The Man Who Walked Like a Bear

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Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov sat in a rough but apparently sturdy wooden chair in ward three on the third floor of the September 1947 Hospital a little over twelve miles outside of Moscow. The September 1947 Hospital got its name from the fact that the city of Moscow was eight hundred years old in the year 1947. The citizens of Moscow had celebrated, cheered, drunk, and wept that their city had survived the war, the Nazis, the antirevolutionary forces.

People had hugged strangers in the street, and Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, an army veteran at age fifteen with a leg badly mangled in an encounter with a German tank, had sat on a stone bench in front of the Pashkov Mansion, which had become the Lenin Library. The leg had been patched, sawed, stretched, sewn, and supported, and Rostnikov had worked dutifully to use the appendage, which had almost been removed by an overworked and underexperienced young doctor in the field.

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