But Valentin explained that visiting hours were severely restricted. If I was lucky, I could see her for half an hour the next morning.
We sat in the kitchen, drinking tea late into the night, as he explained the situation. Mother had been taken directly from the Hydroelectric Institute to the psychiatric clinic, after her superiors and coworkers had signed commitment papers stating she had become “irrationally paranoid and dangerously depressed.” This was her third week in the clinic, and Valentin said she was making no progress.
“Why didn’t you call me sooner?” I had been skiing and drinking hot mulled wine while my mother was locked in some psychiatric ward.
“We didn’t want to worry you, Sasha.”
The next day I walked through the center of the city and onto a street of old brick offices dating from before the Revolution. The psychiatric clinic was one of the oldest of these narrow, two-story buildings. The heavy steel front door was flecked with rust, and there were thick, rusty grates on the windows. The wooden stairs were worn and creaked badly as I climbed to the second floor. The place smelled of damp and there were stains on the walls and ceilings from leaking steam pipes. When I got to the reception, I had to pound on another steel door to get someone’s attention. Finally the door slammed open to reveal an inner steel grate. I was staring into the eyes of a fat nurse whose gray-blond hair was pulled tight against her skull. She scowled severely.
“Name?” was all she hissed as a greeting.
After a while they brought Mother to the stuffy narrow visiting lobby. Dressed in a robe and slippers, she looked stooped and old. The skin of her face was both pale and strangely flushed. Her eyes moved slowly as if searching for focus.
“Only fifteen minutes,” the nurse snapped.
After embracing my mother, I held her at arm’s length, searching her face. Obviously she was under sedation. Her eyes were languid, her voice flat and slow. And she constantly licked her dry lips and slurped the water I brought her in an enamel cup.
But she was just as obviously glad to see me. Her main concern on that first morning was that Misha was all right. She was deeply concerned that my little brother be dressed properly for school and get a good meal in the evening. When I tried to question her about her emotional problems, she fell silent and stared down at the worn linoleum floor.
The next day I brought her a basket of fresh fruit from the bazaar and a casserole of fish soup that I had simmered long in the kitchen. But again, she made no direct reference to the condition that had brought her here. When I probed her, Mother became visibly confused, as if she had no clear memory of those events. She absently rubbed the flesh of her forearms, sliding back the sleeves of her robe. I saw the small scarlet welts of hypodermic marks. But when I demanded to speak to her doctor about the sedation, the nurse scornfully told me to write for an appointment.
It was Mother herself who managed to secure her temporary freedom. When she told her doctor — a shadowy woman psychiatrist — that her son, “a senior Air Force pilot,” was here to help her, the clinic allowed her to return home, on the proviso she visited the clinic as an outpatient, “for regular therapy.”
The first thing I did when she came back to the apartment was to confiscate the brown glass medicine bottles and check their contents. Unfortunately the prescriptions for the capsules were partially written in a special Health ministry code. So I spent a morning seeking independent medical advice. Through friends, I contacted a senior psychiatrist at another clinic. I made a point of wearing my best uniform to the doctor’s office. He took one look at the brown bottles and picked up his phone to call Mother’s clinic.
When she returned for her treatment the next day, the staff was less brutal. For the first time in weeks, Mother was not given an injection.
That night her eyes and mind seemed to clear, as if a curtain was lifting. Again, we sat at the kitchen table, the steaming teapot between us. She began to talk, first in disorganized spurts, then more slowly, with the logical reasoning of a trained engineer. Over that long night and during the next day and evening, the strange story of her “illness” slowly emerged.
What she told me began as a description of an innocuous bureaucratic process. Her story ended as a nightmare.
Under perestroika, Gorbachev’s Politburo had decreed that the resources of the entire Soviet Union be accurately surveyed. In the military this had meant exhaustive inventories of equipment and detailed tabulations of troop strength. Factories had to list every machine and vehicle, registering their serial numbers. Tens of thousands of State enterprises were engaged in the process. In the spring of 1987 the Kuybyshev Hydroelectric Institute had been ordered to produce a complete survey of all the farmland in the oblast that was part of the region’s large, complex irrigation scheme.
Mother had been honored when she was given the task of supervising the survey brigades and tabulating their findings. At first the job seemed relatively straightforward, she explained. There were some minor discrepancies between the new survey sheets and the existing boundary lines of the kolkhoz collective farms and the sovkhoz State agricultural units. But this was to be expected; the new survey instruments were much more accurate than the old equipment that had been used just after the war.
“Then, Sasha,” Mother explained gravely, “a strange pattern began to emerge.”
The new surveys revealed that every collective farm and almost all the State farms were much larger than the official land records indicated. In many cases, a collective farm that was listed as having five hundred hectares of irrigated pasture actually had a thousand. The same pattern held for the sovkhoz vegetable enterprises and orchards. Mother was annoyed.
“So I went out with them, Sasha,” she said, sweeping her hand across the tablecloth. “You’ve worked with survey crews. It’s a straightforward process. Either you use the instruments correctly and tabulate, or you shirk your task.”
“Then I saw the true situation,” Mother said, her voice clipped and somber. “Over a third of the State land in the institute’s irrigation scheme was not officially listed on the records.”
I frowned, not sure where all this was leading.
Mother quickly explained. “It was theft on a scale I never imagined, Sasha.” She shook her head, as if she still could not believe her own words. Somewhere between a third and a half of the agricultural production of the oblast did not officially exist. This meant that the managers, and the government and Party officials responsible for agricultural production, easily and consistently met their monthly and annual quotas, and were generously rewarded with medals, promotions, bonuses, luxury apartments, and holiday packages. But that was only a minor benefit. The actual milk, fruit, meat, and vegetables produced, Mother added, “disappeared” into an intricate illegal distribution network.
“What happened when you presented your findings at the institute?” I was beginning to understand the evolution of Mother’s “mental illness.”
Her face clouded. “At first, they said there were errors in my calculations. Then I made a formal presentation, using the original surveyors’ figures and detailed plans of the land itself, with all the accurate coordinates clearly marked.” She smiled bitterly. “The chief engineer and the institute director thanked me and formed their own study committee to consider the matter.”
“They told me I was working too hard and needed a rest.” She shrugged. “The next day they suggested a holiday at the children’s resort at Anapa on the Black Sea for me and Misha.” Mother’s face clouded. “Sasha, I’d had enough of those luxury seaside resorts. The Pearl Hotel in Sochi was filled with black marketeers, entire families of them, flashing rolls of dollars and deutsche marks, buying everything… even the poor girls who came to the terraces every night to sell their bodies.”
“I’ve seen those girls,” I said. “They can’t make a living with their university degrees, so they drift down to the Black Sea. They like to be called courtesans.”
Mother shook her head in distaste. All her life she had been taught that Socialism had abolished evils like prostitution. Now she looked up and spoke again, her voice stronger. “There was another reason not to go back down to the Crimea. Isolated at that resort, I could have easily had an ‘accident’.”
My first impulse was to reassure her. Then I remembered the tight control the KGB maintained over those hotels.
“I took two days away from the office,” Mother continued in the same dry tone. “When I returned, the chief engineer called me into his office to reexamine my findings. He said there were many errors. Sasha, someone had
