Teeth are our meeting place with the outside world, the point of attack. Crystalline and mineral in nature, teeth show us at our most mollusc-like. The fact that we can grow them, lose them and grow them again (if only once) seems to ally us with reptiles and the largest of the cartilaginous fish. Yet few things mark us more intimately as mammals than our teeth. The development of variable dentition is one of the great trump cards in the arsenal of mammalian evolution. At our very core, we are a tribe of nibblers, biters and grinders. The human dental formula – flat incisors, dainty canines, hard-working molars – is a classic omnivore’s compromise: aggression and carnivory in front, industrious vegetarianism in back.
Harder than bone – harder than any other part of the body – they are also where we are most vulnerable. Thomas De Quincey wrote that if toothaches could kill they would be considered “the most dreadful among human maladies”. Apocryphally, he is said to have claimed that fully a quarter of human misery could be chalked up to their “cruel torture”. I suspect this figure is an exaggeration, but I have had enough cavities, root canals, gum shavings, crown fittings and outright extractions to put the total at a healthy 20%. I have persistent nightmares about my teeth crumbling out of my mouth. For me, the smell of teeth being drilled is the scent of burning flesh.
A borrowed memory – Marek Kuperman was that rare thing in post-second world war Warsaw: a real country Jew. Or at least he acted like one. Whenever he came over to my grandparents’ apartment on Jaworzyńska Street he would bring with him a whole chicken, wrapped in a newspaper, with its head cut off. Someone else would have to take out the feathers.
Marek knew my grandfather from before the war. They met under the auspices of the Communist party, which was illegal in Poland at the time. My grandfather was only a fellow traveller; he didn’t advance to full party membership until 1943, by which time he was serving in a Soviet partisan unit in Belarus.
Marek was already a party member before the war. He went to prison for it, where he had his back teeth beaten out by the guards. Around the dinner table, he liked to pull his lips back and show my grandmother Zosia the gaping red pits where his molars used to be. Zosia always hated when he did that, and would make a big show of squirming and turning away in disgust. Which is surprising, because people were always showing Zosia their teeth.
Zosia was a dentist. Not out of conviction or sadism, but necessity. Her father was a pharmacist for the army, trained in an officer’s school in St Petersburg. Family legend has it that he was supposed to be a surgeon but was afraid of blood. Like all the male members of his family, petty gentry from Lithuania (once upon a time not so petty, but that’s another story) going back 200 years, he died young, of a heart attack, while still in his 40s.
Zosia grew up fatherless in Vilnius, which between the wars belonged to Poland and was called Wilno. On 1 September 1939, she was just about to start her first year of medical school when Germany invaded Poland. Sixteen days later, the Soviet Union joined in, and quickly took Wilno, along with most of Poland’s east. A month later, the Soviets gave the city to Lithuania, which had coveted it since the end of the previous war. The price for this gift was allowing Soviet military bases on Lithuanian territory. This would soon prove to have terrible repercussions for Lithuania, but at the time, what mattered most to Zosia was that Wilno – now Vilnius – was going through a sudden spurt of forced Lithuanisation. The old Polish university was closed and a new Lithuanian one opened in its place. Her medical classes, once in Polish, were now conducted in Lithuanian, a language she did not know in the least.
Decades later, Zosia claimed to remember just one snippet of Lithuanian: a four-line rhyme about a man and his ladder. This was of course not enough to make it through med school, so she dropped out. In the long run, though, Lithuanisation didn’t matter that much; Zosia would have had to quit school no matter what. In June 1940, the Soviet Union annexed all of Lithuania, along with Vilnius, turning it into the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1941, Germany invaded, and the city stayed under Nazi rule for three long years.
Zosia’s sister Barbara ran off with a Russian soldier into the depths of Siberia. Her other sister became an enslaved labourer somewhere in Germany. Zosia stayed with her mother in Vilnius. They all reunited in Warsaw after the war. By then, Barbara’s soldier was dead, and the other sister (her name was never spoken in my mother’s house) had gone mad.
Warsaw itself was in ruins. A great portion of the country’s doctors had been killed, and there was a desperate need for medical professionals of every kind. The intensity of this demand led to a certain loosening of standards in training. This relaxation was even more pronounced in the sister discipline of dentistry. Instead of going to years of medical school, all Zosia had to do to become a dentist was endure a short practicum and pass a test. The test was a set essay, on the “role of the mouth in the beauty of the face”.
Perhaps her response survives somewhere in the archives of the Warsaw Dental Academy. I would love to know what she wrote. At first glance, the prompt seems moronic. But the longer I think about it – and I’ve been thinking about it for 25 years – the deeper the question appears. There is something troublingly ambiguous about teeth. What other part of the body is as deeply implicated in pleasure and pain?
The tray of implements, the chair of restraint, the interrogating light: there is a kinship, long observed, between dentists and torturers. But is this fair? As a child I used to think so. I liked to play with my grandmother’s old dental drill, the only thing resembling a toy in an otherwise toy-less apartment. When Zosia started out in dentistry, drills weren’t yet electrical, but still foot-powered. They resembled wheels for spinning thread. This one was a cast-iron monstrosity, black from the forge and at least as heavy as I was. I liked to press the pedal until the drive wheel was going as fast as it could, my own little one-wheeled railroad to pain. I shudder to think about it. All the more so when I remember that Zosia drilled my mother’s own cavities with it, at home.
My mother made it sound as if she was a butcher, but the wheel was also to blame. Independent of her tools, Zosia had talent, and people appreciated her services. Her first job was at a prison. Some of the prisoners were so grateful for Zosia’s attention that they made her gifts. One made her furniture, some of which I saw for the first time two years ago. While I was staying at my aunt’s inn in the Polish countryside north-east of Warsaw, she showed me one of the last remaining pieces of this carceral bounty. It was a wooden desk of absolutely megalithic solidity, so heavy as to seem immovable. I wanted it for myself, but I couldn’t bear to imagine the cost of shipping it. There was also a set of Krakow-style nativity scenes or szopki, made by another happy jailbird, but I didn’t covet these at all.
I was in Poland to do research for a book. It was a history of eastern Europe, told thematically, in anecdotes and tales. At the time, I was working on the section on empires. I had to describe three: the Russian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian. For each, I wanted to go beyond dates, rulers and boundaries. I wanted to find a way to communicate how they ruled – how it felt to be ruled by them – in a way that was visceral and immediate. For the Russian empire, I thought I found it in the novel The Czar’s Madman by the Estonian writer Jaan Kross.
The book tells the story of Timotheus (Timo) von Bock, a German landowner from Livonia (what is now Estonia and Latvia) and real historical figure, who fought in the Napoleonic wars and became an intimate of Tsar Alexander I. Von Bock was born into a wealthy family in 1787 and received a progressive education at the hands of private tutors. A member of the German aristocracy that ruled over the Baltics, he nonetheless considered himself a Russian patriot. By age 25, Von Bock was the veteran of 60 battles, most fought during the Russian counteroffensive following Napoleon’s march on Moscow. During this campaign, he met Goethe, who dedicated a short, impromptu poem to the handsome German-speaking soldier whose Cossacks helped kick the French out of Weimar. Two years later, in 1815, Von Bock met Tsar Alexander I, who quickly took to the young soldier and made him one of his aides-de-camp. He also made Von Bock swear to always tell him nothing but the truth. Von Bock’s troubles began with this vow.
In 1816, Von Bock resigned from the army. Shortly thereafter he caused a scandal by marrying his Estonian housemaid, Eeva (later christened Ekaterina), who had been born a serf. Von Bock seems to have married Eeva partly out of love and partly out of conviction. Marrying her was a way of demonstrating his contempt for social mores and his belief in the infinite plasticity and educability of humankind. Having shocked his neighbours, in 1818 Von Bock decided to speak his mind to the tsar about serfdom and everything else that seemed amiss in the empire. He wrote Alexander a 60-page memorandum in which he listed out all of the tsar’s faults as a man and a ruler (among them “despotism, hypocrisy, incompetence, cowardice, perfidy and vanity”) and called on him to end autocracy in Russia and inaugurate an era of constitutional rule.
Alexander responded by having Von Bock immediately arrested and sent to an island prison reserved for political prisoners. On the tsar’s personal orders, Von Bock was kept under constant surveillance and denied access to paper, pen, ink and pencils. His wife was not permitted to know his whereabouts or what was happening to him. Denied all human company and distraction, Von Bock started to lose his mind. It is here, during the most intense period of confinement, that Kross’s novel reaches its moral climax. After one of his manic shouting episodes, Von Bock’s jailers enter his cell and knock out his teeth. They do this by shoving a giant iron key into his mouth and turning it, first one way and then the other, until all his teeth except the molars are gone and his entire mouth is an open wound.
After this torture, Von Bock is left a broken man. Where before he would rage against the tsar and the injustice of his imprisonment, he now sinks into apathy and insanity. Through it all, Tsar Alexander keeps close tabs on the condition of his former friend. As if to make up for the outrage of the key, Alexander has a grand piano sent to Timo’s cell (Von Bock was an excellent pianist), but he doesn’t otherwise lift or lessen the terms of his secret imprisonment, which only ends after the tsar’s death.
This was exactly what I had been looking for. For me, this story about Von Bock’s teeth summed up the capriciousness of empire; the way it reaches into the body, and from there to the mind; how it is threatened by speech and thrives on silence.
The problem was that it wasn’t true. Almost everything in Kross’s novel, from Goethe’s poem to the grand piano, is based on scrupulously researched fact. Where those proved scarce, Kross supplied his own brilliantly imagined reconstruction of events. The episode with the key was the only one where he reached beyond the historical record to invent something entirely out of whole cloth. Not that the story was in any way implausible: the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, a radical nobleman a generation younger than Von Bock, lost his teeth in the very same prison – though from scurvy, caused by the terrible jailhouse rations. The state of dental care in Russian prisons has stayed dismal over the intervening 180 years. Before he was murdered last February, pro-democracy activist Alexei Navalny observed from his Arctic prison cell that the defining trait of today’s Russian inmates is not tattoos, prison slang or “a special look, full of sadness and pain”, but the simple fact that most of them have no teeth. According to him, this is caused by “poor nutrition, a lack of solid food, lots of sweet stuff (the most affordable food), a lot of strong tea, smoking, and a complete absence of dental care”. For my book, I used the true story of five Estonian boys who in 1823 knocked their own teeth out in an effort to escape the tsarist draft, which at the time meant 25 years of service and felt close to a death sentence (their self-mutilation was discovered and they had to serve their 25 years anyway).
Despite this, I regretted not being able to use the story of Von Bock’s teeth. In Kross’s book, his disfigurement is not merely an incident but a leitmotif that runs through the entire novel. It is present from the moment we first meet the character, when he is finally back home in Estonia after eight years of prison, a prematurely aged and broken man. Kross knew something about prison himself. He spent eight years in the gulag during the waning days of Stalinism, first in Vorkuta, a coal-mining settlement above the Arctic Circle, and then in the settlement of Aban, near Krasnoyarsk. He was lucky, so far as these things go. In Vorkuta, Kross was assigned to work as a felt-boot dryer, which spared him from the worst of the cold. In Aban, he met his first wife. He also began his first forays into fiction – a way to pass the time in what he thought was going to be his place of exile for the rest of his life.
Kross was sent to the gulag in 1946. His arrest was part of an enormous roundup of Estonian intellectuals, politicians, trade unionists – anyone, really, who might pose a threat to the new Soviet state. In all, the KGB deported 150,000 Estonians between 1945 and 1946. This period of terror in Estonia came just as my grandmother was sitting down to write her essay about the role of the mouth in the beauty of the face. Her future husband, my grandfather Jakub, whom she had yet to meet, was working for the other side of the underground war against dissidents that the Soviets waged across their newly acquired zone of influence.
Jakub had spent most of the second world war as a partisan, fighting in a unit made up mostly of Poles but attached to the Red Army. They were stationed behind enemy lines in Belarus, where he saw Jews herded into work camps and civilians burned alive in barns. He joined the march on Berlin, but didn’t make it to its final destination because of a shrapnel wound. After the war, like many former partisans, Jakub was recruited into the secret services of the new Soviet power apparatus – specifically, to the counterintelligence division of the secret police.
The details of Jakub’s tenure in counterintelligence are rather murky. Although I have reviewed his personnel file from this period, I have yet to obtain his operational file. Because of this, much of what he did (or didn’t do) in the years after the war remains a mystery. However, I do know that he was involved in something called Operation Caesar, a massive false-flag campaign that involved creating a fake underground anti-communist group called Freedom and Independence (Wolność i Niepodległość, or WiN). They used this Potemkin organisation to solicit funds from western intelligence agencies (principally the CIA and MI6) – which gave them millions of dollars, under the assumption that this money was being used by real paramilitaries to fight communism.
The Polish secret police also used WiN as cover to flush out surviving members of the wartime Polish anti-communist underground. Operation Caesar was part of a broader effort to roll up remaining combatants and arrest those who had gone into hiding. To do this, the secret police couldn’t rely solely on a fake organisation. They also needed moles – people to act as recruiters, who former fighters would trust as one of their own.
One of the people they chose was a man named Marian, who went by the operational code name Artur. I came across his story in the course of trying to piece together the extent of my grandfather Jakub’s participation in Operation Caesar. Jakub appears only on the margins, in the footnotes of the files I can access (many more remain out of reach). Marian/Artur, by contrast, is often at the centre of the action. Artur had been a member of the real Freedom and Independence before it was disbanded at the end of the war. As a member of the new, and fictional, “Fifth Command”, he did more than almost anyone else to recruit and then betray other members of the underground.
In 1952, Operation Caesar came to an abrupt halt. The entire ruse, and the fact that the CIA had been effectively fooled, was revealed in a gloating press conference. It’s not clear to this day why Polish intelligence would have ended such an effective counterespionage operation without it having been compromised. Some historians think the order to do so may have come from Stalin himself, as a way of firing a warning shot across the newly elected President Eisenhower’s bow. Whatever the case, life now became fairly grim for Artur. His cover was blown. But he couldn’t come clean about what he had done, to anyone: the fraudulent nature of the revived Freedom and Independence organisation was one of the best-kept secrets in Poland. The pretence that WiN was a real organisation, funded from abroad, and not a fake one, used to ensnare would-be resisters, was kept up for decades. This meant that Artur couldn’t explain the gaps in his employment record caused by the time he had spent in the west working for the secret police. Without a job, he couldn’t get an apartment, or ration cards for meat or butter. For a while, the security service offered Artur a job, a sinecure to keep him off the street, but he drank too much and lost it anyhow.
After a few years, Artur started developing abscesses in his mouth. Soon thereafter, he needed to have all his teeth pulled and replaced, but he couldn’t afford a private dentist, or the cost of penicillin. He began writing to his former handlers, asking them over and over again to pay for a set of fake teeth. At this point, he may have crossed paths with my grandmother Zosia. After marrying my grandfather in 1950, she stopped working in a prison and moved to a nice clinic in central Warsaw run on behalf of the Ministry of State Security – the secret police. In the years Artur was begging for his dentures, she was peering into the mouths of countless agents and spymasters.
Did they ever tell Zosia anything? If they did, she didn’t say. And even if they did tell her secrets, I doubt she would have found them very compelling. Zosia never took much interest in her husband’s work. She seemed oblivious to the various plots and internal knife-fights that rocked the secret police in the period immediately before and after Stalin’s death, and which ultimately scuttled Jakub’s career in counterintelligence. Or perhaps, as is most likely, she was completely unaware. In those days, secrets had to be kept close.
Skilled as she was with a drill, neither reminiscence nor introspection numbered among Zosia’s gifts. She didn’t talk much about the past, nor take much stock of it. She was a strange and rather flighty woman, not given to much deep emotion or affection. There was a joke in my family about this (my father’s side of the family – naturally, there were rifts). They said that Zosia once had an operation to remove a gallbladder, and they took her heart out by mistake. Through four decades of widowhood (Jakub died in 1963), her main interests remained steady: doing her makeup, sunbathing on the balcony, trips to the Baltic shore in summer, baking mazurek in winter. In her 70s she developed a fascination with the American soap opera Dynasty (one shared by millions of her fellow Poles) but would keep the TV on for MacGyver if I was home.
Once in a while, Zosia would take a look at old photos, but mainly to look at snapshots sent to her by old flames. But even if she remained seemingly indifferent to much of what she had lived through, Zosia had come into contact with the hidden history of her times in a way few others could. All those cavities, all those pulled teeth: they must have told her something – something more than what I’ve been able to glean from files and dossiers typed on yellowed paper.
After all, teeth are diagnostic in a way shared by few other body parts. Each mouthful of teeth is its own unique little world. As surely as fingerprints, bite marks, whether criminal or amorous, can be matched with the biters, just as dental records can be used to identify the victims of fires, plane crashes and other immolating disasters. Teeth work like time capsules, too. The pulp inside them is the best source for extracting genetic data after death. Inside the tooth, safe in its protective prison of enamel, DNA can survive for thousands, even tens of thousands, of years. Scientists have reconstructed the template of antique contagions, like tuberculosis and the bubonic plague, based on genes found inside ancient teeth.
Even beyond genes, teeth have things to tell us about the past. Few people know that teeth grow in layers, and so have rings like those of trees. These rings reflect what a person ate and drank at the time it was laid down. Based on tiny variations in their chemistry, it is possible to reconstruct where they were and what they consumed at a given time. For instance, they might show that a person grew up drinking milk and eating fish by the Baltic Sea, and that they suffered malnutrition in Siberia in early adulthood. This is what Zosia’s dental-school exam should have asked. Not about the role of the mouth in the beauty of the face, but teeth as the memory of the body. For in a very real way, teeth remember all. Provided, of course, that they can be kept in hand.
After visiting my aunt at her inn two hours east of Warsaw, I left to do further research in Latvia. During a bus ride through the Courlandish countryside, one of my molars fell out. At least, most of it did. Years of successive damages and repairs had left it architecturally unstable. And then suddenly there it was, in the palm of my hand. The feeling was awful, but not painful. I waited until I returned to the US to have the remaining subterranean portion of the tooth pulled. For those who have not experienced an extraction, the process is unnervingly mechanical. The dentist uses a little metal rod, shaped like a tiny crowbar, and simply pries it out. It’s a bit like having a tree pulled out of your mouth.
Once it was done, my dentist paused to look at what he had done. Apparently my molar, which had been fairly unremarkable above the gum line, had enormous roots – simply gigantic. Dr Bhattacharya said he had never seen anything like it. He couldn’t get over it, and wanted to know where I was from.
“Lithuania,” I told him, and put the tooth in a little plastic case to take home.
This article first appeared in the Point.
