The Gates of November

by Chaim Potok

  Connie Smukler traveled often to the Soviet Union during the 1970s, frequently saw the Slepaks. The apartment teemed with visitors from abroad. From Philadelphia alone, after briefings from the Smuklers and others, came a hundred or more people each year, at times four a week. They got off their planes, checked into their hotels, and walked up Gorky Street to the apartment. We’re friends from Philadelphia, greetings from so-and-so, what can we do to help you? They brought jeans, goods, magazines, books, photographs, messages, good wishes, and information about strategies, demonstrations, conferences. Volodya sat smoking his pipe and listening patiently, at times dozing. Masha seemed always to be in the kitchen, preparing tea and cakes.

  Joseph Smukler’s name was among those listed as agents of the CIA in the letter by Lipavsky printed in Izvestia. The day the letter appeared was March 4, 1977, but the date on the newspaper was March 5, the anniversary of the death of Stalin. An error? An ominous warning of sorts? All on the list had attended the 1975 meeting in the Slepak apartment, when peace had been made between the warring refusenik factions.

  Joseph Smukler applied for a tourist visa to the Soviet Union in 1977 and was refused. The reason given was that he was an agent of the CIA. He was turned down repeatedly until 1988.

  A little more than a year after Shcharansky’s arrest on March 15, 1977—he was still being held in Lefortovo Prison, still under interrogation, still awaiting trial—fighting broke out in the Slepak apartment between the Slepaks and the KGB as new and different weapons came into use in the visa war.

  By the spring of 1978 the longest-standing and probably best-known refusenik not yet arrested was Volodya Slepak. His and Masha’s refusal dated to 1970. He was now generally regarded as the leader of the Jewish dissident movement in the Soviet Union.

  There were still many long-standing well-known refuseniks then, among them Ida Nudel, an economist. She was in her late forties, about five feet three inches in height, vigorous, with dark eyes and hair and a loud voice. She lived in the southern part of Moscow not far from Ryazansky Prospekt. Her sister had received an exit visa, but Ida Nudel had been refused since 1971 because of the claim by OVIR that she knew state secrets. She fought endlessly to aid dissidents who were in prison and to get herself out of the country. She was repeatedly harassed, arrested; her apartment, scoured; her body, searched. After the appearance of the Lipavsky letter in Izvestia and the arrest of Shcharansky, she had commented that Soviet Jews were now being accused of spying in the Soviet Union, “only because an accusation of having murdered a Christian boy would be completely ridiculous in a country of atheists.”

  In that spring of 1978 a NATO summit, a discussion concerning the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, was to take place in Washington. On May 26, some days before the summit, Masha Slepak and Ida Nudel and twenty-three other Jewish women signed and sent a letter to Premier Brezhnev in which they stated that they planned to stage a demonstration outside the Lenin Library on June 1, International Children’s Day. They would be accompanied by seventeen children and intended to display banners decrying their illegal detention in the USSR.

  On the first day of June the women assembled with their children in five apartments. All were immediately placed under house arrest by the watching KGB and prevented from leaving. The women proceeded to hang their banners over the balconies and displayed their placards from the windows. Suddenly there were militiamen and KGB agents everywhere, guarding rooftops, requisitioning adjacent apartments, forming a crowd in the street below each of the five buildings. In one of the apartments the women set up placards bearing the Star of David, with one displaying the clearly visible words VISAS TO ISRAEL. The KGB agents tried to smash down the door, but the women fought back and the KGB withdrew. From an adjoining apartment a KGB officer, swinging a long stick, tore down the Star of David and the placard. In other apartments KGB agents stormed the doors, fought their way through the women and children, used their fists and long poles with nails to rip the placards away from the women.

  At Ida Nudel’s apartment KGB agents confronted a heavily barricaded door and a balcony covered with slogans. As quickly as their poles removed the slogans, Ida Nudel replaced them. They broke her windows with a wrench tied to a rope. She was still inside the apartment when they left at the end of the day.

  That same morning, Masha Slepak, needing to walk her little dog, Chuka, discovered she could not open the apartment door. Olga, Leonids girlfriend, was living in the apartment at the time. Her Russian father, a naval captain, had died when she was three; her Jewish mother had gone off somewhere, having abandoned three-year-old Olga and her little sister to their grandmother, who had raised them in a town outside Moscow. Olga banged on the door, shouting that she had to walk the dog and go to work. KGB agents opened the door—they had roped it to the stairway—and let her out. She walked the dog, returned, and left. The door was again roped shut. Masha locked it from the inside as well. Alone in the apartment now with Volodya, Masha said in a sudden flush of barely controlled anger, “I cannot endure this humiliation!” She wanted to go out to the balcony facing Gorky Street and demonstrate from there.

  Volodya agreed.

  They took a sheet, and with a pencil wrapped in cotton and dipped in paint, Volodya wrote on it, LET US GO TO OUR SON IN ISRAEL. They went through the hallway to their sons’ room. Outside on the balcony each grasped a corner of the sheet. Together they lifted and suspended it over the ledge.

  It was a warm, sunny day. The streets were crowded with Muscovites on their way to work. It did not take long for a large crowd to gather. KGB agents in the neighboring apartment tried to tear down the banner with a long pole, but Volodya seized the pole and broke it. The crowd began to number in the thousands, and traffic came to a halt.

  From the apartment above, someone poured a kettle of boiling water on Volodya, scalding his head. KGB agents on the street below cheered as the water splashed Volodya. He wrapped a towel around his head, and he and Masha went on displaying the sheet. Shouts rose from the crowd: “Hit them!” “Call the executioners!”

  In their eighth-floor apartment, Volodya and Masha heard pounding on the wooden door. Volodya rushed to lock the door to their sons’ bedroom. KGB agents smashed the apartment door to pieces with axes and then hurried through the hallway and broke down the bedroom door and rushed inside and tore away the banner and quickly conveyed Volodya and Masha down the elevator to the courtyard and the street to a waiting prison van that brought them to a militia station in Moscow.

  In the station they sat together for a while on a bench and then were separated. Volodya was taken to another militia station and put in an underground cell that measured about ten feet by seven feet. A small barred window at ground level, an iron door with a peephole, and a little door within the larger one through which food could be pushed into the cell. The floor was of wood, one section raised for a sleeping area. No pillow or mattress. Water and bread for food. On the third night he was put in a prison van with criminals. Inside the van were two round metal chambers, each with a single seat, that served as isolation areas, a jail within a jail. Volodya was ordered inside one of the chambers, and the curved door banged shut in his face. He was taken to Butyrskaya Prison, where he was told to remove his clothes. With the others, he was searched. Papers were then filled out for each man: name, date of birth, reason for arrest. Showered, dressed, they were taken to a room and each given a mattress, pillow, blanket. Volodya was delivered to a cell in which he found six others, one of whom was soon removed. Six iron plank beds in two levels; a table with two benches, all screwed into the floor; a sink; a lavatory pan in a corner. The men wanted to know why he was there. He said he had staged a demonstration. The men said, “On Gorky Street?” He said, “Yes.” They said, “We heard all about it,” and introduced themselves to Volodya.

  Meanwhile, inside the militia station, Masha, now separated from Volodya, was asked to give up her internal passport and then interrogated. Your name, date and place of birth
, where are your children? why did you go out to the balcony? At first she closed her eyes and refused to respond. By Soviet law the accused has the right not to answer. She was told, “Come with us,” put into a van, and delivered to another militia station, where she was given a tin cup and placed in an empty cell. A concrete floor and a narrow wooden rise for a bed. No pillow or mattress. A small barred window, the glass painted white and barely letting in the last light of the day. Light shone in from the corridor through the small ventilating hole above the cell door. After a while she heard the sound of knocking and tapped her cup on the wall in response. She then put the mouth of her cup to the wall and her ear to the bottom of the cup and learned there were three men in the adjacent cell. They asked who she was and why she was there. She cupped her hands around her mouth as she directed her words to the wall and told about the demonstration on Gorky Street. She put her cup to the wall and heard them say that they already knew about it. The guard came to her cell and said in a kindly tone, “It is forbidden to knock on the walls and to speak to the other prisoners. Better for you not to do it.”

  The next day she began to experience pain in her stomach from the bread and water and sugar they fed her. The bread was black bread gone unsold in the shops and grown hard or moldy, then collected, ground into powder, sprinkled with water and yeast, and rebaked. She was interrogated twice each day during the next two days. Thinking she would make things easier for Volodya, she said it was all her idea to write the words on the sheet, to hang the sheet from the balcony. The pain in her stomach grew worse. A doctor was called. She was put into a van. It was night, and the van made several stops, each time loading and unloading prisoners. Masha, seated in an isolation chamber, listened to the two guards talking about her: She was wearing jeans, and they thought she was a lesbian. They stopped next to a van. Guards were shouting, “Faster, faster,” and suddenly she heard the heavy, easily recognizable breathing of Volodya, who was being brought into her van, an especially egregious administrative error; people involved in the same crime were never to be transported in the same van. She cried out, “Volodya!” and heard her husband respond, “Yes, it’s me.” She said, “I took everything upon myself,” and he shouted back, “You are foolish; don’t say another word.” The guards yelled, “Shut up! One more word and you’ll be beaten!”

  The van brought them both to Butyrskaya Prison. Volodya and the other men were taken inside. A moment or two later Masha followed, under guard. She found herself inside a hall as immense as a railroad station, with a domed ceiling and tall arched walls. Many doors led off the hall. In front of one door she saw a pile of men’s shoes and immediately recognized Volodya’s sandals among them. She was placed inside a tiny holding cell that had no light. Needlelike protrusions studded its concrete sides so one could not lean against the walls. After a half hour she was brought into a room with small benches and tables divided by glass partitions. Moments later, seated at one of the tables, with an interrogator behind the partition, Masha was again asked her name, place and date of birth, the reason she had staged the demonstration, who had put her up to it. She said she could not respond, the pain in her stomach was too severe. The interrogation continued. After some while the interrogator pointed to a large metal door in which there was a smaller door. Masha went out through the smaller door into a courtyard. From there a van took her to the militia station in her district, where she was asked to sign a statement that obligated her not to leave Moscow. She was then allowed to go home. They did not return her internal passport until some days later.

  The following morning she went with her brother to see Sakharov and informed him of what had happened. Sakharov’s mother-in-law, Ruth, Elena Bonner’s mother, was there. She said she knew about the prison that was the size of a railroad station; she and others had been there before. Sakharov said he had no doubt Volodya would be put on trial. Masha asked, “What should I do?” Sakharov said, with infinite gentleness, “You must be strong.”

  Some days later, Ida Nudel was arrested in Trubnaya Square during a demonstration, and on June 21 was sentenced to four years of exile. On the very day of her trial Volodya was tried for malicious hooliganism in a different court. Walking along a corridor to the courtroom, he saw with surprise, through the windows, a crowd assembled outside. A huge crowd. Solidarity with him and Masha after their balcony demonstration.

  He had been assigned an attorney, a man named Popov, who was a member of the Communist Party and seemed to be an honest person. At the start of the trial Volodya took the floor and said that he was grateful to attorney Popov, who had helped him prepare for the trial; then, addressing the judge, he asked permission to defend himself, in accordance with such and such paragraphs of the Judicial Code of Procedure. The judge granted his request.

  The courtroom held about forty seats for the public, all of which had been taken early by KGB men in civilian clothes. There was a table for the prosecuting attorney and one for the defense, a large table for the judge, a small one for the secretary. Two guards stood near the defendant; a third guard, at the entrance door. Not one of Volodya’s friends or family was permitted inside; they were told the courtroom was full.

  Masha was not at the trial but in a hospital, undergoing treatment for a stomach ulcer.

  Volodya, defending himself, argued that freedom of speech was guaranteed by the Soviet constitution. He talked about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the inviolability of the home.

  The trial lasted one day. Found guilty of malicious hooliganism, he was sentenced to five years in exile.

  Masha learned of the sentence as she lay in the hospital, listening to a small radio given her by a friend. She closed her eyes, feigning sleep, her temples throbbing and the words “five years” echoing inside her head. Through her terror and grief she wondered where Volodya would be sent and what would now happen to her. They were technically still divorced, and the authorities might not let her accompany him as his wife. But they might let her go as his companion, and perhaps if she, too, were sentenced to exile, they might send her to his place of exile. But that was so naive. The court never fulfilled the defendant’s request for a place of exile.

  Strange, how the patients in the room kept staring at her.

  A young night nurse who was Jewish later whispered to Masha that everyone in the hospital had been told to keep an eye on her because she was an enemy of the people.

  A man in a white coat, a doctor, a smirk on his face, suddenly bent over her. He said Volodya had received five years in exile.

  The next morning she was told they were planning to do a serious invasive test on her, and she ate breakfast, making the test impossible. The head doctor summoned her and said brusquely that they intended to do all the necessary tests and she should make no further attempt to obstruct their efforts.

  In the evening Masha’s brother, Zalya, and Sanya’s girlfriend, Alyona, came to visit. She asked them to bring her clothes the next day. Alyona arrived early, left the clothes in the room, and walked out. Masha donned them and started from the hospital. The woman in the next bed hurried out of the room toward the nurses’ station. Alyona and Zalya stood waiting for Masha outside the hospital building. They made it through the front gate and took a taxi to the apartment.

  Masha spent the following days going from one government office to another, trying to find out where Volodya was being exiled, without success.

  She went to see him in Butyrskaya Prison. Huge stone walls covered with moss. An enclosed courtyard. Bushes, the lawn recently mown, no flowers. A sad medieval castle look. She carried a parcel containing a plastic coffee mug, butter, a loaf of white bread, sausage, cheese, cookies, cigarettes, onions, garlic cloves, tea, a few apples; a sports suit, cotton socks, a sweater, handkerchiefs, a pair of heavy shoes. The mug, the tea—removed by the guards with no explanation. The shoes and sweater—out. It’s summer now, not time yet for winter clothes. Not before October.

  She was given permission to speak with
Volodya. They sat in a room with a glass partition between them and communicated through phones, a guard nearby. Volodya wore a blue jacket and looked pale, exhausted, his beard long, his hair graying. She said, “You need a haircut.” He said, “No, it’s all right; this way it’s warmer.” They talked about the appeals court, her coming trial, her intention, if she was sentenced to exile, to request that she be sent to wherever Volodya was going. They spoke about Leonid. The minutes flew by. The guard shouted, “The meeting is over!” Volodya stood, waved his hand, smiled, and walked out of the room.

  The court of appeals upheld Volodya’s sentence. Masha went to visit him again in Butyrskaya Prison and was told he had been sent the day before to the transit prison near the railroad tracks. He had begun his journey into exile.

  For her trial in the last week of July, Masha wore a skirt and blouse and brought along a backpack containing a toothbrush, a bar of soap, a change of clothes, a coffee mug, some cheese. Friends helped her put together a statement to the judge in which she said that she knew the decision of the court had been predetermined and she would not participate in the hearing. She waived the right to be represented by a court lawyer. The small courtroom was crowded with strangers. The charges against Masha were read aloud. Malicious hooliganism. Masha asked for permission to read her statement and then came forward and placed the statement on the dais before the judge. In response to a question by the judge, Masha responded that she refused to participate in this court hearing. The judge told her to be seated. The prosecuting attorney, a blond-haired woman, gave Masha an odd look. To every question put to Masha by the judge, she gave the same response: “I refuse to participate in this court hearing.” There were murmurs of annoyance from the audience in the court: “Who does she think she is?” “What way is that to show respect for a judge?” The people in the audience were militiamen dressed in civilian clothes; to Masha’s eyes, thugs cut from the same mold. She noticed a familiar face, the woman from the apartment above the Slepaks who had poured boiling water on Volodya’s head, who later testified that the demonstration had indeed blocked traffic on Gorky Street. The judge asked Masha if she agreed with that testimony. Masha said, “I refuse to participate in this court hearing.” The hearing went on for more than an hour. To the judge’srequest that she make a statement, Masha responded by rising and saying, “I refuse to participate in this court hearing and waive the right to a final statement.”