by Maxim Osipov
The occupant of the office has only just gotten up and is still in a somewhat lethargic state. He’s sitting on a bare couch, without pillow or blanket, and dressed in a T-shirt and track pants. Semyon Isaakovich has stuffed one of his feet into a boot, but not the other. He’s a man of some seventy years, short and completely bald, without mustache or beard, but with hair springing abundantly from his ears and nose—in fact, from everywhere that hair shouldn’t be growing from. His hands, his shoulders, his chest are carpeted with salt-and-pepper wool. I think, “A hairy man—like Esau.”
What should I call the colonel? Shlyoma suits him, and I would prefer it, but do you have to be one of his friends to call him that?
“Colonel Schatz,” he says, hobbling up to the table, still wearing only one boot.
Understood. Comrade Schatz it is.
His stomach is big and his arms are thick, like a weight lifter’s. His broad, fleshy nose is pitted with scars, as are his cheeks. It’s hard for me to describe his eyes: I’d hardly looked at them. The colonel reaches the table, puts a uniform jacket on top of his T-shirt, and sits down.
I’ve prepared myself a little: I’m a doctor, a delegate to an international congress.
“A doctor,” he says. “A state employee.” He is silent. “Sit down.”
I sit in a small chair across from him. There’s nothing in the room but a large, polished table, the couch, several chairs. It must have been redecorated recently.
“You a Yid?”
I nod. It’s funny—a state-employed Yid. Like him. Maybe I should get down to business? I tell him about what has happened: our traveling companions, the traders; their inhumane, to put it mildly, treatment; the settling of scores at the hands of his colleagues. One would hope for an impartial investigation, for justice. At the very least, these things should be returned to their owners.
It’s unclear whether the colonel is nodding or his head is faintly trembling.
The phone rings. He picks up the receiver, answers in brief sentences. Mostly foul language. I don’t like foul language, or vulgarity in general, but here it seems absolutely natural.
The walls are bare, with no portraits. But on one wall there’s a map of the world with little flags sticking out. The scope of claims . . . Although the system by which the flags have been stuck in is incomprehensible.
“Go on and finish up there.” He replaces the receiver and turns back to me. “We had a Party organizer, Vassil Dmitrich—a good man. Every morning he’d polish off a bottle of cognac. By 0800 hours he was tanked.”
Why’s he going on about this Vassily Dmitrievich? So what?
“He pinched just enough, you see, so that every morning he could have his bottle of cognac. Understand?”
For the moment I’m just listening.
“But here,” he nods at the telephone, “the director of a government institution has taken thirteen million dollars—in cash. The employees haven’t been paid for half a year. Tell me what that mothertrucker is doing with thirteen million dollars?”
Nicely said. But what does that have to do with the unlucky traders?
“Traders? You could say that. Read this.”
The colonel passes me the same newspaper I’d previously been offered on the train.
“Wanted on suspicion of double murder,” I read, “Police are searching for a man from Petrozavodsk.” And a photograph of Tolya, with a mustache. Here he’s laughing, celebrating. The victims were a man and a teenager, the man’s daughter. They had taken Tolya into their home.
Blunt and simple: a man living alone with his daughter had sold his apartment in order to move to a smaller one; Tolya had sent for his friend . . . Yes, I understand, it was Sery, Sergei.
“No, not Sergei,” says the colonel, “Sery comes from his last name. Which, in the interests of the investigation, is not being divulged.”
With difficulty I fold the paper and return it to the colonel; my hands are trembling and my voice is trembling too.
“Pardon, Comrade Colonel,” I somehow manage to say. “But the yellow press, or any press for that matter, isn’t evidence in and of itself. I’m sorry, but it’s just not convincing.”
“Who are you? A jury that needs convincing?”
The way he says it, I understand that what was published in the papers is true.
The colonel takes out several photographs.
“You say you’re a doctor? Look at these.”
We’d studied forensic medicine, but it’s not the same thing. I begin to feel ill and can’t hide it.
“Here,” he pours me some water. “Drink this.”
Precisely how Tolya and Sery murdered them, I’m not going to say. There really are things that no one should know.
I apologize to the colonel—I’ve slept poorly, the cognac without food, and, well, in general . . .
“Farshteyn,” he says in Yiddish, “I understand.”
“What are the photographs for?”
“To convince their contacts at this end to talk.”
They had identified the murderers on the basis of telephone calls made from the apartment. Automatic telephone exchanges record every number dialed—I didn’t realize that. One or both of them had called Petrozavodsk before the crime and, more importantly, afterwards. They had been saving money by not using roaming.
They hadn’t left the apartment immediately. They spent the night there with the bodies. That really got to me. When a patient dies, I want the windows wide open, and the sooner I’m away from the unit, the better. But this pair . . . they’d actually spent the night, maybe even two nights.
“My God,” I start jabbering, incoherent from fright, “I spent the night with murderers! And I slept well! I didn’t sense a thing . . . My God!”
This makes no particular impression on the colonel.
“Don’t think about them,” he says. “Killers—they’re just your average people.”
•
Again the telephone; again he listens more than he speaks; again I’m on hold, and for this I’m glad. He puts back the receiver.
“What have you got here? Have you looked?” He’s asking about the bags.
No, it hadn’t even occurred to me to look. He takes the bags and lifts them easily onto the table. He’s very strong.
“Don’t touch anything,” he says. “Otherwise we’ll have to fingerprint you.”
Electronics. A PlayStation—for Sery, of course. He opens a small case.
“What’s this?”
“A flute.”
The girl played the flute? I’m feeling faint again.
“Maybe, maybe not. These things might have come from different places.”
There are clothes. They weren’t even squeamish about taking their clothes! No, the clothing was for covering icons.
“Icons,” says the colonel. “Do you believe in God?” Not waiting for my answer, he goes on, “These days, everyone believes. Even the fancy young Jews wear crosses.”
Instinctively I run my hand across my neck: Was the chain visible? I hope the colonel hasn’t noticed. Suddenly I don’t want to upset him.
Books. No, not books—stamps.
“Do you know anything about stamps?”
No. Why would I? I do know that stamps can be very valuable.
The colonel returns the things to the bags.
“It ain’t cheap, this,” he says.
“And these two, the murderers, I wonder if they wear crosses.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m telling you—they’re just your average people.”
•
I get up and walk around the room. How can it be, eh? How can I be such a poor judge of people? Why don’t I get it? I take another drink of water. Already I’m starting to get used to this place.
The colonel takes the bags away.
“Have a seat. You did everything right. You’ve helped the investigation. We’d have had to arrest them in the city otherwise.”
I can see now that it was ju
st a fortunate coincidence. It seems there was a detective traveling from Moscow on the same train in order to arrest them. I recall the man in the tracksuit. It was just a fortunate coincidence. They might not have found them at all. The number of cases actually solved is so small it almost doesn’t make a difference.
“Doesn’t make a difference? What mothertrucker told you that?” The colonel grins and affectionately says, “Shlemazl.”
There’s no such word in my vocabulary. What does it mean?
“Shlemazl,” the colonel explains with pleasure, “means an innocent fool, a suckling pig.”
For this I’d come to Petrozavodsk—to be called a baby pig. I feel bitter.
“In America,” I say, “somehow they get by without clubbing everyone. There are procedures to be followed. I’m not standing up for murderers and their like, but there are procedures . . .”
“In America,” responds the colonel. “Let me tell you a story.”
And then the colonel told me about his father.
•
At the beginning of the war, Schatz Senior, a circumcised Jew, was called up to the front, but he never got to fight: by August of 1941 the army was entirely surrounded and had surrendered. Schatz had taken the documents of a dead Ukrainian, so he wasn’t shot immediately, and instead of finding himself in a concentration camp, he was sent to one labor camp and then another. He ended up in a mine in the Ruhr.
“Do you know what Schatz means in German?”
Riches, treasure, a lode. The colonel nods. His father spoke a little German—before the war, everyone studied German. And so he ended up in the mine with only one wish—to live. Although, as you can imagine, there was no telling how and when the war would end, and he had no idea what had become of his family. A labor camp is different from a death camp, but among those who spent the entire war there, only one in ten survived.
Put himself forward as an interpreter? No, that was out. First of all, in order to lose himself in the crowd, he had to be like everyone else; and second, the normal people in the camp had a strictly Soviet mentality. Only the scum had any more business with the Germans than was absolutely necessary. Schatz did things differently: he didn’t just fulfill the norm, he doubled it. For that, they handed out bonuses—bread, tobacco. He quit smoking—his only pleasure, you might say—but he quit so that he would have more food and be able to work, to fulfill the norm. He traded the tobacco with his comrades for food, and in this way he always had enough to eat. When he was the first one to come up from the mine, he would steal from the guards—potatoes, eggs, bread. Only food. When they caught him he was beaten, heavily beaten—twenty blows every time. You know how the Germans are—order above all. The whole of his back was black-and-blue from the club. They beat him, but they didn’t beat him to death.
“So they didn’t find out that your father was a Jew?”
“As long as they were trying to flush them out, no. In the bath, the other prisoners shielded him—for them he had come up with an excuse.”
“Phimosis.”
“Yes, yes, that was it. Then they found out. They found out from our side.”
When it was discovered that Schatz was a Jew, the matter of his survival became far more difficult. He was something of a “useful Jew”—the Germans had a word for it. Now he had not only to fulfill the norm, but to triple it. He got it from both sides. But there were only a handful of real sadists in the camp. The guards too were just ordinary people.
“Your average people,” I prompt.
“Yes, average people.” The colonel doesn’t notice any irony.
There were only a handful of sadists, no more than now, but one of them was the wife of the camp commandant. A fine-looking dame, his father said. She loved to kick them in the groin. She would force them to take off their pants. It amused her, you see. But she came to grief.
The Americans liberated them. It happened like this: they surrounded the camp and waited for the guards to surrender and get butchered by the prisoners. They could wait all day, even two days. They kept their distance. It was a typical American practice. The Germans wanted to be taken prisoner, but what did the Americans want with German prisoners?
“What did he do to her?” I ask.
“He had his way with her. Do you understand? He was the first.”
“And then? And then what? Did they kill her?”
“Probably.” He shrugs. “They butchered all of the Germans. Hardly anyone survived.”
We sit in silence for a time.
“Tell me, how did your father feel about Germans after that?”
“No way in particular. And why ‘did’? My father is alive. He’s just angry the Germans don’t pay him a pension. He doesn’t appear in any of their documents as Schatz.”
So his father is alive. And what does he do?
“He doesn’t do anything. What’s there for him to do? He likes to go to the market. He remembers that German dame. Before, when my mother was alive, he didn’t say a thing, but now he talks about the German more than he talks about his own wife.”
In the office it’s almost dark. Suddenly I find myself wanting to show the colonel some kind of support, or at least to look him in the eye, but he’s sitting with his back to the window and I can’t see his eyes. I try to say something: something about the incontinence of affect, about geriatric sexuality. As if my membership in the medical profession somehow gives me the right to utter words that are more or less devoid of meaning.
“Throughout the entire war,” says the colonel, “my father didn’t kill one person. And if the Americans had liberated them the way they should have—humanely—then he wouldn’t still be thinking about that German dame.”
The colonel finishes his story and gradually sinks into lethargy. Perhaps it’s time for me to go?
In the end, I ask him, “What do the flags on the map stand for?”
Suddenly he smiles broadly; in the semidarkness I can see his teeth: “They don’t stand for anything. The flags are just flags. That’s all.”
Well, then—should I go?
“And where are you going without a hat?” the colonel asks tenderly. “Have you got a hat?”
“I’ve even got two. A cap and a warm, woolly hat.”
“Put on the woolly one.”
•
Petrozavodsk. Dark. Cold. Ice. Streets barely lit. You can’t make out a thing.
In the evening at the congress I run into the young man with the handsome voice, the one from the train. He shares his impressions of the city, “same shit as the rest of the country,” and expresses a desire to continue our acquaintance in Moscow. Perhaps we could have dinner together? His treat.
Casually he asks: “So how goes it with your two innocents?”
Well put.
“Did you find out anything?”
“No,” I reply. “No.”
February 2010
Translated by Anne Marie Jackson
THE GYPSY
HE’S A decent doctor, with a good head on his shoulders—the kind of doctor you want, if you happen to need one.
As a doctor, he has two jobs: one he does for money, the other out of interest. When he’s doing the interesting job, he thinks: this is the real thing, doctor’s work, but it doesn’t pay. And he’s a young man, he needs money. He’s got to feed his kids, pay for his grandmother’s night nurse; the car keeps breaking down; there are things he wants, all sorts of expenses—that goes without saying. But he never thinks about money for more than a few seconds at a time. He just knows he needs it, that’s all.
The work he does for money, on the other hand, inspires long reflections. I’m not so hard up, he thinks. I’m young, I’ve got goals, things to do—why am I wasting my life? He knows what he ought to be doing. It’s like Pasternak said: Live, think, feel, love, make discoveries. His father used to tell him, rather solemnly: Live with an eye to eternity. He used to read him poems, by Pasternak and others. But that was a long time ago—it’s been m
ore than ten years since his father passed.
The job he does out of interest is easy to imagine: examining patients at the clinic; the happiness he experiences when he manages to help, to do something new, to make a rare diagnosis; and, of course, the heartache he feels when patients die, or when he has to spend hours filling out paperwork. There’s plenty of that—the emergency room, nights on call—but, as we said, he’s a good doctor.
He gets a little money for the interesting job, too: grateful patients, their relatives. But he never names a price: everyone else might do it, but he’s not everyone.
It’s harder to explain the job he does for money: escorting sick people across the border. There’s this organization—it sends people to America, permanently, under supervision. Jews, Baptists, Armenians from Baku, Kurds, all sorts of strange people. Where are they going? How does it all work? Strange people, strange work—but lucrative, six hundred dollars per flight.
•
And so this Friday, he’ll have to swap shifts with another doctor, pack up his medical equipment, make sure his superiors clap eyes on him, and, at around one o’clock, take off for the airport, to fly to America. How many times has he made this trip? He’s lost count. He’ll hand over the patient—after another flight, a short one, from New York to Portland, Maine. He has friends there; a two-hour drive, and they’ll already be in Boston, and it will still be Friday in the States. He’ll get the money in New York, leave the patient in Portland, and his friends—a husband and wife, classmates of his, who’d married early, emigrated early, whom he loves, whom he can count on—won’t let him spend a cent. And in the morning they’ll drive him straight to New York—they had plans to go anyway; they love New York, they love everything that affirms their friendship with him. That’ll be Saturday. He’ll return home on Sunday, rest up—and then off to work on Monday, to his primary job, the interesting one. So it goes, month after month.
But this Friday, as he was just about to leave, he ran into an obstacle—Guber. A request to look over a patient, a woman. Guber is the head of the department responsible for patients who pay—a resentful man, listless, vindictive, and, in the minds of the doctors, a thief. Patients who pay are nothing but trouble, and the doctors don’t see their money anyway. Notice, Guber didn’t ask him himself: he went through a nurse. He himself would have put it differently—something like, you’ve got nothing better to do, so might as well examine a patient.