By Way of Prague

My story is about an ordinary Russian in his 30s having the courage in the extraordinary circumstances in which he was thrust to do the right thing rather than the easy thing. Not an original theme, to be sure, but, given the time and place and the high stakes they generate, a compelling take on it, I believe. The time is the late 70s and the place is Soviet Moscow. An entire generation has been cowed into submission by its own government. The mind-set of its people is to submit meekly to their country’s repressive measures or risk being sent to the gulag, or worse. As the protagonist says: ‘Things just happen to people, and we are bound to accept them without question, indifferent to all moral questions. Just the way things are’. This is the world in which this story is set. Sergei is married with a baby daughter. He is a trained doctor, unable to practice medicine and working ‘in a shithole nursing home’ cleaning out bedpans, a fate he is bound to accept for being the son of ‘a filthy dissident’, himself a doctor and a victim of the KGB and the gulag system. A KGB Colonel brings Sergei a woman who, in the most desperate of circumstances, has plunged a pen into her throat in an apparent suicide attempt. The KGB Colonel installs her in the basement of Sergei’s nursing home. The KGB has its reasons for wanting to keep her secret and alive, and assign her care toward convalescence to Sergei. In the course of caring for her, Sergei’s curiosity and innate oppositionist tendencies get the better of him and he slowly pieces together the mystery of who his patient is and why she needs to be kept both alive and secret. Sergei is confronted by the injustice and cruelty of the KGB’s plans for her and the 10-year boy she left behind. It is at this point that Sergei is forced to choose between two incompatible courses of action: to avoid antagonizing the KGB (and subverting his moral compass in the process) and preventing the injustice and cruelty he is witness to. The hard question of ‘Who to be?’ A fundamental question of identity, a question, I think, that is central to every good story. Sergei needs to discover who he is, at root and to confront his true identity, one which has lain dormant, but uneasily dormant, in his soul. At the risk of repercussions, both physical and psychic, for himself and his family. Sergei chooses the right thing over the easy thing and propels himself upon a journey fraught with unimaginable danger. Through sheer force of will, and in concert with a US ally in Moscow, he defeats the KGB Colonel’s scheme, a scheme devised in league with a corrupt US Embassy officer to install the son of Sergei’s patient into the corrupt officer’s high born family in America, a family steeped in public service at the highest levels, as a sleeper spy. A scheme the corrupt officer was motivated to enter into to avoid the scandal, and subsequent and inevitable reputational damage to his family resulting from being expelled from the Soviet Union on account of his murder of Sergei’s patient’s husband during a violent confrontation over his affair with the dead man’s wife. The KGB Colonel made a promise to the boy to keep his mother safe (free from prosecution for criminal adultery, a capital offence in the Soviet Union at that time) and alive, a promise he is committed to keeping, especially in return for the boy’s promise to submit to the Prague adoption in return. In succeeding at the cost of his life, and, before that, the loss of his family, Sergei helped to undo the injustice and cruelty represented by the KGB’s framing of an innocent man, the US Ambassador to Moscow, in the CIA’s mole hunt for the true traitor, and the imposition by the KGB upon a ten-year boy to live a life of deception in a country other than his own. An outcome which, in my view, serves as an inspiration to other ordinary Russians in that time and place to do the right thing, not simply the easy thing. My script is finished.