Just As I Thought (36 page)

—1984

VI / Postscript

When my mother and father were fifty-nine, my mother died of breast cancer and my father retired from a heavy neighborhood medical practice. They had both been sick for about ten years. My father’s heart trouble meant that he could no longer walk up to the fifth and then fourth floor of our Bronx tenements on house calls. He couldn’t imagine doctoring as an office-only occupation.

He must have done some pretty remarkable medical maintenance: my mother lived ten years after a mastectomy (sixty years ago!). After her death, he lived another thirty years, with hospital visits, bedside oxygen tanks, and the nighttime injections I watched him deliver to himself, slowly, slowly, using as little energy as possible in conveying the hypodermic needle from the table to his arm.

When he retired, he probably thought, What will I do now? He remembered being praised in medical school for his anatomical drawings. So he began to draw, then paint, mostly in oils, teaching himself, practicing, working pretty hard. He had, I think, a great deal of happiness at this work. He had a show at the North Bronx Senior Center. Most of the paintings are now distributed among children and grandchildren. One day Donald Barthelme was at supper and looking things over the way he sometimes did. He said, I like that little painting. My father said, I’ll make you one just like it—and he did.

I don’t remember when he first realized he had lots of stories to tell. When he did, he sat down and wrote them. (Indecisive, somewhat indolent as I am, I couldn’t get over that action immediately following decision.) My sister, generous as always, typed them. Most were about his patients—our neighbors. They were interesting, they were funny. They needed some editing. I was not good at that; he was my father. I should say here that he learned English when he was about twenty-one, a young immigrant, by reading Dickens. (So did my former father-in-law.) That early reading has been evident in his style, in the letters he wrote us from time to time. (He may have learned Italian first—his earliest job was with an Italian photographer on Fourteenth Street.)

The story included here is the only one he wrote about himself as a young man. It’s also one of only three or four that he told us about his Russian youth. Why so much silence? I asked this question in the introduction to the first section of this book. Still no answer. As for the young fellow in the Bachmut prison, he’s as familiar and dear to me as the old man I watched him become.

My Father Tells a Story: “I Should Have Been a Lawyer”

I don’t know how good a doctor I am. My colleagues—well—you know what professional jealousy is. It makes no difference who is right. I know that I chose the wrong profession. I should have selected law as my life’s work.

I began to practice law suddenly, without notice, out of the blue sky. Like Athena, who sprang from Jove’s forehead fully armed, I became a lawyer in the twinkling of an eye, without time-consuming study or apprenticeship.

I was then just eighteen. I happened to be in prison in the small south Russian city of Bachmut.

Now! Now! Compose yourself! I see your eyes are bulging. You are horrified and frightened. You cast an apprehensive glance at your silver spoons, which are lying around exposed and defenseless.

I wasn’t incarcerated for rape, mayhem, misfeasance, malfeasance, or some other feasance, the prefix of which escapes me at the moment. The reason for my presence in the prison and on the wrong side of the bars, too, was due to an argument between me and the then-ruling dynasty on certain political matters. I lost the argument, and as a result, I had to spend six months in prison, followed by a three-year period of cooling my heels somewhere beyond the Arctic Circle.

In the meantime, I wasn’t particularly unhappy. Can you be unhappy when you’re eighteen? Being the first political prisoner, I was placed in a solitary cell, which sounds dreadful, but it was not. My casemate was on the ground floor, bearing on the prison yard, with the prison office right across a narrow yard. To the left, the main building reared its incredibly dirty mass. The comings and goings between the buildings kept down my boredom.

The prison was an ancient one. Its sanitary conditions were of the most primitive kind. The management was lax. Rules were sometimes kept. I wasn’t surprised, therefore, when the day turnkey, instead of locking my door after I came in from the toilet, followed me into the cell, which was against the rules. He was somewhat embarrassed. He scratched the back of his head with the enormous doorkey.

“They say you politicals are very clever,” he said.

I didn’t deny it. When I was eighteen, I had no superiors and only a few peers in the intellectual heights I then inhabited. I came in for some rude shocks. But that was later.

“I am but a human being,” he continued. “Suppose I did get drunk and missed two days. Must I be kicked out of service like a dog? With five children and a sick wife?”

He brushed away a tear.

I was touched at the injustice, but what could I do?

A shy look appeared on his broad, pockmarked face. “You write for me a petition to the chief warden. You tell him about my poor innocent children, my sick wife…”

I was dumbfounded at his request. I had never written any official letters or documents. I told him so.

“You’ll know how to write. You politicals have a head on your shoulders. And don’t forget to mention that my wife is pregnant, and the way she is carrying, it must be twins!”

I was horrified at the thought of so many people starving for such a small infraction of the rules. The twins, which I accepted in my innocence as a 100 percent certainty, finally swayed me.

“All right, Kuzma,” I said. “Bring me a sheet of paper and pen and ink.”

On the windowsill—there was no table in my cell—I began to draft a petition. And right there and then a legal luminary was born. I whizzed like a meteor across the gray skies of Bachmut’s ancient prison.

I put into the petition all the fervor and sincerity of my eighteen years. From the deep recesses of my consciousness swam out shadow forms of legal phraseology. I hadn’t been aware that I harbored them.

With a true lawyer’s instinct I glossed over, hardly mentioning Kuzma’s offense. His two-day drunk I didn’t mention at all. But I promised in his name that never, never would a drop of vodka ever cross his lips! I mentioned his five poor children, none of whom, from my description of their helplessness, could have been older than two years. I remarked on his wife’s present condition. I was on the point of mentioning the menacing advent of twins, but at the last moment, I desisted. A higher power held my hand.

The petition was an unqualified success. Kuzma was called to the chief warden’s office. Obscenities were heaped upon his head, which probably sounded like music to his ears. It was known all over the prison that the chief warden was very dangerous only when he was polite. Kuzma was standing at attention, repeating at appropriate intervals, “Yes, Your Nobleness” and “It’s exactly so, Your Nobleness.”

He came back to his post, opened my door, and said with a smirk, “Forgiven. Anytime you want to go to the toilet, just knock at the door.” This was my reward. In the boredom of prison life, an extra passage through the hall was a lively diversion.

Within twenty-four hours my reputation as a petition writer was firmly established. The trustees, who had the liberty of moving around, were usually the bearers of news in the prison. They hadn’t failed to apprise the rest of the prisoners of the appearance in their midst of a legal light whose very first effort was crowned with success.

The facts that Kuzma had only two children and that his wife wasn’t pregnant at all did not detract from my fame. As a matter of fact, everybody thought it was very slick on my part to have made things look blacker than they were. And if, in the process of doing so, I had resorted to a lie, what of it? It was the result that counted.

The very next day, Kuzma ushered into my cell a long-faced, melancholy-looking convict, adorned with a sparse, shaggy beard. He was obsequious.

“Here you are, Zinovy (my name). Don’t you be scared, Malinikov, speak up!” said Kuzma. To his usually sly look he added the expression of a cat who had just swallowed a canary. I surmised that Kuzma, as a price for allowing Malinikov to see me, must have extorted from him a package of makhorka, a tobacco of unusual venom and acridity. Only a real muzhik could smoke it and survive.

“His wife lives with a discharged soldier.” Kuzma guffawed. He left the cell, jangling the keys.

Malinikov’s marital troubles were his smallest ones. He was a peasant living in one of the nearby villages. Passing the government liquor store one night, he saw someone had broken in through the window. He looked into the store. There was no one there. But so much vodka! He just couldn’t resist.

In the morning he was found with a good deal of evidence inside him, but the incredible number of empty bottles around him and the broken window earned him six years of prison with two years off for good behavior.

But in spite of his good behavior, he was now serving his fifth year, seemingly forgotten. His property was being frittered away. And then he would love to give one swift kick in the pants to the soldier who was living with his wife. Marya was his own wife. He’d had four children with her. Maybe by now there were more than four. Who knew? But he was ready to forgive everything. His last and only hope was my High Nobleness!

I denied my nobleness with indignation; but without the slightest hesitation, I undertook the job of hastening his release.

I drafted a petition to no less a person than the Minister of Justice. I expatiated eloquently upon his helpless wife and numerous children. I added for good measure a decrepit father and mother and drew the attention of His Excellency to his, Malinikov’s, exemplary behavior.

Within a month, he was released. I have a lurking suspicion that my petition had very little to do with his release. Most likely there had been some delay in the slow peregrination of the czarist bureaucracy.

But one and all attributed Malinikov’s release to my legal acumen.

Kuzma did a land-office business charging for permission to see me. When the chief warden and his assistant were away, he would occasionally smuggle in convicts from the main building, no doubt taking a cut from the other turnkeys. In my later years I visited—never of my own free will—other prisons in Russia, but the Bachmut prison was the freest, or rather, the most loosely governed.

I was deeply interested and engrossed in my new calling. I actually liked to draw up the petitions, complaints, and communications. There was no subject too difficult, no authority too exalted for me to tackle.

Sometimes ill success would dog my legal steps, but my initial glory and reputation stood the stress of adversity and remained untarnished. “If Zinovy couldn’t do it!…”

When business slackened, I didn’t know how to overcome my boredom. My mind had become attuned to the legalistic forms which I had managed somehow to pick up. I thirsted to find my way in complex situations; to present my arguments and refute opposite ones. It became a passion and a game.

To make things more unbearable, the month was May. During the day, if I had no “legal” work, I would read or watch the panorama of the prison yard. But at night, or in the evening, even those diversions were denied me! I couldn’t read, because the small kerosene lamp was set so high that I couldn’t see the print of the book.

Standing by the window, when the shadows had enveloped everything but the stars and the moon, was almost a torture. The world was beautiful—on the other side of the bars. The air was full of the fragrance of lilacs and jasmine and some other flowers, the names and shapes of which escape me now. Springtime in Ukraine is so much more fragrant than that of the northern United States. Perhaps it only seemed so during “the golden days of my spring,” as Pushkin puts it.

I longed to promenade on the boulevards in the soft caressing air of the mild spring. I wouldn’t walk, of course, all alone. Yes, there was a girl. And what a girl! And while walking we would discuss perhaps the vestiges of feudalism in England, the institution of the matriarchate in the primitive days of human society … We might sit on a bench, perhaps even touch each other with our bodies. We would suddenly become aware of powerful currents, not covered by economics or the history of culture and civilization …

The slackening of my law practice made me look around and search for a new line of legal endeavor. What was the matter with my own grievances? Not, of course, as far as my own term of incarceration was concerned, or my impending removal to the Arctic regions. To have contested that would have been a piece of folly, not to be countenanced even by my daring and overconfident eighteen years.

But the prison itself was nothing but a monstrous mass of hygienic, fire, and building violations. In my soberer moments I was aware that nothing short of razing it to the ground could cure it of its ills, but the temptation to get my legal teeth into something tangible was irresistible. To put down on a sheet of paper an orderly array of arguments, peppering it liberally with “to wits,” “whereas’s,” was like writing poetry. I let myself go. I asked Kuzma for a sheet of paper and pen and ink.

Now, the chief warden’s power is almost unlimited. He is like the captain of a ship on the high seas. He can put you on bread and water, confine you to a real solitary cell, damp, dark, and full of rats; he can torture you and, at the least sign of insubordination, shoot you—and go scot-free. But he cannot refuse you paper and ink if you desire to communicate with higher powers.

In my first complaint I described the prison toilet facilities, or rather, the absence of them. I described how offensive they were both to the eye and to the nose, the proximity to the water supply, the possibility, nay, the inevitability of an epidemic.