Marusich stared for a moment, then said, “Look at that! The governor of Odessa!”
The two men embraced each other warmly. I took it for a joke, of course, but I soon found out that both men had indeed been the equivalent of mayor in those considerable cities, and because they had stayed in their posts running their cities during the Nazi occupation, they had been convicted of collaboration and treason and sentenced to twenty years. I made friends with Marusich and discovered that he was still in politics: in camp he was one of the key figures in the Western Ukrainian “community,” and a sort of underground leader who wielded a good deal of power.
He was very grateful for the careful attention I gave him and told me that if I ever needed a little muscle to help me over a trouble spot here or there, just to call on him. I did not really expect to see him again, because he was in the KTR camp, but it was always possible that we would turn up on the same work assignment when the sad day came for me to leave the hospital, as I was sure it would; so I was glad of this offer and told him warmly and sincerely that I hoped we would meet again. He was a strong man. His lung healed quickly and I was sorry to see him go, because he was a source of cheer in the gloomy ward. As it happened, I would see him again, and soon, and his generosity would prove to be very helpful to me.
There was a crazy Kazakh named Shargai in our camp. Shargai always sang in a very loud voice, day and night, and he seldom slept. Although he kept his barracks-mates awake most of the night, there was nothing they could do about it. If they asked him to stop he looked at them in a way that indicated blank incomprehension. If they tried to shut him up by physical force they got hurt, because although Shargai was good-tempered he could not stand being manhandled, and he was huge and powerfully built. So the prisoners all complained to the administration, and the administration decided Shargai was insane and had to be hospitalized. That made him our problem.
We discovered that he had two passions: smoking crude, strong Kazakh tobacco, and helping other prisoners, especially those in trouble. He hated the administration and the Organs terribly, and assumed that any of their victims was deserving of a great deal of sympathy. But Shargai could not understand that to stop singing might be considered a way of helping: after all, he had a beautiful voice and knew all kinds of soulful Kazakh songs, and a lot of Chinese songs as well, having served briefly with the Kuomintang army.
I did two things. I canvassed all the Kazakhs I knew in camp, explained that we had one of their brothers in dire circumstances in the hospital, and said that the one thing they could do to help the poor fellow was to make sure that he had lots of tobacco. They responded like true brothers and, although the hospital began to take on a heavy smell from this tenacious smoke, we had periods of quiet.
I then discovered that one way Shargai liked to help was to carry things. If Nye Russki had a very heavy corpse, or there was firewood to be carried, or anything where great strength was needed, Shargai volunteered and was silently happy as long as his muscles were straining to lift and balance his load.
I decided to make him the water boy. We had no running water in the hospital.
All the water had to be carried by hand from the central reservoir. So I explained to Shargai that there was a serious need for fresh water all the time, that we were always short and the patients were too weak and the staff too busy to carry it. He was delighted. With water be would save all the lives in the hospital. If one pail of water would help a little, one hundred pails would help one hundred times as much. His eyes gleamed with the excitement of saving all those lives by carrying water. Ten hours a day he carried water and at night collapsed exhausted and slept like a dead man. We had far too much water and had to detail ambulatory patients to carry it back. But nobody minded that because Shargai was silent all night, and although he sang in short, panting breaths as he ran back and forth with his pails, it was not very loud and he was never in one place long enough to bother anyone.
Shargai had a vision, a premonition about Stalin. Although there had been a few rumors of ill health in the Kremlin, there was no indication of anything seriously wrong with Stalin and few prisoners wasted energy worrying or hoping he would die. There had been one strange occurrence a few months earlier, in the fall of 1952. From time to time there were political indoctrination meetings held by the MVD, and into one of these meetings one evening burst the strange old fellow who ran the so-called boiler room, where you went to pick up hot water for your tea. He had a package under his arm. He shouted out, “The Soviet Power is overthrown. Stand at attention, you!” This was how he shouted at the captain in charge of the meeting, in a very commanding peremptory, confident way. “I am in charge now. Take this parcel immediately to the Comrade Leader Josif Stalin. From now on I am in command!”
Because of the presence of this strange old man, who had been a senior member of the Duma years and years ago, the captain for a moment was so confused and so conditioned to obey authority that he actually sprang to his feet and saluted and took the parcel that was to go to the Leader. Then he soon realized that he was dealing with a madman, and restored order and got the old man back to his boiler room. But there was something that struck everyone there and spread through the camp, about the phrase the Soviet Power is overthrown. People took it as some sort of omen.
The case of Shargai was much more arresting. Adarich and the other doctors often met in the evenings for political discussions. Needless to say, they were not much like the session that our boiler room man burst in upon. These talks were carried on at a frank and pretty intellectual level. The other two feldshers, who had virtually no education, and the orderlies, who were nearly illiterate, did not attend. But Shargai heard of these meetings and begged to be allowed to sit in. It was explained to him that he must not sing or the doctors would not be able to hear each other clearly.
Shargai had a great respect for the doctors. You could say that he loved them, or us, for anyone with a white coat was included in his worship of the magic of medicine. He loved everyone in the hospital. He exuded love. But for the doctors it was nearly adoration. Because we were fond of him we let him attend the meetings. We did not know then that he had a huge brain tumor, but we did know that his mental condition was weakening. For long periods he was blank and uncomprehending. He was physically still powerful, however, and as winter came on I added coal and extra firewood to his burden-carrying. The extra demand pleased him, but we could see the blanks and the memory lapses increasing in frequency, and the joyousness of the man beginning to slip away.
In the meetings he was, usually silent. Sometimes, however, he would deferentially ask leave to speak, and then make an observation usually based on his experience in China with the Kuomintang. His comments were often not very relevant but it was clear that stored away in that disorganized and gradually disintegrating brain there was a great deal of experience and a great many shrewd observations about the ways of men.
In the middle of February Shargai came around to each member of the discussion group in turn, very politely, to say that he had an important announcement to make and to ask, please, and very, very deferentially, if he might be allowed to make it at the next assembly. Everyone was very fond of poor Shargai by now, and nobody would think of refusing him, even though we were all quite certain it would be a strange and probably incomprehensible announcement.
We were very, very wrong.
About nine thirty at night he came to the little gathering. He sat down and looked around at each face very gravely.
“My dear, dear friends,” he said. “I am so grateful that you have allowed me to come and make this important statement. It is a very important statement.”
Shkarin said, just a trifle impatiently, “Well, that’s all right, Shargai, just get on with it now.”
We all immediately felt embarrassed, because Shargai said, “I know that I am going to die very shortly. Very, very soon. A few days at the most.”
His manner was quite lucid. He went on.
“
But that is not my announcement. My statement is that soon after my death the lives of all you prisoners will change radically, drastically, for the better. In fact, before many years after my death, all of you will be free men. But as soon as I am dead, things will begin to change for you.”
We all humored him. “Well, Shargai, that’s wonderful, tell us more about it.
What will cause the change?”
Shargai said, “There will be a single occurrence in the Soviet Union of the greatest importance. It will take place soon after my death.”
“Well, Shargai, what occurrence? Is it connected with your death?”
For a long time he would not tell us. Then he said, “Well, my dear friends, you have been so kind to me and I love you all so well, and I shall be so sorry to leave you all ...” Tears formed and ran down his long, bony nose and dripped onto his huge moustache, and he had to cough and wipe his nose and collect himself before he could go on.
“The event is this. Almost as soon as I am gone, you will learn that the Leader is dead!”
Even though it was preposterous, there was something very powerful in the way Shargai told us this fantasy, and no one knew quite what to say. I do not recall who broke the silence, but I do know that we spent the rest of the evening humoring the poor man because we knew he was right about his own death anyway. Any serious political discussion was forgotten for the evening.
A few days later Shargai started to rave and to complain, when he was lucid, of terrible pains in his head. His eyes protruded and he looked wild and terrifying. But even in his delirium, that deep love of his fellow man and need for their love in return would show itself in the way his iron hand would grasp my arm when I tried to comfort him with pills or an injection.
A day or two later he lapsed into a coma. We kept him alive more than forty-eight hours after that. His lungs were bad from a lifetime of that terrible tobacco. His breathing became stertorous and he brought up a lot of foam. At ten thirty at night on the second day, during my duty, he died. I was with him for the last few hours. I was relieved to see him out of his pain.
We were supposed to wait at least three hours, before sending a body to the morgue. I had checked Shargai’s eyes by pressing them to see the cat’s eye that shows death has come. The body was soon cold. About one o’clock, Vanya came and said he wanted to go to sleep, and couldn’t he wake up Nye Russki and take Shargai to the morgue? I said, “Well, it’s half an hour early, but he’s stone cold now. Sure, go ahead.”
They carried him out of the warm hospital into the freezing morgue. It was a bitter cold night. They took him by the outside route and I could hear their boots squeak on the snow.
I heard the morgue door open. It was a very silent night. Suddenly screams came from the morgue. The two men came running by the window and burst in on me almost speechless with fright. “He’s come back to life. He’s breathing! He has a strong pulse!”
I knew that could not be so. And yet there was always something spooky about Shargai; despite the fact that I had satisfied myself that he was dead and cold, I felt very strange. I ran to the morgue. Shargai’s eyes were half-open and froth and vapor were coming regularly from his mouth. I fell on him and grabbed his hand.
Dead cold. No pulse.
Of course, what had happened was that changing from the heat of the room where the poor man died to the subzero morgue had caused constrictions to force air and fluid from his chest. Vanya, who knew no medicine, had felt for a pulse with his thumb and found his own wildly beating heart.
I went back to the warmth of the hospital relieved, nearly relieved enough to laugh, and somehow moved to sadness for Shargai, and thinking how he had said so fervently that things would soon change for us.
Shargai died on February 28. Three days later, on March 3, there were cries and yells of celebration throughout the camp; news had come in from somewhere that Stalin was dead. Two days later, March 5, we got the official announcement.
Shargai had prophesied. The Leader was dead. And within a very short time things indeed began to change very much for us.
Chapter 23
Lavrenov came into the hospital at midnight. He had never done that before. He was highly agitated. He said, “What are you prisoners trying to accomplish?”
I said, “What do you mean?”
“Well, there must be a plot or an uprising something. There is a whole unit of MVD surrounding the camp with machine guns!”
It came out later that there was a rumor among the MVD that Lavrenti Beria, who actually did try to take over the reins of Soviet power, had arranged to make some sort of special signal to all camp inmates to rise up simultaneously. It was as crazy a bit of speculation as you could imagine.
Rumor spread wildly in camp. It is amazing how much of it was more or less accurate. We heard about Marshal Zhukov coming into Moscow and surrounding the Kremlin with tanks and subduing the MVD forces. We heard tales of Malenkov being imprisoned by Beria. We heard all kinds of speculation about the causes of Stalin’s death.
The armed forces around our camp were withdrawn soon, but there were rumors of mutinies in camps all over the Gulag Archipelago, which is the name ironically given to the entire network of Soviet prisons and labor camps: islands in a sea of oppression. The only immediately discernible result was a sense of anxiety among all the custodial personnel. In some cases this was shown by an unbelievable demonstration of friendliness toward the prisoners. After all, we might soon be freed, in masses, and it would be very unhealthy to be remembered by seventeen million ex-prisoners as a tyrant and a sadist.
There was an MGB commandant in Camp Number Three, not far from ours. Even before Stalin died, when the first rumors began to seep through the walls that he might be sick, this man Tsukerashvili, astonished the prisoners who had known only the hardest treatment from him by going around shaking hands with them, calling them comrade, offering to get tobacco for them from town if they ran short, reminding them to put in a good word for him if he were ever accused of bad behavior.
Tsukerashvili was MGB, not MVD, but he was camp commandant because the number three camp was reserved for escapees and people with particularly notorious reputations. The MVD officials who heard of Tsukerashvili’s strange behavior decided to get rid of him and reported to Moscow that he had gone crazy. He was called to Moscow to be examined. En route to Moscow he heard of Stalin’s death. When he arrived he was kept in detention until the transfer of power was completed and the MGB under control. Then he was courteously examined, declared sane, and returned to his post.
One morning in April or May, while I was giving injections and stitching up minor wounds in the examining room, in walked a colonel of the MGB with his purple-striped trousers and the scrambled eggs on his cap. He picked up a doctor’s gown and threw it over his shoulders, then came to me with a friendly smile and said, “Good morning, dear Comrade, I am Colonel Tsukerashvili.”
.1 shook hands in amazement. I had heard the stories, but to see it in the flesh was something different.
“I have come to see your dear colleague, Dr. Adarich,” he said. “Is he busy at the moment?”
I said, “I don’t believe so. You’ll probably find him in the ward. It’s through that door to your left.”
The man made no move to go. He looked around the examining room, clucking his tongue quietly at the instruments and cases of medicine. He watched the procedure I was doing, and made approving noises, little hmm-hmm’s.
He looked out at the line of prisoners waiting for treatment and said good morning to them. When I finished the last injection, he complimented me on the efficiency of our clinic. I was beginning to think he thought I was MVD or something, despite what I had heard of him, but he soon made that clear. He pulled up a chair and sat on it backwards, leaning his arms on the back; he offered me a cigarette and lit one for himself and said, “Of course, in your position you must think that the life of an officer is very fine and so on, but you have no idea how badly those ba
stard colleagues of mine have behaved. Here I’ve spent my life trying to do my honorable best in a tough service, and look after the interests of you poor prisoners as well as I can, and those bastards start writing reports on me as if I am crazy. Sent me to Moscow! Can you believe that!
“Well, they’re straightened out now, all right, but I can tell you, you’re not the only ones who have a little trouble in life, not in the least, dear Comrade, not in the least!”
He was quite irritated. He kept rubbing his hands together and sucking his breath in between his teeth. Before he had finished his cigarette he stubbed it out and went off to see Adarich, to borrow some medical supplies for his own camp, as it turned out.
Not the only ones who have a little trouble in life!
Lavrenov had almost always been pretty easy to get along with and now he was even easier. He still drank too much, maybe worse than ever, but he was in the hospital a great deal more, trying to be helpful, and as he was a well-trained feldsher and a conscientious man, he was in fact helpful.
After a few weeks he took me aside one day and explained that I had already overstayed the regulation period for the assignment of an uncertified medical person to a hospital job. Almost all pridurki assignments were allowed to continue only for a short period—I think it was six months in most cases. I had been almost a year at the hospital, and compared to the lives of almost everyone I knew it had been a “wonderful” year.
“You’re a first-class feldsher. I’ve seldom seen anyone learn so fast,” Lavrenov said.. “I’m going to recommend that you be sent out as a feldsher. They’ll put you in a tough job, you know, maybe even the mines, but if you go as a feldsher you’ll be okay.”
My buttocks were back to Medical Category One size. The doctors had conferred over my heart every month or two and had declared their amazement that the original 41/2-cm enlargement had spontaneously reduced itself to less than 2 cm. I was healthy again.
Lavrenov said, “Whatever happens, if they want you in the mines it won’t be in fifty-one for a while. It’s closed down. They had a terrible accident. Elevator cable broke.”
An American in the Gulag Page 38