He soon came back from interrogation. That meant he had been interrogated in a special block and not driven off anywhere. He was amazed, depressed, stunned, shaken, and frightened.
“Did anything happen, Gavriil?”
“Yes, it did. Something new at the interrogation. I’m accused of conspiring against the government.”
“Don’t worry, Gavriil. Everyone in this cell is charged with conspiring against the government.”
“They say I was planning a murder.”
“That often happens, too. What were you accused of before?”
“It was after my arrest in Naro-Fominsk. I was in charge of a fire brigade at the textile factory. So I couldn’t have ranked high.”
“Nobody cares about rank here, Gavriil.”
“Well, they were interrogating me about the political circle classes. For praising Muralov. But I was in his squad in Moscow. What could I say? But now Muralov has nothing to do with it.”
His pockmarks and wrinkles now stood out. He was smiling as if he was forcing himself to look calm, and yet uncertain at the same time, and his blue eyes were flashing less and less. But, oddly enough, his epileptic fits happened less often. Imminent danger, the need to fight for his life had apparently pushed the attacks aside.
“What am I to do? They’ll be the death of me.”
“There’s no need to do anything. Just tell the truth. Give them true statements as long as you have the strength.”
“So you think it will be all right?”
“Not at all. It certainly won’t be all right. Nobody leaves here without something happening to them, Gavriil. But shooting’s worse than getting ten years. And ten years is worse than five.”
“I get it.”
Gavriil started singing more often. His singing was wonderful. He had such a pure, bright tenor voice. He sang quietly, in the corner furthest from the spy hole in the door:
How good that blue night was,
How gently the pale moon shone. . . .
More and more often, it was a different song:
Open the window, open it,
I haven’t got long to live.
So let me out to go free,
Don’t stop me from suffering and loving.
Alekseyev would break off in midsong, leap up, and pace and pace.
He often picked quarrels. Prison life, especially pretrial life, makes people quarrel. You have to be aware of this and keep yourself in hand all the time, or find a way of distracting yourself. Gavriil didn’t know these finer points about prison life, and was easily provoked to quarrelling and brawling. Someone would say something that he couldn’t take, or would insult Muralov. Muralov was a god to Alekseyev, the god of his youth, the god of his entire life.
When Vasia Zhavoronkov, a locomotive driver from Saviolovo depot, said something about Muralov in the style of the latest party textbooks, Alekseyev threw himself at Vasia, grabbing the copper urn the cell poured tea from.
This tea urn, which had been in Butyrki prison since tsarist times, was an enormous copper cylinder. It was cleaned with brick dust and shone like the setting sun. The tea urn was brought in on a pole, and it took the two duty prisoners, when they poured out tea, to hold it.
A strongman, a Hercules, Alekseyev boldly grabbed the urn handle, but couldn’t move the urn. It was full of water, as it was well before supper, when the urn was taken away.
So everything ended in laughter, although Vasia Zhavoronkov turned pale and prepared to receive a blow. Vasia was virtually Alekseyev’s fellow accused; he too had been arrested after a class in his political circle. The class leader had asked him, “What would you do, Zhavoronkov, if suddenly Soviet power disappeared?” The simpleminded Zhavoronkov replied, “What? I’d work as a train driver as I do now. I’ve got four children.” The next day he was arrested, and the investigation was now over. The locomotive driver was waiting for his sentence. Their cases were similar, and Gavriil had asked for Vasia’s advice: they had been friends. But when the circumstances of Alekseyev’s case changed and he was accused of conspiring against the government, the rather cowardly Vasia shunned his friend. And he made sure to repeat that remark about Muralov.
•
No sooner had Alekseyev been calmed down after this half-comic grappling with Zhavoronkov, than a new quarrel flared up. Alekseyev once more called someone a schemer. Again he had to be pulled off someone. Now the whole cell understood and knew that It was about to come. His comrades walked along by his side, holding him by the arms, ready at any moment to grab his arms and legs, to hold up his head. But Alekseyev suddenly tore himself free, leapt onto the windowsill, clutched the prison bars with both hands and shook and shook them, swearing and roaring. His black body hung from the grid like a great black cross. The prisoners detached his fingers from the bars, bent back his hands. They were in a hurry, because the sentry in the tower had already noticed the jostling by the open window.
Then Aleksandr Andreyev, the general secretary of the society of tsarist political prisoners, said, pointing to the black body that was sliding off the bars:
“The first secret policeman. . . .”
But there was no vicious mockery in Andreyev’s voice.
1964
THE GENETICIST
THERE were fresh bear tracks on the ground just by the door of the outpatient’s clinic. The lock, a cunning screw lock used to keep the door closed, was lying in the bushes; it had been ripped out from the door and the doorframe with the wood.
Inside the hut, vials, bottles, and jars had been swept off the shelves and turned into a mess of broken glass. The rough smell of valerian drops still lingered in the air.
The exercise books with lecture notes from Andreyev’s paramedic courses had been torn to shreds. Andreyev spent several hours of hard work trying to reassemble, page by page, his precious notes, for there had been no textbooks in the paramedic courses. These exercise books were Andreyev’s only weapon in his battle with disease in the depths of the taiga. One exercise book had come off worse than the others: the anatomy notes. Its very first page, where there was a diagram of the parts of a cell, the elements of the nucleus, the mysterious chromosomes, had been drawn by Andreyev’s clumsy hand, which had never been taught to draw. But the bear’s claws had ripped this drawing, and the whole exercise book in its cellophane cover, in such fury that it had to be thrown into the stove, the iron stove. This was an irreplaceable loss, because those were Professor Umansky’s lectures.
The paramedic courses had been at the prisoners’ hospital. Umansky was an anatomical pathologist, the dissector in charge of the morgue. An anatomical pathologist does the ultimate, posthumous, as it were, check on the work of the doctors treating a patient. During an autopsy, a dissection opening the corpse, a judgment can be made about whether the diagnosis was correct and the treatment appropriate.
But a prisoners’ morgue is not a normal morgue. You might think that death, the great democratizer, should not be interested in who is lying on the morgue’s dissecting table and should speak the same language to all corpses.
Treating a patient who is a prisoner, especially if the doctor is a prisoner, is no easy task, if the doctor is a decent person.
Both in the hospital and in the morgue everything is done for prisoners, following the formalities that should be observed in any hospital in the world. But the scales have been altered, and the real content of a prisoner’s hospital notes differs from that of a free worker’s.
The point is not only that death’s representative, the anatomical pathologist, is still himself alive, with living passions, resentments, merits, and faults, and varying experience. The point is something greater, for the official dryness of an autopsy conclusion is not enough for either the living or the dead.
If a patient with a diagnosis of cancer died and the autopsy revealed no signs of a malignant tumor, but only very profound, neglected physical emaciation, Umansky would be outraged and unable to forgive the doctors for not having
saved a prisoner from starvation. But if it was obvious that the doctor had understood what was wrong, but did not have the right to make the true diagnosis of “alimentary dystrophy”—hunger, feverishly searching for synonyms: avitaminosis, polyavitaminosis, severe scurvy, pellagra, its name is legion—Umansky would help the doctor with his firm judgment. And he’d do more. If the doctor wanted to limit himself to a perfectly respectable diagnosis of influenza-like pneumonia or heart failure, then the anatomical pathologist’s finger would point out for the doctors’ attention the camp peculiarities of any illness.
Umansky’s doctor’s conscience also had its bonds and fetters. The first diagnosis of “alimentary dystrophy” was made after the war, after the Leningrad blockade, when starvation even in the camps could be called by its real name.
An anatomical pathologist ought to be a judge, but Umansky was complicit. The reason he was both judge and doctor was that he could also be complicit. However tightly he was bound by an instruction, a tradition, an order, or specific clarifications, Umansky looked deeper, further, and in a more principled way. He saw it as his duty not to catch out doctors in petty details, but to see—and point out to others!—the more important factor that lay behind these petty details, the “background” to emaciation from starvation, which changed the picture of a disease the doctor had studied in textbooks. No textbook of prisoners’ illnesses had been written yet. It never was.
Frostbitten limbs in the camp were a phenomenon that shattered the frontline surgeons who came from the mainland. The treatment of fractures had to be done against the patients’ will. To get admitted to a tuberculosis department, patients would bring with them somebody else’s “gobs” and put into their mouths what was clearly a bacteria-infected poison before a preadmission analysis was done. Patients would stir blood into their urine, if only from a scratch on their finger, so as to get into the hospital, be it just for a day or an hour, to save themselves from the worst fate that exists for a prisoner: murderous and degrading labor.
Umansky, like all the doctors who were old Kolyma hands, knew all this: he approved of it and forgave it. No textbook of prisoners’ diseases had been written.
Umansky had received his medical education in Brussels and during the revolution had returned to Russia, where he lived in Odessa and practiced medicine. . . .
In the camps he understood that his conscience would be easier if he cut up the dead and didn’t treat the living. He became director of the morgue, an anatomical pathologist.
A seventy-year-old man, not yet decrepit, but with ill-fitting upper and lower dentures, and silver hair, cut short like a prisoner’s—a wit with a snub nose entered the classroom.
His lecture was particularly important for the students. Not because it was the first lecture, but because, starting with the first word Professor Umansky said, the courses came alive and began to exist as a serious reality, however much a fairy tale they had seemed. The time of anxiety had passed. The decision to start the courses had been taken. For many people this meant the end of exhausting labor at the gold-mine pit faces, an end to their daily struggle to live. Studies began with Professor Umansky’s course of lectures: “Anatomy and Human Physiology.”
The silver-haired old man in an unbuttoned fur jacket, a black, well-worn jacket, not the quilted pea jacket that we wore, went up to the board and took an enormous piece of chalk in his little fist. The professor flung his crumpled hat with earflaps onto the desk: it was April, and still cold.
“I shall begin my lectures by telling you about the structure of the cell. These days there are many arguments in science. . . .”
Where? What arguments? The past life of all thirty persons in the class, from a former interrogator to a shop assistant in a village shop, had very little to do with the life of any science. . . . The students’ past lives were further away from them than the next world. Every student was convinced of this. What did they care about arguments in any science? And what science was this? Anatomy? Physiology? Biology? Microbiology? Not a single student could have said that day what “biology” meant. Those who were a bit better educated had experienced enough starvation to have lost any interest in arguments in any sort of science. . . .
“. . . There are many arguments in science. Today it is usual to set out this part of the course differently, but I shall be telling you what I consider to be true. I have an agreement with your administration that I may expound this section in my own way.”
Andreyev tried to imagine the administration with which a Brussels professor had come to an agreement. The hospital chief who had pierced each student at the entrance examination with the sharp eye of a janitor. Or the red-nosed acting head of the health administration who smelled of alcohol, who hiccupped. That was all the top administration that Andreyev could think of or imagine.
“I shall expound this section in my own way. And I shan’t conceal my opinion from you.”
“Conceal his opinion,” Andreyev repeated in a whisper. He was delighted by these unusual words in an unusual science.
“I don’t want to conceal my opinion. I’m a geneticist, my dear friends. . . .”
Umansky paused, so that we could appreciate his boldness and his tact.
A geneticist? That meant nothing to the students.
None of the thirty persons knew, and never did find out, what mitosis was, or nucleoprotein threads, chromosomes, which contain deoxyribonucleic acid.
Nor was the hospital administration interested in deoxyribonucleic acid.
But after a year or two passed, the dark rays of biological discussion penetrated social life in various directions, and the word “geneticist” became sufficiently intelligible to interrogators with an average legal education and to ordinary people subjected to the storms of political repressions. “Geneticist” started to sound menacing, to sound ominous, like the very familiar words “Trotskyist” and “cosmopolitan.”
It was then, a year after the biological controversy, that Andreyev recalled and appreciated old Umansky’s boldness and tact.
•
Thirty pencils drew imaginary chromosomes in thirty exercise books. It was this exercise book with the chromosomes that had aroused the bear’s particular fury.
Andreyev remembered Umansky not just because of his mysterious chromosomes or his obliging and clever “sections.”
At the end of the course, when the new recruits to medicine were already getting used to wearing a paramedic’s white gown, something that separated the medics from ordinary mortals, Umansky again came out with a strange declaration:“I am not going to lecture you on the anatomy of the sexual organs. I’ve come to an agreement with your administration. This part of the course was included for previous students. Nothing good came of it. It will be better if I use the hours for therapeutic practice—at least you’ll learn how to use cupping jars.”
Thus the students got their diplomas without taking an important aspect of anatomy. But was that the only thing that the future paramedics didn’t know?
About two months after the courses started, when they had managed to overcome, fight back, and drown out the hunger that had been gnawing at them all the time, and when Andreyev no longer rushed to pick up every cigarette end he saw on the path or the street or the ground or the floor, and when new—or old?—human features began to appear on Andreyev’s face, he was invited by Professor Umansky to tea.
The tea was just tea. There wasn’t meant to be any bread or sugar, and Andreyev didn’t expect that sort of tea. This was an evening conversation with Professor Umansky, a conversation in the warmth, face-to-face.
Umansky lived in the morgue, in the morgue office. There were no doors between the office and the autopsy room, and the dissecting table, covered with oilcloth, could be seen from every corner of Umansky’s room. There may have been no door between him and the dissection room, but Umansky was thoroughly used to every smell in the world and he behaved as if there were a door. It took Andreyev some time to grasp what m
ade this room a room, and then he realized that the floor of the room was set half a meter higher than that of the dissecting room. Work was coming to an end, and Umansky was putting a photograph of a young woman on his desk. The photograph was roughly framed in tin and glazed with uneven greenish window glass. This well-practiced, habitual action was the start of Professor Umansky’s private life. His right-hand fingers took hold of the drawer wood, pulled the drawer out until it touched his belly. His left hand picked up the photograph and put it on the desk facing him.
“Your daughter?”
“Yes. If I had a son, it would be far worse, wouldn’t it?”
Andreyev was well aware of the difference between a daughter and a son for a prisoner. The professor opened a desk drawer—the desk had a lot of drawers—and took out countless sheets of paper cut from a roll, creased, worn-out, covered in columns, a great number of columns and lines. Each cell had a word written by Umansky in tiny handwriting. Thousands, tens of thousands of words, written in indelible pencil, words that had faded with time and in places had been rewritten. Umansky probably knew twenty languages. . . .
“I know twenty languages,” said Umansky. “I knew them before I came to Kolyma. I know ancient Hebrew very well. That is the root of all things. Here, in this morgue, next to the corpses, I have studied Arabic, Turkic languages, and Farsi. . . . I’ve created a table—a summary of a unified language. Do you understand what it’s about?”
“I think I do,” said Andreyev. “Mother is ‘Mutter,’ brother is ‘Bruder.’ ”
That’s right, but everything is far more complex and important. I’ve made a few discoveries. This dictionary will be my contribution to science, it will give my life meaning. You’re not a linguist?”
“No, professor,” said Andreyev, a piercing pain running through his heart, for he so much wanted at that moment to be a linguist.
“Pity.” The shape of Umansky’s facial wrinkles altered slightly, and he then resumed his usual ironic expression. “Pity. This work is more interesting than medicine. But medicine is more reliable and more salutary.”
Kolyma Stories Page 65