Dancing on Thin Ice

by Arkady Polishchuk

  I kept my promise and paid as if it were full of vodka.

  Soon after the train started moving, I was searched by three men posing as ticket inspectors. This time, the attempt to confiscate my notes was more theatrical than after Stern’s trial: one of the actors looked at my innocent ticket, ineptly portraying suspicion; then he passed it to a simpleton, who clumsily mimicked him. The third man did not look at it, just said, “You have a counterfeit ticket,” and delicately pulled my sleeve toward the sliding door. A policeman and the conductor joined us in the corridor and the troupe solemnly escorted me to his small compartment. I was stripped naked, they did not find my notes, and in strict accordance with their orders, let me return to my berth, the “counterfeit” ticket in my hand. In Moscow the conductor said conspiratorially, “Take good care of the flowers!”

  Two days later, to my shock, Leo Roitburd was arrested at the Odessa airport before boarding a plane bound for the capital, where he intended to meet with other refuseniks. It happened in front of his son, to whom I promised to show Moscow. The trial was held—what a shrewd innovation!—at the airport. Before the start of the proceedings, an expert delivered to passengers a passionate lecture called “Ideology and Practice of Zionism.” Leo was magnanimously sentenced to two years in a labor camp for attacking a six-foot tall policeman who could not remember where exactly he had been struck by the bully Roitburd.

  Citadel wall and old quarter of the city of Derbent, Republic of Dagestan. Circa 1880s/1890s. Dmitri Ivanovich Yermakov via Wikimedia Commons.

  Yuri Yukhananov. 1975.

  IN A WAY, I was prepared for the next trial, in 1975, of a young man named Yuri Yukhananov, several years before my ultimate rebellion. I had first known Yukhananov’s fellow tribesman Asaf Ilisarov. Asaf was an expert in Arabic dialects and befriended me when was translating some text for my magazine. Asaf claimed that he was a genuine Jew, not like me—an assimilated Muscovite who did not know a thing about being Jewish. There was nothing personal in this assessment. He looked down on all Jews who entered Russia after, according to his estimates, eighteen hundred years of wandering in the wilderness of European civilizations, systematically, step by step, losing their Jewish values and physical appearance. Such was this pundit’s view of history.

  A Caucasian highlander with wild eyes and noble facial features, he laughed like a happy kid when I told him that if he grew a mustache, he would look like the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser. His clean-cut head, with its very short curly hair and slightly graying temples, was a little too big for his puny body.

  The first time we met, I asked Asaf if he had been born in Azerbaijan. He looked at me like a shining mountain taking in a swampy lowland and said, “No, I’m a Tat from Derbent, the former Iranian gateway to the Caspian Sea.”

  I thought that Tats were Muslims, worsening my moral and intellectual standing. Nonetheless, he continued, “Many Tats didn’t have anything to do with Jewishness, so it’s better to call us Mountain Jews. We lived in Northern Persia long before Jesus Christ was born, if he ever was born. Fire-worshipping Zoroastrians didn’t force us to abandon our religion. Only centuries later did Iranian shahs coerce us to convert to Islam. Those who didn’t were killed or had to run for their lives into uninhabited mountains. We didn’t interbreed for at least fifteen centuries. And this is why you don’t look like me.”

  I heard something tender, like sympathy in his tenor and saw compassion in his dark eyes.

  All I knew was that the Tats were a small tribe, perhaps a twenty-thousand-strong ethnic group living in the southern regions of the Soviet Union, in Azerbaijan and Dagestan. Asaf was accepted at a military academy in Moscow because nobody there knew that Dagestan Tats were actually Jews. “We were accomplished warriors and served in the Persian cavalry,” he said with such pride as if he had just dismounted at this door of his tiny Moscow apartment where we now stood.

  Right away I asked, “Can you ride a horse?”

  Asaf ignored my tactless question as we went inside, but to prove something, he opened a closet and pulled out a uniform with captain’s epaulets draped it on his narrow shoulders, and placed on his head an officer’s cap with a cockade blazing over the shiny visor.

  Yuri Yukhananov definitely did not want to serve in the military. Just a year earlier, in 1974, the military-medical commission of his and Asaf’s hometown Derbent again found him unfit for service. The nineteen-year-old had a congenital spinal defect. However, after he filed an application to emigrate, it suddenly became clear that Yuri was perfectly healthy, and the Motherland was eager to take him into the ranks of her defenders.

  That was why Yuri, his friend Boris, and I were now on the way to an attorney.

  I naively tried to draw their attention to the red building of the Moscow City Council and the gloomy gray building of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, located opposite each other on both sides of Gorky Street, the central street of the capital. However, they were much more interested in the monument erected between these two temples of communism. The young men fell in love with this handsome founder of Moscow, Prince Yuri Dolgoruky (“Long-handed”), and even more so, with his mighty horse.

  “You have horse-riding in your blood,” I said, “so, tell me, could a prince ride a gelding?”

  They rushed to examine the appropriate part of the horse. It was perfectly smooth.

  “Do you youngsters remember Khrushchev?” I asked. “He was the one who ordered that the balls of this poor creature be cut off. In his educated opinion the whole assemblage looked too natural.”

  “Lenin wouldn’t do such a stupid thing,” said Yuri.

  “He wouldn’t erect a monument to a prince in the first place. Stalin was the one who ordered it. However, Khrushchev’s directive represented historical progress; if Stalin didn’t like this stallion, he would’ve ordered the balls cut off of the sculptor, the architect, and a good hundred other people involved in this crime against the Soviets.”

  “We don’t prance on horseback anymore in Derbent,” Boris said, “but our grandfathers did, in tall lambskin hats and long cloaks.”

  Their visit to Moscow was successful. The lawyer said that even if the court did not dismiss the case based on the diametrically opposed medical records, he would argue that the court demand Yuri had a new examination at a major military hospital. We were also lucky with Alexander Lipavsky, a very good doctor. This refusenik was an experienced specialist precisely in the field of congenital spine problems. Dr. Lipavsky examined Yuri and explained how he should behave in the hospital.

  We had been friendly acquaintances—Lipavsky was interested in my work at the magazine and in my opinion about Soviet espionage in Africa and Asia. I had trouble refraining from telling him about our correspondents, but managed to keep my mouth shut. Who knows, maybe this silence protected me from prosecution. Two years later, in March 1977, we learned that he was a KGB stooge.

  A few days later, Yuri, Boris and I were hiking between two sixth-century walls, clambering along a small dirt trail two miles straight from the Caspian Sea up into the mountains. The walls protected a narrow passage, about three hundred yards wide, leading to a fortress that towered over Derbent. Using the knowledge I had obtained in the past from Asaf Ilisarov, I called them the descendants of a Persian colony. “Yes,” said Boris. “We defended Persia against the Steppe Khazars. Jews are the oldest people in the world.”

  I allowed myself to say, “On this planet there are many oldest peoples in the world.”

  We stopped and through a passage punched in the ancient wall saw endless rows of vines and fruit trees. “It’s a Jewish collective farm, one of four such farms in Derbent,” said Yuri. “Jews for centuries cultivated the land here.”

  For centuries, I thought? In a Muslim country? I found that pretty unusual. I remembered one of the oldest European anti-Semitic clichés—Jews never wanted to cultivate the land.

  “Mountain Jews had been making cognac a thousand years before the French,�
�� said Boris.

  “Don’t tell this to the French anti-Semites,” I said.

  “The Qur’an does not allow Muslims to produce wine and tobacco,” Yuri said. “Now they drink and smoke, and don’t believe in Allah.”

  At this point, a group of tanned vine-growers, men in sun-bleached working clothes and wide peaked caps, and women in long dark dresses and small headscarves, approached the passage. Loudly discussing something in an unfamiliar language, they came to us, said hello in Russian, and all the men shook our hands. The women did not, but smiled silently. The older man said in the affirmative, “Yuri, your guest is from Moscow.”

  Yuri nodded.

  “Are you a lawyer?” the man asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “And when will the trial start?”

  “The day after tomorrow,” said Yuri.

  The man turned back to me, “How many years, do you think, will Yuri have to stay in jail?”

  “This year four Jewish boys have received sentences of two to three years for refusing to serve in the military; in Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow, and not far away from here—in Krasnodar,” I said.

  Yuri’s lean face showed nothing but determination, but I changed the subject. “Please tell me, in what language were you talking?”

  Everyone laughed. One of them exclaimed, “Muscovites!”

  The older man explained that the Tats speak in a mix of Persian with ancient Hebrew and resolutely returned to the topic of conversation. “Isn’t it better to go into the military than to prison?” he asked.

  “After three years of service he won’t be allowed to go to Israel for at least another five years.”

  The men shook our hands again; one of them patted Yuri on the shoulder, and they left.

  “So,” I said, “you rule your womenfolk with an iron hand. They didn’t say a word. In Israel, the girls will show you who the boss is.”

  “We wouldn’t mind,” said Boris. “Old folks still remember how their grandfathers could have up to three wives.”

  We passed several more holes in the high stone walls, the ruined defense towers, and stopped at the remains of an inn with a large courtyard called the caravansary. Whenever I glimpsed back, the shining sea was always in my view. Wherever I looked up, I saw the forbidding mountains.

  From the remnants of the fortress we went down to the old city. From above, its narrow streets and flat roofs looked like the curves of cracks in a pile of flat stones.

  In the middle of a steep and winding street, the peculiar smell of brandy hit my nose. I was sniffing the air when Yuri said calmly, “Ah, this is the famous Derbent cognac.”

  This country still called this brandy “cognac” with impunity.

  My face obviously radiated confusion, and Yuri explained in a dull voice that when a Moscow commission suddenly descended on the Derbent Cognac Factory and there was a lot more of it than was indicated in the documents, the best Soviet cognac had to be quickly poured into the sewer pipes. “We have lousy drainage, as you can see—all around here there is just bare ground; that’s why the odor seeps everywhere.”

  “It would be better,” I suggested, “to send several rail cars with that cognac to people you trust in a big city.”

  “There was no time.”

  “Didn’t the Moscow auditors know how to sniff?”

  “We don’t know the details,” Yuri said.

  “Money doesn’t smell,” said Boris.

  I remarked that those were the two-thousand-year-old words of a Roman emperor, who talked of a fee for the use of public restrooms.

  “You will smell our public restrooms, free of charge,” Boris said, perking up. “Yuri lives now with me and five hundred neighbors, under one roof.”

  My gloomy protégé did not say a word.

  Soon we reached a strange structure with walls unevenly plastered with clay. The long building did not have doors facing the street and looked rather like a fortress. We walked through a low gateway into a huge courtyard, probably the only passage into this hot and dusty quadrangle. Countless narrow doors, some of them open, and small windows faced each other from all four inner sides of the structure.

  “This is the old Jewish quarter,” Yuri said. “Very old. A family is living in each pencil box.”

  Slovenly dressed women, often with young children, sat beside the doors. I did not see a blade of grass. Boris pointed at the center of the quadratic court: “These are our latrines.”

  Several small sheds plastered with the same clay stood there atop a three-foot-high common foundation, probably sheltering tanks with an unambiguous purpose. Children had been jumping from this podium down onto the dusty ground and repeatedly climbing back onto it, rushing between the sheds to the opposite side of the foundation, and jumping and climbing onto it again. It lasted forever.

  Regal mountains rose far beyond the flat roof of the ancient structure, looking with disgust at the squalor of it.

  THE TRIAL DID NOT last long. The Moscow lawyer immediately said that the case could not be considered without the expert opinion of the Regional Military-Medical Commission, as the documents of the case contained conflicting conclusions from local medical experts. The judge, without further ado, said that in the next day or two, Yuri would receive an appropriate referral from the city enlistment office and would have to go to a military hospital for the examination.

  In the small courtroom there were only a few of Yuri’s friends. Neither his parents nor the secret police were there. The old vine-grower, whom we met on the steep road to the citadel, ran, breathless, into the room when we were departing. He said, “The Russian military can be very difficult for a Jewish boy; thank God, we don’t look like Jews.”

  Late in the evening, Yuri came to my hotel with two pieces of important news. One, his father had invited us to lunch at his home. And two, an officer from the enlistment office went around to Yuri’s friends and told them that he must urgently report to the military commissar. He had repeated the same phrase, word for word, to each of the friends, “It’s in his interest.” In the end he did find Yuri and led him to his boss.

  The lieutenant colonel promised to give Yuri, no later than the next afternoon, a referral to the main hospital of the North-Caucasian Military District. He had sounded almost paternal. “You’ll go by train to Rostov—it’s a ride of about twenty hours. If you have no money, ask your father to buy a ticket for you. You have to get there as quickly as possible. Remember, it’s in your best interest.”

  “What does all this mean?” Yuri asked me.

  “The KGB knows you’re not faking. Maybe they’ve decided not to pursue your case. The brave military commissar has already soiled his pants; he was the one who, on the KGB’s instructions, arranged the latest conclusions of the local military-medical experts.”

  “And why would the KGB do that now?”

  “They began to understand that if you were to go to jail, all of your medical records will reach tricky Jewish doctors in the West, who will raise hell, and you’ll become the size of a major Hollywood star, and will be invited to appear there in the role of Superman.”

  “That would be neat,” Yuri said.

  He promised to remember the KGB and send discreet letters from the hospital to our volunteer mail recipient Lucy Litvinov, in whose apartment I lived for several months, about his health and medical procedures. I promised to show everything to Dr. Lipavsky.

  But first we had lunch at the house of Yuri’s father. Boris walked us right to the door.

  “His father is a rich man,” he said. “He’s afraid that they’ll put him in prison and take away all that he has acquired. That’s why he kicked Yuri out of his house.”

  Yuri never breathed a word about his family.

  “I’m sure,” continued his buddy, “he’s now paying a lot of money to all the big shots of the city—from the Secretary of the City Party Committee to the last clerk in the court.”

  “No one kills a cash cow,” I said. “They need
him free and prosperous. They would be satisfied if his son alone were put behind bars.”

  “But all the local officials are afraid of each other and can arrest my father at any moment,” said Yuri in a sudden outburst.

  Never in my life had I seen such a large number of carpets in one human dwelling. They were on the floors, on the walls, and on the large low sofas. It seemed to me that they even covered the low ceilings. The lamb melted in my mouth; homemade sugary sweets and hourglass-shaped glasses of strong tea brought back memories of a banquet at an international conference in Baku, the capital of neighboring Azerbaijan. Yuri’s mother smiled silently, carrying abundant treats and looking at her son; I repeated, “Delicious!”

  His father spoke about the weather and the carpets. Perhaps they were the main source of his income. He didn’t say a single word about the trial, but was clearly flattered to see in Derbent an expensive Moscow lawyer and a representative of rebellious Jews. Yuri kept quiet, and I was not too talkative, either.

  When we were leaving, his father said, “Derbent is one of the oldest settlements in the world, many times older than Moscow.”

  Probably he wanted to show that he was a cultured man.

  Already in the street, his outcast son said, “My father is a good man.”

  Two weeks later, we received his first letter: “Dear Lucy, the food here is tasteless, but good. You were right—I am the youngest here. Doctors treat me well. They think that this problem with my back will stay with me all my life. I walk around in a beautiful garden with a true general, also a patient. We have become friends and talk about bears and big cats who live in our mountains. His name is a military secret. This is all. I have to go for a procedure.”

  In none of his three letters did Yuri send kisses to Lucy, though, as was correctly noted by the observant Dr. Lipavsky, a good boy should always do so in a letter to a girl. Saniya (such was Lipavsky’s nickname) winked at me, as is customary with experienced men when it comes to women, and asked who Lucy was. I said that she was my childhood friend, did not have anything to do with emigration, and reluctantly agreed to receive Yuri’s letters.