The Marxism-Leninism test required the memorization of about 50 volumes of communist propaganda. The wise classmate Valeria managed to condense the 50 volumes into 2. It was easier to regurgitate two volumes of the worthless rhetoric that nobody will ever need, including the Useful Idiots.
To pay back the free education, graduates had to accept assignments wherever the communist party sent them. To make sure they complied, the health authorities in Bucharest withheld their medical diplomas until the rural assignment was completed or a replacement was found.
Aurel’s assignment was in two villages in Oltenia which had no electricity, no phones, no running water, no medical supplies, and no medical clinic. One room provided by the local “Feldscher” doubled as occasional examination room and bedroom for the Barefoot Doctor. A feldsher was a term derived from the German word Feldscher coined in the 15th century, given to medieval barbers who practiced ancient medicine in the army.
Patient care was provided on foot, making house calls, rain or shine. After eight months of torture and deprivation of human rights, Aurel resigned, telling the medical commissar in Bucharest to keep his diploma and dropped out of the medical profession temporarily and became a musician.
During his last two years of medical school, students were exposed to some surgery but most of the hands-on medicine was accomplished during the 3-year long mandatory service in rural areas, practicing on desperate people who needed medical care the most.
After graduation, the privileged few, with connections to the Communist Party, remained in large cities as employees of the urban healthcare authorities or enrolled in a specialization course if they met the affirmative action criteria.
One night’s chance encounter with a Polish dentist and his wife in a dance club at the Black Sea where he was performing would eventually change Dr. Mircea’s life. The possibility of postgraduate studies in Warsaw under his sponsorship was discussed.
Poland, although a socialist country under the rule of the communist party, “preserved some degree of freedom of the press, religion and even allowed a certain degree of private enterprise including medical and dental practices. Realizing that the government is not the answer to all problems, the Polish authorities obliged its people’s demand for the preservation of private businesses and family farms.”
At the request of Comrade Ghiorghi Preda, Aurel had performed monthly concerts during medical school years. He would lie to him about the composers – Comrade Gershwinowsky (George Gershwin) and Comrade Portersky (Cole Porter), both graduates of the Moscow Conservatory of Music. Comrade Ghiorghi would nod his “brainwashed communist head in approval. As long you don’t play any imperialist tunes from America, which I hate with passion!” Boiling on the inside, Aurel never told Ghiorghi how much he hated his communist Romania which destroyed the people’s souls and spirit.
Aurel passed the indoctrination Marxist-Leninist written and oral tests with a perfect score, not because he knew the material, he despised it. Thanks to his group of colleagues who had prepared beforehand all the correct answers to questions 1-60. What they thought the communist agitators wanted to hear as answers were lining the pockets of his jacket. With agile prestidigitation, he took out the correct and embellished answer to his question and dazzled the committee on which, surprisingly sat his medical school colleague and commissar Ghiorghi who never showed up for any exams but passed everything with a perfect score of 10.
Had Aurel and his group been caught cheating on the Marxist-Leninist test which counted 25 percent of the graduation score, they would have been expelled and sent to Siberia in a Gulag and would have never be seen or heard from again.
Aurel had picked up his temporary doctor’s diploma - the real one would be held hostage and locked up in the dean’s safe for the duration of the three years of mandatory service as a Barefoot Doctor in a rural area.
Luck intervened again. His prayers were answered when he met a colonel on campus who was looking for a doctor for one of his three non-combatant battalions staffed with young peasants drafted by force under the new conscription law which made them work from dawn to dusk for three years with an axe and a shovel, building roads, bridges, and other infrastructures.
The newly minted battalion physician reported to his job Monday through Saturday, tending to his motley crew in Buzau. The soldiers were healthy and strong, and his job involved only issues of hygiene and nutrition. The sixty-mile train and bus commute were pleasant, and he made friends with the regular riders, all pissed off at the communist regime but helpless to do anything about it.
Through the years, besides his native Romanian language, Dr. Mircea became fluent in French, Russian, Polish, English, and a bit of Afrikaans and Fanaglo, the Bantu People Esperanto of the subcontinent, a mix of Zulu and English.
The military commissar asked Comrade Doctor one day why he was studying foreign languages. Aside from the personal joy of being able to swear in Polish at the totalitarian commissar, Dr. Mircea answered the Comrade Captain with a straight face that he liked to study the history of the Soviet Union in the Russian language.
He wrote, “I was surrounded by soldiers who hated every minute of their forced conscription, by officers who were spying on each other and by a military commissar who tried every day to put someone in jail, including me.” You were never innocent until proven guilty, you were always guilty, it all depended on what charges the commissar would manufacture about a person they wanted imprisoned.
His stint with the battalion ended when he was forced by the new commander to swap his post so close to the capital with his son’s post far away. This son was addicted to drugs and Aurel’s post was much more enticing and closer to him and to the capital. He used threats of many years of jail time against Aurel because he never stopped his correspondence with the Polish dentist, Dr. Kim-Ru, whom he had met at the Black Sea. He knew, of course, all his letters were opened and read by Security Police, a huge apparatus formed to spy on citizens.
Additionally, to improve living conditions for the poor conscripts, they traded medicine they did not need, the soldiers were generally healthy, with the peasants in dire need of antibiotics and anti-inflammatories missing in commercial pharmacies, for meat and wine, improving their pathetic diet. Bartering was a way of life if you wanted to survive under socialism, under the boot of the Communist Party because the economy was a centrally planned mess. Everybody wanted bribes and most people took things from where they worked in order to trade with others and survive. The commissars always wanted their cut until it became politically inconvenient.
Aurel’s constant dream was to have the Polish Ministry of Health give him a stipend for a postgraduate medical program in Warsaw, a suitable position in a good teaching hospital. To thwart those who constantly watched him, he wrote, “Dear Dr. Kim-Ru, I hereby express my total dedication to the cause of socialism in the Soviet bloc. I also voice my desire for Peace on Earth and my willingness to serve the great Marxist-Leninist ideology. I reaffirm that my fate is now in your hands and I’m waiting for your next move. Long live the Proletarian Paradise!” Dr. Mircea explained that, after writing such sentences exclusively for the communist censors monitoring the post office, “he puked three times in protest and hatred of dictatorship.”
Aurel’s chance encounter one night with the famous Russian composer Aram Khachaturian at the Black Sea, who was there on a therapeutic visit to the famous saprophytic muds of Eforie Nord, had lifted his spirits temporarily.
At the end of the summer, Aurel had to choose between being a Barefoot Doctor again or change countries. But fate had other plans.
The place he exchanged with the colonel’s son was in the villages of Tulburea and Aninoasa, a fifty-mile train ride from Craiova towards the Carpathian Mountains. As his mother had told him, all the riches and greatness had gone into the pockets of the communist oligarchy as part of the open-theft, centrally planned economy. The villages were poor places in the hill country, filled with “hard-working old women, sick old men, and hungry children.”
But he was glad that he was not “in some Siberian concentration camp crushing hard rocks with wooden hammers.” His modest rent bought him one room and access to a kitchen and bath. He had one bed, “one wash basin with a suspended water container and a small tea table.
For six working days and nights he slept in the same bed on which he examined the occasional visiting patients. The rest of the time, he had to trek through mud and snow to reach some of the out of the way farms with sick residents.
As a young 25-year old doctor, sent to this God-forsaken place for allegedly “stealing medications and selling local wines,” Dr. Mircea kept repeating to himself that he would not be a communist victim of the healthcare disaster he was witnessing. He wanted a professional career in freedom.
When the heavy snows came and the roads became impassable, the cooperative manager gave him a “living, hungry stallion” for which the villagers donated oats and corn. They also gave Dr. Mircea boiled eggs, bacon, and bread. The local priest gave him a sleigh which was a good thing because the horse was too old to be ridden and could not make it up the difficult hills.
When Dr. Mircea spent two nights a week in his rented one-room adobe in Craiova, condensation from running the gas heater fell from the ceiling onto his face and bed all night like a “small discreet rain.”
The Siberian Express winter storm of 1962-1963 brought weeks of misery and pain for the villagers and for Dr. Mircea. In February he found his beloved horse in the barn mauled by hungry wolves. He cried, overwhelmed by his loss and by mountains of snow.
Freezing temperatures had turned most rivers into easy to cross two-feet deep ice bridges and Bulgarian grey wolves came in packs across the Danube. Hungry and skeletal guard dogs were no match for the ravenous wolves. His beloved pet and friend, with whom he talked as if he could understand him, was dead. He was so deeply attached to him in his rural loneliness.
Dr. Mircea waited weeks until the roads and the rail became passable again and returned to Craiova where he checked himself into a local hospital ward for tests. He was afraid that his daily diet of expired sardine cans may have poisoned him. Under socialist medicine, you had to be checked into a ward in order to have any serum or x-ray tests.
While on medical leave for two months, fate intervened again and he received the opportunity of his life – an offer for a post graduate course, a two-year residency in Ear Nose and Throat surgery at a teaching hospital in Warsaw. The letter with the proposal arrived from Dr. Kim-Ru, just as he had promised. It was delivered through the production manager of a traveling Polish circus in order to escape the eyes of the communist censors. The door to freedom had finally opened for Dr. Mircea!
TO BE CONTINUED
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