Where is the borderline, in times such as ours, between the normal and the sick? M. and I thought about the same things, but with him they assumed a tangible quality: he not only thought about them, but saw in his mind's eye what they could lead to. He would wake me during the night to say that Akhmatova had been arrested and was at that moment being taken for questioning. "Why do you think so?" I asked. "I just do." Walking round Cherdyn, he would look for her corpse in the ravines. Of course it was madness, but once I had recovered from the torpor that had come over me in the train, I too couldn't sleep at night for wondering which of our friends had already been arrested and what they would be accused of—they would be lucky if the charge was only failure to denounce us, but there was nothing that couldn't be pinned on them. The real madness would have been to believe that the interrogator had meant it when he said he was not going to "proceed with the case." To be so trusting could even be despicable: I remembered, for instance, how I had recoiled from Adalis when she told me how she had been summoned for questioning about one of her husbands and, believing everything the interrogator said, at once disowned him, even though he was totally innocent.
Was I sick when I lay awake during those nights, imagining the way in which all my friends were being questioned and tortured, even if such tortures were as yet only psychological, or at least left no traces on the body? No, there was nothing sick about this—any normal person in my place would have tormented himself with similar thoughts. Who of us has never pictured himself in the office of the interrogator? Who of us has never thought up answers to the questions he might be asked? Not for nothing did Akhmatova write these lines:
There, behind the barbed wire,
In the very heart of the dense taiga
They take my shadow for questioning. . . .
M. was, of course, a person of unusual sensitivity who was more vulnerable to psychological damage than others, and always reacted very strongly to external stimuli. But does one need to be all that hypersensitive to be broken by this life of ours?
When I asked that M. be examined by a specialist, the woman doctor refused point blank to arrange it. Her reply reminded me of Osip's "it's against the rules." When I persisted, she avoided talking with me and used bad language. At last she broke down and said: "What do you expect me to do? They're always in this state when they come 'from there.' "
With my old-fashioned view of things I thought it was wrong— indeed criminal—to exile a person suffering from hallucinations, and I denounced the doctor as a murderess because of her indifference. But I soon noticed that the bearded peasants did not think so badly of her. "There's no sense in badgering her," one of them said. "What can she do? Nothing at all." When I asked them what she was like, they said she was "no worse than anybody else." There are indeed circumstances in which it is not possible to display high moral qualities. When I'd seen more of her, I realized that she was just an ordinary country doctor. Unluckily for her, she had come to a place where they sent people "from there," and she was thus forced to have constant dealings with the secret police and act "on instructions." She had learned to hold her tongue and not to disobey orders. Day after day she changed the pus-covered bandages of the peasants, shouting and cursing at them, but at least doing her best for them. And she gave me a good piece of advice: not to try and have M. sent to Perm for a medical examination, or to put him in a clinic. "People get over this, but in one of those places he'd be done for—you know what they're like." I took her advice and it was as well I did so: people really do get over "it." But I would like to know what its medical name is, why it affects so many people held for interrogation, and what conditions "inside" make it so widespread. I repeat that M. was unusually sensitive and may have been prone to mental illness, but I was struck not so much by it having happened to him as by everybody telling me how commonplace this sickness was. People who had known the Czarist jails, which were scarcely distinguished by their humaneness, confirmed my suspicion that prisoners held out much better and kept their sanity a great deal more easily in those days.
Many years later, in a train traveling east, I happened to share a compartment with a young woman doctor who had the same kind of bad luck as the one in Cherdyn: she had been assigned to a hospital in a labor camp. Times were not now so terrible—this was in 1954— and the girl started to tell me her troubles: How could she get out of it? It was more than flesh and blood could stand. "The worst is that you're helpless. What sort of doctors are we? We say and do what we're told." By this time I knew only too well that no doctor dares to show independence and is all too often forced to go against his conscience, though some are not even aware of breaking the Hippo- cratic oath when they refuse to give certificates of illness or disability. But what's the point of picking on the doctors? We all do only what we are told. We all act "on instructions," and there is no sense in closing our eyes to the fact.
18 Professional Sickness
I
imagine that for a poet auditory hallucinations are something in the nature of an occupational disease.
As many poets have said—Akhmatova (in "Poem Without a Hero") and M. among them—a poem begins with a musical phrase ringing insistently in the ears; at first inchoate, it later takes on a precise form, though still without words. I sometimes saw M. trying to get rid of this kind of "hum," to brush it off and escape from it. He would toss his head as though it could be shaken out like a drop of water that gets into your ear while bathing. But it was always louder than any noise, radio or conversation in the same room.
Akhmatova told me that when "Poem Without a Hero" came to her, she was ready to try anything just to get rid of it, even rushing to do her washing. But nothing helped. At some point words formed behind the musical phrase and then the lips began to move. The work of a poet has probably something in common with that of a composer, and the appearance of words is the crucial factor that distinguishes it from musical composition. The "hum" sometimes came to M. in his sleep, but he could never remember it on waking. I have a feeling that verse exists before it is composed (M. never talked of "writing" verse, only of "composing" it and then copying it out). The whole process of composition is one of straining to catch and record something compounded of harmony and sense as it is relayed from an unknown source and gradually forms itself into words. The last stage of the work consists in ridding the poem of all the words foreign to the harmonious whole which existed before the poem arose. Such words slip in by chance, being used to fill gaps during the emergence of the whole. They become lodged in the body of the poem, and removing them is hard work. This final stage is a painful process of listening in to oneself in a search for the objective and absolutely precise unity called a "poem." In his poem "Save My Speech," the last adjective to come was "painstaking" (in "the painstaking tar of hard work"). M. complained that he needed something more precise and spare here, in the manner of Akhmatova: "She knows how to do it." He seemed to be waiting for her help.