Throughout my stay in the hospital my own health improved and my strength began to come back very well. I supplemented my diet with daily injections of glucose, which I administered at night when the hospital was quiet. I had access to all the vitamins I wanted, especially B and C, and niacin; so there was no more scurvy and no risk of pellagra. A friendly guard got me some brewer’s yeast tablets from the military pharmacy, and I took several grams daily, which led to another interesting development in hospital life.
There was a Ukrainian orderly named Musichka who always kept a little bread aside and put it in a jug of water to ferment for a few days to make a very light kvass, a sort of beer with little kick to it but a pleasant flavor. Musichka passed this out to patients and staff alike every day, and even though the alcoholic content was almost invisible, the faint beery taste was good for everybody’s morale. I used to dissolve my sugar allotment in it, and one day I got the idea that this would be a more palatable way to take the terrible-tasting brewer’s yeast.
I had just stirred the sugar and yeast into the kvass when a convoy brought in three miners who had been caught when an ore bucket accidentally dumped. Two were dead on arrival and the third one horribly injured, and I had to go and help Adarich in the operating room. I remember cleaning up a badly crushed skull while the man kept reciting prayers without really regaining consciousness. Then Adarich gingerly picked out pieces of skull and tried to patch him up again. He kept reciting prayers until he died. It was about two hours before I remembered my little beverage and. went back to the room where I had left it on the windowsill.
The)drink was almost boiling. Fermentation was going ahead at a very lively rate. I took a few drops across to the lab and put them under Kask’s microscope and watched the little organisms budding and seething in the brew. I thought this might be pretty good when it settled down a bit. I washed out a bunch of lab bottles. I found some wire to clamp their glass stoppers on with, because while I really was totally innocent in the craft of brewing, I knew that there would be some pressure build-up and I would have to hold the stoppers in. Late at night, when the bubbling seemed to have settled down pretty well, I poured the brew into my little bottles and wired on the glass stoppers and put them in a cabinet in the examining room. The next night, of course, when I was off duty, they exploded and nearly scared the life out of an orderly named Yanyev. We had a terrific fist fight over it, but later several of us settled down to a regular production, in small bottles, so we had. a brew coming off about every three weeks once we learned how to do it properly. Later in the winter I got some friends in the DOZ to make me a small barrel so we could get into mass brewing, hiding the vat in the morgue, under the autopsy table. But when the first barrel came off, our new feldsher Vasya Kargin got drunk and went around the camp at night embracing lampposts and shouting “Long live President Truman!” The MVD threw Kargin in the cooler. We decided that the brewing was getting a bit dangerous, and cut it out for the time being. Soon after, the barrel was confiscated, so that was that.
Chapter 22
Before I finished my days in the hospital I had done, in addition to amputated toes and the amputated leg, three practice appendectomies on cadavers and one on a live patient. I had former patients all over the camps, and many of them stayed friends for the rest of my imprisonment. There were several guards who, having, been cured of gonorrhea by me, would do little favors, look the other way if I bent the rules a little, and so on. My confidence in my medical ability was growing, and with it my morale. I developed a strenuous program of exercise once my general health was in top shape again. I had done some minor acrobatics when I was a kid, and now I began to walk on my hands again, usually practicing up and down the hospital corridor, which was about twenty meters long. One night as I was grunting along on the return. trip, trying to accomplish the full forty meters on my hands—which I had never made yet—I was interrupted by a scream from the end of the hall. I jumped to my feet and saw an old Polish professor we were treating for hepatitis reeling around the corridor with his hands to his head, yelling what sounded like prayers in Polish. I could not imagine what was wrong. As I ran to him he tripped on the coal box, fell, bumped his head, and went out cold on the floor. I dragged him to the operating room as quietly as I could and began to treat the scratch on his head. I was afraid he might have a concussion, although it did not seem that bad a bump. In a few minutes his eyes flickered and opened. He looked quite panicky. “I am going to die, Doctor. Please tell my family. The address is Krakowskie Przedmiescie, 655. Oh, God have mercy on my soul, God have mercy!” And on and on so fast I could hardly understand him at all.
I kept trying to interrupt him. Finally I seized him firmly by the shoulders and gave him a sharp shake.
“Stop all this!” I said firmly. “Tell me what the trouble is!”
“I am going to die. I am dying of liver dystrophy. I know the symptoms are hallucinations. I got up to go to the bathroom, and oh, Doctor! When I came into the corridor I saw you walking on the ceiling!”
He was appalled when I burst into laughter. But when I told him what it was about he was greatly relieved and finally got some reassurance when I did a blood pressure and heartbeat and took a blood sample and all the rest, and in the end he was able to laugh a bit weakly over the joke, finish his trip to the toilet, and go back to bed.
Memory brings all these things quickly to the surface. They were the things that created life in the midst of death and humanity in the midst of a constant and diabolical oppression. Incidents like these comic ones, moments of success in the operating room or in the illicit commerce of spoons and beds and flatirons, these are the pleasures that come to mind when people say, “What was it like in camp?” But these were rare moments—small bright spots almost obliterated by the gloom and terror out of which each day was built.
Years later, sitting around with the Trade Union, which was how former inmates referred to themselves to save embarrassment in the presence of the uninitiated, we would drink a sad toast to “all those still at sea,” and then talk about the good aspects of those terrible days. We would remember the long and fascinating conversations with men of character and intellect whom we had had the good fortune of knowing through the misfortune of camp. We would remember every joke, every bottle of home brew, every funny song and every odd character: that was easy. To recall the horrors was work, and we usually avoided it. Working now over these pages, I avoid it until I cannot anymore, because that is the real fabric of my story. I take a holiday page after page to recall the funny things, and then remember that I must go back to work.
As healthy and productive as the hospital was, in terms of my physical recuperation and my grow as a human being, in skill and in the maturity that comes from responsibility for the lives of other human beings and from intimate association with a dedicated, warm professional like Yevgeni Petrovich Adarich or the marvelous humanity of a simple man like Nye Russki—who sat, night after night when he should have been off duty, gently massaging the foreheads of men in pain, comforting and carrying the paraplegics to the toilet and trying to share the burdens of their despair—despite all this, when I force my memory to be balanced and accurate and fair, it reminds me of grief. I had become hardened in some ways, to protect myself. But grief sometimes broke through any barriers I had built around me, and that was hard.
All the men who would never go back to their families, who died in tears of loneliness. Ultimate, cosmic loneliness showed on their faces.
The fourth ward held the cardiac patients. We had little special treatment for them. The death rate was high. Every few days someone was moved into the bed of someone who had died, and the anguish and fear that came with that bed was terrible to see. It hastened death.
The cancer patients suffered terribly and, since our morphine was limited and had to be reserved for the almost daily influx of the walking wounded in extremes of pain, we simply had to make do with aspirin or mild sedatives, and so the cancer ward was
a space filled with pain. I began to hoard a private supply of morphine ampoules. I did not even tell Adarich. When a cancer patient seemed near the end and the pain was unbearable, I would take an ampoule or two from my private supply, and inject it quietly into the poor agonized soul. I would sit by his bed in the night and caress his hand, and say, “There. The pain will be going soon. Soon you will feel much better,” hour after hour.
I became familiar with the feeling of a hand that crosses from life into death.
A hand in my hand.
And while I sat with one of these dying men trying to give him a little comfort, I knew that all over Dzhezkazgan men were dying alone, falling in their tracks in convoy to die as their fellow slaves stumbled over their bodies, dying without any human contact or comfort in punishment cells, or barbed wire with bullets in their chests, dying in bunks a hundred yards away because there was no room for them here in the little hospital. I knew that most of these men, almost all of them, would have lived out some kind of life with other human beings, raised children, loved wives, done some work they could take satisfaction in, made some choices about the direction of their lives, might have done all this, except that a state that wanted their slave labor had created an elaborate machinery for the creation of guilt where no guilt existed. Almost no one I knew who died, or lived, in Dzhezkazgan, had committed an offense that would be recognized by the law of any country with a democratic parliament and a tradition of loyal dissent. They were innocent men. I took their deaths to be murder, whether they died of bullets or fever or cancer or despair.
There was a boy named Arkadi. Arkadi was a poet from Moscow. He had been in the underground movement and. was considered to be dangerous. He had a boisterous sense of humor and an irrepressible talent for embarrassing his captors. As a result he was constantly persecuted in camp and had spent days in a freezing solitary cell in the BUR.
I felt a strong affinity for Arkadi. I call him a boy, although he was a year or two older than I, say twenty-seven or twenty-eight, because he was boyish in his enthusiasm and his humor until the day he died.
He was one of those young dissidents of the late forties who got into trouble with his eyes wide open. He wrote savagely satirical poems about the regime and about the Leader and circulated them privately. To anyone else that would seem like folly or suicide. To Arkadi it was the only honorable thing he knew how to do, to fight the injustice and the waste and the inhumanity he believed were built into his world. He loved Russia, but not what was happening to her.
When they brought him from the BUR he had bilateral pneumonia. We had no procedures for surgical treatment when the lung abscessed, and we had no antibiotics except sulfa. He was going down every day, and yet he was always gay, always making new poems, love poems, poems about the people in the ward, poems about a bright future.
Arkadi had freckles, which is rare for a Russian. He was a tall, lanky guy who liked to stride around the ward in his prison underwear with his bony knees poking through the cloth, reciting poems and telling funny stories. At night we sat together for hours. I would bring cool cloths for his forehead. He had a constant high fever and he coughed a great deal and brought up enormous quantities of fetid green matter from his chest. There was always a heavy smell of decay on his breath. Yet I loved this boy. We sat close together and talked about how the world could be if all nations put their faith in parliamentary democracy. He believed it could work in the Soviet Union, although it would take a long time and a lot of education. I scrounged some fine white paper for Arkadi and had it bound in book form, and he filled the book with poetry, some his own, some he knew by heart from Russian poets he loved, like Gumilyov. I loved Gumilyov’s poem “The Captains,” about the freebooters, the captains at sea who lived on their courage and their skill, and Arkadi loved to read it to me, aloud, between spasms.
He wrote out poems in French, and then translated them for me. And I remember a romantic poem by Ilya Selvinsky about a Roman woman who had slaves brought up to her as lovers and then had them killed and kept their heads as mementos. This was all decadent poetry, of course, by modern Soviet standards.
Gumilyov had been shot in 1921.
Adarich told me that Arkadi could never survive. I suppose that Arkadi himself knew that, privately; he never showed it. In another camp not far away there was a Spanish chest surgeon named Fuster who could have done the surgery, and one of the few things I have to hate Lavrenov for is that he refused to transfer Arkadi to that camp. For four months he went down steadily while we watched, and we could do nothing. Four months of nights by his bedside taking away the little pan of stinking sputum, and trying to cool him down, and watching the laughing mouth catch every few minutes with another spasm.
Once he said wistfully, “How I would love to eat some onions!”
In four years I had never seen an onion. But somehow, through a friendly guard, through friends of Arkadi around the camp (he was widely known), we found some bright green spring onions. He was delighted.
He was very weak. I gave him extra ampoules of glucose and alcohol intravenously whenever I could; they cooled him and gave him a little more strength to breathe, but the abscess in his lung was suffocating him, and we both knew it. One night I was sitting on the edge of the bed beside him. We were not talking; he was too choked, too short of breath.
He managed to say, “Could you lift me up, please? I can’t breathe.”
I bent over and put his arms around my shoulders and gently lifted him into a sitting position. He motioned toward the little kidney basin. I held it under his mouth and he coughed into it. The cough brought up nearly a hundred cc of foul stuff. I said, “Here, let me put you down and then I’ll go and empty this.” He just nodded. I gently put him down again.
When I came back. I sat down and said, “Well, Arkadi, you want to sleep now, don’t you? Shall I leave you now, and come back in an hour to see how you are?”
He did not answer. I bent over him to draw the blanket up under his chin.
Suddenly I became aware that there was no foul smell from his breath. I felt his chest. It was still. I opened his eyelid; the pupil was very large. I pressed it from beneath the lower lid. It formed the oval cat’s eye. Arkadi was dead.
I said, “This is a hero’s death, but I have no way to honor him.”
He died because he believed in something fine and refused to hide it or to compromise it. I could think of nothing finer.
I went outside behind the morgue. There was a friendly guard on duty around the hospital, and he made no objection if we wanted a little walk at night as long as we stayed close by. Behind the morgue was shadow where the floodlights from the walls could not reach. I could be alone with my thoughts there. I could see the stars. I had learned about Sirius from someone in camp, and took it as my personal star. I looked up and said good-by to Arkadi, somewhere in the stars. I thought of the star traveling westward through the night, toward America. I tried to recall Mary’s face. It was too far away. I tried to recall my own state of mind of four years back. Was that all? I was maturing too fast. I had seen too much death. Where was the carefree American kid I used to be? I felt a sadness that was like a deep burning in my gut. I wished that I could have some peace in which to feel this sadness; I did not want the sadness to go: it was the right thing to feel at the time. I just wanted to be quiet and peaceful with it, but I could feel no peace because a hundred meters away was a man in a tower with an automatic loaded with seventy-two dumdum bullets in its underslung drum, and I could not feel peace that close to so much power for death.
I yearned for living people to love. One I loved had just died, another was so far away her face was fading from me.
I went back.
The next day Adarich asked me to help him with Arkadi’s autopsy. I just shook my head and went quickly out of the room.
And a strange thing that memory does: for twenty years I never spoke Arkadi’s name and never thought of him. When the image of that brave young spirit
came suddenly out of nowhere, as I worked to recall the days and nights in that hospital in Dzhezkazgan, it was long after I had reconstructed the whole story and remembered the poetry and the nights on the ward and the details of his dying before I could recall his name at all. That is what terrible pain can do to the memory.
One morning a man in the line-up of hopefuls had such a bad cough and high fever that I knew when I looked out the door that he would have to be hospitalized. So although there was space for only three admissions that day, I mentally filled one of them before I even began my examinations, even though this fellow was almost at the end of the line.
He clearly had a raging pneumonia in one lung. His fever was just a hair below 40º C. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes drooping at the corners. Clearly a sick, sick man. And yet looking at him made me want to laugh. He was tall, with a very round bald head and slumped narrow shoulders. His face was a clown’s face and his body was a clown’s body. He seemed to have a spirit to match. Despite the illness he smiled and joked while I examined him. He was Ukrainian. He came from the KTR, the extreme hard labor camp. His name was Marusich.
I told Marusich I was going to hospitalize him and made him wait in the examining room while I saw the last two or three in the line-up. Then I took him along to the ward to show him his bed. The minute we entered the ward, a loud voice boomed from the back of the room, “Well, for heaven’s sake! Whom do I see? It is his worship, the governor of Zhitomir!”
An American in the Gulag Page 37
