Just As I Thought

by Grace Paley

  What I’ve described so far is talk and paper, ideas and hope. As for direct action, the day before we left Moscow, Maris Cakars went to GUM, the lively, mobbed Macy’s of Moscow, and deposited handfuls of leaflets (The New York Times ad for Soviet amnesty translated into Russian) on various strategic tables, counters … Finally he was seen, gathered up into energetic police arms, and taken to the police station across the street. He was, he said later, better treated than on certain similar American occasions.

  I would have preferred to have been part of that action but felt a responsibility to work with Paul within the hopeful meaning of the congress and use whatever time could be saved from meetings to try to speak with at least a couple of Russian dissidents.

  The First Visit

  Paul Mayer had already talked to one of the most religious and conservative of dissident Russians, the novelist Vladimir Maximov, author of Seven Days of Creation—translated into German, not yet English. Paul Mayer is a Catholic priest and not as ashamed of saving souls as some other American radicals. He had been in Moscow in April as part of the congress preparatory committee and had gone to see Alexander Galich and Vladimir Maximov. He said later, “I couldn’t dismiss these people; the mark of suffering was clearly on their faces, and the integrity so clear that when these awful things came out of their mouths I was perplexed, but I couldn’t dismiss it.”

  According to Paul, Maximov believed that the Vietnamese and Communism would have dominated the world if the United States had not bombed and smashed Vietnam. The United States, he said, had no choice. Maximov was Russian Orthodox. He told Paul there was a great spiritual awakening among Russians, who are now worshipping in tens of thousands in secret chapels. He said that social change and revolution have nothing to do with Christianity, that good works could not have a public life. It was Lent. Maximov was fasting. Paul Mayer was not. Maximov was angry and indignant with Paul. I understand they argued fiercely. However, since in the course of most wrestling, hugs occur, they ended as friends, and each expressed great longing to see one another again.

  All of this had taken place at the Galichs’ family dining table in April. Paul had exchanged medallions with Angelina Galich, received a medieval Russian medallion, and given her the cross Dan Berrigan had given him when his son Peter was born.

  Therefore, Paul and I were welcomed in October with apples, sardines, tomatoes salted and unsalted, glasses of Georgian wine. There were immediate questions about diet and digestion from Angelina Galich, who called greetings to us from her bed, for she was quite ill.

  Galich spoke to Paul briefly about Maximov, then took our statement from us. We had not yet read it to the Human Rights Commission. He liked the first words of solidarity and support. Then he became troubled. He was disturbed by the third paragraph, he said; it was not wrong, but he considered it an attack. He said they didn’t know about Chile anyway. The Soviet press lied about them, the dissidents, why not also about Chile. There was a curtain of silence. Also, he didn’t like the language—it was unjustified, but not incorrect.

  There were fifteen or twenty minutes of uncomfortable discussion about words, sentences. Finally he said, “But you see, it was not Sakharov alone. Maximov and I at least were involved. We issued the statement together, you must put down our names. It all falls on him. Always because he’s the famous one, he has to bear it all.” We agreed at once and changed the sentence to read “or leading intellectuals such as Sakharov, Galich, and Maximov…”

  Angelina called out from her bedroom and asked me to sit with her and a neighbor for a while and watch how, on television, the dancers of the Bolshoi were stunning the delegates of the World Peace Congress. She laughed and said, “Look what you’re missing! Stuck with us!” I said, “Oh…” and hugged her. I was always short of vocabulary at the beginning of an evening and had to resort to gesture or affection. I did tell her that my parents came from Russia from the town of Uzovka, which became Stalino, which became Donetz. I announced this fact to nearly everyone I spoke to in Russia. It never interested them as much as it did me. The neighbor said, “That one, Angelina, wrote a book about the steelworkers of Donetz—for children.” “Well!” I said. I thought of that town. In my head it is always a bloody Easter and my uncle is killed. My love of country, any country, is always being interrupted in its patriotic advance by terrible remembrance.

  “What does your button say?” the neighbor asked. I answered in Russian baby talk, as though they were the foreigners: “We don’t like Nixon. We don’t want him to be President anymore. He’s terrible.” I had forgotten the word for scoundrel. “You don’t like him? Why? We received all that wonderful bread from him. He wants to be friends. No?” Again and again we learned that the dissidents and the Soviet government people were all agreed (at least on October 25) that the American administration wasn’t too bad.

  When I joined Paul and Alexander Galich in the other room, I asked, “Is Angelina very sick?” “Sick,” he said. “She isn’t well at all. I am not well,” he said. “My heart. I have no work.”

  The Second Visit

  When we visited the second time, the house was so full of saucers and chairs and voices speaking and sighing in Russian that I was as though at home. Angelina said it, in case I hadn’t noticed: “Here you and Paul are at home.”

  We were greeted by Alexander and Angelina Galich, Andrei and Yelena Sakharov. A little later Alexander and Nellie Voronel arrived, and then a young friend who spoke fine English. Voronel is a physicist; he wished to tell us about the fourteen Jews who had just been arrested, picked up on the occasion of the congress’s opening. He showed us a petition asking for their release and explaining what had happened. Twelve others had signed their names. (Later on we brought it as requested to certain other delegates, including people from Amnesty International. We were able to report by phone the next day that they’d been released.)

  We sat down at the table and saw at once the broad, fair Russian face of Andrei Sakharov, so mild, paying attention; the sharp, darker Semitic face of Yelena, distressed with whatever news she had, to make sure we would know and understand. It was hard to begin this conversation, because we had three languages, German, Russian, and English, and two kinds of voices: public, discursive voices and private voices—for friendly or infuriated remarks. Soon, however, we were talking about something.

  “Tell me about Brazil, please,” Sakharov asked. Paul began to tell about Brazil. Clearly, they intended to begin a sensible and fruitful conversation. I was not against it, but I understood Russian, so that my ear was constantly receiving Yelena’s impassioned, agonized remarks or Angelina’s protestations of pain and love, or Nellie would begin to translate into my right ear something my head had already sorted out—or Alexander Voronel, at a moment when collective breath was being taken, would call to us as though we were already far apart (and we might never meet again) a story of prison-camp horror or an argument he had been making to some invented American radical adversary in his mind.

  At some point Paul and Galich decided to speak German, because Sakharov understands German. I foolishly deferred, as is my habit. Also, owning all those Russian words had made me feel rich and therefore generous. But I suffered. I lost exact language and several truths. I did understand Paul as he described the work of the United States in the training of Latin American police, the arrest and murder of labor leaders, the torture of priests, the destruction of whatever rights existed.

  “Even of priests?” Voronel wondered. Paul tried to continue: the economic considerations of the United States were always foremost in Latin America.

  “How many prisoners?” someone asked. “Here we have fifteen to twenty thousand.”

  We happened to have a New York Times clipping describing the U.S. training of 170 Latin American military and political leaders. They passed it around, reading it carefully. Nellie translated. Galich translated. They kept it.

  I began to talk about Chile … the humanity of the Allende government, the t
welve or fourteen daily newspapers on the streets of Santiago.

  “They say only about a thousand were killed,” Yelena said.

  “Why did this happen?” asked Andrei. “How could it happen? Ask yourself this question.”

  “Why?” cried Yelena. “Why? Because they couldn’t live under Socialism. Thank God for the United States.”

  “Maybe ten thousand,” I said furiously, “were killed in Chile, ten thousand.” This time I was angry because I had spent last December and January in Chile. Paul spoke quietly to Sakharov in German: “If we are to argue in arithmetical terms—I have a friend who says, Why bother with the Russians, what is ten or fifteen or twenty thousand when there are two hundred thousand prisoners in Saigon. Speak for them. Forget the Russians. But we don’t think like that.”

  “What are we to believe,” Galich said. “If the Soviet papers support it, or even if they don’t attack it—they tell lies about us, after all.”

  Voronel said in Russian: “Those two [meaning Paul and me], they don’t know what’s going on here.”

  “Of course,” said Yelena, “how could they understand.”

  Sakharov listened and drank his tea out of a saucer. Nellie Voronel whispered into my right ear, “You see, Andrei is a saint, look at his face, he isn’t afraid for himself.”

  Then his good face was hidden, for Angelina and Yelena had leaned across him to speak of Mattvei, Yelena’s new grandchild. Voronel said sadly, “It used to he the babies were named Mottel, now usually it’s Mattvei.”

  “It’s like that in the United States,” I said.

  “We must talk about one thing at a time, we must have one conversation at a time, please,” said Paul. We looked at our new Russian watches, gifts of the Soviet Union.

  Sakharov gently parted the two women who were speaking across his face and we saw him again. He tried to explain in broken German: “Our conditions here are such that you do not understand.” Paul asked Galich to please read our statement aloud in Russian. Galich did this. What they seemed to hear most clearly was the sentence in which we reminded them of the sufferings of those in Santiago and Saigon and asked that they raise their voices for those distant victims. “You do not understand,” they said again.

  This saddened us. So we offered them the Russian translation of the Times ad, which had been prepared for Brezhnev’s visit. It was signed by many American supporters and contained the names of Russian dissidents. They had never seen it. They each took a copy and began to read, speaking the names of the prisoners. “Here’s Kuznetsov,” Yelena said, “and Sylvia—that’s his wife, they’re twenty miles apart, they haven’t seen each other in maybe three years.”

  Then they looked at the names of the signers. I showed them the name of Ramsey Clark.1 I tried to explain how terrible the language of Solzhenitsyn’s article had been, how it had taken an entire page of The New York Times to slander the American left, praise the Indochina policy of the United States, and insult one of our good people (Ramsey Clark) to divide American dissenters from the Russian dissenters. “Wouldn’t you be glad,” I asked, “if a Russian prosecutor turned around and became your defender? Would that make him a silly butterfly, as Solzhenitsyn called Ramsey Clark?”

  Except for Sakharov, who smiled with amusement, everyone laughed out loud at the idiocy of my suggestion. A Russian prosecutor turned around!! Another discussion disappeared before it could develop. Paul was in despair, but actually he had managed at different times to clarify the United States role in Latin America. We came at last to Jackson and the Jackson Amendment. Between us, in English, Russian, and German, we explained our fear that Senator Henry Jackson, a cold warrior, would return our country to the long years of the cold war from which we had just barely emerged. Another twenty years of ice would begin, even if Russia should begin to shift her domestic policies.

  “What is he like, this Jackson?” Sakharov asked. “A popular senator?”

  “Who wants to be President,” Paul said.

  “I hope he wins,” said Yelena.

  “But the workers must like him; after all, they elect him,” said Voronel.

  Paul described his constituency, the war industries of Washington. Of course the workers must have jobs. Jackson is powerful in keeping the industries there. “Ah, of course, they must have jobs.” Voronel translated this for Sakharov. He nodded.

  We asked if it was dangerous for the three men or their families—the fact that we had used their names in the statement. Yelena said, “Yes, there is a danger. They will destroy him. They will get him yet.”

  “No no,” said Sakharov. “It will have no effect on me. They must say it.”

  Nellie whispered, “A saint.”

  Then Yelena began to tell about the camps: they go for hundreds of kilometers, a straight line on either side of the railroad tracks. “They are allowed—you know, you can send them seeds, to plant flowers, but no vegetables. If a vegetable grows, they come and tear it up with their hands.” Paul and I remembered that we had heard the same cruel story about the prisoners in the camps at Con Son in South Vietnam.

  We said, “You see, you have no debate with us. We are not your opponents. You must not think of us this way.” We were near tears, all of us. Everything was unfinished, but we had to return to the congress. We asked if we might repeat our conversations and use their names. They said, “Every word, every name.”

  Then we asked them to please speak about what we’d said and to let us know their thoughts. We would always be thinking about them. Andrei and Yelena came toward the door as we took our coats. “I am a physicist,” he said. “I am not the best person. Why has it fallen on me?” We embraced and parted.

  The Third Visit

  We visited once more. By this time we loved Moscow, had missed most of it, had spoken at the congress, survived the anger of a little less than half the delegation, the approval of about one quarter, and the disinterest of the others. We had also talked to the Russians. We had talked to the Vietnamese we’d known for years so they might receive the statement and the explanation from us rather than the interminable rumor-cooking corridors of the Hotel Rossiya.

  We wanted to speak to Alexander Galich before we left. We thought he had something to tell us, too.

  This is what we knew about Alexander Galich: He had been born Alexander Ginsburg; he had been a playwright, scriptwriter, actor, songwriter, and balladeer. The samizdat are the underground literary communications of the Russians. Many of Galich’s songs exist and are copied all over Russia, from magnitizdat—the underground tapes.

  Galich was thrown out of the Writers Union, the Union of Cinematographers, and the Litfond in 1971. He had been born a Jew but had converted recently to the Russian Orthodox Church, as have several other artists and intellectuals. I cannot write about these conversions. My parents and grandparents have not passed on to me an unbiased or generous view of the Russian Church, and in order to keep history clear of compromising sentiments, when talking to my children, I have kept the old information intact, adding to it for mystery’s sake the strict humanity of Dan and Phil Berrigan, Paul Mayer, Elizabeth McAllister, the sisters and brothers of the Catholic Resistance.

  Angelina had prepared a grand dinner for us, but after she and I had indulged our common requirement for hugs, hand-holding, and kisses, she began to mumble angrily, “What am I doing here, I don’t understand one word, why do I stay?” and she left us. The fact is, Galich was speaking English, which he does quite well, and I was, for once, taking notes speedily—as close to verbatim as my handwriting could accomplish.

  The following remarks represent, I believe, a response from the Galich, Voronel, and Sakharov families. They are meant for all those who have cared about them and feared for them and been angered by them.

  “It is for us very painful that we are published in this way in the West … We don’t wish to speak with them necessarily, the ones who publish us. We also wish to speak with you. But we have so little opportunity to speak to the
West, and no opportunity to speak here, that we must speak when we can. The first person who can write takes it. With you, we talk, we disagree, we agree.”

  Paul interrupted to say, “What about that article in Der Spiegel [a West German periodical, conservative]. Didn’t it bother you that you were with this bunch that call themselves brothers? They’re Fascists.”

  Galich continued: “Yes, we may hate them, but, Paul, we don’t know, we don’t know who our brothers are. You know we can’t protect ourselves in the Western press. We have no rights. But every time I think now for half a year I know Paul, I say something, I wonder what he thinks, if he’s reading it. Now I know Grace—has Grace read it? We have so few friends, real friends. We can’t agree on every question. Say what you think about us, we are friends. We both believe in freedom, peace … We have lived and still live different lives.”

  In an effort to try to make us know their lives in terms of our own, he said, “I know the terrible McCarthy period, two, three years? Well, I was a prominent script and theater writer. Now I am ill. Bad heart. I don’t tell you something my condition is worse than conditions of others. I must live now for 60, 65 rubles. I can write. But I cannot print a line, and my name is not mentioned. My old work will appear, but my name is not on it. What is better, the camp or to live like me? But for a writer, I don’t know what is worse.

  “Now, I can’t tell you how much the names in the ad meant to us. And during Brezhnev’s visit! What it meant to us! You see, it is like McCarthy without jobs, no possibility to live.

  “Yesterday I was by my friend. He is leaving Russia, one of our best. So many people, writers, and poets in the ’40s in Moscow, almost half think of emigrating, have handed in documents. No one wants to leave. But they have no possibility. Now there is a custom, a ritual, a few nights a week someone goes. Of course some people can go not at all. Hardest for scientists and old believers. Emigration today is easiest for Jews. About of every ten people who have made application, six will get it. With greatest pleasure they give passports … We have exceptions. Aronovich, one of our great conductors. Gabai killed himself.