SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (17 page)

Thanks
to the many other Jewish émigrés, Novgerod Mandelstim was able to move to the
west coast of America and there he set up a psychiatric practice with another
of those who had once been in the Party: G.V. Lubetkin.

Yet he
was not happy. The corporeal decadence of the United States disgusted him, the
seventeen different kinds of motor car that they had, in restaurants the little
crackers they gave you that nobody ate, the gaudy suits the negroes wore at the
dance halls of Compton; all of it repelled his puritan soul. Most of all he was
repulsed by his patients: whining, spoilt, greedy, grownup man/woman/child
without any real problems, who constantly clamoured for his attention and
thought he was their friend.

This
displacement caused him to fill his son’s head with stories of the Motherland.
He pointed out at every opportunity the bovine materialism of the Americans, he
contrasted this with the nobility of the Russian citizen; he compared the cheap
jangling music with the poetry that lived within the soul of every Russian:
Pushkin, Chekov, Dostoyevsky — Tolstoy versus Roy Rogers. There was no contest.
Maybe this was why the lad had not prospered; despite his obvious intelligence
somehow little Misha had not done well at college and had left early. In the
years of the Depression he could only get work as a clerk in the accounts
department of the Goodyear Rubber Company, and he had married a little girl
from Yekaterinburg rather than one of the ten-foot-tall Californian women who
ranged the sunburnt streets. So when in 1936 Novgerod Mandelstim heard about
the new Constitution, he resolved to return to the Soviet Union. The provisions
in this Constitution when it was adopted by the Party Congress included
universal suffrage, direct election by secret ballot and the guarantees of
civil rights for all citizens, including freedom of speech, freedom of the
press, freedom of assembly, the right of return for refugees without persecution,
freedom of street demonstrations and the right to personal property protected
by law. Later on Mandelstim reflected that it might as well have promised a new
type of gravity and perpetual freedom from farting for all the difference it
made, but by then it was too late; they were all in the net.

The ‘36
Constitution had caused a very favourable impression abroad; liberal people
said, ‘Now the terror is over, maybe it was necessary, who knows? Now it is
over, though, the Soviet Union will rejoin the world.’ They said this because
they wanted it to be so, they couldn’t believe that free little crackers was
the best that mankind could be.

So
Novgerod Mandelstim told his son he was returning to the Motherland but that he
didn’t expect him to come too. However, as he had secretly hoped, Misha said
that he longed too to touch again the dark earth of Mother Russia. Therefore
Novgerod Mandelstim, his son, his daughter-in-law and his three grandchildren
all returned to the Soviet Union. They were sure that if things went wrong
their US citizenship would protect them.

‘Hello,
Koba,’ he said to Stalin, deliberately using the name of the Georgian folk hero
that the General Secretary had adopted before he became Stalin, the man of
steel.

‘Hello,
Mandelstim,’ replied the emperor of two hundred million souls. ‘It’s damned
good to see you, old friend.’

‘It’s
good to see you too, Koba, especially since I thought I was going to lose my
toes this morning.’

‘Well
now you are here and your toes are safe.’

‘For
the moment, yes, yes they are,’ said the psychiatrist. ‘What do you want of me,
Koba?’

‘Straight
to the point as always. So be it. Well, Comrade Psychiatrist Novgerod
Mandelstim, I have a small problem.’ And the most powerful man in the biggest
country on earth told Novgerod Mandelstim about his small problem with the
little baker from behind the Leningrad Station.

3

When he had finally
admitted to himself that he needed help in sorting out his problem Stalin had
felt better immediately. While they were locating Novgerod Mandelstim the
psychiatrist, Stalin day-dreamed on what it would be like to confide in another
person. All his life Stalin had hidden his thinking behind a thick curtain, his
power rested in the fact that his enemies (which meant every living individual
in the land and some dead ones) never knew what was going on in his brain, what
he was going to do next. To tell all that was in his head to Novgerod
Mandelstim, what would that be like? He had no idea. But maybe it was what he
needed. To relieve the pressure like a valve, the terrible pressure of trying
to make a better world for everybody. ‘Oh,’ he thought, ‘how we suffer, us
Russians. I suppose it is in our nature. But what have I done that life should
be so hard?’ Cautiously he tried thinking about I.M. Vosterov. There came
immediately a terrible spasm of fear that forced him to clutch on to his desk
in order to remain standing. ‘But perhaps,’ he thought afterwards, examining
the fear, ‘it might have been a little reduced already.’

Then
another thought came to him, that maybe he didn’t need Novgerod Mandelstim at
all. He wondered if in some way the little baker was a kind of personal demon
of his who could be placated by gifts, just as the ancients made sacrifices to
their gods. Even as it came to him this notion seemed absurd to the General
Secretary, but he also realised that by now he would try any stupid thing to
ease the fear. Armand Hammer, the American who was the only supplier of
reliable pencils in the Soviet Union and who bought all their oil, had recently
given Stalin as a gift a half-sized metal negro that, via a patented Edison wax
cylinder arrangement in its stomach, sang slave songs and negro spirituals at
the switch of a lever. Stalin promptly ordered the NKVD to have this object
delivered to the apartment of I.M. Vosterov.

The
neighbours watched from behind their curtains and felt a little cheered. It
made a change to see the NKVD carrying somebody into a house, even if it was a
metal negro. Nonetheless, in a society so conditioned to abrupt and brutal
change, no happy sense endures and within the hour a rumour started to go
around the neighbourhood that all workers were going to be sent to the camps
and liquidated: henceforth their jobs would be performed by metal negro robots.
(‘What was wrong with Russian robots,’ many complained, ‘instead of these black
metal monkeys?’)

Stalin
waited for the half-sized metal negro to be delivered then thought about I.M.
Vosterov. Instantly he fell to the floor and Novgerod Mandelstim’s journey from
the camps began.

‘I see,’
said Novgerod Mandelstim after he had heard the story. ‘And you wish me to
treat this fear that you feel?’

‘Indeed,
that’s what I’ve dragged you all the way from bloody Siberia for.’

‘There
will be a price.’

‘There
always is. You know I always think ahead, Mandelstim two or three moves, just
like you Jews, always thinking, thinking. This is what I propose. Your son, his
wife and two of the three children still survive…  for now. If you treat me
successfully they will be released from prison and allowed to leave the
country, along with yourself.’

Novgerod
Mandelstim laughed a genuine, hearty deep laugh, the first in a long time. He
said, ‘You forget, I know you, Koba. I allowed myself to be deluded once but I
know you and I know a little of your mind. If I treat this fear of yours
successfully you will kill me and my family the instant you feel well, despite
any promises that you have made. Patients when they are in the grip of their
illness always think they will be grateful, but when you have brought them back
into the light they kvetch about the bill. You, especially, will be no
different.’

‘You’re
a damned idiot!’ shouted Stalin. ‘Don’t you understand that I could easily have
the children brought here and tortured in front of you?’

‘Then
my heart would be full of hate for you, Koba, and I would not be able to treat
you, even if I wanted to.

Stalin
thought for a long time. ‘Damn! What are your terms then, bastard?’

‘My
son, his wife and his children are to be flown immediately to the United
States. When I have spoken on the telephone to them and to one of the émigrés,
Raskalnikov or Lubetkin, then I will begin treating you, not before.’

‘Why
the hell should I do this?’

‘Because
you want to be well again. Who knows? It might be part of your treatment.’

‘Will
it be?’

‘I don’t
know, Joseph; you will have to do it and find out. For once you do not hold all
the cards and you are not holding the dealer’s family prisoner. You cannot
control events this time, no matter how hard and from how many angles you think
about them.’

The
General Secretary grunted, he pressed a button under the desk and one of his
personal guard came in. Mandelstim was taken to a room within Stalin’s suite of
apartments and locked in it. A cold meal and a bottle of vodka waited for him
on a table. There was a clean suit, shirt and tie in his size hanging in the
closet.

Three
restless days later he was taken by another guard to an office which contained
only a desk and a chair. On the desk was an olive-green telephone. After a
minute or two the phone pingled in a muted fashion. With his hands trembling,
Mandelstim picked up the handpiece. He felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds.

‘Misha?’
he said.

‘Father?’

‘Oh my
son, I am so sorry for what I’ve put you through. I was such a fool. This place
is … is hell.’

‘One of
my daughters is dead.’

‘I
know. Where are you now?’

‘We are
in Lubetkin’s house in Beverly Hills.’

‘Are you
safe?’

‘There
are Pinkerton men with shotguns all around, guarding the house.’

‘Then
you are safe for now.

‘Will
you be coming too, Father?’

‘I don’t
know, son. Let me speak to Lubetkin.’

The
older man came on the phone. ‘Hello, Mandelstim,’ he said. ‘Is he there
listening?’

‘In
another room I expect he is, yes.

‘He
will hunt them down if they are not hidden well.’

‘I know
it.’

‘Don’t
worry. They will be hidden well; we have learnt how to do these things over the
years.

‘Say
goodbye to Misha, Natalia and the children for me.

‘I
will.’

‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’

The
treatment began the next day.

For an
hour each day he would talk to Stalin in the General Secretary’s office. Each
of them sitting at an angle to the other in a comfortable armchair. Stalin had
told his staff that Novgerod Mandelstim was writing a new biography of the
great pilot of the Soviet State.

4

Yet, early on in the
treatment, Novgerod Mandelstim was presented with an ethical dilemma which he
thought no psychiatrist could possibly have encountered before in the short but
colourful history of the profession.

The
dilemma was this. It soon became clear to Mandelstim, from what his sole
patient told him, that for the moment Stalin’s fear was considerably curtailing
his murderous instincts. He could not fail to learn that deportations were
down, that executions were almost as low as they had been under the Tsar, that
terror and dread did not stalk the streets with the swagger that they once had.
In apartment blocks in the workers’ quarters, where citizens had disappeared
more frequently than a magician’s assistant, the population was stable for the
first time in years.

Mandelstim
sensed a little, though not all, of the things that were going on beyond the
three-foot-thick walls of the Kremlin. Without the perpetual and butcherous
attention of the General Secretary, the clamp of the Party on the life of the
Republic began to slacken. The secret police and the army did not know what to
do and the mesh of spies did not know who to send their lies to any more.

As
months went by with no crackdown, so people dared a little to sing the old
songs. To worship the old God. In the west, the border guards became lazy on
their patrols and each night more and more dark shapes slipped through the wire
and into Poland. Via Georgia and Azerbaijan the camel trains again ran trade
into Turkey. To the east, in the sea off Sakhalin Island, a thousand tiny boats
made for Japan in a single night as the Red Coastguard stayed in port drinking
vodka and consorting with whores. In the Ukraine peasants dragged political commissars
from their offices and burnt them alive in the market squares and, as was usual
in times of upheaval, Jews were murdered simply because it was again possible
to do so.

It thus
came to Novgerod Mandelstim that if he was somehow to cure Stalin then the
murder would immediately begin again. Normally he knew that the patient’s
wellbeing was supposed to be the only concern of the psychiatric practitioner,
but he felt he was beyond hiding behind such spineless evasions. Nothing was
normal in the Soviet Union. No, he concluded: every second that Stalin remained
ill, others remained well; therefore it was his duty as a human being, though
perhaps not as a psychiatrist, to actually strive to make his patient worse!
God knows enough of his colleagues had managed to do this without trying.