We didn’t speak to each other; each feared he might frighten off his happiness, his convict joy. The truck hurried on into the next day, and the road came to an end.
We had both been selected by the camp to take paramedic courses. Magadan, the hospital, and the courses were cloaked in fog, a white Kolyma fog. Were there markers, road markers? Would they accept political prisoners convicted under Article 58 of the Criminal Code? Only those who came under Point 10. And how about my neighbor in the rear of the truck? He too was ASA – anti-Soviet agitation. That was considered the same as Point 10.
There was an examination on the Russian language. A dictation. The grades were posted the same day. I got an ‘A’. After that came a written examination on mathematics, and I received another ‘A’. It was taken for granted that future students were not required to know the fine points of the Soviet Constitution… I lay on the bunk, dirty and still literally lousy. The job of orderly didn’t destroy lice. But perhaps it only seemed that way to me; lice infestation is one of the camp neuroses. I didn’t have lice any more, but I still couldn’t force myself to get used to the thought or, rather, to the feeling that the lice were gone. I had experienced that feeling two or three times. As for the ‘constitution’ or political economics, such things were no more intended for us than was the luxurious Astoria Hotel. In Butyr Prison the guard on duty in our cell block shouted at me: ‘Why do you keep asking about the Constitution? Your Constitution is the Criminal Code!’ And he was right. Yes, the Criminal Code was our constitution. That was a long time ago. A thousand years. The fourth subject was chemistry. My grade was ‘C’.
Oh, how those convict students strove for knowledge when the stakes of the game were life! How former professors of medicine strove to beat their life-saving knowledge into the heads of ignoramuses and idiots. From the storekeeper Silaikin down to the Tartar writer Min-Shabay, none of them had ever shown the slightest interest in medicine.
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.