The Big Green Tent (65 page)

They didn't light a fire. A full moon suddenly rose in the sky, illuminating the landscape with an intense brilliance: every stone, every branch, became visible.

The two fat braids of the Tatar girl gleamed in the moonlight with an oily sheen, and her silver bracelets shimmered. Her mother unfolded a muslin napkin and took out some dry Tatar pies, and they all partook of their feast in solemn silence and spiritual concord.

After the meal a conversation got under way, little by little—curiously disjointed, not following any particular path, but somehow concerned with everything at once—about the strange circumstances that had brought them all together, seemingly random, disparate people, unrelated through the past or the future, unconnected by blood or by fate … about the beauty that seemed to have dropped down from the heavens …

The moon retreated, slipping down to the edge of the sky, and an hour later a rose-colored ribbon of light appeared in the east, brightening the comforting darkness. The Tatar man, whose name was Mustafa, said:

“I've remembered this dawn so many times, through so many years. As a boy, I herded cattle here. I looked at these mountains thousands of times, always waiting for the first ray of sunlight. Sometimes it seemed to just shoot out. I thought I would never see it again.”

When it was light, they parted ways. The young people went to Chufut-Kale, and the Tatar family stayed in the ancient cemetery. Mustafa wanted to find his grandfather's grave.

They agreed to meet at two o'clock at the bus station, and to travel to Moscow together.

At the bus station, it was impossible to avoid the police. The young people surrounded “their” Tatars, and began making a happy commotion. Zhenya waylaid two policemen, flirting with them and babbling away to them about nothing. Eventually Edik pulled out his press pass, long expired, and waved it in front of the lieutenant's face. The provincial police turned out to be shyer than their Moscow counterparts. Or perhaps Edik's towering height and horn-rimmed glasses threw them off. In any case, the bus opened its doors, gave an impatient roar, and all seven of them packed in and drove off. Or maybe these servants of the law just didn't want to take on any extra trouble for themselves.

After that everything went like clockwork. The train staff turned out to be from Kazakhstan, and they put the “illegal” passengers in “illegal” seats, shielding them from the conductors and guards the whole way, until they finally arrived at Komsomol Square two days later. A half hour later, Mikha and Alyona and their Tatar guests were already in the long-suffering Aunt Genya's room. In another twenty-four hours, the former Hero of the Soviet Union and former captain Usmanov, one of the initiators of the movement for Crimean Tatars to return to their homeland, with his wife, Aliye, and his daughter, Ayshe, took a flight from the capital of our homeland to the capital of Uzbekistan, and finally sat down in their Tashkent home, where their friends and relatives were waiting for them. Usmanov, a Communist and a hero, placed a handful of stones from the ancient Muslim cemetery of Eski-Yurt on a tray.

“Here. Look at them. Our stones have come back to us; now it's our turn to go back to our stones.”

Henceforth, young Tatars would frequent Mikha's home. They came with petitions, with letters of protest, with requests and demands. They stayed overnight, sleeping on air mattresses on the floor. The cause of these Tatar strangers was closer to Mikha's heart than the efforts of Jews to return to Israel. After all, the Jewish exile had lasted for two thousand years already; it was ancient history, while the Tatars' was still fresh. Their homes and wells in Crimea had not all been destroyed. The Tatars still remembered the Soviet soldiers who had evicted them and then deported them, and neighbors who had occupied their homes.

Mikha got caught up in this cause which was not directly his own, drawn in by his characteristic unflagging sympathy and warmth. He helped them write letters, distribute them, and establish contacts. Several times at the behest of his Tatar friends he traveled to Crimea, and he and his friend Ravil collected memoirs about the deportations of 1944.

He and Edik published their magazine, but, quite predictably, the literary section shrank and the political section grew. They also added a new section called “The Periphery,” in which they discussed the plight of various ethnic minorities and nationalities, the extinction of the smaller peoples, their forced assimilation. Edik, with his characteristic academicism, wished to stay within the framework of anthropology and demographics, which lent the magazine an aura of scholarship. This did not diminish its anti-imperialist bent, however.

*   *   *

Ilya made photocopies of all eight issues. The editions usually numbered about forty copies. A full collection of all the different issues has not been preserved, but individual issues may still be found in various archives, both Western and KGB.

*   *   *

Mikha hadn't seen Sanya in nearly a year, and met with Ilya only on matters of business.

*   *   *

On the night of August 21, 1968, an event took place that would change everything: Soviet troops entered Czechoslovakia. Actually, this was a coalition of troops from five countries, but the initiative was indubitably a Soviet one. They called it “Operation Danube.” Russian tanks rolled into Prague, dealing the strongest possible blow to the global Communist movement.

The whole night through Mikha fiddled with the corrugated knobs on the old Telefunken, his only legacy from Aunt Genya, listening to the Western news reports. Dubcek's “socialism with a human face” lay in pieces, and the last illusions were shattered.

For so many years Mikha had studied Marxism, trying to work out how such wonderful ideas about justice could become so misshapen, so distorted, in their implementation; but now the truth was laid bare—it was a grandiose lie, cynicism, inconceivable cruelty, shameless manipulations of people who had lost their humanity, their human dignity and self-worth, out of fear. This fear enveloped the whole country like a dark cloud. One could call this cloud Stalinism; but Mikha had already understood that Stalinism was only a singular instance of the evil of this enormous, universal, timeless political despotism.

Mikha was prepared to rush out onto the square to share his anguish and horror. But first he went to grab a pencil. He wanted to write a poem; but what came out instead was a vehement tract. For three days Mikha wrestled with the words, but they never seemed as elegant and convincing on paper as they were when they originated in his heart. What he was feeling was a desire to find the right words, and to express them, so that everyone would read them and understand, and everyone would agree …

*   *   *

On Sunday the twenty-fifth, Sergei Borisovich called and asked the young people to come by immediately. From him, they learned the latest news: that on Red Square, next to Lobnoe Mesto, also known as the Place of Skulls, there had been a demonstration against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The names of seven people who went out onto the square were already known. All the demonstrators but one had been arrested. Next to the former site of public executions, she had sat down with a three-month-old baby in her arms, holding a Czech flag.

“Gorbanevskaya!” Mikha said.

Chernopyatov confirmed it. His house was full of people. They were already discussing who would write a letter of protest, and to whom it would be addressed. Mikha shut himself up in Alyona's room and finished the piece that he had been working on all those days, without being able to finish it. Now, after the demonstration, he reworked it, shifted the accent of the argument, and titled it: “The Five-Minute Demonstration of the Magnificent Seven on Lobnoe Mesto.” He handed it to Chernopyatov, who frowned.

“As usual, too much pathos, Mikha!”

In the evening he showed the piece to two more people: Edik and Ilya.

Edik considered it to be too wordy and vague. Ilya took the piece of paper without saying a thing.

Twenty-four hours later, the Voice of America was reporting what had happened on Red Square—about the five-minute demonstration and about the magnificent seven. The text had been edited and shortened. Still, there could be no doubt, it was Mikha's piece!

So someone must have passed it to them! One of two people: Ilya or Edik. Unbelievable!

Everyone was nervous, and tried to keep a low profile. Searches and arrests were taking place throughout the city. In contrast to what the century had seen prior to these events, the numbers of human casualties were small: around a hundred civilians killed on the Czech side, and nineteen Soviet troops. After the successful completion of the operation, about two thousand people were arrested in Czechoslovakia. In Russia, the numbers were negligible: the seven demonstrators on Red Square and ten more demonstrators, unknown and unsung, in the provinces.

A major trial was being planned for the protesters. Chernopyatov knew them all, and all the information about the trial filtered down to him.

Mikha and Edik were planning to publish a new issue of
Gamayun
devoted entirely to the Crimean Tatar movement before the New Year holidays. Putting together a literary section was proving to be the most difficult part, but with the help of his Tatar friends, Mikha was able to find a Crimean Tatar poet living in Uzbekistan. His name was Eshref Shemi-zade. The Tatars did a word-for-word translation, and Mikha translated excerpts from the semidestroyed poem. The excerpts were written with the poet's lifeblood, and Mikha, in anguish himself, somehow managed to make a rendering:

It's not a dog that sets up a terrible howl

In the icy Moscow night.

It's the Kremlin leader, craving blood,

Insatiable. He howls and snarls …

Just before the New Year, Mikha had his baptism by fire. His house was searched. Four men scoured the empty room, taking a long time, then, bewildered by its unyielding transparency, they began to knock on the walls to see if they could discover something that way. On a bookshelf, among the books, they found a packet of letters that had belonged to his late aunt Genya. The letters were wrapped in gray paper and bound with coarse string into smaller bundles, according to year. On every bundle there was a date: one bundle per year, dating from 1915 to 1955. There were forty in all. It was family correspondence with relatives from Arkhangelsk, Karaganda, and the Urals. Mikha had found the letters not long before, when they were discarding the wardrobe. He had kept them at the request of Marlen, but he hadn't even thought to read them, out of a sense of delicacy and tact. Now the police were hastily untying the string; but when they saw the dates, they lost interest. That was unfortunate: among the letters was, among other things, correspondence between the legendary Samuil and Lenin, as well as between Samuil and Trotsky. There was also an extremely interesting letter in which Lenin tried to persuade Samuil to find a secret source of financing, independent of government, to develop the world Communist movement …

“Those letters belonged to my aunt. Her son was planning to come by to take a look at them,” Mikha said by way of explanation, taking possession of the letters again.

“Too late now,” the senior officer said gruffly, and grabbed them out of Mikha's hands.

The whole operation lasted about two hours. There was nowhere to search, and nothing to search for.

They impounded the family correspondence, more out of a sense of professional duty, along with ten pre-Revolutionary poetry collections, almost all of them given to him by Ilya, a rephotographed book by Berdyaev that Mikha kept intending to read, but never got around to, and a small-format, two-volume copy of
Doctor Zhivago
from Pierre Zand.

All the materials for the journal had been deposited with Edik immediately. Nothing remained in the house. Nonetheless … nonetheless, when he saw the two-volume Pasternak in the hands of the searchers, he felt a hot wave of panic wash over him. He remembered a single page, completely filled with very small handwriting. He remembered where he had put that page—in the first book that came to hand—just after the neighbor had called him to the telephone that was affixed to the wall in the main corridor of the communal apartment.

After he came back to his room, he looked around for the paper, couldn't find it, and so reconstructed it from memory. And now Mikha remembered—he had put the little piece of paper in that very two-volume copy of
Doctor Zhivago.

The paper was valuable. For the next issue of the magazine, Mikha had prepared a demographic rundown of the deportees from Crimea during the war. The Crimean Tatars had conducted a poll among the deportees and their descendants in Central Asia, collating the information with old, long-forgotten data. It was a huge project, in which hundreds of Tatar deportees took part.

On the page, in minuscule calligraphic handwriting, under a heading in red ink that said, simply, “The Tatars,” was the following text:

1783—around 4 million Tatars in Crimea when it was annexed by Russia

1917—120,000 Tatars

1941—560,000 Tatars in Crimea

1941–42—137,000 Tatar men mobilized, 57,000 of whom were killed

1944—420,000 Tatar (200,000 children) civilians

1944, May 18–20—32,000 NKVD officials took part in the deportation

1944, May 18—200,000 Tatars (official figures) transported to Central Asia

1945—187,000 deportees died (official figure 80,000)

1956—deportee status of Central Asian Tatars revoked, but return to Crimea forbidden

At the bottom there was a note written in blue ink:

Red: Note that the official figures (the number of deportees, for ex.) are artificially lowered; according to our data, 42 percent of the deportees perished in the first year and a half. This doesn't correspond to official figures, which were all falsified. Ravil is preparing a table from 1945 to 1968.
Musa.