Kolyma Tales (31 page)

Twisting his thin lips in a sneer, the surgeon asked:

‘Who invented penicillin?’

‘Fleming!’ The answer was given not by me, but by my neighbor from the district hospital. His red bristles were shaven off, and there remained only an unhealthy pale puffiness in the cheeks. (He had gorged himself on soup, I immediately realized.)

I was amazed at the red-headed student’s knowledge. The surgeon sized up the triumphant ‘Fleming’. Who are you, night orderly? Who? Who were you before prison?

‘I’m a captain. A captain of the engineering troops. At the beginning of the war I was chief of the fortified area on Dicson Island. We had to put up fortifications in a hurry. In the fall of ’41 when the morning fog broke we saw the German raider
Graf Spee
in the bay. The raider shot up all our fortifications point-blank. And left. And I got ten years. “If you don’t believe it, consider it a fairy tale.” ’

All the students studied through the night, passionately soaking up knowledge with all the appetite of men condemned to death but suddenly given the chance of a reprieve.

After a meeting with the higher-ups, however, Fleming’s spirits lifted and he brought a novel to the barracks, where everyone else was studying. As he finished off some boiled fish, the remnants of someone else’s feast, he carelessly leafed through the book.

Catching my ironic smile, Fleming said:

‘What’s the difference? We’ve been studying for three months now, and anyone who’s lasted this long will finish and get his certificate. Why should I go crazy studying? You have to know how to look at things.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to learn to treat people. I want to learn a real skill.’

‘Knowing how to live is a real skill.’

It was then that I learned that Fleming’s claim to having been a captain was only a mask, another mask on that pale prison face. The rank of captain was real; the bit about the engineering troops was an invention. Fleming had been in the NKVD – the secret police – with the rank of captain. Information on his past had been accumulating drop by drop for several years. A drop was a measure of time, something like a water clock. This drop fell on the bare skull of a person being interrogated; such was the water clock of the Leningrad prisons of the thirties. Sand clocks measured the time allotted for exercise. Water clocks measured the time of confession, the period of investigation. Clocks of sand drained with fleeting speed; water clocks were tormentingly slow. Water clocks didn’t count or measure minutes; they measured the human soul, the will, destroying it drop by drop, eroding it just as water erodes a rock. This piece of folklore about investigations was very popular in the thirties and even in the twenties.

Captain Fleming’s words were gathered drop by drop, and the treasure turned out to be priceless. Fleming himself considered it priceless. It could not have been otherwise, and I remember our conversations very clearly.

‘Do you know the greatest secret of our time?’

‘What?’

‘The trials of the thirties. You know how they prepared them? I was in Leningrad at the time. I worked with Zakovsky. The preparation of the trials was all chemistry, medicine, pharmacology. They had more will-suppressants than you could shake a stick at. You don’t think that if such suppressants exist, they wouldn’t use them? The Geneva Agreement or something like that…

‘It would have been too human to possess chemical will-suppressants and not use them on the “internal front”. This and only this is the secret of the trials of the thirties, the open trials, open to foreign correspondents and to any Feucht-wanger. There were no “doubles” in those trials. The secret of the trials was the secret of pharmacology…’

I lay on the short uncomfortable bunk in the empty student barracks which was shot through with rays of sunshine and listened to these admissions.

‘There were experiments earlier – in the sabotage trials, for example. That comic trial of Ramzin touches on pharmacology very slightly.’

Fleming’s story seeped through drop by drop, or was it his own blood that fell on my bare memory? What sort of drops were these – blood, tears, or ink? They weren’t ink, and they weren’t tears.

‘Of course, there are instances when medicine is powerless. Or sometimes the solutions aren’t prepared properly. There were rules to double-check everything.’

‘Where are those doctors now?’

‘Who knows? On the moon probably…’

The investigator has all the latest scientific discoveries and technology in his arsenal, the latest in pharmacology.

‘It wasn’t cabinet “A” – toxic or poisonous – and not cabinet “B” – strong effect…’ It turns out that the Latin word ‘hero’ is translated in Russian as ‘having a strong effect’. And where were Captain Fleming’s medications kept? In cabinet ‘C’, the crime cabinet or in cabinet ‘M’ – for magic?

A person who had access to cabinet ‘C’, cabinet ‘M’, and the most advanced scientific discoveries had to take a course for hospital orderlies to learn that man has one liver, that the liver is not a paired organ. He learned about blood circulation three hundred years after Harvey.

The secret was kept in laboratories, in underground offices, in stinking cages where the animals smelled like convicts in the Magadan transit prison in ’38. In comparison with this transit prison, Butyr was a model of surgical immaculateness and smelled more like an operating-room than an animal’s cage.

All scientific and technological discoveries are checked first of all for any military significance, even to the extent of speculating on their possible future military uses. And only that which has been sifted through by the generals and found to have no relevance to war is given over for the common use.

Medicine, chemistry, pharmacology have long since been placed under military control. Throughout the world, institutes for the study of the brain have always accumulated the results of experiments, observations. Borgia’s poisons were always a weapon of
Realpolitik
. The twentieth century brought with it an extraordinary tide of pharmacological and chemical preparations for the control of the psyche.

But if it is possible to obliterate fear with medicine, the opposite is true a thousand times – it is possible to suppress the human will by injections, by pure pharmacology and chemistry without making use of any ‘physical’ methods such as breaking ribs and knocking out teeth, stubbing out cigarettes on the body of the person under investigation, or trampling him with the heels of boots.

These two schools of investigation were known as physics and chemistry. The physicists regarded purely physical persuasion as the cornerstone of their building and viewed beatings as a means of revealing the moral foundations of the world. Once revealed, how base and worthless were the depths of human essence! Beatings could achieve any testimony. Under the threat of a club, inventors made scientific discoveries, wrote verse and novels. The fear of beating and the stomach’s scale for measuring its ‘ration’ worked miracles.

Beating is a sufficiently weighty and effective psychological weapon.

Many useful results were produced by the famous and ubiquitous ‘conveyor’ in which the investigators alternated without giving the arrested person a chance to sleep. After seventeen days without sleep a man loses his sanity. Has this scientific observation been made in the offices of political investigators?

But neither did the chemical school retreat.

Physics could guarantee material for ‘Special Councils’ and all sorts of ‘troikas’ where a triumvirate of judges would make their decisions behind closed doors. The School of Physical Inducement, however, could not be applied in open trials. The School of Physical Inducement (I believe that’s the term used by Stanislavsky) could not publicly present its theater of blood, could not have prepared the ‘open trials’ that made all mankind tremble. The preparation of such spectacles was within the realm of competency of the chemists.

Twenty years after these conversations with Fleming I include in this story lines taken from a newspaper article:

What is this? Fragments of testimony of some former NKVD officer during the trial of the judges? A letter from Vyshinsky or Riumin before their deaths? No, these are paragraphs taken from a scientific article written by a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. But all this – and a hundred times more – was learned, tried, and applied in the thirties in the preparation of the ‘open trials’!

Pharmacology was not the only weapon in the investigator’s arsenal of those years. Fleming mentioned a name that I knew well.

Ornaldo!

Of course! Ornaldo was a famous hypnotist who appeared frequently in the twenties in Moscow circuses, and not only in Moscow.

Ornaldo’s speciality was mass hypnosis. Books on hypnosis are illustrated with photographs of his famous tours. ‘Ornaldo’, of course, was a pseudonym. His real name was M. A. Smirnov, and he was a Moscow doctor. There were posters pasted all the way around special drums used for theatrical advertisements. Paolo-Svishev had a photograph hanging in the window on Stoleshnikov Lane. It was an enormous photograph of human eyes with the inscription ‘The Eyes of Ornaldo’. Even now I remember those eyes and the emotional confusion that I experienced whenever I heard or saw Ornaldo’s circus act. There are photographs of Ornaldo’s performances taken in 1929 in Baku. Then he left the stage.

‘Beginning in the middle of the thirties Ornaldo was in the secret employment of the NKVD.’

The shiver of a revealed secret ran down my back.

Fleming would frequently, and for no special reason, praise Leningrad. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that he admitted he wasn’t a native Leningrader. In fact, he had been recruited from the provinces by the aesthetes of the NKVD in the twenties as their worthy replacement. They grafted on to him tastes much broader than those provided by an ordinary school education. Not just Turgenev and Nekrasev, but Bal-mont and Sologub, not just Pushkin, but Gumilyov as well:

‘ “And you, watchdogs of the king, pirates guarding gold in the dark port…” I’m not quoting the line incorrectly, am I?’

‘No, that’s right.’

‘I can’t remember the rest. Am I a watchdog of the king? Of the state?’

And smiling – both to himself and his past – he told with reverence how he had touched the file of the executed poet Gumilyov, calling it the affair of
lycée
pupils. It was as if a Pushkinist were telling how he had held the goose quill pen with which Pushkin wrote
Poltava
. It was just as if he had touched the Stone of Kaaba, such was the bliss, the purification in every feature of his face. I couldn’t help but think that this too was a way of being introduced to poetry, an amazing, extremely rare manner of introduction in the office of the criminal investigator. Of course the moral values of poetry are not transmitted in the process.

‘When reading books I would first of all turn to the notes, the comments. Man is a creature of notes and comments.’

‘How about the text?’

‘Not always. There is always time for that.’

Obscene as this may sound, Fleming and his co-workers could partake of culture only in their work as investigators. Their familiarity with persons of literary and social circles was distorted but nevertheless real and genuine in a sense, not concealed behind a thousand masks.

The chief informer on the artistic intelligentsia of those years was Major General Ignatiev. To hear the name of this former czarist diplomat and well-known memoirist was surprising only at first. A steady, thoughtful, and qualified author of all sorts of ‘memoranda’ and surveys of writers’ lives, he had served fifty years in the ranks. Forty of those years were spent in the Soviet spy network.

‘I’d already read the book
Fifty Years in the Ranks
, and was familiar with his surveys when they introduced me to him. Or him to me,’ Fleming said thoughtfully. ‘Not a bad book,
Fifty Years in the Ranks
.’

Fleming didn’t care much for newspapers, news, or radio programs. International events scarcely interested him. His emotional life was dominated by a deep resentment for that dark power that had promised the high-school boy he would fathom boundless depths, that had carried him to such heights and that had now shamelessly cast him into the abyss.

Fleming’s introduction to culture was peculiar – some brief courses and some excursions to the Hermitage. The boy grew into an investigator-aesthete who was shocked by the crude force that was rushing into the ‘organs of justice’ in the thirties. His type was swept away and destroyed by the ‘new wave’ that placed its faith in crude force and despised not only psychological refinements, but even the ‘conveyor’ and the method of not allowing the prisoner to sit down until he confessed. The new wave simply had no patience for any scientific calculations or lofty psychology. It was easier to get results with simple beatings. The slow aesthetes ended up on the moon. It was sheer chance that Fleming remained alive. The new wave couldn’t wait.

The hungry gleam in Fleming’s eyes faded, and the professional observer again made his voice heard.

‘You know, I was watching you during the pre-operative conference. You had something on your mind.’

‘I just want to remember everything, remember it and describe it.’

Some images swayed in Fleming’s already relaxed and calmed brain.

*

In the Magadan psychological ward where Fleming had worked there was an enormous Latvian. Every time the giant sat down to eat, Fleming would sit opposite him, unable to restrain his ecstasy at the sight of such a mountain of food.