Old Men at Midnight (13 page)

I don’t wish to continue here with too many additional accounts of that terrible war, because it is what took place
after
the war that is of true importance insofar as the rest of my story is concerned. I will tell you that I spent part of the war in Leningrad, where I was sent during the siege to take care of a matter involving some troublesome writers, and saw that the military hospital where I had recovered from the wound to my arm—when the city was called Petrograd—had been almost entirely destroyed in an air raid. The ceiling had collapsed onto the large room where I had lain after the doctor saved my arm. The Germans were bombarding the city and trying to starve it into submission, and the only access was the road we built across the thick ice of Lake Ladoga—the “road of life,” people called it. All the dogs and cats had been eaten; there were no chickens, no pigs; there was no heat or electricity; people walked to work and back in freezing cold; they were
eating carpenters’ glue and leather; some, crazed with hunger, ate the corpses of those who had perished. Not in all my years in the army of the Tsar and the Red Army was I so cold, so helpless. It was as if the sun had died and now lay buried in the bleeding soil of that city. I felt I was a dweller on the planet of death. I left burdened with guilt that I was unable to remain and be of help.

Toward the end of the war some of our departments took on the task of deporting hundreds of thousands of people from the Crimea and elsewhere to Central Asia, Siberia, and the Arctic north—because they had welcomed and collaborated with the German invaders. Many of the stories I heard about those deportations were unpleasant, but I had nothing directly to do with any of that.

I also had no connection with the small group of Jews that Stalin sent to America in 1944 to gain us the sympathies of rich anti-Fascist American Jews and to raise money for our war effort. There had been some talk that I would head up the security police team that would accompany them, but I was ordered to Tashkent instead, where we were facing a problem with some of our intelligentsia. It was fortunate that I was not sent to America, because after the war everyone who went on that mission was arrested and shot.

When the war ended there was a victory parade in Moscow and a night of fireworks. Drunks staggered about the city, pissing on the sidewalks. I was a little drunk myself for a few days, and enjoying the company of a lovely Russian woman, who kept admiring the furniture in my apartment.
I told her I had made many of the pieces myself. Some of the chairs, the coffee table, the end tables. Did you make the bed, she wanted to know. The bed is from the time of the tsars, I said. Come back to the bed, she said.

The war was over. The Motherland had been ravaged. Blood had seeped into every level spot of ground. But I had survived. I was forty-eight years old.

It meant nothing to me that we were soon arresting all the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee who had gone to America. The charges against them: They had become Zionist agents in the pay of American intelligence; they were trying to weaken the Motherland, establish a separate Jewish republic in the Crimea from which they could threaten the very heart of the state. In the end we arrested nearly the entire committee—writers, poets, actors, musicians, journalists, composers—and found all the evidence we needed to put them away. We even arrested the Jewish wife of our foreign minister for talking in Yiddish to Golda Meir, the Israeli foreign minister, and shipped her off to a camp in Central Asia. It seemed the Boss was returning to his old suspicions about foreign influences corrupting the Motherland and weakening his rule. All it meant to me was more work.

Nor did the heated newspaper campaign in
Pravda, Trud, Izvestia
, and elsewhere against “rootless cosmopolitans” and “traitors within” cause me any concern. True, a few dozen Jews in our departments were quietly transferred to police work in the provinces. But that had nothing to do with me. In fact, General Razumkov—he had
recently been promoted—told me that they had no complaints against me, I had worked very well and had nothing to worry about. And so I continued to wake in the mornings, dress, eat my breakfast, and go to my job—and my work was the same as it had been for years: interrogation.

And it continued that way until we began arresting and interrogating doctors.

D
o you remember the Russian saying I mentioned some while ago? Every day learns from the one that went before, but no day teaches the one that follows.

Well, sayings are as often wrong as they are right. One day
can
teach the day that follows.…

One day early in November 1952 General Razumkov handed me a file and said: “Look for a group. The Boss says that it’s impossible he acted alone.”

More than forty of us, from senior lieutenants all the way up to two major generals, had been working on the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee case since late 1948. For a while, in 1949, we were sidetracked by a conspiracy against Stalin in the Leningrad Party, and I went over there with a team of security people to arrest most of their administrative and management leaders. Then I became busy with the interrogation of another member of the Politburo, one of the leaders of that conspiracy. When we finished with
them we suddenly found that we had a problem with our Lubyanka leadership right here in Moscow, a struggle for power. Finally, early in 1952, we got ourselves back to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee case, brought it to the military collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, and were finished with it by the end of July. The newspapers were calling the committee members a “vile gang that stank unbearably” and urging the judges to show “not a drop of pity for the rabid wolf pack.” Some were shot, others were sent off to the camps.

I was very tired, went away to one of our security police resorts on the Black Sea for a long-overdue vacation, walked along the beaches, and wondered what lay on the other side of all that water. The sun got to me one day and I ran a high fever. I lay in my seaside room hallucinating.

The next morning the fever was gone but the scar on my left arm had a vivid pinkish hue. I was careful with the sun the rest of my time there.

About a month after I got back to Moscow, General Razumkov handed me a file.

“Find a group,” he said. He had gained a lot of weight. His brown hair had begun to thin. “There’s talk the Boss got a letter about Kremlin doctors in Zhdanov and is getting ready to finish off the whole leadership. This business is going to make or break careers here. Talk to this Doctor Koriavin and find the group. And, listen, we’re in a hurry. It’s got to be done quickly.”

Doctor A. M. Koriavin turned out to be a man in his early seventies, of middle height, heavy-shouldered, silver-haired,
with a high, smooth brow, thoughtful gray eyes, and a generous roundish face. He stood before me in my office wearing a brown suit and a white shirt, not a flicker of fear in him.

“I am Colonel Leonid Shertov,” I said. “I will be in charge of your investigation.”

“Comrade Colonel, I am prepared to answer truthfully every question you put to me.”

“Then we shall get along very well. Please sit down.”

He took the chair.

“It says here that you are retired.”

“That is correct.”

“Why then were you recently in the Kremlin clinic?”

“I was consulted on a matter of highest importance.”

“And what matter was that?”

“It had to do with the health of Comrade Stalin.”

“Who called you?”

He gave me the name of a doctor whose reputation I knew.

“And why would such an esteemed and active doctor feel the need to consult with you, a retired doctor, on this matter?”

“Because until my retirement two years ago I was the leading specialist in our country on this particular ailment.”

“What ailment is that?” I asked. The very moment the question was out of my mouth, I regretted having asked it. Instinctive curiosity; poor judgment.

But Doctor Koriavin answered without any hesitation,
as if eager to have others made aware of the diagnosis: “Comrade Stalin is suffering from maniacal aggressive psychosis, aggravated by high blood pressure and arteriosclerosis of the brain.”

The small office we were in was overheated; most of the building often lay awash in steamy air that coated the windows with vapor in cold weather and was at times raised to nearly suffocating temperatures inside some of our punishment cells in the internal prison. But a blast of the coldest Siberian air seemed suddenly to have entered the room. I thought the window had blown open, but it was closed, barred, its outside netting coated with snow.

The doctor sat very still, gazing at me out of his gray eyes.

“I am not asking you to commit suicide,” he said quietly. “If you do not wish me to answer, please do not ask the question.”

I said, “Very well, since you are so eager to answer questions, tell me who among the Kremlin doctors has joined in the conspiracy to assassinate the leadership of our country?”

He lost his composure for a moment. “I beg your pardon?”

“Who among the Kremlin doctors is conspiring to murder our leadership through incorrect medical intervention?”

He pursed his mouth and sat gazing at me. “So
that’s
what this is all about,” he said finally, shaking his head. “Now I understand. He is absolutely fiendish.”

“I warn you again, be careful what you say here.”

“Oh, I am very careful, Comrade Colonel. I am a doctor, I am always careful with words. ‘Fiendish’ is what I said, and ‘fiendish’ is what I meant. This is how he is finally going to solve his Jewish problem.”

I asked in surprise, glancing at his file, “Are you a Jew?”

“My nationality is Russian.” He looked at me keenly. “And you?”

“I am not a Jew, I am a Communist.”

“Ah, yes? I am glad. Or I would ask what you are doing here.”

“There are many Jews here.”

“Indeed?”

“Many.”

“Not for long.”

He had somehow managed to throw me entirely off balance.
I
was answering
his
questions. A clever man. My head had begun to ache and my left arm tingled.

“Enough,” I said, getting to my feet. “Sit here for a while and think about my question. We’ll continue when I return.”

“I am not a young man and will soon need a toilet,” he said quietly.

“Sit and think. I want the names of everyone in the group.”

I left him with a guard and decided to go to the dining room for some lunch. The small elevator with its iron prisonlike door was crowded. Six of us stood inside, silent and sullen. The dining room was nearly full, everyone tense, avoiding conversation. One heard clearly the clink of dishes, the thin sliding sounds of silverware. Something
enormous was brewing; after so many years of this, you learned to smell it in the air and feel it on your skin. The arrest of Jewish and Russian doctors, which had begun in the early summer during the trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, was now taking on the proportions of a tidal wave. Our people were out almost every night hauling them in. Mostly Jews, some Russians. Bewildered, terrified; trying for some semblance of dignity; lords of medicine, unaccustomed to being treated that way. Surgeons, internists, neurologists, pediatricians, ophthalmologists, pathologists, psychiatrists, urologists, laryngologists. Word had come to us from on high: The Jewish doctors were killers in white coats; they were murdering people on the operating table, poisoning them with drugs, had even drawn some Russian doctors into their conspiracy. Our prison cells were becoming crowded with the great names of Soviet medicine. The Boss wanted confessions, a trial.

Riding the elevator back to my office, I wondered who was now caring for the patients of all those imprisoned doctors. I felt tired, sweaty. My left arm throbbed, the fingers cold, as if emptied of their supply of blood.

When I returned to the office, I found the doctor still in the chair, looking a little fatigued. I dismissed the guard.

It was hot. I removed my jacket, loosened my tie, and sat on the edge of the desk.

“Well?” I said.

“It is necessary that I use a toilet,” he said quietly.

“It is necessary that I get an answer to my question.”

“I will not help you fabricate a group.”

“One way or another you will sign a confession and give
us names. I would rather not have to subject you to our various forms of persuasion. You have a wife, children, grandchildren. Your refusal to cooperate with us will fall heavily not only upon you but upon them as well. What I will do now is let you go to the toilet and then return you to your cell so that you can have more time to think.”

“Comrade Colonel, you appear to me to be ill.”

“What?”

“Your eyes are toxic. I believe you have a fever.”

“Comrade Doctor-Prisoner Koriavin, go to the toilet.”

I buzzed for the guards and they took him away.

Alone in the office, I sat behind the desk for a while doing paperwork, then signed myself out of the building and went home through a heavy fall of snow.

I had no appetite, slept poorly, but was back at my desk at nine the next morning. I scanned the newspapers, opened the safe, took out my papers, looked briefly at the arrest list, placed Doctor Koriavin’s file before me on the desk, and called to have him brought in.

I motioned the guards out of the office. The doctor sat straight and poised. A Russian worried about anti-Semitism, warning me. Strange. Stubble on his face now. The tired look. No picnic, those cells. Before the Revolution his family might have been members of the nobility. Now, a hated enemy. I must finish this quickly.

“Good morning. I trust you are being treated reasonably well in our hotel.”

“I have lived and eaten in worse places.” His voice had weakened. It was dry, hoarse. The heat in the cells did that sometimes. But his eyes were bright and his features still
wore their look of open generosity. “I was in Leningrad during the siege,” he said.

I was about to ask him where he had served but drew back from further conversation. No more time for small talk. The general was pressing me for results.