The Lepers
Immediately after the war a drama was played out at the hospital. Or, to be more precise, it was the conclusion of a drama.
The war had dragged out into the light of day whole strata of life that always and everywhere remain at the bottom. The actors were not criminals or underground political groups.
In the course of military actions the leprosaria had been destroyed, and the patients had merged with the rest of the population. Was this a secret war or an open one? Was it chemical or bacteriological?
People ill with leprosy easily passed themselves off as wounded or maimed in war. Lepers mixed with those fleeing to the east and returned to a real, albeit terrible life where they were accepted as victims or even heroes of the war.
These individuals lived and worked. The war had to end in order for the doctors to remember about them and for the terrible card catalogues of the leprosaria to fill up again.
Lepers lived among ordinary people, sharing the retreat and the advance, the joy and the bitterness of victory. They worked in factories and on farms. They got jobs and even became supervisors. But they never became soldiers – the stubs of the fingers that appeared to have been damaged in the war prevented them from assuming this last occupation. Lepers passed themselves off as war invalids and were lost in the throng.
Sergei Fedorenko was a warehouse manager. A war invalid, he was sufficiently able to command the disobedient stumps of his fingers to do his job well. He was forging a career for himself and expected to become a member of the Party, but when he got too close to money, he began to drink and run around with women and got arrested. He arrived in Magadan on one of the Kolyma ships as a common criminal with a sentence of ten years.
Here Fedorenko switched his diagnosis. Although there were more than enough persons maimed either by war or their own hand, it was more advantageous, more fashionable, and less noticeable to dissolve in the sea of frostbite cases.
That was how I met him in the hospital – with supposedly third- to fourth-degree frostbite, a wound that wouldn’t heal, one foot and the fingers on both hands reduced to stumps.
Fedorenko was undergoing treatment – without any results. But then every patient tried his utmost to resist treatment so as not to go back to the mines. After many months of trophic ulcers, Fedorenko was released from the hospital. Not wanting to leave, he became an orderly and was ultimately promoted to senior orderly in the surgical ward with three hundred beds. This was the central hospital with a thousand convict-prisoners. One floor of one wing was reserved for civilian employees.
Somehow it happened that the doctor who was normally in charge of Fedorenko’s case fell ill, and Doctor Krasinsky, an old military doctor and a lover of Jules Verne (why?), was handling his patients for him. Kolyma life had not yet beaten out of him the desire to chat, gossip, and discuss cases.
In examining Fedorenko, Krasinsky experienced a feeling of surprise, but he couldn’t put his finger on just what it was. He had known this feeling of anxiety from time to time ever since he was a student. No, this was not a trophic ulcer, not a stub left by an explosion or an axe. The flesh was slowly decomposing. Krasinsky’s heart began to beat. He called Fedorenko over to the window, to the light, and greedily peered into his face, unable to believe what he saw. It was leprosy! A line from a medical school text ran through Krasinsky’s mind – The human face begins to resemble that of a lion – and Fedorenko’s face was a lion’s mask! Feverishly Krasinsky leafed through his textbooks. He took a large needle and poked one of the numerous white spots on Fedorenko’s skin several times. There was no sensation of pain!
Sweating, Krasinsky wrote a report to his superiors. The patient, Fedorenko, was isolated in a separate room, and samples of his skin were sent for biopsies to Magadan, and from there to Moscow. The response came in about two weeks. Leprosy! It was as if Krasinsky were celebrating his birthday. The hospital authorities wrote to still higher authorities about sending Fedorenko to the Kolyma leprosarium, which was situated on an island with machine-guns trained on the crossing. There was a guard, there had to be a guard.
Fedorenko did not deny that he had been in a leprosarium and that the patients, left to their own devices, had fled to freedom. Just as in ordinary life, some followed the retreating army, and others went forward to meet the Germans. Fedorenko calmly began to wait to be sent off, but the hospital was in an uproar. People were shouting and cursing Fedorenko. Everyone feared leprosy, even those who had been beaten during questioning and whose souls had been ground into dust by a thousand interrogations, whose bodies were broken and tormented by unbearable labor, who had sentences of twenty-five years’ hard labor capped with five years’ exile – sentences they could never serve or survive…
The same psychic phenomenon was at work that forced a man to postpone a well-planned escape simply because there would be tobacco or commissary privileges that day. There are as many strange and illogical instances as there are camps. Human shame, for example. How does one measure it, what are its limits? People whose lives are ruined, whose past and future have been trampled on, suddenly find themselves in the grip of some trivial prejudice, some nonsense that they for some reason can neither ignore nor deny. And the sudden appearance of shame is the most subtle of human emotions, to be remembered for one’s entire life as something real and infinitely precious.
There was an incident in the hospital when an orderly, who was not yet an orderly and was simply helping out, was assigned to shave a newly arrived group of women. The administration was amusing itself by assigning men to shave women and women to shave men. But this man begged his superior to classify the affair as ‘sanitary treatment’. He just could not accept that his life was ruined, that these amusements of the camp authorities were nothing but a dirty foam in a terrible kettle where he himself was being boiled away.
This amusing, tender human streak reveals itself suddenly.
The hospital was in a panic. After all, Fedorenko had been working there for several months. Unfortunately, the ‘prodromal period’ of the illness, which precedes the appearance of any external symptoms, can last for several years. Those inclined to suspect the worst were doomed to retain this fear in their souls for ever, whether they were civilian employees or convicts.
The hospital was in a panic. The doctors searched their own bodies and those of their patients for white, insensitive spots. A needle joined the phonendoscope and small rubber hammer as standard equipment for any doctor conducting a preliminary examination.
The patient, Fedorenko, was brought before the orderlies and doctors and undressed. An overseer with a pistol stood near the patient. Doctor Krasinsky, armed with an enormous pointer, gave a lecture on leprosy, pointing his stick alternately at the leonine face of the former orderly, at the fingers that were on the verge of falling off, and at the shiny white spots on his back.
All residents, without exception, civilian and convict, were re-examined, and suddenly a white spot insensitive to pain was discovered on the back of Shura Leschinskaya, a nurse from the front lines on duty in the women’s ward. Leschinskaya, who had been in the hospital for only a few months, had no lion’s mask. Her conduct had been neither stricter nor looser than that of any ‘nurse’ recruited from among the former prisoners.
Leschinskaya was locked up in one of the rooms of the women’s ward, and a sample of her skin was sent to Magadan and from there to Moscow for analysis. The answer came: leprosy!
Disinfection after leprosy is quite difficult. Regulations require that the house in which a leper has lived be burned. That was what the textbooks said. But how could one of the wings of a gigantic two-storied hospital be burned? No one could make up his mind to do that. It was something like disinfecting expensive furs. To preserve the value of their furs, the owners are willing to risk leaving the infection in them. They sprinkle some chemical symbolically on the precious furs, because steaming would destroy not only the microbes but the fur as well. The administration would have remained silent even if it had been a matter of plague or cholera.
Someone assumed responsibility for not burning the wing, and even the room in which Fedorenko was kept under lock and key was not burned. They simply soaked everything with phenol and carbolic acid and sprayed repeatedly.
Downstairs, in the basement, two tiny rooms were constructed for the patients. Fedorenko and Leschinskaya were transferred there. Guards were stationed beside the heavy padlocked doors, and the couple was left there to await an order or a detachment of guards from the leprosarium.
Fedorenko and Leschinskaya spent one day in their cells, and when the guards were changed at the end of the day, the cells were found to be empty. Panic ensued in the hospital. Every window and door in the cells was intact. Krasinsky was the first to figure out how they had fled. They had escaped through the floor.
Fedorenko had used his enormous strength to pry the logs apart and had broken into the bread-slicing room and the operating-room of the surgical ward. They had gathered up all the grain alcohol, and the narcotics from the cupboards, and made off with their loot to an underground den.
They had selected a spot, barricaded it, and thrown blankets and mattresses on top to wall themselves off from the world, the guards, the hospital, and the leprosarium. They lived there as man and wife for several days – three days, I believe.
On the third day guards with dogs found the two lepers. I was a member of the group that searched the tall basement of the hospital. The foundation was very high at that spot. The guards removed the logs and exposed the two lepers lying naked. They didn’t get up. Fedorenko’s dark, mutilated hands were around Leschinskaya’s gleaming body. Both were drunk.
They were covered with blankets and carried away to one of the two cells, no longer separated.
Who covered them with a blanket, who touched their terrible bodies? A special janitor was found in the civilian hospital and, with the permission of higher authorities, given a credit of seven working days for each one spent with the lepers. That is more than they give people for working in the tungsten-mines, the lead-mines, or the uranium-mines. Seven days for one. The article of the penal code under which the man was sentenced was not taken into consideration. They found a soldier, arrested at the front and sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labor and five years of exile, who naïvely assumed that his heroism would shorten his sentence and bring nearer the day of his liberation.
Convict Korolkov, a wartime lieutenant, stood guard at the cell round the clock. He even slept before the door. And when the guards arrived from the Island (on which the leprosarium was located), convict Korolkov was taken with the two lepers to tend to their needs. I never heard anything more of Korolkov, or of Fedorenko, or of Leschinskaya.