The following morning the guest checked out of the Hotel Europa and took a motor taxi to a wooden house in the Walburska quarter. To the front of this house, at Lepecky 6, there soon was affixed a bronze-colored plaque:

I. C. Trumpelman
Practicing Physician

That street, as it happened, was a lucky choice. Many of the houses on it were occupied by industrious and progressive Jews: the managers of the spinning mills, the owner of a furniture factory, lens makers, and such. Poles and ethnic Volksdeutschers, the sort who read newspapers, who wore wristwatches, lived in the rest. Moreover, from morning to sundown hundreds of men and women passed in front of Number 6 on their way to the nearby Rumkowsky Geyser—in fact not a geyser, but a branch of the municipal baths. Of course, such people, so hygiene-conscious, would notice the neat new sign on the wall—the only such sign, by the way, except for old Doctor Fosduk’s, in the entire quarter. You will not be surprised to learn that the new doctor thrived.

Trumpelman rented three rooms in the old wooden house, one upstairs, in which he lived, and two on the ground floor: a surgery and a room for waiting. This last place always contained, for adults, the latest illustrated magazines from Berlin, from Warsaw; and for children there was a round bowl with two fish. The young Volksdeutschers especially would sit with their fists on their thighs, like little men, and stare at the creatures behind the glass. Some of them would knock on the sides of the bowl, or blow on the surface of the water, trying to make the minnows come from their porcelain castle.

The doctor treated most of his patients with pills, either long white ones, or green ones, which were round. How he knew which color to give which patient was a secret; sometimes he would insist that the very man he had previously given the green capsules should now take a white one, or vice versa. “Swallow!” he’d say, and you had to do it, on the spot. Trumpelman had another skill, which in our town was completely unheard of. Without warning, he would shoot out his left hand and take a sick man by the neck; then with his right hand he would twist the fellow’s head like the knob of a door. If the person resisted, the doctor got angry. He would grasp his spectacle frames with one hand, so they wouldn’t fall off; with his other hand he would strike the table. “What’s the matter with you? Are you the expert? Look, I am getting upset!” These different techniques—the pills, which did make people feel better, and the neck-twist, which worked wonders, too—were thought to be typical of medical science in Vilna, though there was no diploma from that northern city, or any other, upon the wall.

From the first days of his practice this physician cared for large numbers of children. There were not then in Central Europe—and perhaps there are few today—specialists in juvenile diseases; yet people brought to this stranger, a man with a foreign lisp, their little ones, even from distant parts of the city. “He treats my Meilech as if he were his own” was how one woman put it, and all the others in the waiting room nodded their round Polish or square Volksdeutscher or long Jewish heads. Trumpelman never gave pills to these children, or wrenched their necks. Instead, he had a box of hollow sweets, which, after you sucked them for a time, suddenly flooded your mouth with a syrup that turned your tongue, your lips, even the world before your eyes, the deepest raspberry red.