An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  Very formal. I said, “Of course. I would be honored.”

  We went into her quarters, attached to the library. It was cramped in the small room, but she had a small hot plate and started to boil water for tea. I felt very mischievous, for some reason. I said, “Do you mind if I take off my pants?” and started undoing the buttons. Poor Ruth. I was sorry the minute I said it because she went very pale and her lip started to tremble. She told me later she thought she was about to be violated. I was almost spastic trying not to laugh, and yet chagrined at the same time. I said, “I mean, I just want to take them off so I’ll be more comfortable.” This made things worse. I decided just to go ahead. Her eyes were horrified as I started to drop my work pants. Then she saw the clean pants underneath. For a while we were both helpless with laughter. I apologized for the joke. She said, “Well, you know so many violent things go on around here. I’m not sure it was good to mix the men and the women. Some of those men are like beasts.”

  I said, “I don’t see how anyone has any energy for anything like that.”

  She said, “Well, you look healthy enough!” And then immediately blushed and trembled again at the lips. “I didn’t mean...” she said, flatteringly, and she did not. She was terribly lonely, it came out finally, for an American colonel named Walters whom she had been seeing in Moscow for some months before she was arrested and on whose account she had been arrested. Later I found out that the KGB, during her interrogation, humiliated her physically while forcing her to describe in intimate detail all the sexual encounters she had had with this Colonel Walters, whom I had met briefly. It was because of him that she had wanted to meet me because of the American connection. There was nothing flirtatious between us. Our relationship was then, and continued to be, platonic, with much discussion of her beloved colonel. We became good friends. She urged me to come back often for books, when I had the energy and attention to read again. Later, years later, when we met again in Moscow at gatherings of the Trade Union, Ruth and I would make the room shake with laughter when we recounted the time I took my pants off in her room at Nikolsky.

  When Margolinshch and I began to install our pre-shaped plumbing units we ran into an electrical crew at the second building. I always enjoy watching skilled hands at work, and I was fascinated to see one woman, whose figure was lithe and graceful, wield the wire and the cutters and the pliers with immense speed and deftness. There was a wisp of pale blond hair hanging out of her cap. She stopped for a moment and took off her electrician’s glove to wipe the sweat from her forehead. I was shocked to see that the backs of her hands were badly scarred from what I took to be electrical burns. She must have sensed me watching from behind because she turned around for a brief moment, and in that brief moment I saw a wonderful face: cool, aloof, frankly appraising. Dark eyes that I first thought were brown, because the surprising eyebrows above them were incongruously dark brown under the honey hair. Later I found those eyes were dark, dark blue—almost black. I never saw eyes like hers anywhere else. She stared back at me for a moment, raised her eyebrows in a kind of dismissing shrug, and went back to work.

  I was hooked. I had to get to know this woman. I thought she could not be more than twenty-one or twenty-two years old. She had a full, sensuous mouth and a dimple in the middle of her chin. I am usually very forward and direct, but this time I felt I had to go around a bit first. I went to find Galya Zaslavskaya.

  Galya laughed. “You’re hardly the first to ask. She is a Latvian girl named Gertrude. Half the men in camp are in love with her without having spoken to her. But you might as well forget it, my friend. They haven’t spoken to her because she won’t let them near her. She’s called the Touch-Me-Not and she’s cold as ice.”

  I could not believe that. I purposely extended my work in that building. I found ways to pass by where she was working or to install pipe where she was wiring. I tried to work hard and efficiently when she was in the same room, and I never offered to speak with her. One day while I was standing on a box trying to attach a connector above my head and using two pipe wrenches at the same time, one of the wrenches slipped out of my hand. I was standing on one foot, reaching for the pipe, and if I had to come down for the wrench I would have dropped everything. I was balancing on my one foot trying to decide what to do when Gertrude dropped her work and ran to hand me my wrench. I thanked her in a very matter-of-fact way, and went on with my work.

  At the lunch break we sat on the floor together and ate our bread silently. I tried not to gaze at her, not to look at her at all, although the picture of those dark eyes was making me dizzy with the effort of avoiding them.

  Suddenly she said in a clear, soft voice, “Where are you from?” I was so relieved I said, “Moscow,” without thinking.

  She said, “No, I’ve heard you talking with your partner. You have a very slight English accent, isn’t that so?”

  I told her I was an American from New York City. She looked wistful. She said she had always dreamed of living in a country where you could determine your own future. Not necessarily in America, she said—in fact, she had really thought of her homeland the way it was supposed to have been before the Soviet takeover. Or France or England. We immediately fell into a political discussion. Gertrude was, indeed, very cool. I could tell that if we were to have any friendship it would have to be, for the present, at the level of discussion we had started with. She was passionate about leaving the Soviet Union. Her parents had been arrested for being dissenters of some kind, and Gertrude, who was only fourteen at the time, had routinely been arrested with them. She told me she was only eighteen now. I was amazed. She took off her jacket for a while during lunch; it was quite warm in the little room. I saw that she had an exquisite figure. I was falling in love without reservation, and yet I had to be reserved.

  “You must understand that I am very cynical about people,” she said with a kind of cool sadness. “Many men have tried to make friends with me and I have trusted them until I found out all they wanted was to sleep with me. I have had the same experience with women. I know everyone says I am very cold; well,, it’s true. I have been hurt a great deal in my life and I am going to be very careful from now on.”

  And yet, as the time went by, when I did not seek her out as a lunch companion, she sought me out. We began to talk, in an oblique way, about a future in which we were both out of the Soviet Union, both in some land where you could build a life of your own. There were just the faintest shades of suggestion from both of us that this might be a future we could make together. But it was perfectly clear that our relationship in camp was to be one of the spirit only. It became very strong. And yet I had an exquisite dilemma. As I became stronger and less exhausted, the sexual pressures within my own twenty-eight-year-old body, in the presence of a number of sympathetic and attractive women, were becoming very acute. And yet I really wanted nobody but Gertrude.

  For a day or two I was distracted from my dilemma by another fortunate turn of events. When I got back to my room one night Lavrenov was waiting for me.

  “How is it going?” he asked.

  “Pretty well, Citizen Chief. How about you?”

  “Well, we have some problems. That’s what I came to see you about. You don’t have anything to drink here, do you?”

  “Unfortunately, Citizen Chief, we’re dry.”

  “Well, no matter. What I came to tell you is that there are so many little accidents and colds and infections and so on here at Nikolsky that we are using up too much transport to bring those people over to the hospital. The women’s camp at Kingir has sent a physician over to handle the women’s enclosure. Now I want to assign you to look after the men. Will you do it?”

  Would I! It meant less fatigue, more interesting work, much more freedom to move around. Besides, I had come to love medicine and, frankly, to enjoy my role as “the Doctor.”

  Lavrenov made all the arrangements. For a couple of days I was busy setting up and stocking a little clinic right in the apartment
block. On the third day I took a break and went off to find Gertrude and tell her of my good fortune. Nobody seemed to know where she was. As it happened, I had a pass to the women’s enclosure that day, so I took my bread with me and went to the library.

  Ruth invited me into her little room and put on the teakettle. She had a very mischievous look in her eyes. She produced two fresh boiled potatoes, a fresh tomato, and a green onion. Some book lover had brought them to her, she explained with a grin as she made us a real treat of a lunch from these simple ingredients. Finally I asked what she was grinning about.

  “I thought you would never ask,” she said, almost coquettishly. “You see, I’ve found out who the other American prisoner is, and who the girl is that’s in love with him.”

  I almost spilled my tea. “Who!” I shouted.

  “The American prisoner is a former employee of the United States Embassy in Moscow!” she said triumphantly.

  “Ruth, for God’s sake, who is he? Stop tormenting me. How did you find all this out?”

  “I found it out from the girl who is in love with him. She has not seen him since the last concert of the culture brigade. Her name is Zoya Tumilovich!” And she burst into laughter.

  Zoya! I knew that if I could find Zoya and find some way to get together my dilemma would be solved. Gertrude might be my future, but my present needs were urgent. Ruth told me where Zoya worked and I immediately went in search of her. Finally I met her in the street. It was impossible to be very demonstrative there, but Zoya knew how to show what she felt through her eyes. We had only a moment together with everyone looking on. But in that moment promises were silently exchanged, and now it was only a matter of finding privacy.

  When I got back to my clinic Lavrenov was waiting. Six beds had been moved in to create a little infirmary, and Lavrenov was checking over my supplies. I had a good supply of simple drugs and some cardiac medications, plenty of syringes, splints and bandages, aspirin and iodine, glucose for intravenous feeding. Lavrenov arranged that I would move my own bed into the examining room so that whenever I had in-patients, I would always be near them. He also had brought me an orderly who was busy cleaning things up.

  “I think you had better meet the physician from the women’s enclosure,” Lavrenov said. “If you have an emergency that is too urgent to wait for Adarich or someone else from the Zone, you can call on her. She’s just a few minutes away. I told her to come over and see you this afternoon. Watch out for her. She is tough. She worked for the Germans during the war. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but they say she did some experiments for them on prisoners. Very hard. Be careful.” I promised I would.

  About three in the afternoon the door opened and a striking, dark-haired woman with bright red lips and sparkling eyes walked into my little clinic. “My name is Dr. Irene Kopylova,” she said. “Since we are to be colleagues, I thought we had better get to know each other. Can you make tea?”

  I had to apologize. I had a burner but nothing else.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. She reached in her satchel and produced a small bottle of pure alcohol, some white bread, and little pots of butter and jam. She spread butter on the bread. Then she mixed a spoonful of the jam with a little water and added a generous slug of the alcohol.

  “There!” she said, pouring the pink mixture into two medicine glasses. “We can always manage when we really want to, can’t we!”

  We drank to each other’s health. Irene motioned me to sit down while she walked up and down in the clinic, never taking her eyes off me.

  ‘I hear you’re an American,” she said.

  “That’s true.”

  “Well.”

  A long silence. She picked up a chair and brought it very close to mine and sat down with her knees touching mine.

  She said, “I think we shall become very good colleagues, Alex. I look forward to our—ah—working very closely together.”

  I was not sure what to say. I lifted my glass and saluted her and drank it off.

  She filled it again immediately. She said, “Because of my position, I am able to arrange passes for people to enter the women’s enclosure. I have quite—ah—private facilities over there. Perhaps you would like to come and return the visit sometime?”

  I said I would like that very much indeed. The woman made me nervous as hell, but I also found her obvious sexual intentions very arousing.

  I also thought that a pass into the women’s enclosure would solve my problem of getting to see Zoya; that was worth taking my chances with Dr. Irene Kopylova.

  For several days I managed to use the pass, which arrived later that same afternoon, without having to account for myself to the tigerish lady doctor. I managed to get into Zoya’s building on the pretext of looking for a patient. I was in my lab coat, with my stethoscope. There was tremendous excitement. Every other woman I saw would exclaim, “Oh, Doctor. Is there any chance you could listen to my chest?” And so on. Zoya came in and we caught a few precious moments together and embraced fiercely and kissed each other so hard we nearly burst. “My dearest Alexander!” she said breathlessly. “I am working on getting the confidence of one of my roommates. Be patient a few days, my handsome one! We will find a way!”

  Then I had to slip away.

  Margolinshch came to see me. He was officially brigadier of the plumbers now, but he had other news that was more important, he declared.

  “Well?” I said.

  “Not here! Not here!” We were in the infirmary among the three or four patients I already had in bed with fevers or intestinal problems. Margolinshch waved me toward the examining room. We went in and shut the door.

  “I have a woman!” He announced it like the next world war, very fierce. I dutifully congratulated him and asked who it was.

  “Woman orderly for your woman doctor friend!” he said, continuing in the voice of apocalypse. It seemed that the combination of moving into the inner sanctum of the medical profession and the possibility of sexual fulfillment all at once had turned his usual tea jag into a cosmic experience.

  “Woman doctor invites us all to party!” he boomed, ignoring the fact that the door he had so judiciously closed was made of thin plywood. “Tomorrow noon! She gives me pass for doing plumbing in her building! Doctor! Doctor! It will be heaven! I know! I know! I told you just wait! Just wait!”

  And he danced out of the clinic.

  A note came from Irene that afternoon, confirming the party.

  We all assembled in her clinic at noon sharp. Margolinshch had somewhere found a dark striped suit jacket two sizes too small for him, which he insisted on keeping buttoned so that it made tight creases across his belly. The orderly was as tall as Margolinshch and much broader. She was very pink and wore a solemn, shy smile, and said almost nothing. Margolinshch’s moustaches were twisted tight and pointed straight as pencils.

  Irene was very commanding. She told us all where to sit, and when she buttered bread and put sliced smoked sausage on it, she instructed us to eat it in a voice that meant business. She poured four glasses full of pink alcohol and jam and water, although I doubt that there was much water in mine. She was breathing quite hard each time she was near me, and always bumped against me or let her arm stroke across mine or pressed her breast against my hand when she bent over to refill my glass, which she did a great deal. I had come with the idea of braving it out, and getting away with nothing more than perhaps some heavy flirting. But somehow all this provocation and the repeated big slugs of pink stuff she poured in my glass overcame this resolve. I remember that after a very hurried lunch, during which Margolinshch wolfed his bread and sausage and kept squeezing his arm around the waist of the blushing, hulking woman orderly, Irene suddenly commanded the orderly to take Margolinshch into the outer room and make sure that all patients understood the clinic was closed until further notice. The moment the door was locked behind them we embraced each other eagerly. It had been almost seven years for me; I have no idea how long for h
er. Any discretion or sense of personal nicety was forgotten in a rush of quite uncomplicated physical urgency. She did not wait for undressing; our mouths were all over each other’s, and her hands groped and found and opened my clothes. In a moment she had pushed me into a chair and leaped on me. It was over in minutes. Meaningless but necessary, I thought, in a mixture of shame and contentment. After a few moments for subsiding, Irene got up from her position astride me on the chair, cleaned herself quickly, pushed her hair into place, checked her face in the mirror, gave me a sort of approving smile as if I had obeyed a minor but essential order quite correctly, checked to see that my clothes were in order, and opened the door. She took me with her into the outer room and motioned Margolinshch and the big orderly inside.

  Margolinshch’s eyes were shining and wet, and his grin as broad as his moustache. The door closed. There were groaning sounds and much scuffling and bumping from inside. Then there was a long silence. Then there were low voices, hers a bit petulant I thought, his a bit apologetic. But we could not make out the words.

  Time passed. Irene began to fidget. She found some tobacco in a drawer and ordered me to roll cigarettes. We both drew in long lungfuls and let them out again in long slow breaths and waited.

  A woman came to the outer door and said, “Dr. Kopylova, I have a problem with—”

  “Shut the door. The clinic is closed for another half hour!” Irene said sharply.

  The woman went away.

  Finally the inner door opened. Margolinshch and his friend came out looking miserable. Neither looked at each other or at Irene and me. Margolinshch quickly picked up his plumber’s tools and his overalls, made a funny little bow to his friend, and dashed out. Irene and I exchanged knowing professional looks. The big orderly burst into tears and fled back into the examining room.