A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka: A Memoir

by Lev Golinkin

  “Did they have to be those stars?” sniffed my sister.

  Locating suitcases was a nightmare. We were permitted two suitcases per person, which made for a total of ten, but rumors of the U.S. border closing sparked a shopping frenzy, and not even a duffel bag was to be found in the stores. One of our neighbors, a surly mechanic who reeked of vodka and glared at me whenever I ventured into the yard, had a knack for ferreting things out on the black market and made a small fortune reselling large red-violet cases with metal frames, hideous but sturdy. The last four came the night of the move, when the neighbor dragged them upstairs. He counted the cash Mom paid him, twice, before carefully tucking the wad into his coat pocket. After some hesitation, the man turned back to Mom and handed her a worn pocket knife with the five-pointed Soviet star etched on the handle.

  “What’s this for?” asked Mom.

  “Consider it a parting gift, doctor.” He managed a grin, which still resembled a scowl. “It’s always good to have a good knife. Use it to slash up the customs officers if they get out of hand.”

  The gloomy mechanic wasn’t the only neighbor we saw that evening. All around the apartment complex, windows were lit long into the night. Mom and Dad tried to keep our date of departure concealed. There were many reports of refugees being hijacked in the lawless plains of western Ukraine, where bands of robbers, given advance notice by their urban scouts, lurked in the wilderness, ready to attack the buses. (Part of the reason the drivers charged so much was because they had to hire their own scouts to monitor the roads for bandits.) It was best to disappear without notice, at night, but moving was a rare occurrence in the USSR. People grew up, lived, and died in the same town, often at the same address. There was no such thing as a new family on the block or a new kid in school, and despite my parents’ attempts at secrecy, the increased last-minute activity alerted anyone with eyes that departure was imminent. The neighbors kept a vigil to see what would be left behind. Every half-hour a thin woman with a black kerchief around her gray hair darted into the foyer to check whether we were done with the kitchen table. She had been promised that table, and she wanted to make sure she got it. Something about her quick movements, gaunt frame, and black dress made her resemble the scrawny birds that hopped around the apartment block’s courtyard scavenging for food. Mom kept telling her to come back, and as the night wore on and the eager neighbor returned, an uneasy feeling washed over Mom—it was as if the bird-woman was waiting for us to die.

  Friends and relatives rotated in and out in a mishmash cycle of legs from my perspective. I tried my best to stay out of the way, but my packing had long been completed. The most important thing was books: a collection of four stories by Gerald Durrell, Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, a new book of Moldavian fairy tales one of my relatives gave me, and a pocket world atlas I appropriated from the book boxes, so I would know where we were going. The rest of the backpack was taken up by ten elite knights and pirates (I tried to be fair but wound up recruiting heavily from the knights), a couple of shirts, a pair of pants, a sweater, socks, and underwear. Lastly, I went to my grandfather’s old toolbox and fished out a little hammer and a couple of screwdrivers. After all, you never know when you’ll have to take something apart. Backpack on my shoulders, my teddy bear (Comrade Bear) in one arm, my pillow in the other, and I was set. The supplies were all that mattered. Everything else, including our destination, was irrelevant: anywhere other than Moskovskyi Prospekt 90, Apt. 5, Kharkov, USSR, was fine with me.

  Dad shook me awake around 4:00 a.m., and I trudged to the sink and lazily brushed my teeth, spitting out the rust-brown liquid that squirted from the faucet. Our itinerary may have been uncertain, but I had a feeling brushing was not going to be at the top of the agenda for the foreseeable future, and I liked that. I got dressed, jogged downstairs, and stepped out into the Russian night. Silence hung over the courtyard. A foot of wet snow blanketed the earth and the flickering streetlights cast a yellow glow on the mounds. Idling next to the apartment block was a bus surrounded with people examining suitcases, loading suitcases, and discussing the status of suitcases yet to be loaded. Eight crates of vodka were stacked on a nearby curb. These were going to be handed out along the way at inspection points and gas stations, to police officers and anyone else we might encounter. When it came to bribery, vodka was the surest form of currency in the volatile Soviet economy. Times were uncertain, exchange rates fluctuated, the ruble went up and the ruble went down, but the value of a good bottle of vodka never depreciated.

  I climbed on the bus, took in the drone of the heater, the voices of the people, the smell of diesel liberally emanating from the tailpipe, and a peaceful feeling settled over me. I liked the rumbling, for some reason I also liked the smell of gas, and I certainly enjoyed watching the adults solve the suitcase placement puzzle. But all that was incidental: I was two months shy of my tenth birthday, yet I understood, fully understood, that I was never coming back (the thought would warm my nights for years to come). I had no one to say goodbye to. I hadn’t spoken with Oleg since that afternoon with the mirror, Kolya and I had a strictly business relationship, and I barely knew the names of my classmates. Everything I needed was already in the gray backpack on my lap. I realized that I would never again walk through the parks, see Mom and Dad’s friends and relatives, take the tram downtown, or quietly read in the bedroom. I also knew we were about to lose ourselves in the world, had no set destination, no friends, no rubles, and no plans beyond Vienna.

  I realized it all; that’s why I was happy.

  However, after a few minutes of picturing the empty apartment I had explored for the past nine years, a strange itch crept over me, and I scrambled out of the bus, found Dad, and told him I needed to use the bathroom. He barked at me to hurry, and I scampered through the yard, up the stairs, past the padded black door, and stood, panting, in the apartment hallway.

  Fifteen minutes had elapsed and already the place was picked clean. Gone was the furniture, carted away, gone were the little things like rugs and lamps, and all that remained were a few mangled boxes that could not be salvaged, bits of string, and a few trinkets on the windowsill. The trinkets, mainly tiny statuettes, were souvenirs from Dad’s business trips around the Union. They had cluttered his bookshelves, much to my mother’s annoyance, and as the shelves were emptied, the knickknacks had been tossed onto the sills. They were cheap, they could not be resold or reused as raw materials, and that’s why they had been ignored by the scavengers.

  I scanned the sad lineup. My eye fell on a small statue of a turtle. Dad had brought it from Uzbekistan, or maybe Kazakhstan—definitely one of the ’stans. I never fancied it; it looked more like a brown lump of clay than like a turtle. In fact, I can still recall the three turbaned wise men from Kirgizia, the Crimean alabaster ashtray decorated with monkeys, and several other attractive items I could’ve rescued. But the clock was ticking and the pathetic crawling turtle looked like it was doing its darndest to catch up with us. Without much thought, I grabbed it and ran back to the bus, and five minutes later we were rumbling through the dead streets of Kharkov, me wedged between Dad’s brown jacket and my pillow, Comrade Bear on my lap, lumpy brown turtle clenched in my fist.

  * * *

  The ride lasted three days. Our drivers pushed the groaning engine as fast as the roads permitted, stopping only in trusted villages and only long enough for bathroom breaks and to check in with their scouts, who monitored the roads for bandits. I sat next to Dad, alternating between sleeping and staring. I cracked open the Moldavian fairy tales, the only book I hadn’t read yet, and powered all the way through the first day of the trip. The next two days were spent staring out the window at country roads with nothing but fields surrounding us. The landscape was shackled with frost and all I could see were dead leaves interlocked with the frozen grass. Patches of trees hunkered down on the horizon. Every once in a while a thin line of them stretched to the road, dividing one field from the next. A field, a flash of
bare branches, then the next field was all there was to see.

  The Ukraine (u-kraina) isn’t much of a name. It’s just a word; it means “the land at the edge,” and this was that edge. We had reached the outskirts of the Great Steppe, a vast sea of grass that stretches from Mongolia to Hungary. It was Eurasia’s no-man’s-land, a place called pustyr, or “emptiness,” in Russian. For centuries, the steppe was inhabited by nomads, wild horsemen, skilled and dreaded archers. For centuries they rode out of the plains, sacking towns and ambushing caravans before receding back into the grasses. No one could predict the cycles of calm and strife: the nomads spoke their own tongues and lived by their own codes, with no discernible pattern or motif. Scythians, Pechenegs, Huns, Bulgars, myriad clans and tribes came and went through the steppe, leaving behind them only kurgans, hill-shaped barrows that concealed the bones and gold of their chieftains. To the Russian mind, the steppe was a symbol of the unknown, the primal, the wild. Thus it was in the beginning, and thus it had remained, even in 1989.

  By the second day the trees thinned, shrunk, thinned some more, and finally ceded the steppe to the earth. The sheer amount of land was astounding. It unfolded steadily, relentlessly, ever expanding and never changing. At first I scanned the terrain as if it were a painting, looking for something distinct or hidden in a landscape composed solely of leaves and grass. After a few hours my eyes started hurting and I allowed them to lose focus and simply stare into the vastness. I thought of bylini, Russian folk tales I loved to read, stories of bogatyri, heroes who wandered into the steppe to test their mettle against the barbarians or the mythical monsters of old. For days the bogatyr would travel, sometimes for weeks. He’d ride and ride and ride and ride and suddenly it’d be a week later, and he’d be somewhere else. It used to frustrate me because the tales never divulged what took place during that time. So what happened? I used to lie in bed and wonder, What did the bogatyr see on his journey? Sitting on the bus, swallowed by the unending blur before me, I realized that the tales got it right. They said nothing because there was nothing to say—there was only the steppe.

  Next to the drivers sat the Kantlers, the family who had chartered the bus. Although we’d lived in the same apartment block, we rarely interacted and heard about each other via the rumor mill that bubbled through the Jewish population of Kharkov. They were a family of five: two parents, two grandparents, and a teenage daughter.

  Behind them were the Zhislins, the third family to share the bus. The father, Yura, was an engineer like Dad. He was short, with a wiry body and small, glistening eyes that gave him a perpetually curious appearance. At every stop, before the bus fully halted, he’d leap out and explore. He also jumped at any occasion to make a joke, laugh, lighten the mood, and his relentless humor spread through the bus, easing the tension. Yura’s wife, Gera, was a tall woman whose quiet demeanor and graceful motions were a perfect foil for her husband. Their children, Igor and Vicki, both in their twenties, were leaving with them.

  Our family sat in the back, behind the Zhislins but in front of the last two rows of seats, which were occupied by the vodka.

  All three families were accompanied by trusted friends and relatives who were coming with us as far as the border. Additionally, each family had one or two young men to help haul suitcases and bulk up our numbers, in case we got boarded along the way. There were about thirty passengers in all, but the bus was hushed. People vanished beyond the border. It was forbidden to return, but many didn’t even call or write. Long before my family left, the adults would gather for tea and muse about how if they left, they would never sever contacts, and how they would always stay in touch. But when our turn came, my parents and sister were so caught up they didn’t say goodbye to many friends.

  The adults were pondering leaving entire lifetimes behind them. The chaperones were preparing for an indefinite farewell to their friends and relatives. And everyone thought of the tamozhnya. With each westward mile the bus carried us farther from the Soviet government, but it also brought us closer to the border and the customs officers who waited there. Some families were rumored to breeze through the border, barely losing a necklace or a ring. Others got shaken down, left to stumble across with almost nothing. Still darker stories swirled around the border, stories of violence and detention and strip searches. Doubtless many were false. Doubtless many were true, and which were which, no one could tell, and that was the point. The reality didn’t matter, because—as with the wild horsemen of the steppe, as with the refuseniks, as with most everything in the Soviet Union—uncertainty made the system work. Fear gnawed at the mind, fear permeated the bus, and the farther west we drove, the stronger it grew.

  * * *

  Uzhgorod, Soviet–Czechoslovak Border, December 23, 1989, 8 Days to the December 31 Deadline

  An ominous haze covered the land as we filed out onto the plain. Nothing broke the frozen emptiness except the barbed-wire fence and the two-story rectangle of the Chop Border Post, which loomed at the end of the road. Our friends and relatives would not be allowed to enter the tamozhnya, so they did what they could, helping us unload suitcases before saying farewell.

  The adults were getting emotional and I didn’t want to stick out. Thankfully, the goodbyes lasted as long as there were suitcases to haul, which didn’t take long. Everyone was on edge—quick hugs and quick good-lucks, that was all. The cases crunched on the dry gravel path, our relatives dwindled to silhouettes in the fog, and we were in the building.

  The inside of the customs was as austere as the landscape: a large, bare waiting hall without so much as a bench or a trashcan. A small bathroom was at one end and a door leading to a separate examination chamber at the other. Several black-clad tamozhniki patrolled the hall. They said very little, and when they did talk, they kept their voices low. Mostly, they watched. They watched, and paced, and waited.

  “First group,” barked a female tamozhnitsa, and the Kantlers, who insisted on going first, disappeared inside the door to the examination room. The Zhislins sat with us on suitcases and no one moved—no one, that is, except Yura, who, driven by his insatiable curiosity, peeked into the bathroom. An older tamozhnik with yellow makhorka tobacco stains on his mustache lazily paced the hall. Lina and Vicki Zhislin nervously chatted about the toiletries and makeup they’d packed for the journey. What will it be? What will we lose? the adults wondered as they counted the minutes. The signs were good: after a mere half-hour, a new crew of tamozhniki took over, and their young shift captain called in the Zhislins.

  One hour passed, then another. Then we heard the muffled sounds of things being flung against walls. I shared a suitcase with Dad, who was straining to hear as much as possible, and every few minutes I’d glance up to see his cheeks quiver, as if an electric current had passed through them. I didn’t know it at the time, and I wouldn’t find out for quite a while, but Dad had a very good reason to sweat. Under his long brown coat, beneath the layers of sweaters and the undershirt, nestled deep within his underwear, were eleven tiny metal disks, microfilms containing engineering patents, designs, and sketches of future ideas—three decades of Dad’s work.

  Many years, and much of Dad’s savings, had gone into cultivating the contacts to create the films. Dad was no fool: he realized that the odds of an ex-Soviet engineer working in the States were tiny. He had full confidence in his acumen and in the value of his designs, but he would need to offer something tangible to American employers. He had no qualms about stealing the patents—they were his patents, and they’d been appropriated by the very dictatorship he was fleeing.

  The only issue was whether he could smuggle them out.

  The clamor from the examination chamber continued. Finally, Mom couldn’t contain herself any longer and cracked open the door.

  “There’s a search going on—do you want to get arrested?!” A tamozhnik flung open the door. “Get back in the waiting room! Your turn will come soon enough.”

  Mayhem reigned on the other side: clothes, books, shards
of porcelain were strewn everywhere, and anything that could’ve been broken lay shattered on the cement. The Zhislins had taken a chance on hiding a little gold; they had their family valuables melted down and spun into thin flexible wires, which an expert tailor had sewn into their clothing creases. Whether through bad luck or good searching, the tamozhniki found the gold and were now ripping everything to shreds. Yura was bent over a table, arms and legs spread, being frisked by a tamozhnik. Gera, Vicki, and Igor were lined up against the far wall, their faces expressionless. Panic struck Dad as all hope of a relaxed search vanished. A few grams of gold were nothing compared with classified power plant schematics. He was trapped inside the tamozhnya with items that could lead to arrests, imprisonment, denial of exit visas for the entire family. Witnessing the devastation of the Zhislins, the full ramification of Dad’s gamble crashed into his mind.

  The door to the examination chamber remained open for only one moment, but it was enough. Yura didn’t know about Dad’s microfilms, but many people tried to smuggle contraband through the border and he assumed Dad might have something. The little man twisted his head up from the table, his face assumed a sad smile, the dark, ferret-like eyes darted over to the far wall of the tamozhnya, and the door was slammed shut.

  Dad waited a few minutes, coughing and rubbing his stomach, then asked the tamozhnik guarding us to excuse him. He made his way to the back left corner of the waiting hall to the bathroom, where Yura had been staring. It contained one toilet, no sink, and no trashcan. Russian toilets did not have standing water in the bowl and clogged up on the slightest pretense, so flushing the disks was out of the question. Dad jiggled the water tank lid but it was fastened shut. He was certain Yura wanted him to check out the bathroom, but once inside, he couldn’t figure out what the man was hinting at. Dad stared at the bowl, about to try flushing the films in desperation, when a flicker of light interrupted his thoughts. Set in the wall above the toilet was a fortochka, a small ventilation window common to Eastern Europe, no bigger than a sheet of paper.