They could have sent the army home after this victory, but trucks with soldiers continued to travel along the thousand-mile highway for many days.
They couldn’t find the twelfth man – Major Pugachov.
Soldatov took a long time to recover – to be shot. But then that was the only death sentence out of sixty. Such was the number of friends and acquaintances who were sent before the military tribunal. The head of the local camp was sentenced to ten years. The head of the medical section, Dr Potalina, was acquitted, and she changed her place of employment almost as soon as the trial was over. Major General Artemyev’s words were prophetic: he was removed from his position in the guard.
Pugachov dragged himself into the narrow throat of the cave. It was a bear’s den, the beast’s winter quarters, and the animal had long since left to wander the taiga. Bear hairs could still be seen on the cave walls and stone floor.
‘How quickly it’s all ended,’ thought Pugachov. ‘They’ll bring dogs and find me.’
Lying in the cave, he remembered his difficult male life, a life that was to end on a bear path in the taiga. He remembered people – all of whom he had respected and loved, beginning with his mother. He remembered his schoolteacher, Maria Ivanovna, and her quilted jacket of threadbare black velvet that was turning red. There were many, many others with whom fate had thrown him together.
But better than all, more noble than all were his eleven dead comrades. None of the other people in his life had endured such disappointments, deceit, lies. And in this northern hell they had found within themselves the strength to believe in him, Pugachov, and to stretch out their hands to freedom. These men who had died in battle were the best men he had known in his life.
Pugachov picked a blueberry from a shrub that grew at the entrance to the cave. Last year’s wrinkled fruit burst in his fingers, and he licked them clean. The overripe fruit was as tasteless as snow water. The skin of the berry stuck to his dry tongue.
Yes, they were the best. He remembered Ashot’s surname now; it was Khachaturian.
Major Pugachov remembered each of them, one after the other, and smiled at each. Then he put the muzzle of the pistol in his mouth and for the last time in his life fired a shot.
The Used-Book Dealer
It all began some time before my release from Kolyma. I had been transferred from night into day – clearly a promotion, a confirmation, a success along the dangerous path to salvation of an orderly recruited from among the patients. I never noticed who took my place, for in those days I lacked the strength necessary for curiosity and I hoarded my movements – spiritual and physical. I’d accomplished resurrections before, and I knew how dearly one paid for unnecessary curiosity.
In a nocturnal half-sleep and out of the corner of my eye, however, I saw a pale dirty face grown over with reddish bristles, cavernous eyes – eyes whose color I couldn’t remember – and hooked frostbitten fingers clutching the handle of the smoky kettle. The barracks’ hospital night was so dark and thick that the flame of the kerosene lantern, wavering and flickering as if in the wind, was not enough to light up the corridor, the ceiling, the wall, the door, the floor. The light ripped from the darkness only a piece of the night: a corner of the bedside table and the pale face bent over it. The new man on duty was dressed in the same gown that I used to wear. It was a dirty, torn gown – an ordinary gown intended for the patients. During the day this filthy garment hung in the hospital ward and at night was donned over the quilted jacket of the orderly on duty, who was always chosen from among the patients. The flannel was so extraordinarily thin it was transparent, but nevertheless it didn’t tear. Perhaps the patients made no abrupt movements for fear that the gown would disintegrate. Or perhaps they were unable to.
The semicircle of light swayed back and forth, wavered, reached out in sudden movements. It seemed that the cold and not the wind swung the light above the night table of the orderly on duty. It was not the wind, but the cold itself that moved the light. Within the circle of light swung a face twisted with hunger, and hooked fingers searched the kettle’s bottom for something no spoon could catch. Even frostbitten, the fingers were more reliable than a spoon; at once I understood the essence of the movement, the language of gesture.
There was no reason for me to know all this; I was only the day orderly.
But a few days later, fate was unexpectedly prodded by a sudden and hurried departure in the back of a jolting truck. The vehicle crawled south toward Magadan along the bed of a nameless river that served as a winter road through the taiga. In the back of the truck two human beings were repeatedly tossed upward and dropped back on to the floor with a wooden thud as if they were logs. The guard was sitting in the cab, and I couldn’t tell if I was being struck by a piece of wood or a man. At one of the feeding stops my neighbor’s greedy chomping struck me as familiar, and I recognized the hooked fingers and the pale dirty face.
We didn’t speak to each other; each feared he might frighten off his happiness, his convict joy. The truck hurried on into the next day, and the road came to an end.
We had both been selected by the camp to take paramedic courses. Magadan, the hospital, and the courses were cloaked in fog, a white Kolyma fog. Were there markers, road markers? Would they accept political prisoners convicted under Article 58 of the Criminal Code? Only those who came under Point 10. And how about my neighbor in the rear of the truck? He too was ASA – anti-Soviet agitation. That was considered the same as Point 10.
There was an examination on the Russian language. A dictation. The grades were posted the same day. I got an ‘A’. After that came a written examination on mathematics, and I received another ‘A’. It was taken for granted that future students were not required to know the fine points of the Soviet Constitution… I lay on the bunk, dirty and still literally lousy. The job of orderly didn’t destroy lice. But perhaps it only seemed that way to me; lice infestation is one of the camp neuroses. I didn’t have lice any more, but I still couldn’t force myself to get used to the thought or, rather, to the feeling that the lice were gone. I had experienced that feeling two or three times. As for the ‘constitution’ or political economics, such things were no more intended for us than was the luxurious Astoria Hotel. In Butyr Prison the guard on duty in our cell block shouted at me: ‘Why do you keep asking about the Constitution? Your Constitution is the Criminal Code!’ And he was right. Yes, the Criminal Code was our constitution. That was a long time ago. A thousand years. The fourth subject was chemistry. My grade was ‘C’.
Oh, how those convict students strove for knowledge when the stakes of the game were life! How former professors of medicine strove to beat their life-saving knowledge into the heads of ignoramuses and idiots. From the storekeeper Silaikin down to the Tartar writer Min-Shabay, none of them had ever shown the slightest interest in medicine.
Twisting his thin lips in a sneer, the surgeon asked:
‘Who invented penicillin?’
‘Fleming!’ The answer was given not by me, but by my neighbor from the district hospital. His red bristles were shaven off, and there remained only an unhealthy pale puffiness in the cheeks. (He had gorged himself on soup, I immediately realized.)
I was amazed at the red-headed student’s knowledge. The surgeon sized up the triumphant ‘Fleming’. Who are you, night orderly? Who? Who were you before prison?
‘I’m a captain. A captain of the engineering troops. At the beginning of the war I was chief of the fortified area on Dicson Island. We had to put up fortifications in a hurry. In the fall of ’41 when the morning fog broke we saw the German raider Graf Spee in the bay. The raider shot up all our fortifications point-blank. And left. And I got ten years. “If you don’t believe it, consider it a fairy tale.” ’
All the students studied through the night, passionately soaking up knowledge with all the appetite of men condemned to death but suddenly given the chance of a reprieve.
After a meeting with the higher-ups, however, Fleming’s spi
rits lifted and he brought a novel to the barracks, where everyone else was studying. As he finished off some boiled fish, the remnants of someone else’s feast, he carelessly leafed through the book.
Catching my ironic smile, Fleming said:
‘What’s the difference? We’ve been studying for three months now, and anyone who’s lasted this long will finish and get his certificate. Why should I go crazy studying? You have to know how to look at things.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to learn to treat people. I want to learn a real skill.’
‘Knowing how to live is a real skill.’
It was then that I learned that Fleming’s claim to having been a captain was only a mask, another mask on that pale prison face. The rank of captain was real; the bit about the engineering troops was an invention. Fleming had been in the NKVD – the secret police – with the rank of captain. Information on his past had been accumulating drop by drop for several years. A drop was a measure of time, something like a water clock. This drop fell on the bare skull of a person being interrogated; such was the water clock of the Leningrad prisons of the thirties. Sand clocks measured the time allotted for exercise. Water clocks measured the time of confession, the period of investigation. Clocks of sand drained with fleeting speed; water clocks were tormentingly slow. Water clocks didn’t count or measure minutes; they measured the human soul, the will, destroying it drop by drop, eroding it just as water erodes a rock. This piece of folklore about investigations was very popular in the thirties and even in the twenties.
Captain Fleming’s words were gathered drop by drop, and the treasure turned out to be priceless. Fleming himself considered it priceless. It could not have been otherwise, and I remember our conversations very clearly.
‘Do you know the greatest secret of our time?’
‘What?’
‘The trials of the thirties. You know how they prepared them? I was in Leningrad at the time. I worked with Zakovsky. The preparation of the trials was all chemistry, medicine, pharmacology. They had more will-suppressants than you could shake a stick at. You don’t think that if such suppressants exist, they wouldn’t use them? The Geneva Agreement or something like that…
‘It would have been too human to possess chemical will-suppressants and not use them on the “internal front”. This and only this is the secret of the trials of the thirties, the open trials, open to foreign correspondents and to any Feucht-wanger. There were no “doubles” in those trials. The secret of the trials was the secret of pharmacology…’
I lay on the short uncomfortable bunk in the empty student barracks which was shot through with rays of sunshine and listened to these admissions.
‘There were experiments earlier – in the sabotage trials, for example. That comic trial of Ramzin touches on pharmacology very slightly.’
Fleming’s story seeped through drop by drop, or was it his own blood that fell on my bare memory? What sort of drops were these – blood, tears, or ink? They weren’t ink, and they weren’t tears.
‘Of course, there are instances when medicine is powerless. Or sometimes the solutions aren’t prepared properly. There were rules to double-check everything.’
‘Where are those doctors now?’
‘Who knows? On the moon probably…’
The investigator has all the latest scientific discoveries and technology in his arsenal, the latest in pharmacology.
‘It wasn’t cabinet “A” – toxic or poisonous – and not cabinet “B” – strong effect…’ It turns out that the Latin word ‘hero’ is translated in Russian as ‘having a strong effect’. And where were Captain Fleming’s medications kept? In cabinet ‘C’, the crime cabinet or in cabinet ‘M’ – for magic?
A person who had access to cabinet ‘C’, cabinet ‘M’, and the most advanced scientific discoveries had to take a course for hospital orderlies to learn that man has one liver, that the liver is not a paired organ. He learned about blood circulation three hundred years after Harvey.
The secret was kept in laboratories, in underground offices, in stinking cages where the animals smelled like convicts in the Magadan transit prison in ’38. In comparison with this transit prison, Butyr was a model of surgical immaculateness and smelled more like an operating-room than an animal’s cage.
All scientific and technological discoveries are checked first of all for any military significance, even to the extent of speculating on their possible future military uses. And only that which has been sifted through by the generals and found to have no relevance to war is given over for the common use.
Medicine, chemistry, pharmacology have long since been placed under military control. Throughout the world, institutes for the study of the brain have always accumulated the results of experiments, observations. Borgia’s poisons were always a weapon of Realpolitik. The twentieth century brought with it an extraordinary tide of pharmacological and chemical preparations for the control of the psyche.
But if it is possible to obliterate fear with medicine, the opposite is true a thousand times – it is possible to suppress the human will by injections, by pure pharmacology and chemistry without making use of any ‘physical’ methods such as breaking ribs and knocking out teeth, stubbing out cigarettes on the body of the person under investigation, or trampling him with the heels of boots.
These two schools of investigation were known as physics and chemistry. The physicists regarded purely physical persuasion as the cornerstone of their building and viewed beatings as a means of revealing the moral foundations of the world. Once revealed, how base and worthless were the depths of human essence! Beatings could achieve any testimony. Under the threat of a club, inventors made scientific discoveries, wrote verse and novels. The fear of beating and the stomach’s scale for measuring its ‘ration’ worked miracles.
Beating is a sufficiently weighty and effective psychological weapon.
Many useful results were produced by the famous and ubiquitous ‘conveyor’ in which the investigators alternated without giving the arrested person a chance to sleep. After seventeen days without sleep a man loses his sanity. Has this scientific observation been made in the offices of political investigators?
But neither did the chemical school retreat.
Physics could guarantee material for ‘Special Councils’ and all sorts of ‘troikas’ where a triumvirate of judges would make their decisions behind closed doors. The School of Physical Inducement, however, could not be applied in open trials. The School of Physical Inducement (I believe that’s the term used by Stanislavsky) could not publicly present its theater of blood, could not have prepared the ‘open trials’ that made all mankind tremble. The preparation of such spectacles was within the realm of competency of the chemists.
Twenty years after these conversations with Fleming I include in this story lines taken from a newspaper article:
Through the application of certain psychopharmacological agents it is possible, for example, to remove a human being’s sense of fear for a limited time. Of particular importance is the fact that the clarity of his consciousness is not in the least disturbed in the process.
Later even more unexpected facts come to light. Persons whose ‘B phases’ of dream were suppressed for a long period of time – in the given instance for seventeen nights in a row – began to experience various disturbances in their psychic condition and conduct.
What is this? Fragments of testimony of some former NKVD officer during the trial of the judges? A letter from Vyshinsky or Riumin before their deaths? No, these are paragraphs taken from a scientific article written by a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. But all this – and a hundred times more – was learned, tried, and applied in the thirties in the preparation of the ‘open trials’!
Pharmacology was not the only weapon in the investigator’s arsenal of those years. Fleming mentioned a name that I knew well.
Ornaldo!
Of course! Ornaldo was a famous hypnotist who appeared frequently in the t
wenties in Moscow circuses, and not only in Moscow.
Ornaldo’s speciality was mass hypnosis. Books on hypnosis are illustrated with photographs of his famous tours. ‘Ornaldo’, of course, was a pseudonym. His real name was M. A. Smirnov, and he was a Moscow doctor. There were posters pasted all the way around special drums used for theatrical advertisements. Paolo-Svishev had a photograph hanging in the window on Stoleshnikov Lane. It was an enormous photograph of human eyes with the inscription ‘The Eyes of Ornaldo’. Even now I remember those eyes and the emotional confusion that I experienced whenever I heard or saw Ornaldo’s circus act. There are photographs of Ornaldo’s performances taken in 1929 in Baku. Then he left the stage.
‘Beginning in the middle of the thirties Ornaldo was in the secret employment of the NKVD.’
The shiver of a revealed secret ran down my back.
Fleming would frequently, and for no special reason, praise Leningrad. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that he admitted he wasn’t a native Leningrader. In fact, he had been recruited from the provinces by the aesthetes of the NKVD in the twenties as their worthy replacement. They grafted on to him tastes much broader than those provided by an ordinary school education. Not just Turgenev and Nekrasev, but Bal-mont and Sologub, not just Pushkin, but Gumilyov as well:
‘ “And you, watchdogs of the king, pirates guarding gold in the dark port…” I’m not quoting the line incorrectly, am I?’
‘No, that’s right.’
‘I can’t remember the rest. Am I a watchdog of the king? Of the state?’
And smiling – both to himself and his past – he told with reverence how he had touched the file of the executed poet Gumilyov, calling it the affair of lycée pupils. It was as if a Pushkinist were telling how he had held the goose quill pen with which Pushkin wrote Poltava. It was just as if he had touched the Stone of Kaaba, such was the bliss, the purification in every feature of his face. I couldn’t help but think that this too was a way of being introduced to poetry, an amazing, extremely rare manner of introduction in the office of the criminal investigator. Of course the moral values of poetry are not transmitted in the process.
Kolyma Tales Page 24