One January morning, at breakfast in the American settlement, Aurora received a typewritten note with an official-looking stamp, letting her know that she’d been excused from her usual translating duties for the morning and inviting her to come to the infirmary for some reason. Ignoring it didn’t seem like a good idea, given that she’d been under the eye of Comrade Tishenko, and hence presumably of the OGPU. So she dutifully walked down out of Berezka, the little town of cottages where Western engineers and high-ranking bureaucrats lived. She skirted the open-air prison of the Collective Labor Colony and began picking her way across a flat area, a couple of kilometers across, between the Magnetic Mountain to her left and the row of coke ovens and blast furnaces to her right. This was called Fifth Sector. Billed as a temporary improvisation while the new Socialist City was being erected, it showed every sign of becoming the real and permanent city of Magnitogorsk. Tens of thousands of workers lived here in nameless, numberless barracks—long, low buildings of wood tacked together and slathered with stucco. It was famously impossible to tell one from the next, and tired ironworkers were forever getting lost only a few meters from their own beds. Aurora had a vague notion that the medical block—yet another row of barracks, just like all the others—was in the southeast corner, near the big machines that crushed and sifted the ore coming down out of the gutted mountain. So she navigated by the sun and the fixed landmarks of the blast furnaces and the mine.
“May I assist you, Comrade Aurora?” This from a man who had been crunching along behind her for a while and then, as she stopped at a crossing of haphazard ways trying to puzzle out her next move, had begun to encroach on her peripheral vision. She’d instinctively been turning away from him. It was twenty below zero. She was peering out through a sort of gun slit framed by scarves and an ushanka. This style of dress created funny distortions in the usual etiquette that prevailed between men, who enjoyed looking at women, and women, who only wanted to be looked at in a certain way. There was nothing for a man to see unless he could maneuver around directly in front of you and peer through the aperture in the wool-and-sheepskin bunker that was keeping you alive. But this man had somehow recognized her.
She looked at him. It was Comrade Fizmatov. He kept a respectful distance and made a little suggestion of a bow—a bourgeois affectation that, if he kept it up, wouldn’t do anything to shorten his prison sentence.
“I thought it was you!” he exclaimed. “I saw you walking by as they were letting me out the gate.” Meaning, as she understood, the gate of the Corrective Labor Colony. “Oh, please don’t think I’ve been following you. We seem to be headed the same direction, that’s all.”
“Where are you going?”
“The Mining and Metallurgical Institute, as usual. And yourself?”
“The hospital barracks.”
“They are practically next door to each other. May I accompany you? It would be my honor.”
Nobody talked like this. Had he picked up such manners during his studies in Paris? She nodded and smiled. Not that he could see her mouth, but perhaps it would come through in her eyes. With one mittened hand he indicated the direction they should go, and then fell in step beside her. “I trust everything is all right?” he inquired.
“Oh. You mean, why am I going to the hospital barracks? Nothing more than some kind of routine examination, I guess. You know how the bureaucrats are.”
He did not make any sign of agreement but only walked beside her for a while, apparently lost in contemplation of whatever it was that PhD metallurgists thought about.
“So, what sort of name is Fizmatov?” she asked. For it seemed funny for him to catch up with her, introduce himself, and walk with her, but then to say not a word. “Ukrainian?” For he had that kind of accent.
“It is a totally made-up name!” he said. Amused, but not in a cruel way. “With your skills as a linguist, I’d have thought you could puzzle it out!”
“Now I feel stupid! But I’m afraid it means nothing to me.”
“Physics and Mathematics,” he said, turning toward her. “Phys-Mat. Fizmatov. You see?”
“You named yourself after physics and mathematics?”
He shrugged. “You must know that this was all the rage after the Revolution. People discarding their old bourgeois names, taking new ones. Naming their children after whatever they found inspirational in the new order of things. My old name had reactionary associations, especially strong in Kyiv, and so I renamed our family after the institute where I worked.”
She already knew he was divorced, his ex-wife living in Moscow. “Your family,” she repeated. “You have children?”
“Indeed, two boys.”
“And did you give them inspirational names?”
“Most certainly! Proton and Elektron.” He pulled up short in another intersection and turned to enjoy her laughter.
“You named your sons after subatomic particles!”
His frost-encrusted eyebrows went up. “Ah, you know about physics! You are well-informed.”
“I went on some dates with a young man in Chicago who wouldn’t stop talking about such things.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m afraid here’s where we part company. The institute is that way, and the hospital barracks are just down there on the right.” The mitten emerged briefly from the coat pocket to show her the way.
“Thank you, Comrade Physics and Mathematics.”
“It was my pleasure, Comrade Battleship.” He turned away and took a step, then turned back, his eyes serious. “I shall come and check on you later.”
“Oh, it’s as I said, I’m perfectly fine! It is just a routine examination or something.”
He looked as if he were making a conscious decision to say nothing. Then he made his little bow again, turned his back on her, and walked away.
At the medical barracks, Aurora presented the typewritten summons to a nurse and was sent through to an examination room with an un-Soviet level of efficiency that might have made her suspicious. But sometimes Aurora had a knack—a knack that didn’t always serve her well—of telling herself stories about what was going on. And the story that got her through the wait that followed was that, thanks to the information about her legal identities that she had provided to Comrade Tishenko, some decision had been made to transform Aurora Maximovna Artemyeva into a Soviet citizen in good standing. That certain rights, as well as responsibilities, went along with that. That among the former was healthcare, and so of course they would want to perform a basic examination and start a file.
The wait was long enough that she considered walking out of there, but they had all of her warm clothes. Finally a nurse came in, weighed her, and took down her blood pressure. Later a female doctor (for they had such things here) entered the room and chatted with her briefly, explaining that some routine tests and examinations were in order. And examine Aurora she did, thoroughly and invasively, muttering notes to the nurse the whole time.
She noticed the needle marks on Aurora’s arms. They weren’t particularly obvious, for the drugs had been administered by professionals under reasonably hygienic conditions. But you could see them.
“There is an explanation,” Aurora said.
“I look forward to reading it,” the doctor replied.
“Reading it?”
The doctor was washing her hands, obviously getting ready to leave.
“Would you like me to come back some other time, or—” Aurora began.
“No need,” the doctor replied with a bright tone and a prim little smile. “We are going to admit you for further tests. Get your clothes on, I’m sending you over to a different clinic.”
THEY PUT HER IN THE BACK OF AN AMBULANCE, JUST A WINDOWLESS SHEET-METAL BOX on the back of a truck, benches along the sides and a stretcher sliding and bouncing on the floor. In the front was a slit to allow communication with the driver. Peering out through it she saw a hundred or so Fifth Sector barracks pass by, then finally some hills and some new construction: the modern superblocks of the Socialist City. To the left, then, would be the mud-hut slums called Shanghai, a place she had been sternly warned against visiting even in the daytime. But she could only see what was dead ahead. The doctor had spoken of some other clinic. It must be one of the more modern facilities being erected in these new parts of town? But the ambulance drove straight through all of that, all the way to the shore of the Industrial Lake, just a perfectly flat strip of snow-covered ice dotted with fishing shacks. A pile of earth reached about a third of the way across and then they were driving over the top of the dam. This was a low structure, barely more than a levee made of concrete that had been poured in frantic haste by shock brigades a couple of years ago when the city was nothing more than tarps and tents. Nevertheless, it proved capable of supporting the ambulance’s weight. As soon as they got to the west bank they turned south and fishtailed down a track of compacted snow into a tiny old town, Magnitnyi, which had existed before Stalin had decided to build the world’s largest iron and steel complex across the river. This miserable huddle of mud huts had been improved with a barracks, exactly the same as the ones carpeting Fifth Sector. The ambulance pulled up in front. Out the slit, Aurora could see nothing but an old cemetery with the frozen river running along its edge. She already knew that the door at the back of the steel box wouldn’t open from the inside. After a quarter of an hour, she heard footsteps approaching. The latch clattered, the hinges groaned, and the doors swung open, revealing a pair of very large men who had thrown winter coats over the white uniforms of medical orderlies. They gave her much unasked-for and unhelpful assistance in climbing out, then bracketed her during the brief walk through the facility’s entrance, past a desk, and into another examination room. There followed a repeat of everything that had just happened at the hospital barracks in Fifth Sector: exchanging her clothes for a shift, waiting, being weighed, and so on. While she was waiting she noticed that in this facility there seemed to be rather a lot of shouting, dimly perceptible through the walls.
Nevertheless, it still did not penetrate her awareness until they pushed her through a barred door into a ward full of women, dressed in shifts like her, and locked the door behind her, that she had been committed to a psychiatric hospital.
“EXPLAIN THE NEEDLE MARKS ON YOUR ARMS,” SAID COMRADE STASOVA. YET ANOTHER woman doctor. A psychiatrist. It had taken her two days to find enough time in her schedule to sit down and interview Aurora. So far, she had shown intense focus on two topics: polo and tommy guns.
Aurora could explain those easily. But now the interview was headed into more difficult territory. “I had a medical crisis,” she said. “During my recuperation, I was given drugs. Morphine.”
“A lot of it!” scoffed Dr. Stasova.
Aurora was beginning to perceive that not all psychiatrists were there to listen with a sympathetic ear. “These doctors were up to no good. They were trying to control me.”
“So, when doctors give you medicine in a ‘medical crisis,’ would you say they are conspiring against you? Trying to control your thoughts?”
Aurora sighed. “You said yourself it was a lot of morphine.”
“Depends on the nature of the medical crisis. In some cases, it might be warranted.”
“I doubt this was one of those.”
“What exactly was it?”
“I became pregnant. Out of my womb, they say, came a monster.”
Dr. Stasova slapped her pencil down on the desk and sat back in her chair with such violence that it threatened to give way.
After a long silence she said, “I’m sending you back to the women’s ward.” She glanced up at a clock on the wall. “Later I’m going to show you something in the men’s ward. It’s okay, we’ll be safe. Afterwards, we will resume this conversation.”
Now, the women’s ward was just a long room, a row of beds along each wall, the beds occupied by women, some of whom seemed normal, others in the grip of mental afflictions of which Aurora knew nothing except that they seemed to make the sufferers prone to making noise at all hours. The ones who weren’t making noise all the time never made noise and wouldn’t talk to Aurora. So she hadn’t been sleeping well and she hadn’t made any friends.
The men’s ward, as she discovered a couple of hours later when she went in there with Dr. Stasova, was a whole different world of loudness and bad behavior. In thirty seconds she was exposed to the sight of more penises than she had seen in her whole life to this point, and she had been in some rugged places. She and the doctor were escorted by a burly man with a nightstick.
In the center of the lane running down the middle of the ward was a wooden table, not large—it might have seated four, or six in a pinch—but extraordinarily massive. Nearby was a wheeled cart where a man in a white coat was at work with tools of the druggist’s trade: a mortar and pestle containing bright-yellow powder, a delicate scale, miscellaneous vials and jars. He was mixing up some amber concoction in a beaker.
The doors at one end of the ward burst open. In stormed the pair of extraordinarily large orderlies who had escorted Aurora from the ambulance into the building. They were holding a smaller man between them. Each of the orderlies was holding one of the man’s arms twisted behind his back. They had him bent over, but he was craning his neck up to look forward, making it obvious that a cigar-sized dowel had been inserted horizontally across his mouth, secured behind his neck with a leather thong. He had a salt-and-pepper goatee, but the whiskers on his cheeks had been growing out for a while. His hair was cut somewhat long, as if he were in the habit of brushing it back from his high forehead. But it had not seen comb or brush recently. He was wearing pajama bottoms.
As soon as he saw the table, he planted his bare feet. The orderlies jerked him up off the ground and kicked his legs out from under him, and from that point he was just being dragged, the tops of his feet making a faint squeaking sound along the tile floor. The orderlies picked him up effortlessly and heaved him belly-down onto the table. Then they performed a neatly choreographed pas de deux in which each of them, while using one hand to keep the patient’s arm twisted behind his back, pirouetted back and sat down on one of the patient’s thighs. The combined weight must have been five or six hundred pounds. The only part of the patient’s body still capable of movement was the lower legs, which were kicking. The orderlies soon used their free arms to trap the ankles in the crooks of their elbows and hug them against their bodies.
The druggist drew the amber fluid up into a steel syringe and approached the table. He jerked the waistband of the pajamas down to expose the tops of the buttocks. In quick succession he jabbed the needle in four times: once into each buttock and once beneath each shoulder blade. Each time he shoved the plunger down a quarter of the way.
The logic behind the dowel now became clear as the patient, who until now had only been trying to talk, began screaming. He was too thoroughly immobilized to flail around and had to settle for smashing his forehead into the tabletop, perhaps in an effort to render himself unconscious.
A couple of nurses—stocky women whom Aurora identified as peasants—entered the room. From under the table they dragged out a rusty washtub full of water. A big piece of canvas had been soaking in it. They hauled that out, dropped it on the floor with a heavy splat, and unfolded it. The orderlies heaved the shrieking patient up off the table. His whole body had turned as red as a boiled lobster. They dropped him along one edge of the sopping canvas and quickly rolled him up in it, like a human cigarette. They then squatted there, holding the free edge of the canvas in place, while the women got to work with curved needles and stout thread, sewing the canvas into place around the patient’s body, leaving only the head exposed.
That looked like it was going to take awhile, and the shrieking, even through the gag, was becoming hard to take. Dr. Stasova plucked at Aurora’s arm and nodded at the guard.
A few moments later they were sitting back in the office. The doctor picked up her pencil and examined it between her hands as if it were a dagger.
“The canvas will shrink as it dries,” she said.
“That was the one part of it I understood.”
“Pyretotherapy,” Dr. Stasova said, looking Aurora in the eyes. “Developed in the West ten years ago, for syphilis. The drug causes the body temperature to go up—so hot it kills the spirochetes that are the cause of the disease.”
“That man had syphilis?”
The skepticism in Aurora’s voice was so clear that it caused the corners of Dr. Stasova’s mouth to draw back a millimeter. “Later it was determined that these high temperatures can alter the chemistry of the brain in a way that is therapeutic for schizophrenics.”
“It seems quite painful?”
“Sometimes Novocain is administered first.”
“But not today.”
“No.”
“So that man is schizophrenic.”
“He has been diagnosed as such,” Dr. Stasova said quite slowly and distinctly, again looking Aurora in the eye, and then said nothing for a while, letting her think it all through. “It will be helpful for you to know that, here in the USSR, the science of psychiatry has advanced beyond where it is in the West. New types of schizophrenia have been discovered.”
“And are being treated.”
“As you saw.”
“What are the symptoms of these newly discovered types of schizophrenia?”
“Oh, I don’t think you need concern yourself with those. Your symptoms are easily covered by the old, well-known types.”
“My … symptoms?”
“Hallucinations. Delusions of grandeur.”
“Such as?”
“Claiming you are a polo player. That you are a tommy gun–shooting public enemy like Bonnie and Clyde. And that a monster came out of you.”
“I can explain the first two.”
“THE OLD WAYS OF MAKING A LIVING—SO EXPLOITATIVE, SO PRODUCTIVE OF REVOLUTIONARY fervor among the working class—were for the same reason unattractive to proud, energetic people who simply wanted to have food and stay warm.”
Aurora had, at long last, come to understand that she needed to start talking like this in order to get out of this psychiatric hospital with her body and her mind intact. Fortunately she had grown up around Bolsheviks and got a refresher course in the most up-to-date Stalinist verbiage by spending time with Comrade Tishenko. She saw no trace of concern on Dr. Stasova’s face as she launched into this. On the contrary, the doctor appeared to be relaxing.
Aurora continued: “Deprived of the opportunity for a genuine people’s revolution, the men of my mother’s family discovered that their skills had more lucrative uses. Some of them transported whisky across the border from Canada and put it on the railway, disguised as other goods. Some, it is true, robbed banks. Others allowed themselves to be exploited by the polo-pony industry, which—whether or not you believe it—is very lucrative in eastern Montana and Wyoming.”
“Because of the cavalry units stationed there to suppress the Indians?” Dr. Stasova guessed. For even a psychiatrist knew that one could not maintain an effective modern cavalry without polo.
“That’s how it got started. The big operations are all run by remittance men.”
“I am not familiar with the term.”
“Younger sons of British aristocrats. By law only the eldest son can inherit. The others are still rich and need never work. A monthly remittance is cabled to them, wherever in the world they may roam. Some spend it. Others invest.”
“In polo-pony ranches?”
“It gives them an excuse to ride and play every day of their lives.”
“I wouldn’t think there’d be much of a market, out there—”
“They ship ponies all over the world. British cavalry officers in India ride ponies from Wyoming. American plutocrats take the train west, marry off their daughters to remittance men’s sons, ride their ponies, and buy them for their stables in New York.”
“Trading daughters for horses. The ways of the elite beggar parody. Tell me, though, what need did such men have of revolutionary outlaws?”
“They needed men who could handle horses. Who could ride. And play.”
“Cowboys play polo?”
“Cowboys, and Indians. These remittance men living out in the middle of nowhere must have opponents—and good ones—or they will become bored and forget how to play the game.”
“And is it really the case that you know how to play?”
She paused long enough to control the beginnings of a smile. “I spent four summers working on such ranches, mucking out stables at first. Then riding new ponies, teaching them not to fear the whirling club, the whack of the ball. It is ticklish business. If a new pony receives even a glancing, accidental blow from an errant club or a mis-hit ball, it may take months for it to lose its fear—a great waste of time and effort. If the club goes between its legs and trips it, the animal may be a total loss. So, the trainer must be able to control the club and strike the ball nearly as well as a player. Before I could even begin to work as a trainer, I had to …”
She noticed that Dr. Stasova was glaring at her, and she trailed off.
“Yes,” she said, “I learned how to play.”
This seemed to satisfy Dr. Stasova, at least as far as the first of Aurora’s “delusions”—being a polo player—was concerned. “Now,” she said, “as to the tommy guns and so on? I assume that there is some connection there to the members of your family who were engaged in criminal activities.”
“That is true, but in a more roundabout way. As an adolescent girl I took no part in such operations. Oh, everyone in that part of the country is familiar with guns, and I was especially interested in automatic weapons because of the memories I had from childhood, of Veronika.”
“The machine gunner who lived in your kommunalka.”
“Yes. But an ordinary girl living on a ranch has no need of a submachine gun. Sometimes the men of the family would carry one if they were worried about wolves.”
“Isn’t an ordinary pistol or rifle sufficient to kill a wolf?”
“Yes, but not a whole pack. They told stories of wolf circles.”
“What is a wolf circle?” Dr. Stasova had become sufficiently interested that she was forgetting to take notes.
“Sometimes in the wild places they would find the remains of a man, completely torn apart and decayed, but clearly human. Somewhere near him there would be a revolver, out of ammunition. And around him would be a circle of dead wolves. It was not difficult to understand what had happened.”
“The man had been surrounded by a pack consisting of more than six wolves.”
“Yes. So if they were going into a place where they knew there was a big wolf pack, and if they had a submachine gun, they might bring it along. But again, I rarely saw a tommy gun and never touched one until last year.”
“What happened last year?”
“As I grew older, Mama and Papa worked out a deal. I’d ride the train to Chicago and see him sometimes.”
“Passenger or—”
“The Comintern’s records will show that he paid for passenger tickets. Which he did. I cashed them in and kept the money, then hopped freight trains instead.”
“Alone?”
“With uncles or cousins who were going to Chicago on business.”
Dr. Stasova nodded. “They repackaged Canadian liquor as freight, and transported it by rail—”
“With an escort. Which was necessary, especially during the last few miles.”
“What exactly happened in the last few miles?”
“The line passed through the territory of the Westside O’Donnells, en route to the Cicero Hump. Once we got there, I would stay in the boxcar and keep my head down while the Bugs’s men handed over the money and loaded the goods onto a truck.”
“Bugs’s men?”
“Agents of the primary customer. Have you seen Scarface? The North Side Irish gang depicted in that film is based on Bugs Moran’s organization. They are credited with introducing the tommy gun to Chicago.”
“So, when you say that you kept your head down—”
“I meant it literally. They were at odds with the Westside O’Donnells.”
“Who apparently did a poor job of policing this thing called the Cicero Hump.”
“It is a forty-two-track bowl. It’s three miles long. No one gang could control it. But there would be skirmishes. Anyway, when the coast was clear, we would hike out and take the Cicero Avenue bus all the way up north to Belmont and then cut east toward the lake and get to where Papa lived.”
“That is the district of Chicago where the headquarters of the IWW were also located?”
“He lived and worked in the same flop,” Aurora said. “The Wobblies have fallen on pretty hard times.”
“Yes. Perplexing, given the movement’s success in Britain.”
“He went to England around the time of the general strike, as you know, so I didn’t see him for a while. Other than that, yes, everything ran smooth until three years ago when Mama got sick.”
“Cancer?”
“A wart, she told me at first, when she had it cut off. Later they took out a piece of her scalp the size of a postage stamp and she had to cover the scar with her hair. She was hoping it would blow over. The next year she started to get other symptoms and came clean with me as to what it really was. We went into Chicago where she could get better treatment. They would poke a radioactive needle into her for a while, then pull it out. She never complained. I stayed with Papa and rode the El to the hospital, visited her every day toward the end. I know, bourgeois sentimentality. But after she died, it felt right to stay there with Papa for a time. Which is how I got caught up in the Bonus Army stuff.”
“Rekindling the revolutionary fervor that had lain dormant during your exile as an impressionable youth surrounded by charismatic revanchists,” Dr. Stasova corrected her, writing the words down.
“Exactly.”