“Greetings brother, greetings sister!” cried the groom, and two horses, mighty creatures with powerful flanks, pushed themselves, one after the other, their legs close to their bodies, their shapely heads dipped down like camels’, propelling themselves, with the sheer force of their writhing bodies, through the doorway they completely filled. But they promptly stood upright on their long legs, their coast steaming thickly. “Give him a hand,” I said, and the willing girl hurried to hand the harnesses to the groom, but she was hardly near him when the groom threw his arms around her and shoved his face against hers. She screamed and ran back to me for safety, two red rows of tooth marks imprinted on her cheek. “You brute,” I yelled furiously, “I’ll give you a whipping, I swear,” but then I immediately remember that he is a stranger, that I don’t know where he comes from, and that he is helping me of his own free will when all others have refused me. As if he has read my thoughts, he takes no offense at my threat, but, still busy with the horses, only once turns around to look at me. “Get in,” he then says, and everything is actually ready. I note to myself that I have never ridden behind such a magnificent pair of horses, and climb in cheerfully. “I’ll drive though, you don’t know the way,” I say. “Of course,” he answers, “I’m not going with you at all. I’m staying here with Rosa.” “No,” shrieks Rosa, and runs in the house with a justified presentiment of her inescapable fate. I hear the door chain rattle into place, I hear the lock click shut, I watch as she extinguishes the lights in the hall and in each room as she runs through, trying to hide her whereabouts. “You’re coming with me,” I inform the groom, “or I won’t go, urgent as my journey is. I do not intend to hand the girl over to you in payment for my passage.” “Giddap!” he cries, clapping his hands, and the trap is swept away like a twig in the current. I hear my front door splinter and burst as the groom attacks it, and then my eyes and ears are swamped with a blinding rush of the senses. But even this lasts only a moment, for, as if my patient’s courtyard opens just outside my gate, I am already there. The horses stand quietly; it has stopped snowing and there’s moonlight all around; my patient’s parents hurry out of the house, his sister behind them. I am nearly lifted out of the trap; I glean nothing from their confused babbling. The air in the sickroom is barely breathable; smoke is billowing out of the neglected stove. I need to open a window, but first I must examine the patient. Gaunt but with no fever, neither warm nor cold, with vacant eyes and no shirt, the boy hauls himself out from under the bedding, drapes himself around my neck, and whispers into my ear: “Doctor, let me die.” I take a swift look around the room; nobody heard him. The parents are silently leaning forward, awaiting my diagnosis; the sister has brought a chair for my medical bag. I open the bag and search through my instruments. The boy keeps grabbing at me from the bed to remind me of his request. I seize a pair of pincers, examine them in the candlelight, and throw them back. “Yes,” I think cynically, “the gods help out in cases like these. They send the missing horse, add a second owing to the urgency, and even supply a groom. . . .” Only now do I remember Rosa again. What should I do, how can I save her, how can I pry her from under that groom ten miles away when an uncontrollable team of horses is driving my trap? These horses, who have now somehow slipped their reins, push the windows open from the outside—how, I don’t know. Each pokes its head through a window and, unperturbed by the family’s outcry, they stand gazing at the patient. “I’ll drive back home at once,” I think, as if the horses were summoning me for the return journey, and yet I allow the patient’s sister, who imagines that I’m overcome by the heat, to remove my furs. I am handed a glass of rum, the old man claps me on the shoulder, a familiarity justified by the offer of this treasure. I shake my head; the narrow cast of the old man’s thoughts would sicken me; for this reason only I refuse the drink. The mother beckons me from the side of the bed, I come forward and, while one of the horses neighs loudly to the ceiling, lay my head on the boy’s chest. He shivers under my wet beard. I confirm what I already know: The boy is healthy. He has rather poor circulation and has been saturated with coffee by his anxious mother, but he’s healthy and would be best driven from bed with a firm shove. But I’m not here to change the world, so I let him lie. I am employed by the district and do my duty to the utmost, and perhaps beyond. Though miserably paid, I’m both generous and ready to help the poor. But Rosa still has to be taken care of, and then maybe the boy will get his wish, and I’ll want to die too. What am I doing in this eternal winter? My horse is dead and no one in the village will lend me his. I have to drag my team out of the pigsty; if they didn’t happen to be horses, I would have to drive sows. That’s how it is. And I nod to the family; they know nothing about it, and if they did know, they wouldn’t believe it. It’s easy to write prescriptions, but it’s tougher to really get through to people. Well, that about wraps up my visit; once again I’ve been called out unnecessarily, but I’m used to it. The whole district torments me with the help of my night bell; but that I had to forsake Rosa this time, that beautiful girl who’s lived in my house for years, almost unnoticed by me—this is too much of a sacrifice, and I shall have to try and painstakingly arrange my thoughts with great care and subtlety so as not to attack the family, who even with the best intentions in the world could not restore Rosa to me. But when I shut my bag and gesture for my coat, the family is standing around in a group, the father sniffing at the glass of rum in his hand, the mother probably disappointed in me—why, what do people expect?—tearfully biting her lip, the sister twisting a blood-soaked handkerchief; I am somehow ready to concede that the boy might be sick after all. I go to him, he smiles at me as if I were bringing him the most nourishing broth—alas, now both horses are neighing; the heavens, I’m sure, have ordained that this noise shall facilitate my examination—and now I discover: Yes, the boy is sick. On his right side, by his hip, a wound as big as the palm of my hand has opened up: various shades of rose-red, deeper red further in, paler at the edges, finely grained but with uneven clotting, and open like a surface mine to the daylight—so it looks from a distance. But closer inspection reveals a further complication. Who wouldn’t let out a whistle at the sight of that? Worms, as long and thick as my little finger, rose-red too and blood spattered, caught in the depth of the wound wriggle toward the light with their small white heads and hundreds of tiny legs. Poor boy, you are beyond all help. I have unearthed your great wound; this bloom on your side is destroying you. The family is pleased, they see me being busy; the sister tells the mother, who tells the father, who tells some guests as they come tiptoeing in through the moonlight in the open door, their arms stretched out from their sides for balance. “Will you save me?” the boy whispers, sobbing, completely blinded by the life in his wound. This is typical of the people in my district, always asking the impossible of the doctor. They have lost their old faith; the minister sits at home and picks apart his vestments, one by one, but the doctor is expected to fix everything with his fine surgical hand. Well, if it pleases them; I haven’t foisted myself on them; if they misuse me for sacred ends, I’ll let that pass too; what more could I want, an old country doctor robbed of his maid! And so they come, the family and the village elders, and undress me; a school choir, led by a teacher, stands before the house and sings this verse to a very simple tune:

Then I’m naked, calmly surveying the people, with my fingers in my beard, my head bowed. I am quite composed and feel fairly superior to the situation and remain so, but still it doesn’t help me, for they pick me up by the head and feet and carry me to the bed. They lay me down next to the wall, on the side of the wound. They all leave the room and shut the door, the singing stops, clouds obscure the moon, the bedding lies warm all around me, the heads of the horses sway like shadows in the open windows. “You know,” a voice says in my ear, “I don’t have much confidence in you. You just blew in here, you didn’t even come on your own two feet. Instead of helping me, you’re crowding my deathbed. What I’d love best is to scratch your eyes out.” “You’re right,” I say, “it’s disgraceful. But I am a doctor. What should I do? Believe me, it’s not easy for me either.” “Is that excuse supposed to satisfy me? Oh, I suppose it must. I’m always supposed to be satisfied. I came into the world with a gorgeous wound, that was my sole endowment.” “Young friend,” I say, “your trouble is that you have no sense of perspective. I have been in sickrooms far and wide, and I tell you this: Your wound isn’t that bad—made at angles with two sharp blows of the ax. Many offer up their sides and barely hear the ax in the forest, let alone that it’s coming closer.” “Is it really so, or are you deluding me in my fever?” “It is really so, I give you my word of honor, the word of a public health official.” He took me at my word and lay still. But now it was time for me to think of my own salvation. The horses were faithfully standing their ground. I quickly collected my clothes, furs, and bag, as I didn’t want to waste time dressing. If the horses sped back as fast as they had come, I would more or less be jumping from this bed into mine. One of the horses obediently drew back from the window; I flung my bundle into the trap; the fur coat, flying too far, caught on a hook by only one sleeve. Good enough. I swung myself up onto the horse. The reins trailed loose, one horse was barely hitched to the other, the trap swayed wildly behind, and, last of all, the fur coat dragged in the snow. “Giddap!” I shouted, but the horses didn’t gallop. We crawled slowly through the wasteland of snow like old men; for a long time the sound of the children’s new but incorrect song followed us:

I’ll never reach home at this rate; my thriving practice is lost; my successor will rob me of it, but in vain, for he cannot replace me; that foul groom is raging through my house; Rosa is his victim; I don’t want to think of it anymore. Naked, exposed to the frosts of this most unfortunate era, with my earthly carriage and unearthly horses, old man that I am, I am buffeted about. My fur coat hangs from the back of the trap, but I cannot reach it, and not one of my agile pack of patients lifts a finger. Betrayed! Betrayed! A false ring of the night bell, once answered—it can never be made right.