- Doctor Tagabat, what do you think?
The doctor (emotional):
- Kill them!
Andryusha was watching, a little bit scared of the doctor and hesitating. Then, with shivering hands, he uncertainly says:
- I don’t agree with you, doctor.
- You don’t agree? – And thunder of laughter echoed in the kings chambers.
I was waiting for this laugh. It has always happened. But every time I shudder and it seems that I walk to the cold quagmire. The rapidity of my thought reaches peak.
And at that time a vision of my mother appears in my mind…
- …“To kill”???
And my mother watches me crestfallenly.
… On the town’s tower beyond the pass is the anxiously ringing copper again. It is chime. Dark on the west. In a noble house barely heard deaf bombardment. Someone informs us by phone: we have gone on counterattack. Behind the curtain in the glass doors glow: there are burning villages, burning fields and dogs are howling in corners. There is silence and the beating of people’s hearts in the town.
... Doctor Tagabat has pushed a button. Then a menial brings old wines on a tray. After that, the menial goes and his steps disappear.
I am looking at the candelabrum, but my sight involuntarily goes back to Doctor Tagabat and the watchmen. They hold the wine bottles and they drink it meanly and wildly.
I think: “It has to be”.
But Andryusha nervously paces from place to place, all time about to say something. I know what he thinks: he wants to say that it is foul, that communards don’t act like that, that all of this is Bacchanaliya etc.
Oh, he so amazing, this communard Andryusha!
But when doctor Tagabat dropped the last bottle on the velvet carpet and clearly wrote his surname under resolution “to kill”, I was unexpectedly taken by calamity. This doctor with broad forehead and bold, with cold mind and heart of stone – he is, he my hopeless master, my animals instinct. And I, the head of this black commune’s court-martial, - I’m nobody in his hands, I, who surrendered to the will of wild element.
“But where is the escape?”
- What escape?? – I didn’t see the escape.
Then in my mind I see the whole dark history of civilization, and wandering people, and centuries, and time…
- But I didn’t see the escape!
In fact, doctor Tagabat was right.
… Andryusha signed beneath the resolution quickly, but the degenerate was staring at the letters with satisfaction.
I thought: “If the doctor is an evil genius, then the degenerate is a killer”.
But I thought: “Gosh, common! Does he look like a killer? It’s for him in stressful time I have been wrote an anthem.”
