Dancing on Thin Ice

by Arkady Polishchuk

  Once I waited for him and his son among the trees and flowers of the hillside far above the summer residence of the Habsburg emperors. Nothing could bother me on that bench. I was deeply immersed in my struggle with an English textbook for German speakers when I felt someone’s delicate attempts to pull my pants down. I looked in the direction of this surprise attack and saw the unexpected: a powerful brown-grayish goose kept pulling at my pants. Soon, disillusioned but waddling with dignity, he went back to his partner who was quietly observing the scene. Never before had I seen Canadian geese. When they disappeared, I made sure that three-hundred-pound wild boars were not creeping up on me. Irmi Bloch—now returned from Moscow—had already shown me such a fanged family contemplating an assault on Vienna in the wooded hills of her neighborhood.

  I placed my textbook on the bench and violently shook my head as I heard a crackling and a boy’s voice, “Bang—bang—bang! Boom—boom!” On the path appeared a child shooting at the squirrels, the birds, and at me. The massive toy pistol looked like the real thing.

  “Where did you buy it?” I asked his father. “There are no toy weapons in stores here. I haven’t seen children with such toys in Vienna. After their recent history, they have demilitarized their society.”

  “You just don’t know where to look for the good stuff,” Boris said.

  An hour later we began our descent toward the Baroque beauty of the Imperial palace. When we reached the crowds of tourists, many were looking at the weapon in Michael’s hand. The boy started shooting at people: “Bang—bang! Boom—boom—boom!” They began yelling at us. Only then did Boris demand, “Stop aiming at people!”

  After a fierce struggle he snatched the pistol out of the boy’s hands and put it in a plastic bag with Mozart’s image.

  SOON AFTER my arrival in Austria, I applied to immigrate to America, though I was in no hurry. Irmi arranged my meeting with Cardinal Franz Koenig and organized my first press conference. Thanks to her, Amnesty International groups in Vienna, Salzburg, and Graz began writing letters demanding the release of Christian prisoners. I had already received invitations from Swedish and Norwegian Christian and human rights organizations and had an Austrian travel passport.

  Finally the day came when I could visit the American Consul. In the reception room sat one Muscovite, who instructed me in what to say about my communist past.

  “It’s as easy as pissing on two fingers,” he said, “All former communists pass easily. Just tell them that you were forced to join the Party.”

  He spent some five minutes in the consul’s office and, joyous, came out of it, “I’m flying to my relatives in New York.”

  I liked the consul. He was honest and concerned about my fate. When I said that since childhood I had dreamed of joining the Party and nobody forced me to do this, I drove him into a corner. He apologized and said that he had to reject my request to emigrate to the United States. After the interpreter read the 1952 law on Suppression of Communism, I tried to explain that to leave the Party on your own was impossible and dangerous, though I had tried to do just that. The consul did not understand this nonsense. After I said that I was arrested several times, he expressed his sympathy to me, but had to stick to the law of the country. When I began suspecting that he was unaware of the very existence of the Soviet Union, the consul said that he only recently arrived from Frankfurt and had never had anything to do with communist countries. I mentioned Sakharov and said that he was one of those who set up the Soviet atomic bomb. The consul looked at me in horror—he had never heard this name. It was pointless to tell him how difficult it was for Sakharov to find me in Vienna, and how he reached me by chance on the overcautious Yuri Mnukh’s phone and asked me urgently to go to Rome to participate in the International Sakharov Hearings (which I did, with a train ticket bought by the IRC). We were living on different planets, this consul and I, but we both understood that even among aliens there were some good beings. I went to Doctor Faust with apologies; he would have to spend some more money to support me in Vienna until, with the help of Irmi’s diplomatic contacts, my documents arrived. To my surprise, he rubbed his hands gleefully, “Now we have an amazing story for the New York Times. Three other countries are ready to take you. I have to call my friend immediately. You’ll be a celebrity.”

  Participants of the International Sakharov Hearings, November 15–28, 1977, held in Rome. From left to right: Arkady Polishchuk; Tatyana Turchina; outstanding Russian poet and prose writer Naum Korzhavin (first arrested in 1947 in the midst of the campaign against Zionism); Valentin Turchin, Tatyana’s husband and a well-known physicist. Photographer unknown. (Sakharov Archive)

  I pleaded, “Please don’t call. Sooner or later, they’ll let me in just like everybody else.”

  When Newsweek correspondent Alfred Friendly Jr. invited me to a bar, I wasn’t aware that he had even left Russia. Preparations for the trial of Sharansky were still dragging on. The KGB had not yet dug up any fascinating spy stories to support its case against him and meanwhile had “exposed” three American correspondents in Moscow as CIA agents. Friendly was one of them. We chatted a lot, and I mentioned that America prevented another former communist from landing on its sacred ground. He asked me not to worry.

  A couple of months later, in the middle of September 1978, I received a copy of a letter to the American ambassador in Austria. It was signed by U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and the chair of the American Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Dante Fascell. Both gentlemen were perhaps unaware of my very existence until recently, but they certainly had developed a high opinion of me. Most probably Alfred Friendly Jr. was the one who influenced their opinion.

  But worldly glory is transient, and only one person—my dear Irmi Bloch—accompanied me to the airport bus. Of course, to demonstrate a more dramatic and glorious farewell, I could say that all who accompanied me to the plane to New York cried.

  NINETEEN

  Russian Jews, a Russian Tiger, and Some Other Russians

  I SERIOUSLY NEEDED to work on my English. I sounded like an insecure child unsure of his path on the bumpy road to adolescence while in fact, upon my arrival to New York, I was a man of forty-eight. The KGB had given me this chance to relive my life, to fall into childhood again on this unfamiliar planet called America.

  As a newcomer in New York in the hot sticky fall of 1978, I quickly learned that even the skills passed from generation to generation differed in America from those in Europe. They were even farther from the muddled rules of Russia, which are sometimes more or less European, or at other times, more or less Asian and can be confusing for the psyche of the country. It can be blamed partially for Russia’s split personality—the entire nation wandering in the wilderness of history’s crossroads.

  Alas, I was not a very good alien and still occasionally offended some social, cultural, religious, sexual, political, ethnic, moral, medical, gender, and other sensibilities; for example, I still cannot stop myself from offending some women by holding a door for them while saying the politically incorrect “ladies first.”

  Nonetheless, extraterrestrials are capable of learning a lot. Now l can eat without a knife and know how to make a sandwich out of anything by putting everything on top of everything, and to not drop a crumb from my edible skyscraper of American ingenuity. I forced myself not to cover my mouth with my hand while yawning; such covering might mean that you did not have good American teeth. If somebody tells me “Let’s meet for a lunch or coffee,” I do not ask anymore where and when—it would be boorish, they do not mean it, it is just a term of politeness, similar to “good bye.” I even tried to walk and to talk while keeping my hands in my pockets; later I understood that the trick was invented by people in three-piece suits to avoid rude finger-pointing.

  My mind still remained on another planet when Lyudmila Thorne from the Freedom House befriended me. Her Baptist parents escaped from Russia in the early 1920s, soon after the Bolsheviks seized power, and so Lyusia ha
d a soft spot for me. “Improve your English, and you’ll be a member of our Lecture Bureau,” she said and suggested a language school in Manhattan.

  At that school, as the only male in the class, I found myself back in an exotic part of Russia. The rest of the students were young women, most of them from the Black Sea city of Odessa. They called their Brooklyn neighborhood Little Odessa. Every Russian knows Odessa Jewish jokes; many Russians know that the city has given the country a disproportionate number of writers, poets and musicians, a good number of crooks and bandits, and many other colorful characters. One hundred years ago, it was the most Jewish town in Europe. In the Soviet years Jews were heavily represented in the intellectual and criminal categories of local citizenry. They also ran a lot of underground enterprises, which in America would have been mostly lawful and not the subjects of criminal inquiry, imprisonment, or extortion by officials. Nowadays, the rich flavor of the good old Odessa has somewhat faded. While extortion, bribes, the black market, and the Black Sea are still there, the majority of Jews moved from its shores to Brighton Beach and relocated Odessa to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

  The ladies at the school were puzzled by the very fact that I had been studying English instead of making a decent living like a true mensch, like their mature and responsible husbands, boyfriends, and brothers. They certainly followed the old Odessa Yiddish saying: “If you have money, you are wise and good-looking and can sing well, too.” Per contra, the women liked this somewhat strange man, a journalist who no doubt had connections in high places but instead of using them wisely, was learning a new language.

  I had no intention of telling them that every month I was receiving a fortune—five hundred dollars from a Californian mission “Evangelism to Communist Lands.” The mission, soon renamed “Door of Hope International,” needed me; I needed their devotion, support, and network. Soon they arranged some of my speaking engagements in Evangelical churches on the East Coast.

  From time to time I would disappear from the classes, and that furnished a wide variety of assumptions from the women. A couple of times I overheard wild whispering about my public, and, of course, intimate life. One of them saw in Life magazine a picture of me sitting at the table with the wife of famous exiled writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn at the International Andrei Sakharov Human Rights Hearings in Washington DC. I became an instant celebrity.

  The women wanted to do something good for their dissident. They wanted to take care of this lonely man who, poor soul, did not even have a girlfriend; at least, that is what he, under serious scrutiny, kept telling them. At one point one of the ladies in flashy dresses chimed in, “Look at our expensive dresses. All of them are stolen.”

  “Interesting,” I said politely.

  “Wouldn’t you like to have good clothes for little money?” asked my well-wisher, while a couple of others were nodding and smiling affably. “Just give me all your sizes, from shoes to hat, from shirts to suits, and the boys will deliver.”

  Another relatively young lady inserted, chuckling, “If you don’t know your size, we can take all the measurements ourselves.”

  They were having fun and were ready to measure all parts of my body without delay. Then they explained: the “boys” go to the best department stores in town and take out whatever they like, not just clothing, but also TV sets, bikes (“you need a bike!”), jewelry, china sets, watches. I gracefully declined.

  This was that blessed carefree time when unsuspecting Americans did not yet have magnetic security tags in stores.

  This Russian tolerance toward theft multiplied during the years of Communist rule. Many times I had heard the expression, “The state robs us, we rob the state,” or, “The only ones who don’t steal are those who have nothing to steal,” or, a much older Russian saying, “You’re not a thief if you’re not caught with the loot.”

  In the meantime my cohorts began asking my opinion and advice about all earthly and heavenly matters. One morning, the defiantly blond and good-mannered Nina asked my opinion about whether it was OK for her to have a lover. She had been married for several years and loved her husband. I said that the affair could undermine her love and pointedly stressed that she already was unfaithful to her husband.

  “Why?” she asked fearfully.

  “Because it already happened in your mind and heart.”

  Nina took this “it” very seriously, and I felt how cruel I was being, playing a hard-nosed moralist. I liked her; she seemed to be a good and unspoiled person.

  Once Nina invited me to live in her house. My eyebrows shot upwards.

  “My husband and I want you to get acquainted,” she continued, “with my sister-in-law. She’s a programmer, good-looking, and intelligent.” Probably, my eyebrows continued moving up and she added, “We just want you to have good meals, relax, and enjoy your life in good company.”

  “Does she live with you?” I said, somewhat lost.

  “Yes, we rent a house near the ocean, at Brighton Beach, near the famous boardwalk. Alice saw you once.”

  “Where?”

  “Here.”

  “Why did she come here?”

  “To take a look at you.”

  “Come on! You’re all crazy!”

  “You could become her boyfriend.”

  I tried to escape this minefield. “What if I’m a sadistic and lazy bum? Is she desperate?”

  “Oh! No—no. Alice just doesn’t want to live, as she’s saying, in a ghetto.”

  “I really appreciate the invitation, it sounds lovely,” I said and explained that soon I would move to California, to work for a Christian mission on behalf of some Christians back in Russia. It might take years and wouldn’t make me rich. “Who knows what’s ahead... The best thing for Alice is to move from Brighton Beach to America.”

  “Are you a Christian?” she asked.

  “No. I’m a Jew, and most of my relatives were killed during the war. In Ukraine.”

  “She said that you look like a prince.”

  “Oh yeah, like a prince of Egypt,” I said with a nervous laugh, “just taken from a sarcophagus.”

  The invitation was never renewed.

  IRA FYBISH WAS the first true New Yorker I met. At the Jewish Center in Queens, he volunteered as an English tutor to recently arrived Russian Jews. He knew more Russian words than many of his students, but the only problem with this two-legged talkative bookcase was that he was unable to put three Russian words together. Ira had lived in Greenwich Village all his life; this in itself, for many, would have been a clear sign of refinement and sophistication. The floor of his smallish apartment, his bed, bathroom, and stove were all covered with books, often with titles I was unable to understand. Ira knew everything about everything, and for years, while teaching children with mental problems, he had been working toward a sociology PhD. We needed each other. It was a kind of symbiotic friendship. He was the only American capable of talking with this mute, deaf, and mulish Russian for hours, day after day, with no signs of exhaustion.

  At that Center, Ira befriended a pretty lady named Natalie who had been teaching English for several years in one of the rare Moscow schools where children studied English intensively from the first grade. During my second visit she secretively showed me the Old Testament and whispered, “This is the Christian Bible.” Mimicking her, I whispered back, “This is also the Jewish Bible; only Jews call it Torah. You don’t need to hide it; this is basically the same text. The difference is mainly in conclusions made by different humans.”

  She looked at me with disbelief and quickly put the dangerous book back in the drawer.

  “Did you read it?” I asked.

  “No. But I flipped through it—pretty boring stuff. The Torah must be more interesting.” She obviously couldn’t trust my information. “You know,” stressed Natalie confidently, “they don’t have bibles in the Soviet Union.”

  She apparently made this major discovery only in Queens.

  Ira was looking for a nice Jewi
sh wife of Russian origin, and Natalie became candidate numero uno. He could not know that such immigrants did not even understand what country they left behind and even less about what planet they landed. Thanks to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, he was searching for a mysterious Russian soul residing in an attractive body. His logic was faultless: the less attractive the body, the less mysterious is the soul. I recommended that he read some other Russian writers of the nineteenth century and even quoted Saltykov-Shchedrin’s “If I fall asleep and wake up in one hundred years and am asked what is happening now in Russia, I’d say: drinking and stealing.”

  Less than a year later, in 1979, Ira Fybish married a good-looking Polish Jew. It was she who stood with us at the New York Zoo, in front of an open-air cage with a huge Siberian tiger. My friend was not interested in the magnificent cat at all. He was busy trying to help me to survive in America. My article on the plight of persecuted Russian Evangelicals had just been published in the terribly reactionary American monthly National Review. “You might be forgiven for the article,” Ira worried, “but only because you’re an alien and people can suppose you didn’t know how staunchly conservative this publication is. However, if you do it again, no one will publish you anymore. All doors will be closed.”

  “What you’re saying reminds me of Soviet intolerance,” I was trying my best to copy his scholarly manner of speaking. “The only difference is that your unwillingness to grant equality to the diversity of opinions comes in a more democratic way, not from the government itself but from a certain opinionated stratum of society.”

  At exactly this point, we were rudely interrupted by the tiger. When we first came to the cage, he had been pacing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, his heavy tail jerking. But after a while, the animal began reacting to the shrill voice of my friend. As he was changing direction, the pupils of his yellow eyes would, for a split second, fixate at my loud critic with long hairy arms endlessly dancing in the air. Soon the tiger stopped, lowered his heavy head, quickly lifted it and studied Ira at point blank range; the beast turned into a striped statue with watching, unblinking eyes. And then he found the way to put the end to our spirited discussion. The beast abruptly turned around, as if he’d grown tired of us and decided to forsake our company, but before leaving the mise-en-scene, he lifted his hind leg, aimed a hefty paw at the hazy sky, and sent a powerful yellow jet right into Ira’s face. Ira gasped, his glasses softly dropped in the grass as he spit out the bitter yellow droplets. I almost collapsed from laughter. My friend became very angry with both of his opponents. His wife and I took him to a nearby fountain to wash his face and his shirt, no longer very white. He emanated stink and kept cursing the innocent brute.