Dancing on Thin Ice

by Arkady Polishchuk

  Outside the court building, I came across another Ukrainian who, just as the prosecutor, perhaps, had also acquired his knowledge of Jewish gold in early childhood from his loving mother. Leaning against a prison van and looking skeptically at me, this elderly man, pronouncing each word with gusto, told his interlocutors, “He was caught with the gold at the border. Wanted to escape to Israel.”

  During one of many long breaks and my travels through corridors and outside the court building a quiet old Jew came up to me and asked, “Is it true that the Sterns feed you caviar every day?”

  “Sometimes even for breakfast,” I said. “But always, for lunch and dinner. And their mastiff gets all of the leftover caviar and doesn’t want to consume anything else.”

  “You laugh,” he said sadly, “but we live here.”

  “Then why aren’t you afraid to come up to me?”

  “Ah! Whether I approach you or not, we already know what will happen to all of us. After this trial, the Jews in this city will be eaten alive. I didn’t allow my family to come within a gunshot of the courthouse.”

  “That’s why the two brothers of Doctor Stern never came to the court?”

  “They are frightened to death.”

  It was time for me to return to my seat. He shook my hand and then let me know, “The other day neighborhood boys called my youngest son to play soccer. When he arrived, they were kicking around the field a skull taken from an old Jewish cemetery.”

  THE INTENSITY of emotions grew with every passing day. On December 13, Orlovsky said in a trembling voice, “Day after day, right from the very first minute, I, the judge, have been disparaged badly. They have grabbed me by the throat.” And here he demonstrated his talent. “Some individuals,” he said, “are interested in distorting the meaning of what is happening here. They want to keep us from an objective examination of the case under the law.”

  I whispered to the KGB man next to me, “About whom is he talking?”

  He shrugged.

  After another long recess, the judge suddenly explained: some of the individuals present in the room were law students. The next day one of them came into intimate contact with us. It was thus impossible to take a picture of Stern even when the convoy was putting him in the prison van. Out of desperation, we decided to photograph the van and the crowd around it. We moved to the other side of the street and circled around Victor. He promptly opened his coat, and, as we parted, pressed the camera trigger two or three times. Immediately, as if out of thin air, in front of us materialized one of those law students, “Follow me to the police! You have no right to photograph a military vehicle!”

  “You just assumed,” I said boldly. “And anyway, who are you?”

  The “lawyer” turned red and ran away. We already knew him. He was always somewhere near, even at the cafe, where we sometimes went during the lunch break. As soon as Victor handed his camera to a reliable person, the “student” came running back to us, now with two heavy-breathing men in uniform. One of them said, “You were filming a military vehicle. You all have come along to the police station for identification.”

  “It’s an ordinary truck,” I said naively.

  “Didn’t you see the red military star on the door?” said the smart student triumphantly.

  At the District Police Department, Victor was led to the second floor. The three of us were brought to a room on the ground floor. Soon there came that same lieutenant colonel, who on the first day of the trial successfully went incognito. It turned out he was the commander of this department.

  Rather than order some corporal to do the body search, this Colonel Koval did it himself, with exemplary enthusiasm. It was quite a show: the completely petrified Lasaris, his hands raised, the flaps of his unbuttoned coat and jacket swung open and parted far to the sides, there with the burly colonel fussing around this suddenly pale, skinny statue. After removing from this Moscow Zionist his notebook and a few pages of transcripts of the proceedings, the relieved officer was obviously thinking of the success of his highly professional actions. He scoured Goldfarb and me with careless negligence, which saved my own precious records of the proceedings.

  My companions were released. Victor was fined 30 rubles for disorderly conduct, while for an hour and a half I explained to the amiable head of the city’s passport office why tiny Israel so cruelly attacked millions of peace-loving Arabs. He asked me if I knew the Arabic language. This meant that he was told something about my recent past. After that, we met several times in court. Always dressed in civilian clothing, he called me by name and patronymic, shook my hand as a good friend, and solicitously inquired about the source of funds I lived on. Maybe my Moscow well-wishers were magnanimously considering the use of the penal code article on the parasitic way of life as my first punishment—the article provided for no more than three years in prison.

  THE STERNS’ PHONE was disconnected in the early days of the trial, and late in the evening we dictated from the city call center our statement to our Moscow friends. An operator listening in on the line, as usual, covered her mouth with her plump palm and repeated the same remark in a theatrical whisper, “Israel is again at booth 13!”

  We stated that much of the witnesses’ testimony, as recorded in the preliminary investigation, was untrue and Orlovsky accused us of intending to pervert the course of the trial.

  Maybe, by allowing our calls, the KGB was killing two birds with one stone. It showed to the word that the trial was open to public scrutiny and helped Boris Antonov from the Novosty News Agency to adjust his coverage of the trial to make a better piece of propaganda targeted at foreign audiences.

  The judge and the prosecutor had made their contribution to these efforts. When Stern said that after receiving an invitation to emigrate, he began preparing for the arrest, Orlovsky used one of his favorite words: “This isn’t related to this trial. The comrades”—a contemptuous glance in my direction—“will transmit … They get paid for it.”

  On another occasion, the judge said, “Hostile radio stations broadcast that Stern is ill, that he spits blood. Some of the people sitting in this hall pass along such information …”

  One evening the Stern sons were summoned to the regional prosecutor’s office. “Convey to your friends,” said Ivan Timchenko, the Deputy Chief Prosecutor for Vinnytsia Region, “the possibility of criminal liability for transmitting defamatory information to the West.”

  The following evening several Moscow refuseniks signed a statement seeking to protect us. It said: “A campaign of intimidation and threats has been conducted against three Muscovites… They are accused of transmitting defamatory information to the West… Such a charge may serve as the grounds for imprisonment… The actions of the court are an attempt to turn the trial into closed proceedings.”

  A few days later Goldfarb and I were not allowed in the hall and were led to Oleg Gotha, the head of the criminal investigation bureau of the Leninsky District Police Department. The conversation lasted three minutes.

  “I have to warn you about your improper behavior in the courtroom,” he said, but instead of answering my question as to what constituted our bad behavior, he added, “If we continue to receive complaints from the public in the hall, the police will take action against you.”

  ON THE SIXTEENTH DAY of the trial I sent the editor-in-chief of the local Vinnitsa Pravda a letter beginning, “Judging by the silence of your paper, the readers of Vinnitsa are less interested in this trial than Londoners.” I informed him that Antonov’s reports appeared in The Times in London, asked him to take into consideration the interests of the local population, and report about the trial. It was strange, I stressed, that a large news agency was interested in such a run-of-the-mill story and notified the foreign public of so miniscule a case of bribery. I asked the editor to help me to find the invisible Boris Antonov from the Novosty News Agency in the courtroom.

  On Friday, three days before sentencing, after a long wait the hearing was canceled again
. The trial was already over. The prosecutor demanded that the judge sentence Stern to nine years in prison. Stern’s defense counsel Axelbant, referring to the same string of witnesses, demanded a full acquittal.

  Judge Orlovsky, in a new, well-cut suit with medal ribbons, declared to the jam-packed room that lay judge Laktionov was ill and the final testimony of the defendant was delayed until Monday morning. A little man with curled lips and legs sat in the first row every day. Everybody knew he was an alternate lay judge waiting for such an occasion. Someone forgot to inform him.

  The judge turned to me, his voice like acid, and said, “You can write it down!”

  “Thank you!” I said and wrote it down.

  Saturday and Sunday were days of anxious waiting.

  Then, on the night of Monday, December 30, 1974, Ida Stern and her sons barely slept. In the morning we naively thought that we arrived at the court half an hour before the start of the hearing. Only Judge Orlovsky, the prosecutor, both lay judges, as well as activists from the taxi fleet knew that the trial had been rescheduled to take place an hour earlier, at nine a.m. We certainly would not have been allowed in, and Stern would have addressed his last plea to the judge and the taxi drivers, who filled the hall to capacity, and not to his sons, his wife and the world imperialism.

  But it did not happen, thank God and the Russian laxity, which in the future will more than once serve the good of Mother Russia—we did not see the defense lawyer in the room. In the hallway the judge nervously chastised the court clerk, and the poor thing was looking for excuses and claimed that she could not find Axelbant at the hotel. Thus, the Jewish lawyer sabotaged the operation to combat misinformation. Knowing nothing, he came to the court at the usual time, as did we.

  Stern cried out for justice. He denied all the allegations against him, and finally, throwing caution to the wind, he said, “This hasn’t been a normal trial of a bribe-taker and a fraud. Some people wanted to turn this court into a bloody feast.”

  And again, there was a break until the end of the day, instead of the expected verdict. They were still waiting for Taratuta, the Regional Party Secretary, the Stern sons assured me. He had been in Kiev for a few days, at the Plenum of the Ukraine’s Central Committee.

  That important Monday the taxi drivers enjoyed the trial so much that the next day they returned to hear the delayed verdict. It was December 31, New Year’s Eve, the busiest day in the life of a Soviet taxi driver, and yet they were there. For nearly one and a half hours, the hostile audience, standing, listened to Judge Vasily Orlovsky. The verdict scrupulously preserved even that which had nothing to do with the conviction, including the willful exposure of the young “in the presence of their mothers, focusing their attention on the genitals of their sons.”

  The taxi drivers liked to hear about the genitals. One nudged his neighbor and they smiled happily. They also liked “That’s not enough! You’re stingy!” and “So give me the money!” and, of course, the “advertising as foreign, scarce and expensive drugs that were ordinary Soviet medicines.”

  The case was moving to the end. The tired cabbies whispered and shifted from foot to foot. Pale Stern, not hiding contempt, was looking at the judge and made signs to his wife and sons.

  “… It is taken into account …,” the judge finally concluded in a hoarse voice, “that the defendant had not been tried before, and therefore the panel of judges considers it possible to pass the minimum sentence provided under Article 168 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic.” Orlovsky cleared his throat, threw out his chest, and breaking the monotonous patter, said solemnly, “The panel…” He again made an expressive pause, and in the ensuing dead silence we all heard “Bastards!”

  “Who said that!?” cried Orlovsky and took off his glasses. “Who dares offend the court!?”

  “I do,” said August Stern.

  “No,” his mother said. “I did.”

  “Leave the room immediately!” the judge ordered her.

  Ida Stern, her head held unnaturally high, went to the door. At the door she paused between two policemen and loudly said, not to the judge, but to the standing audience—all eyes fixed on her—“Murderers!” and left the room. All eyes bored now into the judge.

  At this point I even liked Orlovsky. After all, for contempt of court, he could have punished this little woman in accordance with the Criminal Code. However, the judge put on his glasses and finished reading the verdict with obvious relief, “… has sentenced Mikhail Stern to imprisonment for a term of eight years, to be served in a maximum security hard labor camp, with confiscation of all property.”

  Immediately, without pause, as if a call to battle, there rang the doctor’s sharp voice, “Shame on those who sow hatred of the Jews!”

  All of us were let out of the courtroom only after Dr. Stern, the prisoner Stern, had been taken away in a van with a red star on the green door.

  IN THE TRAIN on my way home I was alone. Goldfarb and Lasaris left for Moscow a few days before the end of the trial. I wondered whether the Ukrainian friends told that Jewish child that the skull they used as a soccer-training ball was from a Jewish cemetery. This unhealthy thinking stopped as soon as I was strip-searched. There was an element of legitimacy at play in this act, with a real witness, not an informant or police. This guy was a railroad big shot, and it was absurdly unreal. I had never seen such impressive insignia on a railroad uniform. In the end, with the window wide open, they left me naked in the conductors’ tiny compartment alone with this official, as he had to sign the protocol. He got up from his seat and closed the window with the words, “We’re all in winter coats, and you can catch pneumonia.” He caught my look of surprise and added, “I wish you success in all your endeavors” and quickly went out, finally allowing me to dress.

  Upon arrival in Moscow, it took a couple of hours to confuse my shadows. I was not going to return home. Natan Sharansky had been already enjoying his homeless life in my apartment. His family lived near Moscow, and he had now a chance not to tramp for three or four months while I, hiding in Lucy Litvinov’s apartment, was finishing writing my clandestine book Why a Physician Was Tried. My portable miracle of East German Socialist engineering, an Erika typewriter, was able to print up to four carbon copies of my manuscript on very thin paper, with no margins, and no air between the lines. To my surprise, it was read by some people I never knew. In May 1975 Sharansky managed to pass it to someone from the West. But we were blind—we could not even know whether my backstreet samizdat crossed the border.

  Dr. Mikhail Stern at the Andrei Sakharov tribunal in The Hague. 1980. (Rob Bogaerts, Anefo)

  The Stern case got worldwide publicity, and it was realistic to assume that he would be released before his sentence was finished. It happened sometime in March 1977, within twenty-seven months after the trial, much sooner than the deeply disillusioned Vinnitsa Party leadership and I anticipated. On that occasion the APN correspondent Boris Antonov finally addressed the Russian audience with an article that revealed the intrigues of world Zionism. A couple of months later Mikhail and Ida Stern came to see me in my apartment unaware that I was faraway on a secret trip to the unregistered Pentecostal church in Krasnodarsky Territory.

  As for my manuscript, during the 1979 International Andrei Sakharov Human Rights Hearings in Washington, a woman in her sixties from a leading Jewish organization approached me and said that it had disappeared from a drawer of her desk. I went numb, but my only thought was: focus on your present problem. I had to concentrate on my task. In a few minutes I would speak through an interpreter on behalf of thirty thousand Russian Evangelicals who needed to emigrate in order to escape persecution. Perhaps the lady was surprised at the calm with which I listened to her. The moment she gave me her name, it escaped me. We never met again.

  Arkady Polishchuk, Why a Physician Was Tried, clandestine publication (samizdat). Moscow, 1975.

  TEN

  Different Courts Without a Difference

  ONE
MORNING IN APRIL 1975, soon after my finishing my book and returning home from Lucy’s, Sharansky was planning to dictate a statement of Andrei Sakharov’s with which he had been entrusted from my phone to someone in Canada. Before 7 a.m. two men from the telephone exchange woke me up. They said they had to switch something in the metal box above my front door. One of the technicians stepped onto the ladder, opened the box, made a single quick movement inside it, and before setting a foot back on my floor, said, “For systematic use of your phone for anti-Soviet purposes, it’s been disconnected.”

  In a second they were gone. If someone wakes me up too early, I make the dumbest mistakes. I cursed myself for opening the door and fatalistically waited for Anatoly. Two hours later a neighbor knocked. He asked, “Does your phone work?” In former times this Party secretary of the Moscow Composer Publisher had not shown any interest in my life, but recently I had constantly been hearing the click of the tiny metal flap that covered his door’s peephole—he followed my comings and goings. My composer friends told me long ago that this neighbor was a known snitch.

  To the envy of the vast majority of Muscovites, all tenants of my privileged co-op had phones. The only problem with ours was insignificant: all of them had been paired. I gleefully explained to the snitch that the ungrateful KGB shut off his phone. He frowned and left. My mood improved a little. Sharansky found me standing on a stool studying the ill-fated box above my door.

  “It had to happen,” Anatoly said in a businesslike way.

  “Of course! You used my long absence very productively. You’re supposed to know what wiring should be reconnected here in order to blow up the KGB headquarters.”

  Sharansky climbed up on the stool and became cheerful at once. “These idiots simply disconnected the wiring from the plug.”