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

by Lev Golinkin

  The terror at the border made saying goodbye to the Soviet Union much easier for my father. Dad was about to turn fifty-two, and he had stockpiled his good moments, good memories—even the USSR couldn’t steal those from him—but the tamozhnya had torched the nostalgia. Mom kept reminding herself that every passing kilometer was taking us farther away from them, the tamozhniki, the anti-Semites, the Communist Party of the USSR. She gazed out at rows of cottages perched on hills lining the road. Colorful garlands of gourds and dried peppers hung from their eaves, and something about the bucolic Slovak countryside made Mom believe that it was possible to establish a life beyond the border. I only remember that the bus was quiet, very quiet, and that we had distributed a significant portion of our dwindling vodka supply at gas stations and checkpoints along the way.

  Dusk had fallen by the time our drivers pulled up to the sprawling gray Bratislava train station and killed the engine, which shuddered a few times before coughing up its life. This was as far as the drivers’ permits allowed them to go. The workers loading crates onto freight trains ignored us; they’d seen Jews pass this way before. A few bored Czechoslovak policemen approached, punched our visas, and ambled away, vodka bottles in hand. Yura, Dad, and Sergei Kantler bought tickets to Austria. All three men had been told to head for the Westbahnhof rail station in Vienna, but no further information had been provided. People who left the USSR before us had embarked for the Westbahnhof; beyond that, our plans ran out.

  Before the three drivers began the return trip, the head of the team pulled Dad aside. “Watch out for the Kantlers,” he warned. “Five minutes after they walked into the tamozhnya, a tamozhnik came to the bus and went straight for where we kept the money you paid us. He left us only enough to make it back to Kharkov. They’ve done this before, at other border posts, but this bastard didn’t even have to search. He went straight for my seat cushion. Now how would he have known that?”

  Dad nodded. He’d noticed another driver carefully tucking bills into a tiny flap under the seat. (“It keeps my ass warm,” the man told Dad when he saw him stashing the rubles.) The Kantlers’ behavior had been strange from the start. Sergei had insisted his family go first, and they had waltzed through the examination room in half an hour. Several times before the journey, Sergei and his wife had asked us and the Zhislins what contraband we were packing, and then after the border, they kept to themselves. Maybe they sold us and the drivers out (they wouldn’t have been the first family to do so), or maybe they just felt awkward for no other reason than that they were spared and we were not.

  Dad’s the only one who spoke with the driver at the Bratislava train station. Yura was in shock for a good couple of days after the border, and doesn’t remember anyone warning him about the Kantlers. Mom thinks it’s all bullshit and Dad’s imagining things. Either way, the tamozhniki’s ministrations left both Yura’s family and mine shaken and terrorized; the Kantlers, in the meantime, took a nap on the bus. Whatever the cause, Sergei and his clan barely spoke to us afterward, and we behaved the same toward them.

  We boarded a standard, decrepit Communist train with two-bench cabins and an aisle running down one side of the car. The cabins’ sliding glass doors made me think of the see-through cages for monkeys and reptiles at the zoo. Strewn inside our enclosure were the suitcases, members of my family interwoven among them. Dad, who up to this point maintained the red-violet luggage in regimented formation, was now too exhausted and temporarily allowed the cases to rest wherever they lay. Evening returned, and the black windowpanes threw our reflections back into the cabin, underscoring the fact that, as of now, all we had were our bags and our bodies.

  As we lumbered across the Czechoslovak–Austrian border, a group of customs officers boarded the train. We were jumpy around men in uniform, but the Austrian inspectors were easy: a few quick glances, more stamps on the visas, and we were back to creaking through the darkness. The gloom was finally broken, first by small depots and then by the orange glare of Vienna’s Westbahnhof station. The train stopped, the doors slid open, and we stepped out onto a platform teeming with refugees. Some must have arrived before us. Others apparently had shared our train—we hadn’t even noticed. Porters dawdled by stairways, announcements buzzed over loudspeakers, and all up and down the concourse Soviet Jews squinted, stretched, and yawned, making the transition from motion to stillness, train to ground, Communism to freedom.

  This sleepy moment was interrupted by a short, pudgy gentleman with glasses, a round, hoggish face, and a blue blazer. He strode among us, six or seven assistants in tow, all of whom were consulting paperwork and gazing around the platform as if whatever was written on their papers didn’t quite jibe with what was in front of them. The short man nosed his way through the crowd, then spun around and yelled, in shrill English. “We need you to rapidly relocate to this side of the station. Do so immediately! Go now!”

  “What’s he saying? What does he want?” the grumbles began, and even once translated, the message had no effect. “What’s so special about that corner? Where are we going afterward? Who are these people?” The pudgy man’s eyes darted all over the platform, his lips wordlessly moving. Finally he launched into the speech once more. He had a strong voice for a small man, one that reverberated throughout the concourse; it was imperative to have us in that corner. We migrated slowly, individuals keeping in families, families gathering by cities, Muscovites here, Leningradians there, and so on. The man weaved in and out of the huddles, once in a while tossing a perfunctory glance at a visa. I misliked the porker at once. When Pig Face came near us, Dad overheard him muttering about terrorists being around the corner and needing to get us out of Vienna immediately. Dad made the mistake of translating the man’s words, and some of the other English speakers must’ve done the same, because a restless murmur churned through the crowd.

  It was Christmas Eve, and last-minute shoppers scurried around the platform, juggling parcels and packages in the rush to get home. We gawked at their clothes and strained to catch a peek of what they carried. Many Austrians cast surprised glances back at us, and at some point I realized that as exotic as I found the Westerners, we were the ones who didn’t belong. My family wasn’t alone in racing to beat the December 31 deadline for asylum in America: more trains arrived, disgorging refugees who’d gone through Krakow, Budapest, and Bratislava, and the crowd had swelled to over one hundred people. Each new batch was greeted by Pig Face’s half-pleading, half-barking “relocate to this side” command. Judging by his exasperated expression, all the man wanted for Christmas was a few Scottish border collies, the ones that can corral sheep on cue. But time and again, despite his feverish prayers, the dogs would fail to materialize and he would sigh and start his speech anew.

  A tall woman trotted back and forth between the platform and the street-level concourse at ten-minute intervals. She wore a long brown coat and had a tower of salt-and-pepper hair hovering over her head, and I can still recall the wind playing with her beehive and whipping the exposed ends of the paperwork clutched to her chest. Dad chatted to a group of Armenian Jews encamped nearby, reminiscing about the eateries he’d discovered on a trip to Yerevan five years back. I watched him, transfixed. Three days earlier he, like the rest of us, had jettisoned his entire life. He was a stranger in a strange land, stranded in an alien train station with no money and few possessions beyond some pots and spare underwear. The station was freezing, the food had run out that morning, his family was nervous, the Armenians were nervous, the Austrian shoppers were nervous, Pig Face was one violent sneeze away from a massive aneurism, and here was Dad, extolling the superiority of Armenian shish kebab over its Georgian, to say nothing of Azerbaijani, counterpart. That’s who Dad was.

  Bells ringing in Midnight Mass pealed through the city, the flow of shoppers died down, and one final train screeched in. Two hours later the woman with the salt-and-pepper beehive rushed down the platform steps, eagerly chattering to Pig Face. “There are buses located outside,” he
announced. “Load quickly—terrorists are here! Whatever cannot be placed on buses will remain behind. We must leave Vienna now!”

  In a flash, I focused on the move. Shove, shove, grab everything. Big suitcases and Grandma first. Up the stairs, to the long line of idling buses. Pick bus, leave suitcases by it, Grandma will watch them. Run back, grab more. Lina and Mom already moving toward Grandma. Count cases. Dad’s behind me. Shove, drag, move to bus. Grandma’s sitting on a suitcase and watching everything. Next to her is another grandma. Next to that one are more. Dozens of sentinel grandmas, all guarding suitcases. Load cases under bus. Count and load, count and load. Where are the Zhislins? Grab seats. Pillow’s here. Dad’s here. Mom, Lina, Grandma, Comrade Bear are here. Good.

  I don’t know if they had prior intentions of sorting us or taking a census, but any such plans quickly disintegrated in the slapdash race to board. After making sure our bus was full, someone barked something to the driver, who slammed the shift into first gear and rumbled off. I never got to see the terrorists.

  The pudgy man wasn’t crazy. Western Europe had been reeling from the deadly onslaught of radical Islamic terrorism long before it reached U.S. shores. What’s more disturbing is that some of the terror strikes were aimed directly at Soviet migrants. In 1973, the Austrian government intercepted three members of Black September, the Palestinian group infamous for the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre, en route to bomb a Vienna hostel that housed Soviet refugees. Later that year, the as-Sa’iqa sect hijacked a Bratislava–Vienna train (the same corridor my family took) filled with migrants bound for the West: the terrorists’ main demand was for Austria to close its border and refuse asylum to displaced Soviet Jews. And on December 27, 1985, merely four years before my family walked out onto the Westbahnhof platform, the Abu Nidal Organization made international headlines by executing coordinated attacks on El Al Israeli airline passengers in Rome and Vienna airports, which resulted in nineteen fatalities and 138 injuries. Terrorists lurking under train wheels was an exaggeration; the need to evacuate a huge crowd of Soviet Jews milling around an exposed platform was real.*

  The bus wound through Vienna proper. It was late on Christmas Eve and the city slumbered under an enchantment. Rows of nutcrackers, puppets, candy, and chocolate beckoned from giant window displays. Christmas trees lit up plazas; garlands of snowflakes, crescents, exquisite ornaments, and intricate tinsel were draped across streets and twined around lampposts. It was bright, festive, varied, nothing like the anemic New Year’s lightbulbs people hung up in Russia. And the roads shocked everyone, too: the smooth pavement and lack of potholes felt like being in a land where people drove on butter. As Vienna faded into the distance, the glimmer of Christmas was replaced by the red-and-white glow of reflector posts that lined the highway. These also were a surprise to us, after we’d traversed the dark roads of Czechoslovakia and the steppe. The Austrians even splurged on side streets and parking lots. How much light do these people have?

  The bus was warm, very warm, with soft seats and classical music on the radio. The music, the warmth, the gentle lilt enveloped us. For the first time since we had set out from Kharkov, we were no longer in control, and, paradoxically, that brought us peace. We had no choices, we didn’t know when to stop or where to go; we couldn’t even speak the language, but it didn’t matter—we were safe and we were moving, and within a half-hour of leaving Vienna nearly everyone on the bus was fast asleep.

  When Dad nudged me awake, we were idling in a lot illuminated by powerful spotlights mounted on a large building, the only structure in sight. Several other buses were parked nearby, and the people from the train station were already outside, making tracks in the fresh snow. Now that we were out of the city and confined to buses, the workers appeared calmer, a lot more confident. The pudgy man in the blue blazer carried on a discussion with a short bald man who somehow managed to sweat despite wearing just a thin white shirt and a tie, and no coat. After a few minutes he signaled to his assistants, who fanned out, each going to a bus. The tall beehive woman in the brown coat approached ours. The driver hopped out, unlatched the storage compartments, began tossing the suitcases onto the snow, and we sprang into action. It’s amazing how efficient and ingrained the process had already become: Dad and I haul from lot to building, Grandma watches in building, Mom and Lina watch in lot. Go back and repeat, count and haul, count and haul.

  Dad carried the suitcases whereas I dragged them, and by the time I deposited mine under the wary eye of Grandma he was already on his way to pick up another one. I took a few seconds to regain my breath. People scrambled with their belongings as the short bald man darted around in the snow like a matador dancing with fifty bulls. Rich, velvety darkness concealed the world beyond the lot. I inhaled, and the cold air stung my lungs. It was crisp, thin, and clean, and I liked it because it woke me up and made me concentrate on the cold instead of my hunger. A throng of migrants laden with bags pushed by, Yura Zhislin and his son, Igor, among them. Igor flashed me a smile though his thick mustache, and I ran to drag another suitcase.

  Families coalesced around their belongings, each one staking claim to a little piece of the lobby. The tall woman in the brown coat positioned herself by the rear wall, in front of a line of men. The head of each family presented her with the only documents he had left, the pale green Soviet exit visas. These had several folded pages, which three days ago had been blank but had since broken out in a rash of seals, stamps, and scribbles worthy of an international treaty. The woman jotted down information on her clipboard, then directed the refugee to the bald man in the thin white shirt, who presided over a box of room keys.

  Suddenly there was an epidemic of illness and obscure medical conditions as everyone in line angled for the best rooms. Someone had a blind mother; someone else was recovering from abdominal surgery. When our turn came, Dad, who was nervous about asking for handouts, started stammering. The man looked up at him, sharp blue eyes flashing from his flushed face. “Not worry,” he rasped in a thick German accent. “You—I find rooms. It is okay,” and in a few minutes a young blond woman approached us with two keys.

  Before hauling anything, Dad and I went upstairs to investigate. The rooms were tiny, comprised of a single bed, a table, and a little closet, with not much floor space left over. “Two whole rooms—two beds—that’s wonderful!” Dad mused. “Lina and Grandma will share a bed, and Mom will get this one, and the two of us—the men,” he winked at me (Dad was extremely proud of my help with the suitcases), “we’ll figure something out. If we get any food, we’ll use the balconies for storage; in this weather, they’re as good as fridges. Agreed?”

  I was gawking at the floor. I was exhausted and starving, but still, I grew up on linoleum and didn’t even know fully carpeted rooms existed outside of the Arabian Nights. “Agreed?” Dad repeated to snap me out of the shag-induced trance.

  “Agreed!” I nodded, trying to sound as manly as possible, and we hurried downstairs to give the ladies the good news.

  Once everything was heaped onto the floor you couldn’t see much of the carpet. Mom and I reclined on the bed and watched Dad play with the suitcases. Mom suggested we wait until morning and I couldn’t have agreed more, but Dad persisted and would’ve probably arranged everything if not for the young blond woman, who handed him a napkin with a number smudged on it and waved for us to come downstairs. There we joined the tail end of a line that snaked into a cafeteria. At the far end was a table with coffee, tea, and small brown rolls with dabs of butter on them. Each person received one cup and one crispy, hot roll. I forced myself to nibble at mine, because I remembered reading in one of my books that you shouldn’t eat quickly when you’re starving. Afterward, Dad gingerly folded the napkin and tucked it in his pocket. Others were already wrapping their rolls in pieces of newspaper, fudging the numbers written on the napkins, and getting back in line to try to sneak out another one. Quietly, effortlessly, life stripped to a bare hierarchy of needs. Warmth? Yes. Shelter? Yes. Family?
Here. Food? Got some. Not sure when there’ll be more. Better change the number, get back in line, try to get more. Eat a little, save the rest. Save, save, save. Like a squirrel.

  * * *

  I woke to the sound of the adults rummaging through suitcases for toothbrushes, towels, and soap. Lina stopped by to say hi and was off to find the bathroom. Russians were everywhere, milling around the hallways, yelling up and down the stairwells, lounging on couches in the lobby. I tagged along after Dad, who went downstairs to the cafeteria, following the aroma of warm bread and fresh coffee. I grabbed juice, Dad got coffee, and we walked outside, where the tracks from the night’s bustle were dusted over by a fresh coat of snow. We were standing atop a hill, next to a road, the only road in sight. Down the slope to the left was a tiny village, so small one could easily walk to the farthest house. To our right, the road meandered through snowy fields, losing itself in a patch of forest on the horizon. A wavy line of small blue-gray mountains rested against the bright winter sky. The only mountains I’d ever seen were two grim black monoliths that rose from the Black Sea in Crimea. These looked different, clean and beautiful, and I instantly loved them. Behind Dad and me stood the white flat-roofed building, four stories of identical windows ringed by black balconies. More Russians stomped around the lot, smoking the remnants of old Soviet cigarettes. Three rows of black letters over the entrance spelled out “Hotel Restaurant Binder.”

  “What’s that mean, Dad?”

  “Well, the first two are clear: there’s a hotel and a restaurant here, but I’m not sure about the binder … Lina!” he shouted to my sister, who poked her head out from the second-floor balcony. “What’s a binder?”