The gates of November (36 page)

The dirt roads and lifeless steppes froze to the hardness of iron as the temperature dropped to forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. At night the cows and pigs fell silent and the air was still save for the occasional barking of dogs in different corners of the village. The sky cloudless, myriad stars would shine coldly and clearly. During the day Masha and Volodya took frequent walks through the village and along the steppes. The winds were harsh. On the steppes a herd of horses roamed freely, and sheep grazed on the winter grass.

One day every family in the apartment building abruptly left to join their relatives in the wooden houses throughout the village. A fierce storm was coming, they said. Masha and Volodya had no place to go. The village became very quiet. A haze covered the sun. The wind began to rise, a sound like someone blowing through a pipe, high-pitched, then howling. The sun, hidden by the haze, grew darker. Wind blowing and whistling and howling shrilly outside. Snow mixed with sand striking the windows and the balcony door. The door and the metal roof of the apartment house rattling. Very dark outside and the storm growing more fierce and suddenly no electricity and cold in the apartment. They put on heavy clothes. Colder and colder. Volodya lit the kerosene lamp, a small, shuddering flame. They wrapped blankets around themselves, but it was impossible to fall asleep; something kept clanging and banging outside.

The storm lasted fifteen hours. When day came, they saw a vast landscape of snow, and electric poles down in the snow amid a tangle of wires, and the barely visible roofs of nearby houses, and on the steppes little mounds where sheep had died. It took bulldozers five days to clear the road from Aginskoye to the village, which remained all that time without water, telephone, mail. Masha and Volodya lived off the food and water they had stored in the apartment.

That February, Leonid, still avoiding conscription and living on the run, decided to fly from Moscow to Siberia to see his parents. By flying, he risked discovery, but his parents desperately needed certain foods and medicines and the heavy parkas brought to Moscow as gifts by visitors from Canada.

Direct flights from Moscow to Chita were booked far in advance, mostly by army officers and government officials; Chita was a large military center. Leonid used a plastic shopping bag full of pens, chewing gum, and women’s stockings to persuade one of the high-level Moscow airport personnel to get him a ticket at least as far as Irkutsk. From there he got on a local flight to Chita, an old commuter plane with about twenty passengers. One of its windows, warped and not fully closed, let in arctic air. A man tried to shove a rag into the crack, with no success. The propeller-driven aircraft lurched and bounced in the gusting Siberian winds. Someone had taken a goat on board; there were other animals as well. People vomited. Leonid had with him a large backpack and two enormous bags of food, medicines, and other necessities. In Chita he was told that the bus to Aginskoye had departed and the next bus was in the morning. He spent the night on the floor of the bus station and left the following day. Six hours on that winding road in an old bus with almost no shock absorbers. It was nearing dark in Aginskoye when he arrived. None of the cabdrivers wanted to take him to Tsokto-Khangil. He offered money to some men who were standing around. They didn’t want money. They had plenty of money; there was nothing to buy with it. He held up two packs of Marlboro cigarettes, and a fight nearly erupted over who would take him. On the road to the village in the pitch-dark night, the driver asked where exactly he was going, and Leonid told him, and the driver said, “Ah, that couple from Moscow. The word is they’re nice people.” He knew precisely where Masha and Volodya lived and left Leonid off at their door.

His parents had not seen him in months, did not know he was coming, and greeted him with excitement and disbelief. He was able to stay only briefly and flew back to Moscow with his mother.

In order for Masha to retain her Moscow residence permit—Volodya’s lapsed during his exile—and the registration for the apartment, it was necessary that she return regularly, be seen in the apartment building by neighbors, and keep her air tickets as proof that she had traveled back to the city.

One of the regulations printed on the last page of every Soviet citizen’s internal passport stipulated that a citizen could be absent from a place of residence no longer than six months. After that the apartment could be taken back by the government—on the grounds that there was insufficient living space for the people, and that a person who doesn’t use an apartment doesn’t need it. A lawyer friend in Moscow had advised Masha that it was best she not remain away longer than four months because sometimes apartments were taken away after an absence of five months.

So in mid-February 1979, about four and a half months after she had arrived in Tsokto-Khangil, Masha together with Leonid took the bus to Aginskoye and a second bus to Chita, and a plane from Chita to Irkutsk, and another plane from Irkutsk to Novosibirsk, and finally a plane to Moscow. Frigid weather, uncertain travel, irregular flight schedules, crowded airports, lengthy delays, jostling and pleading and bribing clerks for tickets—a hellish journey Masha repeated every three or four months throughout the five years they lived in exile. In Moscow she saw her relatives, greeted friends, did some necessary shopping—for herself and Volodya and also for the Buryat women she came to know, who sent her with lists of goods to buy: clothes, winter boots, candy; she spent hours on long lines in Moscow stores and brought back everything they asked for; she wanted to live with them in peace—and then returned to Tsokto-Khangil.

That first year of exile she remained in Moscow two and a half months, waiting with Leonid and Olga for the arrival of their first child, born in early April, a son, whom they named Eugene, after Olgas father.

That same April came the joyful news that five of the men imprisoned for their involvement with the 1970 “Leningrad Hijacking Plot” had been released. And about one week later the Kremlin traded five religious and political dissidents for two Soviet spies imprisoned in the United States. Shcharansky, however, languished on in a prison camp, and Ida Nudel in a distant exile.

In late April, Leonid returned to Tsokto-Khangil to say good-bye to his parents; he had been notified by OVIR that his request for an exit visa was approved. He spent five days with his parents. Talking with his mother. Playing chess with his father. Nights, sleeping on the floor. Just being with them in their exile.

He was twenty years old. One day, at the age of four, he had come running in tears to his mother from the courtyard of the apartment building on Gorky Street where he was playing with friends. One of the children had called him a
zhid
, a Jew, a kike.

“But you are a Jew,” said his mother.

“No, I’m not,” Leonid cried.

“Well, what do you think you are?”

“I’m a Muscovite.”

An odd reply from a four-year-old, who might have been expected to respond with the more traditional answer that he was Russian or Soviet.

His mother told Leonid to calm himself. Then she said, “I am Jewish; your father is Jewish; both your grandparents are Jewish. That makes you Jewish.”

Leonid replied stubbornly, “You can be anything you want. I am a Muscovite.”

That was the first and only time in his entire childhood that Leonid experienced anti-Semitism. But he did not grow up in an ordinary Russian neighborhood or attend a commonplace Russian school. Together with his older brother, Sanya, he was raised among the very elite of the Soviet system. He lived in an apartment with three rooms, in one of which was a family of strangers only because Grandfather Solomon could not bear the notion of living in such luxury while so many in Moscow needed a roof over their heads. He knew nothing of his father’s work. He was of course aware that his father traveled often by train or plane to testing grounds and to various factories in Minsk in White Russia. On the day he was admitted into the Pioneers, at the age of ten, he ran home and proudly showed his red scarf to his father, who at that moment was deep in conversation with a man from Riga. His father sat listening to his son’s bubbling words, an odd dismissive smile on his face. The man from Riga drew from a pocket a postcard with a stamp from Israel and showed it to Volodya and then to Leonid. The boy was a passionate collector of foreign stamps, his sole source for acquisitions the bookstore on their street, which sold stamps only from socialist countries. And now suddenly, in the hands of this stranger, a truly foreign stamp! And from Israel! The man from Riga let Leonid steam the stamp from the card and put it into his album. His father warned him never to show the stamp in school.

Early recollections.

He knew almost nothing about Israel but sensed there was something different about his parents and their friends and that the difference had to do with Israel. Anything foreign was forbidden fruit to a Russian and exciting. And it was clear to Leonid by the age of eleven that his family was in the process of going to Israel; they were emigrating, this year, next year. There was nothing religious about their act of emigration; they were simply one family among others, a community of ethnics, united by blood and waiting to leave for a Jewish country. But they didn’t leave. And the years dragged on.

As enthusiastic as Leonid was about foreign stamps so was his older brother, Sanya, passionate about living creatures. In their room, with its balcony overlooking Gorky Street—once their parents’ room, when the grandparents Solomon and Fanya had lived in the apartment—Sanya had built a terrarium for hedgehogs, lizards, a viper, and had a cage with fifteen birds, and raised to full size an eagle, given to him during a trip in the Crimea, where it had fallen out of its nest; it sat on a glass shelf in that small room: a beady-eyed, hook-mouthed presence, defecating fiercely against the walls and double doors of the balcony. They left it in the Moscow Zoo one day, thrusting it clandestinely through the narrow bars of the aviary after the zoo officials had refused to take it because they had enough eagles. Sanya subscribed to a magazine called
Young Naturalist,
and some of its exquisite color photographs of birds and fish adorned the walls of the room.

Leonid spent a year in a Moscow institute of construction engineering, passed his first semester with ease, and, just before he was to take his final exams, was informed by one of the professors that he would not pass, that it would be best if he left. Since he was doing well in his studies, it was clear that the school was responding to an order from the KGB that he be dropped from its rolls. He took the exams that June of 1977, failed them, and was expelled. That now left him open to immediate conscription into the armed forces.

On a Thursday in October a postcard came, notifying him that he was to report the following Monday to the local draft board. He and his parents spent the weekend drafting a letter to the minister of defense, in which he stated that he refused to serve in the armed forces of the Soviet Union for two reasons. First, he had been trying to leave the country since the age of ten. If he was now drafted for two, perhaps three years, he would afterward be told that he was a security risk and couldn’t leave for five more years; he would then have waited a total of fifteen years to leave the country, an absurd situation. And second, he had become a citizen of Israel at the age of thirteen and could not pledge his loyalty to the USSR, where he was being held against his will. The letter was mailed to the office of the minister of defense, and a copy sent to the local draft board. Copies were circulated among foreign correspondents.

That Monday night Leonid packed a bag and left the Gorky Street apartment. On Thursday of that same week, October 27, Sanya departed for Israel. Leonid, in hiding, could not go to the airport to bid farewell to his brother. From the end of October to the end of November, Leonid remained inside the Moscow apartment of a friend, keeping away from the windows and listening to records of classical music. He met his parents one night in December in Pushkin Square and told them he was getting out of Moscow and going to Vilna to live with friends he had met during one of his summer trips to the Crimea, when he had been introduced to and become part of a
kompaniya
—young people from well-to-do families, most of them not Jews: painters, actors, “free” professionals, people who could get away with not working for a while because they could claim they were between projects and would therefore not be accused by the authorities of being economic parasites, a criminal offense.

He took a train to Vilna, first making certain to shake off any possible KGB tail, something he had been doing since the age of thirteen. He did not have time to purchase a train ticket. On the train he paid the conductor, who pocketed the money and let Leonid sleep in his compartment.

In the early spring of 1978 he returned to Moscow from Vilna with a high fever and in near-delirium. Clearly in need of a physician, he went directly to the apartment on Gorky Street, where his mother tended to him. As soon as he was well, he left.

That was a tense period. The KGB was closing down the entire Helsinki Accords Monitoring Group. Orlov had been arrested. Shcharansky was in prison. Leonid’s father, spearheading a worldwide campaign to free Shcharansky, was a prime KGB target. Leonid went to friends in Armenia. Later that spring he was back in Moscow, staying in the apartment of close friends. His girlfriend, Olga, whom he loved, showed up to tell him that his parents had been arrested for staging a demonstration from his and Sanya’s balcony. Leonid, nineteen years old, suddenly aware that he was alone and might have no one to care for him were he to be arrested and exiled, asked Olga to marry him. She agreed. At considerable personal peril, he visited his mother in the hospital where she was undergoing tests and treatment for her ulcer. To apply for the marriage license, he needed his internal passport, which she was keeping for him. Masha was appalled when she saw him; the hospital was full of KGB informers. She gave him the passport, and he fled.