The Genitive of Negation

by Arthur Kronfeld, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The file was tied with grey tape, the kind the post office used for parcels, and somebody had knotted it twice so that it had to be picked open with a fingernail. Saalfeld picked at it for a full minute in the cold of the second-floor consulting room while Rudneva warmed her hands on the tea glass and watched him. The stove in the corner had been lit at seven. By ten it had made a ring of warmth about a metre across, and neither of them was standing in it.

"You could cut it," she said.

"Then they would know we had opened it."

"They know we have opened it. That is why they sent it."

The knot gave. Inside were the investigator's order for a forensic-psychiatric examination, two pages, typed; the protocol of the search of a room in a communal flat on the Third Rybinskaya Street; the denunciation that had led to the search, in a round, careful, schoolroom hand; the protocol of the first interrogation; and, in a brown envelope that had once held photographs, eleven letters.

Ozerov, Kirill Matveyevich. Born 1907, Tula. Russian. Non-party. Electrician, tram depot at Sokolniki. Charged under Article 154-a.

The order put two questions to the commission. Saalfeld read them twice, translating under his breath, though by now his Russian was good enough for documents and failed him only in conversation, where it came out correct and a beat too late, like a man answering the question before last.

1. Is the examinee responsible (вменяем) for the acts with which he is charged?

2. Does the examinee suffer from a sexual perversion requiring medical treatment?

The second question had been added by hand, in pencil, under the typing.

"That is Ponomaryov," Rudneva said. "The investigator. He is young. He reads."

"What does he read?"

"Whatever there is." She put the glass down. "You understand why I asked for you."

He understood. Antonina Pavlovna Rudneva chaired the commission, and two years ago she had chaired it with four colleagues; now she chaired it with two, and Saalfeld was not one of the two. He was a consultant. He was called in on the German-language cases, and, since a winter evening in 1936 when he had said too much at a dinner, on cases of this kind. She knew where he had worked in Berlin. She had never once said the name of the place aloud, and he was grateful to her for it in a way he had not decided how to show.

"I understand that you want somebody to answer the second question," he said, "so that you do not have to."

"I want somebody who knows the literature." She looked at the window, which was white with frost to the height of her shoulder. "There used to be a great deal of it. In Russian, too. Now there is a great deal less."

---

He read the letters before he saw the man. It was against his habit, and he noted that it was against his habit, and read them anyway, because Ozerov would be brought up at eleven and the letters were the only thing in the file not written by someone who wanted Ozerov to go to a camp.

There were eleven of them on cheap squared paper torn from an exercise book, folded small. None was dated. None was signed with more than a letter, В., and none named a street, a factory, a mutual friend, a station, anything that a man with a map and the patience of Ponomaryov could have walked to. Saalfeld noticed this before he noticed anything else. It was not the carelessness of love. Somebody had taught the writer to write this way, or he had taught himself, or they had taught each other.

What they said was ordinary. The writer had been to the bathhouse and the water was cold. The writer had a cough. The writer had queued two hours for herring and been given salt cod and had eaten it anyway, and thought of K. eating it, and laughed in the street. The writer was tired. There were no descriptions of acts. There was one sentence, in the seventh letter, that the investigator had marked twice in the margin with a blue pencil: когда ты сдесь я не боюсь ничего. When you are here I am afraid of nothing.

The writer spelled badly. Сдесь for здесь; щастье for счастье; a soft sign missing in almost every infinitive. And on every letter, over the mistakes, there were small corrections in grey graphite, in a second hand, neat and upright: the с struck through and a з written above it, the щ struck through and сч above that, the soft signs set in like little flags.

Ponomaryov had marked those too. He had underlined each correction in blue and in the margin of the first letter written: шифр? Cipher?

Saalfeld laid the letters out on the desk in a row, two rows, eleven, and looked at them with his hands in his coat pockets. In Berlin he had seen a hundred such bundles, more, brought in by mothers, by landladies, by the men themselves when they had nowhere else to keep them, and he had learned to read the paper before the words: the creases, the pinholes, the places where a letter had been carried against the body long enough to soften. These had been carried. Two of them were worn through along the folds. Somebody had read them often enough to see, each time, a new mistake to put right, and had put it right, and given them back, or kept them.

He thought: the investigator is not stupid. A man who corrects another man's letters and returns them is a man who expects there will be more letters. That is what the corrections say. Ponomaryov has read them as cipher because cipher is the thing he has a form for.

He thought also, because he was obliged to, of what the corrections did not say. Whether the corrector was patient or contemptuous. Whether the writer welcomed it or wept over it. The paper did not tell him. He made a note to ask, and crossed out the note, because it was not the commission's business, and wrote it again underneath, because it was his.

---

Ozerov was brought up by a guard who stayed in the corridor, and the door was left ajar, and Saalfeld did not shut it. He had learned that, too, in two years.

The man was tall and had been heavier; the jacket hung off the points of his shoulders. Head shaved, the scalp a prison grey. A healed split in the lower lip. Hands broad, the nails cut very short, the tips of the first two fingers on the right hand thickened and yellowish with the callus of the screwdriver and the pliers. Chilblains on both ears. He sat when he was told to and put his hands flat on his knees, which was what the cells taught.

"I am to examine your state of mind," Saalfeld said, in Russian, slowly, "for the court."

"I know. They told us. They said a German would come." Ozerov looked at him with some interest. "You don't sound German."

"I sound like a German who has been practising."

That got nothing. Saalfeld began where the forms began, because the forms were what there was, and because a man who has been interrogated for five weeks needs a quarter of an hour of questions that are only questions. Birth. Father a smith at the arms works in Tula, dead 1919, typhus. Mother living, in Tula, sixty-one. Two sisters, one dead. School to fourteen. Apprenticed to an electrician at the Tula works at fifteen. Moscow in 1925, because a cousin had a corner in a room in Sokolniki and the trams were being electrified as fast as the wire could be strung. The depot from 1926. Overhead line, then motors, then the substation. Never ill except the ordinary things. Two shocks from the line, one bad, in 1931, when he had been thrown off the tower wagon and broken a wrist. No fits. No drink to speak of. No head injuries except the fall. Saalfeld examined the wrist, and the pupils, and the reflexes at knee and ankle, and found them in order, and wrote it down.

There it was: the constitution, which was a strong one; the history, which was a working man's history in a working man's decade; and a third thing, the thing he could not examine with a hammer, which was sitting on the other side of the desk being careful.

"The room on the Rybinskaya," Saalfeld said. "How large?"

Ozerov looked surprised, for the first time. "Nine metres. Nine and a half, with the window."

"Yours alone?"

"Since thirty-four. Before that, my cousin and his wife and me. Then they got a place in Lyublino, and the house committee let me keep it, because of the depot. Because I'm on call for the line at night." He moved his shoulders. "There are six rooms in the flat. Twenty-two people. One kitchen, one tap. In the room next to me there's Zinaida Fyodorovna and her son and the son's wife and the baby. Four of them in eleven metres."

Saalfeld turned back to the denunciation. The round schoolroom hand. I consider it my duty as a Soviet citizen to report. There followed a list of evenings, with dates, on which a man had been heard in citizen Ozerov's room after midnight; the sound, through the wall, of two voices speaking low; the sound of laughter; on one occasion, the sound of a man weeping. There was no description of the visitor's face. The hall light in such flats was a single bulb on the shared meter, which nobody would pay to leave burning, and the neighbour, Saalfeld supposed, had never managed to be in the hall with a lamp at the right moment.

At the foot of the page, as if in passing: I also report that citizen Ozerov occupies 9.5 square metres alone while a family with a child is living in 11.

"Did you know her well?"

"Zinaida Fyodorovna? She kept my milk on her windowsill when I was on nights. I fixed her iron." Ozerov said it without bitterness, as he had said everything; and then, after a moment, in a lower voice: "The baby cries all night. Through the wall. You can't sleep. I used to think, when they get my room, at least the baby will have a corner."

Saalfeld wrote: Relations with neighbours: without conflict. It was accurate. He had learned in Berlin that the files of the persecuted were full of such accuracies, and that the persecution was in what the form had no line for: nine and a half square metres, a wall, a bulb nobody would pay to leave on.

He asked, because he had to, about the visitor: how they had met, how long. Ozerov looked at the floor and said, "I've told the investigator I don't know his name," and that was all he said, and Saalfeld did not ask again. He wrote nothing on that line. It was the only line on the form he left empty.

"Your cellmates," Saalfeld said. "Have they given you advice?"

Ozerov's eyes went to the open door and came back. "Everybody gives advice."

"What advice?"

"To say I'm sick." He said it plainly, the way he had said typhus and 1931. "There's a man in our cell, he was a bookkeeper. He says if the doctors write that you're sick, it's the hospital, not the camp. Or it's three years instead of five. He says the doctors like it if you're sorry."

"Is that what you want me to write?"

Ozerov did not answer. He looked at Saalfeld's pen.

"I will tell you what I can tell you," Saalfeld said. He chose the words before he spoke them, as he did in this language and had begun, in two years, to do in his own. "The first question the court asks is whether you understood what you were doing and could control it. I have examined you. You understood and you could. That answer I cannot change, and it would not help you if I tried, because the hospital the bookkeeper means is for people who are not responsible, and you are responsible, and the next doctor would find it out." He put the pen down. "The second question is whether you have a perversion that requires treatment. That question is not a medical question, though it is written as one."

"What kind of question is it?"

"A question about what the court would like to hear."

Ozerov considered this. There was a smell coming off him that Saalfeld had stopped noticing in Berlin and noticed again here, the smell of the cell: carbolic, old wool, other men. Out in the corridor the guard shifted his weight and the boards complained.

"In twenty-six," Ozerov said, "when I came to the depot, there was a lecture. In the club. A doctor came from the Institute of Social Hygiene and talked about the new life. It was mostly about abortion and the venereal diseases, and syphilis, and you mustn't drink. And someone asked about men with men, and he said, that is not the state's affair now. It was in a book, he said. A doctor wrote a book about it, and it was printed abroad, so they would know there what we were doing here." He moved his hands on his knees. "I believed it."

"It was true," Saalfeld said. "In 1926 it was true. I read that book in Berlin. We all read it."

"And now?"

"Now there is Article 154-a."

"So which is it?" said Ozerov. "Sick or not sick? You're the doctor. In twenty-six they said, not sick, not a crime, a private matter. Now they say crime. And the bookkeeper says, say sick, and they'll go easy. So it changes. It changes every few years. I want to know what you think, who has read everything."

The pen was on the desk. Saalfeld left it there.

What he thought could be put in a sentence, and the sentence had taken him twenty years and three analyses and a whole institution to be able to say without qualification, and the institution was ash now, its library burned in the Opernplatz in May 1933 while students sang. The sentence was: the category is a thing made by men for a purpose, and when it is examined it does not hold. There is no disease here. There is a man whose body disposed him one way, whose history gave the disposition a shape, and whose world has decided, this year, to put him in a camp for it. What he suffers from is the world.

He had written that, more or less, in Berlin, in German, in eleven years of certificates. In Berlin it had been a weapon in the hand of the defence. Not ill had meant: leave him alone, he is a citizen like any other, the paragraph is wrong. He had seen what not ill meant in Moscow in 1938 on the first page of the file. If not ill, then responsible. If responsible, then guilty. If guilty, then five years.

"What I think," he said, "is that you are well. That it is not a disease. That there is nothing to treat."

Ozerov nodded slowly. He seemed less surprised than relieved, as if he had been told the price of something he had already decided to buy.

"Then write that."

"You understand what it means. In this court."

"It means five and not three. Or not the hospital." Ozerov lifted his right hand off his knee and looked at the callused fingertips, and put it back. "I've been sorry for five weeks. I said I was sorry to Ponomaryov every night. Sorry I was born, sorry for Tula, sorry for my mother. I signed what he wanted about myself." He looked at the doorway. "I won't sign that I'm sick. Not for two years. Two years is not so much."

It was a good deal. Saalfeld had seen men come back from two years. He did not say it.

"There is another thing," he said instead. "The letters."

The man's whole body changed. It was small: the shoulders came in, the hands closed on the knees. The constitution, Saalfeld noted, still did what constitutions did.

"Will they read them in court?"

"They are in the file. I have read them."

"Out loud, I mean."

"I do not know."

"He wrote badly," Ozerov said, and to Saalfeld's astonishment the man was embarrassed, colouring from the collar up to the chilblained ears, not at anything the letters said but at the spelling. "He left school at eleven. He's not stupid. Nobody showed him. I used to put the letters right and give them back, so he'd see. He asked me to. He said, I want to write properly to you." The colour stayed. "It's stupid. I know it looks stupid."

"The investigator," Saalfeld said carefully, "believes the corrections are a code."

Ozerov stared at him. Then he laughed: once, a short bark like something breaking, so that the guard put his head round the door and looked at them both and withdrew it.

"A code," Ozerov said. "Щастье. With a щ." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand where the split lip had opened a little. "I told him a hundred times. Сч. It's сч."

---

Saalfeld wrote the finding after lunch, at the desk in the ring of warmth, with Rudneva at the other desk dealing with a railwayman from Kursk who had set fire to his wife's sister's house and claimed to have heard the instruction from the radio.

He wrote the first part in the house form, which was a good form, he thought, better than the Berlin one; the Institute had built it carefully in the twenties, before the careful people began to go. Anamnesis. Somatic status. Neurological status. Psychic status: orientated in place, time and person; contact adequate; thinking ordered, coherent, purposeful; no delusions, no hallucinations, no disorder of perception; memory and intellect corresponding to education and experience; emotional reactions adequate to the situation, with marked anxiety concerning the investigation. Then the conclusion to the first question, in the phrase that would be read out and was the only phrase most people in the court would hear: Вменяем. Responsible.

Then the second question.

He wrote the sentence in German first, on a scrap, as he still did when it mattered, and looked at it.

Die homosexuelle Neigung des Untersuchten ist keine psychische Krankheit und erfordert keine Behandlung.

The homosexual inclination of the examinee is not a mental illness and requires no treatment.

It was the sentence he had written for Hirschfeld's patients in their hundreds. It was the sentence Ozerov had asked for. It was also, word for word, the sentence Ponomaryov needed to close the file, and there was no way to make it say one of those things without saying the other. He had spent his life insisting that a diagnosis must be examined before it was trusted: what made it, what it was for, whom it served. He examined this one. It had been made in Berlin to free men. In this building it would serve the court. And the man it described had chosen it, knowing what it would serve, because it was true and because it was his.

He translated it into Russian and wrote it into the form in ink.

Гомосексуальное влечение испытуемого не является психического заболевания и в лечении не нуждается.

Underneath, after a moment, he added a second paragraph, which no one had asked for:

The pencil marks in the letters attached to the case (envelope, 11 sheets) are corrections of spelling in the ordinary sense: з for с, сч for щ, the soft sign restored at the end of infinitives. They correspond to errors frequent among persons of limited schooling. In the opinion of the consultant they are of no other significance.

He read it over. It was not much. It took nothing away from the five years. It might take a charge of espionage off the man who had written щастье, whoever and wherever he was, and off Ozerov too, and it might, in the same stroke, put a German consultant's name a little higher in a file he would never see. He thought about the dinner in 1936 and the winter of 1937 and the colleagues who had stopped coming to the commission. He thought about Grete, who did the queues in the mornings so that he would not be seen in them speaking Russian with an accent, and who would have told him to write it, and then not slept.

He left it in.

---

Rudneva took the form at four. The railwayman from Kursk had been taken down. The light was going over the roofs, and the frost on the window had begun to climb again from the sill.

She read it standing, the way she read everything, with the glass of cold tea in one hand. She read the first part fast, her lips moving very slightly on the terms. At the second question she stopped. Saalfeld watched her read it twice. He watched her read the paragraph about the letters, and read it again, and look at the envelope, and back at the paragraph.

Then she put the glass down, took a pencil from behind her ear, leaned over the desk, and made a mark.

He stood up to see. She had struck through the ending of психического заболевания and written above it, small and upright: -им -ием.

"Instrumental," Rudneva said. "After являться, always the instrumental. Even with не." She looked at him over the top of the form, not unkindly. "You Germans. You learn the genitive of negation and then you put it everywhere. Не является психическим заболеванием. It is not a mental illness. The not doesn't touch the case."

"No," Saalfeld said. "I see that."

She initialled the correction. She did not touch the paragraph about the letters. She signed the finding at the foot, in the place for the chairman, and turned it round on the desk for him, and held out the pen.

He signed under her. Консультант Л. Э. Саальфельд. Then the third member, who had not been in the room all day, would sign it tomorrow, and it would be typed in four copies, and one would go to Ponomaryov, who read.

He put his coat on and went down the stairs and out past the porter into the dark. It was twenty-two degrees of frost, and the snow on the pavement had been beaten flat and shone. At the corner the tram was coming, its two lit windows swaying, and as it took the points under the bridge the bow on its roof jumped on the wire and threw a single blue spark, very bright, which lit the whole street for an instant: the snow, the queue at the bakery, a woman's face turned up, the iron of the bridge. Somebody had strung that wire. Somebody kept it. Saalfeld stood at the stop with his hands in his pockets and waited for the next one.

---

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Novembribus (1 November 2026), ab Arthurō Kronfeldiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Arthur Kronfeld, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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