The investigation, it seems, was completed in September. The trial was set for December, and the prosecutor pending the trial released the gang of five from jail. Andrei’s experience and his instincts told him this would be a preface to more lenience shown the kidnappers. The implication was clear: The state would get convictions in its ‘war’ on underworld crime, but the perpetrators themselves would suffer little.
‘God only knows how the case will end,’ Andrei wrote to us early in September. ‘That is why myself and other people who worked on the case consider that you should use all the official channels (Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Australia, Australian Embassy in Moscow and mass media) to express protest against [the] Moscow prosecutor actions. That is because the case is of international interest.’
The idea that Miasnikov and his cohorts were even now out on the loose where no one could watch them scared us silly, but prosecutor Gennady Lobanov had little sympathy—and apparently no use—for Danny and me. He cabled us later that month about the court date, saying that because Grigory had signed a statement admitting he had organised the kidnapping, we weren’t required to attend the trial. Not that we had any intentions of going to Moscow in any case, but it seemed like a kiss-off, as if he didn’t want us there to complicate things. It was a private party.
Perhaps not coincidentally, when we asked the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to see if they could acquire transcripts of the impending trial, the judge flatly refused the request. It didn’t take a leap of imagination to wonder if the last thing he wanted was any public scrutiny of what would happen in his courtroom, and if bribes would trump evidence—and in fact already had.
The trial began on December 10 in Moscow’s Frunzensky Regional Court, Hall No. 10. Because of the unwritten laws against kidnapping and extortion, the official charge lodged against the gang was ‘racketeering with aggravating circumstances,’ a nebulous catch-all we feared would be aggravating only to us in the end. By now, Lobanov had stopped communicating with us, so we knew nothing of what transpired behind those closed doors. Then, on December 31, the Australian Embassy in Moscow received a cryptic cable that read: ‘The verdict handed down this afternoon sentenced the three men accused to six months’ imprisonment, but in view of the time already spent in custody, they were released.’
When we read those cold, sanitised sentences, it had the effect of another thudding kick in the gut and a stinging slap in the face at the same time. For the men ‘sentenced’ to no additional time, it was a slap on the wrist. But which men were they? Why only three? We had no answers, since the judge allowed no transcripts to be seen or further details to be heard.
Things became a bit clearer when out of the sewer popped Grigory Miasnikov himself to spout off in public. Seeking as wide an audience as he could for his ego, Miasnikov offered himself to Australian television shows to talk about the still-highly-charged case and appeared on A Current Affair in early January. Only now did it become known that the cases were closed on Orloff and Robert (whose real name was Vladimir Shemeken). They had apparently accepted plea-bargain deals in exchange for testifying against Grigory and Oleg, as ringleaders of the plot, in a separate trial.
However, Miasnikov defiantly maintained his innocence; in his twisted logic, to him, Danny and I were more guilty.
Perspiring heavily and wearing a creepy fixed smile, he once again showed himself to be a strutting narcissist, beyond shame. It was most sickening and galling. He was so unrepentant, so sanguine about what had happened to us—and so confident about getting off so easily. Incredibly, he had just proclaimed to the joint ventures that he was reinstating himself as general director of Video Technology. Never mind that the company no longer existed. That didn’t seem to faze him. Miasnikov obviously still saw a gold mine in us through our connections—if not us ourselves.
For us, he had nothing but contempt and didn’t seem to care how badly it reflected on him to verbally savage us. Among his crackpot ravings was that we really weren’t beaten at all, that we’d only been ‘struck’ twice and had only ‘surface injuries.’ Just as bizarre, he claimed that ‘there were no plans to kill them, only to put them on trial, put them on investigation,’ and that ‘the punishment [was justified] for this crime.’
Saving his most demented words for me, he labelled me a ‘stupid bitch’ who ‘deserved what happened to her.’
‘They tried to rob me,’ he oozed shamelessly. ‘They cheated us; they were in debt to forty companies. What happened was because of them. They made possible what happened.’
Whatever he hoped to gain from this front of vitriol and lies didn’t work. Fixing a case is one thing; going public with manic arrogance is another. The ‘connections’ he had boasted would save him turned out not to be there. He too was convicted, as was Oleg. Yet in the end, all the convictions—and the trials themselves—were merely for show, to pad prosecutors’ records and give the Russian cops and government something to crow about. Like the others, Grigory and Oleg were given empty six-month sentences and immediately set free on time served, getting not a day more for leading a plot that made prisoners out of two innocent people who were battered, kicked, and tortured, leaving us with psychological scars until the day we die.
For what happened to me at that cursed dacha, violated as I was like a slab of meat by a man who was never even arrested or prosecuted, they all deserved to have acid poured on them and have their flesh peeled off. I only wish I could be the one doing the pouring.
A headline in one of the Australian papers said it right: ‘NO JUSTICE FOR COUPLE.’ Yet we had to live with the tainted verdict handed down by a corrupt and perverted legal system. We had to let go of the notion of getting even, lest we be prisoners of our own minds forever. There are times when I can do that, forget, not look back. I don’t think I will ever really be free, and for that I am angry. Angry and scared. Because I am, I won’t ever let go of my hatred for those animals.
I wish I could say I don’t care anymore, because they don’t deserve the satisfaction of knowing I do. That won’t happen until I see their rotting corpses lying in the gutter.
By early 1993, our hopes of reprising our financial Xanadu were slipping away. Trying to keep alive our corporate status, we managed to buy what is called a ‘shelf company,’ that is, one that had gone bust and then sold at a discount by its officers from ‘off the shelf.’ We kept it going for a few months, but we couldn’t raise enough capital from our software-development business to keep it afloat. And so, in the middle of the year, both the new company and the software business had gone the way of Video Technology, into the grave.
Our resources were dwindling. We were living from savings and now, it was time to swallow all that over-inflated pride of living the high life.
For example, I had been making my own homemade, hand-sewn ‘scrunchies,’ those bow-like hair ties women use, never giving a second thought to somehow making money from them. I just had very thick hair I wanted to get out of my face. One day, I went to a fabric store to buy some tartan material to make them. The next day, I just happened to walk into a Sportsgirl store, being one of a large chain. The salesgirl noticed the scrunchie in my hair and commented on the fact that they were a large size for girls with thick, long hair. She asked me if I had samples; I told her six. She asked if I would take the samples to the Sportsgirl distribution centre to show the buyer, which I did. The very same afternoon, she ordered three thousand scrunchies! I was astounded. She asked if it was possible that they be made and delivered in ten days.
I did the math and found that, with the percentage she was offering me, I could make several thousand dollars, after the expense of buying enough fabric for that massive job. For the next week, I sat at home, cutting fabric, threading elastic bands, and sewing on a huge, old industrial sewing machine that Danny’s uncle had in the warehouse he once owned. My parents helped, and the kids pitched in. We made it a family undertaking. By the week’s end, we had made all three tho
usand. Even though I just collapsed in a heap from fatigue, I was very proud of what I had achieved.
The irony wasn’t lost on me that only a year or so before, I was living the jet-set life, globe-trotting to exotic places, being a high-powered businesswoman with deals in the millions on the table and danger nipping at my high heels. Now here I was using that table to manufacture scrunchies to make ends meet. The weirdest irony of all was that I didn’t miss the old lifestyle one bit. Doing manual labor to complete a rush assignment, and knowing I had done it, gave me deeper feelings of satisfaction. Besides, the danger, as I had learned, was something I could do without.
I missed the money. There was none to throw around on expensive dinners, vacations, or trinkets, but only enough on which to live. We had lost just about everything. The next step for us was to quit dreaming and hit the pavement and find jobs, like real people do. Danny managed to secure a software-development contract for a transport company, and I, knowing nothing about the recruitment industry, landed a position at Adecco Personnel, earning $40,000 a year, for which I was grateful. The pressure and worry were beginning to level off in matters of money and security.
The same, however, could not be said about our marriage. On my part, at least, I was heartsick that Danny and I had morphed into different people than we were when we had married. We had grown testy and distant; the genesis of the problem, in retrospect, was that strange and awkward moment in the Ministry of Interior when I saw him for the first time after being rescued when he held back his emotions. I began to back away from him. On a subconscious level, we irrationally blamed each other for the pain we felt and would always feel; or else we couldn’t push away the memories as long as we had to look at each other. Whatever the psychological answer was, where once we had grown in unison, we now began to grow apart, unable to make peace with ourselves, our own insecurities, our own demons, much less that of each other.
I had believed that barrier would naturally come down, but it never did. I knew before he did, I’m sure, that the marriage was over. Danny, in fact, seemed in denial; despite the fact that he looked at me differently and behaved differently, he was set in the ways of marriage and what he believed to be true love. Or, perhaps he did know it was over, too, but refused to admit it to himself and to other people, wishing not to face that stigma. He needed a shield from all that, so he went along as if the marriage was inherently strong. In the same way, he was able to recover from our ordeal far quicker than I could. Sometimes I wished I had that ability to be emotionless, cold, not feeling what I really felt.
A prime example of that divergence was our lovemaking. While we went about it, and Danny was fine with it, for me it was never out of love or desire, only obligation. I did it because I wanted Danny to be happy. Within my soul, it brought no relief from the emptiness. I suppose it didn’t help that I could not get out of my thoughts the horrible night I was violated at the dacha; like a Freudian nightmare, the more I tried pushing it away, the more it would torment me and reignite the inner debate I was having about whether to tell Danny—whether I ever would be able to tell Danny. Not telling him always won the debate, and the fact that I was not being completely truthful with him weighed me down with guilt.
What’s more, I also could not stop fretting that Sascha the Snake had given me a venereal disease. I confided this dread to my local doctor, who administered blood tests. They all came back negative, but the mental scar took a greater toll on me than any disease.
Well into 1994, more than a year after the kidnapping, I was still a prisoner, of my own mind. I felt claustrophobic, like I wanted to launch into great primal screams or else implode from all the psychological ravages I’d suffered. One day, I woke up and I just couldn’t put off any longer making a break from the marriage. I just didn’t love Danny anymore. I knew I had to leave him.
If we’d been characters in a fictional story, the happy ending would have stretched beyond the rescue. We would have become closer in our shared pain and victory. Our love would have found new avenues in which to flourish and a deeper pool of trust and respect from which to draw, new adventures to share.
Unfortunately, as we learned, life is not a love story; it’s terribly and heartbreakingly complicated, and too often a tragedy. It makes one cry more than laugh. It’s a mystery none of us will ever be able to figure out.
There’s only one thing I know for sure. My life, in so many ways, was altered by those eleven days in Purgatory.
The odd thing, given his immediate reaction after the rescue, was that Danny seemed to rebound emotionally to everyday life far more quickly and far better than I. Again, that was his shielding, his blocking of debilitating trauma before it had a chance to linger and fester. He just had a way of letting things slide. Like the marriage. Despite all the warning signs, he was a little shocked when I told him I was leaving. But I was the headstrong one. He knew he couldn’t stand in my way. He may have even thought that if I’d go, I would get this nonsense out of my system and be back.
No, that was not going to happen. At the same time, however, I was not about to hurt him. Why would I? I didn’t leave him because I didn’t care for him. There was not a whit of bitterness involved. No one was to blame; it was just something that happened. I take pride, in fact, in saying our separation was very likely the most congenial one in history. It wasn’t for the usual reasons. In fact, after I left, we ‘dated’ for a while, because we always adored each other’s company and because it was still a natural thing for us to be in each other’s lives. After I had taken Melanie and Romy and moved into a three-bedroom flat in Caulfield, Danny helped me get settled. Knowing I had to go to work very early in the morning, he would come by every day at 7am to stay with Melanie and then take her to kindergarten.
Things would get a little bumpy for us in the ensuing years, over things not even worth mentioning, but I don’t hesitate in the least to say that Danny Weinstock was, and is, one of the kindest men I have ever known in my life.
When I left, I took very little, nor did I want anything. I was perfectly prepared to rebuild my life now on my own. In time, Danny did come around to accept that I would not be coming home. We slowly began to drift our separate ways—still bonded by the fact that we were still technically married, never having bothered to file divorce papers. Neither one of us was overly eager to go careening into another marriage. We both agreed amicably to share custody of Melanie. Having done that, Danny and I considered it case closed, at least for a while.
That turned out to be six years. With the dawning of a new millennium came a new life direction for me that no one, least of all me, could have possibly foreseen.
The past years had brought stability, but changes. At age twenty-one, Romy had become intrigued by our family’s ancestral roots in Israel and went there to live. Melanie was now a poised young lady of eleven. And me? I was forty-four, back on my feet financially, and satisfied that my life did not depend on dreams of being a member of the super-rich class. Neither did I fancy meeting a frog that would turn into a mythical prince.
And so, of course, as often happens when you’re not looking for something out of a romance novel, I did find a prince, at least in my eyes.
In July of 2000, I met Sam Bornstein, a forty-three-year-old American visiting Melbourne. I did have relationships since separating from Danny, but I had erected my own self-defense mechanism not to let myself get too close to anyone, emotionally. Either that or I wasn’t meeting anyone to whom I wanted to get that close. Sam, I knew immediately, could take down my fortress walls; indeed, they didn’t seem to stand very long whenever we talked.
And did we ever talk. Sam had many qualities that can attract a woman’s eye. Six foot three inches tall, tapered at the waist, and ruggedly handsome, he cut a dashing figure just walking down the street. Just as diverting, though, was his sensitivity and intellect, a very rare combination. Recently divorced, he was the father of seven- and twelve-year-old daughters. His family roots were in the Jewis
h ghettos of Poland.
Clearly, he was a man with whom I had much in common, and our endless conversations proved as much. Sitting over coffee or on a park bench with him, I found myself talking about anything and everything under the sun, including feelings locked in my heart that I thought I had blotted out in pain. In turn, he was fascinated by my misadventure in Moscow. Never, he said, had he known anyone as strong in constitution as I was to have survived that. We found ourselves wanting to see each other, needing to, and he extended his stay for that purpose.
There seemed no end to his depth. When we ate at my home for the first time, he shooed me out of the kitchen and whipped up a delicious meal for us—he is a gourmet cook. Some might call him a Renaissance man; to me, he was a mensch, as our people say, meaning a ‘decent man.’
With no hesitation at all, we had plunged into a whirlwind courtship, with neither of us really paying any mind to the logistical snag that he lived in America, in Southern California, and I in Australia.
Sam confronted the geography issue head on. Sam asked me to visit him in September, which I did.
My departure date for America was September 18. On that day, I was half-dazed with excitement. My friend Rhonda drove me to Melbourne International Airport. I was on my way to Sam.
After spending less than a month in Los Angeles, I knew full well that we were both smitten. I was head over heels when he asked me to marry him. Only he could have made me even consider such a thing, and I’m sure he would not have taken no for an answer. Moreover, after making the decision, no one in my family could tell me I would be wrong to say yes to such a momentous course change in my life. Not that they didn’t want me to remain in Australia, but they also knew I still had that adventurous streak in me.
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