The House of Cards

When I was growing up, few things worried me more than the state of my father’s back. He suffered from regular bouts of backache—what the Russians call radikulit—that made him walk like a penguin and that no doctor could remedy. His backache would especially act up on the eve of inclement weather, which, in our parts, lasted a good two-thirds of the year. In addition to walking, the condition made other kinds of movement, especially that of bowels, quite painful for him. The strain involved exacerbated his backache, which further aggravated his constipation, which, in turn, made his backache even worse. The hours he spent on the communal toilet trying to relieve himself—preceded by imbibing generous amounts of castor oil—left him drained and dispirited, and led to skirmishes with sosedi, the apartment roommates who claimed the throne for themselves. At such times I knew better than to get in his path, for this normally cheery, soft-spoken man, now reduced to a state of sullen gloom, was prone to lose his temper and give me a drubbing at the slightest of pretexts.

For a long time I had remained ignorant of the true origins of my father’s ailment. He himself had vaguely alluded to it as frontovoy, a war injury. The story went that once, while on a reconnaissance mission near the river Dnieper in the Ukraine, he had stumbled upon an SS patrol, and had to dive into the ice-cold waters of the river, where he spent an hour or so hiding in the reeds. The ordeal had cost...