Untrodden paths
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Victor: Or cyanide.
Andrei: Exactly. Well, soon I developed symptoms of cardiac arrest, and I started panting. I must admit that despite my chronic TB and periodic coughing of blood, I had never faced the prospect of imminent death. In short, dying is difficult if it’s the first time you’ve experienced it. Panicking, I gulped a huge amount of eleutherococcus’ extract, you know a plant of the ginseng family. They give it as a stimulant to cosmonauts or sportsmen. May be it’s this stuff that saved me; I don’t know.
Victor: I doubt it. I guess it just wasn’t your time to die.
Andrei: I guess you’re right. Anyway, dashing around the apartment, I, on the one hand, knew that it was death, and I was dying; on the other, I felt some force which wouldn’t let me die. This experience of two opposite forces clashing within me, tearing my body apart, was rather terrible. Yes.
Later that day my parents came and called the emergency. I was taken by our garrison ambulance to the district hospital, where the only thing they gave me was some sedative, for neither the colonel who’d brought me, nor the hospital’s civilian staff, could figure out what the problem was.
Next morning I returned home as if nothing had happened, but later in the day some red rash appeared and began spreading rapidly so that by evening my whole body had become red, with a fever of over 40. Again, the doctors were at a loss for the diagnosis: It didn’t look like measles or anything else they knew.
Victor: It was the poison burning down in your body.
Andrei: Yeah, I guess so. I can’t say how long I had this high fever, nor would I like to go through it again, recollecting all this. Anyway, I survived, much to the confusion and chagrin of this gang.
So they had no option but to take me once again to the prosecutor’s office and give me the same ultimatum: either the army or a labor camp – this time on charges of evasion of military service.
Okay, I said, I opt for the labor camp, but first, you have to conduct the medical check.
They did it, and again the prosecutor offered me to choose: either the army or a psychiatric asylum for criminals. I said how about the five years in a labor camp you promised last time? No, he said; we cannot send you to a labor camp: the medical check shows you have an active form of TB.
After that I had no option but to try, before they did lock me up, to appeal for help to the US Embassy.
That’s what I and my mother were institutionalized for.
Victor: Did you go to the Embassy together?
Andrei: Yes. Luckily, they didn’t keep her there long.
Andrei: In the psychiatric hospital they continued with their threats, promising me a trial by a tribunal for treason and espionage, unless I showed repentance for what I’d done. I said I’d rather plead guilty and surrender the whole of the spy-ring: meeting places, addresses, names – and what names, too.
To forestall such a scandalous possibility, the KGB reported that in addition to the American embassy, there were two or three other western embassies I had tried to get into; in short, that I had an obsession for appealing to foreign embassies, after which they diagnosed me as schizophrenic, and therefore non-composmentis; that is, mentally unable to stand trial for the committed crime – evasion of military service.
Victor: If I get it right, it means that you are a deserter, but they didn’t try you because you happen to be a loony, too.
Andrei: Yes, sir. And they rounded me up for this youth festival period because I’m also a suspected spy as well.
Victor: Small wonder, in light of the fact that you know English and can freely communicate with the enemy in their own language, an ability often beyond their own mental grasp. How long did they keep you then?
Andrei: I can’t say for sure. About three months.
Victor: Just three months? They keep people locked for years in such cases.
Andrei: That’s what they had actually planned, but my hunger-strike must have spoiled everything. They did their best to persuade me not to raise a racket: sit quiet for a year or so, they said, and we won’t give you any injections, only pills, which you can spit or swallow – nobody cares. In a year the scandal dies down, and we let you out.
I wouldn’t listen to their propositions, though. By that time I’d seen enough to know better. Besides, being in a mental hospital and communicating with ordinary guys, like Sasha, I saw that what they’d done to me wasn’t an isolated incident, but a typical example of how this system works. I saw that there were lots of ordinary people actually getting a much harsher deal from this gang than I was. In other words, I understood that dealing with the commies no quarters should be asked, nor given; that they were simply destroying us under various guises, because, I became convinced, sooner or later we’d destroy them. There’s no other option, no.
In short, by that time I hated those bastards so much I wouldn’t talk with them anyway. Besides, they overdid their persuasions: to make me more pliable, they transferred me from the observation ward where ordinary criminals were kept to the ward for the privileged. Apparently they thought a guy from Star City would feel greater kinship for high-ranking thieves rather than the common rabble which was so overflooding their labor camps that they were forced to send some of them to psychiatric hospitals.
I must say that some of the boys were sent there for taking part in mass protests – either by cutting their wrists, or going on a hunger-strike – there was a lot of unrest in prisons and labor camps at the time.
Victor: The Sun was rather active that year, spurring mankind to fight for freedom, not just in our country, but all over the planet. Remember the workers’ revolution in Poland, the tragic hunger-strike of the IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland? They are good examples of this.