The Procurator of Judea
On the fifth of December 1947, the steamship Kim entered the port of Nagaevo with a human cargo. Winter was coming on and navigation would soon be impossible, so this was the last ship that year. Magadan met its guests with forty-below weather. These, however, were no guests but convicts, the true masters of this land.
The whole city administration had come down to the port. Every truck in town was there to meet the boat. Soldiers – conscripts and regulars – surrounded the pier, and the process of unloading began.
Responding to the summons of the telegraph, every truck not needed in the mines within a radius of 500 kilometers had arrived empty in Magadan.
The dead were tossed on to the shore to be hauled away to the cemetery and buried in mass graves without so much as identification tags. A directive was made up ordering that the bodies be exhumed at some later date.
Patients who were moderately ill were taken to the central Prison Hospital on the left bank of the Kolyma River. The hospital had just been moved there – 500 kilometers away. If the Kim had arrived a year earlier, no one would have had to make the long trip to the new hospital.
The head of surgery, Kubantsev, had just been transferred from an army post. He had been in the front lines, but even so he was shaken by the sight of these people, by their terrible wounds. Every truck arriving from Magadan carried the corpses of people who had died on the way to the hospital. The surgeon understood that these were the transportable, ‘minor’ cases, and that the more seriously ill had been left in the port.
The surgeon kept repeating the words of General Radischev, which he had read somewhere just after the war: ‘Experience on the front cannot prepare a man for the sight of death in the camps.’
Kubantsev was losing his composure. He didn’t know what sort of orders to give, where to begin. But something had to be done. The orderlies were removing patients from the trucks and carrying them on stretchers to the surgical ward. Stretchers with patients were crammed into the corridors. Smells cling to memory as if they were poems or human faces. That festering camp stench remained for ever in Kubantsev’s memory. He would never forget that smell. One might think that the smell of pus and death is the same everywhere. That’s not true. Ever since that day it always seemed to Kubantsev that he could smell his first Kolyma patients. Kubantsev smoked constantly, feeling he was losing control of himself, that he didn’t know what instructions to give to the orderlies, the paramedics, the doctors.
‘Aleksei Alekseevich.’ Kubantsev heard someone say his name. It was Braude, the surgeon who had formerly been in charge of this ward but who had been removed from his position by the higher-ups simply because he was an ex-convict and had a German name to boot.
‘Let me take over. I’m familiar with all this. I’ve been here for ten years.’
Upset, Kubantsev relinquished his position of authority, and the work began. Three surgeons began their operations simultaneously. The orderlies scrubbed down to assist. Other orderlies gave injections and poured out medicine for the patients.
‘Amputations, only amputations,’ Braude muttered. He loved surgery and even admitted to suffering when a day in his life went by without an operation, without a single incision.
‘We won’t be bored this time,’ Braude thought happily. ‘Kubantsev isn’t a bad sort, but he was overwhelmed by all of this. A surgeon from the front! They’ve got all their instructions, plans, orders, but this is life itself. Kolyma!’
In spite of all this, Braude was not a vicious person. Demoted for no reason, he did not hate his successor or try to trip him up. On the contrary, Braude could see Kubantsev’s confusion and sense his deep gratitude. After all, the man had a family, a wife, a boy in school. The officers all got special rations, lofty positions, hardship pay. As for Braude, he had only a ten-year sentence behind him and a very dubious future. Braude was from Saratov, a former student of the famous Krause, and had shown much promise at one time. But the year 1937 shattered Braude’s life. Why should he attempt to take revenge on Kubantsev for his own failures…?
And Braude commanded, cut, swore. Braude lived, forgetting himself, and even though he hated this forgetfulness in moments of contemplation, he couldn’t change.
He had decided today to leave the hospital, to go to the mainland. The fairy tale seemed to be over, but we don’t know even the beginning.
On the fifth of December 1947, the steamship Kim entered the port of Nagaevo with a human cargo – three thousand convicts. During the trip the convicts had mutinied, and the ship authorities had decided to hose down all the holds. This was done when the temperature was forty degrees below zero. Kubantsev had come to Kolyma to speed up his pension, and on the first day of his Kolyma service he learned what third-and fourth-degree frostbite were.
All this had to be forgotten, and Kubantsev, being a disciplined man with a strong will, did precisely that. He forced himself to forget.
Seventeen years later, Kubantsev remembered the names of each of the convict orderlies, he remembered all the camp romances and which of the convicts ‘lived’ with whom. He remembered the rank of every heartless administrator. There was only one thing that Kubantsev didn’t remember – the steamship Kim with its three thousand prisoners.
Anatole France has a story, ‘The Procurator of Judea’. In it, after seventeen years, Pontius Pilate cannot remember Christ.