Her looks and appearance deteriorated, too. Her Western clothes began to lose their sheen, get shabbier. Her makeup, if she used it, would be excessive, a wide gash of red across her mouth. In the suburban area where her sister lived she was now known for her unsteady walk and frequent outbursts of weeping on the streets.
She talked a great deal about him too, until her sister was bored with constantly repeated stories of Igor Bukansky. She had never in any case approved of Lydia’s affair with this older man and she made a few half-hearted attempts to introduce her to some young workers in the area. But Lydia was always too indifferent or too drunk to make any impression on them, and her pregnancy was already beginning to show.
Before autumn she was seeing a doctor twice a week. He had forbidden alcohol and prescribed tranquilizers. She had simply taken both.
She was to be seen now in the local vodka store, two fingers held high in the hope someone would share the price of a bottle with her. A few weeks later her sister’s husband asked her to leave.
She could not live alone, not in that apartment. Each night she cried her way through a bottle of vodka and passed out on the bed. She dreamed or drunkenly plotted, she no longer knew which, to travel to Barskoye village and burn all her uncle’s treasured manuscripts, but alcohol sapped her initiative and her hate.
Not long after it sapped her love, too. At first it became difficult to remember the outline of his face. Then, in a frenzy of frustration, she would pace the apartment forcing herself to remember his full name. Then as she drank more, the details of their life together faded. She would examine her broken, scratched Western shoes admiringly. Or as she stumbled out in the morning, peremptorily require the janitor’s wife to inspect the quality of her now torn and stained Paris dress.
No more than a few miles away across Moscow, Igor Bukansky spent his days in the free association room of Psychiatric 36. His fellow patients dribbled and laughed and poked their fingers at him, as he walked among them telling simple jokes or showing childish tricks. Often he thought about Lydia and wondered who now was buying her Western dresses and it was the only time he was unhappy.
He had never been treated with sodium amytal or any of the other possible drugs. Twice he had seen young men being taken down corridors, babbling drunkenly in an attempt to fix and retain their reason. Both young men (he never knew their names) had seemed normal enough when they had stood in line with him to be registered. One he believed to be simply a witness in a coming hearing for a Sverdlovsk dissident, and he thought again of Lydia.
Of course he feared the drugs, but he had long ago spent an evening with his friend Dr. Felperin discussing the nature of the chemicals most favored and rehearsing their effects. Perhaps even then he had been preparing himself for his ordeal.
In the first week at the 36 he had been escorted to a room, more an office than a doctor’s surgery, for his reception examination. The doctor had invited him to sit down, then had taken up a pen and begun to write. Without looking up he had asked, “What is the date today, Citizen?”
“I’m not sure,” Bukansky said casually. “Sixteenth… seventeenth?”
“Ah… and what day of the week is it?” The doctor’s face was round and smiling, but his lips were thin so that he managed to convey an accurate impression of his total insincerity. For a moment Bukansky studied the pink moon face, unable to restrain his amusement.
“It is Wednesday, doctor.”
“Tuesday, Citizen.”
“Doctor, today is Wednesday. If, however, you say it is Tuesday, then I agree.”
“What is a hundred minus ten?”
“Why do you try to insult me?” Bukansky said casually.
“I ask you a simple question,” the doctor was looking at him now, smiling patiently.
“The answer to your question is ninety,” Bukansky said.
“Good. What is the meaning of the expression ‘you’re riding in the wrong sleigh?’”
“You’re in the wrong place… pursuing the wrong course…”
“Do you ever apply it to yourself?”
“Do you, doctor?”
The smile disappeared. The doctor looked down at his papers. “I have here a complaint you wrote to Nikita Khrushchev personally. This was in the days when he occupied a position of power in our country.”
“I wrote to him, yes.”
“Can you remember the content of your letter?”
“I see no need to repeat it since you have it before you.”
“But do you remember it, Citizen?”
“I complained in my letter of August nineteen sixty-two that I was being subjected, that’s to say the magazine was being subjected, to excessive critical comment from unqualified sources.”
“You referred to the Bureau of State Security.”
“I did.”
“Why did you write the letter?”
“I don’t understand your question, doctor.”
“Ah… it’s a simple enough question. What was your purpose in writing the letter?”
“I said I did not understand your question. My meaning is that I did not understand why you asked the question since the answer is in the letter itself.” Bukansky spoke as if to a child.
“But what prompted you to write the letter?”
“I was receiving daily batches of mindless criticism…”
“Mindless, ah…”
“Yes. And if you’d seen that rubbish you, even you, would have agreed it was mindless. I couldn’t produce a magazine in those circumstances. I couldn’t breathe in those circumstances.”
The doctor nodded. “Did you experience this difficulty in breathing before nineteen sixty-two?”
Bukansky stood up and strolled to the door. “I’ve had enough for today, doctor. You have a limited talent to amuse.”
“Patients who prove non-cooperative can be treated in other ways, Citizen.”
“The fiksatsiya, the chemical strait jacket?”
“A course of drugs, yes.”
Bukansky looked down at him for a few moments. “Don’t ever find that you’ve been riding in the wrong sleigh, doctor. To change over when the horses are at full gallop could be very, very dangerous.”
At the time [Zoya wrote later] we in the northern and northeastern camps had no idea what was happening in Moscow. The big change in our lives dated from the day Colonel Rospinev became commandant of Panaka. He was small, white-haired and obsessive about his appearance. I remember two things above all about the first day I saw him, the glistening polish on his boots and the angle of his red-topped military cap, tipped slightly backward to give him that extra inch of height. No, I remember three things. The last was that he was carrying a dog-whip. God knows what his orders were, but I’m certain that he never even considered the possibility of an uprising. He would attend morning appel every day, slapping the whip against his polished boots, and he would personally detail the work allocations.
I used to watch from the sick bay window to see what Anton was assigned to that day. I could often see the looks that passed between the guards behind the colonel’s back. The point was they never felt safe out in the woods unless there were enough of them with any one detail to back each other up. And there just weren’t that number of guards anymore.
Even worse, from their point of view, was that the colonel was splitting the details so that often thirty men would march out with only two guards. And they would be allocated to a cutting zone too far away to shout for help from the next detail. For the prisoners it meant an easier life. Two or three of them would slip away into the birchwood for an hour or two’s rest, to be replaced later by the next group when their time was up.