From time to time, the brigadier’s assistant would check up on us. Other brigadiers were sending goon squads around to step up the work pace with threats and curses and occasionally blows from a stick. Gorelov had bought us peace; so we just lay around the rest of the afternoon and got to know each other. After a while I broached the subject of escape. The way my two companions looked at each other suggested to me they had something in mind. I pressed them about it, and after some fencing and testing, they decided to let me in on it and take me along if I wanted to go.
They had made two knives from scrap steel and hidden them in the tool shed at the quarry. They planned to kidnap a civilian truck driver late in the day when the trucks came for the loads of stone. They would bind and gag him, using the knives to intimidate him, and hide him in the tool shed. They were prepared to kill him if they had to, but since the drivers were free men and not part of the MVD, they bore him no ill will. They would then jump in the truck and drive toward the gate. Just before they reached it, they would build up speed and trip the dump so that the road behind would be strewn with rocks and the dump box would tilt up and provide a shield against machine gun bullets from the watchtowers behind them. Then they would crash through the gate, which was only wire and poles, and just keep going out into the desert. I said I thought the radiator of the truck would be punctured going through the gate and they would bum out the engine almost immediately. They disagreed. So we passed the afternoon, between bouts of my running outside to find a rock to squat behind, chatting about this plan in a relaxed way. I thought it was too fantastic to come off, and privately believed they were just talking.
Late in the afternoon the young urki leader stuck his head into our hide-out and handed in my shirt. I felt in the pockets. Some sugar and tobacco that Effroimson had given me were gone. “Sorry,” said the urka, “I guess my guys have liberal tendencies.” He winked and went away.
I was beginning to feel terrible. I was sore from so many bowel movements, and terribly thirsty. Gorelov and the half-Chinese took turns getting water for me. At six we made our way with the rail gang up the long spiral road to the gate. The climb was extremely difficult for me and I was apprehensive about the march back. We had a chance to rest on the ground while they rounded up the guards after the head count was made, and I began to feel I could make it after all.
It was a bizarre walk back. We had not gone more than a kilometer before I felt another attack coming. I whispered to my neighbor, “Will they let you stop? My bowels..
He shook his head violently. “Don’t try it. They shot the last guy.”
In the end I just had to keep on walking and let it happen. I felt humiliated, but no one said anything about it, so I guessed it was not the first time.
Then there was a commotion up ahead in the line. The convoy soldiers began t curse the prisoners and threaten to shoot. There was a kind of wavering in the line ahead that came closer and closer to us. Then I realized the men ahead of me were stepping over something. It was a body. One poor man had collapsed, and the convoy just kept us marching. Finally they halted the march and detailed two prisoners to pull the fallen man out of the line so they could have a look at him. One soldier kept his rifle pointed at the pitiful shrunken figure, while another felt his heart and peeled back the eyelids. “He’s dead,” the soldier said shortly, as casually as if he had said, “It’s hot out.” Four prisoners were ordered to pick up the body and carry it back to camp.
Everyone was exhausted, and carrying an extra load was a terrible task. The soldiers stopped the column every few minutes and assigned a relief group to take over the body. It was past eight o’clock when we got back to the gates.
As soon as the count was made and we were turned loose in the compound, I went to find Victor and ask him how I could wash out my pants. He found me some water, and while I was cleaning up the mess he told me that I just might be able to talk my way into the hospital on the basis of the diarrhea by claiming it was the fever again. He could see how feeble I felt, and he said, “You won’t last in the quarry, even with a clever tufta artist like your friend Gorelov. So you better get into that hospital by hook or by crook.”
And so, after another night fighting off the bedbugs and catching what sleep I could, I grabbed my bread when it came and went straight to the hospital without the rest of my breakfast.
The man who examined me—a prisoner, of course—was sympathetic. There was a great line-up of would-be malingerers, with differing schemes for appearing to need hospitalization, and some genuinely sick men. When it was my turn, the doctor shoved a thermometer under my arm and asked me my story. “I think it’s another malaria attack,” I said, trying to sound very sick. I was sorry I had not brought a mug of tea with me to heat my fingers in, or a clove of garlic, although garlic was the rarest of treasures in camp and ought not to be wasted in the wrong orifice.
The doctor looked at me very carefully. He said, “You’re not Latvian, by any chance?”
“No. I’m an American.”
“An American!” He seemed delighted. He immediately started speaking English, almost without an accent. “I’ve been dying to find someone to talk English with,” he said warmly. “Now, we are not allowed to put you into the hospital for diarrhea and..
He looked at the thermometer. “Hmm, no fever. I guess you knew that. Let me see.”
Then he said in a loud voice, in Russian, “This looks very serious. Wait in the surgery. I want to do a more thorough examination.”
When the rest of the line was processed, a few minutes later, he came into the surgery seeming in a great hurry. “Now, listen,” he said in a whisper. “I am allowed only a small quota each day, and I’m over it now. I’ve got to make you really sick if you’re going to stay here. Would you be willing to give yourself an infection if I promise to cure it for you later?”
“Anything!” I said. “I’ll do anything to get in here. What’s the plan?”
He said, “You’ve got a boil on the back of your arm, not a bad one. I’m going to lance it for you and give you some of the pus on a matchstick.” He moved quickly and deftly; I scarcely felt the probe. Then he handed me the match with a big, unpleasant drop of white matter on it.
“Hold that,” he said. “I have to cut you now. Can you stand it? It won’t be very nice.”
“Go ahead,” I said. I was fascinated.
Again, with a speed and deftness that I found amazing, he made an incision on the inside of my arm. It was made in a way that produced little blood.
“I can’t do the next part,” he said with a half-humorous, half-serious look. “My professional ethics won’t let me infect a wound. But you can. I’ll look away.”
I stuck the match in the incision and wiped the pus off inside. Then Atsinch, which was this doctor’s name, sent me to a feldsher to get a bandage on the cut. He explained that he could keep me overnight, but by morning he would have to justify bringing another patient into the ward, and by then I should have a spectacular infection. I remembered Vasya’s leg at Kuibyshev and felt faintly sick. But I had formed an immediate trust and liking for this soft-spoken young surgeon with such marvelous hands. I was sure that he could manage anything.
Atsinch sent me to the barracks for my things, and told me he would do a very thorough examination as soon as I got back, to see what else he could find that might let him keep me in the hospital for a good long time.
As I was going out the door, I turned back and said to him, “Dr. Atsinch, why are you doing all this for me?”
“I told you,” he said easily, with a big smile, “I’ve got to practice my English or I’ll forget it.”
We became very good friends, Arvid Atsinch and I. It began with the unbelievably soothing connection he could make with his patients through his fingertips. He went over my whole body meticulously, and everywhere he touched me I had the feeling that the process of healing began at the point of contact with those fingers.
My legs had been swollen
for some days; he pressed the puffiness along my shinbones and a depression remained when he took his finger away. “That’s got to be connected with something,” he said quietly. Eventually he found it. He did a most meticulous examination of my heart, by percussion, and with the stethoscope, over and over again tapping, listening, tapping, listening, pressing, closing his eyes as if his fingers could look inside my body.
Then we sat down and he wrote out a very extensive history, always speaking English, of course, and occasionally asking me for the English word if he had forgotten it.
He liked the colloquial ways of the language, and he announced right at the beginning that he would call me Al, if that was all right with me.
“Al,” he said, “this is serious, but it is good news in a way, because I am going to be able to make a good case to the medical administration to keep you here for some time. If we let this infection develop in your arm, along with the edema in your legs and the way your heart sounds, I think I can make you out to be a real mess. But you’ll be able to walk around and do light work, and if you like I’ll give you some medical training because I need another assistant, and then we can work together and talk English all we want.”
“Wait a minute,” I said anxiously, “what’s all this about my heart? Are you serious?”
“Well…” He paused for quite a long time, looking very serious, so that I became a bit alarmed.
“Let me ask you about your treatment before you got here,” Atsinch said. “I have the impression that you’ve got a fundamentally very strong body, a very healthy body. But it seems to me that it has been very badly abused recently; am I right?”
I told him about the beatings and the sleeplessness and the cold and the starvation.— “Perhaps that explains it,” he said. “The left ventricle of your heart is quite enlarged. Without an X-ray I can only estimate how much, but it seems to me to be about four and a half centimeters. That’s pretty serious. I can’t believe that you could survive a lot of hard physical work. I think you have what we call congestive heart disease, and with your dystrophic diarrhea and your general weakness, it means that we will have to start some very extensive therapy.”
That suited me. It meant rest and food. Atsinch found me a bed and a hospital gown. He started vitamin injections and intravenous glucose right away. By the time the hospital administrator, an MVD captain, came to check me out, I was plugged up with tubes and had a huge, purple infection in my right arm. The captain was evidently impressed, as Atsinch had planned. I was allowed to stay.
Arvid Atsinch began my medical training later on that very first day. He asked if I felt up to making rounds with him, and gave me a white smock and a stethoscope to wear around my neck. We saw men with tuberculosis and silicosis, men with dysentery and men with bowel blockage. We saw a great variety of wounds from the mines and the quarry and the construction sites. Fractured skulls and limbs, eyes and fingers and toes lost, lacerations and scrapes and burns. Atsinch believed very strongly in vitamin injections; right away he taught me how to sterilize the skin with alcohol and pinch up the muscle or stretch it out, depending on the kind of injection, and how to clear air from the syringe before quickly plunging in the needle. The patients were mystified at the language we spoke, but Arvid Atsinch was always kind and made a real effort to make every man feel better. To the patients, I was clearly another physician: I had the uniform. They would say, “Thank you, doctor,” when I made the injection, and look at me with a respect I did not deserve.
I saw that Atsinch watched me very closely too. He said, later in our first day together, “You know, Al, I think you have the makings of a physician. It is really too bad you never studied medicine. But I’m going to teach you as much as I can while you’re here with me. It may be the only way you will ever survive camp, with that heart of yours, to have a skill that will keep you out of the mines.”
What an irony that was. Arvid Atsinch’s own exquisite medical skill would be, not too many years later, the very thing that took him into the mines and to his death. I would see, a lot of deaths in my years in camp. One had already taken place almost under my feet. I would get hardened to death as a fact, as a part of the environment. I would feel grief for only a very few, but Atsinch’s would be one of them. He was the first man I became strongly attached to in camp. He was a lifeline to my own roots because of his command of English. He was a teacher by instinct, and a good one. He was a passionate democrat. His father had been a minister of state in Latvia, before the Soviet take-over, and Atsinch often talked about the excellence of the democratic system in that small republic. His father had been shot after the take-over.
He was as committed as I to finding ways to survive the rigors of camp. But he said, “Survival is no good without moral integrity. You survive at almost any cost. The almost means that indecent methods are outside the range of acceptable cost. If you survive by stepping on others and lose your compassion, then you’re not worth saving.”
Although he was only a few years older than I, I found myself looking on him as a guide and accepting his teaching unreservedly, whether it was medicine or philosophy or politics. When he entered the ward, faces lit up. Most of our patients were in pain most of the time, and Atsinch’s presence seemed to relieve that pain. I think much of it had to do with his moral clarity. I had considered myself a kind of natural democrat. Atsinch was the first one to put into my head ideas about the moral basis of democracy. I don’t think I had ever done any serious thinking before I met Atsinch, and the person who starts your mind working in a serious way is someone you remain grateful to. He believed strongly that a man deprived of liberty tends to degenerate morally. That was why he kept stressing the point of survival with decency. He tied that theme into the whole of history. He knew more history of the English-speaking world than I did, and virtually gave me a course in the history of England, which he saw as the story of a people gaining moral strength through the development of institutions to protect and enlarge liberty. I had never really understood before what an idea was, in this sense, and it was as if I were taking off dark glasses and for the first time finally getting a clear look at the world. This was an invigorating experience: even in the midst outlook on life became more optimistic. I was growing as a human being probably faster than I ever had before, and it felt just fine.
It was a curious experience to be learning medicine as part of my own therapy. Atsinch was always teaching, always showing and explaining, sometimes about what was happening to me, sometimes about other patients. He seemed to be fulfilled by having a pupil—maybe even disciple is not too strong a word.
A day or two after my arrival at Atsinch’s hospital, he told me that he wanted to begin a program of colonic irrigation with potassium permanganate to try to make some headway against my stubborn diarrhea. He assigned a feldsher to perform the operation, which was to be simply a matter of a huge, ten-liter enema, to be repeated several times over several days. I was alarmed at the idea of such a volume of liquid being pumped into me. Atsinch warned me that it would be very uncomfortable for a short while, but that I was to expel it all immediately and then I would feel all right again. He gave me a couple of cigarettes to keep me calm and occupied throughout the procedure, and the feldsher and I went off to the toilets to get on with it. I lay down on a bench and lit up a cigarette. The man inserted the tube, held a funnel well above me, and began to pour. I could feel the warm water slowly beginning to fill me up. The pressure became strong after a while and breathing was uncomfortable, so I assumed that the ten liters must be almost in. Then I heard the door of the toilet open, and a strange and very commanding voice said, “What is going on here!”
I turned my head and almost swallowed my cigarette, because three MGB officers in full uniform were standing there staring at this strange sight of a man on a bench with a pail draining into his backside. Somehow, with the effort of turning and the difficulty of breathing and the surprise of our visitors, I was seized with a sudden fit of coughi
ng. Perhaps I had swallowed some smoke. The coughing sent terrific spasms into my swollen abdomen. The contents of my lower bowel started to spurt out the funnel that the pail was pouring into. The startled feldsher did not have the presence of mind to lower the funnel. Perhaps it was fastened to the ceiling, too. It began to spray all over the room, the feldsher, and the MGB colonels. If I had not been coughing, I would have been seized with laughter, and the laughing impulse probably kept the cough going for a while. I saw the colonels back hastily out of the room, wiping purple liquid and brown and yellow fragments off their impeccable uniforms. The feldsher was terrified, and when I thought about what I had just done, I began to get a bit scared too.
But nothing came of it. The MGB were a commission of inspection, looking for malingerers. They acknowledged that they had burst in unannounced during a medical procedure and took no punitive action. There was something about Atsinch’s presence, though he was a prisoner, that won respect even from the Organs. And I won respect from the whole camp, and a title: they called me the Man Who Shit on the Organs.
The next morning Atsinch brought me with him to the dispensary where the outpatients came, and where everyone hopeful of being admitted lined up. He began to teach me some rudimentary pharmacology, and I continued giving injections under his supervision. One of the first patients we saw that morning was Effroimson. He said all he wanted was aspirin, and Atsinch told me where to get them and how many to give. When I brought them to Effroimson he leaned close to me for a moment and whispered in my ear, “I don’t need these at all. I just wanted to tell you that Gorelov and the Chinese boy tried their escape yesterday. They made it out the gate all right. Then they ran out of gas about thirty miles out on the steppe. The Organs have a small search plane. They found them pretty fast. They are very badly beaten, but people think they’ll survive. They’ve been locked in the BUR. That’s all.”
An American in the Gulag Page 26
