Alas! I never got a second lemon.
My sumptuous feasts ended the very next day. From then on, prisoners were unable to bring anything. Their supply of cigarettes was severely cut down, and this could damage the concord between the law enforcement and the petty criminal world. The KGB had obviously uncovered shocking facts of our life of luxury.
Finally the administration found a good citizen. Soon after arrival this former navy warrant-officer, a brave boxer, called me a saboteur and promised to put me in my place if I dared to offend his patriotic feelings. Nobody paid attention to him. We continued our political study.
Birdie, who failed to punish me on the day of my arrival, now became an expert on Christianity. “Why did you kill this Jesus?” he asked.
“Do you really care?” I said. “Maybe you’d prefer to tell us why you killed sixty million Russians during the twenty-nine years of Stalin’s rule?”
“I didn’t kill them. It was Stalin,” Birdie said.
“I didn’t kill Christ either,” I said. “Anyway, it was his predetermined destiny. But what an athlete this Stalin was! He alone killed more of his own people in peace-time than Hitler during the war. Could it be that our mustached God had millions of helping hands? Who were those turnkeys, and interrogators, and judges?”
“Jews,” Birdie said.
“I didn’t serve as a jailer or as a prosecutor, or in a shooting squad, or as an informer. Your neighbor did. He would help Stalin to send all of you to a camp—just for listening to me.”
“You’re crazy,” he said.
“Remember how tsar Nikita Khrushchev dragged the embalmed Stalin out of Lenin’s Mausoleum and put him in the garbage? Our saints aren’t immortal anymore. Today Nikita himself is in the garbage and we all dearly love you-know-whom...” I did not dare to utter the name of the Leader.
The main topic seemed to be quite innocent, and I was surprised when, thirty minutes later, the warrant-officer pushed me from behind in front of the urination trough. I lost my balance and stepped with one foot in the stinking gutter.
He said, “I’ll make you drink piss from the pail.”
The cop at the door was glowing with delight.
“We’ll see,” I said while walking to a sink. I took the shoe off and rinsed it under the tap. I took a sock off, washed it and used it to clean my naked foot. I washed and wrung the sock again. The good-natured jailer said, “Hurry up.”
My cellmates already knew about the threat. When we were taken back, one of them immediately blocked the peephole, two guys took hold of the patriot’s hands while the fourth—my taciturn friend from the wooden platform—quickly grabbed his hair with one hand and with the other covered his nose and mouth with a dirty cloth. In seconds, they began dragging him to the pail. The rest of the cellies were swearing approvingly. The more the patriot shook his head and mumbled through the rough cloth, the more they twisted his arms; he was becoming more and more bent forward to the stinking pail.
“He’s a brainwashed fool,” I said, “Let him go, guys. A happy slave.”
“You don’t know who the warden will bring here tomorrow,” my coolheaded friend knew what he was talking about. “You’re in trouble if they send in two more dogs like this.” For the first time he demonstrated an ability to produce sentences in correct Russian. After that he turned to slang again, “Check this out, piss-pot, next time I’ll bust you up.” To make his point more convincing, he hit the back of the patriotic warrant-officer’s head.
That quiet evening we talked about the over-fulfillment of the State Planning Committee’s five-year economic plans. To my surprise the audience found this subject easy to grasp. Flier summarized my boring delivery: “If you have to make ten screw-bolts in one day and instead you make fourteen, it means that the Socialist plan isn’t truly scientific. But if it’s scientific, it means that you screwed up all the bolts.”
“You should teach at Moscow University,” I said, “and make your students analyze the official slogan ‘Perform the five-year plan in four years!’ The government urges true patriots to do hack work. So, who is the saboteur? Remember Khrushchev’s favorite slogan ‘Catch up with and overtake America!’? In fact, this task was proclaimed during Lenin’s rule, in the early twentieth century. At that time even the new Socialist names were invented—Dognat (Catch-Up) and Peregnat (Overtake).”
Butcher interrupted me. “It’s not a big deal, and we can catch up with America.” He checked to see that everybody was looking at him, and finished triumphantly: “But if we overtake them, all the Americans would see our bare asses.”
I concealed from the audience that I knew the joke.
It seemed like ages since my fellow inmates stopped smuggling little goodies for me. The anxious men in uniform told them that if they were caught with even a rotten potato, this would be the last day of their cigarette business. My stomach struggled even with bread. Watery and gluey, it kept adhering to the teeth and gums, and only fingernails helped to unstick and push it down the gullet. Mother Nature is wise—my difficulties with our strict diet were fully compensated and balanced by unstoppable diarrhea.
One lucky day I enjoyed some rare solitude in the toilet. My bare bottom was hanging over the hole in the concrete floor. I ignored the nasty bouquet and thought about the meaning of life. My exalted thoughts were rudely disturbed by someone tickling my anus. In fear and disgust, I reached out and right away grabbed something slimy and wriggling between my fingers. At that crucial moment the only wish of my life was not to tear it apart or allow the creature or a part of it to slide back inside my intestines. What else can a human dream of?
I began slowly bringing the unlucky thing out and before my eyes. A five inch worm was dancing in my fingers. It was in one piece! What a relief! Alive and kicking! Sadly, it preferred suicide to my diet. I threw it into the hole.
One evening I saw a happy smile on the usually gloomy face of our navy warrant-officer. He said, “I have something for you,” and began unbuttoning his pants.
Someone yelled, “Hah, the boxer is an exhibitionist!”
Another one shouted, “No, I always knew this penis wrinkle was a fag!”
The warrant-officer kept struggling with his pants. He had difficulties bringing out his member. Eventually, he overcame the muddle and displayed a hidden treasure for public viewing. The prison walls were nearly shaken by the thunderous roars of laughter. A thick carrot was attached by a string to his otherwise unattractive penis. He did not allow an eager volunteer to tear away the carrot, which he gingerly untied and passed to me.
“Thank you very much,” I said politely. “You’ve turned me around your little finger.” He smiled from ear to ear. I rubbed the carrot with my coat and relished it thoroughly as I ate.
At dawn of my fifteenth, and last day in prison, I said, while shaking thirty-five hands of my cellmates, “To avoid our last plenary session, they might kick me out before you return from your paradise.”
Birdie shook my hand longer than the others.
In the afternoon I had two visitors, the warden and the lieutenant. Never before had I seen the warden. The overweight lieutenant colonel came to tell me that each day of my stay in prison I had been earning a transfer to solitary confinement for fifteen more days.
“I haven’t broken any prison regulations,” I said.
“You tried to foment a riot,” he said.
“No,” I said. “We talked quietly about the meaning of life.”
He shook his head and said, “You’re lucky,” and they departed.
An hour later the lieutenant was back. He said, “For systematic violation of regulations you are transferred to solitary confinement for seven days.”
I said, “I declare a dry hunger strike.”
I spoiled their game! The warden knew the meaning of the word “dry”; for him it meant a hospital after three days of not drinking any liquid, and for the KGB it meant new publicity for the Jewish emigration movement.
Two h
ours later I was released.
Just released from prison. November 5, 1976.
ONE
The Cliff Edge Where It All Began
MY BUMPY DESCENT into that prison began nearly twenty years before I was locked up there.
In the fall of 1958, after my escape from the northern city of Kostroma, where I had been living since 1956, I called Markevich, department head of the Working Woman magazine, Rabotnitsa. The essay I had just completed for him on the women of the forest was already in the galley, and recently he had talked of prospects for long-term cooperation. Markevich sighed, “So, you’ve returned to Moscow.” He sighed again. “What happened in Kostroma?”
“The First Secretary of the Regional Party Committee didn’t like my piece.”
“That was clear from the Literary Gazette’s response to the criticism for publishing your satire,” said Markevich.
“Oh, so you know,” I said, surprised.
“Well, that’s beside the point,” he said. “You’ve got to come in. My editor-in-chief wants to speak with you. She won’t publish your work.”
An hour later, as I walked into his office, Markevich asked, “Is it true—you sent us a piece already published in your Kostroma paper?”
I choked with hurt, “My editor knew that I was submitting to you the work mostly about the same timber enterprise. She called it ‘great publicity for our region.’” My voice was faltering. “I didn’t cheat. Your story is three times longer.”
“I think you’re in trouble. Tell Vavilina what really happened.”
The whole country knew Valentina Vavilina. As an appointed staunch opponent of the Western warmongers, she was an ever-present member of Soviet peace delegations, of the Committee of Soviet Women, of the Committee for the Defense of Peace, and a member of the Soviet parliament—a Supreme Soviet. In addition, she was photogenic.
“Does she know about my satire?”
He nodded.
I was screwed.
“Immediately after this lampoon, they demoted me,” I said, attempting to explain. “But the First Secretary wanted to keep me there until the end of the one-year trial period for my Party-candidacy. Then they could expose my political failure and moral unscrupulousness and not accept me into their ranks.”
“Yes, and no publication under the sun would accept you even as a doorman.”
If someone had told me that it was an incidental allusion to my distant future, I wouldn’t have believed them.
Vavilina, Supreme Soviet deputy, did not give me the chance to talk, though she was as sympathetic to me as circumstances unknown-to-me could allow.
“We cannot work with you currently. How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“You’re young, and I hope you’ll draw the right conclusion from this. By law, we’ll pay you fifty percent of the fee for the galleys.”
At this, the audience was over.
I returned to Markevich with the voice of an injured child. “I guess, I should see this fee as a bold manifestation of support.”
“If Vavilina wanted to,” he said, “she could find a reason not to pay you a kopeck.”
Only one thing was clear—the Father-of-the-Kostroma-Region was able to stop even my unpublished essay. All my efforts to find work would henceforth have to be kept secret.
My parents saw our dour expressions when my wife Irina and I talked in hushed voices on the couch three yards from them. We had no other place to live.
My father spoke: “Stop whispering, children. Your secret is known to everyone. You’re our family and can live in this room for as long as you wish.”
“Tomorrow morning, in the line for your only restroom,” I said grimly, “ask the neighbors of this communal apartment for their opinion on this hot subject.”
My mother stepped into our conversation. “Aunt Fannie invited all of us to dinner,” she said.
“Their son will bring a family friend who works for the TASS agency,” Papa said.
But I knew that all TASS correspondents abroad were intelligence operatives. Their Human Resources would have been examining my behavior since I came into this world at the maternity hospital.
“And kids, please, don’t joke about Jews on a visit to Fannie. In 1919, Ukrainian bandits…”—Mama searched for the right words—“tore this journalist’s mother to pieces while he lay in plain sight in a cradle. Fannie already was in a potato sack; the Ukrainian family made a little hole in it for her to breathe, and she heard a man stomping around the bags in the dark cellar looking for her and crying out, ‘Where is this skinny Jewess?!’”
“This friend must be very influential,” I said. “TASS, the largest news network in the world, already has its token Jew.”
“It’s a widespread notion that you Jews are very good at promoting each other,” Irina said.
We were having a nice dinner when the gray-haired TASS journalist said, “I’ve heard you are an expert on agriculture.” He was quiet and confident.
With my recent experience I was cautious. “Yes, for a Muscovite I’m an expert—after two years of working in Kostroma I can tell a plow from a rake.”
“Can’t you be serious for a change?” My wife’s voice cracked.
“Okay, I reported on various agricultural activities, about meat and dairy farms, about flax, oats, and politically illiterate corn, which, regardless of Party directives, refuses to grow in the north.”
He was amused. “The political fashion!”
We left the table, and I could not help but talk about the forest and about lumberjacks freed from hard labor camps a few months before my arrival in 1956. This was three years after Stalin’s death, and they still celebrated it every year, though cautiously. The TASS correspondent was not interested in the forest and asked whether I was a Party member.
“I’m a candidate,” I replied.
Days later, when my new acquaintance opened a heavy door upholstered with leather, four men of commanding appearance were waiting for us in the huge office. I doubted such a procedure was routine for hiring a newcomer. Everybody shook my hand and introduced himself. The Agricultural Department’s head led the conversation. He asked, “Have you ever milked a cow?”
They all laughed.
“I was brave enough,” I said, “to touch the udder and even attempted to milk one unhappy creature. When she resisted, I tried to talk her into cooperation. Alas, neither party enjoyed this encounter.”
My audience chuckled, and I continued to develop the story. “I also took a stab at dragging heavy cans of milk. The girls were all giggling but after that, they shared with me their concerns and worries. They still work with a kerosene lamp hanging on a hook. The mechanization and electrification of all processes is needed; otherwise, the future of Kostroma dairy farms looks grim.”
“It’s obvious that you take to heart the problems of our agriculture,” said the Head of the Main Editorial Board, who was chairing the gathering. “I will reveal to you our little secret—our esteemed colleague was very pleased with the chance to converse with you. I don’t see a reason to test your skills and knowledge; you’ve already provided us with compelling clippings.” He smiled. “In addition, you’ve just shown your ability to gather the material.”
I was delighted.
“There is one more thing we have to stress,” said the Agricultural Department head. “I’m sure you understand the political importance of every single word produced by TASS. Our product is reprinted by hundreds of Soviet and foreign papers. Classified parts of our material go directly to the leadership of the country.”
The chair concluded the meeting, “Now we can pass you into the caring hands of our Human Resources Chief.”
The KGB general, I thought. As the only person making written notes during our conversation, he flashed a smile as he handed me a small piece of paper. “Call me Monday morning at this number,” he said.
That big Monday morning finally arrived. I called him and only managed to say
, “This is Arkady Polishchuk,” before he interrupted me. This aging KGB man sounded like a young detective in a movie who caught the perpetrator in the act. “Now we know you better,” he said. “You’re not the person whom you claim to be.”
He hung up.
I felt a sharp pain in my left temple. Only now did I understand the extent of the Kostroma Region’s first secretary’s influence. They called my satire a slander—but it wasn’t really a crime by any stretch of imagination. Had it ruined his ambitious plans to create a branch of the Union of Soviet Writers in his patrimony? Neighboring regions already had such branches, and some boy from Moscow had dared to prevent him from acquiring his own group of nationally well-known writers. He defended the honor and dignity of the Party while I, a fool, thought that I had simply been making fun of the three literary fraudsters with Party cards in their pockets.
I DECIDED TO LOOK for help where it all began nine years ago, when instead of high school finals I had dreamed of my upcoming brilliant career in journalism. The section editor of the youth newspaper Moscow Komsomolets remembered me and my silly failure to understand why my first satire was slaughtered by the censor.
“I hope, old man, you wised up out there in the bucolic hinterland.” The paper’s old hand still bowed his head, now more grizzled, to the side and narrowed an eye as if evaluating his interlocutor.
“Not really,” I said.
“Then re-educate yourself into a house manager while you’re still young,” he suggested cheerfully.
“I’m looking for a job and ready to be your freelancer again.”
“I have a feeling that you’re in trouble,” he said and took me to the third floor, to “a good man at a new and rapidly growing paper.”
This “good man,” Yegor Yakovlev, greeted me like an old friend.
“I’ve read your lampoon. You whipped them nicely.”
Flattered, I gave no sign of it, saying only, “I paid for this dubious honor.”
“You came here right on time.”
Dancing on Thin Ice Page 3