This was the New York I wanted and didn’t even know.
This was the New York where you would stand penniless, drenched, with the vice president of the United States on the line.
Some weeks later I got in a taxi.
As the taxi driver pulled away from the curb, without even looking at me, very matter-of-factly, he said, “Rosanne Cash…I reviewed Interiors for Rolling Stone.”
And there it was again. My New York. My taxi driver who wrote these words that I had clung to, that meant so much to me, about a project that meant so much to me. And here we were in our New York together.
And then he glanced at me in the rearview mirror, and he shook his head, and he said, “It should have been the lead review.”
* * *
One of the country’s preeminent singer/songwriters, ROSANNE CASH has released fifteen albums of extraordinary songs that have earned four Grammy Awards and eleven nominations, as well as twenty-one Top 40 hits, including eleven number-one singles. She is also an author whose four books include the bestselling memoir Composed, which the Chicago Tribune called “one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read.” In addition to regular touring, Cash has partnered in programming collaborations with Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, San Francisco Jazz, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the Library of Congress. She was awarded the SAG/AFTRA Lifetime Achievement Award for Sound Recordings in 2012 and received the 2014 Smithsonian Ingenuity Award in the Performing Arts. She was chosen as a Perspective Series artist at Carnegie Hall for the 2015–16 season and curated a series of American-roots music, including her own performance. She continued her association with Carnegie Hall as a Creative Partner for the 2017–18 season. Her 2014 album, The River and the Thread, garnered impressive worldwide acclaim and won three Grammy Awards. Her new album of original songs, She Remembers Everything, was released in November 2018.
This story was told on March 29, 2017, at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City. The theme of the evening was All These Wonders. Director: Catherine Burns.
There was a hard knock at the door in the middle of the night. I saw three men in military uniforms. One of them, the KGB major, handed me a warrant for my arrest.
It was Moscow, the Soviet Union, May of 1944, and I was twenty-one years old.
They put me in a black passenger car, and after a short ride we arrived at the large iron gates at Lubyanka Street. The gate slid open, the car drove inside the prison yard, and I heard the rattle of the gate closing behind me.
Just a few yards from the street, and I found myself in a completely different world. Growing up in the Soviet Union, I knew that parallel to our world there was another mysterious and dreadful world where people were disappearing from our life, and among them my father.
Both my parents had been arrested seven years earlier. My mom came back after a year and a half in a KGB jail. My father was sent far north above the polar circle to a labor camp.
Many years later I learned that this camp had killed him with cold, hunger, and overwork.
So, sitting in the backseat of the car, I was thinking, Well, it’s my turn.
They put me in a tiny cell with no windows. They called it a box. The box was a meter by a meter and a half. I don’t know how long they kept me there. All sense of time was lost. Hours, maybe days.
I had a feeling that they had buried me in this box, this grave, for the rest of my life.
But then a prison guard led me to a large room. A huge portrait of Stalin hung on the wall, and sitting under the portrait was a puny man in a KGB uniform with a pale, ratlike face.
He announced to me, “You have been arrested as a participant in an anti-Soviet terrorist group.”
“Terrorist?”
I didn’t understand what he’s talking about. I was confused.
“What does it mean, terrorist?” I asked.
He said, “It means that you nasty little snakes were planning to kill Comrade Stalin.”
A chill ran through my body. It was the Soviet Union. I knew that they could arrest me for any reason they wanted, but planning to kill Stalin was absurd.
It was scary. It meant big trouble—the death penalty.
I understood that the “nasty little snakes” he was referring to were my friends and myself. Several friends had been arrested recently. Some of them were my buddies from elementary school. We grew up together; we were very close. It was a company of really bright kids. There was no TV—we read a lot and discussed books.
In spite of the censorship in the Soviet Union, books by authors like Jack London, Hemingway, and Steinbeck were published in translation, because the KGB considered the authors critics of the capitalist reality.
We read these books and saw a very attractive picture of the Western world.
Freedom.
Writers were free to criticize. People were free to speak, to travel, to do whatever they wanted—to change their profession, go to Spain and watch bullfights.
Not like in our country.
The officer started asking questions:
“What kind of anti-Soviet conversation was taking place in your company?”
“Who participated in the anti-Soviet conversation?”
“Who expressed his anti-Soviet views in your presence?”
“Did you express your anti-Soviet views?”
“Did you have anti-Soviet views?”
There was nothing like this going on, and I denied everything. But the questioning continued the whole night.
In the morning I was brought back to my box. Sleeping in the daytime in the prison was strictly prohibited. The guard watched me through the peephole in the door and kept me awake.
The next night I was back to questioning. One interrogator, then two. They showed me testimonies of my friends who had already confessed and implicated me. They turned on a powerful, very bright lamp and directed it at me.
They cursed me.
They humiliated me.
They threatened me.
The officer would put his finger up to the back of my head. “Here our KGB bullet will enter your damn enemy skull. Here it will come out. We will grind you into the dust. We will erase you.”
This went on night after night, with sleepless days in the box.
My feet were swollen, my eyes were irritated.
I was so exhausted from the sleeplessness that from time to time my head would dive forward and down, and the officer would kick me with the toe of his boot to keep me awake.
Finally I stopped thinking clearly. I couldn’t concentrate. Everything was in a fog. And on the sixth sleepless night, that was it. I couldn’t take it anymore.
I didn’t care. I just wanted this torture to end.
And when my interrogator said, “Have you participated in this anti-Soviet conversation?”
I said, “Yes, I did.”
“Do you accept being a member of this anti-Soviet group?”
And I said, “Yes, I do.”
But the interrogation didn’t stop. Now they wanted me to confess in planning to kill Stalin. And here, I don’t know how, but I found the strength to resist. Maybe in my subconscious the idea stuck that this confession would bring my death.
They transferred me to a regular prison cell, and the interrogation continued for nine months. But I never confessed to planning to kill Stalin.
Then one day I was sentenced. It was not like an American court with a big chamber and a judge and a jury.
I was led to a small room without a window.
The KGB manager was sitting at a small desk. He handed me a piece of paper. It was my verdict—the Resolution of the Special Board of the KGB. I was convicted as a member of an anti-Soviet group and for anti-Soviet agitation.
I was sentenced to a labor camp for five years.
As you can see, I survived the five years.
&n
bsp; As soon as my term ended, I was sent to Siberia in exile for life. Then, four years later, friendly cosmic forces intervened in my life.
Stalin croaked.
He died, and my exile ended.
I came back to Moscow, completed my education, married Dora, the girl I fell in love with. Our son, Matvey, was born. Little by little we built a decent life by Soviet Union standards.
But as soon as the door for immigration opened slightly, we applied and emigrated to the United States. I was fifty-seven years old at the time. My wife was fifty-four. Not the best time to start a new life in a new country! But I always remembered the years behind barbed wire and the humiliation I suffered under the KGB interrogation.
I knew we had to go.
Many years later, when the Soviet Union collapsed and in Russia the KGB files became open for victims, I finally found the reason I was arrested.
It happened to be that this company of independently thinking young people was under suspicion and surveillance, so my friend’s apartment was bugged. Using the recordings of our conversations, the KGB fabricated this plot about Stalin’s assassination.
Why? To prove the importance of the KGB. To prove that the watchful eye of the KGB never sleeps. Thirteen young people were arrested so dear Comrade Stalin could sleep peacefully. They made seven confess to this nonsense about killing Stalin. They didn’t have any proof, but it didn’t matter. They had the confessions, and it was enough for sentencing.
Three young and healthy gifted guys didn’t come back from the camps—the camps killed them. The camps took long years of life from others who survived.
I am ninety-four now, and I am the only survivor of those boys, who in faraway Moscow were reading Hemingway and Steinbeck, dreaming about freedom, and paid a heavy price for daring to think.
I live in the United States now, and I have come to realize that this life is the life we all dreamed about.
Life in freedom.
* * *
VICTOR LEVENSTEIN was born in the Soviet Union in 1922. At the age of twenty-one, he was arrested on the trumped-up charges of anti-Soviet activity and conspiring in a terror plot against Stalin, and he spent nine years in prisons, labor camps, and exile until Stalin’s death. He emigrated with his family to the United States in 1980 and at the age of fifty-eight started a successful career in the new country. He worked at Jeffrey Dresser in Columbus, Ohio, from 1980 until 2003, designing underground mining machinery and receiving three American patents. After retiring from the engineering job, Victor wrote and published two books in Russian. His book in English, Thirteen Nasty Little Snakes: The Case of Stalin’s “Assassins,” was published recently. He lives in Columbus with his wife of sixty-three years, Dora. His son, Matvey Levenstein, and daughter-in-law, Lisa Yuskavage, are both artists living in New York City.
This story was told on October 6, 2016, at Massey Hall in Toronto. The theme of the evening was Learning Curves. Director: Meg Bowles.
When I was a kid, I never cried—I never had time to.
I was always put in adult situations. Like the time when I was twelve. My mother abruptly woke us up in the middle of the night, tears streaming down her face, her mouth filled with blood from being punched repeatedly.
We knew that it was time to flee from him, and from that day on we were homeless and on the streets.
I was the man in charge. My four-year-old sister and I would wait down the street in a park while my mother scoped out the shelters. But those places always had social workers and police, which meant we might get taken away from her. So most of the time, we’d sleep under a tree in a park.
Living under trees was only hard for the first couple of weeks. It was early fall, so it wasn’t too cold yet. At that time of year, all we really needed was a layer of cardboard underneath us, a blanket we all shared, and plastic on top of it.
We had a routine all worked out: free breakfast at school, showers at the local swimming pool, then we’d walk around with a shopping cart until dark. We knew exactly when the police would patrol the parks, and when they were done with their rounds, we could safely crawl under the tree without being seen.
It was all right, until we found the tree.
It was this beautiful fifty-foot pine tree. Once you settled yourself in near the trunk, you were immediately hidden by its branches. The tree itself became a wonderland of a home. The dirt was smoothed over by all the Portland rain. It felt good—good enough for us to relax a little, and sometimes sleep.
I lay back and looked up through the branches of this tree that I called home. I looked at my mom and sister, amazed at how peacefully they could sleep here, not a care in the world when their eyes were closed. I admired it, imagining how wonderful their dreams must be. But me? I had to protect them no matter what. As the only man in the tree, it was my duty, so I never dreamed.
But that night when I watched over them, I thought, with mixed emotions, about what I was about to embark on the next week with all the Portland public-school sixth-graders—Outdoor School, a five-day environmental school at a sleepaway camp in the forest.
We’d been hearing about it since kindergarten: no classrooms, just outdoor learning around fires, and s’mores for a whole week. But best of all, I’d get to have my own bed, with clean sheets and a pillow!
The day I leave for Outdoor School is hard for me.
I tell my mom, “Now, look, if you’re going to walk me to the bus, you have got to leave our shopping cart with all of our stuff behind the market so nobody sees us.”
She agrees. My little sister is holding my backpack, which is as big as she is. She’s always trying to help.
I give my mom and sister a big hug, and I hop on the bus.
The conversation on the bus with the other sixth-graders is around who will be the first to cry of homesickness, and they say that at the end everybody cries, because you’re so sad that it’s over.
Cry? What for? This is the opportunity of a lifetime: a bed for a week, clean sheets, hot food at every meal. Nothing to cry about here.
We got there, and we were bombarded by cool sixteen-year-old counselors, who actually wanted to hang out with us. They had been waiting here. They gave us each a necklace made out of a slice of tree trunk, with our name on it, and we all had the opportunity to run and jump in the river if we wanted to.
All the other kids just ran and did it, without even worrying about their clothes. I really wanted to. But I only had two pairs of pants and two pairs of underwear and no quarters for the Laundromat. Matter of fact, I didn’t even know if they had a Laundromat.
So I went to the counselor, and I asked him. He told me that they would wash and dry my clothes for me, and I didn’t have to worry about it, so it was okay to run and jump in the river.
I felt taken care of. At Outdoor School I didn’t have a care in the world.
As the week went on, I forgot about my family and the struggles we faced; I forgot about the struggles they were probably facing right now while I was away. I liked not thinking about how hard everything was. For the first moment in my life, I felt like a kid.
The high point of Outdoor School was the competitive game of tug-of-war. Now ten of us would represent our school to pull as hard as we could against the other rival middle schools.
I knew that this was my opportunity to shine.
The teacher came up to us and said, “All right, kids, raise your hand if you want to go on the front line and pull as hard as you can.”
Nobody raised their hand, so I did.
She said, “Go ahead. You pull as hard as you can.”
I approached the tape to get ready to take my position in the muddy area where the competition was taking place. Then I looked down at my shoes.
These are my only pair of shoes, and they’re actually Nikes, which gives me just enough credibility at school that the kids don’t know I’m homeless. And now they’re going
to get really dirty, and I’m going to have to wear them home like that.
They’re patent leather—white-and-red Deion Sanders Nikes that I got as a gift from a girl at school whose dad worked for Nike—and I know that next week the kids are going to see my dirty shoes and know that my family has no money.
But this opportunity is too great for me to worry about adult things, like trying to find a place to wash and dry my shoes. So I don’t hesitate for long.
I grab that rope in my hands. My feet begin to sink in the mud, giving me the proper leverage I need to pull for my team.
Before the whistle blows, I look in the eyes of the kids from the rival school. They’re taunting me, saying that I’m not strong enough, and blowing kisses at me.
I tilt my head up to the sky, and I thank whoever gave me this gift to just be a kid for five days.
The whistle blows. I pull with all my might for my team. I hear grunting and screaming, and suddenly it’s over, and we won!
All the kids are running toward me, picking me up in the air, telling me that I was strong, that I belonged.
The last night of Outdoor School, we sat around listening to counselors tell stories like they do. And one story I will never forget.
It was a story from long ago about how all the animals sought shelter from the worst of a storm. Some of them went into the cliffs, and some of them went into the caves, but in the end the mice were left with nowhere to go.
So what they did was they sought shelter in the mighty pine trees. To this day if you look at a pinecone, you can still see what looks like their tails sticking out from the bottom.
Hearing that story, I start to cry. After a while I could tell that all the kids have noticed that I’m crying, and they’re all whispering.
But in that moment I do not care. I am too overwhelmed with emotion to be embarrassed. I look around at this wonderful place and my new friends, yet I can’t help but think that I’ve deserted my family in our tree.
The Moth Presents Occasional Magic Page 11