Dancing on Thin Ice

by Arkady Polishchuk

  In mock surprise I raised an eyebrow. “Conspirators?”

  “It’s the norm,” Goretoi said with a grin. “I assign the time and the place of each prayer meeting two hours before it starts.”

  The faces of the children who were to participate in this criminal offense were carefree. I said, “Your kids’ untroubled faces impress me more than Eugene Bresenden’s letter to justify his emigration, about Siberian police throwing tear gas canisters into a room with worshipers.”

  In my head crept some bombastic words about what I could learn from these children, and I said, “At your age, I was a slave; I was born a slave, but you were born free.”

  “And when you were nine years old?” Valery, the cherry picker, was clearly trying to make sense of what this gray-haired Muscovite was saying.

  “At your age,” I admitted, “I dreamed of becoming a border guard defending the Soviet Union from spies and saboteurs.”

  All the kids started smiling and looking at each other again. Maybe they began understanding what I had said so abstrusely.

  The long days of June meant it started to get dark after nine. When a street lamp lit in front of their house, Varvara Nikolaevna said, “It’s aimed at our door.”

  “Maybe the builders installed the lamp crookedly,” I said.

  “Ours is the only house with a street light on a long street—is that by chance, too?” She looked at me like a mother amused by the naïvete of her child and nodded toward the house across the street. “We’re being watched from there.”

  “I wanted to smash this lantern with a slingshot,” Valery said with a sigh, “but father forbade me. He said, ‘Let it shine, so our grannies won’t trip.’”

  “Thank the KGB,” I said, “for not following your grannies’ movements with a military searchlight mounted on an all-terrain armored vehicle.”

  “This year, almost every day, shadows have been following us everywhere and police, for no particular reason, have broken into our homes,” said Goretoi, “but today, on the occasion of your arrival, they are nowhere to be seen.”

  “The local KGB should pray for you every day,” I said. “Without you, they would’ve stagnated here, without an increase in rank and salary.”

  After this lively exchange of views on the role of light and darkness in the spiritual life of mankind, we all crossed the kitchen garden planted with heavenly potatoes, passed by green onions and fragrant dill, and, through a narrow opening in the fence, began making our way to the house of Vera Shchukin. One by one or in pairs, we used the most roundabout paths between houses. The village was asleep. Almost all windows were now unlit.

  I wiped sweat from my forehead and whispered to Goretoi, “Muggy.”

  He said nothing. I couldn’t stop talking. “For how long have you been aware that this gathering is prohibited by articles 142 and 227 of the Criminal Code?”

  “For as long as I’ve believed in my Savior,” he whispered.

  When we entered the one-room house, its windows had been already sealed shut, carefully curtained, and a dim kerosene lamp was burning. People quietly took their seats, our shadows darting fearfully on the walls and ceiling. In the semi-darkness, folks kept coming, and children and women huddled on the beds and on the floor with the little ones on their laps. Children giggled and jostled each other in the ribs. The men were pushed up against the walls. Two old women sat close to the invisible gap between the door and its frame, in hope of catching a breath of fresh air. On stools sat an old man, white as chalk, and two pregnant women. One of them, with a hand-copied New Testament, offered me her chair, but I shook my head and clung to the wall. When nearly forty persons had squeezed into the house, the deacon turned on the light, and ducked outside to check if it escaped to the street.

  I was already seized by euphoria when the service began, to my surprise, with individual prayer; each participant, young and old, prayed as he or she wanted and about what he or she wanted. Everybody was talking to the Lord. For me, this steady hum was a symbol of the democratic structure of Pentecostal church life, which was out of place not only in the Soviet regime, but also in the hierarchical structure of Russian Orthodoxy. Whether it would fit into the life of a synagogue I had no clue.

  In ten minutes my clothes were soaked through with perspiration. But it almost did not bother me. I was a part of this service, just like the kids who sang and prayed like everybody else, though maybe I was more like that baby babbling something very important on her mother’s lap.

  Three sermons were preached, and Goretoi was just one of the preachers. In Moscow he repeatedly quoted the Bible by heart. Now he opened a book with this tarnished gilt cross on its cover, the only copy his church had. Goretoi inherited it from his Orthodox mother; it seemed to me that his eyes were closed when he read a long passage. Later he passed it to the next preacher. After every sermon, prayers were offered. All earthly suffering of these people, prisons and beatings, poverty and humiliation—it all became small and insignificant; they were with God and no one could erase from their faces the expression of joy, peace, and hope. Time and again everybody was singing psalms. Overwhelmed, only after a while did I realize that they sang softly, so no one outside could hear. The service was interrupted only once, when Goretoi suggested to the hunched old woman at the door that she go outside to catch some fresh air. She refused and the preaching and singing continued.

  I knew I would not see printed songbooks and would instead hear the hymns that had somewhat changed as a result of repeated oral transmissions, or which were composed by Goretoi and other preachers. Every handwritten hymnal, from a thin notebook up to a volume of three hundred pages stitched together, was subversive literature. Each was a single copy and labor of love forbidden by law. The torn-out notebook pages were bound in illustrated homemade covers. The front, inside, and back sides of some covers were adorned with postcards of great artists of the remote past who could not foresee that their clandestine “religious propaganda” would be used by courts as evidence at the trials of Christians in the second half of the twentieth century.

  We were returning home after midnight, again in silence, when the village and all the birds of the world were long asleep. The kids were right, their life was easy here; today they prayed at home, right in front of neighboring houses. In Marxist terms, this was historical progress. In the South Siberian winter of Barnaul, they went out of town for ten miles to pray in the open steppe, in the icy wind; in the Far East they trudged to the harsh hills; in other parts of the country, they gathered late at night deep in the woods.

  Soon the Goretoi family was also asleep, except Varvara Nikolaevna and me. She asked if she could speak with me. We went outside and sat under the cherry tree, talking softly and eyeing the large shining moon oddly sliced by the sleepy branches.

  We knew we would never meet again.

  She asked me with a sigh, “Do you want to count how many times we’ve run away from one place to another?”

  “Fifteen?” I guessed.

  “No, more than that,” and she started counting on her fingers, listing the cities, towns, and villages. She counted twenty-one places.

  “With small children.”

  “There is nowhere else to run in this country,” she said.

  “And how many times have you been fined?”

  “That’s impossible to count,” she said. “With all of the money we’ve paid in fines, we could’ve built a skyscraper for you in New York City.”

  “That’s very generous of you, not a very tall skyscraper though.”

  “Why? Every time, we’re fined half of our monthly wages. We’re used to having to pay for everything, even for Christian funerals, and getting fined just for praying.”

  “Maybe you’re right—since 1918, a million fines a year multiplied by sixty—we could build a Pentecostal city. Would you allow my tribe into such a heaven? Muslims don’t.”

  She giggled exactly like her children did. “Ask Enoch and his Nadia about how, after
their wedding in Ukraine they were interrogated. The police informed the managers at the enterprises of all people caught at that wedding and fined almost everybody.” She looked tired. “They demanded information on salaries of all present.”

  “Let’s postpone further talk until daylight,” I said, suppressing a yawn. “But just answer one question—how do you manage to feed them?”

  “There were times when we collected spikelet from collective farm fields after harvest and dug edible roots out from under the snow. Wherever we lived, supervisors knew that we would agree to take the worst jobs.”

  “Medicines cost money, too.”

  “The Lord has sown various herbs, roots and leaves for us. Talk with Nadia, and she’ll send parcels with healing herbs for you to America. They say that only cactuses with prickles grow there.”

  “But why! Pork stew is also growing there. During the war, as a child, I adored this canned American fruit.”

  We fell silent and listened to the night. I said, “We’ve done well today, without police and with cherries. It’s time to go to bed.”

  “No,” Varvara Nikolaevna said firmly. “Tomorrow you will be busy talking to people from other places.”

  “Oh, Varvara Nikolaevna!” I begged again, “I need to go to bed.”

  “No—no! First I have to tell you what my husband wouldn’t want to talk about.”

  “Okay.”

  “Enoch worked here at a cement plant. At first we were surprised that Enoch was hired as an electrician, but after two weeks, when he went to the paymaster, he only got pennies. The plant needed an artist, and they gave this job to my husband; you know, he was an art teacher when we met. To impress me, he even drew my portrait.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “Oh, I fell in love with it. Before him, a couple of drunkards created problems for the plant director when he needed some posters and slogans.”

  “I would go on a binge, too, if I had to do such work,” I said. “I just can’t imagine this pious pastor writing ‘Onward to the Triumph of Communism!’”

  “We had to make a choice. In Nakhodka our children went to bed hungry; after his arrest, everybody was afraid to hire me even as a cleaning lady. By the way, I think, he and Nikolai Bobarykin were sent to the same camp because their camp commander had good connections at the top. Everyone knew that both sectarians had magical hands. Nikolai built the officers’ houses, and my husband drew paintings for them. And slogans.”

  In the morning Goretoi painted a wider picture. “I once refused to write a banner with the words of Stalin’s favorite poet, ‘Lenin lived. Lenin lives. Lenin will live forever.’ I told the camp’s deputy chief, ‘I cannot do this. Why should I deceive people? He’s been long dead.’”

  “You’re a rascal, Nikolai Petrovich!” I chuckled, “How many days in a punishment cell did you get for this revelation?”

  “You lose track of time in the cooler,” he shrugged. “No more than a week—they needed me.”

  Goretoi used to say that one day he would draw a landscape for me, but inexorable fate decreed otherwise. It was not given to us to know that two years later, when I already was in the United States, half-blind Goretoi would again make posters and draw pictures, only in another camp. This time he was sentenced to seven years of hard labor and five years of exile, not only for religious propaganda but also for anti-Soviet activities. That was how the government labeled his struggle for emigration.

  We must pay tribute to the Perm-37 camp commander who, as the head of a famous camp for political prisoners, demonstrated political blindness and ordered Nikolai Petrovich Goretoi to draw unprincipled lyrical landscapes and even the portraits of his children, from family photos, of course. No doubt, these paintings still adorn the homes of the camp commander’s children and grandchildren, maybe even in America.

  Goretoi asked me not to roam the village. Everyone I wanted to see would come to me themselves. Though, judging by my smooth arrival, at the moment, the police followed new instructions to just hang back, and nothing threatened us. With two underage bodyguards, I went to see the construction of a house for a church member and the kneading of the clay.

  “We bring this stiff clay from a quarry,” Enoch said, looking up at the blue sky. “To knead it with bare feet is difficult. Eh, well, sometimes the Lord sends rain to help us make it softer. In other places, if lucky, we would hire a horse from a collective farm to do the job. Here we use our children.”

  He threw another shovelful of sawdust into the clay, and I pointed at the mountain of sawdust. “From the farm?” I asked.

  “Pay five rubles to a tractor-driver, and he’ll bring the farm chairman himself. They throw it in a landfill, anyway.”

  Two other builders laid the mixture of clay with sawdust in the four sections of the mold constructed from wooden boards, and then, tapping on the sides of the mold with shovels, released four raw adobe bricks to dry.

  Sometimes a shortfall of communication helps. A few days later, my luck, the guests began to arrive. The young and the old, men and women, came to see me every day. I was struck again. They seemed to have lost the instinct of self-preservation inherent in any creature. They had entered their names and addresses in the thousands-strong list of traitors who had decided to notify the omnipotent authorities of wanting to leave the sacred Motherland of world Communism. This list would serve as irrefutable evidence of their guilt in future courts, but these people did not have a choice. They knew that the state was determined to destroy their faith.

  Only the haste with which they left the village shortly after being included in this joint list may have signaled their anxiety, but there could be other reasons I wasn’t aware of, such as work and families. And, in case of arrests and just as mementos, we took pictures.

  Later I regretted not having taken a picture with a heavyset and vigorous woman from the Kiev region. Somehow, this ruddy Ukrainian villager reminded me of the women I saw in West Africa, whose beauty was defined by their weight. Thanks to her, I heard someone speak in tongues for the first time. Of course, with my atheist background, I immediately tried to determine what language was given to her by the Holy Spirit and was amazed to hear a few words of German. After the common prayer on the knees, I at once began my cynical calculations. She looked no more than thirty; even if she were thirty-seven and was born a year or two before German tanks rolled into her village, it still would be unlikely that the occupiers had enough time to play with this toddler.

  Today, I would not dare to be so skeptical, but even then I liked that I could not find a rational explanation for this phenomenon. Soon she took me in the yard and said that God knew what he was doing when he sent this Jew to help Christians. After that the woman whispered that she and her husband observed the Sabbath and did not eat pork. I was smart enough not to ask her how a true Ukrainian could survive without salted and garlicked pork fat, although my tongue itched to do just that. In parting, she mentioned the recent dispersal of a Christian wedding in Kiev. Then, without hesitation and to my horror, the beauty planted her impressive seat firmly on the fragile rear end of a motorcycle, said, “Praise the Lord! It’s a miracle they didn’t arrest you here,” and waved for a long time, not trying, thank God, to turn around to face us. I thought about my grandmother. A neighbor hung her after the Germans entered Kiev.

  Here, one of Nikolai P. Goretoi’s sons, Victor, is carrying exactly the same kind of primitive bricks, the production of which I observed in the Cossack village Starotitarovskaya nine years before this particular photo was taken. At that time, Victor Goretoi was one of those children who solemnly guarded me on my way to the construction of a new house for a member of their church. He also was one of the boys who kneaded clay barefoot for such bricks.

  From Get Out of Your Land and Go: Interviews—autobiographical testimonies of believers in a stage of their exodus from the USSR to freedom (Bramante: Urbania) 1988. This collection of photographs and documents was published in Italian by a Catholi
c organization in Rome that dealt with the persecution of Christians in communist countries. See also the photo of Goretoi on page 195.

  One of the youngsters brought me out of my reverie and back to Starotitarovskaya. He asked his older brother, “Is she pregnant?”

  “No, she’s not,” responded the more experienced fellow. “A pregnant woman’s belly is smaller.”

  “Maybe she has three babies in her tummy,” insisted the younger expert.

  Their father heard them and said, “We have to include the names of the unborn in our list, but only the Lord knows whether they will be boys or girls.”

  “I don’t think,” I said, “that if tomorrow your church is allowed to go, the Soviets would say ‘No, this newborn was not listed in your family’s names and cannot go.’”

  “Arkady Abramovich,” said Goretoi, “you idealize the KGB. We have to include the names of the unborn.”

  When tasked to find names suitable for both boys and girls, I pleaded, “The ending of all Russian female names is always different from male names.”

  “Don’t be picky,” he said, “please, choose similar names.”

  “What if they are twins or triplets?”

  “Arkady, don’t shy away from hard work.”

  I came up with four names—Valentin or Valentina, Alexandr or Alexandra, Yevgeniy or Yevgeniya, and Pavel and Pavla.

  “Not enough,” said the pastor firmly. “We have to supply such names to other churches. Haven’t you heard the little ones speaking about triplets?”

  After a few more minutes I squeezed out of my brain two more unborn babies, Gabriel and Julian; they sounded more Jewish or Armenian than Russian. Silent during our conversation, Enoch suddenly asked, “Arkady Abramovich, what should I name my next child?”

  Goretoi looked at him with undisguised interest.

  “I like a Valentine,” I said. “It sounds like the strumming of a guitar.”

  Many years later I met with her. She had become a teacher in Boise, Idaho.

  THE NEXT WEEK, on June 16, 1977, a dusty green jeep pulled up in front of the house. Two men in dark suits and mottled ties emerged from it. The driver remained in the car. Peering from the window, Goretoi said, “What an honor! One of them is from the District Party Committee, the other—from the KGB. Dressed as for a state holiday, which means they are visiting you.”