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avoid all contact with doctors, I threw myself joyfully on the broad chest of the professor...
It was some time since the yellow aeroplane had roared away over the town and turned in the
direction of Lvov, taking with it the professor and his new patient, but I still could not get over my
unexpected encounter. Who would have thought that our favourite speaker and perhaps the most active
of all the Komsomol members, Dmitry Panchenko, would twenty years later become a professor of
medicine!
In the short time we had spent together in the office, the professor had managed to tell me quite a lot
about himself. At the end of the twenties he had left his post as Regional Komsomol Secretary in a town
on the Volga and with a Komsomol authority in his pocket gone to Leningrad to study at the Army
Medical Academy. It had been his good fortune to see Academician Pavlov. From Pavlov personally,
after a lecture, he had heard the famous words that the great physiologist afterwards included in his
behest-letter to the youth of the country: "Consistency, consistency, and still more consistency!"
... As Maremukha and I walked round Zarechye, I recalled yet another incident in my life the
argument I had had long ago with engineer Andrykhevich.
From my far-off youth, on that sunny post-war day, crowded with so many chance encounters, the
angry, bitter face of the old engineer floated into my mind. Even then he had been connected with spies
and counter-revolutionaries of the industrial party who were waiting for the collapse of the Revolution
and hoping to trick Soviet rule. And again I seemed to hear his cunning question: "Where will you get
your educated people from? Going to teach yourselves, are you? 'One, two see how she goes!' I doubt
it... I doubt it very much!..."
Petka and I walked to the Old Estate where he had spent his childhood. But there, too, we found
only ruins. The little house where Petka's father and mother had lived before the war was a heap of
reddish rubble. Goose-foot and thistles watched over the ruins. Evidently the house had been destroyed
by artillery fire in the first year of the war, when Hitler's armies, after capturing Ternopol, had advanced
through our town towards Proskurov.
And the tall gates outside Yuzik's cottage had gone too. How many times had we stood by those
gates yelling: "Yuzik! Yuzik! Weasel!"
At last he would appear, our stern quick-footed ataman, tapping a long stick as he walked, and we
would set out for a raid on the orchards of Podzamche or to bathe near Paradise Gate. Never again
would he respond to our call, our dear Yuzik...
Where their cottage had once stood a grey enemy blockhouse, quite recently built, rose from a deep
clay pit. Twisted wire protruded from the concrete. The narrow horizontal embrasure of the blockhouse
looked out to the East.
Evidently it had been one of the strong points built by the enemy on the Volyno-Podelian plateau.
Neither this blockhouse, nor hundreds of others like it had been able to save the Nazis!
Maremukha climbed on to the roof of the blockhouse, glanced down the ventilator that stuck out of
the top like a railway engine's whistle, spat down it, and tapping his heel on the concrete, said: "Our guns
have blasted out bigger things than this. Ever seen tree stumps being stubbed in the woods? That's just
about what they did with these blockhouses."
Depressed by the sight of the ruins that surrounded us, we wandered in silence back to the Old
Fortress through the suburb of Tatariski. It was guarded by a tall watch-tower rising on the bank of the
Smotrich.
In the purple light of the sunset the Old Fortress looked particularly impressive silhouetted against the
evening sky. Half way across the bridge we stopped. Resting his elbows on the oak rail, Maremukha
gazed down at Zarechye. From this high point the grey blockhouse looked quite small, like the turret of a
tank buried in the earth.
"I say, Vasya," Petka said suddenly. "Do you remember our neighbour, the daughter of the chief
engineer at the works? You were rather interested in her at one time... She went away to Leningrad,
didn't she? You didn't see anything of her there, I suppose?"
"Of course I did, Petka!" I replied, " I don't mind admitting to you frankly that after I had got to know
Angelika I did everything I could to help her become a new person. In the days when she broke with her
family and went away to Leningrad against their will, I helped her. When H went into the army, we wrote
to each other. In her letters she suggested I should come to Leningrad when my service was over. And
that's what I did. I took a job at a plant there and' settled down. We met as friends. I remember it as if it
were yesterday; we went to the Philharmonic Hall together and heard Chaikovsky's Sixth Symphony.
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