Efim thought of his medical visits when he’d just graduated, of how a doctor’s call, once the patient settled, could become something of a social occasion. Sometimes a family had paid him for his services with food and drink. Efim often learned valuable information about his patient this way, and about how the family functioned. This visit? Efim wanted only to run and escape his dread, escape this man. Was it evil? Was Arkady Balakirev evil? Nothing so simple. Corrupt? This idea felt more accurate yet more difficult, because corruption meant something good had once existed there and might, with intervention and care, exist again. Survival, then? Had Balakirev turned himself cold and hard because all around him had gone cold and hard?
Eyes reddened, Arkady passed Efim a glass of vodka. —We must be about the same age, Efim Antonovich, the same sort of man.
— Is that so?
— Old enough to remember the horrors of the tsarist days. Instead, I give you the Party’s promise of a radiant future.
Each man emptied his glass.
Arkady gestured to the table. —Try the diced cucumber. I’m sorry, the bread’s gone. I think I’ve got some crisp biscuit here somewhere. I eat out more and more. The NKVD cafeteria is quite good, you know, balanced meals.
— Nutrition is important.
— Never know when the next bout of food difficulties might come.
Efim detected a uric scent then. The tomcats? No, cat urine smelled very different, and the animal had wandered off. —When was your last medical checkup?
Arkady wiped yogurt from his lips. —I’m fine.
— A devoted servant of the Revolution like yourself, pushing body and mind so hard…
— It’s Kostya who needs you, not me. Did he ever tell you how we met? He was a bezprizornik in Odessa, one of hundreds. At least I thought I saw hundreds. I don’t know the numbers. Dangerous place to be lost, Odessa. Then the Germans took Odessa, cleaned up the streets and solved the bezprizorniki problem. They hanged them. The boys, I mean. I don’t want to think about what happened to the girls. Leave children alone. Why is that so difficult? I once had a photograph of those gallows. I kept it to remind Kostya and myself what I’d saved him from. I burned it last year. It was hard to guess the boys’ ages, because their faces looked so tough, all cheekbones and scowls, yet those baggy smocks belted round narrow waists as they queued told me they were starving. Why do we photograph such things?
— I wouldn’t know.
— An execution should be efficient and humane, quick and clean, for condemned and executioner alike. Too much terror in a hanging, too much temptation into theatre. That is why I approve of guns. Instantaneous.
Efim considered the impact of a bullet on a brain. —As close as we can get.
— I got Kostya out of Odessa just before the Germans took it.
— Kind of you.
— Completely unplanned. I simply had orders to return to Moscow. Kostya begged me to take him with me. When I saw those photographs years later, I knew I’d been right to do so. More?
— Please.
Arkady poured vodka. —We’ll drink to beauty.
— Women?
— Confession.
— Very well. To the beauty of confession.
The vodka burned Efim clean of worry and fear.
Arkady put down his glass and laced his fingers over his belly. —It’s good for the soul. My own father was a doctor. There now, you’ve seen one of the stains in my file: my petit bourgeois background. Use it against me, if you wish. I didn’t have the good sense to hide it when I joined the Cheka. I didn’t boast about it, but I didn’t I hide it. It gets worse. My mother came from wealth. We took holidays in Odessa. The climate, you see, it agreed with my mother. So when I had a chance in the Cheka to visit Odessa, reconnaissance, set up a Cheka depot, I leapt for it. And despite everything, at first I felt so happy. That changed. Odessa felt desolate, boarded-up windows and bread queues, carriages and trains, and bezprizorniki everywhere, like they heaved out of the gutter. That’s how they smelled. They all begged. Kopeks or cigarettes. They always wanted cigarettes. Smoking kept them from feeling hungry.
Efim thought about how much Kostya smoked.
Pouring more vodka, clinking the bottle neck against the rims of the glasses, Arkady smiled. —Kostya wasn’t begging. I found him almost frozen to the ground. Someone had doused him in water, in January. I helped him up. Just another sign of the struggle, I thought, one who would have to find his place in the new order or die, but when I heard him curse, I knew then he must be special.
— Because he cursed?
Arkady tilted his head to one side, then put on his spectacles. The lenses magnified his eyes, and Efim could not look away. —In four different languages. A born polyglot. He’s fluent in six languages now. He’ll tell you it’s seven, but his spoken English is not very good. He’s got gifts to burn, so when he drinks himself to oblivion, or risks his career and his life for some whore, I confess, I tend to worry.
Prying cucumber loose from his teeth with his tongue, Efim considered how much he’d scrubbed his hands earlier in the evening, how difficult he’d found it to remove Nadezhda Ivanovna’s blood from his cuticles.
Vodka glugged and splashed as Arkady refilled his glass yet again. —Kostya’s shoulder. The pain is eating him alive. I can see it.
— If you want his pain controlled, then I need to increase his morphine dose, and that starts us up the ladder to narkomania.
— That’s not good enough.
— Some shrapnel wounds never heal. I repeat what I said when I first examined him: proper convalescence, and then, if he must work, a desk job only.
Arkady shook his head. —I can’t do that. Too much attention is dangerous.
— More dangerous than severe pain or raging narkomania? What will that do to his judgement and career? What has it done already?
— A crippled officer is an easy target in a purge.
Efim had nothing to say to that.
Arkady stood up. —Let’s get you comfortable, Efim Antonovich. Pick whichever chair you like, or the couch.
— What? I can’t stay here.
— So inject him now.
— While he’s unconscious and liable to vomit? I might kill him.
— Then you must stay. No doctor wants to kill his patient.
Efim clenched his fists and stifled a cry. Laboratory of Special Purpose Number Two. How many more? Certain he could smell blood from his fingers, and certain Arkady could, too, he reached for his medical bag. To calm his thoughts about the lab, he imagined the inventory of his bag: stethoscope, tongue depressor, reflex hammer, tourniquets, bandages, syringes, morphine. Speculum, dilatation rods, curettages, and a wooden dowel dented from the recent pressure of Nadezhda Ivanovna’s teeth.
Risk of hemorrhage. She should not be left alone.
Arkady settled himself into an armchair. —Take the Persian rug from the study so you don’t get a chill.
Near half-past two in the morning, pain tearing a hole in his sleep, Kostya cried out. Efim followed Arkady to the little room, and, like Kostya, squinted and frowned in the sudden light.
Arkady took his hand from the light switch and stood close to Efim, leaving Efim little room to work.
Efim ignored him as he picked up Kostya’s wrist and took his pulse. —Shoulder?
— What the fuck else?
Arkady snorted. —Kostya, you will not make the doctor’s work more difficult than it needs to be.
Kostya sat up. —Arkady Dmitrievich. Why are you here?
— It’s my house.
— Right, right, debauchery in the iris bed.
Arkady flinched.
Missing this, Efim took equipment from his medical bag and prepared an injection. —He’s still drunk.