The Girl from Krakow

by Alex Rosenberg

  She decided to change her approach. Breathlessly she said, “Doctor, I’d be very grateful,” . . . and she began to unbutton the white blouse beneath its flag-red scarf.

  “Stop that at once, young lady. I have just conducted an examination of your uterus. Do you think I also need to conduct one of your breasts?”

  Now she was in tears, beating her chest and beginning to moan so loud Gil expected a nurse to barge in.

  “Quiet down. My dear, I am going to help you. I don’t know why. Call it an act of patriotism.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. Thank you. I will find the money to pay you.”

  “No money, please.”

  She misunderstood his demurrer. “Well, then, valuta . . .”

  Did she have access to gold in coins, in foreign currency? This was a worse crime in the Soviet Union than abortion. How deep was he sinking into danger, helping young Comrade Madame Malov?

  “No. I don’t want anything. I am going to help you, and you are going to give me only gratitude in return, do you understand?” One never knew when gratitude would be useful, especially if you were keeping the secret of a party member married to a division commander. Influence, access, protection were more valuable than gold. He handed her the piece of paper on which he had been writing. It was his home address and a date a week hence.

  It would take a week to organize matters. Things were in such short supply Gil could only take small quantities of what was required—a bit of ether, gauze, and some disinfectant. He had the speculum and curettes he needed in his personal medical kit bag at home. There was a sturdy dining table under a bright light in the apartment that would enable him to conduct the procedure. He had done a simple D and C many times before, in Barcelona and Lvov, to deal with a variety of women’s complaints, and, discreetly, abortions.

  Madame Malov—he couldn’t think of her as comrade, though it was the only acceptable style of address—knocked on his door at the stroke of 8:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Gil opened the door. “I assume that you have nothing planned the rest of the day. I am going to insist on your remaining long enough to be sure there are absolutely no complications.”

  When he was finished twenty minutes later, he helped his wobbly patient into his bedroom and supported her as she lay down on a towel spread across the bed. “Please don’t move around. Take a nap.” He closed the shade on the window against the gray sky and tiptoed out.

  In the late afternoon, Gil was just turning on the lamps against the impending gloom when Madame Malov appeared at the bedroom door.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Well, thank you, Doctor. You have never called me by my name. Do you know it?”

  “Yes, it’s on your record. Irena Yaraslova.”

  “Please call me that. No more Comrade Madame Malov.”

  “Very well, Irena.” He did not add the patronymic. He never did. Not doing so was part of his Spanish persona. “Now, you may go. Bathe when you wish, but no intercourse for a week.”

  “Not for a year.”

  “As your gynecologist, I cannot advise such abstinence. But I can provide you with something that will prevent a recurrence of your problem. Come to my office next week.”

  “Without fail,” she said, pulling on her winter coat. But Gil was not listening. Writing the note to himself to secure a diaphragm, there came a stab—Rita’s face, that last afternoon in Lvov, as he handed her the diaphragm. Rita. Rita. Rita. A score of images all expressed themselves in that one word sounding silently across his mind. What had become of her?

  Gil knew enough about what had happened in Karpatyn after the Russians came. He understood the fate of his parents. The letters, addressed poste restante to Marseille and forwarded to Lvov, had stopped early in 1940. When he saw what became of the bookshops and their owners in Lvov, it became obvious what had happened in Karpatyn. He knew he was not going to do himself any good by making inquiries. But Rita? Where was she? Alive, dead, escaped . . . He decided to think about something else. Comrade Madame Malov’s breasts, for example.

  Daily life in Moscow was difficult, but never boring, even exciting for a time. Once the immediate German threat had receded, people began again to feel they had a future to look forward to. Later they became more guarded, reticent, suspicious, much more careful about their opinions. But in the first flush of realizing they would not be defeated after all, Muscovites felt almost free. War news was grim, especially that spring of ’42 when Germans began their second full-scale offensive across the entire Eastern Front. But the catastrophes of the first summer—635,000 encircled at Bryansk, 650,000 surrendered at Kiev, 300,000 at Bialystok—were not being repeated. With the English bombers holding down a million Wehrmacht soldiers on antiaircraft duty and the Americans finally in the war, expressions of confidence in the outcome were no longer made just to keep security organs off one’s neck. There was enough straight reporting in the newspapers so that people knew what was really going on. Boredom was not possible.

  Even after people and supplies came back to Moscow, there was little to choose from in the shops when it came to food, cigarettes, or liquor. Gil finally began to recognize the retail stores—rare, small, and bare, hidden in corners, beneath railway underpasses, on sleepy backstreets, their shelves a disorderly array of the few goods on offer. Most people survived on what they were fed at work and what they could bring home from canteens for their families. No one left for the day without carrying a “just in case” shopping bag. Almost everything that was worth eating, wearing, buying, or smoking could, of course, be secured under the table, “nalyevo”—on the left—for a price beyond the reach of most people.

  But money couldn’t secure nearly as much as did a strategic location in the intersecting webs of party, military, and government. That was just where Gil found himself now. His maternity hospital was in the center of the old city, known since before the revolution for the excellence of its care. Its semiofficial, accepted name was the Krupskaya, after Lenin’s estimable widow (still alive and hard at work building socialism). It turned out to be a node in all three of these networks of special treatment. When the Krupskaya lacked for anything, you could be sure the commodity was really in short supply. And when it came to the wives of the vanguard of the proletariat, their newborn infants, and those who cared for them, creature comforts could always be found somehow. So, most days Gil ate well in the canteen, wore a freshly starched white coat, remained warm in his consulting rooms, read his newspapers on wood spools each morning in the doctors’ lounge, had real coffee with his colleagues, served in prerevolutionary china, and could tipple from a sideboard of Georgian brandies and liquors—gifts from grateful husbands.

  In spite of the privations and shortages, he would later look back on wartime in Moscow as the best years of his life. He knew he was part of something important and good—like being with the Spanish Republicans, but this time winning. Now when he heard the words of the International again—now in Russian, not Catalan—again he found himself wanting to sing along. He did sing along!

  Gil was bringing examination records up-to-date one morning when his phone rang. “Ministry of Foreign Affairs for you, Comrade Doctor.” Before he could clear his throat, a strident voice was speaking all too rapidly and loudly down the line from . . . from where? Probably the Kremlin. “Third secretary Dalglashin here, Doctor Romero. I need to see you urgently at the ministry. Can you come now?” Gil looked his diary, but before he could respond, the voice went on, evidently speaking to someone else. “I see, I see.” Then, evidently, to Gil again: “Not now after all, comrade. This evening? I will send a car for you at the hospital. Shall we say 21:00? Good-bye.”

  Gil had not said a word, not one word. How could this man—what was his name, Dalglashin?—even been sure he had the right party?

  Could he find out who this person was? There was certainly no directory he could consult, and inquiries might be treated as suspicious. What had he done, anyway, to attract the attention of the foreign m
inistry? Surely the Spanish NKVD’s search for Tadeusz Sommermann in 1938 could not be a concern to the Soviet foreign ministry in 1942.

  Normally Gil would be finished by six or six thirty each evening, but that night he found enough work to keep him busy after the entire daytime staff had left. Minutes before nine o’clock, he went to the cloakroom for his coat, fur-lined hat, and gloves, and was standing at the main entrance when a large black ZIS-101 came to a gradual stop at the curb. A uniformed chauffeur got out. Opening the back door, he said, “Dr. Romero?” Gil saw that there was no one else in the car—a good sign. He nodded to the driver and entered.

  Through the checkpoints at the Kremlin wall, up to a large squat building, then a series of identity checks. Romero was a name on a list they had. “Go right ahead; you are expected.” Up a carpeted staircase, Gil followed the driver. Then along a marble-floored hallway that magnified the sound of the driver’s metal toe-tips as they struck the floor. No one was to be seen in the hallway. Finally the man stopped before a double door, a pair of doors that must have been two meters high, that opened up to an anteroom, guarded by no one. He led Gil through still another polished wooden door, at which he stopped, knocked once, nodded to the office’s sole occupant, waited till Gil had entered, and quietly left, closing the door behind him.

  The room’s occupant was a very tall man with a long horse face, dark hair parted in the middle but combed back away from a wrinkled forehead. The eyes were so deep-set Gil could not tell their color. Two deep parentheses bracketed his mouth, and his cheeks showed the stubble of someone whose beard grew fast. He wore a double-breasted gray suit too fine to be made anywhere in Moscow, and he was smoking Gitanes—Gil had never forgotten the aroma. “Sit down, Comrade Dr. Romero. Cigarette?” He offered the packet, and Gil took one. The man handed him a heavy desk lighter.

  Gil must have looked as alarmed as he felt. “Please, no cause for disquiet, Doctor. You are in no difficulties. I am Comrade Dalglashin, Vladimir Dimitriov Dalglashin, third secretary of the ministry, responsible for . . .” He stopped. “Well, that’s not important. I have asked you here on a personal matter. Your name was given to me by my daughter, Slava. She is a close friend of Irena Yaraslova Malov.” Gil was so visibly relieved that a broad smile Dalglashin could not understand broke out across his face. “Irena Yaraslova has told Slava of . . . a service you performed for her and of the complete discretion with which you were able to accomplish it.”

  Gil decided this was a good time to break in. “And your daughter has mentioned it to you, as she finds herself in the same predicament.” He said it as matter-of-factly as possible. Then he changed tone. “I regret that Irena Yaraslova broke confidence with me. I helped her because I believed pregnancy would disrupt her role as an example to others of the New Soviet Woman. I violated Soviet law in order to protect the morale of a husband at the front. I refused to take any payment. And for this Irena Yaraslova betrayed me.” Gil enjoyed the sound of indignation in his voice.

  “Calm yourself, Doctor. She has not betrayed you. No one has found out beyond my daughter and me. No one will. But if you allow me, I will explain the circumstances, and perhaps you will see your way to helping another worthy young person who has made a misstep.”

  Gil didn’t need to listen. But he waited the anxious father out before agreeing to his proposal.

  Young people’s bodies are resilient. They endure procedures older people cannot tolerate well. They come through them quickly, with no long-lasting consequences. Not one of the women that Gil was able to help over the next three years perforated; not one ever became infertile, or at least they all continued to have normal cycles. On two occasions he had to intervene again. He also tried to solve their problems more permanently. Alas, his access to a supply of diaphragms was limited. He couldn’t get his hands on more than a half dozen at a time. By the battle of Kursk in August 1943, they had altogether disappeared.

  A few of Gil’s patients were young women private soldiers, taken by officers as campaign wives and dismissed when they became pregnant. Others were middle-aged Bolshevik matrons, raised on the early Soviet acceptance of free love and still militantly committed to it. One was a nurse at the maternity hospital, who would later show her gratitude more than once during quiet nights on the lying-in wards.

  Gil had spent years among the bohemians on the Left Bank in Paris. Now he saw the same willingness in young people to take risks, incur dubious reputations, to experience everything in life at least once, and generally to throw caution to the winds of war. He was certain it was the same everywhere. He disapproved of it nowhere.

  Once they began parading German POWs through Red Square in the fall of ’44, Gil felt he had to make some changes. Moscow might not remain cordial once the war was over. Prudence demanded something fungible he could carry with him if needed. So he began to accept the payments offered.

  Gil was an excellent gynecologist, and he was remarkably discreet. His clientele was invariably so well connected, he concluded there was no significant risk of apprehension. Finally, he was circumspect about how late in a pregnancy he would intervene. Accepting payment did not appreciably reduce his business, but it introduced him to the circulation and variety of gold coins in the Soviet Union. After twenty-five years of Communism, Russia was still awash in Nicholas II twenty-ruble pieces, Louis Napoleon twenty-franc pieces, and twenty-dollar US gold coins, now as illegal in the United States as they were in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Within a few months, Gil had several of each of these. As the hoard grew, the danger did as well. Just being apprehended with such coins was a death-sentence offense. Where to hide them? Finally he decided: in the hospital library, behind the twelve copies of History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course written by the Commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). This work was rumored to have been authored by the first secretary, Comrade Stalin himself. There was no such thing as having too many copies in a scientific library.

  Well before Gil had begun to charge for doing his patriotic duty, his freely offered help had opened many doors, including at least one door he didn’t want to walk through at all.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Comrade Dalglashin of the foreign ministry had a wayward daughter. He also had a wife with complaints more frequent in older women. The daughter’s reports of Gil’s bedside manner came to her mother. Soon the entire family—father, daughter, and wife—had made his acquaintance. Once Gil had made Madame Dalglashin more comfortable, with attendant benefits for Comrade Dalglashin, it was inevitable that he would be taken up by their circle of friends and acquaintances. Besides an agreeable manner, an exotic name, and international experience, Dr. Romero played chess, something Dalglashin valued. He was also a deft hand at contract bridge, a game Madame Dalglashin had learned in a Western posting and that they did not wish to share with Dalglashin’s fellow party members.

  A few invitations to make up a fourth, sometimes along with Madame Dalglashin’s younger sister, began to give Gil an insight into the Nomenclatura that governed the Soviet Union. Dalglashin’s apartment was not much different from upper middle-class life Gil had glimpsed in Paris and Barcelona: large rooms, warm and subdued, with heavy curtains to ensure privacy; carpeting a little too deep to be very old, under dark furniture on which rested more than one bright brass converted samovar lamp. There were family portraits in silver frames littering the top of a baby grand piano and landscape paintings that might have been by Corot, lit from above by gallery lights, labeled discreetly at the bottom of the frame. A set of decanters on the sideboard revealed a taste that had moved beyond vodka to French liquors and American cocktails.

  After two rubbers of bridge one evening, Madame Dalglashin excused herself for the evening and retired, followed out of the room by her sister. Dalglashin looked at his watch. It was just before 10:00 p.m. “On call, Doctor?” Gil shook his head. “Well, it’s too early to call it an eve
ning. Come with me. I’ll introduce you to my favorite watering hole in Moscow.”

  It was the last of the summer in Moscow and a pleasant walk from Dalglashin’s apartment through the quiet streets. “We’re going to the Metropole Hotel. Best bar in Moscow.”

  The Metropole turned out to be Moscow’s idea of a large Art Deco building, suffering, like most prerevolutionary buildings, from recent remodeling. It stood next to the river and only a few minutes from Red Square, which glowed behind the hotel.

  The door was opened smartly by a doorman in a livery that made him look every inch the White Russian Cossack. “Good evening, comrade minister.” Holding the door, he bent ever so slightly at the waist. Gil anticipated a heel click, but it was not forthcoming.

  Across the lobby the entry to the bar was visible. The space itself was not large. The counter was contained within an alcove held up at its corners with four marble columns. Beyond it the room was furnished in a parody of a London club. Wing chairs with leather backs held down by a tracery of brass tacks, each chair fitted with its own side table, on which a small lamp glowed. A radio was playing the only song that seemed safely Soviet and yet sufficiently romantic, “Katyusha.” There were a few thin and leggy younger women in the bar, but it was populated mainly by men in dark suits speaking quietly to one another.