Shalamov - SHOCK THERAPY

 SHOCK THERAPY

EVEN IN that distant blissful period when Merzliakov worked as a stableman and was able, by using a homemade grinder cobbled together from an old tin can with holes in the bottom to make a sieve, to make flaked grain fit for human consumption from the oats that were provided for the horses, and thus cook porridge, a bitter hot gruel that suppressed and reduced his hunger, he was pondering one simple question. The big draft horses brought in from the mainland were given a government oats ration every day which was twice what the squat, shaggy Yakut ponies got, although the draft horses pulled no more than the ponies. Thunder, the monstrous Percheron, had as much oats poured into his trough as five Yakut ponies could eat. This was justifiable, it was done everywhere, and that was not what tormented Merzliakov. He couldn’t understand why the human rations in the camp, the mysterious prescription of proteins, fats, vitamins, and calories destined to be swallowed by prisoners and called the “pot sheet,” were drawn up with absolutely no consideration of people’s live weight. If they were to be treated as beasts of burden, then questions of rations should be dealt with more logically, instead of observing some terrible mathematical average or bureaucratic whim. At best this terrible average would benefit only the lightweights, and in fact those who weighed less took longer than the others to become goners. Merzliakov had a constitution like that of Thunder, the Percheron, and that pathetic breakfast of three spoonfuls of porridge only increased the nagging pain in his stomach. Yet a workman in a brigade could get almost nothing in addition to his ration. The most precious items—butter, sugar, and meat—were never added to the pot in the quantity prescribed by the pot sheet. There were other things that Merzliakov had seen: tall people were the first to die. Being inured to heavy labor made absolutely no difference. An intellectual weakling still held out longer than a giant from Kaluga, where tilling the earth was in the blood, if they received the same food, in accordance with camp rations. There was not much advantage in increasing your ration by exceeding the production norm by a percentage either, because the basic prescription was unchanged and still did not match the needs of tall men. If you wanted to eat better, you had to work better; but if you wanted to work better, you had to eat better. Everywhere, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians were the first to die. They were the first to become goners, which always led the doctors to remark that the Baltic peoples were weaker than the Russians. True, the living standards of the Latvians and Estonians were far higher than those of the camps, or even of the Russian peasant, so they found things harder. But the main cause lay elsewhere: they weren’t less tough, they were just taller.

About eighteen months earlier, after an attack of scurvy, which quickly knocked out anyone new to the camps, Merzliakov was given a job as a temporary nurse in the tiny local hospital. He saw there that medicines were dispensed in doses according to the patient’s weight. New medicines were tested on rabbits, mice, or guinea pigs, and human doses were determined by calculating body weight. Children’s doses were less than adult doses.

But the camp rations were not calculated according to the weight of the human body. This was, then, the wrong answer to the question that astonished and worried Merzliakov. But before he became hopelessly weak, he managed by some miracle to get a stableman’s job, where he could steal the horses’ oats and stuff his own stomach with them. Merzliakov was already thinking he could get through the winter and then face whatever was coming. But things worked out differently. The stable manager was dismissed for drunkenness, and a senior stableman was promoted. He was one of the men who had shown Merzliakov how to use a tin can to make porridge oats. The senior stableman had himself been something of an oats thief and knew perfectly well how it was done. He now felt the need to ingratiate himself with his bosses, and he no longer needed any oat flakes. He therefore personally sought out and destroyed all the homemade grinders. People started roasting, boiling, and eating oats, husk and all, treating their stomachs as if they were horses. The new manager wrote a report to the authorities. Several stablemen, including Merzliakov, were put in solitary confinement for stealing oats and then sent from the stables back to where they had come from: ordinary manual labor.

•

Doing manual labor, Merzliakov soon realized that death was imminent. He staggered under the weight of the beams he had to drag around. The foreman took a dislike to the idle bruiser (“bruiser” is what they called anyone tall in the camp) and always put Merzliakov “under the butt,” that is, made him carry the heavy butt end of the beam. Once Merzliakov fell down and could not at first get up from the snow-covered ground; he suddenly decided to refuse to carry this damned beam. It was late, dark, and the guards were in a hurry to get to their indoctrination class, while the workmen wanted to reach the barracks and food as fast as they could; that evening the foreman was late for a card-game duel. Merzliakov was blamed for all the delay. So he was punished. First, he was beaten up by his workmates, then by the foreman and the guards. The beam lay abandoned in the snow and, instead of the beam, it was Merzliakov that was carried to the camp. He was let off work and lay on the bunk. The small of his back hurt. The paramedic rubbed him down with tallow—the medical center hadn’t had any proper ointments for ages. Merzliakov lay there, bent half double, all the time complaining of pain in the small of his back. The pain had gone long ago, his broken rib had quickly mended, but Merzliakov was determined, using any lie he could, to put off being declared fit for work. They didn’t declare him fit. One day they put his outdoor clothes on, laid him on a stretcher, and loaded him into the cab of a truck to take him, with other patients, to the district hospital. There was no X-ray machine there. Some serious thinking had to be done about everything, and Merzliakov thought. He stayed there for some months, still bent half double; he was then transferred to the central hospital where, of course, there was an X-ray machine, and where Merzliakov was put in the surgical section, in the ward for traumatic illnesses (the patients, unaware of the irony in the pun, called these illnesses “dramatic”).

•

“And this man, too,” said the surgeon, pointing to Merzliakov’s notes, “we’ll hand over to you, Piotr Ivanovich. He doesn’t need treatment in the surgical section.”

“But you’ve written a diagnosis of ankylosis due to spinal trauma. Why should I have him?”

“Well, of course there is ankylosis. What else can I put down? Worse than that can happen after a beating. I had a case at the Gray mine, where the foreman beat up a good worker—”

“Seriozha, I haven’t got time to listen to your cases. I’m asking why you’re transferring him.”

“But I’ve written ‘To be examined with a view to documentation.’ Poke him with needles, let’s document him and get him on a ship. Then he can be a free man.”

“But you’ve taken X-rays, haven’t you? We shouldn’t need needles to detect any abnormalities.”

“I have. Have a look, if you’d care to,” and the surgeon placed a dark film negative on the muslin screen. “This picture makes no sense at all. Until we get proper lighting, proper voltage, our X-ray photographers will go on giving us this fuzz.”

“It really is fuzzy,” said Piotr Ivanovich. “All right, so be it.” And he signed his name on the notes, agreeing to accept Merzliakov’s transfer.

The surgical section was noisy, chaotic, overcrowded with cases of frostbite, dislocated limbs, fractures, burns—the northern mines were no joke—and some of the patients lay on the ward and corridor floors; just one young, infinitely tired surgeon and four paramedics worked there, none of them sleeping for more than three or four hours a night. Nobody had the time to give Merzliakov proper attention. In the neurology section, however, where Merzliakov had been so suddenly transferred, he realized that a really close examination would begin.

All his desperate prisoner’s willpower had long been focused on one thing: to not unbend. And he didn’t. His body so very much wanted to straighten out, if only for a second. But he recalled the mine, the piercing breath of the cold air, the slippery frozen stones of the goldmine pit face, which shone from the sub-zero temperatures; the little bowl of soup, his dinner, which he devoured in one gulp, not needing any spoon; the rifle butts of the guards and the boots of the foremen—then he found the strength to stay doubled up. In any case, it was now easier than it had been in the first weeks. He didn’t sleep much, since he was afraid of unbending while he slept. He knew that the duty nurses had long ago been ordered to watch him and catch him faking. And if he was caught—Merzliakov knew this, too—he would immediately be send to the punishment mines, and what would a punishment mine be like, if the ordinary one left Merzliakov with such terrible memories?

The day after he was transferred, Merzliakov was taken to see the doctor. The chief of the section asked him briefly about the early stages of the illness and nodded in sympathy. The doctor told him, as if by the way, that even healthy muscles could get used to being in an unnatural position after many months, and that a man can turn himself into an invalid. Then Piotr Ivanovich started examining his patient. As the doctor inserted needles, tapped away with a rubber mallet, and pressed certain points, Merzliakov gave random answers to his questions.

Piotr Ivanovich devoted more than half of his working hours to exposing malingerers. Of course, he understood the reasons that induced prisoners to fake their symptoms. Piotr Ivanovich had been a prisoner not so long ago, and he wasn’t surprised by the childish stubbornness of malingerers, nor by the primitive and frivolous nature of their faked symptoms. Piotr Ivanovich, formerly a lecturer at a Siberian medical institute, had made his professional career in the same snowy world as the one where his patients tried to save their lives by trying to deceive him. One cannot deny that he felt sorry for people. But he was more a doctor than a human being and he was, above all, a specialist. He was proud of the fact that a year of manual labor in the camps had not destroyed the specialist doctor in him. He looked at the problem of exposing malingerers not from a lofty, statesmanlike point of view, and not morally. He saw this problem as a proper use of his knowledge, of his psychological skill in setting traps for hungry, half-insane, wretched people to fall into, to the greater glory of science. In this battle between doctor and malingerer, everything favored the doctor: thousands of subtle medicines, hundreds of textbooks, a wide array of equipment, the help of the guards, and the enormous experience of a specialist, while all the patient had on his side was his horror of the world that he had left for the hospital and was afraid of being returned to. It was this horror that gave the prisoner the strength to battle on. Exposing yet another malingerer gave Piotr Ivanovich deep satisfaction. Once more he had proof from real life that he was a good doctor, that instead of losing his skills, he had enhanced them, perfected them—in other words, that he still could. . . .

“What fools those surgeons are,” he thought, as he lit a cigarette after Merzliakov had left. “They don’t know topographical anatomy, or they’ve forgotten it, and they never have known what reflexes are. X-rays are their only answer. If they haven’t got an X-ray, they can’t be sure even about a simple fracture. Yet they’re so conceited.” Piotr Ivanovich, naturally, had no doubt that Merzliakov was a malingerer. “All right, he can stay in bed for a week. That week will give us time to do all the analyses, so we jump through all the hoops. We’ll stick all the right bits of paper in his notes.” Piotr Ivanovich smiled as he anticipated the theatrical effect of this, his next unmasking.

A week later the hospital would be getting a party of patients ready to be shipped home to the mainland. The papers were being drawn up in the ward and the chairman of the medical commission had come from the administration building to examine personally the patients whom the hospital had prepared for dispatch. The chairman’s job was limited to examining the documentation, checking that the proper formulas had been used—actual examination of a patient took only thirty seconds.

“I have in my lists a certain Merzliakov. The guards broke his back a year ago. I’d like to send him off. He’s recently been transferred to the neurology section. Here are his documents, all ready for dispatch.” The chairman of the commission turned to face the neurologist.

“Bring Merzliakov,” said Piotr Ivanovich. They brought in the patient, bent nearly double. The chairman gave him a cursory glance.

“What a gorilla,” he said. “Yes, of course, there’s no point keeping men like that.” Picking up his pen, he reached for the lists.

“Personally, I’m not signing for him,” said Piotr Ivanovich in a clear, loud voice. “He’s a malingerer, and tomorrow I shall have the privilege of showing him up to you and to the surgeon.”

“Right, then we’ll leave him out,” said the chairman indifferently, and put his pen down. “Anyway, it’s time we stopped, it’s getting late.”

“He’s a malingerer, Seriozha,” Piotr Ivanovich said as he took the surgeon by the arm, when they were leaving the ward.

The surgeon freed his arm.

“He may be,” he said, frowning with distaste. “Good luck with exposing him. You’ll get an enormous amount of pleasure.”

The next day, at a meeting with the head of the hospital, Piotr Ivanovich reported in detail on Merzliakov’s case.

“I think,” he concluded, “that we can expose Merzliakov in two stages. First comes Rausch anesthesia, which you, Seriozha, have forgotten about,” he said triumphantly, turning to face the surgeon. “That should have been done straightaway. Then if Rausch anesthesia doesn’t work,” Piotr Ivanovich spread his arms, “it’s shock therapy. That’s a very intriguing procedure, I assure you.”

“Not too intriguing?” asked Aleksandra Sergeyevna, the manager of the biggest section in the hospital, the tuberculosis section. She was a stout, heavily built woman who had only recently arrived from European Russia.

“Well,” said the hospital chief, “for a bastard like that. . . .” The presence of ladies didn’t inhibit him much.

“Let’s see what the Rausch anesthesia does,” said Piotr Ivanovich in a conciliatory tone.

Rausch is short-term anesthesia administered by an overwhelming dose of ether. The patient goes to sleep for fifteen or twenty minutes, enough time for a surgeon to manipulate a dislocation, amputate a finger, or lance an infected boil.

The hospital chiefs, dressed in white gowns, surrounded an operating table on which a submissive, half-bent Merzliakov had been put. Male nurses picked up the linen straps that usually tie patients down on the operating table.

“No need, no need,” shouted Piotr Ivanovich, as he ran forward. “Straps are the last thing we need.”

Merzliakov’s face was turned upward. The surgeon placed an anesthesia mask over it and picked up a bottle of ether.

“Start, Seriozha!”

The ether began dripping.

“Breathe in deeper, deeper, Merzliakov! Count aloud!”

“Twenty-six, twenty-seven,” Merzliakov counted in a lazy voice; then, suddenly stopping counting, he started saying broken phrases, making no sense at first, some of them obscene curses.

Piotr Ivanovich was holding Merzliakov’s left hand. After a few minutes, that hand relaxed and Piotr Ivanovich let go of it. The hand fell gently, like a dead object, onto the edge of the table. Piotr Ivanovich slowly and solemnly unbent Merzliakov’s body. Everyone gasped with amazement.

“Now tie him down,” Piotr Ivanovich told the nurses.

Merzliakov opened his eyes and saw the hospital chief’s hairy fist.

“How about that, you reptile?” the chief was rasping at him. “You’ll be charged and tried.”

“Congratulations, Piotr Ivanovich, congratulations!” repeated the chairman of the commission, clapping the neurologist on the shoulder. “To think that only yesterday I was about to give that gorilla his freedom!”

“Untie him!” ordered Piotr Ivanovich. “Get off the table.”

Merzliakov hadn’t fully regained consciousness. His temples throbbed, and he could still taste the sickeningly sweet ether in his mouth. Even now he didn’t understand whether he was awake or dreaming, and it may be that he’d had dreams like this before.

“To hell with the lot of you!” he suddenly yelled out, and bent himself double, as he had been.

Broad-shouldered, bony, his thick long fingers almost touching the floor, his eyes clouded, and his hair disheveled, Merzliakov really did look like a gorilla. He left the bandaging room and Piotr Ivanovich was told that the patient Merzliakov was lying on his bed in his usual posture. The doctor ordered him to be brought to his office.

“You’ve been exposed, Merzliakov,” said the neurologist. “But I’ve asked the chief, and you won’t be charged, you won’t be sent to a punishment mine. You’ll simply be discharged from hospital and go back to your mine to do what you were doing. You’re a hero, man. You’ve pulled the wool over our eyes for a whole year.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” said the gorilla, not lifting his eyes.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? We’ve only just straightened you out!”

“Nobody straightened me out.”

“Look, dear man,” said the neurologist. “There’s no need for all this. I wanted to do it the nice way. Otherwise, watch out, because in a week’s time you yourself will be asking to be discharged.”

“What do I care what’s going to happen in a week’s time?” Merzliakov said quietly. How could he explain that just one extra week, an extra day, an extra hour spent somewhere that was not the mine was his idea of happiness. If the doctor couldn’t understand that, how could he explain it? Merzliakov said nothing and stared at the floor.

Merzliakov was taken away; Piotr Ivanovich went to see the hospital chief.

“Well, you could do it tomorrow, instead of in a week,” said his boss after he’d listened to Piotr Ivanovich’s proposal.

“I promised him a week,” said Piotr Ivanovich. “It won’t bankrupt the hospital.”

“All right,” said the chief. “In a week, then. But bring me along. Are you going to tie him down?”

“You can’t tie him down,” said the neurologist. “He’d dislocate an arm or a leg. He’ll be held down.” Taking Merzliakov’s notes with him, Piotr Ivanovich wrote in the treatment column “shock therapy” and named a date.

Shock therapy consists of intravenously injecting the patient with a quantity of camphor oil several times higher than the dose used subcutaneously for maintaining a seriously ill patient’s cardiac activity. The camphor oil acts by causing a sudden attack, like an attack of violent madness of epilepsy. A rush of camphor causes a sharp increase in all of the patient’s muscular activity and motor forces. Muscles are tensed as never before and the patient’s strength, although he has lost consciousness, is increased tenfold. The attack lasts several minutes.

Several days passed without Merzliakov thinking of unbending of his own free will. The morning named in his notes came and he was taken to see Piotr Ivanovich. Any entertainment is highly appreciated in the north, so the doctor’s office was crowded. Eight burly male nurses were lined up against the wall. A divan was placed in the middle of the office.

“We’ll do it here,” said Piotr Ivanovich, getting up from his desk. “We shan’t bother the surgeons. Where’s Sergei Fiodorovich, by the way?”

“He’s not coming,” said Anna Ivanovna, the sister on duty. “He said he was busy.”

“Busy, busy,” repeated Piotr Ivanovich. “It would do him good to watch me doing his job for him.”

Merzliakov’s sleeve was rolled up and the paramedic rubbed some iodine on his arm. Taking a syringe in his right hand, the paramedic pierced a vein near the patient’s elbow joint. Dark blood flowed through the needle into the syringe. With a gentle movement of his thumb the paramedic pressed the plunger and a yellow solution began entering the vein.

“Get it in as fast as you can!” said Piotr Ivanovich. “And then stand aside quickly. As for you,” he told the male nurses, “hold him.”

Merzliakov’s enormous body leapt up and writhed in the nurses’ hands. Eight men were holding him down. He rasped, he struggled, he kicked, but the nurses were holding tight and he started quieting down.

“You can restrain a tiger like that, a tiger,” shouted Piotr Ivanovich in his delight. “On the other side of Lake Baikal that’s how they catch tigers by hand. Now watch closely,” he told the hospital chief, “see how Gogol exaggerated. Do you remember the end of Taras Bulba? ‘Almost thirty men were hanging on to his arms and legs.’ Well, this gorilla is rather bigger than Taras Bulba. And he only needs eight men.”

“Yes, yes,” said the chief. He didn’t remember Gogol, but he did like the shock therapy enormously.

The next morning Piotr Ivanovich did his rounds and stopped at Merzliakov’s bed.

“Well, then,” he asked, “what’s your decision?”

“You can discharge me,” said Merzliakov.

1956

From: KOLYMA STORIES

Volume One

VARLAM SHALAMOV

Translated from the Russian and with an introduction by

DONALD RAYFIELD