"The Gates of November" - читать интересную книгу автора (Potok Chaim)

8 The Amulet

Before his trial Volodya was kept in Butyrskaya Prison for four weeks. Once a week, a shower and change of underwear. Mornings each prisoner received six hundred grams of black bread and two cubes of sugar. Hot food three times a day.

After his trial and the rejection of his appeal, he was transferred to Krasnopresnenskaya Prison. The routine strip search. Guards poked through his bag of personal belongings and then put him into a cell with about thirty others. It was a transit prison; men constantly came and went. He spent four days there and was sent to another cell, strip-searched again, his bag turned inside out. The cell was called, in prison idiom, the accumulator.

One evening he was taken with others to a police van. Guards with machine guns loaded them inside. There was room in the back for at most twenty people standing solidly jammed together, but more than twenty-five needed transport. The surplus prisoners were stacked like sacks on the heads of those standing.

The van brought them to a railroad depot outside Moscow. A concrete platform, a web of tracks, sheds, empty railroad cars. Lights on tall poles illumined the tracks.

A second van pulled up, and out of it jumped guards with muzzled German shepherd dogs. The prisoners were herded onto the platform and ordered to squat with their hands clasped behind them. Each prisoner’s small bag of personal belongings lay on the ground by his right foot. A guard pointed to a railroad car and announced that when he gave the signal, the prisoners were to run to the car and stop there. He said, “If while you are running, you take a single step to the left or to the right, it will be considered an escape attempt, and you will be shot.” The muzzles were removed from the dogs.

Guards with a leash in the left hand, a weapon in the right; guards in front and on the sides; a guard in the rear with a long rubber truncheon for prisoners moving too slowly. Dogs and guards at their heels, the prisoners dashed across the ties and tracks and pebbled ground and came to a halt near the car, where they squatted and were counted and made to answer to their names and state the article of the penal code under which they had been sentenced. Then, again, they were strip-searched. And sent to their compartments.

Volodya found himself in a car with a long corridor where armed guards walked up and down. The corridor windows were painted white on the outside. Windowless compartments walled by thick chicken-wire grillwork lined the side of the corridor across from the translucent windows. The guards-Central Asians: Uzbeks, Yakuts, Buryats-knew hardly any Russian and were unable to communicate with the prisoners beyond the barking of basic commands. Each compartment, built to accommodate four passengers, contained at least ten prisoners, and on one of the many trains Volodya took on that long journey, one compartment held thirty, packed into the seats, the luggage bins, and standing. None of the men knew in which direction they were being ferried or what sort of fire or ice awaited them at their final destination.

Each prisoner received food to last until the end of the first leg of the journey: black bread, salted herring, and six lumps of sugar. Because they were normally given two lumps of sugar daily, they now knew they would be traveling in that car for three days. They felt the bump as the car was attached to a freight or passenger train. Soon the train started up. They rolled, creaking and clanking, away from Moscow.

Volodya was then fifty-one years old.

Siberia is a land so vast-about three million square miles-that its boundaries are often given as imprecise, roughly extending eastward from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific region until recently known as the Soviet Far East, and southward from the tundra world along the rim of the Arctic Ocean through a zone of vast forests to the near-lunar landscape of the nontillable, semidesert steppes of Central Asia and Mongolia.

Its use as a site for penal colonies and political exile began in the seventeenth century. The arduous journey, which originally took months, was made easier when the Trans-Siberian Railroad was completed in 1905. That was the railroad the young Bolshevik, Solomon Slepak, once took with his wife and daughter and infant son, Volodya, to a new life in China as a journalist and Comintern agent representing the then-nascent Soviet government. Now his son was riding it into exile as a prisoner of that government.

Always that journey-etap, the Russians called it, the transport under guard-from the initial transit prison to the final destination was the very worst of times for a prisoner. On the train you were allowed out of your cell twice a day to go to the toilet. And you had no idea where the train was heading unless it stopped in local towns and villages to pick up “transits,” prisoners who were being brought to various district centers for trial. From those “transits” you would learn the direction the train was traveling.

During the first day of travel, the train Volodya was riding stopped briefly to pick up two lads. He watched as they were brought into the adjacent compartment. When the train was moving again, he called through the wall, “Boys, where are we traveling through?” and one of them answered, “Through the land of evergreen tomatoes,” and the men in both compartments roared with laughter. Soon they were in a world of tall and broken hills, the train navigating their curving shoulders among dense forests. The Ural Mountains. Their first stop would be the city of Sverdlovsk,

At the end of each stage of the etap, the prisoners were directed off the train and made to squat and wait with their hands behind them, armed guards and killer dogs all around, until they were taken by van to a prison. There they stayed until the authorities organized the next leg of the journey, when they again received their food rations and went off on another train.

Beyond the Ural Mountains, the stops along the journey-Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk-were cities with prisons. They arrived in Sverdlovsk late at night, were counted, taken by van to a prison, strip-searched, and after showering put in a cell. The city served as a hub, as the gateway to the Gulag, the vast system of forced-labor prisons in the USSR. From Sverdlovsk the prisoners went off in different directions: to labor camps, to places of exile.

In Volodya’s cell there were about one hundred beds and 150 prisoners: thieves, criminals, murderers, some making the journey a second or third time.

A “striper,” a man whose striped prison garb indicated he was being sent to a maximum-security camp, seemed to be the acknowledged leader of the cell. He asked Volodya what crime he was being sent away for. Volodya told him about the demonstration. The man said, “Aha, a good kike!”

The prisoners’ class system divided the world into good kikes and bad kikes. The bad kikes were Brezhnev, bureaucrats, members of the Communist Party; the good kikes, Sakharov, all other dissidents, and now Volodya.

Being a good kike earned Volodya respect and a bed for night sleeping; the shortage of beds necessitated their use during the day as well. When Volodya won second place in a chess contest organized among the prisoners, his standing in the eyes of the others rose considerably. A dissident, a political prisoner, a nice fellow, and also a splendid chess player. A good kike indeed!

He was in that cell fourteen days. Each morning they received their daily ration of bread and sugar; three times a day, hot food. There were two sinks and two lavatory pans in the cell. By the second week three-quarters of the prisoners had dysentery. Some lay about like dying men. They lit strips of blankets and burned pieces of bread and ate the charcoal to stop the diarrhea. No one said anything to the authorities. Telling the guards or doctors about the illness might have resulted in a two-week quarantine of the cell, possibly of the entire prison, an embarrassment to the officials administering the trains and prisons-they would have to answer to those above them for the unsanitary conditions of the cells-and brutal vengeance wreaked by prisoners and authorities upon the one who had dared say aloud what all knew but wanted kept silent. Volodya, too, fell ill.

One day a desperately ill Armenian asked the guards for a doctor. The striper had four prisoners beat him mercilessly; in prison language, they “unbuttoned his kidneys.” When the doctor finally arrived, the Armenian said he needed something for a headache.

On the police van to the train that was to take him out of Sverdlovsk, Volodya discovered that the contents of his bag had been stolen and a large rag left inside it to simulate his possessions. The thief was no doubt one of the guards who had searched the bag; no one in the cell would have dared steal from another prisoner. Volodya was left with only the leather sandals and cotton jogging suit he was wearing. A disastrous turn. One of the men in the crowded van removed his jacket and gave it to Volodya. “You’re going to freedom,” he said. An exile was considered a free man by those who were headed to the labor camps. “It’s cold there; take it.”

On the train to Novosibirsk, Volodya was in constant pain from the dysentery and cold in his sandals and jogging outfit and one jacket. Next to him a sick old man who could not control his bladder used one of his own high boots as a latrine bucket, which he emptied during his evening trips to the toilet.

The train halted briefly at one point, and two young women prisoners were brought on board and placed alone in a separate compartment. They were on their way to a labor camp. From their compartment came the sweet sounds of their voices as they sang duets. Russian folk songs. There were eight guards in the car, all Asians. From time to time the singing would stop as guards entered the compartment and raped the women. A normal activity in Gulag life; no woman would think of resisting or complaining.

Normal, too, was the way the prisoners were given water on the train. Twice a day a tank was attached to the outside of the chicken-wire wall of each compartment, and a tap pushed through to the inside. One cup for all in the compartment; it went from mouth to mouth. Near Irkutsk there was a camp for prisoners with tuberculosis. On board the train were many who carried that disease.

It was near the end of August. In Irkutsk, Volodya saw light frost in the early mornings and thin ice on puddles.

One month and two days after he left Moscow, Volodya arrived in the Siberian city of Chita. His father had once had a girlfriend there, during his years as a Bolshevik commander. Volodya spent four days in the prison in Chita. A police van brought him to Aginskoye; he remembers a punishing ride of more than seven hours along a narrow road that wound through mountains and valleys and steppes. In the van were Russians, one very sad-looking man who had killed someone in a labor camp and was returning from his court hearing, and Buryats, who shared their goat cheese and cured lard with Volodya. It turned out that the man had good reason to be sad: This was the second time he had committed murder, and he was sure he would now receive the death penalty.

After a weekend stay in the prison in Aginskoye, Volodya was taken by the deputy chief of police in a jeep the twenty miles to the village of Tsokto-Khangil. It was August 28, 1978.

Volodya thought that he had been assigned originally to Tsokto-Khangil, but months later he discovered that by law, he could have chosen to stay in Aginskoye, a fairly large town with a sizable Russian population. He had not been informed that exile meant only that he could not vote or leave the district and had to appear once a week to register in the local militia station. Probably the KGB had told the militia of Aginskoye that they didn’t want him living among so many Russians and to send him to the village.

It was early afternoon and turning cool when they arrived in Tsokto-Khangil. The entire village was actually a kolkhoz, a collective farm. The deputy chief of police brought Volodya to the one cafeteria in the village and treated him to a full meal. Then he took him to the office of the head bookkeeper of the kolkhoz, who was expecting him.

Volodya had no clothes, no money. The bookkeeper led him to the only hotel in the village; the dirt road that ran parallel to the village went on to Mongolia, and truckers used the cafeteria and the hotel for food and rest stops. The one-story hotel had four rooms. Slanting floors. A sink in the corridor. The water closet, with no running water, outdoors. He was given a small room with a bed. The bookkeeper advanced him one ruble against his future earnings and told him to report the following morning to the kolkhoz office.

The chronicles record Volodya’s initial response to his village of exile, to its dirt roads, enormous sky, the rush and hiss of wind across the endless steppes. He felt, in his words, “bewitched by the purity of the air and the songs of the birds.” The sensation did not last long.

He had traveled about five thousand miles, during which he had been entirely cut off from the world beyond etap. He asked if he could send a cable to his wife from the post office. He had no money for the cable and borrowed ten rubles against his future earnings. In Moscow neither the Interior Ministry nor the KGB had informed Masha of Volodya’s final destination. Hearing nothing from him for so many weeks, she had begun to fear he might be dead. He cabled that he was in the village of Tsokto-Khangil, Aginskoye District, Chitinskaya Province, and asked that she send him some money. Shortly afterward she called and told him about her trial and sentence.

Later that day, with the money he had borrowed, he bought a pair of heavy work boots, strips of white cotton cloth to use as socks, two sets of underwear, a flannel shirt, cotton pants, and a cotton-padded jacket. He was now dressed warmly enough to withstand moderately cold weather.

He reported to the kolkhoz chairman, a Mongolian who happened also to be a deputy to the Supreme Soviet. He was not pleased to have an enemy of the people on his kolkhoz and lectured Volodya sternly about his behavior as an exile: He expected him to work hard and not cause trouble. He assigned Volodya to a job in the granary. Months later Volodya discovered that according to law, he could have chosen his job and changed it at will. But no one had informed him of his rights as an exile, and there were no lawbooks available in prison.

The next day two hundred rubles arrived from Masha. Two days later she phoned again to tell him that his father had died.

All her life, as far back as she could remember, Masha had a sense of herself as an amulet; others used her for their own good luck. Often her mother had called Masha “my amulet,” “my good-luck charm,” and in 1976 Bertha purchased a red, blue, and yellow enamel amulet in a shop in Jerusalem, had the back of its metal case engraved with the Hebrew words le-masha me-ima (“To Masha from Mother”), and asked an American tourist to deliver it to Masha in Moscow. Near and distant friends would beg Masha to accompany them to the OVIR office when they went to submit their applications for exit visas. More often than not their visas were granted, and they were certain it was because of Masha’s presence. She accepted as her destiny the uncanny probability that she was alive to serve as the good fortune of others, but not her own.

In September 1978, some days after the funeral of Solomon Slepak, she and Volodya-aided by impatient KGB agents who had grown weary of watching them wait in endless lines in the crowded Moscow airport-managed to buy tickets for one of the usually sold-out direct flights to Chita. They arrived before sunrise and took a cab to the bus station, which was closed.

It had been hot in Moscow when they left, but it was quite cold in Chita. Buryats stood around in silence. The bus arrived: old, rickety, twenty-five seats. Chita lay in an enormous valley surrounded by forest-covered mountains. A river, the Chitinka, ran through the city. Masha saw small houses, fences. On the seat beside her, Volodya slept.

The bus, swaying and rattling, left the city and began to climb. Tall evergreens lined the narrow asphalt road. Huge, polished boulders lay among the trees. They kept climbing, the road now chiseled out of the side of a cliff. A broad valley below and mountains like a theater backdrop stretching to the horizon. The sun rose, bathing one side of the valley in a pale light and leaving the other in blue-green shadows. A river snaked through the valley, houses and fields along its banks. Masha thought it all a beautiful sight and remembered that Chekhov, in his account of his travels to the island of Sakhalin, had described the region as “Russia’s Switzerland.”

Gradually the road turned narrow, rocky, dangerous. It dropped to a dusty valley. They rode through a silent village of wooden houses covered with gray dust and stopped briefly at a coffeehouse in a valley burned by the sun. Along the horizon lay forested hills. After four hours of travel they reached the Trans-Siberian Railroad crossing just as a train was passing. A sign on the side of each car: MOSCOW-PEKING. The railroad Volodya and his family had once taken on their way to China and back. No villages on these steppes, no people. Short, thin, stunted trees, with few branches. Six hours on the road and now, along the horizon, houses on the hills and the town of Aginskoye. A bus station at the edge of the town, a well-lighted waiting room.

Masha and Volodya recovered their belongings and stood on the ticket line for the bus to Tsokto-Khangil. The bus was due in from the south in two hours. In that region Aginskoye was the last town with a large presence of Russians. Southward extended the land of the Buryats-Asian people of the steppes, nomads, Buddhists.

The bus to Tsokto-Khangil was older than the one from Chita. The road, unpaved and rutted; the terrain, an infinite desolation. The doors on the bus couldn’t be closed entirely; dust powdered the driver and passengers. The Buryats in the bus gazed curiously at Masha and Volodya; they did not often see Russians traveling this far south. Trembling like an old horse, the bus made its way up and down hills, and on what seemed the highest hill it stopped, and the Buryats climbed out to pray. They offered money as bribes to evil spirits and candies and cookies to good spirits. Twenty minutes of prayers and offerings. They climbed back on the bus, and now along the road ran a dry riverbed in which grew scrawny birch trees with crooked trunks the thickness of an arm and bent to the ground as if permanently overwhelmed, defeated.

The village of Tsokto-Khangil sat in the middle of a valley that was about thirty miles long and seven miles wide. Low hills fenced in the valley; the sun rose, burned its way across the valley, and set. About three thousand men, women, and children lived in the one-story wooden houses of the village. There were nearly two hundred houses, each with a backyard in which nothing grew.

In the village square stood the administrative buildings of the kolkhoz: the kolkhoz office, on the first floor of which was the village telephone center; the House of Culture, with a concert hall; the post office, with a telegraph, an international telephone line, and a bookshop. Nearby were a medical aid station staffed with a Russian nurse; a maternity ward; a veterinary aid station; a machine and tractor station; the hotel where Masha and Volodya first stayed; a department store; a restaurant; a child care center; a boarding school for the children of Buryat shepherds; a yard for agricultural machinery; another food shop; a greenhouse; a bathhouse; sheds for cows. The entire village was a collective farm that raised pigs and cows and was domesticating the Buryats, attempting to get them to sever their ties to the seminomadic traditions of their ancestors, who had lived off sheep, and to settle into the life of sedentary shepherds bound to a Soviet kolkhoz.

Masha and Volodya arrived on an evening in the second week of September, in weather that had been warm during the day but was brushed with a strange dry cold when they came down off the bus. No one greeted them; no one spoke to them. A wind blew from the north down toward Mongolia and the Gobi Desert.

The hotel was a shabby one-story building. At the far end of its single corridor were two faucets, only one of which had a sink beneath it. The water from the other faucet ran directly onto the floor and through the semirotted boards to the ground below. The room they were given had two iron beds, a table, chairs; a lightbulb hung from the ceiling by a wire. There was electricity only in the morning and evening. The window was without curtains. Gazing out into the darkness, Masha felt she was on a planet burned to dead charcoal by a merciless sun. Five hundred thousand square miles of dull, unfruitful earth, and the Gobi Desert only a few hundred miles away. Still, people live here, she thought that first night. It is possible to survive here.

Volodya woke early to go to his job. They had brought with them a one-burner stove, on which Masha cooked their breakfast. Volodya worked unloading the grain trucks that arrived from the combines. At one point during the day the chairman of the kolkhoz said to him that he knew all about Zionism: The Zionists were evil people who wanted to conquer the world.

Toward the end of September, with the start of the very cold weather, Volodya was given a job as a stoker in the boiler room that heated the kolkhoz garage, in which were trucks and jeeps. There was no antifreeze on the kolkhoz, and frozen water lines could spell disaster for the vehicles. His salary was 120 to 140 rubles a month. He and Masha could not have survived on that, but assistance came from the special fund established by the refuseniks. The money that entered the fund through the sale of tape recorders, radios, cameras, and clothing left behind by overseas visitors was allotted to impoverished refusenik families whose wage earners had lost their jobs and could not find work, and to prisoners and the families of prisoners.

In October winter descended swiftly and cruelly upon the village. Volodya worked in the boiler room of the kolkhoz garage. His labors began at 8:00 A.M. Stripped to the waist in the blistering heat, he stoked the furnace for twenty-four hours and then had forty-eight hours free. He toiled week after week. Twenty-four hours of labor in that boiler room; forty-eight hours off.

In the beginning all the villagers appeared alike to Masha. But Volodya, who had spent his childhood in China, distinguished easily among the various Asian faces: Buryats, Tatars, Yakuts. He began to talk at length to Masha about his years in China. He had never done that before, talked to anyone about those years. Life in Peking and Mukden. His Chinese nanny. The day he and his sister saw the wildcat in the garden. His exile returned him in memory to the warmth and innocence of his beginnings.

At first there was no place where they could live other than in that wretched hotel, its heating system erratic, its walls pocked with holes, its toilets in the yard outside. It was a stop for truck drivers who hauled goods from Chita to Mongolia, which lay a few dozen miles to the south. An old Buryat woman would open the door for them at all hours of the day or night. She would give each a room with a bed, food, and a bottle of vodka, and they would drink until they dropped.

Masha grew fearful of remaining alone in the hotel. At times, when Volodya worked nights, drivers who had discovered there were exiles living in the hotel would yell drunkenly through the door, “Open up! Open the door!” and Masha would say, “Go away or I’ll call the police.”

One night a Buryat driver, drunk to near-unconsciousness, tore the door off its hinges and stood there, staring into the room, swaying. Masha said in a calm voice, “Why are you behaving so badly?” The driver, seeming to sober up a little at her composed, reprimanding tone, pulled himself up and said, “I wanted to open the door and look.” She said, “Well, you looked. Now you can go back to your room, or I’ll call the police.”

Volodya told the chairman of the kolkhoz that he and Masha could not go on living in the hotel. Why couldn’t they settle in nearby Aginskoye, only twenty miles away? But the KGB authorities didn’t want the Slepaks in Aginskoye and suggested to the kolkhoz chairman that he give them one of the apartments in the two-story brick building nearing completion in Tsokto-Khangil. The chairman of the kolkhoz called Volodya in and said, “I intended to give that apartment to the best worker in the kolkhoz, and instead I have to give it to an outlaw, to an anti-Soviet element.”

Volodya said, “You aren’t giving me that apartment. You were ordered to do so. Why are you complaining to me? If you don’t like it, you should complain to them.” And he left.

The apartment was one room in a two-story brick building near the dirt road and dry riverbed that ran to the west of the village. The room measured twenty feet by ten. There was a ten-by-seven kitchen and a bathroom, a toilet, a balcony. In the toilet and bathroom were sinks and a tub and a lavatory pan-entirely unusable because there was no running water in the village. From the window and balcony they had a clear view of the unpaved road to Mongolia and the riverbed and the steppes beyond, numbing with monotony, barren save for brownish, brittle, rain-starved grass, and empty of people. Wolves and foxes roamed about, and packs of wild dogs. In the farthest distance were hills, tall climbing mounds of gray rock, without trees, without vegetation.

The building had been constructed by a crew of Armenians from blueprints drawn up for apartment projects in the more moderate climate of Moldavia: hollow plywood doors, thin outer walls with no insulation against the cold. Because it was among the last to have been completed, the apartment was built of whatever pieces of lumber had been left. The result was a nightmarish dwelling: buckling, shabbily painted walls, ill-fitting doors, warped windows, cracks between the floor planks. Cold air blew in through the doors and windows, and the floor was difficult to walk on because of the uneven length and thickness of the boards.

Masha and Volodya began to transform the apartment. They repainted the walls, doors, and floors. With the planking of discarded packing crates, Volodya built shelves and a table for the kitchen. In a garbage dump he found a junked bed, which he brought to the apartment and repaired. He built bookshelves, shoe racks, benches, a sofa. He had brought tools with him from Moscow; the nails he found along the sides of the road that ran through the village. Once, out on the steppes, he came upon a new wrench. Often the Buryats, after repairing broken machinery or equipment, carelessly left the hardware behind. They didn’t care. None of it really belonged to them; it was all the property of the Communist state.

One night in early November it began to snow, tiny flakes thickly falling. The wind picked up the dust and sand of the steppes, mixed it with the snow, and pelted the village. In the dry air of the morning the snow vanished quickly, but the village stood pallid and dust-covered. Everywhere, sand-in one’s clothes, eyes, mouth, food. Toward the end of the month Masha and Volodya moved into the apartment.

In the evenings the uncovered windows seemed menacing black holes to Masha, and she bought fabric and made curtains. She and Volodya went to the department store and brought back cartons, which they laid out on the uneven planks of the floor and then covered with plastic; the floor was even now, and insulated. She stuffed rags into the hollows of the plywood doors, and when the frost deepened and the winds grew stronger, she bought the thick felt used by the Buryats for their yurtas-the tepeelike structures in which they lived during the periods they grazed sheep on the steppes-and hung it over the doors for further insulation.

The Buryats had never before lived with an exile in their midst, indeed had been informed by the authorities that these Russians were enemies of the people and were to be shunned. But Masha invited the Buryats who lived in their building to join them for tea and cookies, and finally, after repeated invitations, some came and sat in silence, looking around the apartment, sipping the tea, nibbling on the cookies. Volodya had earlier explained to her that Buryats were of Mongolian stock and were called Buryats on this side of the border and Mongols on the Mongolian side. Mongolia, Masha of course knew, was a puppet client state of the Soviet Union. The Buryats invited by Masha into the Slepak apartment later invited the Slepaks into their apartments. Masha and Volodya noticed they had covered their windows with curtains, and their floors with cartons and plastic, and their doors with felt.

Volodya built a lamp for the kitchen and a wall desk and a desk lamp for himself. On the wall over the desk he hung photographs of Andrei Sakharov, Natan Shcharansky, Ida Nudel, Iosif Begun, and Yuri Orlov. Near their bed were photographs of Sanya and Leonid.

To his delight, Volodya discovered that the bookstore in Tsokto-Khangil-stocked with the usual pens, pencils, maps, notebooks, periodicals, children’s books, and adult books-also had on its shelves volumes difficult to obtain even in Moscow. Masha began to buy children’s books, intending to send them to her grandchildren abroad so they could read and not forget the Russian language. The family chronicles offer Volodya’s attempt to clarify the odd presence there of those books: “It was one of the paradoxes of the socialist system that when a book was published, copies would be distributed to bookstores in the Soviet Union, not on the basis of demand but according to population.”

They had brought with them from Moscow a small shortwave radio. But in Tsokto-Khangil the Voice of America was being successfully jammed. They were able to buy a small television set, but the satellite signal gave them only three or four hours a day of watching. The isolation they felt was nearly overwhelming.

Their difficulties with the people of the village did not involve language-all spoke Russian-but culture: They were sophisticated urbanites in the midst of a world of erstwhile seminomads, core Muscovites among border Buryats, Jews who dreamed of distant Israel living with Asians whose homeland was nearby Mongolia. Even had the KGB not insisted that they be separated from any sort of communal life in their place of exile, they would still have felt thrice imprisoned: exile, Jew, Russian. In a prison state called the Soviet Union.

Slowly they came to know some of the villagers. A chance encounter here, an affable greeting there. Word spread: The Moscow couple didn’t seem so menacing, indeed were friendly, helpful; the man an engineer, the woman a doctor. Why are you here? We are Jews and we want to go to Israel, and they won’t let us. No one in the village had ever seen a Jew, though many knew of Israel. Twice over the years they were asked to Buryat weddings. Party bosses came from Aginskoye and scolded the Buryats for hosting enemies of the people. The Buryats listened quietly with impassive faces. One day one of the Buryat men said to Masha and Volodya, “Why do you want to go to Israel? It’s so far away. You’re good people. Stay here with us. We’ll give you a dozen sheep, two dozen, if you want.” Another said later in a confiding tone to Volodya, “Listen, your wife is too old. If you want, we’ll find you two young ones.”

The dirt roads and lifeless steppes froze to the hardness of iron as the temperature dropped to forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. At night the cows and pigs fell silent and the air was still save for the occasional barking of dogs in different corners of the village. The sky cloudless, myriad stars would shine coldly and clearly. During the day Masha and Volodya took frequent walks through the village and along the steppes. The winds were harsh. On the steppes a herd of horses roamed freely, and sheep grazed on the winter grass.

One day every family in the apartment building abruptly left to join their relatives in the wooden houses throughout the village. A fierce storm was coming, they said. Masha and Volodya had no place to go. The village became very quiet. A haze covered the sun. The wind began to rise, a sound like someone blowing through a pipe, high-pitched, then howling. The sun, hidden by the haze, grew darker. Wind blowing and whistling and howling shrilly outside. Snow mixed with sand striking the windows and the balcony door. The door and the metal roof of the apartment house rattling. Very dark outside and the storm growing more fierce and suddenly no electricity and cold in the apartment. They put on heavy clothes. Colder and colder. Volodya lit the kerosene lamp, a small, shuddering flame. They wrapped blankets around themselves, but it was impossible to fall asleep; something kept clanging and banging outside.

The storm lasted fifteen hours. When day came, they saw a vast landscape of snow, and electric poles down in the snow amid a tangle of wires, and the barely visible roofs of nearby houses, and on the steppes little mounds where sheep had died. It took bulldozers five days to clear the road from Aginskoye to the village, which remained all that time without water, telephone, mail. Masha and Volodya lived off the food and water they had stored in the apartment.

That February, Leonid, still avoiding conscription and living on the run, decided to fly from Moscow to Siberia to see his parents. By flying, he risked discovery, but his parents desperately needed certain foods and medicines and the heavy parkas brought to Moscow as gifts by visitors from Canada.

Direct flights from Moscow to Chita were booked far in advance, mostly by army officers and government officials; Chita was a large military center. Leonid used a plastic shopping bag full of pens, chewing gum, and women’s stockings to persuade one of the high-level Moscow airport personnel to get him a ticket at least as far as Irkutsk. From there he got on a local flight to Chita, an old commuter plane with about twenty passengers. One of its windows, warped and not fully closed, let in arctic air. A man tried to shove a rag into the crack, with no success. The propeller-driven aircraft lurched and bounced in the gusting Siberian winds. Someone had taken a goat on board; there were other animals as well. People vomited. Leonid had with him a large backpack and two enormous bags of food, medicines, and other necessities. In Chita he was told that the bus to Aginskoye had departed and the next bus was in the morning. He spent the night on the floor of the bus station and left the following day. Six hours on that winding road in an old bus with almost no shock absorbers. It was nearing dark in Aginskoye when he arrived. None of the cabdrivers wanted to take him to Tsokto-Khangil. He offered money to some men who were standing around. They didn’t want money. They had plenty of money; there was nothing to buy with it. He held up two packs of Marlboro cigarettes, and a fight nearly erupted over who would take him. On the road to the village in the pitch-dark night, the driver asked where exactly he was going, and Leonid told him, and the driver said, “Ah, that couple from Moscow. The word is they’re nice people.” He knew precisely where Masha and Volodya lived and left Leonid off at their door.

His parents had not seen him in months, did not know he was coming, and greeted him with excitement and disbelief. He was able to stay only briefly and flew back to Moscow with his mother.

In order for Masha to retain her Moscow residence permit-Volodya’s lapsed during his exile-and the registration for the apartment, it was necessary that she return regularly, be seen in the apartment building by neighbors, and keep her air tickets as proof that she had traveled back to the city.

One of the regulations printed on the last page of every Soviet citizen’s internal passport stipulated that a citizen could be absent from a place of residence no longer than six months. After that the apartment could be taken back by the government-on the grounds that there was insufficient living space for the people, and that a person who doesn’t use an apartment doesn’t need it. A lawyer friend in Moscow had advised Masha that it was best she not remain away longer than four months because sometimes apartments were taken away after an absence of five months.

So in mid-February 1979, about four and a half months after she had arrived in Tsokto-Khangil, Masha together with Leonid took the bus to Aginskoye and a second bus to Chita, and a plane from Chita to Irkutsk, and another plane from Irkutsk to Novosibirsk, and finally a plane to Moscow. Frigid weather, uncertain travel, irregular flight schedules, crowded airports, lengthy delays, jostling and pleading and bribing clerks for tickets-a hellish journey Masha repeated every three or four months throughout the five years they lived in exile. In Moscow she saw her relatives, greeted friends, did some necessary shopping-for herself and Volodya and also for the Buryat women she came to know, who sent her with lists of goods to buy: clothes, winter boots, candy; she spent hours on long lines in Moscow stores and brought back everything they asked for; she wanted to live with them in peace-and then returned to Tsokto-Khangil.

That first year of exile she remained in Moscow two and a half months, waiting with Leonid and Olga for the arrival of their first child, born in early April, a son, whom they named Eugene, after Olgas father.

That same April came the joyful news that five of the men imprisoned for their involvement with the 1970 “Leningrad Hijacking Plot” had been released. And about one week later the Kremlin traded five religious and political dissidents for two Soviet spies imprisoned in the United States. Shcharansky, however, languished on in a prison camp, and Ida Nudel in a distant exile.

In late April, Leonid returned to Tsokto-Khangil to say good-bye to his parents; he had been notified by OVIR that his request for an exit visa was approved. He spent five days with his parents. Talking with his mother. Playing chess with his father. Nights, sleeping on the floor. Just being with them in their exile.

He was twenty years old. One day, at the age of four, he had come running in tears to his mother from the courtyard of the apartment building on Gorky Street where he was playing with friends. One of the children had called him a zhid, a Jew, a kike.

“But you are a Jew,” said his mother.

“No, I’m not,” Leonid cried.

“Well, what do you think you are?”

“I’m a Muscovite.”

An odd reply from a four-year-old, who might have been expected to respond with the more traditional answer that he was Russian or Soviet.

His mother told Leonid to calm himself. Then she said, “I am Jewish; your father is Jewish; both your grandparents are Jewish. That makes you Jewish.”

Leonid replied stubbornly, “You can be anything you want. I am a Muscovite.”

That was the first and only time in his entire childhood that Leonid experienced anti-Semitism. But he did not grow up in an ordinary Russian neighborhood or attend a commonplace Russian school. Together with his older brother, Sanya, he was raised among the very elite of the Soviet system. He lived in an apartment with three rooms, in one of which was a family of strangers only because Grandfather Solomon could not bear the notion of living in such luxury while so many in Moscow needed a roof over their heads. He knew nothing of his father’s work. He was of course aware that his father traveled often by train or plane to testing grounds and to various factories in Minsk in White Russia. On the day he was admitted into the Pioneers, at the age of ten, he ran home and proudly showed his red scarf to his father, who at that moment was deep in conversation with a man from Riga. His father sat listening to his son’s bubbling words, an odd dismissive smile on his face. The man from Riga drew from a pocket a postcard with a stamp from Israel and showed it to Volodya and then to Leonid. The boy was a passionate collector of foreign stamps, his sole source for acquisitions the bookstore on their street, which sold stamps only from socialist countries. And now suddenly, in the hands of this stranger, a truly foreign stamp! And from Israel! The man from Riga let Leonid steam the stamp from the card and put it into his album. His father warned him never to show the stamp in school.

Early recollections.

He knew almost nothing about Israel but sensed there was something different about his parents and their friends and that the difference had to do with Israel. Anything foreign was forbidden fruit to a Russian and exciting. And it was clear to Leonid by the age of eleven that his family was in the process of going to Israel; they were emigrating, this year, next year. There was nothing religious about their act of emigration; they were simply one family among others, a community of ethnics, united by blood and waiting to leave for a Jewish country. But they didn’t leave. And the years dragged on.

As enthusiastic as Leonid was about foreign stamps so was his older brother, Sanya, passionate about living creatures. In their room, with its balcony overlooking Gorky Street-once their parents’ room, when the grandparents Solomon and Fanya had lived in the apartment-Sanya had built a terrarium for hedgehogs, lizards, a viper, and had a cage with fifteen birds, and raised to full size an eagle, given to him during a trip in the Crimea, where it had fallen out of its nest; it sat on a glass shelf in that small room: a beady-eyed, hook-mouthed presence, defecating fiercely against the walls and double doors of the balcony. They left it in the Moscow Zoo one day, thrusting it clandestinely through the narrow bars of the aviary after the zoo officials had refused to take it because they had enough eagles. Sanya subscribed to a magazine called Young Naturalist, and some of its exquisite color photographs of birds and fish adorned the walls of the room.

Leonid spent a year in a Moscow institute of construction engineering, passed his first semester with ease, and, just before he was to take his final exams, was informed by one of the professors that he would not pass, that it would be best if he left. Since he was doing well in his studies, it was clear that the school was responding to an order from the KGB that he be dropped from its rolls. He took the exams that June of 1977, failed them, and was expelled. That now left him open to immediate conscription into the armed forces.

On a Thursday in October a postcard came, notifying him that he was to report the following Monday to the local draft board. He and his parents spent the weekend drafting a letter to the minister of defense, in which he stated that he refused to serve in the armed forces of the Soviet Union for two reasons. First, he had been trying to leave the country since the age of ten. If he was now drafted for two, perhaps three years, he would afterward be told that he was a security risk and couldn’t leave for five more years; he would then have waited a total of fifteen years to leave the country, an absurd situation. And second, he had become a citizen of Israel at the age of thirteen and could not pledge his loyalty to the USSR, where he was being held against his will. The letter was mailed to the office of the minister of defense, and a copy sent to the local draft board. Copies were circulated among foreign correspondents.

That Monday night Leonid packed a bag and left the Gorky Street apartment. On Thursday of that same week, October 27, Sanya departed for Israel. Leonid, in hiding, could not go to the airport to bid farewell to his brother. From the end of October to the end of November, Leonid remained inside the Moscow apartment of a friend, keeping away from the windows and listening to records of classical music. He met his parents one night in December in Pushkin Square and told them he was getting out of Moscow and going to Vilna to live with friends he had met during one of his summer trips to the Crimea, when he had been introduced to and become part of a kompaniya-young people from well-to-do families, most of them not Jews: painters, actors, “free” professionals, people who could get away with not working for a while because they could claim they were between projects and would therefore not be accused by the authorities of being economic parasites, a criminal offense.

He took a train to Vilna, first making certain to shake off any possible KGB tail, something he had been doing since the age of thirteen. He did not have time to purchase a train ticket. On the train he paid the conductor, who pocketed the money and let Leonid sleep in his compartment.

In the early spring of 1978 he returned to Moscow from Vilna with a high fever and in near-delirium. Clearly in need of a physician, he went directly to the apartment on Gorky Street, where his mother tended to him. As soon as he was well, he left.

That was a tense period. The KGB was closing down the entire Helsinki Accords Monitoring Group. Orlov had been arrested. Shcharansky was in prison. Leonid’s father, spearheading a worldwide campaign to free Shcharansky, was a prime KGB target. Leonid went to friends in Armenia. Later that spring he was back in Moscow, staying in the apartment of close friends. His girlfriend, Olga, whom he loved, showed up to tell him that his parents had been arrested for staging a demonstration from his and Sanya’s balcony. Leonid, nineteen years old, suddenly aware that he was alone and might have no one to care for him were he to be arrested and exiled, asked Olga to marry him. She agreed. At considerable personal peril, he visited his mother in the hospital where she was undergoing tests and treatment for her ulcer. To apply for the marriage license, he needed his internal passport, which she was keeping for him. Masha was appalled when she saw him; the hospital was full of KGB informers. She gave him the passport, and he fled.

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.

As the 1970s drew to a close, Masha and Volodya were among the seventy Jews in the Soviet Union who had been in refusal for more than ten years. In all, there were about 4,800 refuseniks in the USSR, 221 of them for five years or more. One Muscovite, Benjamin Bogomolny, had been refused a visa since his first application in 1966 and would not be allowed to leave until October 1986.

In the last week of December 1979 Volodya and Masha were in their apartment in Tsokto-Khangil when they heard over the radio that the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. They understood immediately that the era of détente was over.

The months went slowly by. The two of them were often ill. The horrid desert climate, the unsanitary conditions in the village. And their improper diet. Food distribution to the village was erratic. There was rice, pasta, frozen fish. Few vegetables. The Buryats would not sell their meat in the winter, when they froze and stored it, and the meat they sold in the summer was often unfit to eat. Every three days there was a shipment of bread from Aginskoye, quickly snapped up by the old women and children who waited hours on line for its arrival. Once, astonishingly, a sack of flour from Belgium found its way to the village, and Masha bought it. At about the same time a bag of yeast arrived for them through the mail from a friend in Sweden. For weeks afterward Masha, still able to recall her grandmother’s recipes, baked breads and challahs.

Alcoholism, arthritis, cirrhosis of the liver, syphilis, gonorrhea, were endemic among the villagers. Requested by the authorities in a nearby village to accept a well-paying job as a doctor in a new clinic, Masha refused, offering instead to work without pay as a volunteer, a proposal they turned down. She was fearful that if someone in her care were to complain to the authorities of maltreatment, it would be used as grounds to have her arrested and separated from Volodya. She practiced medicine only on her husband, to keep him alive.

Traveling back and forth every three or four months between Tsokto-Khangil and Moscow, she repeatedly experienced the cruelties of winter in Siberia. Her ulcer became a recurrent distress; her legs, exposed to the cold, were once dangerously frostbitten. She practiced medicine on herself as well.

She was in the apartment on the day in February 1980 when her brother telephoned from Moscow. He had just heard from their sister, Gera, who lived in Beersheba, that their mother had died. In a hospital in Beersheba, in the wilderness of Judea. “I will heal and be a bridge for you,” her mother had promised before leaving nine years ago. But even God seemed powerless to build a bridge between the deserts of Judea and Gobi.

News of the world beyond Tsokto-Khangil reached Masha and Volodya over the radio and the small television set, for which Volodya had managed to rig up an antenna that now enabled them to receive the local television station in Chita and a Moscow station via satellite. And news came from the relatives and friends who visited them. Thus they learned that in 1980 the number of Jews who received exit visas was 60 percent less than in previous years; in the next year the number was again cut by 50 percent. It seemed that with the end of détente the Kremlin no longer had anything to gain by letting the Jews leave.

They learned, too, that Ida Nudel, released from exile in March 1982, was finding it impossible to acquire a new Moscow residence permit-her old one had lapsed during her years in exile-and therefore could not reapply for an exit visa. Lost in a Soviet-style bureaucratic nightmare, she was eventually ordered out of Moscow by the KGB and permitted to register in the Moldavian Republic near the Black Sea, where she lived in misery and isolation until she was allowed to emigrate in October 1987.

By the time the Slepaks returned to Moscow in December 1982, Leonid Brezhnev was dead and Yuri Andropov-a former head of the KGB who had once referred to Volodya and other refuseniks as a menace that should be exterminated-now ruled in his place. Ronald Reagan was the president of the United States. The 100,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan were mired in a war grimly reminiscent of Americas Vietnam involvement. The Cold War had heated up, and serious talk about disarmament had cooled. Between 1983 and 1986 only about 1,000 Jews a year left (896 in 1984 and 1,140 in 1985); emigration had averaged more than 25,000 a year during the 1970s. Jewish mass emigration had come to a halt. When my wife and I met the Slepaks in January 1985, they were staring grimly at the bitter prospect of living out the remainder of their lives in the Soviet Union.

In Siberia, Volodya had counted the days with care. He knew precisely how long he had served in exile and how much time he had left. You counted from the day of your arrest, knowing that according to Soviet law, one day in prison or in a prison railway car was equal to three days of exile. He knew, too, that after his exile he would lose his Moscow residency permit and might be ordered by the authorities to live beyond the 100-kilometer (62.5-mile) city limit. Technically he and Masha were still divorced; they had hoped all the years that the divorce might have gained Masha an exit visa-vainly, as it turned out. In January 1982, at the beginning of their last year of exile, they went to the village soviet and were remarried. It was now possible for Volodya to apply for and obtain a Moscow residency permit.

Later that winter there was a violent snowstorm that melted too quickly in a sudden thaw. A powerful stream tore through the houses, and for four days much of the village lay deep in water. Houses collapsed. Pigs, dogs, calves, sheep perished.

With the spring rain the steppes returned to life: pink, yellow, and white blossoms, poppies, tulips, grasshoppers, birds, butterflies. It was a brief life, lasting about one month. The summer came, and with it winds from the Gobi Desert carrying blast furnace heat. And dust. The moisture in one’s eyes dried. And in one’s mouth and nostrils. The humidity was 10 percent. Volodya began to cough. Masha wet down bedsheets and hung them about the apartment.

Fall and winter came. Masha marked the time on the wall calendar, every morning crossing out a day. They began to sell off some of their possessions, gave some away; they packed and sent things to Moscow.

Volodya’s appointed day of release was December 2, 1982. Several days before, he called the airport in Chita and booked two tickets on a flight to Moscow.

On the day of his release he and Masha took the bus to Aginskoye. In the militia station he picked up his internal passport and all the documents he needed. They spent the night in a hotel in Aginskoye and took the morning bus to Chita. Masha gazed out the dusty window at the steppes, the hills, the forests, the valleys. Five years of their lives, gone. Because of a balcony demonstration. For a postcard from OVIR. On the seat beside her Volodya slept.

It was dark when they arrived in Chita, and they stayed that night in the airport hotel. At about four o’clock the next morning, in freezing air, they boarded the flight to Moscow and arrived early Sunday morning, December 4.

When Volodya emerged from the Moscow airport terminal, he had the eerie sensation that he had never left the city. Five years, and nothing seemed to have changed. Streets, buildings, trams, traffic, clothes, shops. Dirty snow on the streets, an icy wind. Moscow frozen in time.

In the apartment on Gorky Street the woman who occupied the third room appeared genuinely happy to see him. Everything about the apartment-the walls, the furniture, the floors, the windows-was the same as when he had departed. Except the front door. The old, broken door, smashed during one of the many KGB searches of the apartment, had been replaced by a new wooden door, painted the identical brown as the previous one. Masha called relatives and friends. Volodya was home! Yes, home. Safe. Excitement, joy.

Volodya wanted to reapply immediately for an exit visa but couldn’t, because he no longer had a Moscow residence permit. Masha went with him to the local militia station to apply for the permit, and the officer in charge of residence permits said it would be necessary for them to turn in their internal passports while the application was processed. They handed him their passports.

Weeks went by. Volodya repeatedly called the officer, who said he could do nothing for them; he had sent on the application to his chiefs and was himself waiting for their decision. Eleven months after Volodya turned in the application, it was approved. Residence permit in hand, he applied to OVIR for an exit visa. The answer came one month later. Refused. The reason: “Secrecy.”

On the day he received the residence permit, indeed at the same time it was being stamped into his internal passport at the local militia station, Volodya was told to see another officer in that station. The officer warned him that because he hadn’t worked in months, he was about to be indicted and brought to trial as a parasite; he had two weeks to find a job. Volodya said that he hadn’t even been able to look for a job because he hadn’t had his internal passport, which had been taken from him in that same militia station. The officer said that was no affair of his, it was a different department.

His friends helped him find a job as an elevator operator in a hospital. Working nights, he discovered that if he halted the elevator between certain floors, he was able to penetrate the Soviet jamming of overseas radio broadcasts. He began to listen again to the voices of the West, in that way keeping himself aware of the worldwide activities of the movement: demonstrations wherever high Soviet officials appeared, at political meetings, cultural events, scientific conferences, conventions of judges and lawyers. There was continuing unrest because of the refuseniks.

At the Geneva Summit conference in December 1985-in the wake of the sudden deaths of Soviet Premiers Andropov in 1984 and Chernenko in 1985-the plight of Soviet Jewry was mentioned to the new Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, by President Ronald Reagan. Demonstrators hoisted placards and marched through downtown streets. Avital Shcharansky displayed a photograph of her imprisoned husband, and Jesse Jackson asked the Soviet premier about the Jews and was informed that the “so-called problem of Jews in the Soviet Union does not exist.” Such events were widely reported by the media; they filtered out of the small radio Volodya held to his ear when he stopped the elevator during the quiet moments of the night and went searching for cracks in the wall of Soviet jamming.

After a year as an elevator operator, he was promoted to the job of controller. From behind a desk in a small office, he ran the hospitals electricity, water supply, sewage, and heating systems. Problems in those systems were directed to him; he called the electricians, plumbers, repair crews.

In February 1986 Shcharansky was released, to everyone’s joy and surprise. He flew off to a tumultuous welcome in Israel.

Between 1968 and 1986, nearly 270,000 Jews, 12.5 percent of Soviet Jewry, had emigrated. But there were about 10,000 refuseniks in the USSR in 1986, among them Masha and Volodya, whose names and long struggle were by then legendary. Elie Wiesel talked about them often-to American senators, to men and women in the House of Representatives, to government officials in France, to Gorbachev.

The likelihood of freedom for the refuseniks seemed dim. Some for whom hope of release was now dead had decided to turn their efforts at emigration inward, to create for themselves and their children a new Jewish culture inside the Soviet Union, in defiance of Soviet law. Secret religious schools for children; clandestine places of prayer and study for adults; illegal lectures on Jewish history and customs; furtive Purim and Hanukkah parties; covert Hebrew songfests in forests-all in place of the efforts previously expended on petitions, sit-ins, demonstrations, hunger strikes, now regarded as futile.

The Israelis did not take kindly to such activities, thought them a yielding to the Soviet effort to stifle Jewish emigration, a waning of the refuseniks’ Zionist enthusiasm. On this matter Volodya tended to agree with the Israelis, who regarded him as one of their greatest assets.

In March 1986 he and Masha exchanged their single large communal apartment on Gorky Street for two small apartments. They moved into a six-story building on Vesnina Street, about a twenty-minute walk to the Kremlin. The woman and her son, their Gorky Street neighbors, went willingly into the second apartment in a different section of Moscow. Quite small, the apartments, but unshared, private. The Slepak apartment had two rooms, one with a balcony. And a telephone, which the KGB for some reason had not thought to shut down. On the first floor of the building were a bookstore and a hairdresser’s shop. Soon visitors were finding their way to the new lodgings, Vesnina Street 8/10, apartment 52. Volodya again sat listening, smoking his pipe, talking. And Masha served tea and sugar cookies, hovered in the background, and worried about her husband’s health.

Volodya applied again for an exit visa and was refused. The KGB tailed him constantly, arrested him several times for participating in demonstrations or for planning an action or to prevent trouble at official events like an international festival or a congress. Each time they held him for one day and sent him home.

In March 1987 a number of members of Congress met with Gorbachev in the Kremlin. One of the congressmen, James Scheuer, asked for the release of the Slepaks. Gorbachev replied, “Slepak will never leave the Soviet Union. Let’s not discuss his case.” Congressman Scheuer informed Masha and Voldya about the conversation.

One month later, in April, Masha and Volodya went on a seventeen-day hunger strike to commemorate their seventeen years of refusal. One day for each year, no food, only tap or mineral water, the strike announced in advance to the foreign press. They appeared in front of the Moscow “White House,” the parliament building, wearing placards that read LET US GO TO OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN. Many refuseniks and KGB agents watched in silence. On the fourth day they were arrested by the KGB. They thought they might be detained for ten to fifteen days; it would have been Volodya’s sixteenth such arrest in thirteen years. Instead they were brought back to their apartment and warned not to demonstrate again. Masha ended her strike that day; her health would not permit her to continue. Volodya kept at it through the seventeenth day. When he returned to his job after the strike, he learned that he had been fired. He never worked again in the Soviet Union.

That April about fifty refuseniks received invitations to a Passover Seder to be held in the Moscow residence of the American ambassador to the Soviet Union. The arrangements had been scrupulously attended to by several American Jewish women led by Sara Inick, wife of the American cultural attaché. The matzah and wine were flown in from Israel. In a large ballroom stood a dozen tables, all meticulously arranged for Passover. At each table sat a number of Americans: diplomats, press people. Ambassador Arthur Hartman and his wife greeted each person who entered. When everyone had arrived, the ambassador and his wife came over to Masha and Volodya, who had only the day before ended his hunger strike. They sat together at the same table. The ambassador put on a skullcap, and the Seder began. The refuseniks took turns reading from the Haggadah.

In the middle of the reading, George Shultz, the American secretary of state, entered the hall wearing a skullcap. He went slowly from one table of refuseniks to another, shaking hands, exchanging words, handing each person a book or memento. He recognized all the refuseniks, knew them by name, seemed awed and reverential in their presence. These activists-their names and photographs by now mythic symbols of defiance against tyranny, displayed everywhere, on placards, in books, schools, at demonstrations-were men and women who had for years defied, paid a terrible price, and were continuing to defy, a pitiless empire. Alexander Lerner was there that evening. Masha and Volodya Slepak. Viktor Brailovsky. Nahum Meiman. Iosif Begun. And many others. When George Shultz approached Masha and Volodya, he shook their hands and said he had a gift for them. His assistant handed him a photograph, which he gave to Masha and Volodya: a picture of Sanya and Leonid and the grandchildren taken at the time of the two brothers’ hunger strike in front of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to commemorate their parents’ seventeenth year in refusal. Shultz then briefly addressed the refuseniks. He said he and the American administration would never cease fighting for the freedom of Soviet Jewry. Then he introduced the new American ambassador; Ambassador Hartman was soon to retire. The reading of the Haggadah continued. At the conclusion of the Seder every family was presented with a box of Israeli matzos and every woman there received a red rose. Then all but a half dozen guests left.

In another room of the embassy, the half dozen guests who had remained, Volodya and Masha among them, spoke at some length with Richard Schifter, George Shultz’s aide in human rights issues. He had accompanied Shultz into the hall, and the refuseniks in the room knew him well; it was his third or fourth visit to Moscow. Later, as the refuseniks left the protected grounds of the embassy and returned to Soviet soil, they passed under the scrutiny of many KGB eyes.

Congressman Scheuer was back in Moscow that August and again asked Gorbachev to release the Slepaks. Gorbachev said that if the Americans and Soviets signed an arms agreement, the Slepaks might be released. When Masha heard that, she thought: We are being sold like slaves, one by one, children and parents separately, each kept behind for a possible higher bid.

Suddenly, in September, one of the long-term refuseniks received permission to leave. Then others. And then Iosif Begun and Ida Nudel. For all the friends of the Slepaks, the card from OVIR, the exit visa. Only Masha, Volodya, Alexander Lerner, and a very few others were left. Masha thought she and Volodya were deliberately being separated from their old friends. To be alone in Moscow. Another exile. Interminable.

On October 13, 1987, at 2:00 p.m., the telephone rang in the Slepak apartment on Vesnina Street. Volodya wasn’t home. Masha lifted the receiver.

A man’s voice asked, “Is Vladimir Semyonovich at home?”

“No,” said Masha.

“Is this Maria Isaakovna?”

“Yes.”

“This is Deputy Chief of Moscow OVIR.” He gave Masha his name, but she has since forgotten it and it is therefore absent from these chronicles. “You are granted permission to leave the USSR. Please come tomorrow to the OVIR office to get the card with the list of documents you must bring with you in order to obtain your visas.”

Masha had the presence of mind to say, “But tomorrow is Wednesday; it is not a reception day at OVIR.”

“It will be for you. When you arrive, ring the bell. A militiaman will open the door. Tell him your name, and say that Major [another forgotten name] is waiting for you. The major will give you the card with the list of the documents you must bring when you come for your exit visas.”

Masha, stunned and disoriented, hung up the telephone. After eighteen years of waiting-that was it? A telephone call instead of the usual postcard! She had expected the heavens to part, the earth to tremble. This was so… ordinary. She sat waiting and after a while began to think she had imagined it all, had dreamed it; there had been no call.

Volodya returned. She told him about the telephone call. He refused to believe it. Finally he said, “Tomorrow we’ll go to OVIR. If they give us the card, we’ll know it’s real.”

The next day they went to OVIR. A guard let them inside. The empty building echoed with their footsteps. They felt like sleepwalkers. An official handed them the card with the list of documents they would need to bring in order to receive exit visas. Masha held the card. What they had endured for this little piece of paper!

They went over to the restaurant where a farewell party was in progress for Ida Nudel. Masha followed behind Volodya, who entered holding the card high over his head and announcing that they had received permission to leave. There was a large crowd-friends, correspondents. Pandemonium erupted Joy. Tears. Exhilaration. If Slepak is getting out, we’ll all get out! The correspondents wanted interviews.

There was much to do. They collected the many papers they needed, paid for the visas and for the loss of their Soviet citizenship. With the papers and a bank receipt in hand, they came to OVIR and got their visas. Showing the visas, they were able to book seats on a flight to Vienna. Then they went to the embassy of the Netherlands, which at the time represented Israel in the USSR, and received their visas to Israel. Their Austrian transit visas they obtained in the Austrian Embassy. All those visas enabled them finally to purchase the plane tickets they had booked.

In the meantime they were saying good-bye to all their relatives. They visited the graves of Masha’s father and Volodya’s mother. And stood in silence awhile before the grave of Solomon Slepak. They sold some of their furniture and gave away many of their possessions to relatives and to fellow refuseniks. About 150 people showed up at the farewell party in the apartment, among them Richard Schifter, aide to Secretary of State George Shultz.

Once again, by sheerest chance, in the apartment that evening was Sister Gloria Coleman, the Catholic nun from the United States who had become involved in the Soviet Jewry movement. Unaware that they had received permission to leave, she came with others to visit the Slepaks and stumbled upon the celebration. She recalls a crowded apartment filled with laughter and joy and remembers seeing Volodya, “an amazing-looking man, wonderfully well-looking, considering what he had been through, sitting there amid the reverence and respect being shown him by the refuseniks and the press. He was effusive. The whole room radiated with excitement, elation.” She went over to Volodya and introduced herself. He took her hand in both of his. She was warmed by the way he immediately engaged her, brought her into the celebration, indeed by the way the refuseniks made all who were there, including the press, part of the evening’s happiness. They did not play to the press; they involved the press as people in the drama of their lives.

The day before their departure Volodya and Masha brought their baggage to customs in the airport. Seven suitcases. They waited five hours and then stood watching as the customs agents picked everything apart. It was four in the morning when the agents were done. They had, they told Masha and Volodya, no blank forms for the baggage receipts. “But don’t worry, when you come tomorrow to check in, the receipts will be there for you.”

About two dozen people-relatives and very close friends-were at the airport to see them off. It was late afternoon of October 25, 1987. In an odd juncture of events, their son Sanya had left the Soviet Union precisely ten years before. The clerk at the counter who went through their tickets and documents could not find the baggage receipts; they would be unable to claim their baggage. To the devil with all the baggage, thought Masha, frantic. Let’s just get out of this place! The chronicles record that it was a wet, cloudy day, the air filled with a mixture of snow and rain. The Soviet aircraft was a TU-154, and the flight number was SU-263. It departed for Vienna at 8:15 p.m.

During the flight an attendant came over to Masha and Volodya and handed them their baggage receipts. They had been found on the floor of the aircraft, she said. The final knife thrust of the KGB, thought Masha.

When she and Volodya descended the stairway and stepped onto the tarmac in the Vienna airport, they were met by Ambassador Max Kampelman, head of the American delegation to the Soviet-American Disarmament Conference in Vienna. Inside the terminal waited Sanya; Senator John and Teresa Heinz of Pennsylvania; the American ambassador to Austria; Marion Wiesel, wife of Elie Wiesel; a representative of the Jewish Agency, which was responsible for the settlement of Soviet immigrants in Israel; and the Slepaks’ close friends Kirill and Irina Khenkin, who had come from Munich, where they worked for Radio Liberty, one of the stations Volodya used to bring in on his radio during his years in the forests outside Moscow, on camping trips in the Ukraine, in the apartment on Gorky Street, and as he navigated the hospital elevator through the waves of noise thrown up by the Kremlin against the outside world.

There were many journalists in the terminal. The press conference lasted about twenty minutes. As soon as it was over, the American ambassador asked Masha and Volodya to join him at his residence for dinner. They could spend the night there, in a room already prepared for them.

The next day Masha and Volodya and Sanya flew to Israel in a Lear-jet chartered by Senator Heinz, Elie Wiesel, and Patti and John Thompson, a Christian couple from Nashville. When the pilot announced that they were above Israeli waters, Volodya opened a bottle of champagne. They gazed out the windows at the blue glitter of the sea, and Masha saw the beaches of Tel Aviv below. The jet landed, and Masha and Volodya came out the door and down the stairs and stepped onto the soil of Israel. It was a warm, sunny October day. A huge crowd of relatives, friends, and reporters greeted them in the terminal. Leonid, involved at the time in a controversy with Israeli authorities over his passport and not wanting to touch down in Israel lest he be obliged to serve in the army, was not present. Volodya opened the press conference. “Finally we are here…”

The chronicles record that Masha was wearing her amulet.

Three days later they celebrated Volodya’s sixtieth birthday in the Jerusalem residence of Chaim Herzog, president of Israel. From the residence Volodya telephoned Moscow and talked with Alexander Lerner, who, some weeks later, received his exit visa and went to Israel. When the festivities at the residence of the president ended, Volodya and Masha made their way to a more private party arranged by some of their closest friends, immigrants from the Soviet Union, one of whom owned the Jerusalem discotheque where the second party went on and on until the very early hours of the morning.

The chronicles further record that Volodya and Masha flew to the United States that November and were greeted at Kennedy Airport by the five grandchildren they had never seen; three of the children were Leo’s, and two Sanya’s. They then traveled about for two months, pleading the cause of other refuseniks and raising funds for the Soviet Jewry movement. They were looked upon as valiant figures and listened to with profound regard as they spoke about the thousands of refuseniks still remaining in the USSR, their fate uncertain even in the days of perestroika and glasnost. Not until the dissolution of Communist power in 1991 would the word “refusenik” begin to fade from the worlds agenda.

Finally the chronicles tell us that in June 1988 Masha and Volodya set out with a number of other refuseniks on a goodwill and fund-raising mission to London, Los Angeles, Australia, and New Zealand under the auspices of the World Jewish Congress. In Australia, at the request of Isi Liebler, then vice-president of the congress, they all were to meet and express their gratitude to Prime Minister Bob Hawke, one of the most noted figures in the struggle for Soviet Jewry.

During the night that Masha and Volodya stayed in Los Angeles, someone entered their second-floor hotel room through the balcony, whose doors they had neglected to lock, and stole every object of value that lay in view: their watches and camera, Volodya’s wallet and credit cards, and all of Masha’s jewelry, including the amulet. Fortunately they had placed their passports, traveler’s checks, and airline tickets in a suitcase. They flew on to Australia for appearances before admiring audiences and the meeting with the prime minister. The mission over, they returned to Israel.

A few months later Volodya and Masha found suitable jobs in Israel.

Their sons were by then permanently settled in the United States.

Here the chronicles come to an end.