Old Men at Midnight

by Chaim Potok

  “I am not a young man and will soon need a toilet,” he said quietly.

  “Sit and think. I want the names of everyone in the group.”

  I left him with a guard and decided to go to the dining room for some lunch. The small elevator with its iron prisonlike door was crowded. Six of us stood inside, silent and sullen. The dining room was nearly full, everyone tense, avoiding conversation. One heard clearly the clink of dishes, the thin sliding sounds of silverware. Something enormous was brewing; after so many years of this, you learned to smell it in the air and feel it on your skin. The arrest of Jewish and Russian doctors, which had begun in the early summer during the trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, was now taking on the proportions of a tidal wave. Our people were out almost every night hauling them in. Mostly Jews, some Russians. Bewildered, terrified; trying for some semblance of dignity; lords of medicine, unaccustomed to being treated that way. Surgeons, internists, neurologists, pediatricians, ophthalmologists, pathologists, psychiatrists, urologists, laryngologists. Word had come to us from on high: The Jewish doctors were killers in white coats; they were murdering people on the operating table, poisoning them with drugs, had even drawn some Russian doctors into their conspiracy. Our prison cells were becoming crowded with the great names of Soviet medicine. The Boss wanted confessions, a trial.

  Riding the elevator back to my office, I wondered who was now caring for the patients of all those imprisoned doctors. I felt tired, sweaty. My left arm throbbed, the fingers cold, as if emptied of their supply of blood.

  When I returned to the office, I found the doctor still in the chair, looking a little fatigued. I dismissed the guard.

  It was hot. I removed my jacket, loosened my tie, and sat on the edge of the desk.

  “Well?” I said.

  “It is necessary that I use a toilet,” he said quietly.

  “It is necessary that I get an answer to my question.”

  “I will not help you fabricate a group.”

  “One way or another you will sign a confession and give us names. I would rather not have to subject you to our various forms of persuasion. You have a wife, children, grandchildren. Your refusal to cooperate with us will fall heavily not only upon you but upon them as well. What I will do now is let you go to the toilet and then return you to your cell so that you can have more time to think.”

  “Comrade Colonel, you appear to me to be ill.”

  “What?”

  “Your eyes are toxic. I believe you have a fever.”

  “Comrade Doctor-Prisoner Koriavin, go to the toilet.”

  I buzzed for the guards and they took him away.

  Alone in the office, I sat behind the desk for a while doing paperwork, then signed myself out of the building and went home through a heavy fall of snow.

  I had no appetite, slept poorly, but was back at my desk at nine the next morning. I scanned the newspapers, opened the safe, took out my papers, looked briefly at the arrest list, placed Doctor Koriavin’s file before me on the desk, and called to have him brought in.

  I motioned the guards out of the office. The doctor sat straight and poised. A Russian worried about anti-Semitism, warning me. Strange. Stubble on his face now. The tired look. No picnic, those cells. Before the Revolution his family might have been members of the nobility. Now, a hated enemy. I must finish this quickly.

  “Good morning. I trust you are being treated reasonably well in our hotel.”

  “I have lived and eaten in worse places.” His voice had weakened. It was dry, hoarse. The heat in the cells did that sometimes. But his eyes were bright and his features still wore their look of open generosity. “I was in Leningrad during the siege,” he said.

  I was about to ask him where he had served but drew back from further conversation. No more time for small talk. The general was pressing me for results.

  “So were about two million others,” I said. “We will now resume our talk.”

  “As I told you yesterday, Comrade Colonel, every question you put to me, I will answer truthfully. I have nothing to hide.”

  “Very well, then. Tell me if you know the following people.”

  We went through lists of doctors. He knew most of them professionally, some socially.

  “Is it not true that you, together with these and these, were involved in a conspiracy to assassinate our heads of state through the use of improper pharmaceuticals?”

  “My duty is to heal, not to kill. I leave the killing to soldiers and police and politicians.”

  “I suggest that you stop this talk, otherwise it will end badly for you.”

  “I have no expectations that this will end well for me.”

  “You have a family.”

  “Comrade Colonel, if you must know the truth, I do not want my family to grow up in this country. Now that I can see what is really about to happen here, I know that this country has nothing to offer them.”

  “You don’t care for the health and safety of your own children and grandchildren? Who has the sick mind here?”

  “Are you telling me that you can guarantee their health and safety? Why should I even want their health and safety? So that in twenty years one of my grandchildren can sit where I am sitting now and be put through another such experience?”

  I removed my truncheon from a desk drawer and held it in my right hand. He stared at it.

  I said in a low voice, “I will strike my desk a number of times and shout at you. Cry out in a loud voice each time.”

  He stared at me in amazement.

  “A loud voice,” I said through clenched teeth.

  He nodded, still staring.

  I struck the desk repeatedly and he cried out. I shouted, “You will confess. Save yourself and your family and confess!”

  I struck the desk again. His face was flushed. Astonishment and amusement played about his mouth and eyes.

  I stopped. A sharp pain had lodged above my eyes. I stepped back to my chair and sank into it.

  “Think about that on your flesh,” I said after a moment, feeling the tightness in my left arm. “Go back to your cell and think about what it will feel like on your arms and legs.”

  The guards came for him.

  I made some notes in his file and closed my eyes.

  They brought him back later that day and he sat quietly in the chair. He was beginning to look scruffy. His trousers and jacket lay upon him creased and rumpled. He gazed slowly about the room. On one wall hung a framed picture of Stalin; on another, of Dzerzhinsky. He said softly, “Is it permissible for me to speak?”

  I nodded.

  He paused, regarding me intently out of his calm gray eyes. “I mean, is it permissible to speak?”

  I felt myself mesmerized by him, and nodded again.

  “I know his mind,” he said in a low voice.

  Stop him, I told myself. But I said nothing.

  “I was his doctor for years. No one knows him better than I do. I know the inside of his head.”

  We sat there looking at each other in silence. Outside the window it was growing dark. An icy gale blew snow in white waves through the streets.

  He said quietly, “I will offer you a conjecture as to what he is planning.”

  I felt myself staring at him through the cloud and the buzzing noise in my head.

  “At best, he regards doctors as bourgeois intellectuals; at worst, he looks upon us with psychopathic dread, because he stands naked in our presence. He is afraid that we will know him too well. And he is absolutely correct. I would conjecture that he plans to do away with all of you.”

  “All of—?”

  “The Jews.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “Every last one of you.”

  “Enough.”

  “Sooner or later, he will finish what Hitler started.”

  “I said, enough!”

  “I speak as a Russian who cares for his country.”

  “None of this can be of any help to you.” />
  “Probably through deportation. He has already deported more than half a dozen nationalities. He will deport all of you too.”

  “Listen to me—”

  “A hue and cry throughout the country over the diabolical Jewish doctors, and then a mass deportation of all the Jews—”

  “Enough!”

  “—with the support of the entire Soviet people.”

  “What you just told me can get you ten years in a camp!”

  “Comrade Colonel, I am repaying you for your kindness to me this morning.”

  “I’ll give you one more night to think about my question. Tomorrow there will be no charade.”

  He said abruptly, “You look decidedly unwell.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you in any discomfort?”

  “I have a slight headache.”

  “You should see a doctor,” he said with a faint smile.

  The guards took him back to his cell.

  I ate without appetite that evening, went with a woman to the theater, but left her shortly afterward and returned home to a night of bad dreams, none of which I remembered clearly the next morning.

  I had the doctor brought to one of our more austere interrogation rooms. He looked weary and less sure of himself. His face was sallow, his gray eyes blurred.

  I said, “Doctor Koriavin, the preliminaries are over.”

  He said, “With all respect, Comrade Colonel, for you they have just begun.”

  “Give me the names.”

  “There are no names. There is no group. The man is old and sick. He sees conspiracies everywhere. He refuses to take the medicines prescribed for him.”

  “The names!”

  “I tell you there are no names. He is delusional. With medication, he may live another two or three years. Without—who knows?”

  “Listen, you’re a doctor, I have great consideration for doctors, and I don’t want to raise my hand to you. But you’re leaving me with no choice.”

  “I am grateful. You leave me with some hope for our country. Please consider this. He recently mobilized all of Soviet medicine to find a cure for his hypertension. Then he has his best doctors arrested. Tell me, is that the act of a sane person?”

  “Enough!”

  “Where did you get that scar?”

  “What?”

  He was looking at my arm. I had removed my jacket and rolled up my shirtsleeves.

  “It’s an old war wound. The first war.”

  “Was it recently exposed to the sun?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will give you some medical advice. Don’t expose an old scar like that too long to the sun.”

  The arm was strong, ridged with veins, the scar like a white-and-pink range of low hills about six inches long and in some places half an inch wide.

  “You’re very fortunate that you didn’t lose that arm. In war it’s more practical sometimes to remove an arm than to take the time to treat it.”

  “A Doctor Rubinov treated it.”

  “Rubinov?”

  “Pavel Rubinov.”

  “Indeed? The hand surgeon.”

  “You know him?”

  “Of course I know him. For years I referred patients to him. He is probably in one of your cells.”

  I stared at him.

  “He treated the arm of Comrade Stalin.”

  After a long moment I said, “Listen, you will cry out and scream, just as you did yesterday in my office. Understood?”

  Later I sat at my desk, looking through the arrest lists of the past days, which I had scanned too quickly before, and found his name. Pavel Rubinov. The one in charge of his investigation was Colonel Rudenko, a methodical and ruthless man. There would be no charades in his interrogation room.

  My head throbbed. I looked at my left hand, saw with alarm the way the fingers trembled, and left the office and went home.

  I drank myself into a stupor that night and fell asleep in my clothes in one of the easy chairs, and woke suddenly in cold terror to the sounds of someone knocking on my door. “One minute, one minute,” I called out, straightening my clothes and running a hand through my hair. I opened the door.

  The hallway was deserted. Blue-black shadows clung to the walls and doors. I stood there a long moment staring into the darkness. I closed the door and collapsed back into the chair and fell asleep.

  The next morning I went to our infirmary. The doctor who looked me over said I had the flu. “A mild case, two, maybe three days. Take aspirin, go home, sleep it off.” Four days later I was still sick but returned to work, and the next day went again to the infirmary. The first doctor was not there and a different one examined me and asked some questions. “Probably you picked up something on your vacation,” he said. “A Black Sea bug.” He gave me some pills.

  That day we started Doctor-Prisoner Koriavin on the “conveyor.” There was nothing I could have done to prevent it.

  In a room nearby, Doctor-Prisoner Pavel Rubinov was undergoing interrogation at the hands of Colonel Rudenko. Not yet the “conveyor” for him. Shivering with fever, I went home early.

  I lay in bed two days, sweating, then saw another doctor, who said I had a minor blood disturbance that would resolve itself by the end of the month when a certain constellation in the sky reached a certain alignment. By then we were in the dead of winter, Moscow lay deep in snow, Doctor-Prisoner A. M. Koriavin was writing his confession, and Doctor-Prisoner Pavel Rubinov was on the “conveyor.”

  It was January. My headache and fever had disappeared for two days at the end of December and then returned; the fever was now low-grade, annoying, on occasion causing me the shivers. We were still arresting doctors. The work felt endless, exhausting. In the provinces they were purging Party people—most of them with Jewish names, I noticed. There is an old Russian saying: When fingernails are being pulled out in Moscow, fingers are being chopped off in the provinces. That saying one can take at full value.

  On Dzerzhinsky Square there were chilling rumors of an impending major shakeup of our department because we hadn’t detected the plot by ourselves and had begun to act only after receiving a letter from some informer, an X-ray technician, a woman. Someone I knew who worked in our archives told me they had started to review old files. “Winnowing and threshing,” he said, giving me a sad look. Back in my office I phoned General Razumkov. “Don’t get heated,” he said. “I won’t ask who slipped you that piece of information, but it has nothing to do with you. You get the highest commendation, especially after the job you did with Koriavin.” I had no idea what he meant and later learned that he immediately called for a meeting of the archives personnel and the next morning raged and stormed at them for their big mouths. Then I remembered with a thunderous shock that decades ago he had put into my file the old letter signed by Zinoviev. Zinoviev, whom Stalin had hated as much as he did Trotsky and who’d been executed after his public trial back in the thirties. A favor from Doctor Pavel Rubinov to get me back safely to my village; a payment of a sort for having taught him to read some Hebrew prayers. I had no idea if the letter represented a threat to me. Doctor Pavel Rubinov. I pictured him in his white coat and trim red beard and gold-rimmed spectacles, and I wondered if he had continued to read Hebrew.

  After three days of normal temperature my fever returned, along with the headache. I did not go back to the infirmary but took aspirins instead.

  Black ice and filthy slush encumbered the streets. On a freezing day in mid-January I opened a copy of Pravda, saw the large headline, ARREST OF A GROUP OF SABOTEUR-DOCTORS, and slowly read the story about the recent discovery of a “terrorist group of doctors who had made it their aim to cut short the lives of active public figures of the Soviet Union through medical treatment involving sabotage.” The story went on through ten paragraphs. It listed nine doctors, six of them clearly Jewish, and claimed that “documentary evidence, investigations, the conclusions of medical experts, and the confessions of the arrested”—I paused over tha
t, and had a vision of Doctor Koriavin—“have established that the criminals, who were secret enemies of the people, sabotaged the treatment of patients and doomed them by wrong treatment.” The editorial referred to the doctors as “monsters and murderers,” as a “gang of anthropoid animals,” and pointed out—I turned cold reading the words—that “some of our Soviet organs and their leaders abandoned vigilance and became infected with gullibility. The Agencies of State Security did not detect in time the existence of a saboteur-terrorist organization among the doctors.”

  In the building on Dzerzhinsky Square, we walked around avoiding one another’s eyes and kept busy: more doctors were being brought in. They were busy in the provinces, too. Then some of the Jewish personnel in the building began to disappear. One day here, the next suddenly vanished. No one talked openly about them. I bumped into General Razumkov in a corridor. He looked enormous, bulging out of his clothes. “Don’t worry so much,” he told me. “After the job you did on that Russian doctor, why are you worried?” I stared at his corpulent back as he waddled away and had no idea what he was talking about.

  The weather was terrible in Moscow that winter. Sleet, wind, snow. Unending snow. Air so bitter cold it felt solid: ceaseless blasts from a frozen hell.

  My fever and headaches kept reappearing and vanishing. The newspaper reports about Jewish doctors had become nearly frenzied. Nine time zones of papers and journals were writing day after day about “monsters disguised as doctors,” about “counterrevolutionary wreckers,” about “people we don’t need in Russia,” about “child murderers.” In a marketplace in Moscow I heard a drunk shouting: “The Yids tried to poison Stalin!” A Russian woman I invited out to dinner one night kissed my fingers one by one, put my hand on her heart, and pressed it against her. She was telling me she didn’t believe what she was reading about the Jewish doctors.

  Strangely, five or six times in the weeks between the middle of January and the middle of February I heard banging on the door to my apartment. But no one was ever there. Only the deep blue-black darkness in the hallway. And the pounding in my chest. And the cold metal taste of terror in my mouth.

  In our building on Dzerzhinsky Square we began to hear about a letter that leading Jews were being told to sign. The letter was in the office of Pravda. Something about an appeal to Comrade Stalin to save the obstinate and unruly Jews of the Soviet Union from the deserved wrath of the Soviet people by shipping them all to a distant region of the Motherland where they could dwell in peace and learn to become proper Soviet citizens.