“I can't remember!” I murmured.… “Who is he? What's his occupation?”
“He's an ordinary muzhik from the Karnéev village. He rowed the boat when you were having your spree on the lake.”
“Hm! Perhaps! I can't remember.… I was probably drunk, and somehow by chance.…”
“No, sir, not by chance.… He said you got angry with him about something, you swore at him for a long time, and then getting furious you rushed at him and struck him before witnesses.… Besides, you shouted at him: ‘I'll kill you, you rascal!’ ”
I got very red, and began walking about from corner to corner of the room.
“For the life of me, I can't remember!” I said, trying with all my might to recall what had happened. “I can't remember! You say I ‘got furious.…’ When drunk I become unpardonably nasty!”
“What can you want more!”
“The muzhik evidently wants to make a case of it, but that's not the most important.… The most important is the fact itself, the blows.… Is it possible that I'm capable of fighting? And why should I strike a poor muzhik?”
“Yes, sir! Of course, I could not give him a certificate, but I told him to apply to you.… You'll manage to arrange the matter with him somehow.… The wound is a slight one, but considering the case unofficially a wound in the head that goes as far as the skull is a serious affair.… There are often cases when an apparently trifling wound in the head which had been considered a slight one has ended with mortification of the bone of the skull and consequently with a journey ad patres.”
And, carried away by his subject, “Screw” rose from his seat and, walking about the room along the walls and waving his hands, he began to unload all his knowledge of surgical pathology for my benefit.… Mortification of the bones of the skull, inflammation of the brain, death, and other horrors poured from his lips with endless explanations, macroscopic and microscopic processes, that accompany this misty and, for me, quite uninteresting terra incognita.