Samson was deafened by the sound of the sabre striking his father’s head. He caught the glint of the flashing blade out of the corner of his eye and stepped into a puddle. His already dead father’s left hand pushed him aside, so that the next sabre neither quite struck nor quite missed his ginger-haired head, slicing off his right ear. He managed to reach out and catch the falling ear, clutching it in his fist before it hit the gutter. His father, meanwhile, collapsed right onto the road, his head split in two. A horse stamped the body into the ground with a hind leg’s shod hoof before its rider dug in his spurs and charged forward at a dozen townsfolk who were running and leaping into the gutters, realising what awaited them. Five more riders galloped past.
But Samson didn’t see them. He was lying flat against the slope of the gutter, the palm of his left hand open on the wet earth and the fist of his right hand tucked under his head. His wound burned and burned, loudly and sonorously, as if someone were hammering a steel rail right above it. Hot blood poured down his cheek and seeped under his collar.
It started raining again. Samson raised his head. He saw before him the sole of his father’s dark-blue English-made high button shoe, which, though splattered with mud, still looked noble. His father had worn them constantly and carefully for five years, since 1914, when a shoe dealer on Khreshchatyk, spooked by the outbreak of war, had lowered the price, rightly sensing that international hostilities didn’t bode well for the sale of fashionable goods.
Samson didn’t wish to see his dead father in full, with his head split open, so he crawled backwards along the gutter, tightly clutching the severed ear. He got out on the road, but couldn’t straighten up. For a moment he just stood there, thin and hunched over, not allowing himself to turn round. When he at last took a couple of steps, he tripped over a corpse. Samson made his way around the body, but then an awful roar again assaulted his head, pouring like molten tin into the hole that had been his ear. He pressed his fist against the bleeding wound, as if trying to plug it shut, to block the noise that had burst into his head. Then he started running. He was simply running away, but it happened to be in the direction from which he and his father had come, towards Zhylianska Street, where he had been born and raised. Amid the general roar, he made out individual gunshots, but these didn’t stop him. He ran past confused, aimless townsfolk, all of them staring blankly, and when he felt that he could go no further, that his legs were giving out, he spotted a large sign above the door of a two-storey house: DR N. N. VATRUKHIN, SPECIALIST IN DISEASES OF THE EYE.
Samson ran up and pulled the door handle with his left hand. Closed. He knocked with his fist.
“Open up!” he shouted.
Now he pounded the door with both fists.
“What do you want?” a woman’s frightened voice asked from within.
“A doctor!”
“Nikolay Nikolaevich isn’t seeing patients today.”
“He has to! He’s got to see me!”
“Who is it, Tonya?” a rich male baritone asked from deeper within.
“Someone out in the street,” the old woman responded.
“Let them in.”
The door opened a crack and the old woman peeked out at blood-stained Samson. She allowed him inside and immediately slammed the door shut behind him, double bolting it.
“Oh, Lord! Who did that to you?”
“Cossacks. Where’s the doctor?”
“Let’s go …”