Dancing on Thin Ice

by Arkady Polishchuk

  In a couple of minutes he was delivering Sakharov’s statement to Toronto.

  What happened after that should be the subject for a symposium of American experts on Russia. Obviously, some KGB bureaucrat checked off a victorious operation and moved on to other urgent matters. From that very morning, for twenty-nine days and nights in a row, we successfully used this detoxified phone for our nefarious activities. Only after nearly a month of this did the report of my newest crime reach some decision-making official. Most likely, the head honchos were never informed about this serious blunder of their subordinates. This time my neighbor was victimized again. Our two phones were disabled somewhere at the telephone exchange.

  Before long, I was on a train again, this time with a lawyer, who happened to be a close friend of Simon Verbitsky, my pal at Asia and Africa Today. A Moldovan refusenik, Sender Levinson, was accused of profiteering with foreign fabric he received in parcels from Western sympathizers. His older sister sold three pieces of this poplin to her co-workers at a factory producing silk and was released from the pre-trial custody after he, on the advice of his KGB minders, took full responsibility for the crime and admitted that she had acted at his insistence. This lawyer, Valentine Shereshevsky was his name, had been hired to defend them.

  “Can you imagine,” he said to me, “that the parents were even allowed to visit their children in the local jail so they could determine whom to sacrifice unto the beast—their son or their daughter?”

  “It’s a plot for Shakespeare,” I said.

  If he didn’t confess, the minders said, his thirty-year-old sister would be sentenced to six years in prison and, even if released in good health, she’d never find a husband. “So touching!” I said. “In this town the KGB ‘shrinks’ know what is brewing not only in your kitchen pots, but also in your brain.”

  “Actually, this is for Orwell,” the attorney said.

  “What secrets did this former soldier manage to acquire years ago, while constructing apartment buildings for officers?”

  “This—now this, is something for Nikolai Gogol,” Valentine said and turned the conversation to rumors about refuseniks living in luxury and regularly receiving checks and parcels from the West. So far I had received only one $25 check from some American in front of the synagogue. He had patted me on the shoulder and said something soothing. Even now I did not feel comfortable talking about this. I had exchanged it at the Central Bank for a certificate in dollars, felt as rich as Baron Rothschild, and went to a Beryozka store, stocked mostly with foreign goods.

  Valentine expressed pretended outrage, “Beryozka, the beloved birch tree, celebrated in poetry, prose and songs, a symbol of our patriotism, doesn’t even admit ordinary citizens with their rubles in foreign currency shops!”

  I agreed. “Nothing is sacred anymore.”

  “So, has this been your only income since you stopped receiving your fat salary?”

  “No, once I received from London an album of Salvador Dali’s paintings and felt only joy. One fellow wanted to buy it, but I was afraid of bringing greater joy to the KGB by going to prison for profiteering, just like Sender Levinson. As an honest citizen, I took the album to a secondhand bookshop.”

  “How much did they pay?”

  “200 rubles, half of my monthly salary.”

  “For Dali, this personification of decadent capitalism, I’d give you your entire monthly pay.”

  “What do you think,” I asked, “how many copies of this album are there in Moscow?”

  “Maybe none.”

  “So, that’s why I wouldn’t be able to sell it.”

  “Yeah, were I the buyer, after revealing this jewel to my guests, I’d soon serve as a witness at the trial of a nouveau riche named Polishchuk.”

  “Are you so open with me because Simon Verbitsky is our mutual friend?”

  “Just a nice coincidence.”

  I asked him why was he traveling with an enemy of the state. Wasn’t it an open challenge to the authorities?

  “No. You’re a client, too. You’ve brought me your pregnant ‘relative.’ Her husband has been arrested for economic crimes.”

  “The KGB knows what kind of a relative I am.”

  “This game is in their interests,” he said. “We, defense attorneys, and people like you legitimize these courts just by being there.”

  “Isn’t it funny?” I said. “I can meet with you but cannot see my buddy Simon.”

  “It’s hilarious. Simon and I will laugh to death when you end up in the Gulag.”

  “Did he tell you about our foreign correspondents?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you take my case?”

  “The KGB might not allow it. It has its own list of defense lawyers.”

  “Clearly I wouldn’t agree with their choice.”

  “Life is unpredictable,” he said.

  I remembered what had happened to the Muscovite-refusenik Gendin in Moldova, but I did not want to tell my fellow traveler about it. In Chisinau prison, they struck him over the head with a steel shovel, doubled the time, threatened to kill him and, to save his life, Gendin heroically escaped and fled to Moscow shortly before the end of his thirty-day prison term.

  In Bendery, on the dusty railroad station square, Valentine woke a coachman in a rumpled black cap dozing on a narrow bench of a four-wheeled droshky, his hand holding a whip rested on his knee.

  “Royal carriage! The chariot of Pharaoh!” exclaimed the lawyer and waved goodbye.

  This was the end of our communication. Stomping down the battered road, I realized that man’s best friend was not a lazy dog but a hard-working horse. Bendery, a city with a population of almost one hundred thousand was just fine without buses, trolleys, and trams.

  Beside the gate of the Levinson’s shabby house stood a sad old mare tied to a poplar tree. She was harnessed to a platform wagon, which had also lived a long and distressing life. Sender Levinson’s father was a private entrepreneur from prehistoric urban times.

  The first thing he said was, “Please, don’t be angry with me for saying this, but you didn’t have to come here along with a lawyer. It makes it look like a political process.”

  Fear—a bad adviser, I thought sadly, and explained patiently that the KGB had already spread the rumor that Sender would be tried solely for profiteering by dealing in foreign goods. After Sender’s arrest, investigators searched exclusively for the contents of overseas parcels and did not even glance at the seditious photocopies and film of reproduced Hebrew textbooks laid out on the kitchen table. Several Hebrew teachers were already serving time just for that.

  Sender’s father pleaded not to send information about this trial abroad. It was too late to ask. It had long been known in the West that this was a lynching of a Jewish activist.

  During the four or five days I stayed there, his parents were mostly silent and looked at me with rueful hope. Between themselves, they spoke softly and reticently in a mixture of Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Romanian. I talked mostly with Sender’s sister, his heavily pregnant wife, and their three-year-old son. The sister told me that at first she sold only one piece of poplin to her girlfriend at the State silk mill, but when the other two girls learned about her brother’s parcels, they begged her to sell poplin to them, too. They preferred this vulgar cotton cloth from overseas to the beautiful silk of their factory.

  In the first seconds of the trial, upon the judge entering the courtroom, I felt an urge to share something immediately with humanity. I gave Valentine a furtive glance. He was already looking at me, covering his misplaced smile with a fist. I wanted to slide off the chair on to the floor, so nobody would see me smirk or to address my heartfelt inner monologue to this plump middle-aged woman: “Citizen Judge! You are a woman, and you want to be beautiful. I love your dress; it’s made from the very same poplin, which cannot be bought without the right connections. You know that. Both defendants deserve nothing but praise for the compassion they have shown toward these to
rmented women by selling them this fucking poplin.”

  The judge was still asking the defendants formal questions, and I had enough time to straighten myself up, and to start following the proceedings.

  The sister, instead of answering the prosecutor’s questions, was crying and repeating, “Sender, I’m so sorry!”

  Her brother shouted, “Stop dodging, say that I coerced you to sell the poplin!”

  The prosecutor looked at him like a grateful dog looks at the man who is about to throw him a bone. The stony-faced judge did not intervene until Sender said, “I’m being tried because I want to go to my historical homeland.”

  The three witnesses were shaking with fear. Valentine tried to explain to the judge that a person could not be accused of profiteering if he did not resell anything, but merely sold his own goods. In response to the defense, the prosecutor listed the American cities from which the parcels came. His passionate final words he devoted to the struggle against world Zionism. He even recalled propagation of Hebrew textbooks that had been pointedly ignored during the investigation. His last sentence, though crude, certainly reflected the essence of Sender’s crime. “This case isn’t just about pieces of fabric; it’s about the defendant’s political failure.”

  Sender Levinson was sentenced to six years imprisonment, his sister to three years. However, the KGB did not disgrace itself. Due to the amnesty announced earlier on the occasion of International Women’s Day, she was released right at the courthouse.

  We were exiting after the trial—me and the Moldovan refuseniks—when a brawny man leaped out of a large crowd of men with stern faces and pulled from the refusenik Joseph’s breast pocket a pen with a red cap. This ballpoint had been presented to Joseph by a foreigner in Moscow. Evidently, the police were instructed to look for microphones.

  I did not join the excited local refuseniks outside. I had my own problem to solve.

  The night after the verdict, the Levinson’s house resembled the house of the Sterns in Vinnitsa. At midnight no one was going to bed, and even the three-year-old boy was as grumpy as had been the three-year-old grandson of Doctor Stern. And here, just as there, this noise pleased me. These shrieks and squawks wisely reminded everyone that life was going on, and one could not put off until tomorrow what should be done today—that is, to put the child to bed.

  When the unlocked door opened and Sender’s close friend Dima entered, no one paid attention. It was as if Dima had never left the house. He turned to me and whispered, “You stumbled very naturally against that baby buggy.”

  “I dropped my notebook right on the baby’s tummy,” I whispered, embarrassed. “The whole town heard his protest against our anti-Soviet action.”

  Our successes were measured, alas, not by acquittal or reducing the sentences, but by being a noisy witnesses to the injustices and crimes of the regime. Our actions could well have been called anti-Soviet propaganda, punishable by seven years of prison often followed by internal exile of five years. Nevertheless, inspired by this, Dima wanted to outwit the KGB again, this time, by putting me on the train going in the direction opposite to Moscow—to Odessa, where another good friend of Sender, Leo Roitburd, would be happy to help me. So far I had yelled from every rooftop that we weren’t hiding any secrets, and our strength was rooted in this openness.

  “We have to go,” Dima said. “Nobody is outside. I noticed in court—during the breaks they avoided you like a leper.”

  The KGB remembered its bad experience in Vinnitsa. To disguise the true nature of this trial, they apparently were ordered to ignore my presence in Bendery.

  The city was asleep, and we got to Dima’s house without any incidents. I had never seen such gigantic burdocks. Heart-shaped, they sprung from the entire ground of his garden like dark-green parasols with broken-off handles.

  “You might hide here,” he smiled.

  “I’d be scared to live here,” I said. “On moonless southern nights like this I’d see a venomous creature under every leaf.”

  “We wrap and bake potatoes in burdock leaf.”

  That was a discovery. Bendery was known to me as a homemade-wine-and-jam town.

  We entered the house. Dima did not turn on the electricity. Holding my hand, he guided me through the dark room to an already prepared makeshift bed on the floor, behind an armoire.

  “Nobody will see you through the window. In the morning, I’ll show you what I do for a living.” He put a small piece of polished wood in my hand. “Now—you can touch my creation.”

  “This is a head with a beard,” I said. “You’re a wood carver.”

  “Yeah, so far I’ve carved figures from the old cherry and apple trees’ roots. In Israel I’ll try to become a sculptor.”

  The first thing I saw in the morning was a calm old Jew with an elaborately carved curly large beard and the steep forehead of a thinker. He lay on the floor next to my palm and stared at the ceiling from under his thick eyebrows. Dima picked up his creation, placed it on the table, and quickly carved on the back of the head “From Dima E. 29.V.75”. Today, it hangs over my desk in Washington DC, and I love it still.

  ELEVEN

  The Sweet Taste of Freedom

  WE HAD NEVER met before, but Leo Roitburd, his wife Lilia and their eleven-year-old son welcomed me to Odessa as though I was a close friend who survived a perilous trip across the world. Depressed, I told them that even if the Moldovan KGB were to get a hold of my notebook, there was nothing new in it—for them, or our sympathizers in the West. Leo suggested that I rest for a couple of days, take a dip in the Black Sea, and only then return to Moscow. After all, no foreign correspondents with their severely limited opportunities to travel within the Soviet Union could fully understand the daily humiliation and poverty of unemployable Bendery refuseniks.

  “Have you seen the KGB people around our entrance?” their boy asked.

  “You’re very observant,” I said to him. “What adult in full possession of his faculties would come running to your family to hide from the KGB?”

  He looked at the laughing adults with amazement that they were so brazenly open, and my spirits were healed.

  When we calmed down, I said, “I have to call my mother to say that I am resting on Black Sea beaches. And she will tell me, ‘You’re lying again, my little boy.’”

  Leo explained how to get to a payphone booth. The KGB had unplugged his phone, but ignored the miracle of technology that had recently captured the imagination of Russians—street telephones used for long-distance calls. I reached it in ten minutes and saw two men hurrying to seat themselves on an empty bench close to the booth. It was a very important moment of my life, a surprise, a sudden realization that fear had given way to an almost physical sense of freedom—I opened the door to the booth and asked them, “Do you also want to call your mom?”

  At this point, the Roitburd boy bumped into me. He grabbed me by the shoulder, stood on his tiptoes, and reached for my ear. “They were following you,” whispered the panting kid, “hiding behind buildings, trees, and in gateways.”

  “Well, you must be mistaken,” I said aloud. “They are good guys, just playing hide and seek!”

  I underestimated the temperament of the young Odessite. “No—no!” he cried. “They were spying on you!”

  “They,” with the glassy eyes of despair, were examining cigarette butts under their shoes.

  “Let’s make it easier for their hard work,” I said. “Don’t close this door. I will talk with my Mama, and you keep asking them if they clearly heard everything.”

  And he did it with the exuberant enthusiasm of a child. It had been a long time since I felt so serene and relaxed, even though my mother did accuse me of lying again and demanded that I come home soon.

  To convince her, I really needed to soak up some sun. At the city beach my brain and body melted like ice cream. I was fine in Leo’s swimming trunks, but my KGB escorts were sweating in their pants and hot boots on a red-hot bench at the entrance to th
e beach. I opened my eyes, covered them with my hand from the sun, and leisurely said to the young Leningrad couple lying on a mat next to me, “Do you see those poor things glued to the bench?”

  “Yes,” the girl said. “What about them?”

  “I suppose they are my shadows. Maybe they should call their boss for permission to remove their fire-breathing pants.”

  “You don’t look like a criminal,” she said with a giggle.

  I told them about the trial in Bendery. They were surprised by my openness and that I did not lower my lazy voice.

  “Some other people are listening to you, too,” said the young man, jerking his head in the direction of other beachgoers.

  I said, “I’m no longer afraid.”

  The girl spoke again, “That’s wonderful! Someone needs to stop being afraid.”

  “I can declare to the entire beach the names of other people sent to prison and hard labor camps for the same reason as Sender Levinson.”

  Everyone was silent and sober for a while.

  “When are you leaving?” she asked.

  I flattened the burning sand, and wrote with my index finger “tomorrow.”

  Her companion smoothed out the word “tomorrow” and wrote “Time?”

  I wrote “evening, at 6.”

  He erased the sand.

  The next evening they were waiting for me at the railroad platform. With three red roses! I was stunned and could only say, “You’re crazy!”

  “What’s your name?” asked the girl.

  “Arkady. Arkady Polishchuk.”

  “Thank you. We’ll remember that.”

  When the train started, I, still greatly delighted, asked the conductor, “Do you have something for these roses?”

  “Crystal vases,” he said with a growl, “are placed only in cars for members of the government.”

  “An empty bottle?” I asked plaintively.

  “It also costs money,” he said sternly.

  “I’ll pay for it, as if it’s full of vodka.”

  He brought me a used vodka bottle, half filled with water and muttered, “We don’t have enough water even for the restrooms.”