Untrodden paths

Andrei: The next ten years my mother spent trying to get to the truth, in endless appeals to numerous authorities, from the bottom level to the top – all in vain: no diagnosis – no treatment. So I was forced to take up herbal medicine and yoga.

Victor: Did they help you cure the TB?

Andrei: No, they didn’t. But they helped me not to die from it; at least, not immediately. Well, after I finished school, I entered a college and was to study applied mathematics, but after six months I had to drop out for health reasons.

After which they were legally bound to draft me. I thought it was my chance to make them diagnose me, so I lodged an appeal with the head of the draft office, demanding judicial inquiry into my case, as well as a medical forensic examination; after which the draft office, apparently under pressure from our top brass and special department, ignored the problem of my draft for five years in the hope that the problem would disappear of natural causes. But it didn’t. Then in 1981 they summoned me to our special prosecutor’s office, and the prosecutor gave me an ultimatum: either I enlist in the army, and receive the necessary treatment there, or they prosecute me for parasitism. I said Ok, if forensic medical experts were to find me healthy, I’d go to prison.

Victor: It’s strange: Knowing how these thugs hate legal scandals and disclosures, it would have been easier for them to kill you rather then start criminal procedures.

Andrei: I suspect that’s exactly what they tried to do. A couple of days after my summons to the prosecutor’s office, in the early afternoon hours, when I was at home alone and my parents at work, I felt a strange pleasant whiff of some perfume present in my room. I learned later that it was the scent of almond.

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.