Dancing on Thin Ice

by Arkady Polishchuk

  “Aren’t you afraid that you might go to jail for this sort of talk?” his wife asked me.

  “Hard-working KGB men, snitches, and Party workers don’t do ice dancing.”

  I was wrong. In the spring of 1971, when the sun began melting our ice again, Alexei invited me to a perfect rink. He had been helping to expand a miniscule group of Soviet elite ice-dancing lovers who were training at the only enclosed figure-skating rink in the largest city of Europe, off-limits to us. Coached by a European ice dancing champion, mostly women, led by an overweight deputy chairman of the USSR’s Council of Ministers, they needed men. Professionals, who under the guise of amateurs took part in the Olympics, used that rink all year round. I was ready to sacrifice my convictions and asked Alexei not to tell this deputy chairman that in the last elections I managed to slip into my pocket the ballot with the name of his boss, Premier Kosygin. Under the watchful eye of plainclothes patriots, I put a blank piece of paper into the ballot box.

  “What did you do with the stolen ballot?” asked his wife.

  “Presented it to someone.”

  “Do you have children?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Do you have parents? Friends? Aren’t you a bit old for this mischief?”

  “I want to embellish my boring life. It’s sickening to know that if I play by the rules, I’m destined for success.”

  “Arkady, you’re playing with fire,” she said.

  “All of these are childish pranks,” I said. “What else is there to do? Blow up Lenin’s Mausoleum?”

  “Some Jews have begun emigrating,” Alexei sighed. “Maybe you too should go.”

  “I’m forty one, have the wrong occupation, don’t know any other languages, and my only sister and her husband are much older,” I said. “The KGB will never allow me to go. They might imprison me—I know a few of their secrets. I don’t want to lose my friends. My mother will cry her heart out for as long as she’s alive. Shall I go on?”

  I shared this encounter with a gloomy Tom Kolesnichenko. “You don’t even know what you want,” he said. “To quit your job? It’s crazy. To emigrate? It’s even worse. The KGB will never let you go. The simple truth is that the whole world is mired in shit. Any state is a cage; you escape one only to find yourself in another. Here is shit, and there is shit. A good place to be is the only one where we’ve never traveled.”

  I was not convinced, so he became more specific. “If I were the KGB, I would let you go to the West,” he said. “You’d be an outsider; nobody needs you there. You couldn’t survive a day without the Moscow chatter, and you’d be dumb and silent. You’d die of longing for me.”

  “Now you’ve convinced me,” I said. “I will stay in this cage and join the dissidents.”

  “They’re either plain crazy or suicidal. You’re making me upset.” Tom babbled some nonsense: “I will secretly feed this unemployable derelict for the rest of my life. … Let’s find you a bride with ties to the Politburo.”

  The rest of my friends also expressed their strong opinions.

  “If I were a Jew,” said Gena Snegiryov, “I’d leave today. On foot. It’s unfair—why don’t they allow ethnic Russians to emigrate?”

  “You, in your sweet sixteen, sailed in the Pacific with ichthyologists to Chukotka,” I snapped, angry for no particular reason. “Why didn’t you jump ship on an ice floe, sailing to Alaska? Today the Jews are clambering up it.”

  “I was too young!” Gena said condescendingly, and before starting his usual search for any kind of pain medication in my apartment, he said wistfully, “Send me a pair of jeans from America.”

  I promised.

  Fred Solyanov, a stagehand again, said, “It’s madness to be so open with people you just met.”

  “Look who’s talking?” I shot back. “Wasn’t it you who in 1968 shared his not so humble opinion with the entire staff of the Theater Museum?”

  “I didn’t have as heavy a stone hanging around my neck as your correspondents. Be ready for a long incarceration.”

  Another university friend, Nahl Zlobin said only: “When you suddenly started to dance on ice, I knew that the whole show was coming to an end.”

  ONLY ABOUT TWO YEARS later did I finally decide to talk to my sister and her husband. Maria’s dreams were fixed on the future of her daughter and on having the right contacts in food and clothing stores. Her husband Simon’s life was devoted to a new phenomenon in Russian life—his vegetable garden. He tolerated useless flowers only near the gate. This land, allocated for factories to fight food shortages, was the most visible part of Khrushchev’s economic reforms after Stalin’s death. Workers were happy to get these smallish plots, usually far away from their homes and workplaces; the green light was given even for building summer cottages there. With the permanent housing crisis, the regime feared that allowing construction of heated houses in these suburbs would lead to the plundering of building materials across the country. To prevent this explosion of antisocial behavior, small summer kitchens were permitted to be built only at a considerable distance from dwellings. This wise solution was explained as a measure to prevent fires. Thus, the citizens were forced to steal and cheat less in their attempts to provide for better living conditions in their summer nests.

  There was no phone in their community, three miles from the nearest village Odintsovo and its railroad station, and the road was sometimes impassable even for pedestrians in high rubber boots, except for my brother-in-law Simon with his high spirit. My sister hated this garden. The piercing smell of the stolen chicken manure lovingly spread over their plot pursued Maria even to her Moscow communal apartment. Lucky Simon bought this treasure for a song on a neighboring collective farm.

  Maria’s first question to me was not rhetorical: “Are you crazy?”

  “Would you go if it weren’t dangerous?” I asked.

  While she pondered the answer, Simon said, “We might.”

  “You have to emigrate for the sake of your future grandchildren,” I said.

  “Tanya will soon marry a nice Russian boy,” my sister said, perking up a bit.

  “Mazel tov!” I said, trying not to sound ironic. “Will you try to squeeze him into this birdhouse?”

  She shrugged. Explaining anything was useless. Our worlds were far apart, but I had to introduce to them my world with its choice between imprisonment or maltreatment and an attempt to emigrate. I promised to apply for an exit visa on one sole condition—if they would also apply. For their sake, I thought, I’ll keep quiet as a mouse in anticipation of the official answer. Probably, they’ll get the visa. No doubt, I’ll be denied it.

  “Because you’ve been published in Pravda?” asked Simon.

  I burst out laughing. “No, because your daughter was born in the Ural Mountains,” I said. “Does she know how you, as a Jew, were kicked out of your Moscow plant a couple of years before Stalin’s death, and forced to accept a similar position in Kamensk Uralsky?”

  “It wasn’t easy to get back here from the Ural Mountains even after his death,” he said. “That’s why I’m an ordinary engineer now.”

  They had a good chance to get visas. Nothing but state abuse and humiliation threatened them if they applied for it: they were old, and Tanya’s future occupation as a high school geography teacher was laughable as far as the KGB was concerned. In Russia, there were few schools with this position. “Simon,” I said, “When they unanimously expel you from the Party, scream that as soon as the plane lands in Tel Aviv, you’ll join it again. Blame it all on me.”

  I did not want to cause a heart attack, but I had to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. “I know one state secret,” I said, “and the KGB knows that I know it.”

  Fear froze their faces. They did not dare ask me what it was. Both were dejectedly silent. I myself was not so sure that my chance to survive this was by balancing on a tightrope—keeping silent on this sensitive subject, but making a lot of noise about the regime’s human rights abuses. I made it
clear to Maria and Simon that I would start hectoring the KGB as soon as their plane took off.

  They could not bear to think about the ordeal that I brought to their table, but, as always, I was deliciously fed. My sister looked at me the way people look at a corpse. After dinner, I tried to broaden their horizons. They were unaware that in their Ural city, they lived with the descendants of Russian slaves who, ninety years before, had been permanently assigned to factories. As I spoke, their tired, empty eyes made me stop the history lesson.

  “Why do you think we’d be allowed to go?” Simon asked.

  “They would benefit from isolating me from my family,” I said. “And, in the worst-case scenario, even from the parcels of black crackers that my sis would be allowed to send me twice a year,” I added, delicately hinting at imprisonment regulations.

  “Give us some time,” Simon said.

  “Okay. Just remember, my silence will be working against me.”

  “I don’t understand this,” Maria whined. “You make twice as much money as we two together. You have a lovely apartment. Papa was proud of you.”

  A few days later Simon called. “We agree,” he said, his voice cracking.

  “Don’t discuss it with Mama,” I said. “I’ll do it myself.”

  “And you, please, don’t talk about it with our daughter.”

  I kept my word and went for the first time to the only synagogue in Moscow. My heart was pounding. Outside there was a crowd of Jews who had applied for exit visas or who had talked about applying for years. Many spoke in whispers, inquisitively looking at each other, and, warily, at the police and the passersby. I felt like a full member of a global Jewish conspiracy.

  My first step was to get acquainted with a man whose name I never bothered to find out. On the street outside the synagogue I passed him a piece of paper with the names and addresses of the new five-member Zionist cell, including my mother who never learned of her participation in this global cabal. He often looked around and during those moments fell silent.

  “This invitation,” the man said, “is a mere formality, but without it no official will talk to you. Some diplomats and tourists bring them.”

  He obviously knew about some mysterious relatives who would be delighted to invite us to live in Israel, though they wouldn’t be frustrated if we ended up somewhere else. I asked him if he ever entered the doors of this synagogue.

  “Why?” he said. “To listen to that KGB man in a yarmulke? There are enough of his colleagues right around here. What’s your occupation?”

  “Journalism,” I shyly admitted.

  “Don’t waste your time. Master a more respectable profession.”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything. Car mechanic. Doorman. Electrician, plumber.”

  “How will I get the invitations?”

  “Come here. Get acquainted with refuseniks. They will help. All the others are very passive—they want to sail quickly and that’s that.”

  “The KGB could easily block this flow of invitations,” I said. “There must be a reason why they don’t do that.”

  “I never thought of that,” the man said.

  I thought, what if he was going to deliver our names right to the KGB?

  Soon I entered this strange world. In the morning, as usual, I went to work. And in the evening, instead of ice-dancing, I was making friends with people who just yesterday had been of little interest to me. Many of them had been ostracized for years, thrown out of society and driven from their jobs in disgrace. The Soviet citizen lived from paycheck to paycheck. Somehow the refuseniks continued to exist. People took up any job. Massive Russian corruption helped many to survive. A foreman and a plant manager enrolled his wife/mistress/niece to the post which was held by engineer Katz expelled yesterday in disgrace. The work was still done by Katz, and everybody was happy. A relative/mistress/friend received a salary and honestly gave half of it to the grateful Katz. There were many other win-win options. My friend Victor Elistratov the engineer became a stoker, doctors washed floors in hospitals, teachers gave private lessons, and a surgical nurse continued to work in the operating room with a salary of a cleaning lady.

  A large group of refuseniks preferred going to the synagogue to having any contact with people suspected of political activities—only “hooligans,” people close to my heart, sought such acquaintances. Some refuseniks were sincere in saying, “We don’t intend to change this country. All we want is to get out of here.” Some were hoping that such a “neutral” stand would protect them from more serious trouble.

  Yet all these groups were not isolated from each other by a stone wall, and those who yesterday took part in scientific and cultural workshops, sometimes out of desperation joined the “hooligans” and participated in various protests, including demonstrations, hunger strikes, refusal to serve in the army, and sending abroad collective letters addressed to the Soviet authorities. Nevertheless, there was a group who lived in complete isolation, avoiding any contacts outside their immediate families, and hoping that good behavior would be eventually rewarded with visas.

  Rather than exposing a new Jewish conspiracy and sentencing to death a few conspirators and spies, the authorities cracked open the steel gate, and thousands of Jews, humiliated and robbed by the state, were allowed to leave the country. Just a few hundred of them were punished severely. It seemed that the Party, by slightly opening the society, which could operate only in complete isolation, had gone mad and lost its sense of self-preservation.

  EIGHT

  The Unpredictable World of Dissent

  WITH RESPECT TO the security apparatus, the refuseniks lived out their segregation under a transparent dome, and yet I was surprised to be detained while heading with innocent intentions to the Korenfelds, a hospitable family of refuseniks who often hosted an extremely motley crowd.

  We were all arrested in different parts of the neighborhood—in the street and at the streetcar stop, at their apartment building entrance, and next to the elevator. Had the KGB waited to arrest us all at the door of this family, it would have needed only a fraction of the agents involved in the sting operation that was intended to prevent a demonstration which, as it turned out, was not planned by anyone. Maybe the top brass sought to demonstrate to higher command the scope of the operation foretold to be a complete success. In this respect the KGB was no different from other ministries, whether it was the Ministry of Culture, Defense, Health, Foreign Affairs, or Agriculture. Part and parcel of everyday life, this kind of bureaucratic cheating was embodied in Newspeak by one simple word known to every citizen—“pripiski.” At least six words are needed to translate it into English: “gross exaggerations of achieved results and fake reports.” They—pripiski—were used not only in Uzbek cotton production and the Kostroma milk yield, but also in building up the military power, in running elections, and in reporting on the progress in the struggle for world peace.

  I worried. What would happen to me at work after the KGB notified everyone that the executive editor was actually a rabid Zionist? Our editorial Jews and half-Jews and quarter-Jews would shit their pants on the spot. I had hoped that my first chance to try out my strategy would not come until after I had sent my Party card to the District Party Committee and my sister had applied for exit visas. Now suddenly, I was exposed fluttering and then pinned to the wall like a butterfly. This could definitely spoil my game, and so, desperate, I decided to challenge the two KGB officers, to show that I didn’t fear them, didn’t give a damn, and wasn’t about to be intimidated with such a trifle as the first arrest.

  They ignored my challenge and more than that, the blond who handled us acted like a normal human. This KGB man was unusually frank. He had just returned from a business trip in Mordovia (everybody knew that this forested republic had more prisoners than local citizens); we were detained for our own good, and he warned us against attempting to join the next day’s demonstration timed to coincide with the arrival of Henry Kissinger. He hinted at the
Mordovia option. In the past Blondie had worked as an instructor of a District Party Committee. He even shared with us a much more serious secret—the following day he was expecting there to be a lot of work if it were necessary to arrest and bring to court another fifteen people.

  To maintain my mental health, my subconscious likely ordered me to forget the details of this first encounter which earned me a place on the KGB’s list of public enemies. This memory lapse tells me how deeply this first apprehension disturbed me. Fortunately, among us was an architect, Gary Berkovich. Thanks to a passion for recording significant events in his life, Gary’s 2006 memoir Guinea Pigs3 revived in my memory many details of that encounter.

  According to Gary, when the officer said that he was writing a thesis, I asked, “On the use of force against detainees?”

  The Jews at the police station were shocked by my senseless impudence. Blondie replied in a good, cultured manner, “No, my dissertation is on the role of grassroots Party units in the fire departments.”

  I will never believe that Gary, even with his sardonic grin, could invent such a gem about the Party heroically battling these apolitical forest fires on both sides of the barbed wire while thousands of prisoners were felling trees inside. So, my good friend must have also certainly quoted me correctly.

  Probably, after a hard fight with my facial muscles, I was able to ask innocently, “In Mordovia? On logging projects?”

  At that moment Blondie’s boss came into the room and asked, “What are you talking about?”

  I blurted out, “Chicks, what else?”

  He ignored my vulgarity. When the man said that he had also written a thesis, I lost all concern for self-preservation. “About defending the interests of an individual in a democratic society?” I asked.

  The boss abandoned his scholarly manners and put a stop to my innuendo. “Don’t get smart with me, Polishchuk,” he snapped. “The interests of a person are subordinate to the interests of the state.”

  At this point my sense of humor forever abandoned me, and I became hysterical, “Don’t you know that people hate you and your state?”