Stalin's Barber

by Paul M. Levitt

“At poetry readings?” asked an incredulous Alexei.

  “Please don’t mention it.”

  As Alexei recited some poems, the train car came alive, and the babushkas shared with him and Konstantin their wicker baskets of food. When the tea man returned, pushing his trolley with its steaming samovar, Alexei treated all his benefactors.

  “More poems!” said a partially paralyzed elderly woman, waving her cane in the air like a baton.

  “A love lyric, if you don’t mind,” said a man with silver hair and matching spectacle frames.

  “Do you know Pushkin’s poem ‘Night’?”

  To the surprise of all, the conductor, just then making his way through the car, stopped and recited the short poem by heart.

  “Wonderful!” exclaimed Alexei. “I have used the poem for my own purposes. It’s dedicated to my wife, who stayed behind. Permit me to read my revision.”

  The passengers begged him to do so.

  Alexei closed the book on his lap, leaned back, closed his eyes, and recited:

  “My voice for you Natasha is so gentle

  It’s like the dark night’s velvet mantle.

  By my bedside rests a candle, my sad light

  That flutters, lifts and falls, like a tailless kite.

  But always my thoughts return to you alone,

  And in the dark, your eyes shine like precious stones.

  Your smile outshines the light and brings back your voice;

  My dearest wife, sweetest one, you are my choice.”

  The conductor’s sour expression presaged his judgment. “You’re no Pushkin, but I understand your feelings.”

  In Voronezh, the soldier led Alexei, with his one valise and satchel, to the main police station, where the exile was required to register and then report weekly. Ossian Oblomov, the commissar of police, an insecure fellow who disguised his fears of inadequacy through bluster, looked at Alexei’s papers and asked in a loud authoritative voice:

  “Where is your medical degree? The official certificate? The stamp that says you are actually a real doctor? With all the quacks running around, we don’t need another. Is that why you were sent here, to peddle poisonous potions, or was it to maim patients with the so-called mercury cure?”

  Oblomov leaned back in his chair proud of his authoritative voice and his pronouncements about medical malpractice. The chief medical examiner for his district had in fact damned him as “passive,” a serious Soviet crime, for not rooting out all the faux physicians under his jurisdiction. Oblomov remembered this exchange with some embarrassment because, in addition to being reproved for his laziness, he had been forced to ask the medical officer the meaning of the word “faux.” Bad enough he even had to ask, but the man merely exacerbated his insecurities by exclaiming:

  “You are the commissar of police and have never studied French?”

  Oblomov had left school in the sixth grade and felt superior to most of his men because he could read and write, and he knew the difference between classical Russian and modern, a dual system that remained a mystery to most native speakers. Prepared to take out his frustrations on this exiled medical graduate, he had a brilliant insight. Who better than this young man to uncover the medical quacks in Voronezh oblast?

  Oblomov’s idea handsomely served at least two people: himself and Alexei. Shortly, Moscow would give Oblomov a medal with a red ribbon for exposing the medical mountebanks who swarmed through the area. He immediately found Alexei lodgings and work. The implications of this happy conjunction meant that the commissar of police had to trust Alexei’s judgment, even when it contradicted his own, a hard pill to swallow, and that Alexei was free to travel outside Voronezh oblast, a liberty that few exiles enjoyed.

  The city itself, in the southwestern black-earth region and located on the Voronezh River close to the spot where it empties into the Don, lacked Leningrad’s architectural grandeur and Moscow’s political influence. Founded in 1585 by Tsar Feodor I as a fortress town to protect Russians from Tatar raids, Voronezh grew into a city when Peter the Great established a large naval shipbuilding yard on the river. Like the Tsars, the Soviets favored this city for exiling poets, painters, and intellectuals for antistate activities, inadvertently creating a hotbed for artistic and dissident ideas. Although exiles often went hungry and suffered the cold—the government offered no subsistence—the pariahs managed to organize poetry readings and concerts and lectures, making police surveillance a necessary activity, to the chagrin of Oblomov and his constabulary, who generally had no interest in hearing poetry or Beethoven sonatas. Of course, there were exceptions, such as Konstantin, men and women who loved the sound of words and classical music. These secret agents kindly chose to overlook travel violations, curfews, and printed material passed among friends. A few of the police even asked the artists for their autographs, surreptitiously. Konstantin, for example, always wore civilian dress when he attended a poetry reading. He knew that the audience would comprise as many secret agents as genuine lovers of language.

  Oblomov’s first instinct had been to house Alexei in Lena Goracheva’s boardinghouse. When his wife died from typhus, he took Lena as his mistress, and he often directed travelers to her address. But on further reflection, he decided that since the young man would be scouting the countryside, he couldn’t properly take advantage of Lena’s hospitality and cooking. Instead, he found him quarters in a run-down barrack on the grounds of the military training camp; and to navigate the oblast, he assigned him one of his dissolute colleagues, Yevgeny Peterov, who was given the authority to arrest any purveyor of false medical treatments.

  Peterov requisitioned a horse and a low Finnish sleigh. In winter, the ancient Fiat car assigned him would not carry them any farther than the city limits. Having grown up in a farming family—his father had once owned land, though Peterov steadfastly denied it—he felt at home around horses. At the outbreak of the Civil War, a group of Red Army men had swept through his village and inducted him into their company. Wholly uninterested in politics, he never knew exactly what principles he was fighting for, but did know that the availability of drink and whores perfectly suited his tastes. His comrades called him Casanova and Romeo; they also called him brave because he seemed oblivious to his own safety, frequently charging enemy positions with only a rifle. When the Soviets accused his father of holding land and charging interest on loans to peasants, Yevgeny pleaded ignorance, saying that he and his father rarely spoke, a statement supported by neighbors who said that the father beat the boy as a child, and that in later years the boy beat the father.

  Together, Alexei and Yevgeny set out, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, on a quest more illusory than real. Although the countryside was rife with illness and the two men slept in barns and huts and on the floors of hovels, eating what others ate, earning the trust of the peasants proved difficult. The moment the two arrived in a village, no one would identify the potion peddlers. Alexei would ask to speak to the nurse or midwife, since doctors were virtually nonexistent. Most hamlets housed neither. He would then question the villagers about their medicaments and treatments, as well as the advice they had received on how to prevent cholera, typhus, scrofulous, botulism, and polio. Frequently, Alexei would gather the locals and lecture them on the origins of illness: on the nature of germs and viruses. During these presentations, he never failed to notice how many young people supported themselves with crutches, usually the result of polio. As for Yevgeny, once he had heard the lecture, he saw no need to hear it again. So he would find a bottle of vodka or a plump peasant girl or both and disappear for the rest of the evening.

  Eventually, word spread through the oblast that Alexei had been sent by the government to improve their well-being, a rumor that led people to reveal their maladies and remedies, but not the toadstool doctors on whom they relied. After all, Alexei would be leaving, and the quacks staying. What other alternative did the afflicted have? Folk medicine filled the void. Alexei therefore begged the villagers to heed his warni
ngs: Mercury, as surely as arsenic, poisons. Radium burns and leads to a painful lingering death. Snake venom paralyzes the nervous system and fails to cure seizures. Horseradish and turmeric do not arrest cancer, nor do electric shocks. Hot baths and petroleum soaks may feel good but cannot cure or relieve tuberculosis. Ice baths or winter baptisms do not dispel killing fevers, even if the patient’s temperature falls temporarily. Powdered tiger teeth or monkey testicles or rhino horns do not restore virility. Mandrake roots are a fiction, and medical science, as yet, has no remedy for female sterility. Holy relics are probably not holy, and they have never proved a balm for palsy or dropsy or ague. If found trading in such items, the dealer could find himself imprisoned for five or ten years, perhaps longer.

  A favorite “cure” that had lingered in illiterate communities, and one which fraudulent healers and itinerant priests exploited, was the casting out of devils. Alexei told the people that they were not possessed, that the idea of exorcism came from the Middle Ages, that devils did not exist, and that those who foisted on the sick this superstition were saying, wrongly, that they had made themselves ill. Could a person make himself sick? Yes, from frequent drinking, excessive eating, smoking, living in unhygienic conditions, and resorting to quack remedies.

  When medicine was unavailable were prayers an alternative? Alexei knew the penalty for promoting religion, but in the midst of such abysmal poverty and endemic ignorance, he felt that he could not rob the people of all hope; he therefore told them that if prayers made them feel good, and if they were convinced that they helped, then by all means pray, but not in lieu of seeking legitimate medical help.

  After weeks on the rutted roads, caramelized with ice, they found, like Peter the Great, that the icy sledge paths made an ideal highway. Had they been traveling in spring, they would have cursed the ankle-deep mud brought on by the thaws. But they returned to Voronezh in the dark of February, heroes of the countryside and, except for their failure to apprehend felons, celebrities in the city. How many bastard children Peterov had fathered would not be known until fall. The last leg of their journey, the fastest, had been by train, which Alexei cursed for its stopping at every station, so great was his desire to receive Natasha’s letters, even if they were banal. But outside of Voronezh, at an army garrison, several soldiers had been diagnosed with cholera. A telegraph sent to one of the train stations directed Alexei to stop at the camp.

  Working next to an army doctor, Viktor Gubin Podol, he instructed the soldiers on proper hygiene and suggested to Viktor that the sewage system might be the source of the outbreak. An investigation of the clay pipes discovered numerous leaks that had affected the well water from which the garrison drew. Viktor congratulated Alexei on his good thinking and said that a celebratory drink was in order.

  “I’ll have my driver take us to our glorious state-run inn,” said Viktor derisively. “I want to get away from this pestiferous base.”

  That evening a black Zim car carried the men into town, where Viktor, who had a low threshold for alcohol, quickly succumbed to drunkenness on the hundred-proof vodka. Alexei sipped his drink, fearing the effects. The half-timbered inn brought to mind Falstaffian revelers and buxom barmaids, even though the flat-chested woman who served them was glum. Their table, with innumerable names and symbols carved into the wood, the low ceiling, darkened from years of smoke, the roaring fireplace, the oak logs, and the formal barkeep, wearing a leather apron, pouring drinks and toting up Viktor’s bill on a tab that he kept in a drawer, invoked England not the USSR.

  “Did I ever tell you,” Viktor slurred, “how I came to be posted at this godforsaken place?” Before Alexei could answer, Viktor continued in his drooling fashion. “Because of a woman. A beautiful girl at a state clinic. I took her for a meadow walk . . .” He laughed. “I needn’t tell you what I mean by that, and the bitch reported me. Can you imagine? There we were by the creek, birds singing, may flies thick as dust. I did what any red-blooded Russian would do. But when I unbuttoned, she refused. None of the other women ever complained. I had to put a pistol to her head.”

  Sprawling across the table, he passed out.

  * * *

  As Alexei expected, Oblomov handed him a full bag of mail. With Natasha having promised to write every day, he could hardly wait for the evening, to sit, read her letters, and picture her incomparable face. After two months of listening to Yevgeny’s stories, repeated endlessly, and having to save him from irate fathers who insisted he marry their daughters, he was glad to be rid of the drunken Casanova. Had Alexei not been faithful to his wife, he could have acted on the numerous offers that women, lovely and ugly, had extended to him. One young widow, in particular, had caught his eye, and although he took a modest supper with her and a sip of homemade vodka, he refused the offer to share her bed. Thoughts of Natasha kept him pure.

  Upon receiving his mail, he quickly rustled through it, identifying dozens of postings from his Leningrad friends, most now certified doctors and practicing in various cities. Pocketing the numerous letters from his wife, he soon discovered that she seemed unable to rise above the boring and bromidic. He could have cried. One of the letters he actually burned.

  My dear Alexei,

  Life without you is tedious. I go to work each day and come home. Razan adopted a little girl. She’s ten. I like her. We sometimes do things together. Mother is mother. She’s always looking for ways to you know what. Would you believe that I saw a woman in a mink coat? She was walking on Arbat Street. I guess she’s the wife of some high official. I’m hoping that Razan will become a high official and buy us a car. How are you? Do you think of me? I try to keep busy so as not to think of you. Write me!

  Love and kisses, N.

  Since Natasha had no way of knowing when Alexei was returning to Voronezh, he took his time writing back.

  Dear Natasha,

  I received your many letters and read them several times. Their shortness I can ascribe only to your busy schedule. You say nothing of the child your parents adopted; you don’t even mention her name. What is she like? What led Razan to select her and not some other child? You say nothing of your stepfather’s work in the Kremlin. Surely he must see and hear things that would make for an interesting tale. Or is he forbidden to talk about his work and the people he meets? I was glad to hear that your mother has not lost any of her energy for you know what. She’s an amazing woman.

  In the town of N____, I met a woman who had been stricken with polio as a child. She walks with two sticks, and yet she manages to raise three children and care for her house. Her husband died the year before in a farm accident, but she soldiers on. She asked me if I had any medicine that could ease the pain in her stick-thin legs and could keep her own children from the crippling disease. (I even enjoyed her cooking one night.) You have no idea how many children have died or been disabled by this terrible disease. Some are reduced to pushing themselves around on boards with wheels. The peasants seem not to notice, a fact that horrifies me.

  Can you imagine what it would be like to have a child stricken so badly that he can’t lift his head off the pillow or move a limb? Polio epidemics are the scourge of the world. We must find a cure for this dreadful disease. Worst of all, though, is the widespread hunger. The government blames it on hoarders and looters, but I saw no evidence of either. What I did see were children with distended stomachs and lolling tongues, adults with no more skin on their bones than a rotting carcass, empty storage bins, silos, and larders, withered crops, blasted fields, and failed farm equipment. I could not help but think that this disaster was man-made. And yet we are told that the people are well fed and warmly clothed. No one decries the cholera and typhus. I begin to wonder what world the government is describing, certainly not the one I have seen.

  The man I traveled with was a jovial drunk who ran after women. Had it not been for his ability to handle our horse and sled, I would have dumped him at the first tavern. Except for driving us once into a snowbank when besotted, he negotiat
ed the frozen roads with skill. He also loved telling jokes. Here’s one you might enjoy. An illiterate peasant was told to report to the local military officer for induction into the army. The man showed up and said that he was unfit for service. “Why is that?” asked the recruiter. The peasant held out his right hand. The index finger was retracted, as if paralyzed. “It’s my trigger finger,” said the peasant. “It’s been frozen in this position for years.” The recruiter shook his head. “I see. But tell me, Ivan, what was the finger like before the paralysis?” The peasant straightened his index finger and held up his hand. “Like this!” he said.

  Given what I have experienced on this trip, I find Yevgeny’s jokes my only relief. Write me with some details. I long to hear about your life.

  Love, A.

  When Alexei returned to Voronezh, his meritorious record persuaded Oblomov to house him with his mistress, Lena Goracheva, the widow of Major Gorachev, a hero in the Great War, who had left Lena a house with an attic apartment that she rented to supplement her modest pension. It was here that the commissar of police brought Alexei, leaving the barrack behind. Lena was delighted to have as a tenant a young medical student, even if he was labeled an enemy of the people. Her usual renters were government bureaucrats who bored her with their constant repetition of official phraseology that celebrated the “New Soviet Man” and “Five-Year plans” and “engineers of the human soul” and “phases” and “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” She looked forward to talking about actual events and to consulting Alexei about the sciatic nerve pain at the back of her leg.

  Lena and Oblomov were very proper in the presence of Alexei. As the commissar left the sitting room, he said to the young man:

  “Lena’s specialty is potatoes and beets. She can prepare them a hundred different ways.”

  Alexei replied dryly, “I can’t wait.”

  As the door closed, Lena lifted Alexei’s valise as easily as a down pillow and carried it to the attic. A muscular peasant woman with a broad Tatar face and narrow eyes, she had a man’s shoulders and a braid that ran down her back like a Chinese coolie. Before Alexei could object, she had snapped opened his valise and started to store his belongings in the armoire and small chest of drawers.