“Give me your trousers,” she said in a voice loud enough to be heard above the sound of the water. “I’ll iron them while you’re getting washed. They’ve got really creased.”
She waited for a moment, then repeated what she had said, then listened again to what was going on behind the door. The only thing she could hear was the sound of running water.
The Doctor had been very fond of dictations: he knew a lot of poems, and he would declaim them loudly, striding round the room, while Fariz and Sultan wrote down the text in special exercise books — they each had their own. Then the doctor would check their efforts and go through their mistakes with them.
The Doctor very often recited poems by Pushkin. The Rector remembered some of them for the rest of his life. Unlike Sultan, he went to an A
