Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story

4. Cavalier of the Gold Medal

76 4 Cavalier of the Gold Medal My l ife as a young r ef usenik was a fight, a Jewish boy’s desperate ascent. Between the ages of ten and eighteen I didn’t attempt a single line of poetry. My main interests were in the natural sciences, especially in biology and medicine. First it was anything about fish that I could lay my hands on. I bought books on ichthyology in Czech and German that I couldn’t read—just for the illustrations. I bred tropical fish in my bedroom . Later it was genetics. And in the middle of high school, doctoring became my obsession. My father discussed medical cases with me on our evening walks around the neighborhood. I knew about types of diabetes and thyroid disorders, and in eighth and ninth grades I could only envision my life as a physician. Literature was and had always been my love, but never in high school did I think of writing as a future profession. (In retrospect, it occurs to me that it must have had something to do with the fact that after expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers, my father made a living solely as a medical doctor while writing for his desk drawer or for unsanctioned publication.) Determined as I was to get into medical school, at the age of fourteen I had to devise a plan for the ninth and tenth grades, then the last two years of Soviet high school. Such a plan was supposed to carry me, against all odds, over the barriers of anti-Jewish institutional quotas. It also meant that I had to prepare myself for complications stemming from our status as refuseniks. In practical terms, the yearning to get into medical school translated into several resolutions I made around the spring of 1982, two months shy of my fifteenth birthday. One was to acquire practical experience and recommendations that would help me get into medical school. Opposite Cava l ier of th e Gol d Meda l | 77 from our apartment building was the campus of Moscow City Hospital No. 52. In the spring and summer, stupendously bored patients amused themselves by taking down large bathroom mirrors, holding them outside the windows of their wards, and directing reflected sun rays at our apartment building. Many times I would be blinded in my own bedroom by a ray of light dispatched from the hospital ward—a warning not to venture into medicine, or a trite metaphor of fate. I didn’t take heed. Instead, I landed a summer job as a medical orderly on the nephrology ward. My monthly salary was eighty rubles, and it was strange to think that some people actually subsisted on the meager sum of money I was paid. (For comparison, my father’s modest salary at his medical clinic was about two hundred rubles per month.) It was uncommon for Soviet kids my age, especially in big cities, to work in the summer. Unlike our peers in the capitalist world, we were supposed to “enjoy” our Soviet childhood —by going to sleepaway summer camps, dachas, or resorts, or by simply loafing around the city. At the hospital, where I worked for parts of two summers, I didn’t meet a single employee my age. I was initially supposed to clean rooms, wash bathrooms, and change bed linens. However , my lot changed after the head nurse, a medical school dropout by the name of Marat, took me under his wing. Marat, who was in his middle thirties when I met him, came from a family of diplomats and had had a privileged Soviet childhood. He was the spitting image of the Russian Romantic poet Lermontov, with small hazel eyes, at once fearless, melancholy , and mocking, a tall forehead, pudgy cheeks, and a hussar’s curled mustache. Because of his suave air of confidence in dealing with patients, I had originally thought Marat was a doctor. Indeed, because of Marat’s intelligence and medical experience, the doctors, especially the medical residents, often deferred to him. Marat was also sharp-tongued and quite the thespian, and his mind stored an incessant supply of jokes. No one told Brezhnev jokes more burlesquely than did Marat, and still today I entertain my students with what I remember from Marat’s treasure-trove. Brezhnev is riding to the airport on his way to India, to visit Indira Gandhi , and his aid notices that one of the General Secretary’s shoes...