It was. I took my family to the embassy early in December to claim my American passport. In fact the embassy kept it for me until the end, for safekeeping. Peter Swiers took us to the ticket office to buy our Air Austria passage to Vienna, and our Pan Am tickets to New York. The Air Austria flight was chosen because there were too many stories of someone with an exit visa going off on an Aeroflot—plane which made an unscheduled stop in Leningrad, and the would-be emigre was never seen again.
December 13 passed, and it was twenty-three years since I had gone for that walk down Gorky Street, with the clock on the telegraph office that will forever in my mind say ten past one. Sleep was almost impossible. Friends were kissed farewell in a whirl of faces and promises. The refrigerator to give away, the books, the letters and photographs for Irene’s mother, the old guitar I had not played for so many years. And finally the apartment on Lilac Boulevard was stripped of everything to do with me, and the door was closed for the last time. December 21, 1971. Peter Swiers took us to the airport. And still the tenacious bastards were not through making trouble.
The KGB at passport control looked at our visas.
“No, these are not in order,” he said firmly. He pointed to their small airport interrogation room. “You will have to step in here,” he said authoritatively. “It’s nothing, I’m sure. It will only take five minutes. Don’t worry.
Don’t worry! I had heard that before. I was almost paralyzed. I looked at Swiers in panic. Swiers knew exactly what to do. He vaulted over the counter like an Olympic athlete and started yelling at the KGB.
“What’s the matter with those papers!” Swiers yelled. “I am a representative of the United States Government and I demand to know WHAT YOU THINK IS WRONG WITH THESE PAPERS!”
“Please! Please!” the KGB said in a loud whisper. “Please lower your voices”
“I WILL NOT LOWER MY VOICE UNTIL YOU EXPLAIN!”
The KGB was red with consternation. “Look, look,” he whispered lamely. “Her visa is not the same as his.”
“Of course they’re different!” Swiers roared, only a little more temperately. “She is a Soviet citizen and he is an American. Of course their papers are different. Read them, man!”
The KGB was utterly cowed. “Of course, of course,” he said mildly. “Yes, of course, of course.” And he waved us through.
I could hardly see. This seemed, somehow, after all the terrors and so much time, to have been the narrowest escape of all. Everything in a blur now. Blurred images of kind, handsome girls moving around us in the airplane, offering food and drinks and coffee in fluent Russian and English, with German accents. Blurred runway slipping past. Blurred rooftops. Ground falling away.
Roads leading away from Moscow. Roads I had walked so often in the corridors of Lefortovo, in the cell at Sukhanovka, roads to freedom, blurring now, too far down to make out clearly, roads to freedom blending with white snow and black forest lands, and the unfamiliar rumble and whine of jet engines and the kind hands bringing drinks and coffee, and Irene, tears in her eyes, singing softly to herself to keep her courage up lest the plane crash after all.
Schwechat International Airport, Vienna. Stella, her husband. Tears and laughter. A sea of grinning, warm, strange faces. The strong, welcoming hand of John
P. Humes. A big grin. A warm welcome.
Christmas in freedom, with my indefatigable sister, in Vienna, the city of music.
The wonderful, inexhaustible kindness of Ambassador Humes, who had even arranged a per diem for us throughout our stay in Vienna, and in New York until we got settled, and who personally arranged to have our tourist-class tickets home exchanged for first-class. The one diplomat who would not accept the idea of my being one-of-a-number. The one who made it happen.
And then that brilliant day in January when we climbed aboard a Boeing 707, an American airplane, bearing the big blue Pan Am globe, which I had never seen before.
Painted on the nose of the airplane, the name Great Hopes.
An ocean underneath us. The ocean whose floor I walked in my imagination, beating my way home to America, how long ago? Where was it exactly that I left the coast of Spain in my mind and walked into the sea and under the waves and kept on going west? How many more paces today? Fifty-three hundred? How many kilometers? Force yourself to think, Alex! Do the arithmetic. Pardon me, boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo-Choo?
Irene gripping my arm suddenly and pointing. Skyline growing out of the clouds, as familiar as all the landscapes in my memory, although it is thirty-eight years since I saw it slip down out of sight behind the stern rail of a ship whose name I can’t remember.
John F. Kennedy International Airport. Everyone is speaking English! My cousins are all there. My mother’s favorite sister, Tessie! I see all their faces in a blur. Before we climb in the car I look back at the sky toward the east. There are faces there, too. Dear faces. If they could have come to share this...
George Tenno, most of all. Mother. Father.
Pavel Voronkin and Victor S. and Galya and Adarich and good Nye Russki.
Zoya Tumiovich. Arkadi.
Gertrude.
Arvid Atsinch. Who said when I last saw him, “Whatever you do, write about us. Tell the world about us. People have to know.”
I promised I would.
The End
An American in the Gulag Page 54