Dancing on Thin Ice

by Arkady Polishchuk

  “No,” he said. “Russia won all wars. Lenin overthrew the tsar. Haven’t you seen the movie Lenin in October?”

  I asked if I could take a nap after two sleepless nights. He said “no”; it was against regulations.

  The prisoners returned from the warehouse in a good mood. Three of them obviously had a buzz on. The fellow nicknamed Butcher fake-punched my chest with the fist, quickly, like in boxing. “Did they peel you?” he asked.

  “No, and your stuff is fully intact. Guards have an order not to search me.”

  “Can’t believe it!” he said in a booming voice and opened his clenched fist; I was blinded by the shining beauty of two fat cloves of garlic. My new buddy Nikolai tapped him on the shoulder while I was consuming with passion this sweet heavenly treat.

  “How do you manage to bring in the cigarettes?” I asked.

  “The men are in business with us. We pinch apples, oranges, onions, and stuff, and kick down this loot to them. Right at the storage. Sometimes I climb over the fence, just two strings of barbed wire, the guys pass me a couple of boxes, and I drag them behind the corner and hawk stuff to passersby. We give money to the pigs; they buy cigarettes and some vodka for us and for themselves.” Butcher punched the air with a fist.

  “You’re such a showoff, Butcher. Stop yelling.” It was my seasoned defender of the last evening. “The guard is always walking by. You’re not at the top of Mount Ararat,” he added, hinting at Butcher’s Armenian roots.

  “The Turks took Ararat from us centuries ago,” Butcher muttered under his breath. “The men who shake us down at the checkpoint, confiscate food and take their cut of fags.”

  After everybody had settled on the planks, they asked me why I wanted to leave Russia. I put out my sole condition, “Don’t hesitate to ask nasty questions.”

  Someone instantly said, “Why do Jews put Christian blood in matzo bread?”

  The question caught me off-guard and I said, “There are many fairy tales about Jews. Who has heard about Jews having horns?”

  “I did,” said one prisoner.

  “Me too,” said the frail boy, my neighbor.

  “So, I’m here, try to find ‘em.” They all laughed. “Well, you laugh now, but when you heard it for the first time, did you laugh?”

  “My kindergarten buddy told me,” said the frail boy. “I was scared.”

  “Just four hundred years ago every European believed it.”

  “Interesting,” he said, scratching his disheveled head fiercely.

  The frail boy began to feel chatty. “Where did they get water in that desert for their matzo?”

  I responded, “All I know is that for the first two thousand years—poor me!—I was unable to pour your blood into my matzo.” Heat rushed to my face as if I was admitting my Jewish crime. It took effort to look them in the eyes. “Christians didn’t even exist at that time. Is there anybody here who has ever read the Bible? Nobody. I myself read it only recently. You can’t buy or get it from a library.”

  “Do you eat matzo bread?” was the next question from deep in the cell.

  “I will, if you can find some for me. My mother used to buy it in April on the black market. It’s when my buddy makes his Easter cake and guess what? He always puts on it this six-pointed star you’ve seen in caricatures against Zionist murderers. He says all the first followers of Christ were Jews...”

  “It’s a falsehood!”

  “It’s what the New Testament says. And he believes that they had been putting this Star of David on their Easter cakes. He, secretly a Christian, doesn’t go to church—the priest is obliged to report every newcomer; my friend is a Party member.”

  “Did he give you his Bible to read?”

  “He doesn’t have one. I saw a handwritten copy of the New Testament in one underground church. Would you believe it? It’s huge, like this!” I parted wide my thumb and the index finger. “And one more thing, I’m no less Russian than you are.”

  “You’re not a Russian; you’re a communist,” giggled an inmate called Flier. His name aroused my interest in him.

  “A good point—all of us are more communists than Russians. Twenty million Party members. Generation after generation we’ve been reading the same papers and books, watching the same movies, worshiping the same saints. And what do they tell us? ‘We’re good,’ ‘We’re building Paradise,’ ‘They’re bad’—‘“They”’ live in Hell.’ Look at yourselves—are we any good? Aren’t we in Hell already? Remember Nikita Khrushchev? He put in the Party Program the exact date of our arrival at that Paradise—four years from now. So boys, be patient, just wait a little and in 1980 they will destroy this prison and overnight put a flowerbed here instead. And all of us, when we wake up that morning, won’t be drunks anymore. For the first time in years we’ll brush our teeth, or what’s left of them, and become gardeners taking good care of roses and drinking lemonade for the rest of our no-longer-stinky lives!”

  And as had happened at the moment of my arrival, raucous laughter flooded the cell.

  “Now,” I concluded, “thanks to the inquisitive questions of my distinguished colleagues, you have learned why Jews want to leave this country. And on this friendly exchange, let’s finish today’s concert. The performer will be given seven years of hard labor in Perm camp #36.”

  “Amen!” said Flier.

  “Are you actually a flier?” I asked.

  “No, I’m an engineer, build planes,” he said with some pride.

  “Only one more thing,” I said. “I don’t want to emigrate. Who needs a Russian journalist in the West?”

  “Then why did you take part in that demonstration?”

  “Solidarity,” I said. “Remember what’s written across the top of Pravda?”

  “Sure,” Flier said, “Proletarians of the World, Unite!’”

  “Proletarians of the World,” Butcher solemnly exclaimed, “kiss my ass!”

  “You’re crazy,” Nikolai said an hour later when I was laying next to him. “I don’t understand this stuff, but I need your advice.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “I’m a candidate-member of the Party. In half a year my candidate term will be over.”

  “And if they refuse to accept you as a full member of the Party, you’ll lose your job and all the perks it delivers, and you’ll load furniture for the rest of your life.”

  “You’re very smart. Think of something! I’m sure the guys covered my absence in the store for a while. I always did it for them.”

  “Take the lead,” I said. “Write a letter to your Party committee. Beat your breast. Blame it all on the love you bear for your wife. Tell them the truth, but not the whole truth. Say that you, drunk like a sailor, tried to catch a taxi in the middle of Moscow’s main street. Police arrested you, you stumbled on a stair at the police office, broke two ribs, damaged your cute face and, after fifteen days in jail, you stayed at home for another two weeks, burning with shame. Until all healed. Give the honest Party word that never again shalt thou drink.”

  “You think it will help?”

  “It might, if you have no enemies. Russia has been soft on drunks for centuries. They can extend your trial period, your candidate status. I also had a problem with my term of probation for Party membership.”

  “Tell me. What happened?”

  “Ah, in short: I published a satire, some twenty years ago, but a member of the Party’s Central Committee was offended and my piece was pronounced ‘anti-Soviet.’ These guys are more important than several ministers lumped together. If this big gun were to succeed, I’d be a lumberjack for the rest of my life.”

  “Listen,” Nikolai said, his face lighting up, “could you quit whatever you do now and work for me? You’ll get rich soon.”

  “So you’re also crazy. The KGB would put you in jail in a heartbeat.”

  “You’re right.” He sighed. “But listen, if you need money, come to me, I will help. I’m serious.”

  “Thank you,
Nik.”

  I thought, poor Nikolai! He still has healthy impulses.

  “I know some very, very important people,” he whispered. “They might help.”

  “Be careful,” I said. “Important people are good at dumping their friends. Unless they need you.”

  “Did they dump you?”

  “No. Thanks to important friends, I didn’t go to jail for seven years, and I remained a journalist after that satire.”

  Finally I understood what we had in common. Naiveté.

  Everybody was already asleep. Nikolai pressed his turned-up nose against my ear and whispered, “Sometimes Brezhnev buys furniture for his whores in our store.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “One of his assistants always calls and asks us to deliver the same suite of furniture to a new address. He always tells me to control the delivery carefully, to go with the suite and the loaders I trust, and to be present when it’s unpacked and follow the instructions of the person who’s waiting for us.”

  “A person? A half-naked beauty?”

  “No. All three times it was the same man in a custom-made dark suit. He always knew how and where to put it all.”

  “Did you like the apartments?”

  “New houses, you know, very good apartments for a family of four—a bedroom, a nice kitchen with a window, you can even put a small table there, a decent living room with a balcony, an anteroom. Nice!”

  “You should see if this guy who calls you can help.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “The invoice always lists office furniture. It was his idea. It was he who encouraged me to join the Party.”

  “They entrusted you with a top state secret. And they wouldn’t want to lose sight of you and have you become a loose cannon.”

  We again had something in common—I also possessed a top state secret, and the KGB for sure did not want to let me out of sight. It was a sad irony in my thinking. What was more dangerous—to know how many beds Comrade Brezhnev had given to his mistresses or the identities and assignments of a dozen Soviet spies? I did not reach a definite conclusion and asked, “Have you ever seen this man?”

  “No, but he gave me his phone number, and I called him a couple of times when we were waiting too long for the next delivery from Egypt.”

  “From Egypt?”

  “Yes. It’s great furniture, better than Finnish. Lots of gold and ivory.”

  “For every sweetheart exactly the same reward?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is what we call true democracy,” I said. “Equal pay. Equal rights. Equal opportunity employer.”

  “I think,” said Nikolai, “the presidents of Israel and the USA also have whores.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but they buy them different suites of furniture, and this creates an inequality of women’s rights.”

  Laughing quietly, Nikolai then said in all seriousness, “The main thing is to make sure that the bed won’t creak.”

  “If it creaks, not only you, but I bet also the bureaucrat who calls you, would be sacked and expelled from the Party. The president of Egypt might also lose his job.”

  “It’s not real gold and ivory,” said Nik.

  “The founder of this state promised to use gold in communist society for toilet bowls.”

  “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin? You’re kidding,” whispered Nik.

  “Actually, I’m not.”

  On the fourth day after my arrest a newcomer shook my hand. He had heard on America’s Radio Liberty about our demonstration—a broadcaster had mentioned me by name. Listening through heavy jamming required patience and craving for knowledge. And in this way I was introduced to the goddess of lucky chance, Miss Publicity. Quickly word spread through the mess hall and toilet, so the news arrived to Victor Elistratov, Michael Kremen, and Felix Kandel, my partners in crime locked away in other cells.

  The very next day, the 25th of October, each cell had its own celebrated Jew, altogether fifteen men who had taken part in a demonstration in support of our two-day sit-in inside Brezhnev’s Reception Room. On October 26th another newcomer told us that the American president named either “Garter” or “Garder” sent a telegram to Brezhnev urging our release. It was the presidential candidate Jimmy Carter.

  I was in the toilet minding my own business at the trough when somebody put a hand on my shoulder. I turned around—it was a black-bearded refusenik named Isaac Elkind. “Welcome to the club,” I said. I hadn’t seen him since Brezhnev’s Reception Room, where Isaac had been quietly petitioning for an exit visa to Israel and joined us, but was not arrested with our gang because he was sitting with timid people petitioning for their imprisoned relatives. What had he done to end up here?

  “Fifty Jews marched to the Party’s Central Committee,” he said, “surrounded by an army of plainclothes KGB agents.”

  A policeman at the door began yelling at us.

  “Continue peeing,” I said.

  “This is it,” Isaac said. “I can’t.”

  “Shake it!” I said.

  “We all wore yellow Stars of David!” he said, his voice broken from the effort.

  “Great!” I said. “Jews are becoming impudent.”

  “A bunch of Gypsies saw us, and one of them yelled, ‘Look! Sheriffs!’”

  “Hah—ha! Hollywood should be proud of such a great cultural success. And stop the violent shaking of your toy! You might get a headache.”

  EVERY EVENING my cell had a political study class. There was even a student behind a wall—a young fellow in the punishment cell. He had heard our indiscernible voices and managed to hollow out a narrow hole in that crumbling wall. Sometimes I heard him shouting “Wow!” right into that breach, enthusiastic applause, and merciless beating on the old wall. “Comrade Wow” had been transferred from our cell to the windowless punishment room before my arrival.

  We met by chance, face to face, so to speak. We both had diarrhea and were fortunate that the man in uniform watching our behavior in the toilet was that old carelessly-shaven policeman whose only concern was his upcoming retirement. Maybe our quiet talking gave him a chance to daydream at the door.

  Before his arrest, the young man had spent the evening with his fiancée in a restaurant of the Moscow Hotel known for its good dance orchestra. They waltzed, tangoed and hugged, danced and kissed, drank some dry wine, kissed after every sip, and were happy. When the lovebirds were leaving this monument to ponderous Stalinist architecture, a collision on a scale of an ancient Greek tragedy took place. Outside the entrance there were several immense square columns. Comrade Wow rushed between them toward a taxi, to get ahead of others and to open the door for his girl. At that particular split-second two cops were coming out from behind a column. The bridegroom knocked one of them off his feet. The whole Pantheon of Greek gods could not prevent this.

  He apologized many times. His fiancée apologized many times. But the policemen brought him to a police station, and when he begged them to measure his level of alcohol intoxication, the whole station laughed. When he begged after midnight to let him go—today was his wedding day, they laughed even harder. He threatened to take them to court, and that was hilarious. In the morning the judge sent him here. He was crying, swearing, kicking the cell door and demanding to see a prosecutor until guards locked him in the solitary sweatbox.

  I expressed my sympathy to the fellow, “From now on you should believe in fate. Are you an atheist?”

  “Of course,” he said, “I’m an engineer. And you?”

  “Not anymore, but I’m afraid, in my temple there is only one parishioner. Lately I’ve met very religious people and have come to admire them greatly.”

  “Jews?”

  “No, Christians.”

  “Difficult to believe that there are still some true believers here. Who are they?”

  “Pentecostals, Baptists, other Evangelicals.”

  “These are terrible people! Sectar
ians!”

  “The best people I ever met. They could be a treasure for any country, but here they’re considered to be weirdos—they don’t drink, don’t beat their wives, don’t swear, don’t steal.”

  “How do you know all of this?”

  “I’m trying to help some of them.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s tempting to answer your ‘why’ pompously, like, it’s easy to help your own tribe—it’s like helping yourself, anyway, but try to help those who aren’t like you…. But even this is a shallow answer. I envy them. They are innocent like children. Their only crime is their faith.”

  “Faith also helped to kill millions,” he said.

  “True. But atheism, to a large degree is also a religion; the same goes for Communism—it also killed millions, and it isn’t familiar with the word ‘repentance’.”

  Our Argus at the latrine’s door apparently returned to this sinful earth from his dreams of retirement. He began gesticulating at us and yelling, “You guys have no shame!”

  When we walked to the door, I said, “I’m sure, if you see a drowning child, you’d try to help.”

  “Go. Go!” the guard growled. “Professor!”

  “But a child can drag you to the bottom,” said my interlocutor.

  “Yes, it happens.”

  While the old jailer was fiddling with the key of my cell, the young engineer asked, “Why didn’t you talk about them with your cellmates?”

  “I’m here as a Jew,” I said.

  The prison administration was aware of my sermons and took measures to stop this disgrace. The lieutenant brought two of the stronger cellmates to his office and suggested they knock the crap out of me and write a report about my anti-Soviet propaganda. They refused, and one of them was proud of it. The other fellow was nervous, yet managed to bring me a tiny onion. Once Nikolai brought a skimpy lemon. The dirty, unripe lemon with greenish skin tasted sweet, not sour at all. There must be a medical explanation for why the lemon was sweet. On that day, I managed to pass a small onion to Anatoly Sharansky, a fellow inmate from the next cell and a future Israeli minister. He had a high fever and was sick as a dog.