Free The Redhunter by William F. Buckley Page A

where that took
     place. Presumably not at Eighty-seventh Street.
    Erik Chadinoff, M.D., Major, AUS, was thirteen years older than Harry Bontecou and enjoyed most about life at Camp Plattling
     his late-hour chess sessions with the young lieutenant from New York. (“Never forget. I’m from New York too. In fact, Queens
     is more authentically New York than Manhattan.”) They would begin at nine, or a little later if Major Chadinoff had heavy
     duties at the hospital.
    Whenever: Chadinoff would appear with energetic delight (“I shall have back at you after the last time”); they would sit in
     the officers’lounge, and Chadinoff would bring out of his pocket a medicine bottle, look quickly about him to ensure that the colonel wasn’t
     sitting there staring at this little breach of rules (only beer was served in the BOQ), and pour out his liqueur, a dark Russian
     concoction—“Riga balsam,” he called it—in which Chadinoff delighted. It was a drink served at home, he explained one night,
     waiting for Harry to make his move. The elder Chadinoffs had arrived in New York in 1915 with their two-year-old son. “My
     grandmother,” Chadinoff explained, stretching out his legs in an exaggerated gesture of fatalism about the length of time
     Harry would take to make his move, “insisted that my parents leave the country before ‘that foolish Czar Nicholas conscripts
     all the doctors in Russia and sends them west to fight against the Germans.’ ” Chadinoff’s father had enlisted in the army
     when Congress declared war in 1917. Erik did not remember his father, who did not return from the war. He grew up in Queens.
     His mother served the Queens Hospital as a nurse and tutored students at Queens College in Russian.
    Erik remembered the earnest reading by his mother of all news reports from Russia. He spoke to his mother in Russian and,
     when he could write, communicated with his grandmother—“I remember the photograph she sent on Easter 1921.” But when he was
     nine, in 1922, his grandmother stopped writing. There was no explanation. Months later, his mother’s youngest brother had
     written to say that the “authorities” had removed the senior Chadinoff lady from her house in the outskirts of Kiev. It wasn’t
     known where she was taken. “She may very well be alive,” Uncle Alexis wrote. “We don’t ask questions about that kind of thing,
     though there is no reason why you shouldn’t continue to write to her.” Erik’s mother did. At first the letters were returned,
Addressee Unknown;
after a while, they went unacknowledged or unreturned.
    In high school during the American Depression, Erik attempted, but finally abandoned any hope of succeeding, to instruct his
     classmates on the failed idealism of Communism. Most of the boys and girls in his class were unconcerned with Russia or its
     ideology. But the few who were concerned, he told Harry, were enthusiastic about the great Soviet social experiment that would
     teach the world how to avoid such capitalistic blights as the Depression they were now contending with. Erik’s frustration
     led him to attempt a little poetry, firstin Russian, then in English. His instructor smiled when she read it and said he had a nice talent for verbal formulations,
     but he must be careful not to permit himself to be obsessed on the matter of Communism. He had persisted, with Communism and
     poetry.
    Harry didn’t ask to see any of the poetry. He reasoned that if Erik wanted to show it to him, he would do so. Erik Chadinoff
     was decisive in all matters—what medicine to prescribe, what knight to move, what U.S. foreign policy should be.
    At the end of the game one Saturday night, Major Chadinoff asked Harry if he would like to meet with one of the prisoners.
     “Dmitri Usalov is in the hospital, pneumonia. We’ll lick it, thanks to penicillin. But he’s weak and needs four or five days
     of beefing up. What’s special about Dmitri is that his mother