According to the testimony of K. S, who spent some six months with Taube in the Norilsk prison camp, this is what happened that day: on the bus on Tver Boulevard, a man sat down beside Taube with whom he wanted to start a conversation; when the man realized Taube was a foreigner, he abruptly got up and changed his seat, mumbling some excuse. The manner in which he did this hit Taube like an electric current, like a sudden revelation. He got off at the next stop and wandered through the city until dawn.
For a week he didn’t leave his room on the third floor of the Lux, where his wife nursed him with tea and cough syrup. He emerged from this illness worn and looking much older, and he resolutely knocked on the door of Comrade Chernomordikov, who was in charge of personal matters. "Comrade Chernomotdikov,” he said in a hoarse, trembling voice, "I don't consider my stay in Moscow a vacation. I want to work." “Be patient a little while longer", said Chernomordikov enigmatically.
BETWEEN ACTS
The least-known period in the life of Dr. Taube, strange as it may seem, is the interval between his arrival in Moscow and his arrest a year later. Some records show that for a period of rime he worked for the International Trade Union, after which, at the intervention of Bela Kun (himself in disfavor), he worked as a journalist, then as a translator, and finally as a proofreader attached to the Hungarian section of the Comintern, It is also known that in August 1936 he resided in the Caucasus, where he had accompanied his wife, who had become ill. Ungvary states that it was tuberculosis, while K. S. claims that she was being treated "for nerves." If we accept the latter explanation (and much circumstantial evidence supports it), it points to the hidden and to us unknown spiritual suffering the Taubes experienced during this period. It is difficult to say whether it was a question of disillusionment or a foreboding of the imminent catastrophe. “I am convinced,” says K. S., "that for Beitz anything that was happening to him could not have had larger repercussions; he thought, as we all did, that it was a question of a slight misunderstanding relating to him personally, a misunderstanding that had nothing to do with the major and essential currents of history and that, as such, was entirely negligible.”
However, one seemingly trivial incident relating to Taube draws our attention: in late September a breathless young man with a cap pulled down over his eyes collided with Taube (who was returning from the print shop) so awkwardly that he knocked his glasses to the pavement; flustered, the young man apologized, and in his haste and confusion stepped on the glasses, smashed them to pieces, and then promptly disappeared.
Dr. Karl Taube, alias Kiril Beitz, was arrested fourteen days after this incident, on November 12, 1936, at 2:35 a.m.
THE BLUNT AX
If the roads of destiny were not so unpredictable in their complex architecture, where the end is never known but only sensed, one might say that, despite his horrible end, Karl Taube was born under a lucky star (provided our thesis is acceptable that, despite everything, the temporary suffering of existence is worth more than the final void of nothingness). For those who wanted to kill the revolutionary in Taube-both in Dachau and in distant Kolyma-did not want to, or could not, kill the physician in him, the miracle worker. Here we don't want to develop the heretical and dangerous thought that could be drawn from this example: that disease and its shadow, death, are, particularly in the eyes of tyrants, only the masks of the supernatural, and that doctors are magicians of a kind-all of which is the logical consequence of a particular view of life.
We know that toward the end of 1936 Dr. Taube spent some time in Murmansk prison camp, that he was sentenced to death, that the sentence was reduced to twenty years at hard labor, and that during the first months he went on a hunger strike because they had confiscated his glasses. And that's all. In the spring of 1941, we find him in a nickel mine in the far north. At that point he was wearing a white hospital coat and, like one of the righteous, visiting his numerous patients sentenced to slow death. Two operations had made him famous in the camp: one performed on his former torturer from Lubyanka, lieutenant Krichenko (now a prisoner), on whom he successfully operated when his appendix burst; and the other on a criminal whom they called Segidulin; of the four fingers Segidulin had cut with a blunt ax to free himself from the horrendous torture of the nickel mine, Taube saved two. The reaction of the former burglar was interesting. Having realized that his own surgical undertaking had been unsuccessful, he threatened Taube with a just punishment: to cut his throat. Only after another criminal, his bunkmate, had informed him of rumors about the pending rehabilitation of the socially acceptable (rumors that turned out to be true) did Segidulin change his mind and withdraw (at least temporarily) his solemn threat. He must have realized that in the practice of his profession as a thief those two fingers would come in handy.
TREATISE ON GAMES OF CHANCE
In the ever-growing testimonials about the hell of the Frozen Islands, documents describing the mechanism of games of chance are still rare; and I don’t mean the chances of life and death: the entire literature of the lost continent is actually nothing more than an enlarged metaphor of this Great Lottery in which winning is rare and losing the rule. It would be interesting for the modern researcher to study the relationship between these two mechanisms: while the wheel of the Great Lottery turned relentlessly, like the incarnate principle of a mythical and evil deity, the victims of this inexorable merry-go-round, driven by the spirit of an at once platonic and infernal imitatio, emulated the great principle of Chance: the bands of criminals under the flattering and privileged label of "socially acceptable” gambled through endless polar nights for anything they could; money, caps with ear flaps, boots, a bowl of soup, a piece of bread, a cube of sugar, a frozen potato, tobacco, a piece of tattooed skin (one's own or someone else's), a rape, a dagger, a life.
But the history of the prisoners' card games and games of chance in the new Atlantis remains unwritten. So it may be useful if I explain briefly (and according to Tarashchenko) some of the principles of these monstrous games-principles that in a way are interwoven with this story.
Tarashchenko cites the numerous ways of gambling among the criminals he observed during the ten years he spent in various regions of the sunken world (mostly in Kolyma), of which the least bizarre is perhaps the one played with lice-a game very similar to the one played in warmer regions with flies: a cube of sugar is placed in front of each player, then everyone waits in grave silence for a fly to land on one of the cubes and so determine the winner and loser, as previously agreed. The lice have the same role, except that the bait here is the player himself, without any artificial props except the stench of his own body and "a lucky break." That is, of course, if it’s luck that's involved. For very often the person to whom the louse crawled had the unpleasant duty of cutting the throat of whomever the winner marked as the victim. Equally interesting is the list of prisoners' games and their iconography. Although during the 1940’s it was no longer a rarity to see a real deck of cards (stolen or bought from outsiders) in the hands of criminals, nevertheless, says Tarashchenko, the most popular way of gambling was with a handmade (and of course marked) deck, made out of pieces of glued-together newspaper. All kinds of games of chance were played, from the simplest, like skat, poker, and blackjack, to a kind of secret Tarot.
THE DEVIL
The Devil or the Mother represents a whole symbolic coded language very similar to the Marseilles Tarot. It is interesting, however, that the hardened criminals, those with longer prison experience, used the handmade cards for another kind of communication: often, instead of using words, they would pick up a card and suddenly, as if by an order, a knife would flash, blood would spill. We have further learned, from the explanation given by a murderer whose confidence had been gained, that the medieval iconography of those cards was mixed with some elements of Eastern and ancient Russian symbolism. In the commonest variation, the number of cards was reduced to twenty-six.