At 4:39 a.m., Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kogan is sufficiently awake to be surprised when he hears the knock on the door.
Surprised because he was given reason to believe that he had a week to get his affairs in order. Could this be a mistake? Wrong door, perhaps?
Most people don’t get warnings, grace periods. Kogan thought he did. Perhaps their plans have changed. The fact that Kogan is still at large is a surprise to everyone—starting with Kogan.
Exactly one year, three months, and one week ago, Kogan was stripped of his administrative and academic titles—chief of surgery at Pervaya Gradskaya Bol’nitsa, Municipal Hospital Number One, and professor of surgery at First Medical Institute. He continues to practice as an ordinary surgeon, often at the emergency room. Sometimes he makes house calls at the regional clinic. Sometimes he rides with an ambulance, mostly because he wants to, and because no one cares enough to stop him.
After dismissal, Kogan allowed his wardrobe to drift toward simpler things, which hang sack-like on his short, broad frame. A heavy cotton shirt that buttons off-center—tolstovka—replaces his officious coat and tie. The fedora loses its purpose and is replaced by an old military hat. Not his karakul papakha of a colonel (his rank when the war ended), but a basic ushanka, the sort a private might wear.
Being in the streets, easing pain, maybe even saving lives on occasion agrees with Kogan. While taking care of a drunk in the ER, he made a promise to himself that when this political madness ends and his posts are offered back to him with apologies, he will simply reject them and return to the life of a simple doctor. Of course, there are advantages to being a colonel, but sometimes being a private feels cleaner.
“Cosmopolitism,” the reason for Kogan’s dismissal, is, of course, preposterous. By birth, he is a Jew, but he is Russian to the core, a hero of two wars, a partisan in the Civil War, a military surgeon in World War II. Yet he is also proudly cosmopolitan. Having trained in Berlin and Paris, he has the skills that would enable him to practice in any hospital anywhere in the world. He can easily lecture in German and French. Alas, over the preceding two decades, he has had no opportunities to do so. And he has family members in New York and Copenhagen.
The word “cosmopolite” has become another way of saying Yid. Before the Party’s hard line on cosmopolitism, a drunk in the street would call you “zhid porkhatyy,” a rootless Yid. Now, in the newspapers, the epithet of choice is “kosmopolit bezrodnyy,” a rootless Cosmopolite. It’s a simple word substitution, a way of saying the exact same thing without saying “Yid,” a way of making it official, acceptable. This nonsense is getting firmly implanted in the psyche of the people. Kogan feels it as a doctor. On house calls, patients call him bloodsucker, and accuse him of efforts to kill them. As a professional, Kogan doesn’t take this personally, but as a patriot he wonders: Does madness ever recede? Can it get better on its own, without therapeutic intervention?
* * *
Some events in life deepen the dimension of time, as though the brackets that define ordinary instants are spread apart.
The instant of the knock, like the instant of death, can be eternal, and here it is, at exactly 4:39 a.m.
What do we do when the knock comes? Is the final instant of freedom shaped by our past lives? How do we balance the practical considerations against the symbolic? Kogan’s thoughts rush in at once: “Should I remain in my pajamas? Should I put on street clothes? Is there time to change? Has my valise been packed?”
He is not torn by doubts about correctness of the Party line. He is past that. Consider the books that shaped him intellectually and spiritually: he is reading Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, two poetesses described in the propaganda as “idealess” or worse. Akhmatova is cursed by the official ignoramuses as a “half-nun, half-harlot,” a hybrid heretofore unknown to mankind. “Reading” Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva means continuously, the way a believer reads a sacred text.
Kogan is in possession of Der Process, The Trial, by Franz Kafka, published in Berlin in 1925 by Verlag Die Schmiede, a full decade before the Moscow Trials. (Its original owner was a German medic shot near Stalingrad.) The opening lines were scarily applicable to Moscow of 1953, despite being written nearly four decades earlier: Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong, but, one morning, he was arrested.
The ending—the execution of Josef K.—seemed even more shocking because it was so amateurish, so homespun: But the hands of one of the gentlemen were laid on K.’s throat, while the other pushed the knife deep into his heart and twisted it there, twice. As his eyesight failed, K. saw the two gentlemen cheek by cheek, close in front of his face, watching the result. “Like a dog!” he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.
Most dangerous, Kogan has developed an obsession with clinical applications of psychoanalysis: interpretation of dreams. That’s about as far as you can depart from medicine based on “scientific Marxism-Leninism.” Rooted in class structure, it rejects the very idea of the significance of troubles of an individual. Mental health is achieved through belonging to a collective. Self-indulgent navel-gazing is harm. A man’s dream is just that. It’s not rooted in class, has nothing to do with his relationship to ownership of the means of production. And obsession with sex is, of course, a capitalist vice.
Something about the spirit of the times makes Kogan read every epidemiology book he can get his hands on at the library of the First Medical Institute. Indeed, he is starting to think of purges as epidemics that start out with a small, concentrated population, then expand their reach nationally, even globally. Once he picked up a blank piece of paper and started to jot down the fundamentals of a discipline he would call politico-historical epidemiology.
One of the models he gleaned from epidemiology is that epidemics of infectious diseases can reach the peak, but then inevitably start to recede. How is Fascism not an infectious disease? How is Stalinism not a plague?
Events outside the window and in his own life convince Kogan that the climax is still far away. Things can get much worse. But what are we dealing with? Is this outburst of ignorance and hatred akin to systemic disease? Alternatively, this disease could have a single source that sends pathogens throughout the system. What if you find a way to intervene and neutralize it?
Is a therapeutic intervention possible? Of course, Kogan knows what this means. Murder. He took lives in his pre-medical past, and he has no apologies, no regrets for having done so. Perversely, he hopes that his old friends, now under arrest, were plotting to kill that old brigand Stalin. Alas, they probably were not.
Is violence an option?
Kogan knows that after three decades of saving lives as a physician he lacks the fortitude required to return to taking lives. He will be dignified, polite, professorial. Perhaps he will even use the arrest as a way to ennoble his oppressors. They are the enemy, nominally, but they are still Red Army soldiers, the grandsons of the men who served alongside Kogan during the Civil War, the sons of the men he operated on in field hospitals during World War II.
Rumor has it that the old brigand isn’t in the best of health. What happens when the devil finally takes him? Will this disease start to recede?
Kogan went through these constructs a week ago, after a hellish day at the ER.
After jotting down the fundamentals of what he jokingly called “politico-historical epidemiology,” he went into the bathroom, struck a match, burned the piece of paper containing the fundamentals of this new discipline, and, with a flush, sent the ashes to the Moskva River, Volga River, and—ultimately—the Caspian Sea.
* * *
And now, at 4:39 a.m., the knock.
He thought he had a week. Are they playing with their kill? Has someone turned him in? Is anyone aware of Kogan’s ideological deviations? Has his turn come? How could it not? It’s a simple progression: cosmopolitism, expulsion from the Party, loss of administrative and teaching positions, followed by what? Trumped-up charge of negligence in patient care? Accusations of medical murder? (The so-called Kaplan case seems to be just that.) Has time come to an eternal standstill? Will it always be 4:39 a.m.? Will 4:40 a.m. ever come?
Usually, it’s the wife’s lot to pack the husband’s briefcase for the journey “over there.” A classically packed briefcase contains a toothbrush, an extra pair of glasses, a pair of socks, underwear, a small sewing kit, and medications. He never got around to packing that bag, warranted though this action was, and now, in eternal mid-knock, it is too late. Is this his last contorted vestige of loyalty to Dusya, an intestinal torsion of loyalty?
In an odd way, he looks forward to being shipped over there, to the Siberian woods. This wish doesn’t mirror a cancer patient’s desire to die. Death happens only once. Hence its mystery. For Kogan, Siberia is a place altogether devoid of mystery. For a full year, he lived a partisan’s life along the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Before he took the oath to do no harm, before he became Dr. Kogan, he was Sasha pulemetchik, Sasha the machine gunner.
Of course, Kogan’s focus on felling trees in the forests that once gave him shelter is a mild form of denial. A public trial, a beaten-out confession, and execution in a Lubyanka cellar are a more likely outcome.
* * *
The time has budged. Kogan feels the second hand move haltingly toward 4:40. Another knock.
He gets out of bed, slips a robe over his striped pajamas, and puts on his slippers, realizing that this is the last time he will be allowed such luxuries. He walks up to the window first. Looking down, he sees the top of a Black Maria beneath a dim streetlight seven stories below.
“Should I jump? Does primum non nocere apply to my beloved self?”
No, jumps are melodramatic.
Kogan needs no spectators.
He opens the doctor’s bag, which he keeps on the bookcase, right in the middle, next to the anatomy volumes and the Dahl Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language.
Another knock, as time moves forth and as oblivion nears.
Kogan quickly opens the small stainless-steel case used to sterilize the syringe. He assembles the syringe, connecting the sixteen-gauge needle and inserting the plunger. Quickly, as he breaks the ampule, he looks around the apartment, pushes the plunger to squeeze out the extra air, finds the vein in his left forearm, and inserts the needle.
What are Dr. Kogan’s thoughts? Is he thinking of the revolution, his comrades in the guerrilla band, the enemy boys he mowed down beneath the Ural hills? And what about the war where his mission was to heal? Is Kogan visualizing the mountain of mangled limbs he had to amputate to save the soldiers’ lives? Is Kafka on his mind? Are poetry’s verbal pirouettes of any comfort?
His thoughts are in a massive vat, a very real vat, filled with formaldehyde. Inside are severed parts of unclaimed bodies taken from the morgues to train his students to dissect. He first encountered those floating limbs and torsos in the twenties, when his excitement about acquiring lifesaving skills and fear of professors didn’t let him take a pause and think of dignity in death.
He saw enough of that, and life which he desired he’d build anew. These severed parts didn’t torment him when he taught. You need cadavers if you are to learn to heal. This changed in June of 1952. With weeks to go before the loss of everything he worked for, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kogan thought he saw his own face on a severed head that stared at him from inside the vat.
The eyes weren’t vacant. Kogan thought he saw them blink.
* * *
Another knock, then another. It’s their play, they get to write it.
“I will withhold participation in the only way open to me. No, I will not give them the satisfaction of participation in public spectacles. I will not betray innocent colleagues at Pervaya Gradskaya.
“Do I say something? Do I look around for the last time? No, no time, no thoughts, a quick exit. I give the plunger a quick push. If the pain is intense, it’s really potassium. The burning sensation is indeed intense. They will be breaking the door about now.
“Of course, it’s potassium. What else can it be? Next, a quick, hard push on the plunger will stop the heart.”
“Otkroy zhe nakonetz, yob tvoyu mat’.” Kogan hears a familiar voice, pleading in Russian. Open the door at last, fuck your mother.
“Potz,” says Kogan in Yiddish, pulling the needle out of the vein. Prick.
* * *
Kogan opens the door and, instead of the Angel of Death, Komandir Levinson walks in in all his tall, stooped, gangly splendor.
He is wearing an ill-fitting, bloodstained uniform of an MVD lieutenant. With him none other than Friederich Robertovich Lewis, in the uniform of a private—except, of course, his face is now painted white. The poor devil looks like a cadaver.
No scenario Kogan can imagine includes seeing Levinson’s stooped frame in the blood-soaked tunic of an MVD lieutenant.
Squinting at the hallway lights, Kogan says in Yiddish: “Dos bist du.” So it’s you.
Suddenly, a wave of laughter erupts deep within his gut.
“We need your dacha,” whispers Levinson as he and Lewis step into the apartment.
“Akh ty yob tvoyu mat’,” says Kogan, through spasms of dull, deep, nearly silent laughter. Fuck your mother.
“You’d better button your overcoat, Comrade Komandir,” he adds. “Have you slit someone’s throat again?”
Levinson nods. “They came for me.”
So he did it, fought back. One should never underestimate the power of a stubborn son of a bitch.
“How many?”
“Three.”
“And the corpses, where are they?”
Levinson points downstairs, toward the courtyard.
“Is Dusya here?”
“I convinced her to leave me. What do you intend to do with the bodies?”
“Dacha,” says Levinson, extending his hand for the keys.
“I think I might as well come with you,” says Kogan. “I have a week. Fresh air will do me good.”
At 5:07 a.m., Levinson opens the back door of the Black Maria. “You will be traveling in the cage.”
After Kogan climbs into the cage, Lewis gets behind the wheel and Levinson in the passenger’s seat.
“I hope you don’t mind the company, Professor Kogan,” says Levinson, looking back through the bars as Kogan eases into the seat above the corpses.
“I do, to be honest. But it’s good practice.”
* * *
“Comrade Lewis!” Levinson calls out as the Black Maria passes by the Kazan Railroad Station.
“Present, komandir,” says Lewis, not looking up. The familiarity in his response verges on mockery.
LEVINSON: Comrade Lewis, what have you learned about our country over these past twenty-two years?
LEWIS: You are drunkards, brutes, barbarians. You have an exaggerated sense of duty and honor, which makes you reliable, and you are prone to messianic delusions, which makes you insufferable. Most of you cannot be counted among inhabitants of the world of real things. Am I missing anything?
LEVINSON: Where do I fit into this?
LEWIS: Not a drunkard, but the other things—yes.
KOGAN: I second that, Solomon. These comrades, whom you have offed, would concur also. Half of me wishes I saw that, the other half is glad I didn’t.
LEVINSON: I was speaking with Lewis. What have you learned specifically about our peculiar traditions of law enforcement, Comrade Lewis?
LEWIS: Law enforcement? Do you have that? Do you even have a genuine police function?
LEVINSON: Continue, Comrade Lewis, you are making a valuable point. What do we have instead of the police?
LEWIS: Do you have anything but terror?
LEVINSON: Excellent! Look at what we’ve done so far. I killed three MGB operatives. That’s three armed men. It was so easy. I am surprised it’s not done more often. We threw the corpses in the back of their Black Maria and drove through the center of Moscow, running every red light. We showed the MGB the corpses of their colleagues. And you, Comrade Lewis, were in whiteface through much of the operation. A badly done whiteface, at that.
LEWIS: Your point, komandir?
LEVINSON: I am not as far as the point, Comrade Lewis. Patience, please. Only questions for now. Here is another: In our country, what will happen if someone decides to break every law in the most flagrant ways imaginable? Comrade Kogan, would you like to answer this?
KOGAN: He will get far.
LEVINSON: I am still doing questions. Here is one more: What if, instead of resting on our laurels or crawling into a hole, we take this as far as we can?
LEWIS: Am I starting to hear a plan?
LEVINSON: I have been looking at our situation this way and that, and I see no way we can survive for more than a couple of weeks if things are left as they are. Even as stupid as they are, they will find us.
KOGAN: I concur, with obvious reluctance. Of course, this situation isn’t particularly significant in my case.
LEWIS: How can that be?
KOGAN: A competing life-limiting factor. Unrelated unpleasantness at the hospital. It’s complete idiocy. The Special Department wants me to make a preposterous public confession, name names, that sort of thing.
LEVINSON: Comrade Lewis, there is some chance that they will not learn about our connection. So this would be a good time for you to get back to your Siberia, dive under your desk, and pretend that nothing happened.
LEWIS: I thought of that, and I don’t believe it. It’s well known that I stay with you when I am in Moscow. Never thought I’d need to make it secret, so I didn’t.
LEVINSON: So you truly believe that you have nothing to lose? This is important.
LEWIS: Yes.
LEVINSON: I was hoping you would see it this way, because we could use you. You have a good strategic mind.
LEWIS: Use me for what?
LEVINSON: Patience! Not there yet! First, Kogan, am I to assume that you are up to trying something ambitious, something that may be our only hope?
KOGAN: Yes, you know my limitations. I don’t kill. Not anymore.
LEVINSON: Squeamish you’ve grown in your old age. Your hands will remain clean. What I do is my business.
Lewis, Kogan is a perfectionist in all of life’s endeavors. Since he has been a doctor much longer than he was a machine gunner, he may have indeed saved more lives than he has taken.
KOGAN: I hope so, Solomon. Do you believe you have reached the point where you can conclude your strategic onanism and tell us directly what your plan is?
LEVINSON: We are at that point, old goat. The plan is to escalate the process I have begun to its absolute furthest extreme. There is no point in halfway measures. They will not help us in the least. We must go for the top. The very top. Nothing less than a beheading will do.
KOGAN: Levinson, are you suggesting what I think you are suggesting?
LEVINSON: I think you understand correctly. Beheading … the top … eto odnoznachno. There is no way to misunderstand. You have to eliminate the root cause. How can I be more clear?
LEWIS: Beheading a specific individual or beheading the system?
LEVINSON: In our country, comrade, aren’t they one and the same?
KOGAN: Whom or what do you want us to behead, Solomon?
LEVINSON: Is something wrong with my diction?
KOGAN: Is something wrong with my hearing?
LEVINSON: Does it have to be one or the other?
KOGAN: Are you saying you want us to behead our beloved Iosif Vissarionovich?
LEVINSON: What other choice do we have?
KOGAN: You want us to behead the Great Stalin? The Genius of all Times and Nations?
LEVINSON: Was I so vague that you have to pester me with questions?
KOGAN: You are insane, but did we not know that?
This can’t be serious, Lewis concludes. Yet, Levinson’s demeanor suggests that it is, in fact, completely serious. He appears to be resolute, komandir-like. Unless, of course, he is acting.
“You scare me, gentlemen,” he says.
As a Soviet engineer, Lewis is trained to identify objective difficulties. These are daunting. How do you slip past thousands of soldiers of the MGB? How do you evade tanks, cannons, guard dogs, missiles, bombs? How do you get through the layers of defenses? How can you suggest such nonsense?
“How do we scare you, Mr. Lewis?” says Kogan. “Do you fear becoming an accessory to regicide?”
Is Kogan really getting involved in this insanity? Or is this the weirdest practical joke ever staged?
“No. Not that. Why would I give a shit about regicide? You know me better than that. I am just unable to tell whether you are genuine plotters or just two idiots.”