“Take down a report,” he said. His tongue would hardly obey him, so parched was it with thirst.
The policeman entered the house after him.
“Wait!” said Slim, more with the movement of his head than in words. He saw a glass jug of water standing on the table and the coolness of the water had studded the jug with a thousand pearls.
Slim drank like an animal which finds drink on coming from the desert. He put down the jug and shivered. A short shudder passed through him.
He turned around and saw the man he had brought with him lying on a bed over which a young doctor was bending.
The lips of the sick man were moistened with wine. His eyes stood wide open, staring up at the ceiling, tears upon tears running gently and incessantly from the corners of his eyes, down over his temples. It was as though they had nothing to do with the man—as though they were trickling from a broken vessel and could not stop trickling until the vessel had run quite empty.
Slim looked the doctor in the face; the latter shrugged his shoulders. Slim bent over the prostrate man.
“Georgi,” he said in a low voice, “can you hear me?”
The sick man nodded; it was the shadow of a nod.
“Do you know who I am?”