We stopped. Steps. One step … and I should see the figures of the doctors in their white aprons and the enormous dumb Bell.
With force, with some sort of an inner screw, at length I succeeded in tearing my eyes away from the glass beneath my feet, and I noticed the golden letters, “Medical Bureau.” Why did he bring me here rather than to the Operation Department? Why did he spare me?—about this I did not even think at that moment. I made one jump over all the steps, firmly closed the door behind me and took a very deep breath, as if I had not breathed since morning and as if my heart had not beaten for the same length of time, as if only now I started to breathe and only now there opened a sluice in my chest. …
Inside there were two of them, one a short specimen with heavy legs, his eyes like the horns of a bull tossing the patients up, the other extremely thin with lips like sparkling scissors, a nose like a blade—it was the same man who … I ran to him as to a dear friend, straight over close to the blade, and muttered something about insomnia, dreams, shadows, yellow sand. The scissors-lips sparkled and smiled.
“Yes, it is too bad. Apparently a soul has formed in you.”
A soul?—that strange ancient word that was forgotten long ago. …
“Is it … v-very dangerous?” I stuttered.
“Incurable,” was the cut of the scissors.
“But more specifically, what is it? Somehow I cannot imagine—”
“You see … how shall I put it? Are you a mathematician?”
“Yes.”
“Then you see … imagine a plane, let us say this mirror. You and I are on its surface. You see? there we are, squinting our eyes to protect ourselves