Mikhail Bulgakov. The Fateful Eggs -
7 >
which there was an ordinary unstained specimen of fresh amoebas. At the very
moment when Persikov was changing the magnification from five to ten
thousand, the door opened slightly, a pointed beard and leather bib
appeared, and his assistant called:
"I've set up the mesentery, Vladimir Ipatych. Would you care to take a
look?"
Persikov slid quickly down from the stool, letting go of the knob
midway, and went into his assistant's room, twirling a cigarette slowly in
his fingers. There, on the glass table, a half-suffocated frog stiff with
fright and pain lay crucified on a cork mat, its transparent micaceous
intestines pulled out of the bleeding abdomen under the microscope.
"Very good," said Persikov, peering down the eye-piece of the
microscope.
He could obviously detect something very interesting in the frog's
mesentery, where live drops of blood were racing merrily along the vessels
as clear as daylight. Persikov quite forgot about his amoebas. He and Ivanov
spent the next hour-and-a-half taking turns at the microscope and exchanging
animated remarks, quite incomprehensible to ordinary mortals.
At last Persikov dragged himself away, announcing:
"The blood's coagulating, it can't be helped."
The frog's head twitched painfully and its dimming eyes said clearly:
"Bastards, that's what you are..."
Stretching his stiff legs, Persikov got up, returned to his laboratory,
yawned, rubbed his permanently inflamed eyelids, sat down on the stool and
looked into the microscope, his fingers about to move the knob. But move it
he did not. With his right eye Persikov saw the cloudy white plate and
blurred pale amoebas on it, but in the middle of the plate sat a coloured
tendril, like a female curl. Persikov himself and hundreds of his students
had seen this tendril many times before but taken no interest in it, and