Никита Т – The visualizer, or the man who alters reality (страница 2)
But times had changed. Eastern winds began to blow. First the Foundations activities were declared harmful, and then the Foundation itself was designated a foreign agent. Mutual sanctions were hitting both sides of the conflict, and ordinary citizens who had nothing to do with politics sometimes found themselves caught in the crossfire.
The government had not forgiven the organization for the inconsistent presentations given by Russian schoolchildren before the German parliament — addresses in which, at the behest of their Western handlers, they had argued for revisiting the outcome of the Second World War. The Russian government took careful notice of those presentations. It was a serious blunder by the Foundations leadership, made through sheer thoughtlessness. But it carried equally serious consequences.
Funding dried up significantly, and the Foundation let go of a number of its permanent staff members, including some it had long worked with productively. Non-core managers were the first to be cut. Eventually the psychologist was made redundant too.
Vera Ivanovna had left her well-paid position with regret, but life moved on and she had to think fast. That the Foundation had engaged in activities hostile to the state barely concerned her. She had nothing to do with politics. But that episode was now one of the reasons she could not find new work, despite all her experience and credentials.
Prospective employers who might otherwise have found her professionally and personally suitable looked askance at the glowing references she had received upon leaving her previous job. Nobody wanted to associate with someone who had been tainted by a connection to a foreign organization that the state had officially designated a foreign agent. Most Russian organizations wanted loyal, spotlessly clean employees — people whose biographies were beyond reproach.
She no longer worked for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, but that fact continued to cast a shadow over her new life, and she regretted having ever decided to take that attractive position at such a well-known foreign firm.
Generally speaking, the only employers who might now offer her work were the major Russian resource-extraction companies. But those companies underwent periodic government inspections, and former foreign agents could become an unwelcome irritant that state officials at various levels might take an interest in. Officials could start poking around in the companys affairs, leading to serious expenditures and even premature bankruptcy. Unnecessary scrutiny from officials was the last thing anyone wanted. There were already more than enough headaches involved in obtaining permits, licenses, and certificates, all of which cost enormous sums.
So employers kept turning her down, even though they showed genuine interest at first, recognizing they were dealing with a top-tier specialist. Interviews almost invariably ended the same way: she was wished every success, but was never invited back for a final meeting with the head of HR or the company director.
Vera Ivanovna surfaced from her gloomy thoughts. She was still looking at her monitor, and she still had not worked through all the mail in her inbox. Several messages were from former clients with whom she stayed in touch by email.
One letter she read twice. A young man was thanking her for the help she had given him the previous year and writing to tell her that his life had finally turned around. My life has changed completely, he wrote. Your lectures pushed me to switch fields. In my new line of work I have achieved remarkable results. Letters like that were easy and pleasant to read. They strengthened her belief in herself and her hope for success — her conviction that she had chosen the right profession, and that the difficulties she was now facing in her job search were only temporary.
As she was clearing her inbox, Vera Ivanovna noticed a message from an unfamiliar address. Normally she deleted such things immediately. This time, for some reason, she decided to do otherwise. She opened the message out of habit, expecting another piece of spam that had wandered into her inbox by mistake. She was already about to delete it, but something stopped her. She looked at the sender and read on, puzzling over this unexpected communication that had somehow found its way to her email address. The message contained a job offer — exactly the kind of offer she had given up hoping for.
At first Vera Ivanovna did not take the offer seriously. She was being invited to work at a private psychological clinic — a psych ward, in common parlance. What was more, the employer needed specifically a psychologist with residency experience who had spent at least two years in a private organization and held a medical qualification or had extensive practical experience as a physician.
Vera Ivanovna skimmed the offer and found herself intrigued. She met most of the listed requirements. True, her experience as a physician had been brief, but she could compensate for that gap with her long track record in the field.
She thought it over. Vera Ivanovna was a workaholic who feared no task. She wanted to help people who had found themselves in difficult psychological situations, and she liked being paid well for doing so. She could calm a senior executive under severe psychological pressure just as easily as a manager whose work life had hit a rough patch. She had been known to guide chronic alcoholics out of drinking binges and help neurotics find their footing. In other words, she had no doubt she could handle the new responsibilities. The pay also seemed to be in order: the salary on offer this time was acceptable, the figure stated in the message was one she could live with. Moreover, the clinic was not looking for an ordinary staff psychologist but for a chief medical officer — a fairly senior medical post that matched her ambitions. Perhaps that is why Vera Ivanovna decided she would go to the interview after all, and take a look at what this private psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of the city was actually like.
She opened her computer to look up the clinics location. With an address in hand that was easy enough: maps available online could pinpoint any object within minutes. Although the institution was situated practically in the Moscow Region — in the new construction zones of New Moscow — that did not put her off. The Mayor was personally overseeing development there; the district was destined to become a new showcase for the city, with attractive new buildings and new metro stations going up. Getting there would not be difficult.
She read online that the district had only just been built up. The hospital occupied a recently completed building. The nearest metro station was within walking distance of the clinic — an important detail, since Ms. Maslova disliked commuting by car. She had no husband yet, and she had not yet learned to drive with any confidence. A metro ride held no terrors for her.
Vera Ivanovna decided to respond positively to the offer that had landed in her inbox by chance, and wrote back. She was honest about herself and her qualifications, since she genuinely met nearly all the requirements of the position described in the offer. She wrote that she was ready to attend an interview for the vacant post of chief medical officer at the earliest opportunity, and was prepared to come to the address given in the message at whatever time suited the administration. She could not wait to hear back from the employer so they could discuss the terms of her employment.
The reply came quickly. That evening a letter arrived from the clinics director, proposing a meeting the following Wednesday at eleven oclock in the morning. The time suited her, even though she was fond of sleeping in. Today was Monday, which left Vera Ivanovna time to think everything through carefully.
Chapter 1
chain of torments,
will the sky take pity on us? Never.
you unborn! If you could learn our sufferings,
would not choose to come down here at all.
The I. M. Rabinovich Private Psychological Clinic occupied a pleasantly picturesque corner of New Moscow. Not so long ago the area had been dense suburban forest where villagers from nearby settlements went mushroom-picking. But New Moscow was expanding at a furious pace, devouring every patch of open land and filling the newly annexed territories with apartment blocks and roads, with the noise and clamor of youth.
Construction was under way everywhere. Workers were laying paving tiles and planting young saplings along the pathways. The building never stopped, not for a minute. The constant noise and dirt did not sit well with everyone. The local residents had at first tried to fight the infill development, but the big money that arrived paid no attention to their wishes or their needs. What was more, the locals were unhappy that a psych ward of all things was going up in their district. But they were powerless to stop construction of this large, closed medical facility.