The hospital chief approached the foundation pit, and three men wheeling barrows stopped work, got up, and stood to attention.
Dr. Doctor examined me with great satisfaction.
“So that’s where you are. . . . That’s the sort of job you should be doing. Got it? That’s your sort of job.”
Had Dr. Doctor brought witnesses in the hope of provoking something, if only some small breach of the rules? Times had changed, definitely. Dr. Doctor understood that, and so did I. A chief and a paramedic were not the same as a chief and an ordinary laborer. Not in the least.
“I can do any work, sir. I can even be a hospital chief.”
Dr. Doctor swore obscenely and left in the direction of the free workers’ settlement. The iron rail was struck, and I went off to the hospital, not to the camp or the zone as I had for the last two days.
“Grisha, hot water!” I shouted. “And something to eat after my bath.”
But I had underestimated Dr. Doctor. The department was snowed under by commissions and checks almost every day.
Dr. Doctor was going out of his mind as he waited for the senior bosses to come.
Dr. Doctor would have gotten his hands on me, but other free chiefs tripped him up, pushed him out of a good job, and wrecked his career.
Suddenly Dr. Doctor was given leave and sent to the mainland, although he’d never asked for leave. Another chief replaced him.
There was a farewell round of the wards. The new hospital chief was a portly, idle man who breathed heavily. The surgical department was on the second floor, and they were moving quickly and gasping for breath. When he saw me, Dr. Doctor could not help creating a diversion. “That’s the counterrevolutionary I was telling you about downstairs,” he said loudly, pointing a finger at me. “We kept trying to remove him, but never got around to it. I advise you to do so immediately, at once. The hospital air will be all the cleaner for it.”
“I’ll do my best,” said the fat new chief offhandedly. I realized that he hated Dr. Doctor just as much as I did.
1964
THE SECONDHAND BOOK DEALER
I WAS TRANSFERRED from night to day—a notable promotion, an affirmation, a success in the dangerous but lifesaving career of a male nurse who had once been a patient. I didn’t notice who had replaced me. At that time I didn’t have the strength to be curious. I was wary of making any movement, physical or mental. Somehow I had managed to be resurrected, and I knew how much any unnecessary curiosity would cost me.
But out of the corner of my eye I did spot, in my nocturnal, half-asleep state, a dirty, pale face sprouting thick reddish bristles, with sunken eyes of an indeterminate color and crooked frostbitten fingers hooked into the handle of a soot-stained cooking pot. The night in that barracks hospital was so impenetrably dark that the flames of the kerosene lamp, seeming to sway and shake in the wind, were incapable of illuminating the corridor, the ceiling, the walls, the door, and the floor, and extracted only a small piece of the whole night from the darkness: a corner of the bedside table and a pale face bending over that table. The new duty nurse was wearing the same gown I had worn on my shift: a dirty, torn gown, an ordinary patient’s gown. In the daytime this gown hung in the hospital ward; at night it was pulled over the quilted jacket of the male nurse on duty, who was also a patient. Its flannel cloth was extraordinarily thin: you could see through it. Yet it didn’t tear. Patients were too afraid or too weak to make any sudden movements, so the gown didn’t fall apart.
The semicircle of light swung to and fro, it swayed, it changed. It seemed that it was the cold—not the wind, not a draft, but the cold—that was making the light swing over the duty nurse’s bedside table. The face, grimacing with hunger, swung in this spot of light; the crooked fingers were scraping the bottom of the pot for whatever couldn’t be extracted with a spoon. Fingers, although frostbitten and devoid of feeling, were better than a spoon, and I understood the purpose of their movement, the language of the gesture.
I didn’t need to know any of this. I was the daytime duty male nurse, after all.
But a few days later—a hurried departure, an unexpected speeding up of my fate, thanks to a sudden decision—and there I was in the back of a truck, jolted by every surge it made as it crawled up the frozen bed of some nameless stream, following the taiga winter road that slowly wended its way south to Magadan. In the back of the truck two people were flying about and hitting the bottom with a wooden thump, rolling around like wooden logs. The escort guard was sitting in the cab; I didn’t know if I was being struck by a tree or a man. At one of our stops to eat, my neighbor’s greedy chomping seemed familiar to me, and I recognized the crooked fingers and the pale, dirty face.
We didn’t talk. We were both afraid of jinxing our luck, our prisoners’ luck. The truck was in a hurry; the journey had to end within twenty-four hours.
We were both going to take paramedic courses; we had been seconded by the camp. Magadan, hospital, courses: that was all fog, the white Kolyma fog. Were there any milestones, milestones on the road? Would they accept someone convicted under article 58? Only paragraph 10? How about my companion in the truck? He also had paragraph 10—ASA, Anti-Soviet Agitation, which came under paragraph 10.
A Russian-language examination. A dictation. You get your marks the same day. Excellent. Written mathematics—excellent. Oral mathematics—excellent. Future students are exempted from the subtleties of the Constitution of the USSR, as everyone knew in advance. . . . I was lying on my bunk, dirty, likely still louse-infested; working as a male nurse hadn’t gotten rid of the lice, but perhaps I was imagining things. Louse infestation is a camp psychosis. The lice may be long gone, but you just can’t get used to the thought (is it a thought?), the feeling that there are no lice left: that had happened to me two or three times in my life. As for the Constitution, or history, or political economy, none of that was for us. In Butyrki prison, when I was still being interrogated, the block warden on duty yelled at me, “Why are you asking about the Constitution? Your constitution is the Criminal Code.” And he was right. Yes, the Criminal Code was our constitution. That had been so for some time. A thousand years. The fourth subject was chemistry. My grade was “fair.”
How eager the prisoners in the course were for knowledge, now that their lives were at stake. Here, former professors of medical institutes were eager to drum the lifesaving science into the heads of ignoramuses, blockheads who had never shown any interest in medicine—from the store man Silaikin to the Tatar writer Min Shabai. . . .
The surgeon would twist his thin lips and ask, “Who discovered penicillin?”
“Fleming!” It was not me but my neighbor from the district hospital. His reddish bristles had been shaved. He still had unhealthily pale puffy cheeks (he had gobbled up the soup too fast, I rapidly worked out).
I was struck by what this red-haired student knew. The surgeon looked this triumphant “Fleming” up and down. Who are you, night-shift male nurse? Who?
•
“What was your job before you were arrested?”
“I’m a captain. A captain in the army engineers. I was in charge of a fortified district at the start of the war. We built the fortifications in a hurry. In autumn 1941, when the morning mist lifted, we saw the German heavy cruiser Graf von Spee in the bay. It shelled our fortifications point-blank. Then it left. I was given ten years. If you don’t believe me, treat it as a fairy tale.”
I believed it. I knew the procedure.
•
All the students studied through the night, absorbing knowledge with all the passion of someone sentenced to death who has suddenly been given hope of a reprieve.
But Fleming, after some businesslike meeting with the people in charge, cheered up, and when it was study time in the barracks he would bring along a novel and, eating boiled fish, the leftovers of someone else’s feast, he would casually leaf through a book.
Catching my ironic smile, Fleming said, “It makes no difference. We’ve bee
n studying for three months now, and everyone who’s stayed the course is going to be allowed to pass, everyone will get their diploma. Why should I drive myself insane? You must agree—”
“No,” I said. “I want to learn how to treat people. I want to learn to do it properly.”
“The proper thing is to live.”
That was the hour when it turned out that Fleming’s captain’s rank was just a mask, yet another mask on that pale prison face. The captain’s rank itself wasn’t a mask, but the army engineering was. Fleming had been an NKVD interrogator with the rank of captain. Information had been sifted and accumulated drop by drop over several years. These drops were a measure of time, like water-operated clocks. Or these drops fell on the bare head of somebody being interrogated: the water clocks in Leningrad’s prison cells in the 1930s. Sand-filled hourglasses measured the prisoners’ exercise time, water clocks measured the time needed to extract a confession, the interrogation time. Hourglasses moved fast, water clocks were agonizing. Water clocks counted and measured out not minutes but human souls, human willpower, which they destroyed drop by drop, wearing it away as water does a rock, in the proverbial phrase. This interrogator folklore was very popular in the 1930s, even in the 1920s, too.
Captain Fleming’s words were collected drop by drop, and the treasure turned out to be priceless. Fleming himself considered it priceless, too: of course he would!
•
“Do you know what the biggest secret of our time is?”
“What secret?”
“The trials of the 1930s. How they were set up. I was in Leningrad then, you know. With Zakovsky.[36] Setting up trials is chemistry, medicine, pharmacology. Suppressing people’s will by chemical means. There are an awful lot of those chemicals. And you don’t think, do you, that if there are means of suppressing people’s will, they won’t be used? Are the Geneva Conventions going to stop them?
“If you have in your possession chemical means of suppressing willpower and you don’t use them under interrogation, fighting on the ‘internal front,’ that is being far too humane. In the twentieth century you can’t take those humane ideas seriously. This is the only secret of the 1930s trials, trials that were open, even to foreign correspondents, Lion Feuchtwanger [37] and his ilk. No doubles were used at those trials. The secret of those trials was the secret of pharmacology.”
•
I was lying on one of the uncomfortable short double bunks in the deserted students’ barracks; it was shot through by the sun’s diagonal rays, and I listened to these confessions.
•
“There had been experiments earlier, in the trials of the ‘wreckers,’ for instance. Pharmacology, however, was barely relevant to the Ramzin [38] farce.”
•
Fleming’s stories oozed out drop by drop. Was it his own blood dripping onto my memory, which had now been stripped bare? What were these drops—blood, tears, or ink? No, not ink, and not tears.
“There were cases, of course, when drugs didn’t work. Or the solutions used hadn’t been calculated properly. Or there was sabotage. Then you had to have a backup system. Following the rules.”
“Where are those doctors now?”
“Who knows? Probably in the next world.”
•
The interrogator’s arsenal: the latest in science, the latest in pharmacology.
•
It wasn’t in cupboard A, venena, “poisons,” nor was it in cupboard B, heroica, “strong drugs” (apparently, the Latin word hero becomes a strong drug in Russian translation). Where, then, were Captain Fleming’s drugs kept? In cupboard C for “crimes,” or cupboard M for “miracles”?
It was only through a paramedic course that a man who had at his disposal cupboards C and M, containing science’s greatest achievements, learned that a human being has only one liver, that livers don’t come in pairs. He also found out about the circulation of the blood, three hundred years after Harvey.
•
The secret was hidden in laboratories, underground offices, stinking vivaria where the animals stank just like the prisoners in the filthy Magadan transit camp in 1938. Compared with that transit camp, Butyrki prison was as polished and clean as a surgeon’s theater, and smelled of the operating theater, not of the vivarium.
All scientific and technological discoveries are first tested for their military implications, military, even if it’s only for the future or just a possible conjecture. Only what the generals discard, what isn’t needed for warfare, is returned for general use.
Medicine and chemistry, like pharmacology, have long been preserves of the military. All over the world institutes of the brain have always been accumulating the results of experiments and observations. The Borgia poisons have always been a weapon of practical politics. The twentieth century has brought us an extraordinary flowering of pharmacological and chemical means for controlling the psyche.
But if fear can be destroyed by medicine, then the reverse can be done thousands of times: you can suppress human willpower by injections, by pure pharmacology and chemistry, without any “physical” means such as crushing ribs and trampling bodies with your boots, or smashing teeth in, or stubbing out cigarettes on the body of the person you are interrogating.
•
There were the chemists and the physicists, as the two schools of interrogation were called. The physicists were those who gave priority to purely physical methods and saw beatings as a way of laying bare the moral essence of the world. Once the depths of human nature were laid bare, how vile and contemptible it would appear. Beatings were a method of obtaining more than any statement: use of the stick devised and revealed things that were new to science, it led to the writing of verse and novels. The fear of being beaten, rations based on measurement of the stomach: these things accomplished great deeds.
Beating was a pretty substantial psychological weapon, and it was quite effective.
A lot of benefit came too from the famous and ubiquitous “conveyor,” the process by which one interrogator took over after another, but the prisoner was not allowed to sleep. Seventeen days and nights without sleep would drive a man insane; this scientific observation was surely drawn from the interrogation offices.
But the chemical school would not concede victory.
The physicists could supply the Special Tribunals or any other three-some with material, but the physical-methods school was no good for open trials. The physical-methods school (that seems to have been the same as Stanislavsky’s) was unable to put on an open bloody theatrical spectacle, it couldn’t stage the open trials that made all humanity tremble. The chemists, however, were capable of staging such spectacles.
•
Twenty years after that conversation I find myself inserting into a story some lines from a newspaper article: “By using certain psychopharmacological drugs it is possible, for example, to remove completely a person’s feelings of fear. And, what is very important, this does not in the least affect his clarity of mind.
“Later even more surprising facts emerged. The state and the behavior of people whose beta-wave sleep was suppressed for long periods, in this particular case for up to seventeen days and nights continuously, began to show various psychological disorders.”
What is this? Extracts from evidence given by a former boss in the NKVD administration during a trial of former judges? Is it a deathbed letter by Vyshinsky or Ryumin?[39] No, these paragraphs come from a scientific article by a full member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. But all this was a hundred times more familiar, better tested and applied in the 1930s when the “open trials” were being staged.
Pharmacology was not the only weapon in the interrogator’s arsenal then. Fleming mentioned a name I knew very well.
Ornaldo!
Of course! Ornaldo was a well-known hypnotist, who had in the 1920s often performed in Moscow’s circuses, and not just Moscow’s. His specialty was mass hypnosis. There are photographs of his famous touring perf
ormances, there are illustrations in books on hypnosis. Ornaldo was, of course, a pseudonym. He was in fact N. A. Smirnov, a Moscow doctor. His photograph was on all the posters on the street pillars—in those days advertisements were pasted to round pillars. Svishchev-Paolo’s [40] photography studio was then on Stoleshnikov Lane. Their shopwindow had a gigantic photograph of two eyes, titled Ornaldo’s Eyes. I can still remember those eyes and the mental disturbance I suffered when I heard or saw Ornaldo’s circus performances. The hypnotist performed until the end of the 1920s. There are photographs from Baku in 1929 of Ornaldo performing. After that he stopped.
“In the beginning of the 1930s Ornaldo began working secretly for the NKVD.”
When that mystery was solved, a chill ran down my back.
Fleming often praised Leningrad, unprompted. In fact, he admitted that he wasn’t born there. Actually, Fleming was summoned from the provinces by the aesthetes of the NKVD in the 1920s, as someone suitable to replace those aesthetes. He had acquired tastes rather broader than those you get from a normal school education. Not just Turgenev and Nekrasov but Balmont and Sologub, too; not just Pushkin but also Gumiliov.
“ ‘And you, the king’s hounds and freebooters, / who keep your gold in a dark port. . . .’[41] Have I got it right?”
“You have, completely right.”
“I don’t remember what comes after. Am I a king’s hound? A state hound?”
Smiling at himself and his past, Fleming talked with reverence, like a Pushkin specialist talking about having held the quill with which Poltava was written; he mentioned the folders of the “Gumiliov case,” referring to his conspiracy as the “lycée boys” conspiracy. You’d have thought Fleming had touched the Kaaba stone, so great was the bliss and exaltation of his every facial feature. I couldn’t help thinking that this, too, was a way of approaching poetry. An astonishing and very rare path by which you could grasp literary values in an interrogator’s office. Of course, this was no path for grasping the moral values of poetry.
Kolyma Tales Page 45