Dancing on Thin Ice

by Arkady Polishchuk

  She said, “No, we were enraged.”

  “At that time I was afraid of my own shadow.”

  She took me to a window, “Want to see your shadow?”

  Through the openwork curtain, I recognized the fellow. “Today he’s not hiding.”

  “This is a bad sign,” said the seasoned Irina. “They do this to break people before the arrest.”

  “No, this is a courtesy reminder of my upcoming departure.”

  After this meaningful conversation, she beckoned me and Irmi into the bathroom and, without a word, moved the folder with my documents from my bag into Irmi’s satchel.

  MAMA AND MY SISTER, after consulting with some knowledgeable people, had tried to convince me to take more sets of bedding, linen tablecloths, and some wooden matreshkas, so I could sell these brightly painted nesting dolls in Vienna and thus earn some money. I did not want to upset them, but the fact was that emigrants were taking merchandise in the hope of selling it even in Israel, where the population of Russian matreshkas had probably long exceeded the population of Jews. Departing families were not allowed to take belongings loosely classified as antiques, art, or expensive jewelry. Thus, the official art experts did not allow me to take abroad my only treasure—several cheap statuettes and masks I had brought from Africa years ago. They said that the ebony had “strategic” importance.

  In that moment a family before me had several swollen trunks. The parents and two children nervously looked at two customs officers studying dresses, suits and other garments, old and new, shoes, obligatory matreshkas, old and new underwear, bedding, toys, socks, toothpaste, family albums, medicine, dictionaries, and worn slippers. After all this wealth had been laid out on a large table, a packer began putting it all back into the trunks. In the middle of this procedure the head of the family gave him, as it appeared to me, several one-hundred-ruble bills. For what? I thought, for this junk? Probably also for customs officers. Bribery and fear walk hand in hand.

  Then it was my turn. The officers were looking with suspicion at my cage with birds and wanted to put it through an ugly apparatus, probably a primitive x-ray machine with some cables attached on the side. The thing looked like a caveman’s forefather of modern security technology with its metal and explosives detectors, body scanners, and other devices threatening human modesty more than the threat of terrorism. I said “nyet” and resolutely pulled the cage from the officer’s hands.

  “You’re using force,” he said. “Do you understand that you can be arrested right here and your visa can be canceled?”

  “You wouldn’t do that,” I said, standing my ground. “It wasn’t your decision to let me go.”

  “OK,” he said, “you will miss your flight. It will cost you a lot of money.”

  At this moment out of nowhere came a little man with a nondescript face, rather, a face like a mask with holes behind which hide the eyes. I told this true KGB personality that the birds could be harmed or even killed by this machine. The No-Face was reasonable. He said, “Take your birds out of the cage, and the officers will check it.”

  I got panicky. Over the several days that I had fed and watered my roommates, I never took the creatures out of their cage! I had thought about it, surely—the smell was getting more and more putrid. But I did not want to harm them with my inexperienced handling, and the scariest part of all was the very thought of accidentally releasing and losing Yuri’s adopted children in this huge airport. Not having a choice, however, I fearfully opened the little wire door, and with sweaty, shaking hands began struggling with the poor things, probably harming them in an attempt to take them out, one at a time. After my brutal victory I pressed the jackdaws in unnatural positions with splayed delicate wings to my bosom, my fingers feeling the beaks and scaly warm legs. I held them there while the officers x-rayed the cage. The parties to this struggle were quickly exhausted. Afterwards, I somehow managed to put the resisting birds back and sighed with relief.

  Many family photos such as this one have passed through my hands. On the backs, as a rule, only the names of family members were written, without addresses. About the Gerasimchuk family, pictured here, I remember only that they were from Ukraine. 1975.

  The officers began looking at my belongings, immediately extracting and putting aside the bottle of vodka. After that, they passed to No-Face an envelope filled with photographs. He looked at me, “Who are these?”

  “Relatives.”

  “These are villagers,” he said reproachfully.

  “Yes,” I said. “From Ukraine.” In fact they were from Southern Russia. “My parents were villagers too, from Ukraine.” My heart sank. I was cursing myself for not leaving the pictures with Irmi Bloch or, at least, not putting them in a family album.

  “Many children,” he said.

  “Yes, I might never see them again,” I said, feigning a sigh.

  “You have many relatives,” he said, shifting and rearranging the pictures.

  “And all of them are fools,” I tried to distract No-Face.

  “Why?”

  “They don’t want to emigrate.”

  The wooden grin expressed satisfaction and began putting the pictures back in the envelope.

  I was allowed to move to the packer. My only suitcase was lying flat on the floor and he, squatting, was slowly putting back my belongings. The packer placed my priceless photographs with the large families of Pentecostals next to a brand new English dictionary and said in a low voice, “I hate them, too.”

  “Then why do you work here?”

  “You saw how it works. Very good money. I was a teacher. Don’t want to go hungry anymore.”

  Before closing my suitcase, he squinted toward the officers and whispered conspiratorially, “I can put in here whatever you want. I don’t want any money from you, I just want to help good people.”

  What I said to him in response could be found in any dictionary of American obscenities. I had not sworn for many years. Here at the airport I discovered that I had not lost the skills so brilliantly used in my all-boys school.

  Three months later, at the International Andrei Sakharov Hearings in Rome, the co-founder of the Moscow Amnesty International branch, Valentin Turchin and his wife Tanya said that the same sinewy KGB packer played a similar trick on them. At first glance it seemed that the secret police had a striking lack of logic; they wanted to throw us out, and yet it would be an achievement to arrest us at the border on criminal charges. In fact, it was not just revenge; they saw a broader picture—to intimidate any potential opposition to the regime.

  EIGHTEEN

  New Life, Old Stars

  AFTER THE AEROFLOT PLANE took off, another man with a wooden face sitting next to me, looked at the cage on my knees and asked severely, “Why are you taking the birds to Israel?”

  He obviously knew that on board there were numerous emigrating Jews. They were allowed to fly only with this sole Soviet airline.

  “Are you going to Israel, too?” I asked him in anticipation of a burst of indignation.

  “No,” he said, suppressing his anger.

  “Are you, by any chance, an ornithologist?” I asked politely.

  “No,” he barked.

  “Are you a Soviet diplomat?” exaggerated sympathy grew in my voice.

  “Who are you to ask me such questions?!”

  “I’m sorry, is your occupation a state secret? I can tell you about mine.”

  With that, he did not talk to me anymore.

  Traveling abroad was a rare privilege. Jews encroached on his privilege. In the seventies, almost all Russian émigrés were Jewish or married to Jews. Our society slightly opened the doors that had been shut for sixty years. Jewish spouses were called means of conveyance, and some of the “chosen people” even charged those desperate ones who wanted to get out and—oh, what a historical irony!—were not as lucky as the Jews.

  When the pilot announced, “We are crossing the air border of the Soviet Union,” I got on my feet, stood a
t attention like a soldier ready to sing the Soviet hymn, and raised my eyebrows invitingly toward the “birdwatcher.” But instead of pursuing this patriotic train of thought, I took the cage in my hand and went to the lavatory.

  Upon returning to my seat I closed my eyes and immersed in a strange mental state where events and thoughts mingled like snowflakes in a blizzard. I saw my mother clinging to my chest, the faces of friends, and the guilty faces of my sister and her husband. I saw my former wife. She will remain young and beautiful until the day I die.

  When this blizzard died out, I saw clearly in my mind’s eye Malva Landa. Recently she made me feel guilty on the railroad platform right before her departure to Trans-Baikal knolls. Sentenced to two years Siberian exile, this sixty-two-year-old geologist said acidly to me, “Some people go east; some go west.”

  She was right: If you want to fight, do not desert the combat zone.

  Then human rights activist Alexander Ginsburg, arrested six months earlier, came to mind. On one of those strange days before my departure, I took Nikolai Petrovich Goretoi, Feodor Sidenko, and Nikolai Kunitsa to visit his family.

  While Ginsburg’s wife, Arina, was telling us how KGB agents “discovered” several hundred American dollars inside their toilet bowl, her two little boys, as if bewitched, watched Goretoi’s hands unwrapping a gift—a large sturgeon. The smoked fish, wrapped in several layers of paper, sawdust, and cloth, had survived a long, red-hot journey in overcrowded scorching buses and sweltering August trains.

  The images of my friends and relatives had disappeared into my sleep when the plane began to descend. After it landed and the passengers stood in the aisle waiting for the door to be opened, I turned to the closed-mouth patriot. “Now I can reveal why I brought the birds here,” I said.

  One of his eyebrows went up. I showed him a middle finger, shook it, and, after a meaningful pause, said innocently, “With this steel finger I pushed my family diamonds down their tender throats.”

  He remained silent.

  At the Flughafen Wien, the airport outside of Vienna, I passed the cage to Yuri Mnyukh. “They are waiting for you,” he said, pointing at a group of men.

  After this warning, he deftly checked the birds.

  “They’re probably meeting some officials from Moscow,” I said.

  “Oh Arkady, don’t be naïve, they already put bugs in our place. When you call us or come to us, please, remember that we can do a lot of harm to our friends in Moscow.”

  One more victim, I thought—it’s really sad.

  “We’re physicists,” Yuri said. “We know how they do it.”

  Newly arrived Jews were divided into two groups. A larger one was taken immediately to an Israeli plane under escort of Austrian police with machine-guns, as Arab terrorists tried their best to stop Jewish emigration. A minibus took us, a small group of subdued people who did not go to Israel, to a hotel. Instead of a pompous porter in a magnificent livery, like the ones we had seen in foreign movies, we were greeted by friendly prostitutes propping up a peeling wall next to the ragged hotel door.

  In an hour I had an uninvited guest. For peanuts, a criminal looking Russian bought my two sets of bedding and one tablecloth. He asked, “Don’t you have matreshkas?”

  “No.”

  He looked at me with contempt, but then magnanimously offered to smuggle me to Germany. The guy and his colleagues in the trade were knocking on the doors of all the people who had just checked into the hotel. Everybody was selling them bedding, tablecloths, matreshkas, and cheap jewelry. My wooden dolls were later given as exotic gifts to Irmi Bloch, her relatives and friends.

  A couple of hours later, a tired representative of the resettlement agency Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) told me that in three days my group would be taken to Rome and would wait there until America or any other country would accept our applications. I needed to stay in Vienna: Irmi promised to send, through Austrian diplomatic channels in Moscow, my documents on Evangelicals. He sympathized with my problems, but there was nothing HIAS could do for me; if I were to stay here longer than three days, he said, I would be denied financial support and assistance in resettlement. He gave me Austrian shillings to buy a three-day food supply, and I expressed my determination to remain in Vienna no matter what.

  It was late evening. I was wandering around strangely quiet streets, nervously thinking of my next move in this unknown world of old imperial buildings, sharp spikes of medieval Catholic cathedrals, and noiseless unfamiliar cars of unseen colors, reflecting streetlights like curved mirrors. If I stayed here, how in the world would I survive? What did I have in common with these occasional passers-by stopping in front of illuminated shop windows?

  My thoughts evaporated after I took a closer look at an unlit auto parked in a narrow, neatly scrub-brushed street. Someone was looking at me out of it! The night before I had seen similar outlines in front of my Moscow co-op. My heart began pounding. No—no, we aren’t back—we aren’t there! Just a couple of hours earlier I had felt sorry for Yuri Mnyukh; now I myself was suffering from the same delusion. I began moving unsteadily toward this car: one step, two, three; I came close to it, placed both hands on its shiny top, and bent forward peering through the glass. The car was empty! Only then the cold light of logic began gleaming in my mind: these seats were shaped in a manner I had never seen before—they recalled the contours of human bodies! European autos had headrests, padded headrests! Oh, these unnecessary capitalist inventions! We did not have these hedonistic devices in Russia, damn capitalists! They scared the hell out of me.

  From now on, this terra incognita, Österrreich in the aboriginal language, was not full of dragons anymore. Instead, it was again full of normal uncertainty. Now I could think of Irmi Bloch, still in Russia, and of a phone number of a former prisoner given to me in Moscow. It was nearing eleven p.m., when I saw a telephone booth. I could not control my trembling voice: “Tanya Velikanova said that, if in need, I could call you anytime.” I apologized several times.

  Lev Kwachevsky said, “Of course, come to us right away. You did not wake us up.”

  The unconditional surrender of sleepy Kwachevsky to a stranger supported my opinion about Tatiana Velikanova, one of the founders of the first Soviet human rights organizations: if I ever met a saint in my life, it was this unique woman.

  I was at his place before midnight.

  The very next day he took me to an organization I had never heard of—International Rescue Committee or IRC. His friend Doctor Faust was the head of European operations. They were helping escapees from communist countries. That day the corridor was packed with Poles, some in similar leatherette jackets. It looked as if they all arrived with the same tour bus. I thought with gloating delight, ‘Who is going to drive the empty bus back to Warsaw’?

  Doctor Faust asked if I was ready to surrender the good financial support of Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society for the modest help of his committee. He repeated twice that normal people do not give up this benefit of their own free will.

  In 1936, Doctor Faust had fought against Generalissimo Franco and considered himself a communist. Long before the end of the Spanish Civil War, he was shocked to find out that in the Madrid area the Soviets established several secret prisons. The NKVD experts were torturing and killing Catholics and Spanish nationalists, and very soon they began killing communists who criticized Stalin, not just Trotskyites and anarchists.

  “I was then seven years old and worshiped the NKVD,” I said. “I didn’t like it when it was renamed the KGB.”

  “It seems to me you would have been one of those who rushed to Spain to help,” said Doctor Faust.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “They threatened me, too. It was an ugly time, for all dreamers alike.”

  In two days I had moved to a small windowless room with its slanted ceiling under a creaky wooden staircase. Day and night I was sorely aware of neighbors and of their lovely little children running tirelessly up and down the squeaky sta
irs. Today, I have nothing against children. I even have three of my own. But at that time I was missing the quiet of those probably childless prostitutes who worked in that nice hotel where I had spent my first two or three comfortable nights.

  A month later, I left this closet for an excellent room with two tall windows facing Märzstrasse, a short walk from the Schönbrunn Palace. After the squeaky stairs and screaming kids, the rumble of trams under my windows sounded like a comforting lullaby of rustling leaves. There was only one minor inconvenience: my spacious room was some seventy feet away from the communal washroom with two showers and two toilets, located in the middle of the long corridor.

  I admired Lev Kwachevsky. He was one of those true dissidents incapable of compromising with the regime. Lev refused to have a defense attorney and thus demonstrated his stand toward the sham legal proceedings, denied any guilt, and defended his right to read and disseminate any literature.

  Doctor Faust and I joked with him about his socialist convictions. Lev, the youngest of us, criticized us for being prejudiced on the subject of true social-democratic values, but he was forgiving since he knew about our bad experiences with communist ideology and practice.

  Lev and his wife decided to cheer me up, and we went to watch a movie prohibited in Russia. In ten minutes I found out why they were giggling: it was a porn movie. I could not anticipate that a porno would be so boring and unimaginative. It was the best propaganda for abstinence I have ever seen. Twenty minutes later we left the theater, and I confessed that I experienced much more stimulation in the Vienna streets. After three years in lecherous Europe, my new friends forgot that in the virtuous Soviet Union all women wore bras. The widespread exhibition of nipples in the sticky August heat, for want of this habit in Russia, was much more inspiring and arousing for innocent Soviet citizens than for spoiled Europeans.

  EVERY DAY I LEARNED something new. For example, it was a six-year-old Russian boy who gave me my first good lesson about Austrian sensitivities. In the recent past, his father, a journalist Boris V., had worked at the APN. A year before applying for an exit visa, Boris bribed someone to obtain a new internal passport restoring his ethnic origin.