The rumors and fears, those same rumors and fears that always come true, had begun yesterday. Word was out that some higher-ups had arrived with a whole truck-load of soldiers and a bus, a ‘black raven’, to haul away prisoners, like booty, to hard-labor camps. Local superiors began to bustle about, and those who had been great became small next to these masters of life and death – these unknown captains, majors, and lieutenant-colonels. The lieutenant-colonel was lurking somewhere in the office depths while the captains and majors scurried about the yard with various lists. Golubev’s name was bound to be on those lists. Golubev felt this, knew it. But nothing had been announced yet, no one had been ‘written off.
About half a year ago the ‘black raven’ had arrived for its usual raid, its manhunt. Golubev, whose name wasn’t on the lists, was standing near the entrance with a convict surgeon. The surgeon worked not only as a surgeon, but also as a general practitioner.
The latest group of trapped, snared, unmasked convicts was being shoved into the bus, and the surgeon was saying goodbye to his friend who was to be taken away.
Golubev stood next to the surgeon and watched the bus crawl away in a cloud of dust to disappear in a mountain ravine. The surgeon looked into Golubev’s eyes and said of his friend who had just departed to his death: ‘It’s his own fault. All he needed was an attack of acute appendicitis and he could have stayed.’
Those words stuck in Golubev’s mind – perhaps not so much the thought, or the logic, as the visual recollection: the firm eyes of the surgeon, the bus cloaked in a cloud of dust…
‘The duty officer’s looking for you.’ Someone ran up to Golubev to give him the message, and at that moment Golubev caught sight of the duty officer.
‘Get your things!’
The duty officer held a list in his hands. It was a short list.
‘Right away,’ said Golubev.
‘Meet me at the entrance.’
But Golubev didn’t go to the entrance. Clutching the right side of his belly with both hands, he groaned and hobbled off in the direction of the first-aid clinic.
The surgeon, that same surgeon, came on to the porch and for a moment something was reflected in his eyes, some distant memory. Perhaps it was the cloud of dust that enveloped the bus that took the other surgeon away for ever.
The examination was brief.
‘Take him to the hospital. And get me the surgical nurse. Call the doctor from the civilian village as my assistant. It’s an emergency operation.’
At the hospital, two kilometers from the camp ‘zone’, Golubev was undressed, washed, and registered.
Two orderlies led Golubev into the room and seated him in the operating-chair. He was tied to the chair with strips of cotton.
‘You’ll get a shot now,’ he heard the voice of the surgeon. ‘But you seem to be a brave sort.’
Golubev remained silent.
‘Answer me! Nurse, talk to the patient.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘It hurts.’
‘That’s the way it always is with a local anesthetic.’ Golubev heard the voice of the surgeon explaining something to his assistant. ‘It’s just a lot of talk about it killing the pain. Look at that…’
‘Hold on for a while!’
Golubev’s entire body shuddered at the intense pain, but almost at once the pain was dulled. The surgeons started joking and kidding with each other in loud voices.
The operation was drawing to a close.
‘Well, we’ve removed your appendix. Nurse, show the patient his meat. See?’
The nurse held up to Golubev’s face a piece of intestine about half the size of a pencil.
‘The instructions demand that the patient be shown that the cut was necessary and that the growth was actually removed,’ explained the surgeon to his civilian assistant. ‘This’ll be a little bit of experience for you.’
‘I’m very grateful to you,’ said the civilian physician, ‘for the lesson.’
‘A lesson in humanity, a lesson in love for one’s fellow man,’ the surgeon said mysteriously, taking off his gloves.
‘If you have anything else like this, be sure to send for me,’ the civilian physician said.
‘If it’s something like this, I’ll be sure to,’ said the surgeon.
The orderlies, themselves patients in patched white gowns, carried Golubev into the ward. It was a small post-operative ward, but there were few operations in the hospital and just then it was occupied by non-surgical patients.
Golubev lay on his back, carefully touching the bandage that was wrapped around him somewhat in the manner of an Indian fakir or yogi. As a child, Golubev had seen pictures of fakirs and yogis in magazines, and nearly an entire lifetime later he still didn’t know if such people really existed. But the thought of fakirs and yogis slid across his brain and disappeared. The exertion of the will and the nervous upheaval were fading away, and the pleasant sense of a duty accomplished filled Golubev’s entire body. Each cell of his body sang and purred something pleasant. For the time being he was free from the threat of being sent off to an unknown convict fate. This was merely a delay. How long would the wound take to heal? Seven or eight days. That meant that in two weeks the danger would again arise. Two weeks was a long time, a thousand years. It was long enough to prepare oneself for new trials. Even so, seven or eight days was the textbook period for what doctors refer to as ‘first intention’. And if the wound were to become infected? If the tape covering the wound were to come loose prematurely from the skin? Gingerly Golubev touched the bandage and the hard gauze that was soaked with gum arabic and already drying. He tried to feel through the bandage. Yes… This was an extra way out, a reprieve of several days, perhaps months. If he had to.
Golubev remembered the large ward in the mine hospital where he had been a patient a year earlier. Almost all the patients there ripped off their bandages, scratched or pulled open their wounds, and sprinkled dirt into them – real dirt from the floor. Still a newcomer, Golubev was amazed, even contemptuous, at those nocturnal rebindings. A year passed, however, and the patients’ mood became quite comprehensible to Golubev and even made him envious. Now he could make use of the experience acquired then.
Golubev drowsed off and awoke when someone’s hand pulled the blanket from his face. (Golubev always slept camp fashion, covering his head, attempting above all to keep it warm and to protect it.) A very pretty head with a small mustache and hair cut square in back was suspended above his own. In a word, the head was not at all the head of a convict, and when Golubev opened his eyes, his first thought was that this was some sort of recollection of yogis or a dream – perhaps a nightmare, perhaps not.
‘Not an honest crook, not a human being in the whole place,’ the man wheezed in a disappointed fashion and covered Golubev’s face again with the blanket.
But Golubev pulled down the blanket with feeble fingers and looked at the man. The man knew Golubev, and Golubev knew him. There was no mistaking it. But he mustn’t rush, rush to recognize him. He had to remember. Remember everything. And Golubev remembered. The man with the hair cut square in back was… Now the man would take off his shirt, and Golubev would see a cluster of intertwining snakes on his chest… The man turned around, and the cluster of intertwining snakes appeared before Golubev’s eyes. It was Kononenko, a criminal who had been in the same transit prison with Golubev several months earlier. A murderer with multiple sentences, he played a prominent role among the camp criminals and had been ‘braking’ for several years in pre-trial prisons. As soon as he was about to be sent off to a forced-labor camp, he would kill someone in the transit prison. He didn’t care whom he killed as long as it was not a fellow-criminal. He strangled his victims with a towel. A towel, a regulation-issue towel was his favorite murder instrument, his authorial style. They would arrest him, start up a new case, try him again, and add a new twenty-five-year term to the hundreds of years he already had to serve. After the trial Kononenko would try to be hospitalized to ‘rest up’, and then he would kill again. And everything would begin from the beginning. At that time, execution of common criminals had been abolished. Only ‘enemies of the people’ convicted under Article 58 could be shot.