Dancing on Thin Ice

by Arkady Polishchuk

  “Ira, you’re probably the only person in the world to survive such a dangerous encounter!” I said, trying to comfort him. “Immediately call the New York Daily News! Just imagine the front page photograph of you with the oversized headline ‘New York Teacher Doesn’t See Eye-to-Eye with Russian Tiger!’ They love the Cold War stuff.”

  “Are you serious?” he asked, annoyed.

  He wanted to find a drug store where he could buy some eye drops. I glanced back at the Lord of the Jungle as we left. He was outstretched on the floor, lost in deep thoughts. His serenity and confidence impressed me yet again.

  “It’s about time for a teacher to become a role model for youngsters,” I said while helping Ira with the drops. “You teach handicapped kids. You have an unstoppable desire to learn. Your kids will tell everybody, ‘Our unarmed teacher confronted Russians, armed to the teeth!’”

  His Polish wife had no doubt that I was praising him.

  TWENTY

  Phantoms of the Past in the Shadow of Skyscrapers

  I CELEBRATED MY FIRST American New Year’s Eve with my old Moscow friends Lucy and Boris Zilberstein. I had been living in their small apartment in Queens since the day of my arrival, for nearly three months.

  In New York, these Russian Jews made a discovery—what had been known in Russia as the secular, atheistic “New Year’s fir tree” was in fact the Christmas tree. When American synagogues found out that this tree was part and parcel of the Soviet New Year’s celebrations, some rabbis got panicky. A week before Christmas, Boris showed me a New York Jewish newspaper urging Russian Jews to abandon the Christmas tree tradition. The call did not work. Soon he brought home a nostalgically fragrant tree.

  Exactly at midnight, in accordance with the tradition, we emptied our glasses of champagne in one swig. Lucy had picked up a little pickle bought in a Jewish shop around the corner and said, “The whole of Russia by now is desperately looking for such a medication while we, backward Americans, are still sober.”

  We knew what she meant. It was already the first morning of the New Year in Moscow, and the adult and some underage population already had a terrific hangover; everybody, in accordance with the centuries-old medical tradition, was looking for a drop of booze and a pickle for his aching head. We guessed whether the Pentagon, the CIA, and American presidents knew that these first hours of January were the best time for a perfidious aggression against peace-loving Russia. At this hour the country leadership, the KGB and military brass, strategic aviation pilots, nuclear submarine crews, border and prison guards—all of them were drunk as sailors and were looking for a pickled cucumber.

  At the time of my arrival, a small group of Russian dissidents already lived in New York. Almost all of them were forced into their exile. Ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, Jews—all were given exit visas for emigration to Israel. The KGB reasoned that they should all be considered as Jews in disguise, and that was good for the propaganda machinery’s health.

  The man I admired, the oldest among us, general Peter Grigorievich Grigorenko “rebuked” me for not sharing with my friends the Christian money I allegedly managed to smuggle to the West. He kept asking me, “At least tell us, Arkady, was it a kilogram of rubles? Ten pounds? One shipping container?” His joke was based on an article in a Ukrainian paper that Nikolai Kunitsa managed to send to me from the city of Rovno after my arrival to Vienna. The preacher had yet once again been unmasked as a member of a deranged cult, famous for its cruelty and harm to Soviet citizens. In short, Arkady Abramovich Polishchuk—they used my patronymic, so readers wouldn’t have the slightest doubt about my genetic deficiency—secretly visited an underground Baptist church in Rovno, collected from its ignorant members a bundle of money under the pretense that it would be spent on bribing important people in Moscow and then, this tricky crook emigrated with all this loot to Israel.

  That was by far the best story ever written about me. When the favorite of Russian intellectuals Literaturnaya Gazeta exposed me as a CIA collaborator while I was already living in New York, it was quite a trivial thing. Who wasn’t, in their opinion? But my money-grubbing story was unique. Since Soviet rubles were not a convertible currency, nobody in Israel would have bought the rubles—they were cheaper than the sand of the Sinai desert. Besides, I had never gone to Israel and never visited Rovno.

  AT THAT TIME, Russian dissidents were popular with American politicians. The Cold War was very hot. On Capitol Hill they wanted to know our opinion on the current situation in Russia. We knew that compromises with Moscow would only strengthen its determination to expand Russia’s influence in the world. In January 1980, the puppet government in Afghanistan had “invited” Soviet troops into the country. In February, when the Russian tanks were demolishing Afghan villages and killing their inhabitants, Senator Edward Kennedy criticized Jimmy Carter for trying to scare Americans with the Soviet threat. We were surprised.

  Later, in August of that year, a group of Soviet dissidents was invited as guests to the Democratic Party National Convention where incumbent President Carter was nominated for president. None of us liked what Carter said about the arms race: “The Republican nominee advocates abandoning arms control policies,” he said. “This radical and irresponsible course would threaten our security and could put the whole world in peril. They have now promised to launch an all-out nuclear arms race. … There can be no winners in such a race.”

  It sounded ridiculous to the small group of Russian human rights activists. We knew that the entire economy of the impoverished USSR was strenuously working for the war machine and that the Soviets would consider any arms-limitation agreements to be useful tools for the further spread of their rule. At first we thought that both politicians were naive and ill informed, but soon we understood that we had to apply those epithets to ourselves. Internal political struggle was more important for them than the growing Russian threat. That is why Kennedy did not even mention the Soviet Union in his keynote speech.

  Here we are, guests of the Democratic Party Convention in New York, August 1980. At the front, the Moscow Helsinki Group’s members Ludmilla Alexeeva and, on her right, a Crimean Tatar named Aishe Seytmuratova. Yuri Yarim-Agaev is poking his head up over them. On the right-hand side of the picture you can see me with some Russian and American activists (two women). This was from that time when both American political parties, Republicans and Democrats, consulted with Russian human rights activists. Photographer unknown.

  Two or three days after the Convention, I was still in bed, when my telephone rang.

  “I saw you there,” croaked an affected hoarse voice with a ridiculous Jewish accent borrowed from Odessa jokes. “Come to your Greek neighbor promptly, and we’ll show you the difference between his freshly painted and our fresh Russian pies.”

  It was Tom!

  In three minutes, breathing heavily after my sprint, I was looking outside through a window of the Greek bakery next to my place. In seconds a big black car with tinted windows stopped in front of it. The back door opened, and I saw Tomas Kolesnichenko lying on the back seat and staring at me with anticipation in his irresistible gray eyes. With these words for him, “Are you crazy?” I plunged into the car, right into his arms.

  His wife Svetlana, who was the driver, asked casually, “Alik, what do you want for breakfast, my dear?”

  I blurted, “Do you want to join my friends in the hard labor camp #36 in the Perm Region’s taiga?”

  “Relax,” said Tom, “Nobody sits on my tail. I’m the top Russian correspondent abroad. This is the most important assignment—the Pravda correspondent at the U.N. and in this little town.”

  “How do you know that your car isn’t wired?”

  “The KGB chief-resident would tell me. He loves me and my Party organ.”

  “He still loves this libidinous language,” I said.

  Our driver turned her head to us and smiled leniently.

  “We go together to places where no Soviet citizen is allowed t
o tread,” continued Tom. “I bring nice presents for his wife. He wouldn’t want to lose me over nothing.”

  “So, you’re as generous as ever. But there are dozens of Soviet spooks in New York—so, keep buying off all of them. Thank God the FBI guys don’t need your little bribes.”

  “You’re still not a very smart romantic,” Tom said, patting my back. “The FBI would never blackmail me for contacting dissidents and immigrants. They love it. They want this affection to develop further and deeper. That’s how I found you—a former Jewish refusenik told me in a Russian grocery at Brighton Beach where you live.”

  And he hugged me again.

  We crossed the Queensboro Bridge to Midtown Manhattan and soon arrived at the gates of an underground garage. Now I was lying on the back seat, wrapped in a huge plaid blanket. Heavy Tom was sitting on me, giggling. The Russian guard waved us through with a smile when he saw Svetlana at the wheel. He couldn’t make out our faces through the tinted door glass anyway. The car stopped right next to the elevator. Tom got out and pushed the button; when the elevator arrived, I stepped out of the car, covered in heavy plaid from toe to crown, and dragged myself in.

  “The only neighbor on my floor is out of town,” Tom said. “If someone meets us, begin shivering like hell, you have a terrible cold.”

  I grumbled, “Diarrhea would be more appropriate.”

  And we talked, and talked, and talked. About their children. About our health. About our sex life. He believed that my preoccupation with churches kept me outside of big politics and could not understand why, with my credentials, I did not approach Radio Liberty, where my earnings would have been much bigger than in the poor Christian mission. But I wanted to talk about us.

  “It was pretty unusual,” I said, “that they asked you to talk me out of my rebellion. Did you tell Primakov about our rendezvous at that railroad station?”

  “It looks like he knew it,” he mused. “I asked him recently, ‘Why didn’t they kill Alik?’ and he boomed, ‘Because they liked him.’”

  “Very funny, hah-hah-hah. So, the KGB consulted with him, too. Maybe. Four years later, in ’77, they already had my sentence ready, but decided not to make another famous dissident out of me.”

  “Why, do you think?”

  “When I was in Lefortovo, the interrogator pointed with a thumb at the prison building behind his back and said, ‘You cooperated with a spy; Sharansky once lived in your apartment.’”

  “Was it true?”

  “Yes. You should see the belongings this super-spy left at my place after his arrest. New York beggars would look like party animals next to him.”

  “With your stomach you would’ve quickly died in a camp.”

  “Whenever I was in a wired place, I would say that I wouldn’t leave the country. The KGB seemingly believed that, but I was sure that they would never let me escape from their clutches. … Well, Tom, let’s talk about us. I see, you two are happy. You keep gaining weight, you glutton. They won’t allow me to come to your funerals.”

  “Just look inside this fridge full of fattening stuff from Russian groceries,” Svetlana said, flinging open the huge white door.

  “I don’t see the Russian caviar there,” I chuckled, and we recalled the cruise down the Volga River when they used me as a human shield to hide their love affair. At the river mouth we bought three jars of caviar from poachers.

  Tom yelled, “Huge ones! You can’t afford it anymore; that would be enough to feed both chambers of the American Congress.”

  “You underestimate their appetite,” I said.

  “I still believe that someone powerful saved you,” said my pal. “Don’t look for logic here. Remember how they were killing their own cadres?”

  “It was quite logical,” I said. “It was a part of genetic selection by means of mass killing.”

  “I still don’t understand why they allowed Jewish emigration,” he said. “Nobody in the Central Committee was able to give me a clear explanation. Prisons and Pravda could easily do the job.”

  I suggested that the KGB used this emigration to expand its espionage network. After a pause, Tom again tried to understand why I was allowed to go. “You just don’t know how many sympathetic friends you had in the KGB.”

  “This is ridiculous.” I made a face. “And so touching.”

  “They are humans,” insisted Tom, “and they have their loyalties.”

  “Sure, they are humans. That’s why they killed your father.” I shouldn’t have said it. We never talked about him. He had been executed when Tom was about five years old.

  Tom paused, looked at the ceiling, and returned to Primakov. “Zhenya made a great career. He befriended many big guns, even in the Politburo. Your former sidekick is now the director of your Institute of Oriental Studies—he would have made you the editor-in-chief of your magazine.”

  There were still ten years before Primakov would become the First Deputy Director of the KGB, his first step on the ladder to becoming prime minister in 1998.

  “Did you talk about our spooks in the West?” asked Tom.

  “In public—never. Privately—with friends.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “Fear wasn’t the reason. It was important for me to be treated as a human rights activist. Reporters would certainly prefer talking about spies.”

  “Sure,” Tom said.

  “After I came here, two FBI agents visited me. It was a routine visit, some formal questions for an émigré. I mentioned that I knew some Soviet agents, but they just ignored it.”

  “You’re kidding! That’s why America will lose the future war!”

  “Don’t bet on it,” I said.

  After midnight they took me back to Astoria. We did not talk. I looked at trees and thought of friendship. It takes years for trees to grow, there next to each other, seeing and touching one another in the sun and in darkness, in storms and tranquil calm, with young branches and shiny leaves, and then with the colorless leaves of your friend drifting between your dead branches. Even dying, they stay up for a while, supported by friends. When they finally crash to the ground, their friends stay wounded for quite some time.

  “Calm down, crazy!” flashed through my head. “Trees live in mortal combat with each other. Stupid romantic!” But familiarity with Darwinism did not pacify me.

  The next evening we met again, this time in Brooklyn Heights, at the Promenade near the Brooklyn Bridge where crowds were strolling along the East River, looking at the lights of Lower Manhattan beyond the dark river and at strange animated reflections glimmering in impermeable waters. We did not walk. We just stood there, leaning against the cast-iron railings facing the tip of Manhattan, hoping no one would recognize us. Svetlana was taking pictures of the famous skyline with the backdrop of the Twin Towers marvel a mile away. Both Tom and I were nervous and occasionally turned our heads to check out the passersby. I had the sinking feeling, and he probably did too, that we would never meet again. Tom asked, “Have you made any new friends? You can’t subsist without friends, can you?”

  “Yes, I have,” I said. “But so far they are more like comrades in arms. You can respect and love them; maybe, you can even die for them, but it’s not enough. You hide from them your moral deficiencies.”

  I looked at the rapid river and saw the trees appear again, now drawn by the reflections of the city lights; they were dancing, naked and crooked. I said, “When you’re nearing fifty, new friendship lacks common memories of younger years, no matter how silly or shameful they may be. For me, that’s the most difficult part of life in exile. But I manage.”

  We had picked the wrong place for this rendezvous. It was time to go. I kissed them. Then for an endless moment all three of us stood still in a silent embrace. We did not look into the eyes of each other.

  My voice quavered as I walked away. “Damn them!”—they now had deprived me of even my friends. Then I just kept listening, for some subconscious reason, to the muffled sound of my own steps
on the stone pavement. I was alone. They did not see my tears; I did not see theirs.

  EVERYTHING THAT I write here about Tom is in flagrant contradiction with the Russian official image of Kolesnichenko. When his widow, soon after his death in 2003, asked me to write my memories of him for a book of memoirs, I refused to participate in this official undertaking. “You were always so cheerful and witty together,” Svetlana said. One of the other authors was Yevgeny Primakov, the former head of Russian intelligence and now demoted from Russian prime minister to chairman of the Russian Chamber of Commerce; the rest of authors were no better.

  Svetlana reminded me of one last, fleeting and unexpected meeting with Tom. I had been standing at the entrance to the American embassy in Washington with a small group of Americans and Russian immigrants, demanding to free Sakharov from exile. I was positioned right in front of the door when it suddenly opened, and Tom and I nearly collided nose to nose. Behind him stood Svetlana and some Soviet officials. We pretended that we did not know each other. Without stopping for a moment, with stone faces, the whole group passed by us. No one saw my tears. Svetlana told me that when she looked at her husband, he was holding tears in his eyes too. The wounds of true friendship and love never heal.