The gates of November (34 page)

Volodya found himself in a car with a long corridor where armed guards walked up and down. The corridor windows were painted white on the outside. Windowless compartments walled by thick chicken-wire grillwork lined the side of the corridor across from the translucent windows. The guards—Central Asians: Uzbeks, Yakuts, Buryats—knew hardly any Russian and were unable to communicate with the prisoners beyond the barking of basic commands. Each compartment, built to accommodate four passengers, contained at least ten prisoners, and on one of the many trains Volodya took on that long journey, one compartment held thirty, packed into the seats, the luggage bins, and standing. None of the men knew in which direction they were being ferried or what sort of fire or ice awaited them at their final destination.

Each prisoner received food to last until the end of the first leg of the journey: black bread, salted herring, and six lumps of sugar. Because they were normally given two lumps of sugar daily, they now knew they would be traveling in that car for three days. They felt the bump as the car was attached to a freight or passenger train. Soon the train started up. They rolled, creaking and clanking, away from Moscow.

Volodya was then fifty-one years old.

Siberia is a land so vast—about three million square miles—that its boundaries are often given as imprecise, roughly extending eastward from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific region until recently known as the Soviet Far East, and southward from the tundra world along the rim of the Arctic Ocean through a zone of vast forests to the near-lunar landscape of the nontillable, semidesert steppes of Central Asia and Mongolia.

Its use as a site for penal colonies and political exile began in the seventeenth century. The arduous journey, which originally took months, was made easier when the Trans-Siberian Railroad was completed in 1905. That was the railroad the young Bolshevik, Solomon Slepak, once took with his wife and daughter and infant son, Volodya, to a new life in China as a journalist and Comintern agent representing the then-nascent Soviet government. Now his son was riding it into exile as a prisoner of that government.

Always that journey—
etap,
the Russians called it, the transport under guard—from the initial transit prison to the final destination was the very worst of times for a prisoner. On the train you were allowed out of your cell twice a day to go to the toilet. And you had no idea where the train was heading unless it stopped in local towns and villages to pick up “transits,” prisoners who were being brought to various district centers for trial. From those “transits” you would learn the direction the train was traveling.

During the first day of travel, the train Volodya was riding stopped briefly to pick up two lads. He watched as they were brought into the adjacent compartment. When the train was moving again, he called through the wall, “Boys, where are we traveling through?” and one of them answered, “Through the land of evergreen tomatoes,” and the men in both compartments roared with laughter. Soon they were in a world of tall and broken hills, the train navigating their curving shoulders among dense forests. The Ural Mountains. Their first stop would be the city of Sverdlovsk,

At the end of each stage of the
etap,
the prisoners were directed off the train and made to squat and wait with their hands behind them, armed guards and killer dogs all around, until they were taken by van to a prison. There they stayed until the authorities organized the next leg of the journey, when they again received their food rations and went off on another train.

Beyond the Ural Mountains, the stops along the journey—Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk—were cities with prisons. They arrived in Sverdlovsk late at night, were counted, taken by van to a prison, strip-searched, and after showering put in a cell. The city served as a hub, as the gateway to the Gulag, the vast system of forced-labor prisons in the USSR. From Sverdlovsk the prisoners went off in different directions: to labor camps, to places of exile.

In Volodya’s cell there were about one hundred beds and 150 prisoners: thieves, criminals, murderers, some making the journey a second or third time.

A “striper,” a man whose striped prison garb indicated he was being sent to a maximum-security camp, seemed to be the acknowledged leader of the cell. He asked Volodya what crime he was being sent away for. Volodya told him about the demonstration. The man said, “Aha, a good kike!”

The prisoners’ class system divided the world into good kikes and bad kikes. The bad kikes were Brezhnev, bureaucrats, members of the Communist Party; the good kikes, Sakharov, all other dissidents, and now Volodya.

Being a good kike earned Volodya respect and a bed for night sleeping; the shortage of beds necessitated their use during the day as well. When Volodya won second place in a chess contest organized among the prisoners, his standing in the eyes of the others rose considerably. A dissident, a political prisoner, a nice fellow, and also a splendid chess player. A good kike indeed!

He was in that cell fourteen days. Each morning they received their daily ration of bread and sugar; three times a day, hot food. There were two sinks and two lavatory pans in the cell. By the second week three-quarters of the prisoners had dysentery. Some lay about like dying men. They lit strips of blankets and burned pieces of bread and ate the charcoal to stop the diarrhea. No one said anything to the authorities. Telling the guards or doctors about the illness might have resulted in a two-week quarantine of the cell, possibly of the entire prison, an embarrassment to the officials administering the trains and prisons—they would have to answer to those above them for the unsanitary conditions of the cells—and brutal vengeance wreaked by prisoners and authorities upon the one who had dared say aloud what all knew but wanted kept silent. Volodya, too, fell ill.

One day a desperately ill Armenian asked the guards for a doctor. The striper had four prisoners beat him mercilessly; in prison language, they “unbuttoned his kidneys.” When the doctor finally arrived, the Armenian said he needed something for a headache.

On the police van to the train that was to take him out of Sverdlovsk, Volodya discovered that the contents of his bag had been stolen and a large rag left inside it to simulate his possessions. The thief was no doubt one of the guards who had searched the bag; no one in the cell would have dared steal from another prisoner. Volodya was left with only the leather sandals and cotton jogging suit he was wearing. A disastrous turn. One of the men in the crowded van removed his jacket and gave it to Volodya. “You’re going to freedom,” he said. An exile was considered a free man by those who were headed to the labor camps. “It’s cold there; take it.”

On the train to Novosibirsk, Volodya was in constant pain from the dysentery and cold in his sandals and jogging outfit and one jacket. Next to him a sick old man who could not control his bladder used one of his own high boots as a latrine bucket, which he emptied during his evening trips to the toilet.

The train halted briefly at one point, and two young women prisoners were brought on board and placed alone in a separate compartment. They were on their way to a labor camp. From their compartment came the sweet sounds of their voices as they sang duets. Russian folk songs. There were eight guards in the car, all Asians. From time to time the singing would stop as guards entered the compartment and raped the women. A normal activity in Gulag life; no woman would think of resisting or complaining.

Normal, too, was the way the prisoners were given water on the train. Twice a day a tank was attached to the outside of the chicken-wire wall of each compartment, and a tap pushed through to the inside. One cup for all in the compartment; it went from mouth to mouth. Near Irkutsk there was a camp for prisoners with tuberculosis. On board the train were many who carried that disease.

It was near the end of August. In Irkutsk, Volodya saw light frost in the early mornings and thin ice on puddles.

One month and two days after he left Moscow, Volodya arrived in the Siberian city of Chita. His father had once had a girlfriend there, during his years as a Bolshevik commander. Volodya spent four days in the prison in Chita. A police van brought him to Aginskoye; he remembers a punishing ride of more than seven hours along a narrow road that wound through mountains and valleys and steppes. In the van were Russians, one very sad-looking man who had killed someone in a labor camp and was returning from his court hearing, and Buryats, who shared their goat cheese and cured lard with Volodya. It turned out that the man had good reason to be sad: This was the second time he had committed murder, and he was sure he would now receive the death penalty.

After a weekend stay in the prison in Aginskoye, Volodya was taken by the deputy chief of police in a jeep the twenty miles to the village of Tsokto-Khangil. It was August 28, 1978.

Volodya thought that he had been assigned originally to Tsokto-Khangil, but months later he discovered that by law, he could have chosen to stay in Aginskoye, a fairly large town with a sizable Russian population. He had not been informed that exile meant only that he could not vote or leave the district and had to appear once a week to register in the local militia station. Probably the KGB had told the militia of Aginskoye that they didn’t want him living among so many Russians and to send him to the village.

It was early afternoon and turning cool when they arrived in Tsokto-Khangil. The entire village was actually a kolkhoz, a collective farm. The deputy chief of police brought Volodya to the one cafeteria in the village and treated him to a full meal. Then he took him to the office of the head bookkeeper of the kolkhoz, who was expecting him.

Volodya had no clothes, no money. The bookkeeper led him to the only hotel in the village; the dirt road that ran parallel to the village went on to Mongolia, and truckers used the cafeteria and the hotel for food and rest stops. The one-story hotel had four rooms. Slanting floors. A sink in the corridor. The water closet, with no running water, outdoors. He was given a small room with a bed. The bookkeeper advanced him one ruble against his future earnings and told him to report the following morning to the kolkhoz office.

The chronicles record Volodya’s initial response to his village of exile, to its dirt roads, enormous sky, the rush and hiss of wind across the endless steppes. He felt, in his words, “bewitched by the purity of the air and the songs of the birds.” The sensation did not last long.

He had traveled about five thousand miles, during which he had been entirely cut off from the world beyond
etap.
He asked if he could send a cable to his wife from the post office. He had no money for the cable and borrowed ten rubles against his future earnings. In Moscow neither the Interior Ministry nor the KGB had informed Masha of Volodya’s final destination. Hearing nothing from him for so many weeks, she had begun to fear he might be dead. He cabled that he was in the village of Tsokto-Khangil, Aginskoye District, Chitinskaya Province, and asked that she send him some money. Shortly afterward she called and told him about her trial and sentence.

Later that day, with the money he had borrowed, he bought a pair of heavy work boots, strips of white cotton cloth to use as socks, two sets of underwear, a flannel shirt, cotton pants, and a cotton-padded jacket. He was now dressed warmly enough to withstand moderately cold weather.

He reported to the kolkhoz chairman, a Mongolian who happened also to be a deputy to the Supreme Soviet. He was not pleased to have an enemy of the people on his kolkhoz and lectured Volodya sternly about his behavior as an exile: He expected him to work hard and not cause trouble. He assigned Volodya to a job in the granary. Months later Volodya discovered that according to law, he could have chosen his job and changed it at will. But no one had informed him of his rights as an exile, and there were no lawbooks available in prison.

The next day two hundred rubles arrived from Masha. Two days later she phoned again to tell him that his father had died.

All her life, as far back as she could remember, Masha had a sense of herself as an amulet; others used her for their own good luck. Often her mother had called Masha “my amulet,” “my good-luck charm,” and in 1976 Bertha purchased a red, blue, and yellow enamel amulet in a shop in Jerusalem, had the back of its metal case engraved with the Hebrew words
le-masha me-ima
(“To Masha from Mother”), and asked an American tourist to deliver it to Masha in Moscow. Near and distant friends would beg Masha to accompany them to the OVIR office when they went to submit their applications for exit visas. More often than not their visas were granted, and they were certain it was because of Masha’s presence. She accepted as her destiny the uncanny probability that she was alive to serve as the good fortune of others, but not her own.

In September 1978, some days after the funeral of Solomon Slepak, she and Volodya—aided by impatient KGB agents who had grown weary of watching them wait in endless lines in the crowded Moscow airport—managed to buy tickets for one of the usually sold-out direct flights to Chita. They arrived before sunrise and took a cab to the bus station, which was closed.

It had been hot in Moscow when they left, but it was quite cold in Chita. Buryats stood around in silence. The bus arrived: old, rickety, twenty-five seats. Chita lay in an enormous valley surrounded by forest-covered mountains. A river, the Chitinka, ran through the city. Masha saw small houses, fences. On the seat beside her, Volodya slept.

The bus, swaying and rattling, left the city and began to climb. Tall evergreens lined the narrow asphalt road. Huge, polished boulders lay among the trees. They kept climbing, the road now chiseled out of the side of a cliff. A broad valley below and mountains like a theater backdrop stretching to the horizon. The sun rose, bathing one side of the valley in a pale light and leaving the other in blue-green shadows. A river snaked through the valley, houses and fields along its banks. Masha thought it all a beautiful sight and remembered that Chekhov, in his account of his travels to the island of Sakhalin, had described the region as “Russia’s Switzerland.”