When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (78 page)

More airtime was given to Soviet Jewry outside the closed doors of the summit than within. Reagan did devote an entire session to the issue on the second day, and he specifically mentioned Shcharansky. But there was no concrete progress on this or any other substantive issues, such as arms control. The conversation went in circles. The main point of contention was Reagan's Star Wars project, which Gorbachev feared was not just a defensive shield, as it was described, but a sophisticated space-based weapon that would trigger a new arms race. As long as Star Wars existed, Gorbachev refused to discuss the dismantling of intermediate-range nuclear warheads in Europe. The only tangible result at the end of the three days was an anodyne joint statement reaffirming that a nuclear war could never be won and should not be fought. There was also a commitment to two further summits, one in Washington and one in Moscow.

But the real success of Geneva, as was immediately clear to all observers, was the personal connection forged between Reagan and Gorbachev. The two spent nearly five of the fifteen official hours of the summit alone in conversation with only their translators. Somehow, through Reagan's corny anecdotes and jokes and Gorbachev's slightly sardonic wit, the two began to feel comfortable, even to think they could trust each other. The bigger move was on Reagan's part. He had spent his first term demonizing the Soviet Union, as he had his entire political life. But Reagan was a man led by intuition more than anything else, and something told him that Gorbachev signified a real change. He was willing to bet on this feeling, even if it meant upsetting the right flank of his party and the neocons in his administration—not to mention activists like Avi Weiss—who saw confrontation as the only way to deal with the USSR.

Soviet Jewry had something to gain from Reagan's approach. Nixon and Kissinger had refused to deal with an issue that seemed too moralistic, and Carter had dealt with it too dogmatically and without any real weight behind his words. For Reagan, Soviet Jewry was both ideological and tactical. He was going to give Gorbachev the space he needed to reform. His intuition told him that much. But the relationship would have to be based on trust. And Reagan had made it exceedingly clear that the proof of that trust would be in human rights. Morris Abram, the head of the National Conference and a confidant of Reagan, reported in a memo that the president had told him after Geneva that "if the Soviet Union cannot be trusted to keep its word with respect to existing international obligations on emigration and other Jewish rights, it cannot be trusted to keep its word with respect to arms." The issue of Soviet Jewry, he was saying, was now the barometer.

Two months after her frozen vigil in Geneva, Avital Shcharansky received a phone call from George Shultz. A deal had been reached. Her husband was going to be freed. Shultz told her to make her way to Europe to meet him. Even though she knew about the negotiations, she had been trying not to get her hopes up. After all, it wasn't the first time they had seemed close to reunion—rumors of an imminent release had surfaced at least half a dozen times before. But now Shultz gave her a date, a time, and a place: sometime before noon on Tuesday, February 11, 1986, Shcharansky would cross the Glienicke Bridge, which spanned the Havel River and linked West Berlin with Potsdam, the East German town where generations of Prussian kings once resided. The small, unassuming iron bridge had become one of the most notorious border crossings between East and West. Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot downed over the Soviet Union, was returned to his countrymen across this bridge, as were numerous other prisoners and spies who'd been caught on the wrong sides of the iron curtain. Avital heard the words but couldn't digest their meaning at first. For nearly nine years she had spent almost every waking hour in pursuit of this moment, but the flesh-and-blood man she was fighting for, whom she had not seen since the morning after their wedding night, in 1974, had long since become an abstraction. He was a memory she labored hard to keep fresh as she pursued an exhausting task that she'd never thought she was particularly well suited for. A few times she had confided to Avi Weiss that imagining the reunion with her husband filled her with fear and anxiety. I think I'll die when I see him, she once told Weiss.

The Geneva summit and the general warming of relations had provided the latest prod for an early Shcharansky release. In the late spring of 1985, Wolfgang Vogel, a wealthy East German lawyer with deep connections to the Stasi, had reported to his West German contact that he had a mandate from Moscow to negotiate for Shcharansky's release. Vogel had made a lucrative career out of arranging thousands of prisoner exchanges and spy swaps over the past three decades, starting with the 1962 exchange of Francis Gary Powers for the KGB agent Rudolf Abel. The West German government paid him two hundred thousand dollars a year for his services. Shcharansky was a sensitive case; while he was charged as a spy in the Soviet Union, the Americans did not consider him as such and would not agree to a normal tit-for-tat spy-exchange deal. Throughout that year, Vogel had met secretly with West German officials and Richard Burt, the new American ambassador to Bonn, to try to work out an arrangement. The latitude Vogel was given from Moscow increased following the Geneva summit, as did the rumors that something was in the works. One persistent story, partly true, was that Shcharansky's release was linked to the freeing of Nelson Mandela, whose political party, the African National Congress, had been receiving financial backing from the Soviet Union since the 1950s. P. W. Botha, the South African president, let it be known that he was interested in such an exchange. During his visit to Moscow in September, Edgar Bronfman had conveyed Botha's willingness and tried to convince his Soviet contacts to take the deal. In January, Botha fed the rumor mill by speaking publicly about the high-profile East-West swap.

But the deal that Vogel ended up putting together did not involve Mandela. He arranged instead an ordinary spy swap—Shcharansky, two East Germans who were serving life sentences for spying, and one Czechoslovakian imprisoned for helping Eastern bloc citizens flee to the West were exchanged for four people who had been caught spying for the Soviet Union in the United States and West Germany. At the Americans' insistence, Shcharansky would cross the Glienicke Bridge alone and twenty minutes before the others. This way, the United States could view his release as simply a sweetener unrelated to the spies, and the Soviets could maintain their fiction that Shcharansky had been a CIA agent. This elaborate choreography was finalized by Vogel and his American and West German counterparts at the end of January after a full day of nonstop negotiations at an Austrian ski resort. The Soviets, eager to get full publicity for the release, leaked the news first. On February 2, it made the cover of
Bild,
the popular Hamburg tabloid.

Shcharansky, isolated thousands of miles away in Perm 35, a labor camp deep in the Ural Mountains, had no idea what was happening. He did not know that the American president had mentioned him to the new Soviet general secretary during their first meeting; he knew nothing about the fevered negotiations or the nervous anticipation of his wife. He did know, however, that his captors were trying to fatten him up. Starting at the end of December, he was given daily intravenous infusions of vitamins. A doctor began treating him for a heart condition he had developed in the camp. In seven weeks, he gained more than twenty pounds. But he figured this was in anticipation of a visit from his mother and brother. The last time he had seen them, in 1984, not long after arriving in Perm, the meeting was preceded by two months of hospital care and better food. But after a recent hunger strike—to protest the confiscation of his letters to Avital and his mother—all visitation rights had been taken away until 1987 as punishment.

His answer came on January 22, the same day the deal was concluded in Austria. Without warning, guards brought Shcharansky to the gate that led to the camp, opened the large iron door, ushered him out, and shut it behind him. Four men in civilian clothes—obviously KGB agents—stood there waiting for him. The rest of the day was surreal, as evidence mounted that he might just be heading for freedom. A convoy of Volgas and police cars escorted him on the four-hour ride from Perm. Then he was loaded onto an airplane, which took off with him as the only passenger. As the plane lifted and Shcharansky saw the severe landscape growing smaller and smaller, then receding under the clouds, he finally began to believe what was happening. His first reaction, however, was not excitement. It was anxiety. Just like Avital in Israel, he was leaving the life he knew for a life stripped of the black-and-white morality that had guided him in the Gulag. He described the moment a year later:

When I probed my feelings, I found to my astonishment that my dominant emotion was sorrow. Below me was a world I knew so well, where I was familiar with every detail, every sound, where they couldn't pull any dirty tricks on me, where I knew how to help a friend and deal with an enemy. Down there was a stern world that accepted and acknowledged me, and where I was secure, the master of my own fate. Now, lost in speculation and apprehension, driving away the hope that was now becoming impossible to dismiss, I lost my self-confidence. Suddenly I no longer felt in control.

Shcharansky was brought to Lefortovo, his first prison, which he had left nine years before. There he stayed for the next two weeks, still unclear why he had been transferred to Moscow. He spent his time rediscovering the prison's vast library of books confiscated during the Great Terror of the 1930s and immersed himself in a translation of Schiller. On the morning of February 10 the guards came for him. They gave him a suit, socks and shoes, a long blue coat, a scarf, and a large black Russian fur hat. The pants were too big and kept falling down. When Shcharansky complained, he was given a piece of twine because a belt, he was told, was forbidden.

He was driven to Bykovo airport. Before he could board the plane, Shcharansky asked about the miniature book of Psalms that had become a talisman for him throughout his years in prison. Along with his letters and books, it had been taken away when he arrived at Lefortovo. The guards could not be bothered, and Shcharansky threatened not to move until it was given back to him. A cameraman and photographers were recording the scene on the tarmac. Shcharansky lay down on the snow-covered ground yelling that he would not leave without the Psalms. After a consultation and a check of the book, it was handed to him, and he boarded the plane, clutching it tightly. All this time, he was reciting the prayer he had composed in the desperation of his initial stay at Lefortovo and that had been reverberating through his head in the decade since. "Blessed are you, Adonai, King of the Universe. Grant me the good fortune to live with my wife, my beloved ... Grant me the strength, the power, the intelligence, the good fortune, and the patience to leave this jail and to reach the land of Israel in an honest and worthy way." The plane was headed west. He could see by the direction of the sun. Finally, the Soviet officials with him informed Shcharansky that he was being deprived of his Soviet citizenship and expelled from the Soviet Union for being an American spy. He had imagined this moment in his head for years. Shcharansky wanted them to take down a statement. He was denied. So, with a smile on his face, he said in an official voice that he was happy that the very thing he had asked for thirteen years ago was finally being granted. And he reasserted that he had had nothing to do with espionage or treason. Then he sat down with his Psalm book and started quietly reading to himself.

After the plane landed in East Germany, Shcharansky's KGB escorts ordered him to walk in a straight line to a waiting black limousine. He found this final order grating. So, instead, he zigzagged his way to the car, confusing the watching agents. In Berlin, Shcharansky was taken first to Wolfgang Vogel's house, where Vogel explained what would happen the following day, and then to a villa in the forests of Wannsee, southwest of Berlin. He adjusted surprisingly well for someone who had woken up that morning in a Soviet prison. He could not get enough of the earthy smell and bitter taste of freshly ground coffee, forbidden him during his imprisonment. That night he couldn't sleep; all the black coffee he drank through the evening probably didn't help, but the bed he was given was entirely too soft for him to sleep in. His back had become accustomed to the wooden board in his cell. He paced all night, sleepless, and meditated some more with his Psalms, nervous about what it would be like to see Avital again.

Around eleven the next morning, he stood on one end of the snowy Glienicke Bridge, the enormous black fur hat on his head, a too-large coat draped around him, and his pants held up with a piece of twine. Above his head was the flag of the German Democratic Republic. The Havel River was covered in a layer of frost. Shcharansky began walking with Richard Burt, the American ambassador, who towered over him. He asked where the border was, and Burt pointed out a thin, painted line halfway across the bridge. Shcharansky, with the impish smile he hadn't lost, gleefully jumped across the line, holding up his pants to keep them from falling down. The next moments passed in a blur. A large crowd of journalists, diplomats, and sightseers were cheering on the other end of the bridge. He was rushed into a waiting car. The ambassador pressed his own cuff links, which had been given to him by the secretary of state, into Shcharansky's palm as a gift. There was a call to Washington, small talk aboard a plane, food, and more coffee. And all he wanted was Avital. He was told that she would be waiting for him in Frankfurt, his first stop on the way to Israel.

At the American air base in Frankfurt, Shcharansky was led down a long corridor to a room. He opened the door and looked around. There, sitting in the corner, was a woman dressed in a long wool skirt and dark sweater, her head covered with a kerchief. It was Natasha, now Avital, the girl he had last seen in 1974, transformed into a devout middle-aged woman. The emotional impact of the moment was too much for both of them. He took a few steps toward her and she stood up. They embraced strongly and through tears he said, in a laughing voice and in Hebrew, "Sorry I'm a little late."