The gates of November (37 page)

He and Olga applied for their marriage license in her grandmother’s little town outside Moscow, and were married. When his father was sentenced to exile, Leonid reasoned that the danger to his own person had lessened considerably. The international furor over his father’s sentence was enormous; the KGB would not want to add to it by arresting the son as well. Besides, he, Leonid, was really not much of a dissident; until turning eighteen, he had never participated in petitions or demonstrations because he was a minor, and since eighteen he had been on the run. It made no sense for the KGB to arrest him now.

He returned to the apartment with Olga. From there he went to see his parents in February 1979, and he flew back with his mother to await the birth of his child, which occurred on April 2. On April 8 Leonid went to the hospital to bring home his wife and infant son. Later, on the way into the apartment with his new family, he checked the mailbox and saw the postcard from OVIR: He was to appear at the OVIR office on April 16 to pick up his exit visa.

When you reported to receive your exit visa, you yielded up your internal passport to the authorities. But Leonid needed his internal passport to get on a flight to Chita; he wanted to see his father one final time before he departed. The April 16 deadline for the exit visa was too soon.

Masha accompanied him to OVIR the next day; he remembers she wore the amulet purchased by her mother in Jerusalem. He informed the official that he had come for his exit visa. But, he added, there had been a change in his status since the time of his original application: He had a wife now, and an infant son. And his father was in exile. He would have to write a new application.

The official gave him the necessary papers to fill out and said his visa would be extended only until May 12.

The following day Masha was informed that Volodya had been taken seriously ill. She left immediately for Chita. It seemed that after one of his twenty-four-hour shifts at the furnace, Volodya, drenched with sweat, had walked out into a freezing April morning and was soon in the hospital in Aginskoye with double pneumonia.

By the end of April, with Masha present, his condition had improved, and he returned to the village. When Leonid arrived in Tsokto-Khangil in the last week of April, his father looked pale and was breathing with difficulty. He spent five days with his parents in their apartment, kept Volodya company during his boiler room shifts, slept nights on the floor in a fleece-lined bag, which he left behind when he departed.

He and Volodya talked at length about Israel. Leonid had warm feelings about Israel, but his second language, which he could read and speak fluently, was American English. Since the age of twelve he had been meeting five to fifteen visiting Americans every day in the Gorky Street apartment, translating their conversations with his mother. He knew American movies and pop music, had spent time with American girls, au pairs in the apartments of American diplomatic personnel. Yes, he liked Israel, but he wanted to live in the United States.

Volodya said, “You must go to Israel; otherwise you will damage the image of the movement and my image in particular. I am sure you will go on tour, campaigning in America, to raise money for the movement. Then you can choose where you want to live. Why are you choosing now? You don’t know about Israel. Maybe you’ll like it. Go to Israel, be there awhile, do the campaign, everything will settle down, and then you’ll decide where you want to live.”

Leonid listened in silence. That was their only serious conversation during those days in Tsokto-Khangil. He would normally never talk about matters somber or sentimental with his father. With his mother, yes, but with his father—much rather discuss the nail in the wall, play chess, just be in each other’s presence. Leonid and Volodya parted with the hope that they would meet each other after the exile. He and Masha boarded the morning bus to Aginskoye. Volodya stood on the side of the road, watching them leave.

That was the first of May. There followed frantic days in Moscow: document-collecting, farewell parties, packing. On the evening of May 9 the Gorky Street apartment witnessed a large, joyous crowd. Leonid’s friends, his parents’ friends: Jews, Russians, dissidents, refuseniks, journalists. The next evening was quiet, with a small and intimate family gathering.

On Friday, May 11, Masha accompanied Leonid and his wife and infant son to the Moscow airport and watched them take off for Vienna. Leonid and Olga and little Eugene stayed in the transit camp in Vienna over the weekend and on Monday, May 14, arrived in Israel. A week after being reunited with his grandmother and other relatives there, Leonid found himself in the United States, traveling with an Israeli passport given him by Nechemyah Levanon, talking about the plight of his parents, seeking political support and raising funds for the cause of Soviet Jewry. Sanya had met him on his arrival at Kennedy Airport in New York and then returned to the University of California in Santa Cruz, where he was attending veterinary school.

By the time Leonid arrived in Israel, Masha was hurrying back to Tsokto-Khangil. A week after she and Leonid had left for Moscow, Volodya had suffered a relapse of the pneumonia. In the hospital in Aginskoye the illness would not respond to penicillin, and his fever was dangerously high. Zalya, Masha’s brother, came to visit him, but could do nothing. The doctor said to Zalya, “If the penicillin can’t help him, it may be cancer.” Zalya put in an emergency call to a family friend in Moscow, Dr. Eugenia Gural, who had just received permission to leave for Israel. Instead of getting her exit visa, she bought a ticket to Chita and arrived at Volodya’s bedside in the Aginskoye hospital with a new British antibiotic. She remained for three days, administering the antibiotic to Volodya and at the same time saving the life of a senior nurse who was allergic to a different antibiotic, with which she was being treated by her colleagues. A week later Volodya was able 1:0 return to the village. In the meantime Dr. Gural had flown back to Moscow and shortly afterward left for Israel, where she now lives and practices medicine in Jerusalem.

Years later, once again engaged in the visa war, Masha would fly from Moscow to Siberia to help save the life of a fellow refusenik, Yuli Edelshtein, who lay near death in a labor camp. Keeping one another alive was another weapon in that war.

There is a photograph of Masha and Volodya taken sometime in 1979, in Tsokto-Khangil. Volodya looks like a somber patriarchal figure, streaks of gray in his thick beard and wavy hair, two deep creases between his brows, a grim line to his lips, and dark sadness in his eyes. Masha’s smile is pallid, a brave display of courage. Suspended from a chain around her neck is the amulet purchased for her in Jerusalem by her mother.

Masha brought packets of seed back from Moscow. Tatars in the village gave her a small plot of land, and she planted carrots, squash, and potatoes. In the boxes of earth on the balcony of their apartment, she cultivated onions, lettuce, dill, oregano, and garlic, and she and Volodya had greens during the early summer.

At the height of the summer, with the wind blowing oven heat from the Gobi Desert and the stench of the raw sewage that flowed from the apartment house, it became impossible to open the door to the balcony. Flies swarmed over the clots and coils of putrescence. The walls of the apartment turned black with flies. Masha and Volodya hung nets over the doors and windows. The Buryats who visited them gazed thoughtfully at the nets, noting the way they kept out the flies, and did the same in their apartments.

After the summer the air grew cool, and the earth given them by the Tatars and planted by Masha yielded potatoes and vegetables, which Masha and Volodya ate for months.

In the early fall the local electrician, a Buryat, paid them a visit. He sat for a while, gazing expressionlessly at the doors to the balcony. Finally he said, “So you’re going to use the balcony? I saw you out there the other day.”

Volodya nodded amiably.

“A great view,” said the Buryat. “You can see very far. And from any hill around this valley people can see you. It would take no effort at all to shoot you with a rifle from any hill. And they’ll never find out who shot. We have lots of people being killed here. Difficult to find who shoots from the hills.”

After a moment of silence Volodya said evenly, “If they want to kill me, they’ll kill me. I’m not going to hide.” The word “they” resonated quietly in the still air.

The Buryat said nothing and soon left. On occasion Masha and Volodya encountered him in the village and offered polite greetings. He never visited them again.

Because of his ill health, Volodya could no longer walk the mile to the kolkhoz boiler room and was given the job of stoker in the boiler room of the apartment building in which he and Masha lived. He came down with periodontal disease and lost some teeth.

Every morning that summer and early fall they took the short walk to the post office in the village square. Many seemed to know their address in exile; they were receiving letters and postcards from America, Australia, Europe. People they didn’t know, telling them that they were not forgotten, that many thousands were now joined to their cause. And there were letters from the family in Israel. How strange that was! In Moscow there had been almost a complete absence of mail; the KGB had intercepted and read everything. Here, mail from every corner of the world. For some reason the authorities had neglected to inform the local post office to hold their mail, and no one in the post office seemed to care enough to do that on his own.

Masha began to hang the color postcards they received on the walls of the kitchen. Soon the walls began to fill with photographs of the great cities of America, Britain, Holland, Belgium, France, Sweden, Switzerland. On the wall near their bed she placed the postcards from Israel. Over the years the walls became completely covered. She would ask Volodya if it was realistic to think that they might ever see any of those cities, and he would say in his deep voice, “Of course! I have no doubt. We must believe in that.” She spent many hours gazing at those picture postcards, went off at times in her reveries to the worlds on her walls. She felt intrigued, often mesmerized, by the postcards from Israel. Photographs of Tel Aviv. People on the beaches. The waves. Dark as pitch and twenty degrees below zero outside her window. And the longing for the warm beaches of Tel Aviv.

In November of that year, 1979, she was back in Moscow, holding a press conference in the apartment of Professor Alexander Lerner, a renowned mathematician and a refusenik. She had by then become Volodya’s voice to the world. In a room crowded with dozens of reporters and refuseniks sitting or standing around a large dark wood dining table, Lerner’s oil paintings on the walls, she talked about the horror of what had happened to her husband, his punishing isolation in a cruel land at the far end of the world.

By chance, in the apartment that day was Sister Gloria Coleman, a nun from the United States who, through her friend Sister Ann Gillen, had become involved in the movement for Soviet Jewry. She stood there listening to Masha’s calmly delivered words. She was awed by her outspokenness in an apartment near the very center of the Soviet empire. Masha spoke slowly, in Russian, and someone translated. None of the people in this movement, she said—aloud, without a magic slate—had committed any crimes against the Soviet Union. They simply wanted exit visas. They wanted to do what all free people are able to do: emigrate to the country of their choice. The stories published in
Izvestia
that claimed they were involved in espionage were untrue. They did not wish to harm the Soviet Union; they wanted only to leave it.

She completed her remarks. Questions were directed to her by the reporters—spoken, without the use of magic slates. Sister Gloria remembers Masha’s poised and dignified presence, an eminently civilized woman, her answers delivered in a tone of self-possession and then translated. The press conference came to an end. Masha traveled back to Tsokto-Khangil.

In a letter she wrote that autumn, she opened her heart, sharing the despair that often came upon the refuseniks: their nearly unendurable inner torment and stress: stripped of home, community, and country; the leaders suddenly exiled, jailed; the families fractured; the burden of unbounded waiting borne by parents and children who felt themselves belonging nowhere. “Our sons are free,” she wrote. “Our dream has come true. If it is God’s will, we’ll see them again. If not, then … After so many years, the pain has deadened. Ten years of refusals and stress have told on us both.

“Here in Siberia, our daily life consists of waiting for the 5:00 p.m. radio news broadcast. Every morning we visit the post office; letters are the main link with the world…. Our life here resembles science fiction. We are so far away, more than 8,000 km from Moscow. We two are so alien to the environment here….

“Time slips away. Heat, dust, stuffy air, flies, foul smells.… In the winter the sewer pipe fell off…. After it thawed out, the stuff flowed to a pit through the gutter.

“In front of our apartment is a public convenience,’ which hasn’t been cleaned since last September…. No water. Forty-one months are left to go for us without a water supply. We’ll have to carry it in buckets from a source 300 meters from our building.”

Masha’s poignant locution about God’s will was her way of expressing hope in the language of her pious grandmother. She believed deeply in an all-knowing, all-powerful Being who was beyond humankind’sability to describe, as did Leonid, though neither of them was formally religious. Volodya, uncertain, was the agnostic.

In the warm weather of the following year Volodya was a watchman in the kolkhoz greenhouse, and then for three months he worked in the international telephone station at the post office, talking at times with people in Moscow and elsewhere. The KGB got wind of that and had him fired. Aware of the law on that matter, he sued the KGB in a local court; a worker could not be arbitrarily dismissed from a job he or she had worked on for three months or longer. While the lawsuit wound its way through the bureaucracy of the legal system, he did not have to work, according to the law. Astonishingly, he won the case and was compensated for all the time he hadn’t worked—to the fury of the KGB. He returned to his job as stoker in the boiler room of the building where Masha and he lived.