by Lev Golinkin
Dad craned his neck and peeked out the window. A lone tamozhnik sat on a crate off in the periphery, gazing over the shadowy steppe. The light he saw came from a fire blazing in a steel drum about two meters from the window. Dad snaked his hand out the pane and began tossing the metal disks one by one into the flames, keeping his eye on the sentry. The films popped as they caught fire, and he had to carefully sync his throws with the wind gusts. The timing had to be perfect: too long and he’d arouse the suspicion of the guards inside; too quick, and the rapid popping might alert the sentry. Pop! pop! pop! crackled the films, pop! pop! pop! went thirty years of painstaking labor for the very regime that had oppressed him. Pop! pop! pop! flashed Dad’s chances of working again as an engineer, and with each pop! Dad grew more furious, and with each pop! Dad felt his family closer to escape.
It was already past three in the morning when our turn came. Whatever anger had possessed the tamozhniki to go berserk on the Zhislins had not abated, and they pawed through us and our belongings with a malicious zeal. They carefully ripped through the seams in my coat, perhaps because they thought we had gold sewn into our clothes like the Zhislins. Whenever they chanced upon something fragile they would hold it up as if to get a better look, then let it drop to the floor. Sounds of shattering were followed by flowery apologies as the officers rued their own clumsiness, lamenting, “I’m so, so sorry—you probably needed that. How awful!” Mom, who was always bad at masking her temper, seethed at the taunting, and Dad would periodically have to calm her down. At one point he lost it and began screaming at Mom to keep her mouth shut, and for the first time that night, the tamozhniki smiled.
Mostly the five of us stood against the wall like the Zhislins, like torpid sacks. Once in a while they ordered Dad to move a suitcase, and soon I began moving them, too, becoming engrossed in the task. Everything was suddenly simple. Existence had collapsed into itself, leaving me and ten red-violet-colored rectangles, adjusting, dragging, clearing out bits of broken pottery and glass, untangling shreds of clothes ripped up by knives and caught on suitcase zippers. The tamozhniki must’ve gotten a kick out of a little zhidling assisting with the destruction of his family’s property. Dad, who would have nightmares about the border for years to come, remembered me tending the cases, and he would always speak with pride of how I helped him at the tamozhnya, but I didn’t do it for Dad, and certainly not for those sadistic black-clad fucks. I was sick of being paralyzed by fear, there, at school, at the yard, everywhere. Moving suitcases was the only thing I could do, but it beat feeling helpless.
Thanks to Dad, our only real contraband had already disintegrated in the steel barrel outside. All they were able to find were a few minor items, like Dad’s stamp collection and a pair of antique candlesticks, and as it dawned on the tamozhniki that there was nothing else, the tone of the search changed. They dropped the clumsiness charade and simply smashed what they could. The rummaging grew faster, more aggressive, and still they found nothing. The red exit door to Czechoslovakia was calling to us and we had begun to feel that soon, soon we must pass, soon we’ll be on the other side, when suddenly the shift captain confronted Dad.
“Where are your documents?”
“I gave them to you the minute we walked in here,” Dad said, taken aback. “They were right on that table!”
The documents in question were the complete record of our existence in the Soviet Union. According to the rules, all documents—passports, transcripts, my grade school report cards, birth certificates, death certificates, even official photographs—had to be surrendered at the border. The table Dad was pointing to was a small metal desk bolted into a side wall. Dad had watched the captain place the fat stack of papers on the desk when we first entered the examination chamber, but now the table was empty, its surface devoid of anything but dull metal. The documents were gone.
“You stole them!” the young tamozhnik captain bellowed. “You took them while we were inspecting your luggage! This is a goddamn criminal offense!”
I remember little from the next half-hour, but the few moments that remain are seared into my brain like a vivid nightmare. I remember clenching my jaw to the point where it felt like my cheekbones were going to shatter. I remember Mom’s eyes flashing with unbridled hatred, Lina’s lips uncontrollably twitching, Grandma collapsing on one of the opened suitcases, her face ashen. I remember the yelling, and I remember four soldiers storming out of a recessed side door and positioning themselves, one in each corner, feet apart, machine guns slung across their bodies.
Dad and the tamozhnik captain continued their recriminations until a groggy woman staggered out from the same door as the soldiers.
“What the hell is going on here?” The newcomer was buttoning her uniform as she shambled toward us, looking very much as if she had been roused from a deep sleep.
The tamozhniki hastily assembled. “These people have stolen their documents while we were examining their belongings, Comrade Overseer,” the shift captain reported with a slightly annoyed tone in his voice. “I’m not sure how they did it, but I believe there is reason to suspect they’re smuggling other contraband, Comrade Overseer. I recommend we put them on the pots.”
Putting someone on the pots was a technique employed when a person was suspected of concealing something, usually drugs or diamonds, in his stomach. The prisoner was force-fed a potent laxative, such as castor oil, then locked in a cell with a large pot, where he would remain for the next two days, voiding everything in his body. Dad’s heart dropped when he heard those dreaded words, and I don’t know what would have happened next had the woman not reached out her arm and started groping around the empty metal desk.
“Are these the papers you’re talking about?” In her hand, as if by magic, were the documents, neatly stacked together just as Dad had them when he had surrendered them to the captain. The desk had a secret compartment. A slight push in the right place and the metal surface tilted down, sliding its contents into a little niche hidden in the wall. This mechanism was a fail-safe, a pretense for the tamozhniki to detain those who had no real contraband. My father rushed over to the woman.
“Yes, yes! Did you see what he was doing?” Dad caught the dejection on the captain’s face and launched into a full assault. “This is the kind of blatant Soviet criminal behavior that is broadcast all over the Western world. What is your full name? I have reporter friends waiting for me in Vienna—in a few hours your names and your provocative actions will be aired all over the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and the BBC!”
That was a lie, of course, since we knew no one beyond the fence. But it was a lie bolstered by reality. Every night, as it had for fifty years, the Voice of America crackled across Eastern Europe, broadcasting the crimes of the Soviet Union, and every day, human rights groups pressured the regime to end its abuses. The difference was that for the first time, the USSR was listening. A mere year earlier, the tamozhniki still had the power to detain anyone they pleased, for as long as they pleased. They didn’t have to resort to rigged desks and cheap charades of vanishing documents. They could have done whatever they wanted. But in 1989 a strange thing happened, and a shift, long prayed for but never expected, took place. Earlier in the year, the country was stunned to read that a squad of policemen had been arrested on charges of prisoner abuse. During the summer, state media announced an official investigation into the Red Army Spetsnaz murders of the nineteen Georgian girls slain during the peaceful demonstration in Tbilisi. And on November 9, six weeks before my family stood at the border, a group of East Germans scampered atop the Berlin Wall and tore down the dreaded symbol of Communist power. And the culprits, these timid rodents armed with chisels and sledgehammers, they weren’t shot; they weren’t beaten or imprisoned: they were photographed, and the soldiers on the Wall were ordered to stand down and make way for the cameras. It worked—somehow, the leaflets scattered on American college campuses, the church petitions signed by midwestern housewives, the letters, the protests,
the vigils, the boycotts, the countless irritating stings by countless little nuisances had worked, and Mikhail Gorbachev, the marked Mikhail, took away the Party’s ability to destroy lives on a whim, and by doing so, he had destroyed the Soviet Union, and the old women’s prophesies were fulfilled.
The tamozhnya overseer and her soldiers returned upstairs, leaving us with the wilted captain. “I apologize, it must have been some sort of a misunderstanding … We’ll have to have that desk fixed,” he mumbled. He rifled through the paperwork, fished out the pale green exit visas, which were the sole documents permitted to cross with us, and thrust the rest at a dour older subordinate. “Burn these,” he spat, and waved his hand at us. “What are you waiting for? Gather your belongings and go across.”
Before anyone—we or the tamozhniki—had a chance to exhale, Yura and Igor sprang into the room from the exit door and began scooping up suitcases and hauling them to Czechoslovak soil. The Zhislins had known us for less than a week. They could’ve been licking their wounds on the bus … they should’ve been licking their wounds on the bus. It would’ve taken a divine act to get me back into that cursed building. I certainly wouldn’t have gone back for them. Instead, Yura and Igor remained in the hallway during the entire search, chomping at the bit for the chance to help get us out of there, and to this day, the fact that they came back for us remains the bravest, most insane thing anyone has done for me. Something inside gave me strength and I dragged the suitcases as best as I could, trying to keep up with the men. When I got to the bus, I saw Yura briskly tuck a bag into an undercarriage compartment. The little man looked down and gave me a wink, and it was only later, when we were already safe in Austria, that I found out that in the chaotic aftermath of the search Yura had managed to snatch the one bag that contained our books and Dad’s stamps, petty contraband the tamozhniki meant to retain in Russia.
The examination chamber had no windows, and we had lost all sense of time during the search. It was already past six in the morning, and the first hints of light began to pierce through the fog. I would have been shocked at how long we had been searched, but my emotions were all tapped out, so I simply noted that it was dawn with an apathetic, almost bemused reaction. A wind gust whooshed by my hands, and I felt they were soaked with sweat. I squatted on the ground, reached down and grabbed a fistful of earth, and it felt good to run the cool, damp soil through my fingers. I was crouched in the no-man’s-land separating the USSR and Czechoslovakia as two sets of silhouettes milled about in the fog. To my right, on the Soviet side, several tamozhniki were checking the area, making sure the gate was secured. To my left, in Czechoslovakia, was the box-like outline of the bus, with Yura, Dad, and Igor sorting and storing suitcases, trying to clean up the broken pieces of our possessions.
I remained where I was, crouched on the ground, waiting until they were finished. The driver turned the key, filling the air with the sickly-sweet smell of cheap gasoline, and we resumed our journey to Bratislava. It was only after I crawled back to my seat next to Dad that I realized just how exhausted I was. My knees were wooden, and I couldn’t lift a finger, which was fine because I didn’t want to move; I wanted to pass out and not think, or hear, or feel anything. My head felt stuffed to the brim with cotton, and for some strange reason, the story of the Odyssey kept swimming through my mind. I had read an abridged version of the epic many times, during days spent holed up in the Kharkov apartment, and I remembered how Odysseus spent ten years wandering from sea to sea, wanting so desperately to return to his native soil. I had just crouched on the ground at the very edge of the world that I had known, but I did not miss it, nor did I have another place where I wanted to be, and I remember thinking how Odysseus wanted to go home, and how I wanted to keep going, and debating whether that was a bad thing or not.
Dawn chased away the fog, and for a brief moment I caught the last few stars before they were snuffed out by the gray morning sky.
* * *
Back on the Soviet side of the border, the friends and relatives of our three families heard the coughing of the engine. They had not been allowed to enter the tamozhnya or even approach its territory, so they had spent the entire night huddling on the steppe, listening for the sound of our bus, which was the last communication they would hear from us. There was no shelter, so they took turns in the center of the group, doing their best to ward off the steady, unrelenting chill emanating from the plain. Six hours had elapsed, and at last they heard the engine, stretched out their frozen limbs, and set off on the hour-long hike to Uzhgorod, the nearest town with a train station. No one spoke. They knew that a long wait meant trouble with the tamozhniki, but beyond that there was no way of discerning what had transpired or which family had gotten the brunt of it. Once in Uzhgorod, they snagged some clothes on the black market to cheer themselves up and caught the next train back to Kharkov.
I’m not sure why the tamozhnya overseer saved us. Perhaps she was sleepy, or hungover, and did not even realize it when her fingers fumbled through the desk and grasped our documents. Maybe she was moved by the horror on our faces. However, it’s difficult to imagine that the head of a tamozhnya would not be aware of the devilish intricacies of her own building. Likewise, as tempting as it would be to believe in her goodness, the fact remains that the majority of people who attained positions of power in the USSR had long been stripped if not of compassion, then at least of the desire to act upon it. The most plausible explanation is that what transpired at the tamozhnya had nothing to do with us.
The entire Soviet society, from rural cooperatives to the red halls of the Kremlin, operated on an intricate system of espionage. Graduate students spied on professors (Communist Party came before school). Workers kept an eye on the foremen (Party before work). Children, too, were encouraged to participate: every Little Octobrist and Pioneer learned the story of Brave Pavlik Morozov, a young Pioneer from the 1930s whose father was trying to subterfuge Stalin’s cooperative farming programs. But Brave Pavlik was an exceptional Pioneer, burning with love for Lenin, and he brought his father’s activities to the attention of the Party. Pavlik’s father was promptly sent to the gulag (and eventually executed), and the noble boy became a cult figure and inspiration for generations of Soviet children.* Party before family.
Nowhere was this spying more prevalent than in the Party bureaucracy itself. Hungry young cadets, fresh from training and ready to claw their way up the command chain, were recruited by the KGB to report on their superiors. The cadets either found or fabricated evidence of treachery and corruption, and the supervisors were executed or exiled to the gulags, and the cadets became supervisors themselves, and new trainees were sent in to monitor them. This was an old system developed and instituted by Stalin himself, who routinely purged the top ranks of the Party, the Red Army, and the KGB. The mechanism was designed to sow paranoia and ensure that no one could trust anyone, thereby preventing underlings from colluding against the dictatorship. The tamozhnya overseer must have suspected (whether rightfully or not) the young captain of being out to undermine her. So she decided to embarrass him in front of the same zhidi he was terrorizing. Ironically, the very factors that we ran from—anger, fear, instability, paranoia—united to push us through our last, awful night in the Soviet Union.
In the mid-1990s, after the USSR had fallen apart, my father contacted the newly established Ukrainian Patent Bureau and inquired whether, since the economy was now capitalist, he was entitled to compensation for the dozen patents seized from him by the defunct Soviet government. The bureau offered him the equivalent of six hundred dollars, but only with the stipulation that he personally fly into Kiev to accept the check. They wanted to make sure they awarded the right person, they explained. The whole thing was a joke, since the cost of the plane ticket was triple that of the reimbursement, and the bureau was well aware of it.
Dad’s response was to send them a letter in which he declined their invitation but gave them his expressed written permission to keep the money, pro
vided they shoved it, along with the patents, directly up their asses.
The Ukrainian Patent Bureau did not reply, and whether they took Dad up on his offer remains unclear.
* * *
* “Wanna know the rest of the story?” asked Lina the evening after Anna Konstantinovna told me and my classmates about Pavlik Morozov. “Well, some of Pavlik’s relatives had escaped the Communists, and later on they found Brave Pavlik Morozov and they slit his brave little throat. Because that’s what happens to brave little boys who inform on their families,” said Lina, and lightly drew a finger across my neck to underscore the moral.
Part Two
When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
—From Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon
DOZENS OF SENTINEL GRANDMAS
Czechoslovakia, Late December 1989
The old Soviet bus creaked down the gray outline of a Czechoslovak road. Overhead, dark shades of gray reluctantly yielded to slightly lighter shades of gray. It was the dawn of Christmas Eve. The bus was silent. The tamozhnya had sucked the energy out of us, as if vitality, like our documents and valuables, was forbidden to cross the border. Now we were truly refugees. Back on Soviet soil we had belonged to a nation, however horrible that nation was, but here, beyond the fence, we were ghosts, drifters, entities with no recognizable destination or attachment. This awkward freedom of being beholden to nothing save for the mercy of others still lingers in my psyche and, I imagine, in the psyche of many ex-migrants.
