DOCTOR SVETA by Olga Zilberbourg
Doctor Sveta was twenty-six years old when the Navy commissariat summoned her to Leningrad and put her on a cargo ship among a motley crew of agronomists, agricultural engineers, livestock breeders, and tractor drivers, none of whom knew where the ship was headed or how long the journey might take. Her fellow passengers looked as confused at finding themselves confined to a seafaring vehicle as Doctor Sveta felt. No tractors accompanied them; not a cow, not even a single chicken. The agronomists and tractor drivers were healthy young men and a few women, two of them visibly pregnant. Doctor Sveta had been trained as a surgeon in Leningrad; she assumed it was in this capacity she’d been recalled from her post at a hospital in Minsk, Belarus. Besides the ship’s medic, there were no doctors aboard and not even a basic medical facility. Doctor Sveta worried she’d have to embrace a crash course in obstetrics.
Half a century later, as she tells me this story, Doctor Sveta recalls the words of her professor from medical school, who had counseled her to spend a semester or two at an obstetrics ward. “The work’s not glamorous, but necessary,” this wizened World War II veteran told her. “I assure you, it won’t hurt your own prospects as a mother.” Doctor Sveta found the man’s advice offensive. Did he direct his male students to obstetrics? She would be a surgeon.
We’re sitting to one side of a banquet table, arranged with the other tables in a U‑shape, in the basement space of a downtown St. Petersburg restaurant. It’s my aunt’s 75th birthday party, and in the last-minute seating arrangement, my family placed me next to Doctor Sveta, my aunt’s friend from medical school. As my mother’s obstetrician, Doctor Sveta was the first person to hold my infant self in her arms. Every time I visit St. Petersburg from the United States, she’s anxious to check up on me, to make sure I take my vitamins and exercise in the mornings. Lately, my mother, my aunt, and nearly everyone I know in St. Petersburg has been concerned that although my husband and I have been married for several years, we don’t have children yet. At first, people blamed my American husband for our decision to wait, but now that I’m in my mid-thirties, they don’t know what to think. A few days ago, a nearly-perfect stranger – my mother’s engineer colleague – handed me a piece of paper with a phone number on it. “Young women are suffering today from the birth control pills they’d been sold on. People come to this man from the United States for consultation all the time; he can give you a prescription that will work wonders,” the woman said. I made a joke about this doctor being more up-to‑date than the modern medicine, but the woman pushed the paper into my hands, insisting, “Call him.”
I’m half expecting Doctor Sveta to add her voice to the choir. Tonight, in honor of my aunt’s birthday, she drank half a glass of sweet red wine and launched into her story. I’m doing my best to connect the dots.
“So where was that cargo ship heading?”
“I’ll tell you. Listen – “
Doctor Sveta came from Mogilev, Belarus, where her mother worked as a technologist at a synthetic fiber plant. Her father, a Red Army officer, had been killed in the war Doctor Sveta calls “The Great Patriotic” – the Soviet moniker for World War II. In 1960, Doctor Sveta graduated from the First Medical Institute in Leningrad with a degree in surgery and a rank of Navy lieutenant. After graduation, she wanted to stay in Leningrad – “It seemed the center of the world for a provincial girl” – but to a non-resident, the jobs weren’t forthcoming. Out-of‑towners were generally perceived to be an unreliable and potentially dangerous element, and hospitals were afraid to take a chance. Some friends recommended a fictive marriage to secure a Leningrad address, but the young doctor decided to return to Belarus, to Minsk – closer to her mother, but not too close. She procured an assignment to a surgery ward of a teaching hospital.
Doctor Sveta seems to be blindsided by the memories of her youth that are flooding back all at once, bringing up unexpected emotions. Her voice is starting to shake, and drops of moisture gather at the bottom of her translucent eyelids. Because she doesn’t have family of her own to practice on, her stories are raw, they have not congealed into a series of neat, punchy anecdotes. In Minsk, Doctor Sveta says, the work was demanding, the hospital understaffed, and the equipment substandard. There were some among her colleagues who looked upon her surgical training with suspicion. Recent innovations with endoscopy and the integration of metallurgy and plastics into surgery – experiments she’d been fascinated by in Leningrad – were frowned upon in Minsk. This caused tension at first, but eventually the head of the department took her under his wing and let her assist on his cases.
Listening to her talk, I have to remind myself that the Leningrad of Doctor Sveta’s youth and today’s St. Petersburg are one and the same city. Contemporary St. Petersburg feels hopelessly backwards, at least as far as medicine is concerned. I’m an anesthesiology resident at Mass General in Boston, and after difficult shifts, I entertain myself by imagining what my life would’ve been like had I stayed in St. Petersburg. I recall the vomit-green walls and creaky wooden windows of the hospitals and the outpatient clinics, the smell of urine in the hallways, the waiting rooms packed with small children and the elderly, and I feel privileged to be going back to work at the efficiency and safety-protocol-obsessed American hospital.
“So you were recalled to Leningrad to board that cargo ship? What then, Doctor Sveta?”
“In Minsk, I’d grown fond of kayaking. The hospital was close to the river, and I could go after work sometimes. It was a popular sport back then, and I was good at it. I was training with the men’s team, and our coach was an Olympic champion. Who knows, maybe I could’ve gotten on the Olympic team, if things had turned out the way I dreamed.”
I can easily believe this. Even now, in her seventies, Doctor Sveta is in good shape. She’s not very tall but has broad shoulders and well-developed musculature. She’s the only one of my aunt’s graduating class who’s still working and who never seems to have any health complaints. My aunt, for years an administrator of an outpatient clinic, retired three years ago after suffering a series of cardiac episodes. Two of their male classmates, both practicing surgeons, are already dead. The whole medical field that was barely holding together on the passion and dedication of the old guard is falling apart. As governmental subsidies give way to new commercial medicine and insurance schemes, Doctor Sveta is one of the few who still refuses to overcharge her patients and doesn’t accept gifts larger than a box of chocolates. Her hospital salary barely puts food on her table. As she speaks, I can see two gaping holes on the right side of her upper jaw. She doesn’t even have money for dentures.
As she jumps to the subject of her mother, the chronological momentum of her story gives way to nostalgia. What makes her narrative interesting is the vividly remembered details about a way of life and the country where I too had been born and that since has ceased to exist. It seems that sometime after Doctor Sveta had settled in Minsk, her mother came from Mogilev for a visit. She shared Doctor Sveta’s bed in the room she rented from a local family, and cooked a week’s worth of thick potato soup with fatback and potato pancakes fried with pork and onions. With considerable pride, the then-young Doctor Sveta showed her mother around the hospital, a pre-revolutionary building gutted by the Nazis during the war and renovated in the 1950s. She introduced her mother to a few colleagues, and had a nurse take her mother’s arterial pressure and draw blood for tests. “You should really cut down on starches, fat meats and lard,” the young doctor counseled her mother. “These will cause you to have a heart attack.”
“The silly things we remember!” Doctor Sveta tells me. “I cherished the idea of taking my mother for a ride in a double-seated kayak, but it was drizzling and she refused. ‘And you call yourself a doctor!’ my mother said. ‘You’re a young woman, Sveta, and you should know better than to go near water in such weather – or you’ll never be able to give birth.’ This still counted as received wisdom in those days.”
“In this all mothers are alike,” I complain, looking around. I’m not sure whether I want my mother to be within or without earshot of this conversation. Her seat is empty; she’s on the other side of the room, managing the arrangement of microphones for the toasts. “I can’t have a rational conversation with my parents about this anymore. They don’t want to hear my arguments. I’m their daughter, and therefore, having children is my obligation to them.”
“And they are right!” Doctor Sveta immediately switches sides. “Don’t look at me – my life is not an example for anyone. There will come a time when you will want children more than anything, but it’ll be too late. Your parents want only what’s best for you.”
From the beginning of this evening, when Doctor Sveta entered the restaurant and my mother led her to the empty chair next to me, I’ve been feeling set up, like maybe my mother, or my aunt, or both of them asked Doctor Sveta to have “a talk” with me. Having exhausted their own arsenal of arguments about the necessity of children, they have turned to the resident expert on the matter and asked Doctor Sveta to use her influence. Here comes the lecture, finally, I think, and in the last attempt to divert it, appeal to her logic. “Is this how you thought when you were my age?”
“Oh no,” Doctor Sveta sighs. “Like you, I was focused on my career, on my bright future as a surgeon. And kayaking! I dreamed about my own Olympic medal. There was no point in trying to explain any of that to my mother.”
“Was this before or after you were summoned to the cargo ship?”
“I was summoned to Leningrad, and they even gave me a train ticket! But I didn’t know what I was supposed to do there, or how long they’d keep me.”
Leaving Minsk, Doctor Sveta prided herself on her resourcefulness, which expressed itself chiefly in thinking to bring a winter coat and the current issue of Soviet Sport. She had written a note to her landlady, asking the woman to hold onto her things. She explained her sudden departure as being “dispatched as a medic on a critical Naval mission of vital importance to the Soviet Union,” hoping this would warrant the safekeeping of her old school books and clothes. She sent a telegram to her mother, which at the time she’d thought communicated all her mother needed to know. “Summoned to Leningrad. Will write soon.” She soon regretted the terseness of her message. But by then, the ship was already at the far edge of the Baltic Sea, cut off from all communication.
The toasts are starting. Luckily, I’m considered the baby of the family and so too young to have anything to say on this occasion. Older family members, colleagues, grateful patients who over the years have become friends each in turn receive the microphone and, with a champagne glass in hand, make speeches. Some read awkward form poems. “Every profession is needed / every profession is wanted / but most important of all / is yours, dear doctor.” Etc. Some try to sing. My aunt stands up after every toast and theatrically hugs the speaker and his or her entire family, kisses them all three times on the cheeks. I get a creepy feeling that she’s saying good-byes.
Doctor Sveta declines when the microphone comes her way. She is not a public person, and until today, I’ve never heard her talk about herself. Instead, she whispers something into my aunt’s ear and kisses her once. My aunt nods and as she moves on I see her wiping away a tear.
Once, when I was about five years old, my aunt took me to see Doctor Sveta at the hospital where she worked and where I’d been born. Visitors were not allowed in the obstetrics wards back then, but my aunt had connections with the hospital through her job and was a familiar face, so they let the two of us right in. We arrived just as Doctor Sveta was preparing for delivery. When she came out to greet us, she was wearing a white gown, and her hands, as she reached down to hug me, were puffy and red. At that moment, she appeared to me as an evil dragon from folk tales that was going to snatch me away from my aunt and tear me to pieces. Doctor Sveta seemed all-powerful. She, who had given me life, might also take it away. I hid behind my aunt’s skirt and, to the horror of all the adults in the room, screamed as if my life depended on it. All the newborns in the ward took my lead, raising such a havoc that my aunt and I were forced to flee.
I look at Doctor Sveta’s hands as she takes a forkful of mashed potatoes, trying to glimpse what I’d seen in them as a child, that power of life and death. Now her hands are wrinkled and marked with splotches of discoloration. Her nails are cropped so close to the flesh, the tips of her fingers are flattened and sausage-like. It’s much easier to picture Doctor Sveta doing some mundane task – peeling potatoes, scrubbing the floor, even rowing a boat – than holding a scalpel.
Doctor Sveta takes small bites of her food and chews deliberately. I consider the arrangement of the banquet tables in front of me, the dishes that line its center, and find myself not particularly hungry. How many kilos of mayonnaise went into the killing of perfectly good vegetables? I munch on pickled vegetables and try the salmon. A mistake. It’s been cooked to the point that the single bite leaves my mouth feeling glued together. To my taste, even the champagne beloved by my aunt’s generation is hardly palatable, being much too sweet for the meal. I finish the glass so as not to raise any rumors.
Doctor Sveta’s unfinished story lingers in the air. The noise around us escalates as the toasts spontaneously turn into a karaoke. Drunk people love to sing. I keep glancing at Doctor Sveta, and finally she leaves her fork and knife on the plate and pats her lips with a napkin. “I suppose I do have a story to tell, don’t I?” she asks, and sounds surprised.
“And then, we were in the middle of the Atlantic. A storm broke out,” Doctor Sveta continues.
The women in Doctor Sveta’s cabin kept trying to guess their destination. Their passage had already lasted more than two weeks. NATO planes were occasionally spotted overhead, and the Navy command, still hoping to keep the operation under wraps, ordered all hands to stay hidden in their cabins and cargo holds. Over endless games of cards and cups of watered-down tea, the women talked. They ruled out the Arctic, because nobody on board had been given any winter supplies, and the coat Doctor Sveta had grabbed at the last minute was the warmest garment around. A growing consensus favored either India or Indonesia. Khruschev and Jawarharlal Nehru had recently exchanged visits and talked about agricultural cooperation; ”Hindi, Russi, bhai, bhai” was a popular slogan at the time. On the other hand, Sukarno had recently restarted the campaign to wrest West Papua from the Dutch, and Moscow promised financial and military aid.
“When did you learn the truth?”
“Not until we passed the La Manche. The Special Ops man – Party command – had assembled us in the captain’s cabin. I remember him well; he was a large man with poor hygiene. When we entered the tropics, nobody knew what to do. He developed a bad rash in his privates but was too shy to ask me for petroleum jelly because I was a woman.”
“So, he assembled you in the cabin, and then what?”
“And then he read from a piece of paper: Cuba, port Habana. ‘The Motherland relies on you to fulfill your duty with honor.’ ”
“Cuba?”
“That’s what it was. Later, they started calling it ‘The Caribbean Crisis’.”
“No kidding. Cuba.”
“It’s funny to think today how little any of us knew about it then. The women in my cabin went around the room, trying to put together everything we’d heard. We knew the names Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, of course. We knew that they’d had a communist revolution and were friends of the USSR, defending themselves against the American aggressors. Somebody probably came up with sugar cane, slavery, rum. I’d heard of salsa and rumba – I was fond of dancing.”
“The nuclear warheads? Did you see them?”
“I thought we were on a peaceful mission! I had never guessed that all of those agriculture specialists, agronomists, and dairy maids were the artillery brigade in disguise. Even once our destination became known, they kept their mouths shut. The disguise was intended to deceive the NATO observers who were expected to try to intercept our ship, but I was among their shipmates and I was fooled. Anyway, I quickly got too busy to sit around and gossip.”
The heat increased every day as they traveled south, and hygiene deteriorated. All the washing and laundry had to be done with salt water due to the limited fresh water supply. The ship had not been properly outfitted to transport so many people across an ocean, and the secrecy surrounding the operation made for a host of oversights and blunders. Barrels of cabbage soup and sauerkraut, so necessary for long voyages in the north Atlantic, began to ferment in the heat, and then exploded one by one. There wasn’t a scrap of toilet paper to go around. Doctor Sveta held on to her copy of Soviet Sport for as long as she could, but eventually that respectable publication too went, page by page, into the crapper.
The ship sailed into a storm, and all aboard except the crew and Doctor Sveta were laid up in their bunks. The people were exhausted by the heat, the lack of air, and poor nutrition. Few had experienced sea travel, and some had been sick continuously since the beginning of the journey. Doctor Sveta distributed the vomit buckets and helped to clean up; there wasn’t much else she could do. At its height, the storm was classified gale force 10; the waves towered over the ship, then broke across her bow. Most of the artillery brigade held onto their bunks, with barely enough strength to moan.
“But I wasn’t even dizzy,” Doctor Sveta says. “I was in very good shape from kayaking.”
“How did you know what to do? I mean, your training was in surgery, wasn’t it?”
“The ship’s medic helped. He showed me how to treat pretty much any illness with ethanol, 95% ethanol. There was no shortage of that on board.”
“Were there any major injuries?”
“Two miscarriages.”
I freeze. This touches on something I haven’t shared with my family. Two years ago, when I’d just finished medical school, and soon after my husband and I started trying to get pregnant, I had a miscarriage. It happened at a very early term, a very common occurrence, and the most disconcerting part is that I haven’t had a positive pregnancy test since then. We are at this point in need of professional medical help – if we want to pursue the matter further. My husband and I both are so intensely committed to our work and keep our schedules so full that even finding time to talk about our future seems challenging.
Of course we’ve kept all of this information from my meddlesome family. I don’t need to become a conduit for unleashing their fears and frustrations. But perhaps Doctor Sveta’s story is a matter of coincidence and not a prelude for a moral tale, a lesson from which I’m to draw appropriate conclusions. I feel like I’m needlessly paranoid and too gullible at the same time.
Doctor Sveta goes on, “The technical name of this procedure is abrasio, as you may recall. You have to dilate the woman’s cervix and scrape the remains of the pregnancy from the uterus. Sometimes it comes out in parts, and there are no ways to tell all the parts have been expelled without doing the procedure. And if you do nothing, there’s a very good chance there will be inflammation, and then the whole uterus will have to come out. Of course, on the ship, we didn’t have the right equipment; nothing with which to dilate the cervix. So my only option was C-section, and that’s what I did. We had to tie the women down to the table because we only had local anesthetic and ethanol. If I were in the same circumstances today, I’d probably choose to wait and see before attempting this procedure. Too much pain and risk of bleeding and infection! But I was young and didn’t know any better – “
My heart is beating loudly, and I’m trying to control my gagging reflex. I’ve provided support for a number of dilation and curettage procedures, D&C, administering a mix of local anesthesia, moderate sedation and analgesia; a hysterectomy abortion is today rarely used and would require a general anesthesia. Without these measures, the pain must be mindboggling. How could these women withstand it? How could Doctor Sveta keep a steady hand through the procedure? I don’t actually want to know the answers. In my case, I learned that the fetus wasn’t viable during a regularly scheduled ultrasound. The fetus was tiny and my body expelled it two weeks following the diagnosis. A bad night on the toilet – and that was it.
Doctor Sveta falls silent, allowing her words to linger in the air between us. The party music cuts in: a Beatles tune. People are eating dessert – cream-filled pastries and cake. A waiter places a cup of coffee in front of Doctor Sveta, and her expression visibly changes. Her gaze is no longer turned inwards, scrutinizing her memory; she’s looking at me with a serious, concerned look.
“Don’t say anything,” I ask. “Please.”
“What do you mean? Are you feeling alright?”
She stretches out her hand, to place on mine, and, as though I were still a child, I recoil. She continues to scrutinize my face. “I was the first person to hold you in my arms,” she says. “You’ll tell me if you need help with anything, won’t you? Your aunt, I know, is very concerned that you’re working too much and have been neglecting your health.”
I’d been conflating my aunt, my mother, and Doctor Sveta in my mind into a single voice of authority, I realize. Listening to Doctor Sveta’s life story, I’d been too selfish, too focused on my own troubles to question what, for her, must’ve been pivotal experiences. With effort, I look up at her. “Doctor Sveta, so what happened then? Did you go on to Cuba?”
“I spent two years in Cuba, didn’t you know?”
“What? I had no idea!”
“I forget now. We were under orders not to talk about that, and our friends who knew didn’t know much. After the Soviet Union fell apart all that need for secrecy suddenly fell away. It was . . . I don’t know how to describe that time. There was so much life on that island. You wanted fish, you went out and you caught a fish. You wanted to plant something, you sowed the seeds in the ground and they grew. I fell in love – of course I did. But then it was such a strange life, dreamlike. We knew it would end sooner or later and they would send us home. The dream went on for a while, it went on and on, and as it went on, back in Mogilev, my mother died. My landlady had given away or sold all of my medical books and my dresses. I didn’t mind the dresses – I couldn’t have fit into them anyway. I gained all that weight in Cuba. My medical training grew stale. I was a part of a team of physicians who built a new hospital in the small town where we were stationed. Because I was the only female doctor, I was in charge of the maternity ward.”
“The fate you’d tried so hard to avoid!”
“I didn’t mind it then. When I returned to the Soviet Union, the Leningrad clinic wanted me for my experience with difficult cases. The sojourn in Cuba helped me settle in Leningrad.”
Doctor Sveta stops there and falls silent.
The party is nearing the end. Some guests have already started leaving, and at the center table, my aunt and my parents are collecting the bouquets of flowers, preparing to transport them home. My aunt is receiving the gifts, an extravagant collection of bathrobes, scarves, and tea services. She thanks the givers profusely, but I know that most of these things will be given or thrown away before too long. My aunt doesn’t like to keep things that are of no practical use to her, and there are very few things that she feels she actually needs. For example, pill organizers. My aunt always asks me to bring her pill organizers from the United States, where she knows such things exist. She uses them herself and gives them to friends as gifts they would actually use.
Doctor Sveta is also getting ready to go. I help her into her coat and lead her outside. It’s dark in St. Petersburg in December, not particularly cold, but depressing. The wet snow is coming down in large clumps that melt immediately on impact with our hair and cheeks. “Wouldn’t you rather be in the tropics now?” I tease her.
“That was never an option. We, in the Soviet Union, were never under the illusion that we chose our fate. Instead, we tried to make the most of what we had. Look at me: I’m alone and childless. I should be afraid, but, you know, I’m not.”
Doctor Sveta’s going to the subway, and I accompany her to the corner of the street. She walks straight-backed, taking large, decisive strides. Watching her disappear into the darkness, I think about what it must have been like to return to Leningrad after two years in Cuba. For the first time in her life she must have felt completely alone. And yet, despite her own words, I cannot picture her lonely in the way Americans experience loneliness, disconnected from her community and turned inwards. She must have loved being reunited with her university friends. Together, they went to every museum exhibit in town, every concert, every theatrical performance. This must have been the beginning of many schemes and plans and ideas for the future. At the hospital, she took the ownership of the maternity ward. She procured a piece of land near Leningrad, where each summer she planted a massive garden, and in the fall had jars of jam and pickles to distribute to all of her friends. Leningrad wasn’t Cuba, and it took a lot of effort to grow even the small bitter cucumbers. Doctor Sveta, I knew, took great pride in her produce.
“You had a nice long talk with Doctor Sveta tonight,” my mother comments when I return to the restaurant. “I hope she’s given you some good advice.”
My mother means well, and I’m too tired to fight with her. Her words remind me of her friend who was pushing the number of the fertility specialist on me. None of my American friends and colleagues would ever think of giving such intrusive unsolicited advice. I like to think that nobody in America would ever judge me if I decided not to procreate – and even if they did, they’d never dare tell it to my face. My husband thinks I’m a glutton for punishment when I go to visit my family so often. He complains that I never have anything positive to say about these visits. I want to bring back Doctor Sveta’s story and hold it up to him as a gift. This story, too, is my home.
Olga Zilberbourg’s stories have appeared in Tin House, Santa Monica Review, Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row, Narrative Magazine, and J Journal.