A faith like a guillotine, as heavy, as light.
--Franz Kafka

Out of the darkness, it arrives. Eyes open or closed, it comes without warning, perhaps because our eyes are never fully open. I listen and wait. Still, it comes as a surprise.

Photograph: October, 1933

See him smile under that brush of a mustache; notice how the upper lip curls exposing the crown of a bicuspid, its glistening tip like an inverted Matterhorn, the depth of an iceberg in the Baltic. He shakes Kalinin's hand. In the official photo, he is seen holding a pewter cup: Kalinin is gone. He is still smiling.

A Story

I am pulled from my bed like any other man, my wife howling as they haul me away. How could she know that it was the start of something auspicious? After all, wonderful things rarely happen in the middle of the night, unannounced and with such haste. In my mind, I review a list of the things that they could question about me, affiliations and memberships, what and whom I knew. We all live under the same fear, its presence like an atmospheric condition, a cold front that stalls above us and under which we shiver and curse.

Two men hustle me out of my apartment building, bundling me down the stairs at such a rate our footsteps become a continuous clatter to which Mrs. Yusteva opens her door. She looks at me: bathrobe undone, hemorrhaging sweat from a stupefied face, a crazed peasant monk, and has not even the time to register a certain glee before she sees the men in their greatcoats and slams the door. We are outside for a moment in the paroxysmal cold and then in a car that is already moving, engine howling like a hungry wolf. I do not know where we are going but suspect these will be the last people I see and, reflexively, I ask nothing of them.

I believe we are headed to the outskirts of Moscow, a linden field in the pale light of morning, likely my last, when they suddenly turn north on Kerensky Street and stop at the foot of the building where I have my office. I am extracted with great force and expertise by two men who guide me now to the door of the building through which I pass like a spirit into the next world. I am transported to the landing of the fourth floor where I can see that the lights to my office are on and a contingent of officials awaits. I am shown to my examining room: is this a dream now? Not of linden woods but of a death made more terrible by its familiarity? May I now expect to see the spectral face of my father, a bottle held to his lips even in the next world, or experience the terror of sliding toward a precipice? An NKVD senior official--I know because he wears a hat and looks to be the one most enjoying the exhortations of the others--extends a hand toward my stool as if he were waiting for me all night, all my life. The patient is reclining in the chair, his mouth open, a big toe-sized thumb retracting his cheek, trying to lift the pain away.

Comrade Leader

Comrade Leader Stalin reclines semi-prone in my dental chair. I think it is Stalin. It looks like him. I have only ever seen photographs and in these he is always standing, but the NKVD breathing their threat and my heart sounding out against my ribs tell me it can be no one other than the Comrade Leader.

Dshugashvili. Everyone knows the eyes, but from a distance: among the generals, exhorting the worker, with the schoolchildren holding sheaves of wheat. For me they offer no color in particular, even at my proximity; the pupils are fully dilated, gobbling all the iris's pigment and now reflecting me, embossed in perspiration, gently running my two fingers over the surface of the gum around the offending tooth, maxillary left "2" -3, class III cavity. He winces and everyone reaches for their side arms. I withdraw my fingers and for a moment think of a deserted linden grove.

"Calm, calm," the senior official says, to which my patient nods and the room exhales."It is not an abscess," I say, the first words I have uttered since I said goodnight to Anya six hours before. "It would require some work, but the tooth could be saved."

My patient and the senior official look at each other and nod. The senior official clears the room and brings me closer with a motion of his gloved hand.

"There is the matter of the anesthetic." "Uh, yes. I will use nitrous oxide." "No."

I turn back to my patient, his eyes squinting in pain and fatigue, a mouth that could snap on my hands. I explain the procedure to him: remove a margin around the cavity, replace with an amalgam. He understands. He bobs his head. I touch the base of the tooth and the muscles of his mouth tense, his fists clench. I pull back and look at him.

"Your overall state of dental health is excellent, Comrade Leader."

He stares at me and I smell gulag. He closes his mouth, licks those lips and asks me what nitrous oxide is, causing the senior official to cock his head in alarm. That is how they found me, I now understand, having used the nitrous on Semenov, a careerist party boss who cackled like an idiot even before the gas took effect, who was profuse in his thanks for my efforts at removing the remnants of a volcanically erupted molar, and was now, apparently, my enthusiastic supporter, my patron.

"An anesthetic," I reply. "Something that will decrease the pain of the procedure." "Isn't that dependent on the skill of the dentist?" he asks me. The senior official, head visible in my mirror, now tilts his head back ever so slightly, not suppressing his smile: a cracked incisor is visible, the work of a father's hand or the tools of one of my colleagues, either wielded in infamy.

"Comrade Leader, let me use the tools at my disposal to help you. Without the anesthesia the procedure will be painful, try as I may. I do not want to cause unnecessary pain."

I show him my hands, extricated from the mouth of the tiger. He waves the senior official away; a door opens, the man leaves and from the face of the earth he drops; hat, tooth, man.

"Go ahead," he says, a smile curling his lips that must pain even him. "You'll likely need less gas for me than for Semenov."

Anya

Her smile, modest and alluring as it is, is made more beautiful by the simple fact that I cannot remember it as ever needing to show me a single tooth.

Morning

I am deposited at the door of our apartment. Mrs. Yusteva's door remains steadfastly closed. Anya has been crying, thinking that I will never return, cursing whoever may have provoked this: an aggrieved patient, Mrs. Yusteva, or her brother's writer friends who compose their rubbish and speak with indiscretion after drinking too much. She sobs into me, arms surrounding and thumping the cause of her livid morning.

Langa, Second Man on the Mountain

May 1936. In the annals of dental anesthesia, which are modes of political discourse as anything else, it is registered that an American, one Harry Langa, was the first to use nitrous oxide as anesthesia for a dental procedure. While an abscessed banker or perhaps a weeping press baron in need of dental relief may have allowed Dr. Langa's claim on posterity, what can be said is that he was not the first. What cannot be said, for reasons that should be evident, is that I was.

Yuri

My partner Yuri, once he sees the disarray in which the office has been left and on whose behalf, wants to know what it felt like. What did it feel like? I concentrated on my work, it felt like work. He attempts to smile but has not been feeling well; he is dyspeptic and like me has been passed over for promotion at the university so many times that he does not smile as much as hold his lips in an expression that lies beyond indifference but short of contempt. For the rest of the day he works in silence as if the midnight consultation was a betrayal, as if they should have called on him. He eyes the bottles of nitrous that sit in the corner of my room and makes an effort to show me he has unrelated business in my office. He speaks idly, pretending to search for something in a cabinet."Tell me about his teeth." "A typical mouth." "Is he to be your patient?" "I do not think so. I have not heard." "I can imagine his breath." I allow a modest laugh, "Straight from the devil's arse."

Photograph: 1915, Siberia

Only Stalin could look so happy in exile. It is three years since he has joined the central committee and now he indulges himself in a small martyrdom. Dressed in black, a holdover from seminary days, he is seen smiling engagingly. He holds a cigarette in his left hand, which is folded over his right. A space is visible between his front teeth. In later years, he is more self-conscious, remembering to keep his mouth closed unless the situation absolutely calls for a smile.

Night Call

It is now a routine. In the midst of the trials they call again, still I do not merit a warning prior to the knock on the door-- which has become our new national anthem, Anya's brother says. I tell Anya not to move, that I am certain that everything will be fine and so she does not stir from our bed. She is upset with me for tending to him, for having to tend to him. She whispers that he is a monster and that this is intolerable, to which I can say nothing. A new senior official this time, ushering me into and out of the car and then up to the office. I pray it is a different tooth. The NKVD henchmen clotted around the office are ashen-faced; he has been roaring and all gathered see their death shrouds . Do you understand, dentist, that the leader must speak to the assembly this week? I have no idea of his schedule but say that I understand, trying to steal a look at his open mouth, to see if it is the same tooth. I almost cry with relief when I see the abscess under a different lower molar, the gum glowing like a furnace. The senior official looms, sniffing for the gas, knowing the mistakes his predecessor made. I tell myself that I will help Comrade Leader because a man in pain cannot take pity, a man in pain cannot use his wisdom to do justice, and so I set to work on draining the abscess. He looks at me and groans for the gas.

In the morning, I return home to find Anya reading in the bedroom. She asks me if I know what is going on, how people from the historical society, professors from the university, are going missing. I do not know what she means by this, but I ask her what she would have me do. Would she have me refuse him? Provoke him to a higher madness? I am a dentist and can only do what I have been trained to do.

Photograph: 1929

A glorious celebration of the fiftieth birthday in the Kremlin, December 21st, 1929, with party members Ordzhonikidze, Voroshilov, Kuibyshev, Kalinin, Kaganovich, and Kirov. All surround and congratulate, eyes trained toward the center. Each face is a visage of forced gaiety, and not only because we are seeing things retrospectively; these men are smart enough to know their futures. A subdued smile, a congenial host, the Comrade Leader. They can almost sense the pain brewing in his jaws.

Results

It is months before I can speak to Anya with pride, and by that time it is in White Tass and Pravda, and on every lip in Moscow: he has shown pity. In the midst of a particularly difficult procedure, (full gold crown "2" 7-systeme internationale) during which the gas was used liberally, but judiciously, I spoke to him about the situation of Titov, a man Anya knew and who earned the label of saboteur when he responded to Yaroslavsky's challenge to the Writer's Congress by tearing up his membership card in full view of the gathered assembly. Titov had become the subject of every second rumour in Moscow that summer: his behavior at the congress, a collection of nonsensical poems published by an underground press, and accusations of unwholesome fornication, that last one tainting our family through the implication of Anya's brother. Comrade Leader smiled at the moment I exposed the base of his affected tooth and I knew that such intercessions, posed first to me by Anya, could be broached. I knew him well enough: I was, after all, his dentist and to me he was as much a mouth full of individual problems as he was the Comrade Leader, and perhaps I was girded by whatever residual gas that had seeped into the room and found its way to my lungs. Comrade leader, I said, pity is a virtue of strong men, to which he seemed to smile and acknowledged me with a fatherly, sagacious elevation of his brow. Titov is a poet and not a good one at that. That much is agreed on, but he is not worthy of your displeasure. He continued to nod, great brown moons of his eyes waning. He will be forgotten, unless he is the object of your displeasure. Comrade Leader looked out over the city and studied the cold blue light that broke on it. Silence. I read about it like everyone else. Like Langa, no one knows what I have done. The connection between saving the Comrade Leader from inordinate pain and mercy shown to a poet will remain a mystery to all but her. Anya smiles and kisses me before she goes to her bed. The papers are folded and placed on the table, as I usually like to have them when I return home.

The College

We all have our Siberias, I tell Comrade Leader. He has become paradoxically maudlin, as he often does when he takes the gas, ruminating on his experiences in exile. The enamel has worn from his teeth with the grinding and all his pains are amplified. He asks me what my Siberia is and I tell him it is the dental college, my lack of success in getting a university appointment because I am seen as a dilettante, a huckster with a gas mask. He sits up and grabs my wrists in his hands, telling me that I am more than a dentist, that I am a compassionate healer and possess a scientific mind. His brows arch and his eyes, dark coals now with their inner fire seen, threaten to burst from their sockets. He tells me that my work exemplifies socialism: the conversion from a dream of a better future for humanity into a science. I should not worry, he says, letting his lids droop over his now-tearing eyes. I should not worry.

Marriage

I meet Anya when she is twenty and still living with her father, a physician who specializes in diseases of the inner ear. He is a contemporary of Chekhov, a man for whom the doctor expresses such effusive admiration that the mere mention of the name induces vertigo in me. I think of fathers when I speak with him, of what sort of illness it is to be a father, to impose oneself on one's family like an affliction. Anya's father does not drink or bully, unlike the father I buried without a tear. This man is a mild tickle in the throat, a transient dizziness. During our courtship I am often left alone with Dr. Rostropov in the parlour, discussing the importance of gooseberries, whose taste I do not enjoy, or the maladies of balance to which Muscovites are prone. The pall of these conversations is broken by the arrival of Anya. Arrival, it is such a modest word; she arrives as spring does, quietly infusing warmth and hope, inducing such tender feelings in me that I have never known. Anya is a beauty and has eyes so expressive that I feel my dreams speaking out to me when I dare to look at them. We speak of music, which we both enjoy, and snow, to which we are both indifferent. We gain an understanding of the other's limits and aspirations. After our courtship she accepts my offer of marriage and we begin our lives together in Moscow.

She never wavers in her support of me; from my failure to have an appointment at the university to our inability to have a family. After her father dies we take in her brother, Anton, who stays with us for three years. She remains steadfast.

Promotion

An appointment as lecturer in the newly established department of dental anesthesia. I prepare notes for my course and lecture to rows of bobbing heads. My hand shakes, I am told, when I speak, and so I place it in my pocket, which I imagine lends me an avuncular air. Any questions? None. Well then, you will be examined on this later. I am appalled by the perfunctory approach of my colleagues, who seem willing not just to authorize but endorse slapping the mask on the face of the patient until there is no response, not understanding that the goal is to achieve a sense of well-being in the patient, not unconsciousness. I am viewed with some skepticism in my department, but, as I say, so as not to err in policy, one must be a revolutionary, not a reformer. Yuri handles the bulk of work at the office, picking up where I have left off, tending to politburo wives, occasionally their husbands, and the aching jaws of NKVD men, none of which he sees fit to thank me for.

A promotion follows months later; vacancies have arisen, and now heads nod in our department meetings when I speak. Another year and I am an associate professor, bringing the department into the twentieth century, an era when our profession will not be one of punition but of preservation and restoration. Surveillance of dental disease, I tell my colleagues as I have told Comrade Leader, is the key. Dentistry is like the state, I almost say to him at the end of a composite restoration mandibular right "4" 6, extraction mandibular right "4" 7- systeme internationale, and requires a political awareness of small things, a meticulous observation of detail.

My ascent has not gone unnoticed by my colleagues. I am studied; a new tooth in the mouth, probed for imperfections and held in some wonder. You are in full flight, Yevgeny Mikailovich, my chairman says, eyeing me cautiously, watch the sun.

Occlusal Surface of the First Molar

The cusps become prominent, and by the nature of these surfaces and their physical characteristics it can be seen why most of the grinding of mastication takes place here. The occlusal surface has four cusps--mesiobuccal, mesiolingual, distobuccal, and distolingual. The cusp of Carabelli can be seen when the tooth is viewed occlusally, but does not form part of the occlusal surface.

The Siege

The Comrade Leader returns to me with his aching jaws, as though he has been the one chewing on rats in Leningrad. Despite the pain, he wears his other worries lightly. He falls asleep during the procedure, dreaming of what I do not know. I turn the valve of the nitrous tank to the right, a quarter turn, enough to have the Comrade Leader awaken as I continue working. It feels as though the room is filling with cold water. A man must gird himself.

Father, A Dialectic

A man who possessed property but not the consciousness of the contradictions that it engendered. A man who could not make sense of the world as it changed, and who tried to comprehend it through systematic brutality directed at his family. A man invoking the past that was a lie, seeking solace in icons and the humiliation of others under his hand. A man for whom rage and powerlessness found their true home. A saboteur and progenitor. An enemy, a man, a bourgeois villain. My father.

Intervention

Under my gaze; will the books ever know of it? There will be stories of those who derailed trains, fired the next first-shot and whose noisy subterfuge was heroic only in its lack of humility. What of the man who dismantles the guillotine? What of me, beseeching him as the gas flows and I undo all that his sloth and vanity have done to those smooth surfaces, what of me, scaling and probing to reduce the chance that he will pass on all the pain that he has ever had?

His mouth and its contents of worn boulders are no longer a mouth but the source from which all emanates. His mouth is created and recreated with my hands, under my will. His mouth opens and it is no longer a naturalist's excursion; something has changed when I gaze in.

Photograph: February, 1945

Yalta. Roosevelt, for a rich man, has terrible oral hygiene. Gingivitis by his early thirties has endowed him with periodontal problems that plague him in later years. He smiles, seated beside the other two, roots gleaming at the world. It is a travesty that no one attends to this. One half-expects him to dislodge a molar with his next hacking catarrh. It is clear to the others that he is not long for this world. It is enough to say that Churchill has false teeth that rattle.

Apogee: fifty-three days

Less than two months after I am announced head of the department of the university's school of dental anesthesia, in a grand but somber ceremony that Comrade Leader cannot attend but for which I am honoured by the unanimous attendance of my department, Anya tells me that she is ill. I look at her as I do every morning, but now it is as though I have not seen her at all. Her eyes, her face. She recedes, a day falling into night, before my eyes. Another fifty-three days.

As I am cleaning out Anya's belongings, I come across her correspondence. I leaf through the letters, looking for some sign not just of her but of something else, something I cannot admit at the time but for which I long; a sonnet to her, impossibly from Titov or letters from another useless novelist declaring his love for her, something profane, proof of acts committed, a legion of sentiment. There are only letters from her sister whose contents speak to matters of limited domestic interest.

A Short Journey by Car

As any other night goes, so this one does. Out of the darkness it arrives. New faces at the door and then more at the wheel of the car, some of them NKVD I have seen loitering in Yuri's office. A moon of a scleral blue sits in the western sky. I am not shocked when we pass Kerensky Street because I am this moon, its reflections and slow course around the world in daylight and darkness. The NKVD men perspire, but I do not, perhaps because I am watching them. No explanation is offered when the car stops next to a field and the door opens. The youngest of them takes me by the arm in a way that befits the chairman of a department and leads me across the stubble and cracked earth, raising dust in the moonlight. There are no linden trees, nothing except the limits of vision and now I am alone facing them under this endless, radiant sky. They are all young, most not yet used to this and they will not sleep well regardless of what I do, but I smile. Their right arms rise in unison, as though offering me assistance. I wait for something to break this night, another burst of light, a morning star.

~
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