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A well-known consultant, Dr. Vagralik, would visit me two or three times a day, accompanied by Rulev and sometimes by a doctor who was introduced as a neurologist but was, I suspect, a psychiatrist. Vagralik warned me that I was not a young man, that I could slip into a terminal state at any moment, and that he had already noticed irreversible changes whose progress would accelerate. The neurologist (or psychiatrist) suggested that I was becoming confused and losing my faculties. As he put it, I already had one foot in the grave, and I ought to let the doctors obey the Hippocratic oath and help me.
To all these statements and to Rulev's attempts to take my blood pressure, I responded with a single, set phrase: "I refuse to be examined until I'm reunited with my wife." On the morning of Dec. 8, Rulev said, "You have only a few hours to think it over. You must end your hunger strike."
A few hours after Rulev's visit, a man entered my room. He was from the KGB. "We've met before," he said. It was in 1980, after Lusia surprised the KGB searching our apartment. "My name is Ryabinin. I'm authorized to inform you that your request can now be reconsidered in a positive light, but you must first end your hunger strike." I said that I took the KGB's promises seriously, but that my wife and I could decide to end the hunger strike only when we were together. He said, "You'll be seeing me again."
That same morning, apparatus for forced feeding was brought into Lusia's room. She warned the doctors that she would resist forced feeding with all her strength, even if she died in the struggle. A few hours after this last attempt to break her will, Lusia was driven to Semashko Hospital. In the chief physician's office, after four days of painful separation, we embraced. We insisted that Ryabinin speak in our presence with Academy President Anatoli Alexandrov, as an earnest of the KGB's promise; only then would we end our hunger strike. After 17 days, the strike was over, and Liza was free to join Alexei in the U.S.
Mentally Unstable?
In April 1983 in Gorky, Lusia had what was apparently her second heart attack. The weeks that followed brought two additional cardiac events. She was offered a bed in the Academy of Sciences hospital, but refused to be admitted without me.
The academy soon dispatched a team of specialists to examine me. The head of the team said hospitalization was advisable in my case, as I had received no treatment for a chronic prostate condition since arriving in Gorky, was plagued by angina and borderline hypertension and apparently had suffered several heart attacks -- microinfarcts in 1970 and 1975 and three attacks in Gorky -- as well as a bout of thrombophlebitis. My condition was not nearly so critical as Lusia's, but there was still ample reason for me to be admitted. But I was only kidding myself that my hospitalization was being given serious consideration.