Dancing on Thin Ice

by Arkady Polishchuk

  He was surprised. “How d’you know?”

  “I’m a fortune teller.”

  The faces of these staunch atheists, sitting behind and in front of us, moved halfway from hostility to curiosity.

  “You were born,” I said, “far away from Moscow in a poor working class family.”

  Judging by their faces, I had scored a point or two. “At the age of fourteen or fifteen you joined the Communist Youth Organization, though you were a lazy student.”

  The petty officer hemmed, “At sixteen.”

  I paused. “If you take your hat off, I’ll tell you where you served.”

  He turned to his colleagues-in-arms, who nodded, and he took off his worn, cloth cap.

  “Okay,” I said. “Now it’s better … you served as a border guard.”

  “At what border?” one of them asked acidly.

  “It’s a State secret,” I said.

  They laughed. I admitted, “I might be wrong. It looks as if you served in the occupation forces in East Germany or Czechoslovakia.”

  “We’re not occupiers,” said my guinea pig, “we’re liberators.” But it was clear that at least one of my guesses was correct and I could continue. “You were good at political education studies and joined the Party.”

  Their commander rose suddenly from his side seat behind the driver and came back toward us. “Stop talking with the detainees,” he ordered without raising his voice and went back to his seat. My prestige as a fortune-teller was saved.

  “How did you know that he was a petty officer?” whispered Slepak.

  “The age and commanding manners,” I said.

  We continued traveling on the Dmitrov highway, crossed the Moscow Beltway, passed Severny, a new settlement more than forty miles from the capital, and after a sign that read “Boarding House” entered a deserted forest tract with the sign “Restricted area. Entry forbidden.” The road was empty, except for a black Volga sedan which had been following us all the way from Moscow. The commander looked at his watch, grabbed a walkie-talkie and said, “Yes! It’ll be done!” and announced, “Now all of you will leave the bus!”

  We had several seconds to consider the situation in its proper perspective: three-dozen KGB rank-and-files could wreak havoc right here, on the roadside, in the darkness of a forest. We decided not to leave the bus. We caught hold of the metal handles of the seatbacks and demanded to be taken to any railroad station.

  It is a painful experience when your delicate fingers, clutching at a metal handle, are exposed to crushing blows and at the same time four or five hands are trying their best to tear you away from this handle. I was astonished to see how long Vladimir’s fingers were able to endure this.

  We were losing the battle. Some of us, in order to avoid the beating, finally acquiesced to leave the bus. Those defying the order were thrown out. Josef Ahs, a quiet physician, barely resisted; from the open pneumatic door I saw him lying in the half frozen dirt. Two guards were kicking him. I was trying to set my hands against the door when someone kicked me in the small of my back. I fell out of the bus, and another guy leaning over me, yelled, “You Jewish cunt!” and struck my side with his boot.

  I raised myself a little and spit in his face. A long-distance spittle strike, this sweet reminder of childhood competitions landed on his chest. He couldn’t anticipate such an offense, and I had a second to get up on my feet. He hit me in the ribs with his heavy boot. I felt a sharp pain and thought, you shouldn’t do this! I also thought, they were avoiding hitting us in the face, wasn’t this another promising sign? A minute later I saw Josef Ash’s swollen eyelids and Zakhar Tesker gingerly touching his broken nose. Actually, those soldiers were well disciplined; on this deserted night road they could have crippled all of us.

  Suddenly a military truck with blinding headlights emerged from behind the turn. It slowed down and a baby-faced lieutenant yelled in a high-pitched voice, “What’s happening here?”

  “We are police!” yelled the bus driver, “handling delinquent kikes! Go—go!”

  Then another resisting fool—Boris Chernobylsky tried to stop the truck. Soon he also was lying in the slush.

  At this moment the Volga sedan, which had stopped two hundred yards from the battlefield, reminded us of its existence. Its headlights flashed twice, and the squad quickly went back into the bus. This stubborn kike Boris now stood in front of it with arms akimbo, yelling, “Bandits! Cutthroats! Cowards!”

  Three cursing men jumped out of the coach and pushed him away while the driver backed up the bus a bit and made a U-turn. Furious Chernobylsky tried climbing on the back bumper, but did not succeed. He threw a stone and fortunately missed the target.

  We were left in an unfamiliar place, probably a military area, and we had five chilly night hours to search for a railroad—the first train would only run at about five o’clock in the morning. After walking some six miles we met a collective-farm watchman in a long sheepskin coat. The old man was scared; our scratched faces and dirty torn clothes did not inspire trust. Nonetheless, he gave us good directions, and an hour later we reached an empty station.

  On the train many of us, including the drained informer Tsypin, plunged into a deep sleep. Those who could not sleep decided to continue our assault on the Reception Room in the morning. In Moscow everybody went home to get some rest, except Zakhar and me. We needed to get an x-ray, to furnish evidence. But to whom?

  A doctor in the Sklifosofsky Institute said that I had two cracked ribs and recommended to wind a towel around my trunk. He refused to give me an x-ray film or a written reference. An exhausted night nurse of this principal trauma center muttered, “If we give a reference to every hoodlum beaten in a street fight, the country would soon run out of ink and paper.”

  They certainly had shortages of x-ray films and painkillers.

  The KGB strategists thought they had taught us a measured lesson. But we were poor students and again took them by surprise. Even more than that—now seven more refuseniks joined our ranks.

  On that day, October 20, 1976, boredom reigned in the Reception Room. Upon our arrival all petitioners were sent off the field. They saw with their own eyes the Jews who invaded the Holy of Holies of Communist rule, where visitors had to experience the thrill and awe. To minimize the attention of foreign journalists, we were permitted to stay undisturbed there until the Reception Room was closed, an hour earlier than usual.

  The details of this arrest have vanished from my memory—I was exhausted by pain and the sleepless night. All of us, except Boris and Josef, were brought before a very unhappy judge who, however, knew that all seventeen of us deserved leniency. That day, for sure, he had canceled consideration of all other cases and waited hours for our arrival. In five minutes, without asking questions, he sentenced all of us to fifteen days of imprisonment. A police wagon nicknamed “Black Raven” took four of us to a suburban branch of Butyrskaya prison. We knew nothing about the fate of others. Three weeks later we learned that Boris and Josef were in the main building of this prison, near the Garden Ring, the inner beltway of Moscow with neither gardens nor trees. No doubt, Chernobylsky and Ahs were selected for a harsher punishment because they were not known in the West. During interrogation, both had been promised four years of imprisonment. Yet after four months behind bars they became well known and were released without trial.

  We were lucky to be locked up for just fifteen days. The Soviets still dreamed of the abolition of the U.S. trade restrictions that had been enacted as a direct result of persecution of Jews wishing to emigrate. The Kremlin tried to minimize the scale of the Western protests and the punitive machine became unpredictable.

  Pictured here are eighteen Russian Jews who participated in our invasion of Brezhnev’s Reception Room and those who were arrested during the following days. Many of us are unshaven as this photo was taken just after our release. In the midst of the first row there are two women, the wives of Chernobylsky and Ahs. Their husbands were selected for a much long
er term. On the left is Leonid Tsypin, a KGB provocateur who also was “imprisoned” for two weeks.

  From left to right, first row: Arik Rachlenko, Leah Chernobylsky (wife of Boris Chernobylsky), Mikhaela Ahs (wife of Josef Ahs), Vladimir (Zeev) Shakhnovsky, Evgeny Yakir;

  second row: Anatoly Sharansky, Yosef Beilin, Igor Tufeld, Zachar Tesker, Alexander Gvinter;

  third row: Leonid Tsypin (KGB agent), [?] Zelinii, Dmirti Shriglik, Victor Elistratov, Leonid Shabashov, Arkady Polishchuk, Vladimir Slepak, Aharon Gurevich, Isaak Elkind, Michael Kremen.

  Moscow, November 1976. (Association Remember and Save)

  A New York Times article by David K. Shipler, “Moscow Jews Say They Were Beaten After a Visa Sit-In” (October 20, 1976) reported that “some of the plainclothesmen wore the red armbands of druzhinniki’ or auxiliary police, but the Jews said they were convinced the assailants were policemen or agents of the K.G.B., the security police.” Anti-semitic remarks were made, referring to Jews trying to take over the world, and men were beaten using “very sophisticated tricks,” not damaging the face but clubbing the men “over the neck in such a way as to make the body limp.” This happened “about 35 to 40 miles” outside Moscow. “‘They ordered us out of the bus,’ Mr. Polishchuk reported. ‘We said we wouldn’t leave. It was very dark. We didn’t know where we were and we were afraid.’ The plainclothesmen pushed and dragged the Jews from the bus, he said, and for what some of the demonstrators estimated was 30 minutes, chased them through the woods, pummeling and kicking them.”

  FOURTEEN

  How to Catch an American Spy

  SOON THE SOVIETS got tired of balancing on barbed wire and went full-force. In January 1977, a TV-documentary titled The Buyers of Souls was shown nationwide. In that quaint work of art, Anatoly Sharansky earned special attention as a well-paid agent of international Zionism and imperialism.

  Then in early February, Dr. Alexander Lipavsky miraculously found a room in Moscow’s overcrowded center and invited Anatoly to share it with him. Well done, I thought; this physician has been good in helping others. Recently, he had managed to dig up, somewhere, some perfect sausages for a few Siberian exiles. The living together lasted only a few days. Lipavsky left on family matters, disappeared, and came back some ten days later, yet no longer in the flesh. I learned about it in a subway car. Two college students next to me were reading an article in the Izvestia. One of them said, “Spies should be shot.”

  His friend nodded and glanced at me. I borrowed their paper and my face probably expressed consternation. I muttered, “What a bastard!” In that article Lipavsky called Sharansky a CIA agent and confessed that he also had collaborated with the CIA. My neighbors now stared at me.

  I exited the train at the nearest stop and glanced back at the passengers. They kept looking at me, so I twirled my finger at my temple to show that they were not quite right in the head. One of them made the same gesture at me, and the other one shook his fist. Were we moving back to the days of Stalin? Was I like them a quarter of a century ago, not understanding the absurdity of public accusations of espionage and sabotage well before the arrest of the culprit? Nothing seemed to have changed. The whole country still needed cult-deprogramming counseling.

  Since the beginning of March, Sharansky had been continuously shadowed by a large retinue of agents breathing down his neck. One day, a small group of refuseniks left their usual meeting point near the synagogue, and accompanied by a KGB swarm, was walking toward the Old Square. The somber agents were walking behind us, on both sides, and ahead. A short man, apparently their chief, brazenly stepped into the narrow gap between Sharansky and me. I asked him, “Doesn’t it bother you that we are walking next to you?”

  His reply was quick and businesslike: “Don’t meddle with my work!”

  We stopped at a public restroom, and Anatoly went inside. The chief nodded to one of his men to follow Sharansky. When they returned, I tried to distract Anatoly from depressing thoughts and continued my horseplay. “Was he actually watching your human right movements at the urinal?” I asked.

  Nobody was entertained. The chief pulled a walkie-talkie out of his inside pocket, moved slightly behind the group, and apparently started reporting the current situation on the front line. Our escort was clearly waiting for an impending order from higher authorities, perhaps even the Politburo. The finale to this production dragged on. For one more month, Sharansky continued to do his terrible harm to the country. Only on March 15, 1977, was he arrested. It was the quick capture of a spy in the act, Russian-style. The short-lived experiment with soft sentencing was over.

  The spy’s wealth was still stored at my home—a shapeless winter hat with flaps, torn boots, and a scratchy army blanket.

  The KGB certainly would have preferred to expose an impressive Zionist spy network sprawling the globe, but other than Lipavsky and the red-bearded snitch Tsypin, the unwilling participant in our action the previous year at Brezhnev’s Reception Room, there were no other fish in the KGB’s net. So, in the spring they began interrogating everyone who had signed, along with Sharansky, the various appeals to the authorities and the West. Some of the signers were scared, others, despite a formal nondisclosure agreement, shared their experience with friends. It all came down to looking for the authors of these often old documents, and nothing about state secrets and espionage.

  When it was my turn, I arrived at the KGB’s Lefortovo prison on the edge of old Moscow where Anatoly had already been kept for a couple of months. A somber investigator ordered me to sit down in the long room at a little table in the corner, diagonally opposite to his desk. A square piece of rough paper, which covered the top of this thin-legged table, quickly brightened my mood. I stopped thinking of those who had been kept here for years with no trial. The paper was a shooting gallery target skillfully shot through the center and the adjacent circles. The vulgar torture of the recent past was now replaced by simulation—a paper target aimed at the faint of heart. I felt a rush of amusement steeped in adrenaline.

  “There is nothing here to smile about,” said the investigator sternly. “You’re here to give evidence of the grave crimes against the state.”

  “This paper tablecloth just reminded me of a textbook Chekhov observation,” I explained innocently.

  He did his best not to look dumbfounded, which led me to believe that he was a lousy student at school.

  The door opened suddenly, conveniently obscuring me in my corner. A second later, I grew worried when I saw the green back of a soldier step forward toward my interrogator. Instead of escorting me somewhere, he sat by the window, ignoring my presence, adjusted a pistol at his side, and fixed his eyes on a wall. The interrogator headed for the door, adjusting his tie on the way, and I calmed down thinking of a push button somewhere under his desk. Soon I understood that it was not needed.

  I counted the number of bullet holes in the target and the number of points scored by the shooter. To attract the attention of the soldier, I mumbled Chekhov’s “You cannot put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is meant to shoot it.”

  He did not react. Then I tried to irritate him. “I guess, someone punched these holes with a nail.”

  The tin soldier’s face did not change, and he continued staring towards the wall.

  Then I added, “A rusty nail.”

  When the interrogator returned, the serviceman disappeared, and the questioning continued. Soon it began to resemble a damaged gramophone record with the needle stuck in the same annoying creaky scrap of a tired old song. A dozen times he said, “You signed such and such an appeal in such and such year, month, and day. Is this your signature?”

  A dozen times I repeated, “Yes, it is.”

  And so it went. He asked, “Who wrote this document?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Was it Sharansky?”

  “No, it wasn’t him.”

  “Why are you so certain?”

  “Because when he lived at my place, he neve
r wrote anything.”

  “Then, who was it? You?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Stop playing the fool. When he lived in your apartment, you weren’t there. Do you refuse to give evidence? This is the KGB prison, and for failure to cooperate with the investigation you can end up over there,” he said, nodding at the small barred windows with metal canopies across the prison yard. The investigator’s accent confirmed what’s been said by others interrogated in this prison—the KGB did some horse-breaking of their own provincial cadre in order for them to conduct these investigations of such an important case. The horse behind a big desk now looked rather timid than wild.

  “Do you call evidence,” I said, “the letters sent to the Soviet authorities?”

  “Maybe, it was you who wrote this?” he repeated again.

  “I don’t recall writing it.”

  Everything was infinitely repeated; only the dates and some addressees were different. This dragged on for four or five hours—maybe more. The same stone-faced soldier kept disappearing and reappearing, causing the investigator to hurry off somewhere. Surely, he was receiving instructions from his superiors who were listening to this questioning; maybe a microphone was behind that portrait of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Soviet secret police.

  After the last visit to his supervisors, he said, with a face contorted by anger, “We know everything about you, where you go, whom you meet, and what you do. We don’t have to look for new material to bring a case against you. I’m not talking about a trifle such as turning your apartment into a den for people associated with foreign intelligence services, but we decided to give you another chance to think about yourself and your family. Go home, and be here tomorrow morning at nine sharp.”

  “The boss isn’t pleased with you, my child,” I thought. “Which is good.”

  On my way home, when I stopped wondering why I was not put in a cell at least for one night, I thought about my interrogator’s face. With his big round cheeks and almost lipless mouth, he looked like the target on that rickety table.