‘I collected half a basin of these yesterday.’
A woman’s face looked out from behind the curtain. We rarely saw women, let alone this close and in the same room. She looked beautiful to me. I bowed and said hallo.
‘Hallo,’ she said in a low, wonderful voice. ‘Sergei, is this your friend, the one you told me about?’
‘No,’ Sergei Mixailovich said, tossing his snips into the basin and walking over to the sink to wash his hands.
‘Nikolai,’ he said to his orderly, who had just come in, ‘take this basin away and bring some bread for him.’ He nodded in my direction.
I waited until the bread was brought and left for the barracks. As for the woman, whose tender and beautiful face I remember to this day, I never saw her again. She was Edith Abramovna, civilian, Party member, a nurse from the Olchan Mine. She had fallen in love with Sergei Mixailovich, taken up with him, got him transferred to Olchan, and obtained for him an early release while the war was still going on. She traveled to Magadan to present Sergei Mixailovich’s case to Nikishov, the head of Far Northern Construction. She was expelled from the Party for being involved with a prisoner; it was the usual method for putting a stop to such affairs. She got Lunin’s case transferred to Moscow, had his sentence canceled, and even managed to get permission for him to take his medical examinations at Moscow University, from which he graduated and had all his civil rights reinstated. And she married him formally.
And when this descendant of a Decembrist received his medical degree, he abandoned Edith Abramovna and demanded a divorce.
‘She’s got a pack of relatives, like all those kikes! I don’t need that.’
He left Edith Abramovna, but he didn’t manage to leave Far Northern Construction. After graduation, he had to return to the Far North for at least three years. As a licensed doctor, Lunin used his connections with camp authorities to land an unexpectedly important appointment – chief of surgery at the Central Prison Hospital on the Left Bank of the Kolyma River in the village of Debin. It was 1948, and by that time I was senior orderly of the surgical ward.
I met Lunin on the stairway. He had a habit of blushing when he was embarrassed. His face became very red when he saw me, but he treated me to a cigarette, congratulated me on my successes and my ‘career’, and told me about Edith Abramovna.
Lunin’s appointment was like a thunderbolt. Rubantsev had been in charge of surgery. A front-line surgeon and a major in the medical service, he was an experienced, no-nonsense type who had moved here after the war – and not just for three days. Some didn’t like Rubantsev. He didn’t get along with the camp authorities, couldn’t stand toadying and lying, and had terrible relations with Scherbakov, chief of sanitation in Kolyma.
Rubantsev had signed a contract and had been warned that the prisoners were his enemies. Being a man of independent mind, however, he soon saw that he had been lied to during his ‘political’ preparation. Rogues, embezzlers, slanderers, and loafers were his colleagues at the hospital. It was the prisoners with their many skills (including medicine) who ran the hospital. Rubantsev realized where the truth lay, and he was not about to hide it. He applied to be transferred to Magadan, where there was a high school for his son. He was denied the transfer orally. After considerable effort, he managed to send his son to a boarding-school fifty miles from Debin. This took several months, and by that time he was running his ward confidently and dismissing loafers and thieves. News of these threatening activities was immediately sent to Scherbakov’s office in Magadan.
Scherbakov didn’t like to stand on ceremony with his subordinates. Cursing, threats, and prison sentences worked fine with prisoners, but they wouldn’t do for a former frontline surgeon who had received medals in the war and who was working under contract.
Scherbakov dug up Rubantsev’s old application and had him transferred to Magadan. And although the academic year had already begun and the surgical ward was working smoothly, he had to abandon everything…
Rubantsev left, and three days later a drunken party was held in the treatment room. Even the principal doctor, Kovalyov, and the hospital director, Vinokurov, helped themselves to the surgical alcohol. They hadn’t visited the surgical ward earlier, because they were afraid of Rubantsev. Drunken parties began in all the doctors’ offices, and nurses and cleaning women were invited. In a word, there were a lot of changes. Secondary adhesion began to occur in operations in the surgical ward, since precious grain alcohol could not be wasted on patients. Half-drunk hospital officials strolled back and forth through the ward.
This was my hospital. After I finished my courses in 1946, I was sent here with a group of patients. The hospital grew before my eyes. It had been a regimental headquarters formerly, but after the war a specialist on camouflage had judged it unsuitable because of its prominent location. Indeed, it could be seen for tens of miles, and so it was converted into a prison hospital. On leaving the three-story building, the former owners, the Kolyma Regiment, had ripped out all the plumbing and sewer pipes. All the chairs in the auditorium had been burned in the boiler. The walls were full of holes, and the doors were broken. The Kolyma Regiment had left Russian-style. We had to repair everything – screw by screw, brick by brick.
The doctors and assistants were doing their best to do a good job. For many of them it was a sacred duty – to pay for their medical education by helping people.
All the loafers raised their heads when Rubantsev left.
‘Why are you stealing alcohol from the medicine cabinets?’
‘Go to hell,’ a nurse answered me. ‘Thank God that Rubantsev is gone, and Lunin is in charge now.’
I was amazed and depressed at Lunin’s conduct. The party continued.
At the next brief meeting, Lunin laughed at Rubantsev: ‘He didn’t do a single ulcer operation. And he’s supposed to be a surgeon.’
This was nothing new. It was true that Rubantsev hadn’t done any ulcer operations. The patients in the therapeutic wards who had this diagnosis were emaciated, undernourished prisoners who didn’t have the slightest chance of surviving the operation. ‘The background isn’t right,’ Rubantsev would say.
‘He’s a coward,’ Lunin shouted and transferred twelve such patients to his ward from the therapeutic ward. All twelve were operated on, and all twelve died. The hospital doctors remembered Rubantsev’s experience and kindness.
‘Sergei Mixailovich, this is no way to work.’
‘Don’t tell me what to do!’
I made up a report asking that a commission be sent from Magadan. I was transferred to a tree-cutting group in the forest. They wanted to send me to a penal mine, but the senior official of the local Party chapter talked them out of it: ‘This isn’t ’38 anymore. It’s not worth the risk.’
A commission was sent, and Lunin was ‘fired’ by Far Northern Construction. Instead of three years, he only had to serve one and a half.
A year later, when the hospital administration had been replaced, I returned from my paramedic job in the forest to take charge of admitting patients to the hospital.
Once, in Moscow, I met the descendant of a Decembrist. We didn’t say hallo.
Sixteen years later I learned that Edith Abramovna had gotten Lunin reinstated in his job at Far Northern Construction. She had gone with him to the Chukotka Peninsula, to the village of Pevek. Here they talked things out for the last time, and Edith Abramovna died; she drowned herself in the Pevek River.
Sometimes my tranquilizers don’t work, and I wake up at night. I remember the past and a woman’s beautiful face; I hear her deep voice: ‘Sergei, is this your friend?’