The gates of November (33 page)

The following morning she went with her brother to see Sakharov and informed him of what had happened. Sakharov’s mother-in-law, Ruth, Elena Bonner’s mother, was there. She said she knew about the prison that was the size of a railroad station; she and others had been there before. Sakharov said he had no doubt Volodya would be put on trial. Masha asked, “What should I do?” Sakharov said, with infinite gentleness, “You must be strong.”

Some days later, Ida Nudel was arrested in Trubnaya Square during a demonstration, and on June 21 was sentenced to four years of exile. On the very day of her trial Volodya was tried for malicious hooliganism in a different court. Walking along a corridor to the courtroom, he saw with surprise, through the windows, a crowd assembled outside. A huge crowd. Solidarity with him and Masha after their balcony demonstration.

He had been assigned an attorney, a man named Popov, who was a member of the Communist Party and seemed to be an honest person. At the start of the trial Volodya took the floor and said that he was grateful to attorney Popov, who had helped him prepare for the trial; then, addressing the judge, he asked permission to defend himself, in accordance with such and such paragraphs of the Judicial Code of Procedure. The judge granted his request.

The courtroom held about forty seats for the public, all of which had been taken early by KGB men in civilian clothes. There was a table for the prosecuting attorney and one for the defense, a large table for the judge, a small one for the secretary. Two guards stood near the defendant; a third guard, at the entrance door. Not one of Volodya’s friends or family was permitted inside; they were told the courtroom was full.

Masha was not at the trial but in a hospital, undergoing treatment for a stomach ulcer.

Volodya, defending himself, argued that freedom of speech was guaranteed by the Soviet constitution. He talked about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the inviolability of the home.

The trial lasted one day. Found guilty of malicious hooliganism, he was sentenced to five years in exile.

Masha learned of the sentence as she lay in the hospital, listening to a small radio given her by a friend. She closed her eyes, feigning sleep, her temples throbbing and the words “five years” echoing inside her head. Through her terror and grief she wondered where Volodya would be sent and what would now happen to her. They were technically still divorced, and the authorities might not let her accompany him as his wife. But they might let her go as his companion, and perhaps if she, too, were sentenced to exile, they might send her to his place of exile. But that was so naive. The court never fulfilled the defendant’s request for a place of exile.

Strange, how the patients in the room kept staring at her.

A young night nurse who was Jewish later whispered to Masha that everyone in the hospital had been told to keep an eye on her because she was an enemy of the people.

A man in a white coat, a doctor, a smirk on his face, suddenly bent over her. He said Volodya had received five years in exile.

The next morning she was told they were planning to do a serious invasive test on her, and she ate breakfast, making the test impossible. The head doctor summoned her and said brusquely that they intended to do all the necessary tests and she should make no further attempt to obstruct their efforts.

In the evening Masha’s brother, Zalya, and Sanya’s girlfriend, Alyona, came to visit. She asked them to bring her clothes the next day. Alyona arrived early, left the clothes in the room, and walked out. Masha donned them and started from the hospital. The woman in the next bed hurried out of the room toward the nurses’ station. Alyona and Zalya stood waiting for Masha outside the hospital building. They made it through the front gate and took a taxi to the apartment.

Masha spent the following days going from one government office to another, trying to find out where Volodya was being exiled, without success.

She went to see him in Butyrskaya Prison. Huge stone walls covered with moss. An enclosed courtyard. Bushes, the lawn recently mown, no flowers. A sad medieval castle look. She carried a parcel containing a plastic coffee mug, butter, a loaf of white bread, sausage, cheese, cookies, cigarettes, onions, garlic cloves, tea, a few apples; a sports suit, cotton socks, a sweater, handkerchiefs, a pair of heavy shoes. The mug, the tea—removed by the guards with no explanation. The shoes and sweater—out. It’s summer now, not time yet for winter clothes. Not before October.

She was given permission to speak with Volodya. They sat in a room with a glass partition between them and communicated through phones, a guard nearby. Volodya wore a blue jacket and looked pale, exhausted, his beard long, his hair graying. She said, “You need a haircut.” He said, “No, it’s all right; this way it’s warmer.” They talked about the appeals court, her coming trial, her intention, if she was sentenced to exile, to request that she be sent to wherever Volodya was going. They spoke about Leonid. The minutes flew by. The guard shouted, “The meeting is over!” Volodya stood, waved his hand, smiled, and walked out of the room.

The court of appeals upheld Volodya’s sentence. Masha went to visit him again in Butyrskaya Prison and was told he had been sent the day before to the transit prison near the railroad tracks. He had begun his journey into exile.

For her trial in the last week of July, Masha wore a skirt and blouse and brought along a backpack containing a toothbrush, a bar of soap, a change of clothes, a coffee mug, some cheese. Friends helped her put together a statement to the judge in which she said that she knew the decision of the court had been predetermined and she would not participate in the hearing. She waived the right to be represented by a court lawyer. The small courtroom was crowded with strangers. The charges against Masha were read aloud. Malicious hooliganism. Masha asked for permission to read her statement and then came forward and placed the statement on the dais before the judge. In response to a question by the judge, Masha responded that she refused to participate in this court hearing. The judge told her to be seated. The prosecuting attorney, a blond-haired woman, gave Masha an odd look. To every question put to Masha by the judge, she gave the same response: “I refuse to participate in this court hearing.” There were murmurs of annoyance from the audience in the court: “Who does she think she is?” “What way is that to show respect for a judge?” The people in the audience were militiamen dressed in civilian clothes; to Masha’s eyes, thugs cut from the same mold. She noticed a familiar face, the woman from the apartment above the Slepaks who had poured boiling water on Volodya’s head, who later testified that the demonstration had indeed blocked traffic on Gorky Street. The judge asked Masha if she agreed with that testimony. Masha said, “I refuse to participate in this court hearing.” The hearing went on for more than an hour. To the judge’srequest that she make a statement, Masha responded by rising and saying, “I refuse to participate in this court hearing and waive the right to a final statement.”

The court was then recessed for a half hour. When it resumed, the prosecuting attorney addressed the judge. Reading from a sheet of paper, she stated that all in the courtroom could clearly observe that Citizen Slepak had fully understood and denounced her act of hooliganism, and now, considering her wholehearted plea of guilt and her repentance for what she had done, it would be possible to sentence Citizen Slepak to three years in a labor camp—here a pause before continuing—and to place her on probation. The prosecuting attorney then sat down. Clearly, she had read a speech written for her before the trial by someone who had not anticipated Masha’s silence.

The judge read the sentence: three years in a labor camp, with probation. The sentence could be appealed within seven days. The trial was over. Masha and her friends were overjoyed at the outcome.

Volodya and Masha believe that her sentence was suspended because of her poor health and also because there was nothing to be gained from imprisoning her; the Kremlin authorities had isolated Volodya and knew that Masha would want to follow him into exile.

Now Masha lived in the apartment with Olga, Leonid’s girlfriend. The police sergeant and his wife had left two years before the balcony demonstration. In their room now were a middle-aged woman who was a postal clerk and her teenage son; they had been given a telephone of their own and warned not to let the Slepaks use it or it would be disconnected.

Masha’s family was shattered. Leonid in hiding to avoid prison for refusing to be conscripted, moving from apartment to apartment in Moscow or journeying by train—not plane; you had to give your name and show your internal passport when you traveled by plane—to friends he could trust in Leningrad and Vilna and Armenia. Sanya in Israel and traveling often to Europe and England and the United States under the sponsorship of the Israeli Foreign Office and Jewish organizations, to meetings and conferences, where he spoke to small groups of influential people and large crowds, pleading his parents’ cause, raising funds. And Volodya traveling by railroad with other prisoners under tight guard to his place of exile. None of the officials with whom Masha met could tell her his final destination.

At the end of August, Solomon Slepak, who had spent the summer in a small country house outside Moscow with his second wife, returned home. Astonishingly, he knew nothing of what had transpired with Volodya and Masha and was informed by his nephew Anatoly of Volodya’s arrest and sentence. He suffered a heart attack.

Solomon’s Russian wife later told Masha and Leonid that the old man spent the last days of his long life seated on the sofa with his hat on his head, swaying slowly back and forth and mumbling words in a language she could not understand. Masha thought the old man might have been praying in Hebrew.

Solomon Slepak was eighty-six years old when he died on September 2, 1978. Two days later he was buried in a Moscow cemetery reserved for party members only two ranks below those interred in the Kremlin wall. Volodya doesn’t know and can’t even conjecture who might have authorized his father’s burial in that cemetery. Present at the funeral were relatives, a few friends, and a representative of the local Communist Party committee. The representative delivered a brief speech. KGB agents hovered in the background. The coffin was nailed shut.

After being petitioned by Masha some days before, a high official of the Interior Ministry, acting in compliance with Soviet law, had approved her request that Volodya be allowed to attend his father’s funeral, on condition that while in Moscow he not visit with refuseniks or speak to correspondents or meet any foreigners.

Four days after arriving in his village of exile, Volodya received a telephone call from Masha: His father was dead. She added that she had obtained permission for Volodya to return to Moscow for the funeral. Volodya, shaken and profoundly sad, told himself: What a tragedy. He never understood me, and I’m not sure I ever understood him. His communism turned everything upside down. But he was my father. At the regional office of the militia, Volodya procured the necessary papers and returned by bus and plane to Moscow. He arrived in time for the funeral.

His father’s Russian wife, mortified and outraged by Masha’s arrest and by Volodya’s arrest and exile, would have nothing to do with them. She regarded herself as a patriotic Soviet woman and refused to let Volodya have his father’s personal papers. Years later, after her death, Volodya tried to obtain the papers through the children from her first marriage. But they had thrown everything away. Volodya was left with nothing of his father’s library, nothing of the Old Bolshevik’s letters, manuscripts, notebooks, the intimate record of his lifetime of work for the party.

Masha had requested and was granted leave to accompany Volodya into exile.

On September 8 they set out on a 5,000-mile journey to a village in Siberia that lay about 150 miles south of the city of Chita and some 200 miles from the region of China where Solomon Slepak, sixty years before, had fought as commander of a Bolshevik partisan division during the Civil War.

The Amulet

B
efore his trial Volodya was kept in Butyrskaya Prison for four weeks. Once a week, a shower and change of underwear. Mornings each prisoner received six hundred grams of black bread and two cubes of sugar. Hot food three times a day.

After his trial and the rejection of his appeal, he was transferred to Krasnopresnenskaya Prison. The routine strip search. Guards poked through his bag of personal belongings and then put him into a cell with about thirty others. It was a transit prison; men constantly came and went. He spent four days there and was sent to another cell, strip-searched again, his bag turned inside out. The cell was called, in prison idiom, the accumulator.

One evening he was taken with others to a police van. Guards with machine guns loaded them inside. There was room in the back for at most twenty people standing solidly jammed together, but more than twenty-five needed transport. The surplus prisoners were stacked like sacks on the heads of those standing.

The van brought them to a railroad depot outside Moscow. A concrete platform, a web of tracks, sheds, empty railroad cars. Lights on tall poles illumined the tracks.

A second van pulled up, and out of it jumped guards with muzzled German shepherd dogs. The prisoners were herded onto the platform and ordered to squat with their hands clasped behind them. Each prisoner’s small bag of personal belongings lay on the ground by his right foot. A guard pointed to a railroad car and announced that when he gave the signal, the prisoners were to run to the car and stop there. He said, “If while you are running, you take a single step to the left or to the right, it will be considered an escape attempt, and you will be shot.” The muzzles were removed from the dogs.

Guards with a leash in the left hand, a weapon in the right; guards in front and on the sides; a guard in the rear with a long rubber truncheon for prisoners moving too slowly. Dogs and guards at their heels, the prisoners dashed across the ties and tracks and pebbled ground and came to a halt near the car, where they squatted and were counted and made to answer to their names and state the article of the penal code under which they had been sentenced. Then, again, they were strip-searched. And sent to their compartments.