Alexei gathered from the stock in the storeroom that although the doctors in the main ward, the one that treated physical ailments, frequented the pharmacy, the clinic stood ready to use psychotic drugs when the need arose. Before he and Basmanaya continued their tour of the premises, a young doctor entered and handed Comrade Lvov a book. Alexei could see the title: What Is to Be Done? What he couldn’t see was whether the book was the novel by Nikolai Chernyshevsky or the political tract by Lenin, who had appropriated the title for his own book. Alexei smirked. Lenin had already shown, disastrously, what was to be done, and now Stalin was having his way. What did the title augur for him?
Comrade Lvov took the book, thanked the doctor, and remarked insincerely, “Such an important book. I have always wanted to read it.” He looked blankly at Alexei, who slyly winked.
Basmanaya led his charge out of the pharmacy and into Wards One and Two. The director introduced the other members of the medical staff, all of whom seemed dedicated doctors as well as patriotic Soviets, who hailed him as “comrade” and “a hero of the people” and “one of Stalin’s vanguard.”
Alexei smiled appreciatively. The women’s section of Ward Two housed six beds, only one of them occupied. Helena Schmidt came from a wealthy German family that dated back to the building of the Voronezh shipyards. A stately gray-haired doyen of Voronezh, she had frequently hosted salons that brought together artists of every political persuasion. Her numerous lovers were all conquered by her stately Nordic face, with its unblemished pale skin, brilliant blue eyes, small mouth, and perfect teeth. Proud of her Teutonic forebears, she made no effort to hide her critical views of Lenin and other so-called Bolshevik philosophers, all of whom she regarded as muddled.
“You are marked down as ‘politically insane,’ not ‘criminally,’” Alexei said, as he pulled up a chair. “What put you in trouble?”
“Lenin,” she said, “das Ekel, the horrible man.”
“Did you know him?”
She laughed. “Au contraire. I never wished to. But I have read his nonsense and often said he was a dreamer, a man who took irrational German thought—romanticism—and fused it with French idéalisme. The result was, horribile dictu! an unsystematic belief that everyone could be equal and free and could finally Live, with a capital L, whatever that means. I used to bring together people interested in high culture. During these soirees, I’d speak my mind. One of the guests told the secret police that I had spoken derogatorily about Comrade Lenin. The head of the GPU called on me to ask whether the charge was true. ‘I do not cavil,’ I said, ‘nor do I countenance falsehood. Your odious informant spoke the truth.’ The idiot told me that just because I had earned a degree in philosophy, I had no right to question orthodox Soviet thought. ‘Even if I’m a democratic socialist?’ I asked. ‘How can you be a socialist,’ he replied, ‘if you do not agree with Comrade Lenin?’ ‘Neither do a great many others,’ I answered. An otiose judge subsequently charged me with crimes against the state. The local Soviet found me guilty without allowing me to voice my objections. No doubt because of my family’s affiliation with Peter the Great, they offered me two choices: a work camp or a mental ward. And here I am.”
Well aware that thousands of people thought Lenin’s ideas vague and airy, Alexei concluded that Helena’s position in the community, as a grande dame and the daughter of a distinguished family, explained her having been brought not to the city hospital but to the commissariat clinic. He would compare her statements with Basmanaya’s records to double-check her story.
As Alexei and Basmanaya strolled out of the woman’s section of Ward Two, Alexei asked, “Where is Ward Three, where your other female patient is lodged?”
The director pointed to a branching hallway at the end of the ward. “Miss Rissa Binderova is confined to her own quarters down there, behind a locked door, but she has permission to play the flute and dress as she likes. She has limited freedoms.”
“Exercise?”
A stoical Basmanaya said, “Twice a week. When she agrees to write in the Soviet mode, and not seditiously, she can go.”
“But certainly she’s no worse than Helena Schmidt, a ‘political’ also. What crime would justify two years of solitary confinement?”
Basmanaya, looking as if someone had squeezed his testicles, wheezed, “Her scribblings were the work of a mad person and reached a far larger audience than Helena’s artist friends. To rail against paradise indicates the presence of a dangerous malady.”
“Until now, Comrade Basmanaya, I had never really heard the diagnosis for dissidents so clearly expressed. The Soviet Union is paradise. Those who cannot appreciate paradise are mad and therefore need to be treated. Thank you for the exposition.”
“Worse than mad! Miss Binderova comes from a prominent family, a fact that we have taken into consideration by giving her a private room and special attention.”
“I would like to speak to her—to confirm your diagnosis. Besides, I have treated dissidents before, with some success.”
Basmanaya’s grim expression argued that Alexei would not be allowed to see this particular patient, and certainly not alone.
“What if you accompanied me when I talked to her? Call it a test case.” He winked at Basmanaya. “After all, if one of your patients exiled for unsocial behavior was cured of her pathology, you would be written up in the medical annals and acclaimed.”
Basmanaya, always susceptible to honors, felt the force of Dr. Leshin’s orders weakening. What if this man was right? To save so many people from error might earn the clinic director a medal.
“Dr. Leshin will surely object.”
“I’ll assume the responsibility for the decision, and if it proves wrong, I’ll shoulder the blame.”
Basmanaya looked left and right. “When do you have in mind?”
“Tomorrow or the next day. In the meantime, I can speak to the men assigned to Ward Two.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
Basmanaya and Alexei entered the men’s section of Ward Two. Here he introduced the doctor to the three men, and excused himself, but not before Alexei reminded him that he had not yet received the medical charts. The director assured him that by the end of the day, they’d be available. Alexei huddled collectively with the patients in the ward to determine how they perceived their maladies, which in turn might indicate a pattern of anti-Soviet madness.
“I am perplexed,” he said, sitting on a stool, “that you three gentlemen have been singled out for the clinic and not the general hospital. Tell me about yourselves and how you got here.”
The men, only too glad to share their personal histories, all started talking at once.
“Let’s begin alphabetically,” said Alexei diplomatically.
Benjamin Federov, a sunken-cheeked balding fellow, sat on a stool with ramrod straight posture and pronounced his consonants with the purity of a voice teacher. Claiming that his parents had owned a distillery that was confiscated by the government, he explained, “In the company of my parents I traveled to Moscow to speak to Comrade Stalin. At the gates of the Kremlin we were arrested, questioned, and told that the government knew we were hoarding money and other valuables, like jewelry. They would allow us to go free only if we turned over our treasures.” He turned out his empty pockets.
“Nothing! What we didn’t know, until the police questioned us, was that our family had been denounced. They said they had letters that proved we had grown wealthy on the backs of the poor. My parents, aristocrats by nature, refused to reply, and were sent to camps where they died in less than a year. The Soviets figured that if I also passed away they would never recover our hidden wealth, so they sent me here, with the understanding that I could leave when I revealed what they wanted to know.” He made an obscene gesture. “They should all bite their tongues and die of the poison!”
Alexei noted that Benjamin Federov’s narrative did not include a denial of secreted wealth. But then, under these circumstances, a man might say anything. Ag
ain, he would have to check Benjamin’s statements against the first doctor’s notes.
Arkady Gorbatov came from a family of actors celebrated for their satiric impersonations and miming of famous people. A tall man, his body, thin and sinewy, exhibited a contortionist’s flexibility. When he spoke, he repeatedly used his left thumb and index finger to stroke the enormous handlebar mustache that reached to his chin.
“I learned the art from my family. We traveled through Russia and most of Europe. My father’s specialty was poking fun at famous musicians, like Rachmaninoff and Paderewski, and my mother’s realm was ballerinas. In the Baltics, I started satirizing Stalin, using a false mustache and, because I am tall, walking on my knees to imitate that dwarf.” He fell to his knees to demonstrate. “The GPU heard, and I was put in irons and brought here from Estonia. Since they won’t let me write letters, I am lost to my parents, assuming they are even alive. Like most prisoners in this country, you get a choice: obey and perhaps be released or resist and be jailed. I too was given a choice. Koba wanted me to perform in Moscow. I was to impersonate Tsar Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov and the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. But how can you lampoon a couple who once governed this country and were savagely murdered? I couldn’t.”
“Are you a monarchist?” asked Alexei.
“No, an artiste. I respect all people. Satire, when used as it should be, is directed at people we wish to correct.”
Alexei was willing to wager that Arkady’s family had once performed for the Tsar. It would be easy enough to find out.
The third man, Sviatoslav Sarkaski, a nuclear physicist, looked as if his neck and chest had melted into his abdomen. He was a trinity of legs, stomach, and head. Alexei likened him to a three-act play with a final fourth act yet to be written.
“You ask,” he said to Alexei, “why I am here and not in the city hospital. A good question. I told the secret police that if I was truly out of my mind they should lock me up with real madmen so that I could escape to the garden, like the writer Vsevolod Garshin, and pluck red flowers.”
Alexei knew the story to which the physicist was alluding, one in which the mental patient wants to take upon himself all the suffering of the world and, by plucking the bloody blooms, dispel evil.
“Are you Christ?” asked Alexei, trying to determine whether the man suffered from delusions. “Or do you feel like a savior?”
“Sometimes, but not in the religious sense.”
“Then how?”
With his hands at his back, he paced. “Nuclear physics can save the world or destroy it, which endows people like me with awesome powers, a fact that I have repeatedly tried to impress upon my colleagues, who seem not to realize how great is their moral duty to do good and not evil.”
Alexei had taken courses in physics but felt out of his depth discussing the subject with a man as prominent as Dr. Sarkaski, whom both Lenin and Stalin had once honored. The scientist had presumably fallen out of favor by choosing not to work on nuclear projects he feared might accidentally incinerate the globe.
“Do you think of scientists as the new gods, the modern messiahs, who can create the world anew, so to speak?”
“Do they have the means? Perhaps. Are they gods? Absolutely not. Most of them are prisoners of their own science and, all too often, prisoners of the official ideology.”
“I suppose that you, too, have been told that if you agree to do as you’re asked—in your case, resume your research in nuclear physics—you’ll be released. But you have refused.”
“Your diagnosis is correct, Dr. von Fresser. Your predecessor insisted that my presence in the laboratory might restrain the zealots. Might or might not, I said. More likely my presence would be interpreted as a vote of confidence. That I could not allow, if you see my point.”
“Then you regard my working in this clinic in a similar light?”
“Yes.”
“I am putting my medical knowledge in the service of a government that you find . . .”
Turning his head to one side, he said, “Reprehensible.”
“So you, too, are a ‘political’?”
He shook his head yes. “When Thoreau was arrested for refusing to pay his taxes because he said they would go to support an unjust war, Emerson visited and asked him what he was doing in jail. Thoreau responded, ‘What are you doing outside of jail?’”
Alexei found this exchange disquieting. He would have preferred to keep the discussion on a philosophical level, not a personal one. But Dr. Sarkaski’s comments had made it appear that Alexei was just another apparatchik.
“I have been exiled for five years—for political reasons,” said Alexei calmly, producing a document of his sentence. “I could have continued working in the countryside among the poor or work here. Once you have seen the ninth circle of hell, and tried to ameliorate the suffering there, you gladly accept the chance to serve people like you. Frankly, the task is lighter and I enjoy the company of well-educated people. If my impulses offend you, tell me, and I promise to maintain my distance.”
“The better choice,” said Sviatoslav, before taking to his bed and burying his head in the pillow, “would have been to suffer the cold of the street and to beg for your bread rather than serve these villainous creatures.”
As Alexei exited the clinic, he chose to walk home in the frigid air to clear his head, which at the moment was in turmoil over Thoreau’s point that conscience matters more than the law. He headed for the post office to collect his afternoon mail, hoping to find one from Natasha full of love and well wishing—and wit. The postmaster chuckled as he removed mail from a special slot marked “Exiles” and sorted through it to find Alexei’s.
“That was quite a good joke about the peasant and the paralyzed finger. I laughed heartily.”
Yes, all the stories were true. Any mail posted by an exile was read by the authorities and censored for speaking ill of the state. But which subjects and words constituted “ill”?
“What was omitted?” asked Alexei, hoping that the letter wasn’t completely gutted.
“Comrade Lipnoskii, you know there’s no famine in the countryside. Stalin has forbidden the use of that word.”
“I used the word hunger, not famine.”
“Same thing,” said the postmaster, who shrugged and returned to his desk, opening envelopes and reading through other people’s mail.
Basmanaya, as promised, gave Alexei all the files of the former doctor, except Rissa Binderova’s folder. He would read the notes at his leisure after Lena’s dinner, which he prayed would not include potatoes or beets. Outside his bedroom window, the shape of the tree limbs fascinated him. He could stare for hours at nature’s contours and marvel at the fact that no two trees or flowers were exactly the same, just as no two patients behaved identically; and if they did, madness would truly be afoot. Relaxing in his rocking chair with the files in his lap, he thumbed through them. For some reason, the former doctor’s name had been blotted out, but not his medical notes: clinical facts about temperature, height, weight, physical abnormalities, toilet habits, and, of course, obsessions, by which the Soviet medical establishment meant wrong thinking. Alexei skimmed over the numbers and figures to look at the summaries, which had been written in a graceful hand and prose.
“Helena Schmidt is a ‘political.’ As with all the patients in the clinic, Dr. Leshin hopes that a mental hospital, by means of Freud’s talking cure, will be able to reorder a person’s mind. Although Dr. Leshin has allowed me the liberty to experiment, and although in her case I have, on more than one occasion, resorted to drugs, I have had no success in trying to alter the brain chemistry. In the end, I have to admit that talking with Helena has been more effective than trying to expunge her heresies with drugs.
“Note: I had far more success with drug therapy when I was assigned to the military hospital. Was it because the Red Army men were less educated than patient Schmidt, or was it because they so enjoyed the effect of the drugs that they said what I
wanted to hear? Surely this conundrum is worth a scholarly paper.
“The hours I have spent talking to Helena Schmidt have led me to observe certain patterns. One, she resents being talked down to. At times she resorts to Russian Church Slavic, laced with lexical borrowings from German, English, Polish, Latin, and French. Her archaic language is clearly intended to reinforce her previous position among the aristocracy. When I ask her to speak simply, she says that she prefers the high style. I don’t believe it will be possible to persuade her to avoid philosophy and learned diction for the sake of becoming one of the people. She abhors bad grammar and sneers at syntactical confusions. Her identity is wedded to her education in philosophy, her command of languages, her preference for Hobbes and Locke over Engels and Marx. Well aware that she has been sent to the clinic instead of the city hospital because of her family’s history in the community, she feels it her duty to remain steadfast and not succumb to the bribe of Bolshevism.”
“Benjamin Federov is an interesting case. He loves to talk about his former walks in the woods and bird-watching. By just sitting at his clinic window, he has amassed a great deal of data that any ornithologist would envy. He can even imitate the sounds of birds and identify avians from afar. This last activity takes place when he walks in the clinic garden. He will say, ‘Did you hear that? It is the sound of a cuckoo.’ Or is he merely engaging in self-parody? I sometimes wonder.
“I think that if his parents had not died in a camp we might have persuaded him to reveal the location of the family wealth. He knows the government wants to find it, so he deliberately teases me and others with comments like ‘Have you ever seen a ruby as large as an egg, or a diamond as big as the Ritz?’ This last comment, I think, is a literary allusion, but to what I don’t know nor do I have the time to find it. He also speaks of rubles wrapped in canvas, neatly stacked in bundles of a thousand each. I suspect he’s goading us, but I have no doubt the family hid away a great deal of money. Perhaps one day some peasant will unearth the treasure. I certainly hope so. But would the peasant notify the authorities or keep everything for himself? If I had to wager, I would bet on the latter.
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