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.
Fleming never parted with his pot, the same pot which he had brought from the north. It was a talisman, a Kolyma talisman.
The criminal element in the psychological ward caught a cat, killed it, cooked it, and gave Fleming a portion as the traditional Kolyma tribute since he was the orderly on duty. Fleming ate the meat and kept silent about the cat. The cat was a pet in the surgical ward.
The students were afraid of Fleming. But whom didn’t the students fear? In the hospital Fleming was already working as an orderly, a staff medic. Everyone feared and hated him, sensing in him not only an employee of the secret police but also the master of some unusually important, terrible secret.
The antipathy grew, and the plot thickened after Fleming made a sudden trip to meet with a young Spanish woman. She was a real Spaniard, the daughter of one of the members of the government of the Republic of Spain. She’d been a spy, got involved in a web of provocations, was sentenced and sent to Kolyma to die. It turned out, however, that Fleming was not forgotten by his old and distant friends, his former colleagues. He had to learn something from the woman, to confirm something. But the patient couldn’t wait. She had recovered and Was being sent to a women’s mine. Interrupting his work in the hospital, Fleming suddenly traveled to the mine to meet the woman. He spent two days on the seven-hundred-kilometer road with its incessant flow of vehicles and a check-point every kilometer. Fleming was lucky, and he returned from the meeting safe and sound. The event could have taken place in a novel, a feat of camp love. Alas, Fleming didn’t travel or accomplish any feats for the sake of love. His was a passion much stronger than love, the highest passion of all, and it would carry Fleming safely past all the camp checkpoints.
Fleming frequently recalled the thirties and the sudden flood of murders and suicides. There was the death of the family of Savinkov, the former revolutionary and terrorist. The son was shot, and the family – the wife, two children, and the wife’s mother – did not wish to leave Leningrad. All wrote letters and left them for each other before killing themselves, and Fleming’s memory preserved lines of a note from one of the children: ‘Grandma, we’re going to die soon…’
The sentence Fleming had received in connection with the NKVD affair ended in 1950, but he didn’t return to Leningrad. He didn’t receive permission. His wife, who had retained their room all those years, came to Magadan from Leningrad, wasn’t able to make any living arrangements, and went back. Fleming returned to Leningrad just before the Twentieth Party Congress, to the same room he’d lived in before his disaster.
He had to do a lot of running around to get his pension of 1,400 old-style rubles that he was due for his years of service. His camp medical courses notwithstanding, he was not allowed to return to his old speciality as an expert on pharmacology. It turned out that all the former employees, all the veterans of these affairs, all the aesthetes who were still alive, had long since been put out to pasture – all of them, right down to the last courier.
Fleming got a job as a book selector in a second-hand bookstore on Liteiny Prospect. Although his relationship and contact with the Russian intelligentsia was such a peculiar one, he considered himself to be of its bone and flesh. To the end he refused to separate his fate from that of the Russian intelligentsia, feeling, perhaps, that only contact with books could help him preserve his skills, if only he could succeed in living till better times.
In the nineteenth century a captain in the ‘engineering troops’ would have taken vows and retreated to a monastery, as did the Russian writer Konstantin Leontiev. But the dangerous and lofty world of books was tinted with fanaticism for Fleming, and like any other infatuation with books, it served the function of a moral purge. The former admirer of Gumilyov and expert on both Gumilyov’s fate and his comments on verse could not become a night-watchman. Perhaps use his new profession of hospital orderly? No, better to be a used-book dealer.
‘I’m constantly running around, filling out forms. Bring us some rum,’ Fleming said, turning to the waitress.
‘I don’t drink,’ I replied.
‘How unfortunate, how inconvenient it is that you don’t drink. Katya, he doesn’t drink! You understand? I’m constantly working at it. I’ll return to my old job.’
‘If you go back’ Katya said with her blue lips, ‘I’ll hang myself or drown myself the very next day!’
‘I’m just kidding. I’m always kidding… I’m constantly presenting applications, running around the courts, traveling to Moscow. After all, they took me back in the party. But you know how?’
A wad of rumpled paper emerged from Fleming’s jacket pocket.
‘Read this. This is Drabkina’s testimony. She was a prisoner in my camp in Igarka. Later she published her memoirs under the title Black Toast.’
Quickly I read through the woman’s extensive testimony:
‘As head of the camp he treated the prisoners well and for this reason was soon arrested and convicted…’
I leafed through the dirty, sticky testimony of Drabkina which had passed through the careless fingers of government officials.
Bending down to my ear, his breath reeking of rum, Fleming explained hoarsely that he had been a ‘human being’ in camp, even Drabkina confirmed that.
‘Do you really need all this?’
‘I need it. It fills my life. Who knows, maybe I’ll pull it off. How about a drink?’
‘I don’t drink.’
‘For years of service. But that’s not what I need…’
‘Stop it, or I’ll hang myself!’ Katya shouted.
‘She’s got a heart condition,’ Fleming explained.
‘Take yourself in hand. Write. You have a good style. I know that from your letters. And a story or a novel is, after all, a confidential letter.’
‘No, I’m not a writer. I’m going to keep on working at what I started…’
And slobbering in my ear, he whispered something I could make neither head nor tail of, that supposedly there never was any Kolyma and that he himself had spent seventeen days on the ‘conveyor’ in ’37 and that his mind was not what it used to be.
‘They’re publishing a lot of memoirs now. For example, they just published Yakubovich’s In the World of Outcasts, his memoirs about his years in a czarist penal farm. Let them publish that stuff.’
‘Have you written any memoirs?’
‘No, but there is a book I want to recommend for publication. You know which one? I went to the Lenin Publishing House, but they told me to mind my own business…’
‘What book?’
‘The notes of Sanson, the Paris executioner. Now those are memoirs!’
‘The Parisian executioner?’
‘Yes. Sanson guillotined Charlotte Corday and slapped her cheeks, and the cheeks of the severed head blushed. One other thing: they used to give parties that they called the Victims’ Ball. Do we have that kind of ball?’
‘The Victims’ Ball had nothing to do with the Thermidor Period; it was part of the Post-Thermidor Period. Sanson’s notes are a forgery.’