Descendant of a Decembrist*

Many books have been written about Mixail Lunin, the first hussar and a famous Decembrist. In the destroyed chapter of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin wrote:

Friend of Mars, Bacchus, and Venus…


He was a true knight, an intelligent, well-informed man who not only spoke up for his cause but worked actively toward it. It was indeed a great cause! In due course I will tell you everything I know about the second hussar, his descendant.

Hungry and exhausted, we leaned into a horse collar, raising blood blisters on our chests and pulling a stone-filled cart up the slanted mine floor. The collar was the same device used long ago by the ancient Egyptians. I saw it, experienced it myself. Throughout Kolyma the mine was notorious.

The cruel, snowless Kolyma winter of 1940–41 was approaching. Cold crushed the muscles and squeezed a man’s temples. Iron stoves were placed in the tarpaulin tents that served as our shelter in the summer months, but the tents, a mass of holes, could not retain the free air.

Our inventive bosses were preparing people for the winter. Inside each tent a second, smaller frame was constructed that was designed to trap a layer of air about four inches thick. This frame was covered, all but the ceiling, with roofing material. The resulting double tent was slightly warmer than the single canvas one.

The very first nights spent in these tents made it clear that this arrangement meant doom, and a quick doom at that. I had to get out of there – but how? Who would help? Five miles from us was a large camp, Arkagala, where miners worked. Our group was considered a part of that camp. I had to get transferred there, to Arkagala.

But how?

Convict tradition demands that in such instances, a prisoner first of all approach a doctor. There was a first-aid station at Kadychkan run by a former student of the Moscow Medical Institute who hadn’t finished his course of study. At least, that was the rumor in our tent.

It required enormous will-power to find the strength to go to the first-aid station. I didn’t have to get dressed or put on my boots, of course, since I wore them constantly from one bathhouse day to the next. But I just didn’t have the strength. Why should I waste my rest period on this ‘visit’ to the doctor, when it might result only in mockery or even a beating. (Such things happened.) But the main consideration was the hopelessness, the slimness of the chance of success. Nevertheless, I couldn’t afford to lose even the slightest chance in the search for luck – this judgement came from my body and its exhausted muscles, not from experience or intelligence.

As in beasts, the will was subordinate to instinct.

On the other side of the road from our tent was a small hut used by geologists, exploring parties, secret police, and military patrols. The geologists had left long ago, and the hut had been converted into an outpatient medical facility with a cot, a cupboard with medications, and a curtain made from an old blanket. The blanket concealed the area where the ‘doctor’ lived.

Right down the middle of the road was a line of people queueing up in the bitter cold to be examined.

I squeezed my way into the hut, and the heavy door, closing behind me, pushed me right in. The doctor had blue eyes, a large forehead with two bald spots, and hair. He had to have hair; hair was an existential statement. Hair in camp is a testimony to importance. Almost everyone was shaved bald, so that anyone who had hair was the object of general envy. Combed hair was a peculiar form of protest against life in the camps.

‘From Moscow?’ the doctor asked me.

‘From Moscow.’

‘Let’s get acquainted.’

I gave him my name and shook his outstretched hand. It was cold and somewhat moist.

‘Lunin.’

‘That’s a proud name,’ I said with a smile.

‘I’m his great-grandson. In our family the oldest son is always called either Mixail or Sergei. We alternate. Pushkin’s Lunin was Mixail Sergeevich.’

‘I know.’ Somehow this, our first discussion, didn’t smack at all of the camps. I forgot about my request, since I didn’t want to introduce an inappropriate note into our conversation.

‘Have a smoke!’

I began to roll a cigarette with my rosy, frostbitten fingers.

‘Take more, don’t be bashful.’

‘Back at home I have a whole library of books about my great-grandfather. I’m a medical student. But I was arrested and didn’t graduate. Everyone in our family was in the military except me. I became a doctor. And I don’t regret it.’

‘So much for Mars. A friend of Aesculapius, Bacchus, and Venus.’

‘I don’t know about the Venus part, but it certainly is true about Aesculapius – except I don’t have a diploma. If I did, I’d really show them.’

‘How about Bacchus?’

‘Well, of course, I do have grain alcohol here. But all I need is one shot-glass. I get drunk easily. But you know how things are – I take care of the civilian village as well. Come back again sometime.’

On the point of leaving, I opened the door slightly with my shoulder.

‘You know,’ Lunin said, ‘Muscovites like to talk about their town – the streets, the skating-rinks, the houses, the Moscow River – more than Kievans or Leningraders do… You people like to talk about the city even more, and they remember it better…’

I dropped by several times in the evening when Lunin had finished attending to patients. I’d smoke a home-made cigarette but never got up the nerve to ask for bread.

Sergei Mixailovich, like everyone who either through luck or profession had an easy time of it in camp, didn’t think much about others and couldn’t really understand hungry people. His sector – Arkagala – was getting enough to eat, and the mine catastrophes had bypassed the town.

‘If you like, I’ll operate on you – remove that cyst from your finger.’

‘All right.’

‘Just don’t ask me to release you from work. You know yourself it’s not really convenient for me to do that.’

‘But how can I work with my finger all cut up?’

‘You’ll manage.’

I agreed, and Lunin did a good job of removing the cyst and gave it to me as a ‘keepsake’. Many years later my wife and I were to meet, and in the first minute of our meeting she squeezed my fingers, feeling in amazement for that cyst.

I realized that Sergei Mixailovich was simply very young, that he needed an educated person to talk to, that his views of the camps and his idea of fate were no different from those of any civilian supervisor, that he was even capable of admiring the camp thugs, and that the brunt of the storm of ’38 had passed over him.

I treasured every day, every hour of rest; exhausted from life in the gold-mines, my muscles demanded a respite. I treasured every piece of bread, every bowl of soup; my stomach demanded food, and my will was not strong enough to keep my eyes from wandering over the shelves in search of bread. But I forced myself to remember Moscow’s Chinatown (which has no Chinese) and the Nikitsky gates where the writer Andrei Sobol shot himself and where Stern shot at the German ambassador’s car. It is that part of Moscow’s street history which will never be written down.

‘Yes, Moscow, Moscow. Tell me, how many women have you had?’

It was senseless for a half-starved man to keep up this conversation, but the young surgeon listened only to himself and wasn’t offended by my silence.

‘Sergei Mixailovich, our fates are a crime – the greatest crime of the age.’

‘I’m not sure of that,’ Sergei Mixailovich said with an expression of displeasure. ‘It’s just the kikes muddying the water.’

I shrugged my shoulders.

Soon Sergei Mixailovich got his transfer to Arkagala, and I thought – without any sadness or feeling of injustice – that one more person had left my life for ever and that parting was, in reality, an easy thing. But matters worked out differently.

The supervisor of the sector where we worked, harnessed to an Egyptian yoke like slaves, was Pavel Ivanovich Kiselyov. A middle-aged engineer, he was not a Party member. He beat his prisoners daily. Whenever the supervisor set foot in the sector, there were beatings, blows, and shouting.

Was it because he had no fear of being punished? Was there a blood-lust lurking in the depths of his soul? Or perhaps a desire to distinguish himself in the eyes of the senior supervisors? Power is a terrible thing.

Zelfugarov, a counterfeiter from my work gang, lay in the snow, spitting out his broken teeth.

‘All my relatives were shot for counterfeiting, but I was a minor, so I got off with only fifteen years’ hard labor. My father offered the prosecutor half a million rubles – real ones, in cash – but he wouldn’t go for it.’

There were four of us working the shift, harnessed to the horse collar and walking around the post. We stopped near Zelfugarov. There was Korneev, a Siberian peasant; Lyonya Semyonov, a thief; the engineer Vronsky; and myself. Semyonov said:

‘It’s only in camp that you learn to work with machinery. Try your hand at any kind of work – what do you care if you break a crane or a winch?’ This point of view was popular even among many of the young surgeons in Kolyma.

Vronsky and Korneev were my acquaintances. We were not friends, but we had known each other since we had been together at Black Lake – an assignment where I returned to life. Without getting up, Zelfugarov turned his bloodied face with its swollen, dirty lips to us.

‘I can’t get up, guys. He hit me under the ribs.’

‘Go tell the paramedic.’

‘I’m afraid to, that will only make things worse. He’ll tell the supervisor.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘There’s no end to this. We have only one way out. As soon as the coal production chief or some other bigwig comes, someone must step forward and hit Kiselyov right on the snout. People will talk about it all over Kolyma, and they’ll have to transfer Kiselyov. Whoever hits him will have his sentence lengthened. How many years will they give for Kiselyov?’

We returned to our work, leaned into the horse collar, went back to the barracks, had supper, and prepared to go to sleep. The ‘office’ sent for me.

Kiselyov was sitting in the office, staring at the floor. He was no coward and didn’t fear threats.

‘So that’s it?’ he said cheerfully. ‘All Kolyma will talk about it? I could have you put on trial – for an attempt on my life. Get out of here, you bastard.’

The only one who could have turned me in was Vronsky, but how? We were together the entire time.

After that, life at the work site became easier for me. Kiselyov didn’t even approach our collar and came to work with a small-caliber rifle. He didn’t descend into the test pit either.

Someone entered the barracks.

‘The doctor wants to see you.’

The ‘doctor’ who replaced Lunin was a certain Kolesnikov, a tall young student who had also been arrested and thus had never finished his course of study.

When I arrived, I found Lunin sitting at the table in his overcoat.

‘Get your things ready. We’re leaving for Arkagala. Kolesnikov, make up a transfer sheet.’

Kolesnikov folded a piece of paper several times and tore off a tiny fragment that was hardly larger than a postage stamp. On it he wrote in microscopic handwriting: ‘Transferred to medical section, Arkagala.’

Lunin took the paper and ran off.

‘I’ll have Kiselyov issue a travel permit.’

He was upset when he returned.

‘He won’t let you go. He says you threatened to hit him in the face, and he absolutely refuses to agree.’

I told Lunin the story.

‘It’s your own fault,’ he said. ‘What do you care about Zelfugarov and all these… They weren’t beating you.’

‘I was beaten before.’

‘Well, I’m off. The truck is leaving. We’ll think of something.’ And Lunin got into the cab.

A few days passed, and Lunin appeared again.

‘I’m here to see Kiselyov. About you.’

He returned in a half-hour.

‘Everything’s in order. He agreed.’

‘How?’

‘I have a method for taming the heart of the rebellious.’ And Sergei Mixailovich acted out the conversation with Kiselyov:

‘What brings you back to these parts, Sergei Mixailovich? Sit down and have a smoke.’

‘Sorry, I don’t have the time, Pavel Ivanovich. These petitions accusing you of beatings have been forwarded to me. But before signing them, I decided to ask you if they were accurate.’

‘It’s a lie, Sergei Mixailovich. My enemies will say anything…’

‘That’s what I thought. I won’t sign them. What difference would it make, Pavel Ivanovich? What’s done is done, and there’s no replacing teeth that have been knocked out.’

‘That’s right, Sergei Mixailovich. Why don’t you come home with me? My wife has made some brandy. I was saving it to celebrate the New Year, but on such an occasion…’

‘I’m sorry, Pavel Ivanovich, I just can’t. But I do want to ask one favor in return. Let me take Andreev to Arkagala.’

‘That’s one thing I’ll never do. Andreev is, how should I put it…?’

‘Your personal enemy?’

‘Precisely.’

‘Well, he’s my personal friend. I thought you would be more receptive to my request. Take a look at these petitions.’

Kiselyov fell silent.

‘OK, he can go.’

‘Make up the transfer papers.’

‘Have him come for them himself.’

I stepped across the threshold of the ‘office’. Kiselyov was staring at the floor.

‘You’re going to Arkagala. Here are your transfer papers.’

Lunin had already left, but Kolesnikov was waiting for me.

‘You can leave this evening – about nine o’clock. Right now we have a case of acute appendicitis.’ He handed me a slip of paper.

I never saw either Kiselyov or Kolesnikov again. Kiselyov was soon transferred to Elgen, where he was accidentally killed a few months after arriving. A thief broke into his house at night. Hearing steps, Kiselyov grabbed the double-barreled shotgun from the wall, cocked it, and attacked the thief. The thief tried to get out the window, and Kiselyov struck him in the back with the butt of the shotgun. The gun went off, and Kiselyov took both barrels right in the stomach.

Every convict in every coal-mining area of Kolyma was delighted. The newspaper with the announcement of Kiselyov’s funeral passed from hand to hand. In the mines the wrinkled scrap of paper was held up to the battery light. People read it, rejoiced, and shouted: ‘Hurrah! Kiselyov died! So there is a God!’

It was from this Kiselyov that Sergei Mixailovich had saved me.

Convicts from Arkagala worked the mine. For every hundred men working underground, there were a thousand working in support groups.

Hunger had reached Arkagala. And, of course, it reached the political prisoner barracks first.

Sergei Mixailovich was angry.

‘I’m not the sun that can warm everybody. I got you a job as an orderly in the chemical laboratory, so you have to figure out for yourself how to live – camp-style, you understand?’ Sergei Mixailovich patted me on the shoulder. ‘Dmitry worked here before you. He sold all the glycerine – both barrels. He got twenty rubles for a half-liter bottle. Said it was honey. Ha ha ha. These convicts will drink anything.’

‘That’s not my way.’

‘Just what is your way?’

The orderly’s job wasn’t reliable. There were strict orders regarding me, and I was quickly transferred to the mine. The desire to eat grew stronger.

Sergei Mixailovich rushed about the camp. Our doctor had one passion: he was immensely attracted by camp officials of all types. Friendship or even a shade of friendship with any camp official was a source of unbelievable pride for him. He attempted to demonstrate his intimacy with the camp authorities in any way possible and was capable of bragging for hours about this intimacy.

I went to see him in his office. Hungry but afraid to ask for a piece of bread, I sat and listened to his endless bragging.

‘As for the camp authorities, they have real power. For there is no power but of God. Ha ha ha! All you have to do is please them, and everything is fine.’

‘I’d like to punch each and every one of them in the face.’

‘That’s just your trouble. Listen, let’s make an agreement. You can come to see me; I know it’s boring in the regular barracks.’

‘Boring?’

‘Sure. You can drop by, have a smoke. No one will give you a smoke in the barracks. I know what things are like over there – you light up, and a hundred eyes are watching you. Just don’t ask me to release you from work. I can’t do that. That is, I can, but it’s awkward. I won’t interfere in that respect. As for food, I depend on my orderly for that. I don’t stand in line myself for bread. So if you need bread, ask my orderly, Nikolai. How is it that after all your years in the camps you can’t lay your hands on some bread? You know what Olga Petrovna, the chief’s wife, told me today? They’re inviting me for dinner. There’ll be booze too.’

‘I have to go, Sergei Mixailovich.’

Hungry and terrible days ensued. Once, no longer able to struggle with hunger, I went to the first-aid station.

Sergei Mixailovich was sitting on a stool, clipping the dead nails from the frostbitten fingers of a dirty, hunched man. The nails fell with a click, one after the other, into an empty basin. Sergei Mixailovich noticed me.

‘I collected half a basin of these yesterday.’

A woman’s face looked out from behind the curtain. We rarely saw women, let alone this close and in the same room. She looked beautiful to me. I bowed and said hallo.

‘Hallo,’ she said in a low, wonderful voice. ‘Sergei, is this your friend, the one you told me about?’

‘No,’ Sergei Mixailovich said, tossing his snips into the basin and walking over to the sink to wash his hands.

‘Nikolai,’ he said to his orderly, who had just come in, ‘take this basin away and bring some bread for him.’ He nodded in my direction.

I waited until the bread was brought and left for the barracks. As for the woman, whose tender and beautiful face I remember to this day, I never saw her again. She was Edith Abramovna, civilian, Party member, a nurse from the Olchan Mine. She had fallen in love with Sergei Mixailovich, taken up with him, got him transferred to Olchan, and obtained for him an early release while the war was still going on. She traveled to Magadan to present Sergei Mixailovich’s case to Nikishov, the head of Far Northern Construction. She was expelled from the Party for being involved with a prisoner; it was the usual method for putting a stop to such affairs. She got Lunin’s case transferred to Moscow, had his sentence canceled, and even managed to get permission for him to take his medical examinations at Moscow University, from which he graduated and had all his civil rights reinstated. And she married him formally.

And when this descendant of a Decembrist received his medical degree, he abandoned Edith Abramovna and demanded a divorce.

‘She’s got a pack of relatives, like all those kikes! I don’t need that.’

He left Edith Abramovna, but he didn’t manage to leave Far Northern Construction. After graduation, he had to return to the Far North for at least three years. As a licensed doctor, Lunin used his connections with camp authorities to land an unexpectedly important appointment – chief of surgery at the Central Prison Hospital on the Left Bank of the Kolyma River in the village of Debin. It was 1948, and by that time I was senior orderly of the surgical ward.

I met Lunin on the stairway. He had a habit of blushing when he was embarrassed. His face became very red when he saw me, but he treated me to a cigarette, congratulated me on my successes and my ‘career’, and told me about Edith Abramovna.

Lunin’s appointment was like a thunderbolt. Rubantsev had been in charge of surgery. A front-line surgeon and a major in the medical service, he was an experienced, no-nonsense type who had moved here after the war – and not just for three days. Some didn’t like Rubantsev. He didn’t get along with the camp authorities, couldn’t stand toadying and lying, and had terrible relations with Scherbakov, chief of sanitation in Kolyma.

Rubantsev had signed a contract and had been warned that the prisoners were his enemies. Being a man of independent mind, however, he soon saw that he had been lied to during his ‘political’ preparation. Rogues, embezzlers, slanderers, and loafers were his colleagues at the hospital. It was the prisoners with their many skills (including medicine) who ran the hospital. Rubantsev realized where the truth lay, and he was not about to hide it. He applied to be transferred to Magadan, where there was a high school for his son. He was denied the transfer orally. After considerable effort, he managed to send his son to a boarding-school fifty miles from Debin. This took several months, and by that time he was running his ward confidently and dismissing loafers and thieves. News of these threatening activities was immediately sent to Scherbakov’s office in Magadan.

Scherbakov didn’t like to stand on ceremony with his subordinates. Cursing, threats, and prison sentences worked fine with prisoners, but they wouldn’t do for a former frontline surgeon who had received medals in the war and who was working under contract.

Scherbakov dug up Rubantsev’s old application and had him transferred to Magadan. And although the academic year had already begun and the surgical ward was working smoothly, he had to abandon everything…

Rubantsev left, and three days later a drunken party was held in the treatment room. Even the principal doctor, Kovalyov, and the hospital director, Vinokurov, helped themselves to the surgical alcohol. They hadn’t visited the surgical ward earlier, because they were afraid of Rubantsev. Drunken parties began in all the doctors’ offices, and nurses and cleaning women were invited. In a word, there were a lot of changes. Secondary adhesion began to occur in operations in the surgical ward, since precious grain alcohol could not be wasted on patients. Half-drunk hospital officials strolled back and forth through the ward.

This was my hospital. After I finished my courses in 1946, I was sent here with a group of patients. The hospital grew before my eyes. It had been a regimental headquarters formerly, but after the war a specialist on camouflage had judged it unsuitable because of its prominent location. Indeed, it could be seen for tens of miles, and so it was converted into a prison hospital. On leaving the three-story building, the former owners, the Kolyma Regiment, had ripped out all the plumbing and sewer pipes. All the chairs in the auditorium had been burned in the boiler. The walls were full of holes, and the doors were broken. The Kolyma Regiment had left Russian-style. We had to repair everything – screw by screw, brick by brick.

The doctors and assistants were doing their best to do a good job. For many of them it was a sacred duty – to pay for their medical education by helping people.

All the loafers raised their heads when Rubantsev left.

‘Why are you stealing alcohol from the medicine cabinets?’

‘Go to hell,’ a nurse answered me. ‘Thank God that Rubantsev is gone, and Lunin is in charge now.’

I was amazed and depressed at Lunin’s conduct. The party continued.

At the next brief meeting, Lunin laughed at Rubantsev: ‘He didn’t do a single ulcer operation. And he’s supposed to be a surgeon.’

This was nothing new. It was true that Rubantsev hadn’t done any ulcer operations. The patients in the therapeutic wards who had this diagnosis were emaciated, undernourished prisoners who didn’t have the slightest chance of surviving the operation. ‘The background isn’t right,’ Rubantsev would say.

‘He’s a coward,’ Lunin shouted and transferred twelve such patients to his ward from the therapeutic ward. All twelve were operated on, and all twelve died. The hospital doctors remembered Rubantsev’s experience and kindness.

‘Sergei Mixailovich, this is no way to work.’

‘Don’t tell me what to do!’

I made up a report asking that a commission be sent from Magadan. I was transferred to a tree-cutting group in the forest. They wanted to send me to a penal mine, but the senior official of the local Party chapter talked them out of it: ‘This isn’t ’38 anymore. It’s not worth the risk.’

A commission was sent, and Lunin was ‘fired’ by Far Northern Construction. Instead of three years, he only had to serve one and a half.

A year later, when the hospital administration had been replaced, I returned from my paramedic job in the forest to take charge of admitting patients to the hospital.

Once, in Moscow, I met the descendant of a Decembrist. We didn’t say hallo.

Sixteen years later I learned that Edith Abramovna had gotten Lunin reinstated in his job at Far Northern Construction. She had gone with him to the Chukotka Peninsula, to the village of Pevek. Here they talked things out for the last time, and Edith Abramovna died; she drowned herself in the Pevek River.

Sometimes my tranquilizers don’t work, and I wake up at night. I remember the past and a woman’s beautiful face; I hear her deep voice: ‘Sergei, is this your friend?’


Загрузка...