Feeding Death - Earl James

Arkhara Camp, Siberia
January, 1953

Andrei picked a another morsel of meat from the wooden bown and lifted the spoon towards Nadezhda’s mouth. Meat was a loose term at the camp, but the subjects of the tests got the best that was offered. The particular scrap on the spoon was at least not green. It looked to Andrei as if the Evenki hunters must have brought in a moose. The meat looked as if it had been fresh and was not from the salted slabs that came from the west. The Commissars ordered that the subjects be given the most nutritious food available. They didn’t want their experiment confounded by concerns that the subjects were not being fed property. Andrei reflected on the insanity of giving the most nutritious food to prisoners where being poisoned and decided that it ranked low in the hierarchy of mad acts that the Russian government was undertaking. A society led by a paranoid schizophrenic couldn’t be expected to make too many rational decisions.

He bumped the spoon against Nadezhda’s lips, trying to get her to open and take a bite. A person whose digestive tract was being eaten away by the remnants of a radioactive element does not feel like eating. Soon Andrei knew she would have to be fed intraveinously. As he held the spoon against her lips he imagined that he was sitting next to Stalins bed and feeding him a morsel of meat laced with the Polonium. He could imagine the satisfaction he would feel seeing the man who had caused so much misery ingesting a meal that would eat him to death from the inside. A meal that would liquefy his bowels until he shit them out uncontrollably onto bed. He could imagine making the lie in his own radioactive filth. Listening to the Great One whimper in the pain and misery of it as so many had done in the beds of this lab. He would laugh at the man being reduced to a yellowed cadaver. He couldn’t decide if he would feed him a low dose so he could watch him suffer longer or if he would give him the largest dose possible so that he could watch him wither away in a matter of days.

The image of the death of Stalin made him think of the meaning of Nadezhda’s name. Hope. Despite what he had been through, despite his circumstances, something in Andrei always found a way to hope. To visualize a way that the misery of his life and those around him could be transformed. He knew this was his weakness. He knew this was his downfall. It kept him from confronting those things in his life that were causing his misery. Hope gave him a path to keep his sanity. In his heart he knew that change to something better was a cruel illusion. He knew that this misery that would only be ended when his life was ended. Just as he knew that Nadezhda’s misery would only be ended when her last breath was drawn.