Dancing on Thin Ice

by Arkady Polishchuk

  “This took my breath away,” wrote Berkovich. He magnanimously explained my behavior by my long experience as a desperate refusenik whose tough life had shattered his nerves. In fact, like Gary, I still worked and had not received an invitation from Israeli “relatives.”

  I never behaved so stupidly again.

  Those two PhD impersonators with poker faces obviously shared the popular belief that all Jews were smart and educated so, to find a common language with us, they talked about their theses. To strengthen Jewish respect for them, their jackets were decorated with the commemorative badges of Moscow University graduates. They certainly could not imagine that shortly after graduating from that University, I presented my diamond-shaped badge to a neighbor’s boy who paraded it around the neighborhood sandbox.

  So we were arrested only to be quickly released to help prevent the upcoming demonstration. Our captors’ wise superiors understood that we would immediately begin warning everyone about the impending arrests. At midnight I woke up the veteran refusenik Vladimir Slepak. He forgave me. The “hooligans” hadn’t planned such a demonstration in the first place.

  The next morning at the editorial office I felt like a tiny fish in the KGB’s glass bowl. By the end of the day I told Simon Verbitsky about my arrest and suggested, “Begin your speech at a Party meeting like this, ‘I always suspected Polishchuk of political disloyalty and duplicity. On the front line, we shot such traitors on the spot.’”

  Simon stared at me sadly.

  Nothing exciting happened the next day, either, except that as I approached the police cordon near the synagogue, my heart was pounding again. I already knew a few people and was amazed when my new young friend, Anatoly Sharansky said, “I don’t want to miss the service.”

  “Do you miss this KGB-hand of a rabbi?” I asked. “Haven’t you read his anti-Zionist spell in the newspapers?”

  “I’m going to the temple, not for him,” Sharansky said calmly.

  A year earlier, this rabbi, Yaakov Fishman and I had stayed in the same hospital. He made a strong impression on me by his ignorance and animosity towards those who wanted to emigrate. He apparently believed that we both belonged to the chosen, which, for him, meant people chosen by the Party.

  “Wait!” I said to Sharansky, “‘Fishman told me, ‘It’s unfair, I am preparing cadres and they get an education and get away!’ That was his word—cadres, just like a Party official. Can’t I convince you? As soon as his yeshiva boys were graduating, they applied for emigration, but he asked the Ministry of Internal Affairs to deny them exit visas.”

  “So what?”

  Unlike me, this twenty-five-year-old lad with chubby childish lips easily separated the wheat from the chaff. The temple and tradition made the aggressively atheistic police state and its marionette Fishman of no importance.

  A QUIET STILL reigned at work; the KGB clearly was not in a hurry to push me toward further antics. After a week this began to bother me. In the evenings I warily eyed passersby and looked around whenever I heard footsteps behind me.

  After a couple of months of living in limbo, Vladimir Slepak handed me the invitations to immigrate to Israel, one for my mother, one for me, and one for my sister’s family.

  “They’ve arrived,” I told my brother-in-law on the phone. “I’ll bring them tomorrow night.”

  “Come over,” he said, his voice cracking, and he hung up. At night I wrote three short statements: one, of resignation, to Ghafurov; one to the Party district committee, to withdraw from the Party; and one to the Visa Office to ask for an exit visa. The rest of the night I was thinking about my relatives who failed to understand the sacrifice I was making in applying for it. I thought of the KGB only in the morning, while passing its headquarters on my way to work. What irony! They would feel more confident if I had joined their main enemy—human rights activists. They would prefer to have me inside the country, within their reach; this would guarantee that I would remain silent about their phony correspondents. The death penalty for high treason had not been scratched out of the Criminal Code.

  At nine o’clock I asked Ghafurov’s assistant to pass my sealed envelope to his boss. After that, I went to our secretariat and explained what kind of a letter I had just left on the second floor. Fear lit up their eyes at this horror, but all three women hugged me without asking a single question.

  I rushed to the District Party Committee. The woman behind the tiny window could not understand me. “There’s no such thing as returning a Party membership card,” she said. “We cannot take it. This is simply impossible. I need to speak with the Second Secretary.”

  With my red card in her hand, she left me at her window, no less distressed than I was. I watched her walk down the hallway as if she was holding a grenade, the cotter pin already pulled. Cold sweat filled my armpits. I wanted to run away, but remained by the loophole: the Visa Office would not accept my application without written proof that my Party card had been surrendered. After five long minutes she returned with the second secretary.

  He was cold. “You cannot leave the Party whenever you wish,” he said. “You can be expelled only when the Party deems it necessary.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “The question about your expulsion should be addressed by your grassroots Party organization. We cannot do that here.”

  “I’ve already resigned from my job and have no grassroots organization.”

  “Then the question has to be considered by the Party cell in the place of your residence. Please, take back your membership card and bring it to a meeting of the Party committee in your neighborhood.”

  “Could you write a note that you are in the process of expelling me from the Party?” I asked.

  He did not even raise his voice after such a ridiculous proposition. He asked only, “Why such a rush? You’re the first one to bring his Party card here himself. Usually we see only the relevant resolutions of the grassroots Party units.”

  “I wanted to avoid the bureaucratic red tape.”

  “You act as if you realize that Israel won’t last long,” he said caustically.

  Instead of throwing my red grenade through their embrasure and running away, I put it in my pocket.

  An hour later I posted the Party card by registered mail. I was not going to volunteer for a beating at the grassroots unit. It was now clear, the Visa Office would refuse to talk to me, much less accept my application, without going through all kinds of required bureaucratic humiliation. So, to apply for a visa in person was out of question; a registered letter could do it. And I wrote: “Please issue me a visa to immigrate to the State of Israel. I never had access to any state secrets. Enclosed is the invitation of my Israeli relatives.”

  To prevent them from throwing this insolent application into a dustbin and to make sure that it would be passed along to the KGB, I added: “The very existence of such exit visas contradicts the UN Charter. The requirement to provide references from the Party, trade unions, place of work, house managers, all other kinds of institutions and persons I never knew, the unanimous resolutions of meetings, the written consent of relatives and even former spouses—all of this is contrary to international law. I am not going to break it.”

  I imagined the outrage at the KGB and dropped my second stink bomb at the same post office.

  Yes, humans are weird and inconsistent creatures! Only days earlier I had told the two PhDs of KGB Science almost everything I had been thinking about them. Today, I was shaking with fear in the Party district committee. And finally, after that I challenged the dreaded Visa Office by the outrageous mail.

  I rushed to my sister’s. She and her husband sat in their tiny room like two frightened statues. I laid their invitation on top of their minuscule table. “I did my part,” I said. “Now it’s your turn.”

  Simon gave a sob, his voice trembling. “I’m so sorry, but we are so afraid!”

  I was devastated, I despised them. “Do you understand that I applied for emig
ration exclusively for your sake? Why did I go through all this humiliation?” I nodded to the invitation. “Throw it into your communal toilet. Late at night.”

  “Wait!” My sister came to life and extracted from the refrigerator the usual bag with homemade food in jars ready to go. To be angry with them was pointless. In this country fear was bred into everyone’s DNA.

  After all, they did not exactly ruin my plans. I had already done everything to ensure that a visa would be denied to me. Yes, now I’d become another refusenik, not another human rights activist. Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, a spiteful old man demanded on the phone that I come to deal with, as he put it, “your personal case.”

  “I won’t come,” I said, and hung up. My phone rang endlessly. Senior citizens clearly had nothing else to keep themselves busy.

  The very next day, in my mailbox there turned up a summons to a meeting of the neighborhood Party committee. I tore it to pieces. During the following days there were new summonses and new calls. One day an angry old man in a heavy black coat with fur collar and a mink hat stopped me near my entrance with the words, “Are you Polishchuk?”

  I recognized the voice and suburban accent of that bastard and barked, “No!”

  He began to shout, “You must come to the meeting of the Party committee! Too bad you didn’t get in my hands in the Far East! We would’ve quickly taught you to respect the government!”

  “What are you?!” I asked. “A former executioner, or just out for a curative walk, to ventilate your brainless chump?”

  He did not expect such insolence. He flushed and panted. But I could not stop. “How many people does one need to kill, to earn an apartment in Moscow? I’ve got unpleasant news for you—Stalin died twenty years ago.”

  He swung at me.

  I pushed him away and said, “Don’t break down, you old fool!”

  We were both furious. I opened the front door, hissing as politely as I could, “Would you like to see me to the elevator?”

  He spat at the door.

  In the elevator, I wondered whether his upcoming denunciation would lead to an investigation of my anti-Soviet activities.

  The next phone call was from his Party secretary. She did not mention the previous day’s confrontation, saying only, “I hope that by now you realize that the proceedings are inevitable, and you’ll have to come to our meeting to put an end to this needless stress for all of us.”

  “And this humanitarian who regretted that I wasn’t in his hard labor camp?” I asked. “Will he also participate in the meeting?”

  “He had a very stressful job,” she said.

  “Me too,” I said.

  She promised that day he would get an urgent Party assignment. “Our committee,” she stressed, “is composed of quite serious people—a professor of Marxism, а retired KGB colonel, a retired general of the Interior Ministry, and a political writer. I’m a professor of chemistry.”

  All they wanted was to grind me into dust. Judging by his relatively younger age, a retired military man began speaking with a ridiculous Jewish accent borrowed from anti-Semitic jokes. I did not expect this and was in shock. I mumbled something unintelligible, and, perplexed, looked at the presiding secretary with her slightly confused face and gray hair tied in a knot at her nape.

  I started to come around only when he asked, “How far away from military action did your family live during the war? Somewhere in Uzbekistan?”

  My voice cracked when I said, “Yes, of course.”

  My father had actually volunteered for the war; he was five years older than the enlistment age.

  “There was nothing offensive about this question,” someone said.

  “For many years you’ve worked as a journalist,” someone else said. “In Israel you’ll be paid for slandering Russia.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  “Judging by your answers, you don’t feel any shame,” someone said.

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  The least offensive stab was that “this country” gave me free education, free medical care and a well-paid job. (They did not mention the cheap housing; my co-op was worth a fortune.) They spoke in fiery language about the dangers of Zionism and the need to eradicate it in the Soviet Union. Time and again, they branded me a traitor, betrayer, turncoat. I tried not to listen. It lasted infinitely. The orators continued repeating what had already been said numerous times, until the secretary tactfully denied them a new opportunity to express their outrage. In the end, Arkady Abramovich Polishchuk was unanimously expelled from the Communist Party.

  On the way home, I gave them a crushing, beautiful rebuff. In my head. They did not hear how I said to the happy face of that retired military-hater, “With your imitation skills you should perform as a clown for the guards of Nazi death camps.”

  I imagined his stomping and yelling, and then said, “I was wrong. You would’ve made a better career as a guard.” He stomped and yelled again and I said, “In Uzbekistan we had beautiful villas with vineyards and used the blood of Christian babies in our matzos.”

  After that I slammed the door. What a shame, it was the door of my own apartment and my own expensive parquet was powdered with my plaster. A frightened neighbor rushed to the stairwell and knocked on my door. “What happened?” he asked.

  I opened the door and said, “I’ve just been expelled from the Party.”

  “For what?” asked my neighbor, who was the Party secretary of the Soviet Composer publishing house

  “For an attempt to leave the Party,” I enunciated.

  He returned to his apartment without another word.

  In the following days I realized that my beautiful rebuffs were not so beautiful after all, and for years I regretted that I had mentally descended into that bloodbath.

  SOON I WAS PARTICIPATING in my first demonstration. Many refuseniks were detained on the way to the steps outside the Lenin Library subway station. Nonetheless half a dozen of us managed to make it to the stairs. We were not given time to deploy our modest “let us go” type banners as we were overpowered by plainclothes patriots and quickly delivered into the hands of the police, emerging in numbers from the depths of the subway. The patriots were surely placed on the steps in advance—to demonstrate to citizens the popular anger against the traitors. At the police station, after protocols of detention for disorderly conduct were filed, to my surprise, no one was prosecuted. The KGB were experimenting with democracy.

  I continued testing the limits and joined this demonstration without waiting for a response from the Visa Office. Some thoughtful psychologist in uniform probably paid attention to my inadequate behavior. The following day, a woman’s voice on the phone rattled off to me, “I like you very much and want to see you tonight at six o’clock at ticket booth number three, at the train station near the house of your ex-wife.”

  Only Tom Kolesnichenko, who also lived near the Kiev Railway Station, could know Irina’s address.

  It has begun, I thought.

  A crowd with suitcases, bags, and the Ukrainian accent was raging by the ticket office number three. Tom and I stood in line.

  “Well, where are we going?” he asked sadly.

  “To Israel,” I said.

  A squat woman in front of us shuddered and looked fearfully at us.

  “By train?” asked Tom while smiling fondly at the auntie.

  “We’ll see when we get to the point of departure; maybe in a freight car with bars on the windows,” I said.

  “If you give up your undertaking, you’ll be forgiven. That’s precisely what I was told. The punishment would be limited to expulsion from the Party and demotion.”

  “What incredible charity!” I said and asked the squat woman cordially, “Are you hearing well?”

  She turned away in embarrassment and we continued our secret conversation.

  “Why did they task you to undertake this noble mission?”

  “Because yo
u wouldn’t believe them,” Tom said.

  “Would you?”

  “The devil knows!”

  “Did you tell them that we haven’t seen each other for over a year and have nothing in common?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps you came up with it all by yourself, once again trying to rescue me.”

  “No. They need to protect their...”—he whispered—“correspondents.”

  “For that they have a variety of options,” I said.

  “That’s what troubles me,” he said.

  “Why did you involve that damsel in this patriotic initiative?”

  “For a laugh. To amuse you and myself. She’s our secretary”—he turned to whisper again—“from Pravda.”

  “And what will you say to them?”

  “What a fool you are. I will also say that thou wilt never deliver your friends.”

  “They will understand only because betrayal is part of their job description.”

  “You’re oversimplifying the problem, as always.”

  “Said Stalin to Khrushchev after they starved to death ten million of her …”—I nodded at the woman—“Ukrainian relatives.”

  The woman, who had long been lost in our conversation, clearly understood something, nodded approvingly, and looked around meticulously inspecting our neighbors, who were preoccupied with guarding their belongings.

  Tom glanced at his watch; we said goodbye to the woman—she enjoyed that—and we walked toward his new home, where not so long ago I used to escort him in secret, so that he could see his lover, Svetlana. Now they were married and lived happily ever after, in her apartment. We stopped halfway. I kept glancing around, though today not for his former wife.

  “A relatively new habit, this,” I said.

  “Too bad you weren’t at our wedding,” said Tom.

  When we hugged, he cleverly tucked into my inner pocket an envelope and murmured: “This is for you on the grub.”

  I was about to leave when he asked, “What are your plans for the near future?”

  “I’ll try to attend the trials of Jews.”