The Life of Engineer Kipreev

For many years I thought that death was a form of life. Comforted by the vagueness of this notion, I attempted to work out a positive formula to preserve my own existence in this vale of tears.

I believed a person could consider himself a human being as long as he felt totally prepared to kill himself, to interfere in his own biography. It was this awareness that gave me the will to live. I checked myself – frequently – and felt I had the strength to die, and thus remained alive.

Much later I realized that I had simply built myself a refuge, avoided the problem, for when at the critical moment the decision between life and death became an exercise of the will, I would not be the same man as before. I would inevitably weaken, become a traitor, betray myself. Instead of thinking of death, I simply felt that my former decision needed some other answer, that my promises to myself, the oaths of youth, were naïve and very artificial. It was Engineer Kipreev’s story that convinced me.

I never in my life betrayed or sold anyone down the river. But I don’t know how I would have held out if they had beaten me. I passed through all stages of the investigation, by the greatest good luck, without beatings – ‘method number three’. My investigators never laid a finger on me. This was chance, nothing more. It was simply that I was interrogated early – in the first half of 1937, before they resorted to torture.

Engineer Kipreev, however, was arrested in 1938, and he could vividly imagine the beatings. He survived the blows and even attacked his investigator. Beaten still more, he was thrown into a punishment cell. Nevertheless, the investigators obtained his signature easily: they threatened to arrest his wife, and Kipreev ‘signed’.

Throughout his life Kipreev carried with him this terrible weight on his conscience. There are more than a few humiliations and degradations in the life of a prisoner. The diaries of members of Russia’s liberation movement are marked by one traumatic act – the request for a pardon. Before the revolution this was considered a mark of eternal shame. Even after the revolution former political prisoners and exiles refused to receive anyone who had ever asked the czar for freedom or for a reduction of sentence.

In the thirties, not only were petitioners for pardons forgiven but also those who had signed confessions that incriminated both themselves and others, often with bloody consequences.

Representatives of the former unyielding view had long since grown old and perished in exile or in the camps. Those who had been imprisoned and had passed through the process of investigation were all ‘petitioners’.

For this reason no one ever knew what moral torments Kipreev subjected himself to in his departure for the Sea of Okhotsk – to Vladivostok and Magadan.

Kipreev had been a physicist and engineer at the Kharkov Physical Institute, where the first Soviet experiments with nuclear reactions were conducted. The nuclear scientist Kur-chatov worked there. The purges had not passed over the Kharkov Institute, and Kipreev became one of the first victims of our atomic science.

Kipreev knew his own true worth, but his superiors did not. Moreover, moral stamina has little connection with talent, with scientific experience, or even with the love of science. Aware of the beatings at the interrogations, Kipreev prepared to act in the simplest manner – to fight back like a beast, to answer blow with blow without caring whether his tormentor was simply carrying out, or had personally invented, ‘method number three’. Kipreev was beaten and thrown into a punishment cell. Everything began again. His physical strength betrayed him, and then so did his moral stamina. Kipreev ‘signed’. They threatened to arrest his wife. Kipreev knew endless shame became of this weakness, because he, an educated man, had collapsed when he encountered brute force. Right there in the prison Kipreev swore an oath never again to repeat his shameful act. But then, Kipreev was the only one who perceived his act as shameful. On the neighboring bunks lay other men who had also signed confessions and committed slander. They lay there and did not die. Shame has no boundaries. Or, rather, the boundaries are always personal, and each resident of an interrogation cell sets standards for himself.

Kipreev arrived in Kolyma with a five-year sentence, confident that he would find the path to early release to the mainland. An engineer had to be of value. An engineer could always earn credit for extra working days, be released, have his sentence shortened. While Kipreev had nothing but contempt for physical labor in camp, he quickly realized that only death waited at the end of that path. If he could just find a job where he could apply even a tenth of his technical skills, he would obtain his freedom. At the very least, he would retain his skills.

Experience at the mine, fingers broken in the scraper, physical exhaustion, and emaciation brought Kipreev to the hospital and from there to the transit prison.

The engineer’s problem was that he could not resist the temptation to invent; he could not restrain himself from searching for scientific and technical solutions to the chaos that he saw all around him.

As for the camp and its directors, they looked upon Kipreev as a slave, nothing more. Kipreev’s energy, for which he had cursed himself a thousand times, sought an outlet.

The stakes in this game had to be worthy of an engineer and a scientist. The stakes were freedom.

There is a brief ironic verse about Kolyma that describes it as a strange or wonderful planet; nine months is winter and the rest is summer:


Kolyma, Kolyma – chudnaya planeta,

Deviat’ mesiatsev zima,

Ostal’noe – leto.

This is not the only strange thing about Kolyma. During the war, people paid a hundred rubles for an apple, and an error in the distribution of fresh tomatoes from the mainland led to bloody dramas. All this – the apples and the tomatoes – was for the civilian world, to which Kipreev did not belong. It was a strange planet not only because the taiga was the law, nor because it was a Stalinist death camp. And it wasn’t strange just because there was a shortage there of cheap tobacco and the special tea leaves used to make chifir, a powerful, almost narcotic drink. Chifir leaves and cheap tobacco were the currency of Kolyma, its true gold, and they were used to acquire everything else.

The biggest shortage, however, was of glass – glass objects, laboratory glassware, instruments. The cold increased the fragility of glass, but the permitted ‘breakage’ was not increased. A simple medical thermometer cost 300 rubles, but there were no underground bazaars that sold thermometers. The doctor had to present a formal request to the head of medical services for the entire region, since a medical thermometer was harder to hide than the Mona Lisa. But the doctor never presented any such request. He simply paid 300 rubles out of his own pocket and brought the thermometer with him from home to take the temperature of the critically ill.

In Kolyma a tin can is a poem. It is a convenient measuring cup that is always at hand. Water, various grains, flour, pudding, soup, tea can be stored in it. It is a mug from which to drink chifir. It is also a good vessel in which to brew chifir. The mug is sterile, since it has been purified by fire. Soup and tea can be heated in a tin can – either on a stove or over a camp-fire.

A three-liter tin can fastened to the belt with a wire handle is the classic cooking pot of every ‘goner’. And who in Kolyma has not been or will not eventually become a ‘goner’?

In a wooden window-frame, tiny pieces of broken glass, like cells, are arranged to serve as panes to let in light. A transparent jar can conveniently be used to store medication in the outpatient clinic. In the camp cafeteria, a pint jar is a serving dish for fruit compote.

But neither thermometers, nor laboratory glassware, nor simple jars make up the principal shortage of glass in Kolyma – the shortage of electric light-bulbs.

In Kolyma there are hundreds of mines, thousands of sites, sections, shafts, tens of thousands of mine faces with gold, uranium, lead, and tungsten, thousands of work groups dispatched from the camps, civilian villages, camp zones, guard barracks, and everywhere there is one crying need – light, light, light. Kolyma has no sun, no light for nine months. The raging, never-setting summer sun provides no salvation, for in winter nothing is left of it. Light and energy come from pairs of tractors, or from a locomotive.

Industrial tools, gold washers, mine faces all demand light. Mine faces lit up by floodlights lengthen the night shift and make labor more productive. Electric lights are needed everywhere. Three-hundred-, five-hundred-, one-thousand-watt bulbs are shipped in from the mainland to provide light for the barracks and the mines, but the uneven supply of electricity from the portable-generator motors guarantees that these bulbs will burn out earlier than they should.

The electric-light-bulb shortage in Kolyma is a national problem. It is not only the mine face that must be lit up but also the camp grounds, the barbed wire and the guard towers, which are built in greater and not lesser quantities in the Far North.

The guards on duty must have light. In the mines insufficient light is simply noted in the log, but in camp it might lead to escape attempts. Obviously there is nowhere to escape to from Kolyma, and no one has ever attempted to escape, but the law is the law, and if there isn’t sufficient lighting or enough bulbs, burning torches are carried to the outer perimeters of the camp and left there in the snow until morning. A torch is made from a rag soaked in oil or gasoline.

Electric bulbs burn out quickly and cannot be repaired.

Kipreev wrote a note that amazed the chief of Far Eastern Construction. The chief could already feel the medal he would add to his other military decorations (military, not civilian).

It seemed the bulbs could be repaired if the glass was in one piece.

All over Kolyma stern instructions were hurriedly circulated to the effect that burned-out bulbs must be delivered carefully to Magadan. At the industrial complex forty-seven miles from Magadan, a factory for the repair of electric light-bulbs was built. Engineer Kipreev was appointed director of the factory.

All other personnel was civilian. This happy invention was entrusted to the hands of dependable civilians working on contract. Kipreev, however, paid no attention to this circumstance, believing that the creators of the factory could not help but take notice of him.

The result was stupendous. Of course, the bulbs didn’t have a long life after being repaired, but Kipreev saved Kolyma a definite quantity of hours and days. There were many of these days, and the state reaped an enormous profit, a military profit, a golden profit.

The chief of Far Eastern Construction was awarded the Order of Lenin. All supervisors who had anything to do with repairing the bulbs received medals also.

Neither Moscow nor Magadan, however, ever considered rewarding the convict Kipreev. For them Kipreev was a slave, an intelligent slave, but nothing more. Nevertheless, the chief of Far Eastern Construction did not consider it possible to forget all about his pen-pal in the taiga.

A celebration of great pomp took place in Kolyma, a celebration so great that a small group of people in Moscow took note of it. It was held in honor of the chief of Far Eastern Construction, of all those who had received medals and official expressions of gratitude for work well done. Aside from the official expressions of gratitude for work well done, aside from the official governmental decree, the chief of Far Eastern Construction had also issued bonuses, awards, and official expressions of gratitude. All those who participated in bulb repair, all the foremen of the factory with the bulb-repair shop were presented with American packages, in addition to the medals and certificates. These packages, which had been received during the war under Lend-Lease, contained suits, neckties, and shoes. One of the suits had evidently disappeared during delivery, but the shoes were of red American leather and had thick soles – the dream of every foreman.

The chief of Far Eastern Construction consulted with his right-hand man, and they came to the conclusion that there could be no higher dream for a convict-engineer. As for shortening his sentence or releasing him altogether, the chief would not even dream of asking Moscow about that in such troubled political times. A slave should be satisfied with his master’s old shoes and suit.

All Kolyma buzzed about these presents – literally all Kolyma. The local foremen received more than enough medals and official expressions of gratitude, but an American suit and American shoes with thick soles were in the same category as a trip to the moon or another planet.

The solemn evening arrived, and the cardboard boxes gleamed on a table covered with a red cloth.

The chief of Far Eastern Construction read from a paper in which Kipreev’s name was not mentioned, could not be mentioned. Then he read aloud the list of those who were to receive presents. Kipreev’s name came last in the list. The engineer stepped up to the table which was brightly lit – by his light-bulbs – and took the box from the hands of the chief of Far Eastern Construction.

Enunciating each word distinctly, Kipreev said in a loud voice: ‘I won’t wear American hand-me-downs.’ Then he put the box back on the table.

Kipreev was arrested on the spot and sentenced to an additional eight years. I don’t know precisely which article of the criminal code was cited, but in any case that is meaningless in Kolyma and interests no one.

But then, what sort of article could have covered the refusing of American presents? And that wasn’t the only thing. There was more. In concluding the case against Kipreev, the investigator said: ‘He said that Kolyma was Auschwitz without the ovens.’

Kipreev accepted his new sentence calmly. He was aware of the likely consequences when he refused the American presents. Nevertheless, he did take certain measures to ensure his personal safety. These measures consisted of asking a friend to write to his wife on the mainland to tell her that he had died. Second, he himself gave up writing letters.

The engineer was removed from the factory and sent to hard labor. The war was soon over, and the system of camps became even more complex. As a persistent offender, Kipreev knew he would be sent to a secret camp with no address – merely a number.

The engineer fell ill and ended up in the central prison hospital. There was a compelling need for Kipreev’s skills there: an X-ray machine had to be assembled from old machine parts and junk. The chief physician, whose name was ‘Doctor’, promised to get Kipreev released or at least to get his sentence shortened. Engineer Kipreev had little faith in such promises, because he was classified as a patient, and special work credit could be received only by staff employees of the hospital. Still, it was tempting to believe in this promise, and the X-ray lab was not the gold-mine.

It was here that we learned of Hiroshima.

‘That’s the bomb we were working on in Kharkov.’

‘That’s why Forrestal* committed suicide. He couldn’t bear all those telegrams.’

‘Do you understand why? It’s a very hard thing for a Western intellectual to make the decision to drop the bomb. Psychic depression, insanity, and suicide is the price that the Western intellectual pays for decisions like that. A Russian Forrestal wouldn’t have lost his mind.’

‘How many good people have you met in your life? I mean real people, the kind you want to imitate and serve.’

‘Let me think: Miller, the engineer arrested for sabotage, and maybe five others.’

‘That’s a lot.’

The General Assembly signed the agreement on genocide.

‘Genocide? Is that something they serve for dinner?’

We signed the convention. Of course, 1937 was not genocide. It was the destruction of the enemies of the people. There was no reason not to sign the convention.

‘They’re really tightening the screws. We cannot be silent. It’s just like the sentence in the child’s primer: “We are not slaves; no one’s slaves are we.” We have to do something, if only to demonstrate to ourselves that we are still people.’

‘The only thing you can demonstrate to yourself is your own stupidity. To live, to survive – that’s the task at hand. We mustn’t stumble. Life is more serious than you think.’

Mirrors do not preserve memories. It is difficult to call the object that I keep hidden in my suitcase a mirror. It is a piece of glass that looks like the surface of some muddy river. The river has been muddied and will stay dirty for ever, because it has remembered something important, something eternally important. It can no longer be the crystal, transparent flow of water that is clear right down to its bed. The mirror is muddied and no longer reflects anything. But once the glass was a real mirror – a present unselfishly given that I carried with me through two decades of camp life, through civilian life that differed little from the camps, and everything that followed the twentieth party congress, when Khruschev denounced Stalin.

The mirror that Kipreev gave me was not part of any business scheme on his part. It was an experiment conducted in the darkness of the X-ray room. I made a wooden frame for this piece of mirror. That is, I ordered it; I didn’t make it myself. The frame is still in one piece. It was made by a Latvian carpenter who was a patient recovering in the hospital. He made it in exchange for a ration of bread. At that time I could permit myself to give up a ration of bread for such a purely personal, totally frivolous wish.

I am holding the mirror in front of me right now. The frame is crudely made, painted with the oil-paint used for floors; they were renovating the hospital, and the carpenter asked for a smidgen of paint. Later I shellacked the frame, but the shellac wore off long ago. You can’t see anything in the mirror any more, but I used to shave before it at Oimyakon, and all the civilian employees envied me. They envied me until 1953 when some civilian, some smart civilian, sent a package of cheap mirrors to the village. These tiny mirrors – some round and some square – should have cost a few kopecks, but they were sold for sums reminiscent of the prices paid for electric light-bulbs. Nevertheless, everyone withdrew his money from his savings account and bought one. The mirrors were sold in a day, in an hour. After that, my home-made mirror ceased to be the envy of my guests.

I keep the mirror with me. It is not an amulet. I don’t know whether it brings luck. Perhaps the mirror attracts and reflects rays of evil, keeping me from dissolving in the human stream, where no one except me knows Kolyma and the engineer, Kipreev.

Kipreev was indifferent to his surroundings. A thief, a hardened criminal with a modicum of education, was invited by the administration to learn the secrets of the X-ray laboratory. It is always hard to tell if the criminals in camp are using their own real names, but this one called himself Rogov, and he was studying under Kipreev’s tutelage. The hope was that he would learn to pull the right levers at the right time.

The administration had big plans, and they certainly weren’t terribly concerned about Rogov, the criminal. Nevertheless, Rogov ensconced himself in the lab together with Kipreev, and watched him, reported on his actions, and participated in this governmental function as a proletarian friend of the people. He was constantly informing and made conversation and visits impossible. Even if he didn’t interfere, he was constantly spying and was a model of vigilance.

This was the primary intent of the administration. Kipreev was to prepare his own replacement – from the criminal world. As soon as Rogov acquired the necessary skills, he would have a lifelong profession, and Kipreev would be sent to Berlag, a nameless camp identified only by number and intended for recidivists.

Kipreev realized all of this, but he had no intention of opposing his fate. He instructed Rogov without any concern for himself.

Kipreev was lucky in that Rogov was a poor student. Like any common criminal, Rogov knew what was most important – that the administration would not forget the criminal element under any circumstances. He was an inattentive student. Nevertheless, his hour came, and Rogov declared that he could do the job, and Kipreev was sent off to a numbered camp. But the X-ray lab somehow broke down, and the doctors had Kipreev returned to the hospital. Once more the lab began to function.

It was about this time that Kipreev began experimenting with the optic blind.

The dictionary of foreign words published in 1964 defines the ‘blind’ as follows: ‘a diaphragm (a shutter with variable-size opening) which is used in photography, microscopy, and fluoroscopy.’

Twenty years earlier the word ‘blind’ was not listed in the dictionary of foreign words. It is a creation of the war period, an invention having to do with electron microscopes.

Somewhere Kipreev found a torn sheet from a technical journal, and the blind was used in the X-ray laboratory in the convict hospital on the left bank of the Kolyma River.

The blind was Kipreev’s pride and joy – his hope, albeit a weak hope. A report was given at a medical conference and also sent to Moscow. There was no response.

‘Can you make a mirror?’

‘Of course.’

‘A full-length mirror?’

‘Any kind you like, as long as I have the silver for it.’

‘Will silver spoons do?’

‘They’ll be fine.’

Thick glass intended for the desks of senior bureaucrats was requisitioned from the warehouse and brought to the X-ray laboratory.

The first experiment was unsuccessful, and Kipreev fell into a rage and broke the mirror with a hammer. One of the fragments became my mirror – a present from Kipreev.

On the second occasion everything worked out successfully, and the bureaucrat realized his dream – a full-length mirror.

It never occurred to the bureaucrat to thank Kipreev. Whatever for? Even a literate slave ought to be grateful for the privilege of occupying a hospital bed. If the blind had attracted the attention of the higher-ups, the bureaucrat would have received a letter of commendation, nothing more. Now, the mirror – that was something real. But the blind was a very nebulous thing. Kipreev was in total agreement with his boss.

But falling asleep at night on his cot in the corner of the lab and waiting for the latest woman to leave the embraces of his pupil, assistant and informer, Kipreev could not believe either himself or Kolyma. The blind was not a joke. It was a technical feat. But neither Moscow nor Magadan was in the least interested in engineer Kipreev’s invention.

In camp, letters are not answered, nor are reminders of unanswered letters appreciated. The prisoner has to wait – for luck, an accidental meeting.

All this was wearing on the nerves – assuming they were still whole, untorn, and capable of being worn out.

Hope always shackles the convict. Hope is slavery. A man who hopes for something alters his conduct and is more frequently dishonest than a man who has ceased to hope. As long as the engineer waited for a decision on the damned blind, he kept his mouth shut, ignoring all the appropriate and inappropriate jokes that his immediate superior permitted himself – not to mention those of his own assistant who was only waiting for the hour and the day when he could take over. Rogov had even learned to make mirrors, so he was guaranteed a ‘rake-off’.

Everyone knew about the blind, and everyone joked about Kipreev – including the pharmacist Kruglyak, who ran the Party organization at the hospital. This heavy-faced man was not a bad sort, but he had a bad temper, and – mainly – he had been taught that a prisoner is scum. As for this Kipreev… The pharmacist had come to the hospital only recently, and he did not know the history of the electric light-bulbs. He never gave any thought to the difficulties of assembling an X-ray laboratory in the taiga, in the Far North.

As the pharmacist phrased it in the slang of the criminal world that he had recently acquired, Kipreev’s invention was a ‘dodge’.

Kruglyak sneered at Kipreev in the procedure room of the surgical ward. The engineer grabbed a stool and was about to strike the Party secretary, but the stool was ripped from his hands, and he was led away to the ward.

Kipreev either would have been shot or sent to a penal mine, a so-called special zone, which is worse than being shot. He had many friends at the hospital, however, and not just because of his mirrors. The affair of the electric light-bulbs was well-known and recent. People wanted to help him. But this was Point 8 of Article 58 – terrorist activities.

The women doctors went to the head of the hospital, Vinokurov. Vinokurov had no use for Kruglyak. Moreover, he valued Kipreev and he was expecting a response to his report on the blind. And, mainly, he was not a vicious person. He was an official who didn’t use his position to do evil. A careerist who feathered his own bed, Vinokurov did not go out of his way to help anyone, but he did not wish them evil either.

‘All right, I won’t forward the papers to the prosecutor’s office under one condition,’ Vinokurov said. ‘Provided there isn’t any report from the victim, Kruglyak. If he submits a report, the matter will go to trial. And a penal mine is the least Kipreev can get.’

Kruglyak’s male friends spoke to him.

‘Don’t you understand that he’ll be shot? He has none of the rights that we have.’

‘He raised his hand at me.’

‘He didn’t raise his hand, no one saw that. Now if I had a disagreement with you, I’d let you have it in the snout after two words. Don’t you ever quit?’

Kruglyak was not really a bad person, and he certainly wouldn’t do as a bigwig in Kolyma. He agreed not to send in a report.

Kipreev remained in the hospital. A month passed, and Major-General Derevyanko arrived. He was second-in-charge to the chief of Far Eastern Construction, and he was the supreme authority for the prisoners.

High-placed officials liked to stop at the hospital. They could always find quarters, and there was no shortage of food, liquor, and relaxation.

Major-General Derevyanko donned a white coat and strolled from one ward to another to stretch his legs before dinner. The major-general was in a good mood, and Vinokurov decided to take a chance.

‘I have a prisoner here who has performed an important service for the state.’

‘What sort of service is that?’

The head of the hospital explained roughly what a blind was.

‘I want to request that he be granted an early release.’

The major-general asked about the prisoner’s background, and when he heard the answer, he grunted.

‘The only thing that I can tell you,’ the major-general said, ‘is that you should forget about any blinds, and send this engineer… Korneev…’

‘Kipreev, sir.’

‘That’s right, Kipreev. Ship him off to where his papers say he should be.’

‘Yes, sir.’

A week later Kipreev was sent off, and in another week the X-ray machine broke down, so that he had to be recalled to the hospital.

It was no joking matter now, and Vinokurov lived in fear of the major-general’s anger. He would never believe that the X-ray machine had broken down. Kipreev’s papers were again prepared for him to be sent off, but he fell ill and remained.

It was now utterly impossible for him to return to the X-ray laboratory. He realized this quite clearly.

Kipreev had mastoiditis; he had picked up the inflammation from sleeping on a camp cot. His condition was critical, but no one wanted to believe his temperature or the reports of the doctors. Vinokurov raged and demanded that the operation be performed as soon as possible.

The hospital’s best surgeons prepared to perform Kipreev’s mastoidectomy. The surgeon, Braude, was virtually a specialist in mastoidectomies. There were more than enough colds in Kolyma, and Braude had had the experience of performing hundreds of such operations. But Braude was only the assistant. Novikov, a well-known otolaryngologist and a student of Volchek, had worked for Far Eastern Construction for many years, and she was to perform the operation. Novikov had never been a prisoner nor was she after the hardship pay (commonly referred to as ‘the long ruble’), but there, in Kolyma, she was not condemned for her entrenched alcoholism. After her husband’s death, this talented and beautiful woman had wandered for years about the Far North. She would begin things brilliantly but then would lose control for weeks on end.

Novikov was about fifty, and there was no one more qualified than she. At this moment she was dead drunk, but she was coming out of it, and the head of the hospital allowed Kipreev’s operation to be held up for a few days.

Novikov sobered up, her hands stopped shaking, and she performed Kipreev’s operation brilliantly. It was a parting gift, a purely medical gift to her former X-ray technician. Braude assisted her, and Kipreev recuperated in the hospital.

Kipreev realized that there was nothing left to hope for and that he would not be kept in the hospital for even one extra hour.

A numbered camp waited for him, where convicts walked in rows of five, elbow to elbow, with thirty dogs surrounding a column of prisoners.

Even in this hopeless state Kipreev did not betray himself. The head of the ward prescribed a special diet for the convict-engineer recovering from a mastoidectomy, a serious operation. Kipreev declared that there were many patients more seriously ill than he among the ward’s three hundred patients and that they had a greater right to a special diet.

And they took Kipreev away.

For fifteen years I searched for engineer Kipreev and finally dedicated a play to his memory – an effective way of guaranteeing a man’s involvement with the nether world.

But it was not enough to write a play about Kipreev and dedicate it to his memory. A woman friend of mine was sharing an apartment in the center of Moscow, and it wasn’t until she got a new neighbor through an ad in the paper that I finally found Kipreev.

The new woman came out of her room to become acquainted with her neighbors and saw the play dedicated to Kipreev. She picked it up: ‘The initials are the same as those of a friend of mine. But he’s not in Kolyma; he’s in a different place.’ My friend phoned me. I refused to continue the conversation. It was an error. Besides, in the play the hero is a doctor. Kipreev was a physical engineer.

‘That’s right, a physical engineer.’

I got dressed and went to see my friend’s new neighbor.

Fate weaves complex patterns. Why? Why did the will of fate have to be so clearly demonstrated by this series of coincidences? We seek each other little, but fate takes our lives in her hands.

Engineer Kipreev was alive in the Far North. He had been released ten years earlier. Before that, he had been brought to Moscow and had worked in secret camps. When he was released, he returned to the North. He wanted to remain there until he reached pension age.

Engineer Kipreev and I met.

‘I’ll never be a scientist – just an ordinary engineer. How could I return, stripped of all my rights and ignorant of what has happened in my field? The people I studied with are all laureates of various prizes.’

‘But that’s nonsense!’

‘No, it’s not nonsense. I breathe easier in the North. And I’ll continue breathing easier right up to my pension.’


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