Dancing on Thin Ice

by Arkady Polishchuk

  In the morning, the “target” continued to run to his boss, leaving me alone with a new, now-costumed soldier with a black tie and scuffed shoes. This new actor helped to banish my night terrors. With the weathered face of a soldier on outside guard duty and his tin stare, in his cheap black suit he looked like a doleful mortician who had lost his clientele. I could not expect a better sedative.

  Apart from this detail, the day was similar to the previous one. Only once did the interrogator break the monotony of our encounter, get up from his desk, and with pursed lips, quickly walk up to me. “Do you acknowledge your signature on this document?” he asked, placing on the target an open letter in support of the U.S. Senator Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson and Representative Charles Vanik’s amendment to the current law on trade with Russia. I kept silent. I would not admit to signing it. He repeated his question. I said, “Many people who’ve been refused permission to emigrate have signed it. It’s quite natural that they support the amendment.”

  The narrow line of his lips disappeared—the “target” smiled for the first time in two days. “Therefore you acknowledge that your signature is proof of your participation in this anti-state conspiracy in America’s interest,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “Conspiracy requires secrecy. These are open letters.”

  “Don’t pretend to be naïve,” he said. “With your gray head you’re behaving like a child.”

  “These letters,” I said, “simply ask the world to help us to emigrate.”

  He sounded like a boxer who had just knocked down his opponent. “You’re asking the American Congress to exert more pressure on the Soviet Union and impose higher tariffs on our imports. You call this blackmail the most effective course of action toward the USSR?” He began yelling, “You’re asking them to penalize our country and our socialist economic system! You want America to have power over our internal policy!”

  Instead of getting scared, I was becoming angry and blurted out, “I dislike this amendment anyway.”

  “What?”

  I repeated, “I dislike this amendment.”

  “Okay! Here is a paper and a pen. Write it down!”

  I wrote, “I dislike the Jackson-Vanik amendment because it demands a privilege of emigration only for Jews.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I mean that every citizen of every country should have the right to freely leave it and come back when he wants to. Is it a crime?”

  “Lefortovo prison is not a place for political demagoguery. We’ll see you again very soon.”

  As I was leaving and the door slammed behind me, my elation quickly petered out. “Some hero!” I thought. “What made you so happy? You chickened out of mentioning Evangelicals in this written statement. It was a unique chance to do so.”

  It was already dark when I reached the courtyard stretched along our co-op building. An obese old man, a retiree from the Bolshoi Theater, approached me. He looked around and said, “I don’t see your boys in a car today.”

  “They aren’t mine, they’re yours,” I said.

  His voice cracked. “You’re always joking.”

  “I’ve already chatted with them today,” I said.

  The old musician was breathing heavily when he repeated, “You’re always joking.” He lowered his voice. “Some villagers have been sitting on the bench near your entrance for several hours. Waiting for you. How could you not be afraid!?”

  “I’m afraid,” I said.

  A couple of times my neighbors had seen how this former wind player, on a cold winter evening, despite a severe shortness of breath, came out of his warm apartment to bring homemade sandwiches and hot tea for “my boys” sitting in a cold “Volga” near my entrance.

  But I felt more pity than contempt for him. He did it out of fear, not out of love. The object of his all-consuming devotion was his Jewish boy well over thirty, a cellist, who was constantly touring Europe, earning hard currency for the government. His loving father, to secure the future and employment of his child was simply demonstrating his loyalty to the state.

  FIFTEEN

  The Assault on the American Embassy

  THAT EVENING, a Ukrainian who had already stayed at my place for a couple of days, and two new guests from Siberia discussed with me and Nikolai Petrovich Goretoi the eternal question—how to make the authorities openly recognize the existence of the thousands strong Christian emigration movement.

  The Ukrainian had come to my place with a bunch of Baptists and Pentecostals whom preacher Nikolai Kunitsa brought from the Ukrainian city of Rovno. They had tried, time and again, to apply to emigrate. This most recent time, their applications—written on rough grayish pages of exercise books—were torn up and trashed right in front of everyone; my guests, in turn, heard the same question from an official, “Are you a Jew?” After a well-calculated pause, the official, who was female, had said, chuckling, “First you have to convert to Judaism and after that show me tangible evidence.” Obviously she had circumcision in mind and enjoyed her own stimulating joke. She repeated this to all of the men, with minor variations. No doubt this officer was instructed to humiliate these bumpkins, and these amusements were probably cooked up in cooperation with her thoughtful boss. She knew that these modest provincials would not complain to her superiors out of shame.

  When they returned to my place, frustrated, I said, “Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to complete this idea of hers. Just imagine returning to that office after circumcision. Tell her that you did it because Jesus Christ was also circumcised. She might become terribly upset.”

  I explained to the Siberian newcomers that we were being overheard by KGB bugs and asked them to take a stroll along Prospect Mira (Peace Avenue). Before leaving the apartment, Goretoi filed a brief speech to the ceiling. “We are members of the one Church of Jesus Christ,” he explained for the benefit of the KGB. “Wherever we live and worship Him, we are brothers and sisters in Christ.”

  I interpreted to the godless ceiling: “This means that Evangelical Christians submit an application for emigration as one family, all together, in one list.” After that I shook my head. “Often only one member of a Jewish family applies.”

  “We cannot afford this,” said Goretoi. “We are one family.”

  Scattered out across hundreds of towns and villages, they felt more confident together, on one single list. I admired their faith-based courage, borne of many years of despair, but feared that the KGB could easily turn it into a hit list.

  When we got off the elevator, my new acquaintances examined the unreliable cables over this metal box. They had ridden this unpredictable conveyance for the first time in their lives here in Moscow.

  “Next to you I look like a terrible coward,” I said. “I still can’t forgive myself for not mentioning you during my interrogation.”

  “Don’t worry, Arkady Abramovich,” said Goretoi, “our whole church has been praying for you.”

  “Thank you!” I said. “I need it.”

  We walked slowly along the dark deserted street. “Just sending your applications or passing appeals to foreign correspondents isn’t working,” I said, stating the obvious. “We ought to try to bring it directly to the American embassy.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that while still in the camp,” said Goretoi, “since Feodor and Patryshev gave their passports to that Japanese Consul.”

  “It’ll be hard to break in,” I continued grimly.

  “You shouldn’t come with us,” said Goretoi. “If you’re arrested, no one will know about us.”

  “We need foreign reporters,” I said. “They love messy melodrama. Just to get in touch with them may take an indefinite number of days. That’s where Sharansky would be handy with his English. For you to come at a set time to Moscow is always a problem …”

  One of my Siberian guests remarked, “For several years we’ve been beating our heads against this wall.”

  “Will you go?” I asked him. “They can b
ring criminal charges against all of us.”

  “Members of my church are in prison,” he said. “Children in school have been beaten.”

  “They are forcing our kids to write in newspapers that their parents are cruel and stupid fanatics,” the Ukrainian guest said. “It’s a deadlock. We should try to break into the embassy.”

  “At first I’ll approach the officer in the booth,” Goretoi said, summing up. “Try to break through, after we start talking.”

  At night we wrote an appeal to U.S. President Jimmy Carter. I had already accumulated a mountain of facts about the persecution of Evangelical Christians; it rested upon the stories of people living thousands of miles apart, stories of imprisonment, discrimination, and humiliation. Frequently recorded on tape, they were supported by copies and originals of court sentences and orders, decisions of local authorities, receipts of countless fines, and defamatory newspaper articles. It all had to be squeezed into two thirds of a page. My frail Erika typewriter was able to produce only four copies, and I had to type two more. In the morning they were distributed to all participants of the upcoming suicide mission, and a single copy was laid between the pages of a Pushkin volume.

  Before going on reconnaissance, I joked with them: “Christians, practice running fast.”

  While I was waiting for the elevator, Goretoi dashed out of the apartment to the landing. “Already in training?” I asked, chuckling.

  “Arkady Abramovich, yesterday you were strolling in ragged shoes on the wet asphalt. We have to buy you shoes.”

  “Are you kidding me? Don’t you have enough worries with a dozen sick elderly and your own eleven children? No, thank you very much, I cannot accept such a gift.”

  “Arkady Abramovich, be realistic; you won’t be able to get to my church in these crumbling boots.”

  He was right. I sheepishly agreed, and we dropped by a shoe store in my neighborhood. Wearing my new shoes, I went to a grocery store opposite the embassy, looked through its window and then at my watch, as if waiting for a date while trying to understand when and how the policeman changed duties at the gateway. We needed to find out if our plotters could run into the embassy’s yard alongside an entering diplomatic car, and if we were lucky, to identify at least some of the undercover spies who circled the neighborhood for hours, looking like ordinary citizens.

  The next day, I was watching the progress of our assault from that store. As Goretoi approached a policeman in the booth, several men in civilian clothes appeared out of thin air and dragged my friends to an adjacent yard. I jumped out of the store and ran across Bolshoe Sadovoe Koltso (Big Garden Ring), one of the busiest streets of old Moscow. Dodging honking cars, I finally made it to the curb, where a pair of lovers walking leisurely turned into wolves. Shadowing me, they turned quickly into a semi-vacant lot where a bunch of plainclothes and uniformed police were studying my guests’ passports while packing them into a van emblazoned with flowers on its sides. But the most surprising thing was that my cries and demands to release them were simply ignored. Shouting, “I’m a witness!” I tried to get into the van, but two policemen stretched out their hands, and without uttering a word, blocked me from reaching the wagon door. I continued shouting, “They did nothing wrong! They were just looking at the embassy! Citizens have the right to walk here!”

  After the van carried my friends away from this wasteland, I was left behind, along with that couple of spies, now back in love. Still looking reproachfully at me, they walked back out to the street, again holding hands.

  I hurried to a former general, Peter Grigorievich Grigorenko, one of the few remaining free members of the human rights organization, the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group. The old man said, “Arkady, they still have plenty of opportunities to arrest you. Who knows, maybe you now belong to some criminal case they’re cooking.” He could hardly move, and his hands were shaking. Long incarcerations had taken their toll.

  Grigorenko’s wife, Zinaida Mikhailovna and I visited police stations around the American Embassy. The policemen looked at us with suspicion, as we explained that my visiting relatives were arrested for no apparent reason near the embassy. In fact, we just wanted to make sure that this detention wouldn’t go unnoticed.

  It was late evening when veteran refusenik Victor Elistratov spoke with Reuters and BBC reporters from the telephone booth into which we had both squeezed. They asked him if we had the statement we wanted to pass to Americans. I nodded. Passing the information to the correspondents would happen later, in person, and I silently thanked the KGB for giving their plainclothes robots the enigmatic directive to ignore me and not even search me.

  A year later, on June 27, 1978, seven Siberian Pentecostals, from the Vushchenko and Chmykhalov families, broke into the U.S. Embassy and remained there for almost five years until the Soviets allowed them to emigrate.

  A precinct policeman had visited me from time to time, but recently, after our failed attempt to break into the American Embassy, he began coming frequently. He was well past fifty and had the rank of a major. I had never seen an officer with such a high rank at such a low position. On his chest there were two order stripes clearly earned during the war. He was never rude, and knowing that he had nothing to do with my situation, I treated the old soldier with respect. Once he said, “Please come with me to the police station. They want to talk to you.”

  At the station, a man, looking at me askance, warned that if I would not soon find a job, I might get a two-year prison term for leading a parasitic lifestyle. I told him that recently I found an elevator operator job, but the KGB did not allow the manager of the building to hire me.

  “The KGB has nothing to do with this,” he said dryly.

  “Then, please explain to me why this woman was shaking in her shoes when she turned me down the very next day after promising me this sophisticated position.”

  “Sign here,” he said, “that you have received this warning.”

  After that, the policeman asked me twice more to go with him to police station. I refused and said that if those people needed to talk with me, they could send me a summons to come to their office and not to use the police for their own ends. To my surprise, the major did not insist.

  “They are listening to every word we say here,” I warned the man and saw a shadow of sadness in his eyes.

  Onсe, he came smiling. “At the Visa Office they want to talk to you,” he said. “You have to arrive there at ten o’clock in the morning.” I explained that if they were serious about a visa, they would send me a summons.

  One Sunday morning, in the midst of my attempts to find out what happened to the detained Pentecostals, he said, “Today you must go with me. Otherwise, I will have to arrest you.”

  He saw my reluctance and added, “It’s not at the police station. We’re going to a school nearby.”

  As we walked, I asked if he knew anything about Sunday schools. The major shrugged. I asked if he had read Mark Twain.

  “No,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. “Please don’t talk to me.”

  Clearly the soldier had had some troubles because of my stubbornness, and I shut up.

  Like two peas from the same pod, the school was similar to the one I attended, where, at a tender age I had shed a lot of my own and others’ blood when I was called a kike. The major unlocked the door, and we went to the fourth floor. Before locking me in a classroom, he said, “If you need to go to the restroom, knock on the door.”

  “How long will we be here?”

  “I know nothing.”

  Planning a press conference about the disappearance of four Pentecostals, I had been hurrying from one activist to another, and the KGB had probably decided to slow me down. We spent all day there until dark. When he unlocked the classroom, I said, “You were left without lunch and dinner.”

  To my delight, on the bench at my entrance I found, Nikolai Petrovich Goretoi with Olga Matyash from his church, and Vladimir Stepanov from the Far East. All participants of the action
at the embassy gate left the police station only feeling slightly shocked and with a heavy fine for disorderly conduct. After a night in a police bsement, all four were put on trains and sent home. “Maybe,” I said, “the embassy’s Russian personnel informed the KGB that Americans saw the detention, and to escape publicity, you were pardoned.”

  “Maybe,” said Goretoi. “But maybe you made a lot of noise after we were arrested.”

  “The next time,” I said, “they will accuse you of an attempt to disarm the Marines, capture the embassy, and raise the Israeli flag over it.”

  In a couple of days, the deferred earlier trial of Malva Landa was to be held in the Moscow suburb, where she lived before her room caught fire under suspicious circumstances. This time, I had a chance to introduce Goretoi to Andrei Sakharov. The legendary academician intended to come to this macabre KGB revenge trial and told me that afterward he could talk with the Pentecostals. Usually, Sakharov shied away from new acquaintances, especially the people who came from afar; he feared for their safety. He had already been told twice about the disappearances of these courageous souls.

  The Pentecostals and I were moving through a crowd of men in plain clothes and police uniform, vigilantly looking at us, when I saw a familiar face. Yes, it was Alexei, my buddy in ice dancing to whom a few years ago I poured out my anti-Soviet soul. The good man held out his hand for a handshake, but I did not want to jeopardize him and said, “I’m sorry, you mistook me for someone else,” and proceeded to the stairs leading to the second floor.

  “Malva’s my mother,” said Alexei to my back. I turned around, and we shook hands. “I’ve already been fired from the university,” he said.

  “Why?”

  A.D. Sakharov and E.G. Bonner at home with Anatoly Sharansky (left). Moscow, no later than March 14, 1977. The very next day Sharansky was arrested, accused of being a CIA spy. Photographer unknown. (Sakharov Archive)