Amazingly, Borodin was conscious. He kept whimpering, “Help me, please help me.” I sent for Adarich. Adarich sent for Lavrenov.
It was clear to everyone that this was a Council of Justice attempted killing, or at least a private vengeance against a stool pigeon. Borodin claimed he did not know who had done it, but that there were two people. The two who brought him in said they had just found him lying behind a shed at the work site.
Adarich was all set to hospitalize him and prepare for major surgery, but Lavrenov forbade him to do that. “Just dress the wound, just dress the wound!” he insisted, and ran off to the headquarters building.
Lavrenov was sure that Borodin would be murdered if he was hospitalized, and while he couldn’t have cared less about Borodin, he definitely did not want the bother of an official inquiry into a murder in his hospital. That was the kind of thing that could cost a man his job. Within half an hour he was back with transfer papers and Borodin was shipped out.
We heard later, months later, that he was eventually taken to the Taishet camp in Siberia and that while he was taking his compulsory shower at the time of admission a young man, tipped off by the peg leg maybe, but in any case warned about the stool pigeon by the prison telegraph, knifed him under the shower. He was dead within an hour of arrival at that camp. That’s how effective the prison telegraph was.
All corpses came to the hospital morgue, whether they died in the hospital, were murdered by prisoners’ justice committees, shot by guards, or died from despair or exhaustion. We usually had between six and twelve corpses in the morgue at one time, and then if they had all been autopsied Nye Russki would call the corpse wagon and load it himself, and off they would go to have their heads bashed in and then be buried in shallow graves in the desert. In winter, for some reason, instead of an axe in the head the corpses got a red-hot iron pushed into the chest. They were usually frozen in winter because the morgue was unheated.
The morgue was Nye Russki’s domain. He had to keep it clean, wash down the slab, carry corpses in and out. Guards never went in there, partly because of superstition and partly because the hospital staff spread the story that all corpses were highly infectious. Nye Russki told me that there was a cache of forbidden books and other contraband under the autopsy table, perfectly safe, and that if I wanted to conceal any small articles so that the periodic searches would not put them into the hands of the MVD, I should put them in the morgue. We could easily have hidden weapons there if we had had any. If I had ever been lucky or dumb enough to have a gun in camp I would have stashed it in the morgue.
Autopsies were never performed less than twenty-four hours after a death, by standing orders. Anyone dying in the hospital had a very thorough pathological examination. Anyone shot by a guard was examined only around the wound, and a report was written on the path of the dumdum bullet from the guard’s automatic, point of entry, exit point, description of damage caused internally. Lavrenov attended all such autopsies himself and had to make a report to the local MGB commandant, who was known in camp as the kum, or godfather.
As far as we could tell, the kum was chiefly occupied with creating internal conflict in camp, setting the Ukrainians against the Russians (which was not hard) by spreading rumors and so on, on the divide-and-rule principle. But he had to be notified whenever there was a shooting. If a couple of guards got trigger happy and shot someone on a bet or because they thought they could get away with it or because he stepped out of line in the column or actually did enter the fire zone, the kum would come and photograph the corpse, but not before it was thrown into the fire zone to create a legitimate reason for the killing.
The morgue was usually well populated, one way or another.
One morning Nye Russki came to me and said, “How many corpses are we supposed to have?”
I checked the book “Nine,” I said. “Why?”
“Oh, it’s all right. Thank you.” He went away.
The next day after the camp was counted and locked up, but before the corpse wagon had come, Nye Russki asked me again. There had been no deaths in the night. I said we still had nine and pressed him to know what the trouble was.
“I’m either having eye trouble or trouble with my head,” he said unhappily. “I know you are right about the nine, but two days in a row I count ten. Please.” He motioned me to go with him.
We went to the morgue. Nine corpses. I counted nine, stretched out in their underclothes on the packed earth floor. Nye Russki counted nine.
“Okay now?” I asked him.
“No. I counted ten a few minutes ago. I know I did. What the hell is going on here!”
The next day he came to me looking terrible. “I need some medicine,” he said in a panicky way. “We have twelve corpses!”
“Eleven,” I said.
“That’s just it. There should be eleven, but I’m counting twelve. Please come with me again!”
I went. We counted. Eleven corpses.
Poor Nye Russki felt terrible. He was really a bit superstitious himself, I think, despite the bluff and cheerful manner and the daily embraces with the dead. And I think he was really worried about his mind as well.
The next day he came to me looking very much relieved.
“Please,” he said with a big smile. “I know where our extra corpse comes from. Come! Come! I want to show you!”
He took me outside. We had a ladder leading to the roof of the hospital for snow removal in the winter. He motioned me to follow him up the ladder. The morgue roof was lower than the hospital roof and had a small skylight. We looked through. There was an extra corpse, all right. It was sitting up reading one of our contraband books!
Something clicked. I knew that there had been a search on for several days for an otkazchik, one of a group of conscientious objectors who would not work on their Sabbath and were always being beaten up for it. The search had been a bit confused because, although no one could ever find this guy, the head count was perfectly all right so that officially nobody was missing.
I said to Nye Russki, “You watch the outside door of the morgue. I’ll go and talk to the corpse.”
I had recognized him. His name was Valka; I had treated him in the hospital, and had seen him often in the Zone. When I unlocked the door he was lying among the corpses trying to look like one. I went into the morgue humming a little tune. I walked right over and stood staring down at him. I stopped humming and just stared. I did not make a sound for almost a minute. He could not stand the suspense, 1 guess.
He opened his eyes after a bit and grinned at me sheepishly. “Hello, Doc,” he said. “Tell me about it,” I said.
He had made himself a wire lock-pick and slipped into the morgue on Saturday, his Sabbath, to avoid going to work. He took off his clothes and hid them under a corpse, and when the guards came to count from the door, because they never would come inside, be was just another corpse. There was no alarm then, when the columns went out, because the total camp count was all right. But his brigadier missed him at the work site and nobody could account for his whereabouts. Once the camp was locked up for the day the kid slipped out and came back in again the next morning to hide until the head count was over.
For two or three days after we discovered Valka, he managed to hide somewhere else in the Zone. Then one morning there was a terrible commotion outside the hospital. He had been found. Gusak himself, the camp commandant, was screaming at the terrified otkazchik right in front of the hospital door, which was crowded with staring patients. The commandant screamed curses and started slapping the kid around; then he grabbed him and threw him to the ground and began kicking him. He twisted his arms behind him and slapped on a pair of handcuffs of a particularly vicious kind that tighten up with every movement until you are in agony. They have a sort of ratchet that slips only one way, and unless you are perfectly still, which is usually not possible, they keep on squeezing you more and more.
The patients watching from the hospital door were enraged at this
brutality. Gusak had only one guard with him. In front of the hospital they were out of sight of the nearest watchtower, and no guard would have shot anyway with Gusak in a crowd. The patients stormed out and surrounded Gusak and the guard, grabbing the kid, and took him into the hospital. Gusak and the guard were intimidated and could not identify any of this mob because they were in their prison underwear without any numbers. The patients got the boy’s handcuffs off and slipped him back into the Zone and told him to be damn sure to rejoin his work brigade the next day.
Within half an hour a guard came to the hospital and demanded the handcuffs. All the patients pretended ignorance. “We don’t know anything about any handcuffs! What do you mean?” The guard went away and later an officer came and was very stern. One prisoner said, as if confessing, “I’m sorry, they were thrown down the toilet. You’ll have to dig for them.” The officer was furious. “How am I going to account for state property!” he shouted, and stalked out. The incident was dropped.
Later that night when everything had settled down, I went to see the man who had “confessed.” I said, “I’d like to see those handcuffs, just out of curiosity.”
“Doctor, you know I threw them down the toilet.”
Now this was a very devious guy, Konstantin the Sailor, a semicolored who had spent a long time at sea and not only had a ship in full sail rippling across his back but the sum where the tattoo artist had worked out the price in German marks, as Tattoo 97 Ink 13 Total 110 marks—or something like that.
He was in the hospital because he had fallen sixty feet in the copper mine; he had landed on piles of rubber hose which saved his life despite a lot of internal injuries. I always had trouble with him, but I admired his spirit. I said, “Look, Kostya, I know they went down the toilet, but I’d like to see them anyway. I’ve always heard about these things and I’d like to examine them in case I ever have to deal with them!”
We were sitting in the darkened ward, on his bed. He finally winked at me and produced the handcuffs, with their key, from under the mattress. “Bring them back!” he said.
I slipped into the examining room to look at them in the light. I put the key in the lock and put the handcuffs on my own wrists and closed them. I would be able to bend my fingers back and turn the key, I thought.
The design was cunning and fiendish. With the slightest movement of my hands the ratchet slipped and the cuffs tightened up. I twisted my hand to get the key. The cuffs tightened harder. I could just reach the key with my fingertips. I panicked. The pain was, quite severe and my fingers were swelling and turning blue. I tugged too hard. The key broke off!
I was embarrassed as hell. I could imagine someone walking into the room at any minute and seeing what I had done. I had to find a way out. I strode up and down and tried to think of it, but the pain was too much for me. I flipped my lab coat over my hands in a poor attempt to conceal my incredible blunder, then I went back to the ward. Konstantin the Sailor was sleeping.
“Kostya,” I whispered, almost choking, “wake up”
“What is it?” he said, still half asleep.
“I’ve broken the key and I can’t get the cuffs off!”
He started to laugh. He couldn’t stop. Soon the whole ward was awake and Konstantin was telling everyone.
“Kostya, please, for God’s sake!” I said. But he just rolled about with laughter. Finally he said, “Go get a hypo or some other needle.”
“What for?”
“Oh, never mind. I always carry one in my heel. You should, too, you know.
Even a doctor can end up in handcuffs!”
He pulled out his shoes, pulled a concealed needle out of the heel, slipped it into the ratchet, and I was free.
“Take a hint, Doctor,” said Konstantin the Sailor. “If they ever throw these things at you they’ll slap your wrists down on their knees to tighten them. Then they’ll throw you in the cell for half an hour. By that time you’ll be screaming your head off and your hands won’t be any good for six months. So keep a needle in your heel. As soon as you’re in the cell start yelling. Get the needle out. Loosen the cuffs and keep still so they won’t tighten again, and then yell harder and harder until they come to take them off again. Got it?” And then he started laughing all over again. I was blushing when I left the ward; the patients all applauded merrily.
You would assume that in a prison where most of the population was too exhausted to think about sex, and all of the population was male anyway, that venereal disease would be uncommon, and so it was—among the prisoners. But quite frequently a guard would come to me with gonorrhea because he was afraid to face the punishment Soviet soldiers got in those days if they reported their VD to their own clinic. We had sulfa drugs at first, and later on penicillin. I treated many guards, and they usually became at least moderately friendly as a result. Anyway, one morning one such friendly guard, quite a nice guy, which was very unusual, came to the hospital and asked me to come quickly, there was a wounded man at the BUR and we should bring stretchers. Adarich was away somewhere, so I went with Vanya and Nye Russki.
The BUR was really a prison within a prison. It was surrounded by its own stone wall on three sides. On the fourth side was the outside wall of the prison, with the fire zone. As we walked over there, the guard told me what had happened. A group of informers held in the BUR on protective detention were being taken for their morning walk. One young man who had been terribly depressed for days broke from the group as they passed beneath the watchtower and began to climb the barbed wire of the fire zone. The man in the tower could have shot immediately. Instead he yelled down one warning. But the poor kid, who by now was moaning and whimpering at the cuts he was getting from the barbed wire, just screamed, “Yes! Please shoot me! I don’t want to live anymore!”
The guard took careful aim and shot him in the leg.
We found him in the wire, about six feet up, entangled and motionless. His leg was at a strange angle and bleeding profusely. One of the guards had wire cutters and was already trying to free the body when we got there, and in a minute or two we had him out, ran him to the hospital, and had a look at the leg.
It was shattered below the knee by the dumdum bullet. Only a shred of skin and tendons still held. There was no question of saving it; I knew that much. But Adarich was away. Shkarin was helping out at a work site somewhere. Kask was really only a laboratory scientist and had not touched a scalpel since medical school. Kublanov was terrified of surgery of any kind.
I had to face it: I was the only one who could do it.
I had seen a couple of leg amputations, but I had paid little attention to detail. This was a lot more than a toe or a finger. I had to have more information than was in my head. I gave the boy a morphine shot to knock him out and applied a tourniquet above the knee. I cut away the remains of the leg, by just making a clean cut through the bits of skin and tendon that still held on. Then I packed a sterile dressing all around the shattered stump, left the tourniquet in place, and ran to the examination room for Adarich’s book on surgery.
The diagrams were very clear. I grabbed the book up and ran to the morgue with the amputation knives. I had to practice first.
I did not stop to wash or do any other preparation. There was a cadaver still on the autopsy table. I laid the book down on its stitched-up belly and made the first incision: straight on one side, a wedge on the other to provide a flap. I peeled back the skin. I had no idea how to cut the muscles, but I just followed the pictures. It went remarkably well. I was trembling a lot but I forced myself to keep going, looking carefully for blood vessels I would have to tie, and seeing how the muscles all lay. I knew that I could suture the flap all right that would not be so different from the toes I had done. I did not saw the bone on the cadaver. Once I got the muscles all cut, I went over the diagrams and the cadaver several times to make sure that everything was clear in my mind. Part of me was praying that Adarich would show up. Another part was beginning to say, All right: you can do it, n
ow do it! I went back to the O.R.
I insisted that Kublanov come to help me, to hold instruments and hemostats. I sent Vanya to find Nye Russki; I was not able to face cutting the bone and I thought that Nye Russki, having sawed open all those skulls during autopsies, would probably not mind if I turned that part of it over to him.
Finally it was time to begin. I released the tourniquet and let the blood flow for a few seconds. I picked up the scalpel and took a deep breath. I looked around the room at the eyes of the others. The tension was thick in that operating room and all eyes were on me except those of the unconscious boy. Yet something about his face bothered me, and I covered it with a cloth. Nye Russki stood opposite me. There was a warmth in his good, compassionate eyes that gave me strength. I looked again at the book which Vanya held for me. My hands were still trembling when I made the first incision.
After that it went well. I peeled back the skin and the underlying fascia. I tied off the larger blood vessels. Then I lifted everything away to reveal about two centimeters of bone above the shattered end, and nodded at Nye Russki. He nodded back reassuringly, and then I looked away while he applied the saw. It was a neat, straight cut, and the bone was sound and healthy above the cut. I folded a flap of muscle over the bone to make a cushion and then sutured the whole thing up. We kept saline and glucose dripping into him, and Nye Russki volunteered to stay with him when he came to, and call me or Kublanov if he needed painkillers. Then I simply had to go and lie down. I felt completely exhausted. I went to sleep on Adarich’s bed, and when I woke up Adarich was sitting beside me. He smiled warmly.
“That was a fine job, Alexander Mikhailovich, my boy,” he said. “I’m thinking of retiring, actually, now that you can take over.”
The boy recovered well. There was some superficial infection for a while.
Adarich reopened a couple of centimeters of stitching and put in a drain until it cleared up, and after that there was no more trouble. He was eventually moved into a barracks largely occupied by fellow Ukrainians, and some of them made a peg leg for him. He learned to walk reasonably well, and was made caretaker of the barracks, so that he never had to go out to work again. His brief stint as an informer was forgiven and forgotten, as far as I know. In any case, nobody tried to kill him and I was sorry when he was moved again and I lost track of him, because I naturally felt that in a sense he was a child of my own.
An American in the Gulag Page 36
