorching through him, mixing pain, reproach, and a question.
“Everything’s fine. She’ll be moved to the ward soon. You can visit her. Tell them I allowed it.”
He walked slowly down the corridor, feeling her gaze on his back—heavy, final—severing him forever from that summer evening and the alley dappled with gold. In an hour he had to take Kira for an ultrasound. Today he would learn whether it was a son or a daughter. And now that was the only thing that mattered. Aside from, perhaps, luck in the operating room. Everything else was only the shadow of orange blossoms—a sweet, impossible dream.