After battles, Arkashka and his comrades crawled out of the trenches, dragging stretchers, looking for wounded Soviet soldiers. He had no training in medicine, but quickly became a master of applying tourniquets to near-severed limbs, whispering words of comfort to dying soldiers, making instant triage decisions, and identifying land mines and unexploded ordnance in pitch darkness.
He never carried a weapon. The stretcher, tourniquets, and medical supplies were load enough. Nobody cared what he did, and he felt cleaner without a gun. Whenever possible, Arkashka avoided wearing a helmet as well. It interfered with his ability to hear the moans of the wounded. The Germans didn’t hold fire when they knew medics were in the field, and neither did the Soviet Army. The chance that a new battle would start was always there.
His worst injury was a chipped tooth, a shrapnel wound from Stalingrad.
Often he came within a few meters of the Germans. When he got too close and was challenged, he was able to respond in a faux Bavarian accent. In German, his pronunciation was exemplary.
The orders were to bring back only the Soviet soldiers, but once he brought back a German medic, who had been shot once through the back, presumably by a Soviet sniper. There was something student-like about that young man. Arkashka couldn’t bear to leave him to bleed out in the mud. The medic was barely breathing by the time he dragged him in to the Soviet positions.
In his rucksack, the young man carried a separate waxed canvas bag that contained a copy of Der Process, by Franz Kafka, in German. A corner of the tome was blown off by a sniper’s bullet. The text survived for three reasons: (1) the medic kept the book in the rucksack, (2) the sniper’s bullet pierced the medic from the back, producing a crater-like exit wound in the abdomen, and (3) causing him to fall forward and bleed out into the snow. Had the medic been hit in the chest or the abdomen and fallen on his back, the blood would have surely destroyed Der Process in a manner Kafka would have appreciated.
Arkashka read that book in one sitting the next day. Realizing that a book this important must be passed on, he gave it to a surgeon he didn’t know well, but nonetheless trusted. He had to be careful, because the Special Department could have easily classified Der Process, a book in German, as Nazi propaganda, which would have resulted in an investigation, trial, and execution.
After the war, Arkashka abandoned his dreams of diplomacy and enrolled in the First Medical Institute. There, by a massive formaldehyde vat containing body parts, a professor of surgery greeted him with a proper military salute. Generally, colonels do not salute privates, but in this case rank was beside the point. They were civilians now.
This professor was none other than Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kogan, the army surgeon to whom Arkashka had entrusted a copy of Der Process.
They spent the evening drinking vodka at Kogan’s apartment on Ulansky Street. Frontoviki, men who were at the front, are a brotherhood. That night, they read their favorite passages from The Trial. For both men, these included the opening and the very end: Like a dog.
* * *
Five years later, on February 16, 1953, at around 3:47 a.m., an ambulance was summoned to the apartment of Admiral Pyotr Abrikosov on Frunzenskaya Embankment.
The complaint: the admiral’s seventy-eight-year-old mother, who was paralyzed on the right side a year ago, had become unresponsive.
On ordinary nights, the ambulance crew included a doctor, a driver, and a medic. However, the medic was ill, and only the doctor and the driver were available to make the call.
“Did you know that Jesus Christ was a Yid doctor?” asked Dr. Arkady Leonidovich Kaplan, the doctor on call, as the driver, Spartak Islamov, stepped on the gas pedal and lazily turned on the siren.
It took a man like Arkashka — someone who required neither a weapon nor a helmet at Stalingrad — to make a joke of this sort. A month ago, on January 13, the newspapers had reported arrests of top-ranking Soviet doctors, including many of the Kremlin doctors:
THE ARREST OF A GROUP OF KILLER DOCTORS
Some time ago, organs of state security uncovered a terrorist group of doctors who planned to shorten the lives of leading figures in the Soviet Union by harmful treatment.
Among members in this group were: Professor M. S. Vovsi, a therapist; Professor V. N. Vinogradov, a therapist; Professor M. B. Kogan, a therapist; Professor B. B. Kogan, a therapist; Professor P. I. Yegorov, a therapist; Professor A. I. Feldman, an otolaryngologist; Professor Y. G. Etinger, a therapist; Professor A. M. Grinstein, a neuropathologist; and I. Mairorov, a therapist.
Documents and investigations conducted by medical experts have established that the criminals — hidden enemies of the people — carried out harmful treatment on their patients, thereby undermining their health.
The investigation established that members of the terrorist gang, by using their position as physicians and betraying the trust of their patients, deliberately and maliciously undermined the health of the latter, intentionally ignored objective studies of the patients, made wrong diagnoses that were not suitable for the actual nature of their illnesses, and then, by incorrect treatment, killed them.
The criminals confessed that in the case of Comrade A. A. Zhdanov they wrongly diagnosed his illness, concealed his myocardial infarction, prescribed a regimen that was totally inappropriate to his grave illness, and in this way killed Comrade Zhdanov. The investigation established that the criminals also shortened the life of Comrade A. S. Shcherbakov, by incorrectly treating him with very potent medicines, putting him on a fatal regimen, and in this way brought on his death.
These criminal doctors sought primarily to ruin the health of leading Soviet military cadres, incapacitate them, and thereby weaken the defense of the country. They tried to incapacitate Marshal A. M. Vasilevskiy, Marshal L. A. Govorov, Marshal I. S. Konev, General of the Army S. M. Shtemenko, Admiral G. I. Levchenko, and others. However, their arrest upset their evil plans and the criminals were not able to achieve their aims.
It has been established that all these killer doctors, these monsters who trod underfoot the holy banner of science and defiled the honor of men of science, were in the pay of foreign intelligence services.
Most of the members of this terrorist gang were associated with the international Jewish bourgeois nationalistic organization “Joint,” created by American intelligence ostensibly to provide material aid to Jews in other countries. Actually, this organization, operating under the direction of American intelligence, carried out widespread espionage, terrorist, and other subversive activities in several countries, including the Soviet Union. Vovsi told the investigation that he had received a directive “to exterminate the foremost cadres in the USSR from the ‘Joint’ organization in the United States through Dr. Shimeliovich in Moscow and the Jewish bourgeois nationalist, Mikhoels.”
Another news report:
SPIES AND MURDERERS UNDER THE MASK OF DOCTORS
The unmasking of the band of doctor-poisoners dealt a shattering blow to the American-English instigators of war.
The whole world can now see once again the true face of the slave master — cannibals from the USA and England.
The bosses of the USA and their English “junior partners” know that success in ruling another country cannot be achieved by peaceful means. Feverishly preparing for a new world war, they urgently sent their spies into the rear of the USSR and into the countries of the People’s Democracy; they attempted to implement what the Hitlerites had failed to do — to create in the USSR their own subversive “fifth column.” […] It is also true that, besides these enemies, we still have another, namely, the lack of vigilance among our people.