12
JUNIOR YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL, after returning from a spring break spent with his cousins in Jackson Heights, Vivek started referring to D.C.’s subway as “the Nerf metro.” “Look at this,” he said, half sneering and half laughing, as they boarded at Twinbrook on Friday evening, against the commute, on their way down to see a show at Fort Reno. “Yellow foam seats, these padded handles, carpet even my parents would be embarrassed to put in their home. Buck Rogers stations. You know how silly this shit’ll look in another ten, twenty years? Be like one of those Flash Gordon shows where you can see the strings on the flying saucers.”
The conversation stuck with Jim because it was right—nothing dates faster than visions of the future—and because the Moscow Metro, which he was now riding to Vodniy Stadion, on Moscow’s scrubby northern outskirts, was the anti-Nerf Metro: hard wooden seats, black metal floors, heavy steel doors that slammed shut so hard they seemed angry, and the military, hortatory voice that addressed commuters as “Respected passengers!” The system covers only slightly less ground than New York’s subway, but has far fewer stations; with barely three minutes passing between trains, they hurtle through tunnels fast enough to press forward-facing passengers back into their seats.
The old stations are majestic stone palaces festooned with stained-glass, Social Realist mosaics, or busts of Soviet heroes; the newer ones are bleak, weeping-walled caves with the sort of lighting that makes everyone appear on the brink of vomiting. Armies of stern babushki keep the stations in relative order; they sweep the broad gray staircases, brush the escalators’ wide wooden teeth with bunched branches, give the evil eye to everyone who passes them, and sit purposefully but with no evident function in glass booths at the bottoms of escalators. All of this conspires to make Moscow’s Metro seem more an ecosystem or a natural phenomenon than a commuter rail network.
Vodniy Stadion station has never quite shaken off its Brezhnevian gloom and grime: the station is long, purgatorial, and fluorescently lit. Jim alighted just in front of a dapper-looking older man in a goatee, a burgundy suit, and a New York Knicks wool and leather coat carrying a stack of records bound in twine. The top record showed a slender silhouette in glasses playing a saxophone against a blue background—Sonny Rollins, Saxophone Colossus, which Jim had discovered with Vivek that same year of high school.
Jim walked out of the station just behind a beefy, flat-headed guy who looked like he had been winched into his expensive suit and leather jacket. He wore an expression of utter neutrality, and his rhomboid head sat neckless atop a barrel-chested, boxer-gone-to-seed body. As Jim followed behind him to the staircase, a shambolic little drunk approached them from a bench in front of them, his greasy black hands forming a cup and his stubbly face imploring and streaked with tears. The drunk wobbled his way directly in their path, mumbling with his hands out. The heavy, not even breaking stride, snapped his arm up and out from his side, delivering a quick but effective uppercut right to the drunk’s jaw. He reeled backward, spitting rotten teeth, blood, and phlegm. Instinctively Jim slowed and turned toward the drunk, beginning a crouch, when the jazz fan, also without breaking stride, caught his arm and pulled him along, giving a subtle but steady warning shake of the head. “It’s over. Leave him be. Better him alone than him and you.”
When they got out of the station, the heavy climbed into the passenger seat of a souped-up black Jeep with tinted windows. “See,” said the man, transferring the records beneath his arm. “Those types will shoot you as soon as look at you.”
The jazz buff gave a Moscow farewell—a nod of the head inextinguishable in time or intensity from an involuntary tic—and trudged off in the opposite direction. This was the welcome counterpoint to Moscow’s lawlessness: the readiness—the necessity—of its citizens to look out for one another in endlessly surprising ways. And as much as Jim could boast to himself about liking the danger, the unpredictability, and the toughness of the city, he also loved these unexpected, genuine moments of kindness, too. American life, especially the suburban American life into which Jim was born, tends to flatten out the extreme—one can go years seeing no infraction more serious than running a stop sign, but receiving from strangers nothing friendlier than a professional, tight-lipped grin in a store. Here, though, if you occasionally saw a thug send a beggar sprawling, you also had strangers who pulled you out of harm’s way. And, in truth, while events of the former class make better stories, those in the latter are more common.
IF CENTRAL MOSCOW projects state power, limitless and brutal, and impresses on its denizens just how small they are in comparison to this power, Vodniy Stadion is where the state’s power ends and nature’s begins. The area felt unfinished, vast, with a few industrial sites, a weighing station for trucks, and the usual array of game rooms, portable toilets, and food carts smacked haphazardly in the middle of scrub fields and some low-slung, half-finished or half-started cinder-block buildings in irregular rows a few hundred yards back from the streets. Unimpeded views down a few long streets showed threatening vistas of forest to the east, as if the trees were massing at the edges of this temporary encampment, waiting for the right moment to take back what they had lost.
The Moscow Infectious Disease Hospital Number 2 sat a few hundred yards back from Semyonovskaya Proezd, a good mile’s hike from the station. A driveway lined on both sides by decapitated pine trees wended its way up to the bleak, gray building. By the front doors, which flopped loosely in their frames, a quartet of haggard, hollow-cheeked men in slippers and tattered bathrobes smoked and shivered. As Jim walked past them, one bent double with a spoons-on-washboard cough and hacked up a quivering, reddish-yellow lump that landed on the threshold.
He started to walk through an immense entry foyer into the hospital when a guard—really just a tired, rheumy old man in a sweater with epaulets—whistled from a desk in the corner and beckoned him over. “Passport.” Jim complied.
“American,” he said, with bemused interest. “What is an American doing at this particular hospital on this particular morning?”
“I’m looking for Dr. David Faridian.”
“Faridian?” he asked, his eyes widening and cheeks puffing out. “Are you sick?”
“No, no, I’m just . . . I just would like to speak with him.”
“He’s expecting you?”
“Of course,” Jim said confidently. “I am here to discuss his purchase of some specialized medical equipment.”
“A capitalist in our hospital.” He chuckled. “And meeting with Faridian. Good luck to you. The doctor will probably be upstairs.”
“Excuse me, I don’t understand. Where upstairs?”
“Young man, how do you expect me to know where the doctor is at all times? He works in the surgery unit. The surgery unit is upstairs. Therefore, as I have just told you, you will find him upstairs. Straight down the long hall and up one story.”
“Thank you.”
The guard raised his eyebrows and pulled the corners of his mouth down, nodding, a Russian “You’re welcome,” an expression that said you received only what you asked for, and casting doubt on the wisdom of asking for it in the first place.
The hallway’s pale yellow walls looked less like the product of institutional paint than like some sort of architectural decay. Fewer than half of the fluorescent bulbs worked, and some of those flickered; patients in various states of distress lolled in the beds that lined the hallway. Some milky winter light trickled in through the hallway’s high windows. A powerful smell of ether, blood, and shit pervaded the hospital. In a small room off the hallway Jim saw two nurses cooking something in an old rusty pot that jittered away atop an electric coil. When he looked closer, and saw that they were dropping metal implements—forceps, scalpels, retractors, specula—into the pot, he realized they were not cooking but sterilizing. As he turned his attention from that scene he accidentally banged his foot into the post of a bed occupied by a mottled, wrinkled, slack-jawed, drooling, glassy-eyed shell of a woman poking spookily out of a yellowed housedress stained with urine and vomit. Only the faintest whimper of protest signified she remained among the living.
At the top of the stairs, Jim passed another room that seemed to be given over to sterilization: a few dozen rusty pots, each the size that Vilatzer’s used for stock, sat steaming away on electric hot plates on the floor. All the hot plates were plugged precariously into four jerry-rigged surge protectors in the middle of the room. As Jim looked in, he was shoved from behind; he stepped aside for a battle-ax of a nurse lugging another pot of water, with which she replaced one of the boiling ones.
When Jim walked in she looked up at him almost sweetly. Her blond hair was tucked into a sensible bun beneath her hat, and she had a patient, warm, matter-of-fact expression.
“I’m looking for Dr. Faridian. Can you tell me where I can find him?”
“He is probably upstairs, in surgery. The doctor is very busy today. Come, I will take you,” she said, smiling as she hefted a pot of hot water.
“I can take that,” Jim said. She shook her head, smiling at him through a wreath of steam.
“Please follow me,” she said. “I cannot vouch for the doctor’s mood, as usual, but perhaps you already know what to expect. You may need to wait a few moments.”
They walked down a hallway just as grim, purgatorial, and crowded as the one below. It was quieter, though: fewer moans and screams. Most of the patients were sleeping, sedated, or unconscious. The nurse turned left off the hallway, and when Jim peered around the door frame he saw an operating theater, of sorts: the patient was splayed naked on a wooden table, with a gas mask strapped to his face. He had no IV, but a drop of blood from an injection trickled down his forearm, which hung off the table. Light came from two halogen lamps, one in each corner.
The doctor, a tall, ropy man with salt-and-pepper hair, slightly tinted glasses, and the sort of tan that comes from working outdoors in one’s youth, stood grimly over the patient. He glanced up at Jim then turned his attention back to the patient.
“This procedure is closed,” the doctor said. “What do you want?”
“Dr. Faridian?” Jim asked hesitantly.
“Perhaps.”
“I should probably come back later, when . . .”
“I can give you five minutes,” the doctor said, wiping his hands on his corduroy pants as he advanced. “The patient is healthy and well prepared; he can stand a few more moments under the gas. Masha, do you agree?”
The nurse nodded amicably, and put the pot onto another hot plate. “Of course, Doctor. The instruments are here when you need them.”
“You see who holds the real power in a Russian hospital,” the doctor said with a tight smile.
“Dato Tsepereli suggested I speak with you. I work for the Memory Foundation. It’s a group that records the histories of political prisoners in Eastern Europe.”
“A group that records the histories of political prisoners in Eastern Europe,” he parroted drily. “How interesting. In what condition, may I ask, did you find Dato?”
“Sober,” Jim said plainly. “Terrified. Shaking. But sober.”
“Your visit must have been important, then. May I see your passport, please?”
Jim had stopped remarking, even internally, on the Russian fetishization of official documents. Instead he just handed the passport over. “You are Dr. David Faridian?”
He nodded. “Vee-la-tzeer. American. You have been here only six months, and you are on a business visa.” He handed Jim his passport and looked at him skeptically. “How does someone like you meet someone like Dato Tsepereli?”
“I was sent to him by Vilis Balderis.” Jim didn’t explain the name, hoping Faridian would pick up on it. No such luck. “As I said, I work for the Memory Foundation.” He pulled a card out of his wallet and held it out. Faridian kept his arms crossed. “We record the testimony of gulag survivors. Like Vilis. And Dato. And you, I understand.”
“You understand, do you?” he asked sardonically, leaning over to check the patient’s pulse. “I asked you. I want to know: do you understand?”
Jim remained still. He could not say yes, of course, because after a suburban American life how could he? He did not want to say no, because he worried Faridian would take that as a triumph and evict him. Instead, he went for empathy. “I have tried to. I think Vilis and Dato and Grigory Naumenko have helped me, but I would also like to hear your story.”
Faridian nodded with satisfaction and turned his attention back to Jim.
“He’s well?” Jim asked.
“Well? Is he well ?” Faridian rose, his deep-set eyes alive with indignation. “You can see his condition for yourself. He is unconscious in an infectious diseases hospital, about to have his chest cut open with instruments that were boiled in tap water. You judge for yourself: is that well?”
Unprepared for such a reaction, Jim stammered, “I just meant . . . the gas . . .”
“Ah, the gas, yes, of course. Among the many things we lack is an adequate supply of Sodium Pentothal, so we must supplement it with nitrous oxide. After we finish our little chat, I must rush to find the nurse—or any nurse; we have too few—to see if she will assist me. If we finish quickly, he will be fine; if not, well, I shall have to revive him and perform the operation tomorrow. And I will perform it. Many of my colleagues would not, since, as you can see, this particular patient is indigent, without money for the many ‘fees’ doctors now require. But assuming he lives until tomorrow, yes, he will be perfectly well.”
“What sort of operation does he need?”
“He needs a tracheotomy. He has diphtheria.”
“Diphtheria?”
“Yes, diphtheria, a disease against which you and I have been vaccinated. Most Russians were, up until the collapse. Do you know how many cases of diphtheria existed in your country last year? Five. In mine? About a quarter million. Really he needs an antitoxin, but, of course, we have none. To get that you have to go to a private hospital. And he’s immunosuppressed, which means the simple act of cutting into him could well give him an infection that will kill him.
“Moscow’s water, as you might know, flows through pipes that adjoin sewage pipes. Over time lesions form in certain places on each pipe, and they leak into each other. For most of us, we run our drinking water through a filter, no problem. But this gentleman on the table is not most of us, and our hospital’s filtering system is partly broken, partly stolen. You see,” Faridian spat, “how we live today. Have you been healthy since your arrival in Russia?”
“I have. I’ve been lucky.”
Faridian snorted. “Lucky, yes. You people always are. And if your luck stopped, you would not have to rely on us—on me—to restore it. So no, you do not understand. You cannot understand. And I am disinclined to pour my memory out into your tape recorder. It happened. Errors were made, perhaps. In judgment, in severity, in procedure, in ideology. And? What then? What nation has never made mistakes? Who benefits when we debase ourselves in the pages of history? Whose plan is it for us to be dragged back rather than forging forward?”
“There’s no plan, Doctor. We just think it’s important to hear your stories.”
“And what if I don’t want to tell them?” he asked, glaring at Jim and pounding a fist on the table. Jim held his gaze, trying to look neither confrontational nor weak. Faridian ran a hand over his face, took a deep breath, and began speaking in a quiet, even voice.
“I am a doctor, the son and grandson of village doctors in Gyumri, Armenia. My class background was suspect. I was seized on the orders of a coward, a time-serving army captain who wanted me gone so he could have his way with the woman who became my wife. From a land of bounty and perpetual sun I traveled by cattle train to one of isolation and perpetual cold. That first winter the prisoners trapped fox using contraband barbed wire and bricks smuggled out of the factory. Not for fur, but for food. Some were so hungry they didn’t bother to cook it. It became their last meal. Do you think, with a blue passport like yours, that you can ‘understand’ such stories? Do you think you can convince me you care?”
“Doctor, I’m trying to. What impresses me, though, is how much you care. Dato said you looked after people in the camp. You must have known many others?”
“I knew few other people. I knew as many as I cared to know.”
“So you don’t remember the names of the people you helped?”
Faridian rose to his full height. In another life he might have been a cowboy; he had that lean, self-sufficient, whipcord look to him.
“In a previous life, Meester Vilatzer,” he hissed in sardonic English, “I ran an emergency room in a provincial hospital in Tomsk. One night, I failed to save the lives of two women who were brought in with multiple stab wounds. One of them, the older one, was literally holding her windpipe as they brought her through the doors. The younger one had effectively been flayed from the neck up. They were the wife and daughter of a survivor, you see. Apparently they tried to take away his bowl of soup before he finished.” Gently but firmly, he started shoving Jim out of the operating room. “One thing I resolved when I returned to society is that I would never again face another interrogation. I have fond recollections of only one person from those days. Dato I feel pity for, of course, not fondness. But every so often I drink with Rukhmanov. He is a butcher at Tenth Planet. Now, I have no wish to rake myself and my country over the coals to help the career of a member of the twice-chosen people. I must go find a nurse willing to help me. Otherwise this piece-of-shit patient, this man who someone such as you would step over to get a sushi or a cappuccino, will die. I don’t expect you to care, but I do expect you to leave.”