High-placed officials liked to stop at the hospital. They could always find quarters, and there was no shortage of food, liquor, and relaxation.
Major-General Derevyanko donned a white coat and strolled from one ward to another to stretch his legs before dinner. The major-general was in a good mood, and Vinokurov decided to take a chance.
‘I have a prisoner here who has performed an important service for the state.’
‘What sort of service is that?’
The head of the hospital explained roughly what a blind was.
‘I want to request that he be granted an early release.’
The major-general asked about the prisoner’s background, and when he heard the answer, he grunted.
‘The only thing that I can tell you,’ the major-general said, ‘is that you should forget about any blinds, and send this engineer… Korneev…’
‘Kipreev, sir.’
‘That’s right, Kipreev. Ship him off to where his papers say he should be.’
‘Yes, sir.’
A week later Kipreev was sent off, and in another week the X-ray machine broke down, so that he had to be recalled to the hospital.
It was no joking matter now, and Vinokurov lived in fear of the major-general’s anger. He would never believe that the X-ray machine had broken down. Kipreev’s papers were again prepared for him to be sent off, but he fell ill and remained.
It was now utterly impossible for him to return to the X-ray laboratory. He realized this quite clearly.
Kipreev had mastoiditis; he had picked up the inflammation from sleeping on a camp cot. His condition was critical, but no one wanted to believe his temperature or the reports of the doctors. Vinokurov raged and demanded that the operation be performed as soon as possible.
The hospital’s best surgeons prepared to perform Kipreev’s mastoidectomy. The surgeon, Braude, was virtually a specialist in mastoidectomies. There were more than enough colds in Kolyma, and Braude had had the experience of performing hundreds of such operations. But Braude was only the assistant. Novikov, a well-known otolaryngologist and a student of Volchek, had worked for Far Eastern Construction for many years, and she was to perform the operation. Novikov had never been a prisoner nor was she after the hardship pay (commonly referred to as ‘the long ruble’), but there, in Kolyma, she was not condemned for her entrenched alcoholism. After her husband’s death, this talented and beautiful woman had wandered for years about the Far North. She would begin things brilliantly but then would lose control for weeks on end.
Novikov was about fifty, and there was no one more qualified than she. At this moment she was dead drunk, but she was coming out of it, and the head of the hospital allowed Kipreev’s operation to be held up for a few days.
Novikov sobered up, her hands stopped shaking, and she performed Kipreev’s operation brilliantly. It was a parting gift, a purely medical gift to her former X-ray technician. Braude assisted her, and Kipreev recuperated in the hospital.
Kipreev realized that there was nothing left to hope for and that he would not be kept in the hospital for even one extra hour.
A numbered camp waited for him, where convicts walked in rows of five, elbow to elbow, with thirty dogs surrounding a column of prisoners.
Even in this hopeless state Kipreev did not betray himself. The head of the ward prescribed a special diet for the convict-engineer recovering from a mastoidectomy, a serious operation. Kipreev declared that there were many patients more seriously ill than he among the ward’s three hundred patients and that they had a greater right to a special diet.
And they took Kipreev away.
For fifteen years I searched for engineer Kipreev and finally dedicated a play to his memory – an effective way of guaranteeing a man’s involvement with the nether world.
But it was not enough to write a play about Kipreev and dedicate it to his memory. A woman friend of mine was sharing an apartment in the center of Moscow, and it wasn’t until she got a new neighbor through an ad in the paper that I finally found Kipreev.
The new woman came out of her room to become acquainted with her neighbors and saw the play dedicated to Kipreev. She picked it up: ‘The initials are the same as those of a friend of mine. But he’s not in Kolyma; he’s in a different place.’ My friend phoned me. I refused to continue the conversation. It was an error. Besides, in the play the hero is a doctor. Kipreev was a physical engineer.
‘That’s right, a physical engineer.’
I got dressed and went to see my friend’s new neighbor.
Fate weaves complex patterns. Why? Why did the will of fate have to be so clearly demonstrated by this series of coincidences? We seek each other little, but fate takes our lives in her hands.
Engineer Kipreev was alive in the Far North. He had been released ten years earlier. Before that, he had been brought to Moscow and had worked in secret camps. When he was released, he returned to the North. He wanted to remain there until he reached pension age.
Engineer Kipreev and I met.
‘I’ll never be a scientist – just an ordinary engineer. How could I return, stripped of all my rights and ignorant of what has happened in my field? The people I studied with are all laureates of various prizes.’
‘But that’s nonsense!’
‘No, it’s not nonsense. I breathe easier in the North. And I’ll continue breathing easier right up to my pension.’
Mister Popp’s Visit
Mr Popp was director of an American firm that was installing gasholders in the initial construction phase of the Berezniki Chemical Factory. It was a large order, the work was going well, and the vice-president considered it essential to be present in person when the equipment was to be turned over to its new owners.
Various firms were participating in the construction of the factory. Granovsky, the construction director, called it a capitalist international. The Germans were installing Hanomag boilers; the English firm Brown & Bovery was building the steam engines; and the Americans were installing the gasholders. The Germans were behind schedule; later this was declared to be sabotage. At the Central Power Station, the English were also behind schedule; later this too was declared to be sabotage.
At the time I was working at the Central Power Station, and I remember well the arrival of Mr Holmes, chief engineer of the firm Babcock & Wilcox. Holmes was met by Granovsky at the train station, but instead of going to his hotel, the English engineer went straight to where the boilers were being installed. One of the English installers helped Holmes out of his coat and gave him some working clothes, and Holmes spent three hours in the boiler listening to the mechanic’s explanations. That evening there was a conference. He responded to all the comments and reports with one short word which the interpreter rendered as: ‘Mr Holmes is not concerned with that.’ Nevertheless, Holmes spent about two weeks at the factory, and the boiler began to function at twenty percent of planned capacity. Granovsky signed a report to that effect, and Holmes flew back to London.
A few months later the boiler’s output began to diminish, and a Soviet engineer, Leonid Ramzin, was called in for consultation. Ramzin had been arrested and tried for conspiracy to overthrow the government. He had been sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to ten years’ imprisonment with confiscation of property. While serving his sentence, Ramzin was allowed to continue work on the development of a new water-tube boiler which he had designed in 1930, and he was also frequently called on as a consultant. His trial had attracted a lot of attention in the newspapers. Ramzin had not yet been released, had not yet received the Order of Lenin or the Stalin Prize. All that was to come later, but Ramzin already knew about it and conducted himself in a quite independent fashion at the power station. He didn’t arrive alone, but with a companion whose appearance was singularly revealing. When Ramzin was done, the man left with him. Ramzin did not crawl into the boiler as Mr Holmes had done but sat in the office of the station’s technical director, Kastenner, who had also been exiled and sentenced for sabotage in the mines of Kizel.