Have no doubt but that when there is a lack of vigilance, there will be subversion. Consequently, to eliminate sabotage, vigilance must be restored in our ranks.
Spartak, the ambulance driver, didn’t give a rip about Jesus, or Lazarus, or Yid doctors. He had read something about that in the newspapers, but thought it had nothing to do with him or any Jews he knew.
“I didn’t know Jesus Christ was a doctor,” he replied to Arkashka’s quip.
An Azeri, Spartak would have been a Muslim had he not been an atheist like Arkashka.
“Remember Lazarus? The dead guy he brought back? Now, that’s a doctor!”
“Was Lazarus a Jew also?”
“Good question, Spartakushka. Yes, I think so. Probably.”
“Would he have raised a dead Russian?”
“That’s an even better question, but it’s uncharted territory. To know conclusively, you would have needed to show him a dead Russian and a dead Jew and see which one he selected for raising.”
Arkashka let the train of thought develop silently in his mind, then burst out laughing.
“Or better, a group of dead Russians and a group of dead Jews…”
Arkashka paused again, letting the thought roll on in seclusion, then reported back, “There were no Russians two thousand years ago, we should note to be completely accurate. There were hunter-gatherers or some such, sitting in the trees, maybe, but in those dark, distant times, Yid doctors were already raising the dead!”
“You people are the best,” muttered Spartak.
Spartak didn’t see why this might be amusing, nor did he care, but he was glad to see Arkashka entertain himself. They were grunts from the front, frontoviki, members of a brotherhood, driving through nighttime Moscow with a siren on. It was a say-what-you-want situation. No politics in that ambulance.
Arkashka would have graduated at the top of his class, except for being nearly flunked by the idiot professor of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. He was unable to spew out a satisfactory analysis of Comrade Stalin’s latest work, Marksizm i Voprosy Yazykoznaniya. Marxism and Problems of Linguistics.
Arkashka had flubbed that course godlessly. He had no problem grasping Marx, Engels, and dialectical materialism. Even Lenin was mostly understandable when taken in small doses. But the words of Comrade Stalin made no sense at all, no matter how many sleepless nights he devoted to chewing them.
Besides, being a Jew in 1953, Arkashka was lucky to have any gig, and riding with the ambulance was more than good enough.
* * *
A maid wearing a dark blue dress and a light blue apron opened the door. She was a young woman, roughly Arkashka and Spartak’s age — late twenties, if that.
They walked through a big, cavernous hallway, Arkashka carrying his doctor’s bag, Spartak carrying a stretcher.
With the medic missing, they would both need to carry out the old woman to get her to the ambulance. Some doctors weren’t strong enough for this task, but Arkashka was fine. With no one shooting at you, with no land mines to trip, carrying out the sick seemed so easy that it felt like cheating.
Arkashka instantly grasped the incongruence of the situation.
“Why are we even here?” he asked himself, looking around. “These folks should be using the Kremlin hospital.” Theirs was a simple, regional ambulance, the kind that took care of stroked-out old ladies who had no admiral sons or Kremlin connections. Besides, at the Kremlin hospital they had a ventilator — American.
The maid opened the door to a large room, where a middle-aged man sat in a massive armchair in front of a bed, watching an old woman.
The man was wearing a white undershirt and uniform pants with a thick red stripe along the side, indicating that, even in his undershirt, he was an admiral. He was also wearing a black patent leather belt, the sort one would wear to review parades or have an audience in the Kremlin.
Arkashka knew the admiral’s name from front-line gossip. He had been in command during the defense of Leningrad. There, he deployed something called “the floating machine gun nests.” These were, essentially, rafts, each holding a machine gun and a hapless lone soldier or sailor. The rafts were anchored at various points in the Gulf of Finland, around the city. If a gunner saw the Germans, he was expected to open fire, thereby giving away his position, and since there was no way to escape, this led to certain death. These were literally floating coffins.
Arkashka reminded himself that he was no longer a grunt, no longer the guy who dragged maimed soldiers through the minefields. He was a Soviet physician and, virulent nonsense in the newspapers notwithstanding, he was proud of his rank.
The old woman lay on the bed, beneath a large painting of two deer by a stream. It would have been a peaceful scene, had it not been life-sized and framed in gold. The artist was German. Obviously, this was a “trophy” from the war. The admiral had to have commandeered a railroad car to get this monstrosity from Berlin to Moscow.
The armchair looked like another trophy, a throne grand enough for der Führer.
Arkashka nodded to the admiral but introduced himself to the patient, whose name he had seen on the complaint: “Ol’ga Petrovna, I am Dr. Arkady Kaplan. I am here to make you better.”
The patient was taking rapid, shallow breaths. She was disheveled, obviously dehydrated, unresponsive. Her mouth drooped on the left side, a sign of a past stroke. According to the call, the stroke occurred a year ago.
“Looks like she has been experiencing Cheyne-Stokes respiration for at least twenty-four hours, more likely forty-eight,” Arkashka estimated silently. “Almost certainly, she needs to be hospitalized — or, perhaps, it’s time to say good-bye.”
Spartak gently set down the stretcher and left the room. He would be called in later, to help carry the woman to the ambulance.
“Repeat your last name, young man,” ordered the admiral, and the combination of the tone of his voice and the smell of alcohol on his breath told Arkashka that this wasn’t going to go well.
After years as a medical student, Arkashka grew accustomed to being addressed formally, as vy. This man used the familiar, ty. This was a sign of contempt, which could only get worse after this man got to contemplate Arkashka’s last name. (It’s unlikely that non-Jewish Kaplans exist anywhere in the world.)
“Kaplan, Arkady Leonidovich,” Arkashka repeated. He gave his full name.
“Ot vashego brata ne ubezhish,” said the admiral. There is no escape from you.
Arkashka left this unanswered. “May I examine your mother, Comrade Admiral?”
Arkashka’s preferred way of dealing with ethnic slurs and other forms of insult was to ignore them. This is an accepted approach in the medical profession, because a doctor who is regularly insulted may eventually start to believe in his own inferiority.
Kogan called it a mind-fuck, mozgoyebaniye.
Self-confidence is a component of clinical judgment, and a doctor whose clinical judgment is compromised is harm waiting to happen. Kogan had been getting this nonsense throughout his career, and to protect his patients, he had completely desensitized himself to it.