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.”