Old Men at Midnight Read online

  The day I first heard that rumor, I was interrogating a Jewish doctor. “When did you enter the espionage service of the Americans?” I shouted at him. He was a small, slightly built man in his sixties, an eminent cardiologist, and he sat before me, bewildered and trembling. “Who recruited you? Who are your collaborators? We have all the proof against you that we need. We can make you confess to anything. Your life is hanging by a thread. You had better come to the correct conclusions.” We had lowered the heat. It was cold in the room; he sat naked to the waist and shivering. “You are destroying my health,” he murmured. “And for no reason.” He took the pen and paper I gave him and began to write down all his contacts with enemies of the people. “You won’t need to invent anything for your trial,” I told him. “We’ll provide you with every sentence of your testimony. You’ll have to memorize it. Your case will be ready in a month, at most two.” I let him put on his shirt.

  Later I was in the elevator with an old friend, and he whispered to me the names of those who had already signed the letter to Comrade Stalin. A famous novelist, a violinist, a historian, a physicist. All Jews, of course. There would be many more, he said.

  That night I asked my driver to take me to an apartment building where one of my women friends lived. He left me in front of the building and drove off with a grin on his face. I waited in the entrance hall until he was gone, then took the Metro to one of the Moscow railway stations. The huge station was crowded. I bought a ticket to a suburban stop and boarded the train. It was jammed with weary-looking, expressionless people heavily bundled against the cold. The train rolled out of the station and along the rail yards and after a while I saw the freight trains through the windows, silent and sealed, lining the side tracks for miles. I got off at a stop and took the next train back to Moscow. Another Metro ride brought me to a different railway station. Again the freight trains standing deep in old snow, waiting. I did that two more times. By then I was very tired. It had begun to snow again. I waded through drifts, my face raked by the crystalline flakes, and later sat in a drunken stupor and heard the knocking on my apartment door and did not get up to answer it.

  In the last week of February one of our agents, an old friend, returned from the east and told me over dinner and vodka of the camps he had heard were being constructed in the desert region of Kazakhstan—a vast flat lunar wasteland—and all along the rail line to distant Birobidzhan. “They’re all waiting for the Jews,” he said, quite drunk but instinctively careful to talk in a low voice. “But don’t worry, not you,” he added, patting my arm. “You’re one of us.”

  Later that night I walked through the elegant marble entrance hall of my apartment building and instead of going up the elevator went on ahead and took the stairway down to the basement. At the end of the long, dimly lit corridor was the office of the building committee, its door closed. The lock presented no difficulty. I opened drawers, scanned lists, and after a few minutes found what I had come for: a new list for the local police of the Jewish families in the building. My name was not on the list.

  Carefully, I replaced the list and locked the door.

  The next day I asked to see Doctor-Prisoner Rubinov.

  “What the hell for?” Colonel Rudenko, his interrogator, asked, immediately and understandably suspicious.

  “He was the one who saved my arm.”

  “You’re going to kiss his ass?”

  “A visit for old times’ sake.”

  “Stubborn piece of shit. Get him to sign his confession and I’ll owe you a big favor.”

  I went through the building and down many flights of stairs and through dimly lit corridors and past many guards. A guard let me into the cell and closed the door behind me. The flesh on the back of my neck crawled as the door slammed shut. Odd thoughts entered my mind: Comrade Stalin has never seen the inside of one of these cells; Comrade Stalin has never visited a labor camp. I stood blinking in the light shed by a single bulb in the tiny cell. Stone floor, bare walls. A single bucket. The cold air reeking of urine and feces. No windows; nothing on which to lie down. An icy tomb.

  Near one of the walls sat an old man, naked to the waist. He wore loose gray begrimed trousers with no belt and battered black shoes with no laces. On the lower part of his gray-white wrinkled face was a short disheveled white beard. Gold-rimmed glasses lay crookedly over his large dark-rimmed eyes, both earpieces bent. His hair was thin, scraggly, white. I could see the ugly welts on his arms and ankles. The bones of his chest and shoulders and rib cage protruded grotesquely: sticks trying to push through the drum-tight cover of dry, yellowish skin. He looked starved, shrunken. He sat hunched over, shivering, his head between his shoulders, moving his hands slowly through the air, thumbs and forefingers extended. I watched him and realized after a moment that his hands were performing a tremulous dance with invisible instruments, vague echoes of operating-room procedures: cutting, snipping, swabbing, cleansing, suturing. Then he stopped and lowered his hands and slowly, tremblingly, ran the digit finger of his right hand over the tips of each finger of his left hand, touching them lightly in a flickering caress. He ran his fingers back and forth across his palms, closing his eyes and then opening them as he raised his hands and his fingers began again the surgeon dance.

  I said quietly, “Comrade Doctor Rubinov?”

  He ignored me and went on swabbing, cleansing, suturing.

  I said again, “Comrade Doctor Pavel Rubinov?”

  He looked up at me then, blinked, narrowed his blurred, unfocused eyes, and turned away.

  I could not recognize him at all.

  He sat there moving his hands in that surgeon dance, now murmuring something in a reedlike voice. A vile smell began to rise from him. He sat in a slowly widening puddle of water, waving his sticklike fingers through the air and moving his dry, caked lips. It took a moment longer before I realized he was reciting a Psalm. “O God, do not be silent; do not look aloof; do not be quiet, O God,” he murmured in Hebrew.

  I got to my feet and banged on the door and the guard came and let me out.

  “What is he on?” I asked.

  “They put scopolamine in his potatoes.”

  I nodded. The drug would keep him sedated, close to a hypnotic state. I returned to my office and some time later checked out of the building.

  I was with a woman that night and we both got drunk and I didn’t return to the apartment until after two. I switched on a lamp and sank into an easy chair. Slowly, the room began to spin. The lamp flared, dimmed, brightened, burned steadily. There were deep blue and purple shadows in the corners of the room near the desk and the windows. I owned a few books, mostly cheap novels, and many inexpensive reproductions of old Russian paintings of horses and some statuettes of horses and a large reproduction on very good paper of a painting by Degas of horses racing, their jockeys urging them on. Sitting in the easy chair, I thought I saw the Degas horses actually moving, and quickly shut my eyes. Drunk. I was drunk. And frightened. And angry.

  I opened my eyes, startled.

  Someone had tapped on the apartment door. There was a brief silence and then, again, the tapping. One two three four.

  Dazed, I rose to my feet and went to the door.

  I saw only the blue-black darkness.

  I stood staring into the darkness and reached out to it and touched it and felt the cold, hollow night emptiness of all the hallways in this enormous building and stepped back and closed the door. The lock clicked loudly into place. I switched off the living-room lamp and went into the bedroom, turned on the lamp near my bed, got into pajamas, quickly washed, and lay in the bed gazing at the wall opposite me, on which hung a large oil painting by a Ukrainian artist of a Russian village. A small village, with a wide dirt road running through it and peasant houses on both sides. Fields and a forest and a pond. A blue sky. Horses feeding in the fields, chickens and piglets playing on the road. No church, no synagogue. It was the only original work of art I owned. Inexpensive. Bought during the thirties w
hen Razumkov, then still a colonel, had sent me to the Ukraine to assist in the purge of some local intelligentsia. An ordinary village. Except for the missing church and synagogue, it resembled closely the village of my early life.

  I lay there looking at the painting and must have fallen asleep with the lamp still on and woke groggily to turn it off. As I reached for it, I heard again the knocking on my apartment door and nearly jumped with terror.

  It ceased, and then came again: one two three four. Knuckles or fingers rapping on the door. I put on slippers and padded out of the bedroom and switched on the living-room lamp on my way to the door.

  The corridor was a dense blue-black void. I downed some vodka and switched off the lamp and went to bed.

  The next day a number of men in our various departments did not report in. We knew better than to ask about them. It meant more work for everyone. We were preparing for the trial of the doctors.

  I went to the infirmary. “A kidney infection,” said the doctor. “Nothing to worry about.” He gave me a liquid medicine named after one of the Jewish doctors in our prison. No order had come down to change the name on the bottle.

  Later that day I saw Doctor-Prisoner Pavel Rubinov again. He had confessed to nothing, signed nothing. He sat shivering in his urine, leaning his skeletal body against the stone wall and murmuring inaudibly.

  “Cover their faces with shame,” I said quietly as I stood in the cell looking at him. “May they be disgraced and doomed forever.”

  Day after day we waited to see who among us would pay for our lack of vigilance, for our not having detected in time the terrorist organization of doctors.

  Suddenly, in the last week of February, there were no more orders for additional arrests. We sat in our offices, walked through the corridors, rode up and down the elevators, ate in the dining room—in an atmosphere thick with fear and silence.

  The minister was nowhere to be seen, could not be reached by phone.

  One afternoon I came upon General Razumkov in a corridor. His face was white, the rolls of fat on his neck quivered. He said nothing to me.

  I sat at my desk on the first day of March, a snowstorm raging outside my window, and read carefully through the day’s Pravda—and saw no mention of doctor-poisoners. For the first time in months. Not a word. I looked through the newspaper again and then put it down and sat staring at it. Murmurous voices filled the air and I felt my flesh crawling. I looked quickly around and saw I was alone.

  Nor was there anything in Pravda about doctor-poisoners during the days that followed. Work in our department seemed to have come to a stop. As I sat reading Pravda in my office one morning, the phone rang. General Razumkov wanted to see me. Immediately.

  We were alone in his office. He spoke quickly, tensely, without preliminaries. “Stalin croaked. A stroke. Our old boss is back.”

  I stood there gaping at him. The room whirled. Outside his window the freezing air seemed crowded with faces peering in, listening.

  “Start cleaning up the doctors.”

  I found myself standing outside his office and taking in great gulps of air. My left arm tingled and throbbed, its muscles in spasm.

  A great gulf of terror opened before me. Stalin is dead! What will happen to the Motherland?

  Anarchy!

  The world will devour us!

  Then, slowly, came composure. And a soaring elation.

  Stalin was dead!

  “Start cleaning up the doctors,” General Razumkov had ordered.

  That meant we would soon be releasing them!

  I went along corridors and down dim stairways, rushing now, ignoring the thunder in my head and heart and the pain in my arm, and discovered that Doctor Pavel Rubinov had died during the night.

  In the weeks that followed I found that he had entered me and become a permanent dweller in my memory. It was as if memory were a large hotel and he resided in one of its better rooms. He would emerge often and I would see him not as he was in his prison cell but as he had been in Petrograd during the war: a tall, trim man with a kind face, a short reddish beard, and pale-blue eyes covered by thin round gold-rimmed glasses.

  I would hear him say, “Tomorrow I will try again to clean the wound. One last time.”

  And, “We will proceed slowly and with care, and we will try to save your arm.”

  And, “The hand is a marvelous creation, a thing of surpassing complexity and perfection. Of all the parts of the body, nothing so fascinates me as the hand.”

  And, “I have here a book of Hebrew prayers. Is it possible you might teach me how to pronounce the letters and the vowels?”

  My memories of Doctor Pavel Rubinov would not fade. I see and hear him often to this day.

  Various rumors drifted our way about how the Dark Tyrant had died. One described a drunken party at his dacha with a few of his cronies, after which he had lost consciousness; another, a meeting of the Politburo—or Presidium, as we now called it—when the normally submissive members had strongly and unexpectedly opposed his plan to deport the Jews, and he became so enraged his eyes rolled and he collapsed.

  All the great Kremlin doctors who might have saved his life were in prison.

  The second-rate doctors who were called arrived, diagnosed a stroke, and said there was little they could do. He was still breathing but could not talk. At one point he raised his left hand and pointed it accusingly at those gathered around him.

  Then he began to suffocate.

  His face slowly turned dark, his lips blackened. It took him hours to die.

  Our minister, we were told, did a little dance around his body. “We are free!” he cackled. “The tyrant is dead! Rejoice!”

  Another Politburo member had the final word. He said, “Tonight, the mice have buried the cat.”

  They embalmed him. He lay in public view in the Hall of Columns, waxen, mummified. Millions came to his funeral. Hundreds were crushed to death. We had our security troops everywhere. One of the pallbearers was his son, who was drunk. I saw him up close; he kept drinking from a flask and openly cursing our minister.

  The next day I drove past the Hall of Columns. Workmen were taking down the huge painting of Stalin that had covered the facade of the building. One of the workers released the ropes too quickly and the face tumbled into the street below. They seemed in no hurry to retrieve it.

  Our borders, some will insist, were everywhere tightly sealed. But do you know how many times I went back and forth across borders—crawling, sliding, cutting, running—in the two wars in which I fought during my life? In a time of war, one must necessarily act quickly. But in a time of peace, one makes a plan; one waits with patience. A year, two, five. And then one moves. And trusts to skill and luck.

  I could not figure out all the maneuverings that went on in our Politburo during the months that followed the death of the Dark Tyrant. The arrested doctors were ordered to speak to no one about their time with us and were sent home. Doctor Pavel Rubinov was buried in a Moscow Jewish cemetery. I attended his funeral, observing from a discreet distance. A cold day in March. I heard as if from another time a bearded old man chanting the Kaddish and then reciting a Psalm. Icy winds blew among the silent gravestones.

  The fever and headaches came and went. None of the staff doctors seemed to know what was wrong with me. I didn’t want to see a Jewish doctor privately. That may have been foolish of me, but I felt too ashamed.

  General Razumkov had clearly taken me under his wing, and I couldn’t figure out why. He would smile at me, wink, poke me in the ribs, share with me his vulgar jokes and political stories, slip me confidential information. After many weeks of conversations and allusions, I began to understand that my interrogation of Doctor Koriavin had been so successful that he had spent almost no time at all on the “conveyor” before confessing, signing, offering names. He had then remarked repeatedly to his interrogators and to General Razumkov that his acquiescence was entirely due to my interrogation. I had convinced him of the wisdom of
yielding, he said. Apparently, that had saved General Razumkov’s head, which had been on the verge of being cut off because of our negligence and the slow pace of the investigation. I could not figure out what Doctor Koriavin had had in mind. Unless he knew how near the Dark Tyrant was to the end. And with all the doctors he had named now locked up, there would be no one of sufficient skill around to tend to him, pull him through so he could wreak another two or three years of havoc, murder thousands more. And why not reward me for the charades we had played, for sparing him pain? Maybe. But I have never been able to figure it out.

  The Moscow weather slowly turned warm. General Razumkov’s glee increased with every passing day. He put on more weight. “Our man might be the next Boss,” he said to me one day in his office. “You know what that means for me, for you.” His porcine features flushed and quivered with anticipation. I thought he would do a little dance around his desk. It astounded me, how closely he had linked our two destinies.

  In the late spring, warnings started to come in from our agents in East Germany that there could be trouble there during the summer: demonstrations of dissatisfied workers and maybe riots.

  Our minister, the possible future Boss of the Motherland, who was responsible to the Politburo for the stability of East Germany, immediately ordered up a security police team and put General Razumkov in charge.

  It surprised no one that the general insisted I accompany him.

  “If we do this right, it puts him in the front seat,” he said to me, barely able to contain himself. He was talking, of course, about our minister. “And if we put him in the front seat, you know what he’ll owe us? You’ll make general. I’ll see to that myself.”

  The flight to East Germany was tedious. Razumkov sat next to me, drunk on vodka and eager to get started breaking German heads. We would be purging the Party, smashing secret nests of workers. Nothing we hadn’t done many times before. I had no compunctions about tearing into the Germans. It was only eight years since the end of the war.