One day my father came home slightly later than usual. There was blood oozing from his lip and his nose. He had been coming out of the metro station, having made a trip to see my cousin after a terrible day at work, when a couple of drunks had called him a “dirty Jew.” He answered them back and a fight broke out on the street. Most people ignored it, some watched and a couple joined in. My father was furious. There were tears in his eyes. My mother, who had until then assumed that he had been arrested, gave him a vodka and began to clean him up. He started again. “Tomorrow, first thing, get the papers. We’re leaving. Really. I mean it. This time we’re leaving.”
We were all in shock at the blood on his face and the tears between his words. Pavel became frightened. My mother was worried that the neighbors would hear him. She asked me to turn the radio on. He sat down, his puffing becoming slower and slower, and listened to the Voice of America. Pavel and I sat on the floor and watched him stare far beyond his bloodied shoes while she wiped his face and gently rocked him like a baby.
The next day no one said anything about it. We got up and dressed and had breakfast. They talked to Pavel and me as though nothing had happened. We went to school and they went to work. At night my father came home on time, with no problems on the way home. Work had not been as bad as it could be. My mother had already started in the kitchen. He sat down, and after he had poured himself a drink, she told him in a quiet voice that she had done it. She had initiated an application for an exit visa. He heard her and knew that was it, there was no turning back. His career was ruined. His contacts were useless, everything he had cultivated. He would be expelled from the Party. He put his hands behind his head and leaned the chair back at an angle, balancing between the table and the cupboards. I think he was relieved. He took a deep breath and held on to it for a while before exhaling. I watched him lean forward and look at his hands. He then got up and hugged my mother fiercely before going to bed. This was the beginning and he knew he would need to be rested for what was coming.
When my parents told their Jewish friends they were going to try to leave Russia, the friends were astounded. Surely it would be worse in Israel. Hadn’t my parents heard of the Russian Jews starving in the streets there? I remember a friend of my father’s sitting in our apartment listening to my parents’ announcement. From the inside pocket of his jacket he pulled out a metal shape and, calling me over, asked me if I knew what it was. When I said that I didn’t, he laughed and turned his attention back to my father. “What are you doing this for?” he asked. “She does not even know what a Star of David looks like.”
Three days later I was called into the Principal’s office. I had not mentioned it to anyone but the Principal knew, and I knew immediately that he knew. He spoke in a kindly tone. Behind him Lenin and Brezhnev hung on the wall, staring out way beyond us. What was all this about? Had my parents talked this over with me? I told him they hadn’t, which was strictly true, since all the discussions over the years about leaving—when, if, how and where to—had all been between my parents. We watched, listened—how could we not?—and sometimes asked questions, but we were never consulted.
The Principal asked me if I wanted to leave my school, my friends, my teachers, my Motherland. I told him I didn’t have any choice. I had to obey my parents. I thought that sounded plausible. They loved it when kids talked about obedience. I didn’t want to be having this conversation and wished that it would end as soon as possible. I actually liked school and was sad to be leaving. Even he, with his priggish appeals to the Motherland, wasn’t too bad; at least he had never been cruel to me. I did feel a little that I was letting him down. I understood my parents’ reasons and agreed with them, but I would never be able to explain this to him. I kept telling myself that it wasn’t really him talking but the Party. He didn’t really care about me. This was Brezhnev speaking, that dangerous presence we always and never saw, the man who bored us every day in the newspaper and on television.
He asked me what I knew about Israel. Did I know about the conditions there? As well as the wars, there was starvation. He said it was not like me to do something like this, especially without researching it properly first. He could get me some literature on it if I liked. There had been many cases of Russians, in particular, going there and starving, of young women being forced into prostitution to support their families. Did I know about this? The idea of prostitution sounded fun to me but I didn’t believe him. He told me that one of my teachers was thinking of recommending me for the Komsomol which would have made me, in effect, a trainee Party member. I was flattered. One did not become a Komsomol till fourteen or fifteen, and I was a bit younger than that. I remained polite but firm. I would go where my parents were going.
There was an almost automatic suspension of reality the day my mother launched our international careering. At least, that’s the way it seemed to me. All of a sudden I didn’t have to pass exams. If we were lucky, I would soon be in Rome en route to Israel, or wherever we were really going. If we were not successful I figured we would be in Siberia. Either way, the currency of my elite education would be devalued. Of course, in order to have any chance of getting out, we had to have a direct relative in Israel. This also contributed to the air of unreality because it had always been considered ill-advised for Jews in Russia to receive correspondence from Israel: it brought you under suspicion. Now we needed it. But since we didn’t have any direct relatives there, we had to invent them. My mother made us memorize a false family tree. Aunt Hannah was born in Budapest and lived in Tel Aviv and so on. She tested us on it.
To apply for the exit visa my parents had to hand in their passports. But without a passport you were not a citizen, and you could not work for the government if you were not a citizen. I didn’t have to renounce my citizenship because, being under sixteen, I didn’t have a passport. As my Principal reminded me, I could still turn back. But my parents could not work. They were expelled from the Party. We lost our apartment. It was given to someone else. We were split up. Pavel and I stayed with different friends of my parents, and my mother and father stayed with different relatives on my father’s side. These were the people to whom we had given our possessions. My parents had distributed them variously, my father trying to figure out who was most likely to help us, to put us up, to feed us. He moved about the most. Spread out around Moscow, we waited for our visas.
There was no point keeping anything, since you were permitted to take no more than the equivalent of one hundred dollars per person out of the country. We barely saw my father. He went out in the days without any papers, running around the city trying to find out what was happening with the visas and trying to make some money to live on by offering to do things for people. After seven months we got them.
My mother was quiet at the airport. My father tried to joke with the friends and family who had come to see us off. The customs officer, an older overweight man with a walrus moustache and bags under his eyes, slowly went through everything. Opening all our cases, he took out skirts and shirts and shoes and ripped them apart, ostensibly looking for valuables. The people who had come to see us off stood back. My mother remained silent. My father closed his eyes more tightly with each rip. Then he started on my father’s little television. He said he had to search it and we watched him destroy it, this box my father had treasured. Pavel was fascinated by its disembowelment. He had never seen inside a television before. Stepping away from his handiwork, the customs officer caught a glimpse of me standing behind my mother and beckoned me to come closer. He smiled and then ripped the tiny gold hoop earring my mother had given me from my ear. I screamed. My ear was bleeding and my father could not contain himself any longer. He started shouting and threatening the customs officer, moving towards him menacingly. He jostled him and swore at him. Pavel started to cry. A couple of my parents’ friends moved in to separate them but not before the customs officer was able to land a blow to my father’s cheek.
The customs officer regained his co
mposure rather quickly and disappeared out of view, saying he had to take our papers with him to be checked by his superior. I watched him leave us, taking our papers with him and, my hand to my ear, I remember thinking that the world was too narrow. There was not room enough for us. It was November, already cold, and my ear ached. The television sat in front of us, embarrassingly reassembled, a shadow of its former self. Our torn clothes and shoes, the first of our possessions to be humiliated, were already repacked in their cases and on their way to the plane. I started to trade chocolate with Pavel while my parents traded recriminations. “Why couldn’t you keep your mouth shut? You provoked him,” my mother said.
“He tore off her ear.”
“Don’t shout at me.”
“Shut your mouth, just this once.”
I looked at the time. The plane had just gone. It was snowing in Moscow and all our clothes were torn and on their way to Rome.
The customs officer came back and told us our visas had been confiscated. His superior had said that one of the required stamps was missing. We couldn’t leave without it. He told us we could pick them up the next day from the offices of the Immigration Department. Then he called “Next” and as we passed muttered “Jew” under his breath at my father. Pavel’s shoelace was broken. He thought we might have to walk. It was snowing. There was nothing to say.
The next day my mother went to pick up the visas from the Department. We went with her and waited. Eventually a woman told us that they couldn’t return the visas yet. She said her superior had been consulted and wanted to look at our case more closely. I remember the woman saying, “It won’t take long,” as though our dry cleaning wasn’t quite ready.
“Why not?” my mother asked.
“Why not what?”
“Why won’t it take long?”
“It just won’t.”
We had the equivalent of four hundred American dollars but no rubles. We couldn’t buy anything. Of course, hard currency was very much in demand, but it was illegal to be carrying it. My father was concerned not to do anything that might jeopardize our case. But we needed to eat. It was an offense merely to go out without identification. We were wearing out our welcome with all the people who had put us up over the previous months, and we had no possessions with which to sweeten the aftertaste of their kindness. No answers were forthcoming from the Department. My father’s family felt the whole thing had been ill-advised. They had heard how it had come about and blamed it on the woman who never could keep her mouth shut. Why did we have to go anyway? My father had spent his whole life building up contacts. They had served him well. Wasn’t it good enough for her?
We were getting desperate. It was hard enough to meet up and when we did we fought, in front of someone else in their apartment. I went to school just to visit. Prowling the corridors in search of friends, I was discovered by the Principal. He told me to go. I was not welcome in his school, my school, anymore.
We all, in our separate ways, visited the scenes and places of our lives from the time before our application to leave. Even without identification papers my mother felt compelled to risk visiting the streets, just to see people, the queues, familiar signs, the ubiquitous COMMUNISM IS INEVITABLE. We saw everything with the clarity of outsiders. We were like the disembowelled television. Small, never anyone’s prize to begin with but with certain capabilities, almost attaining grace in that we functioned, we were being crudely taken apart, destroyed, to no other end than to be tossed about by the wind until dust, then forgotten.
In desperation, my father crawled into work. Without any information, how could he develop a plan? Perhaps someone had heard something? Even if they hadn’t, until he had been told that nobody knew anything, he was doing something with a purpose. He spoke to a friend who happened to be non-Jewish. Yes, this man knew something. How good it was to see a friend. What did he know, just quietly? My father’s boss, Zwier, had written a letter to someone he knew at the Department of Immigration. In the letter Zwier had warned that my father was extremely wealthy from his dealings in art and antiquities and that he was smuggling or going to smuggle paintings for diamonds or drugs. It was suggested that, given the overrepresentation of Jews in the Ministry of Culture, my father should be made an example of. He had always been too smooth.
My father told us this in an unemotional tone as if he were recounting the assembly instructions to some gadget. He had gathered us together in someone’s apartment. It was during the day and no one else was there. The weather was fining up. It was the time of the Twenty-fifth Congress of the Party and the U.S. President, Jimmy Carter, was due to be arriving in Moscow. My father seemed relieved by what he had heard at work as though at last he had something on which to base a plan. My mother was furious. Deep into cursing Zwier, she saw my father pick up the telephone. She stopped. Why should he start calling people? There were things to discuss. This was the first real news since “It won’t take long.” Who was he calling?
We sat watching him dial. He was calling Immigration to ask for the person with whom we had been dealing all along. Identifying himself, he asked after her: Yes, she was well. That’s good. We looked at each other in disbelief. Any news on our case? No, nothing yet. They’re still looking at it. My father spoke very politely. If I hadn’t seen it I wouldn’t have believed it was him. He said that he understood that she had said that the visas were not yet ready but that he would be coming down tomorrow to collect them anyway. If they still were not ready he would be pouring petrol on himself in order to set himself on fire in front of the American presidential cavalcade so that they could see what a fantastic flame a Jew can make. He thanked her for her time and wished her a good day.
We were horrified. My mother asked if my father had gone mad. Whether he had or hadn’t, I cried. Pavel just sat there stuffing his torn shoe with newspaper. After a while my mother stopped shouting. Everything she was seeing she had already seen before at night, night after night. Her voice became calm trying to comfort me. Whatever happened we would be all right, Pavel and I. My father walked around the room. How heavy he could make the air. Neither of them tried to tell us he didn’t mean it.
There is a kind of laconic stoicism that may be said to be part of the Russian character. It’s born of putting up with things, of living anyway. When a Jew lives in Russia for a minimum of one generation, this is one of the national traits that is absorbed easily, since we’re used to doing everything in spite of everything else. The laconic stoicism is then mixed with an innate self-deprecating humor until there exists a highly refined tonic which insulates you from a world that seemed to hate you from before you were born. But as successful as the tonic might be in insulating you from the everyday insults, obstacles, irritations and affronts to your dignity, it has almost no effect when confronted with the probable death of someone you love. Nothing can take away this terror, nothing but death itself, your own death. That’s what I was thinking. There we were, hapless figures, pathetic ambassadors of a more or less insignificant people, trapped like mice, powerless inside this rotting superpower. As with people, those countries whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. Everything was a sham fuelled by fear. It would really have been quite funny had my father not promised to self-immolate the next day so that Pavel and I might live beyond the lies, the shortages, the midnight knocks on the door and the sudden disappearances.
Who asked him to do this? What was he doing? Better here with him than the unknown without him. Was this how much he loved us or just how much he hated them? In his calm I saw his rage, the rage of a man who had seen himself all of his life the lone victim of a jostling crowd. Can a lifetime of humiliation and intimidation dumped comprehensively on hopes and dreams, a bloodied shirt from a random drunken explosion of hate, can all of this be assuaged only by his incineration? I could see him burning. He would burn well. He did everything well. My father has so much to teach me. Don’t teach me this. I will not see it as love, I promise you. Don’t risk it. There will be
nothing to remember. I would have to end the uncertainty myself. I would be next. Don’t try me. Stay, you who have always fought, and love me overwhelmingly in your inadequate way.
The following day my father, true to his word, went to the Department of Immigration alone. When he got there the visas were waiting for him. They were in the same state they had been in when they were confiscated. Nothing had been stamped or added to them. He was assured they would be sufficient to get us to Rome. We went to the airport the next day.
My mother had made my father promise to let her handle everything at the airport. She was afraid we might have to deal with the same customs officer. This time we had far less to get through customs. Most of what we had ever owned had either been sent to Rome seven months before, traded for something or given to someone to prolong our welcome. There was one thing my father had not packed the first time, something he had hung on to throughout everything that had ever happened to him: his stamp collection. The original customs officer was on duty. Perhaps he wouldn’t remember us? We knew he would. My mother waited until he was occupied with other people so that we would be seen by somebody else. This other man was younger and not particularly interested. He went through our things absentmindedly, as if he had soccer or his girlfriend on his mind. Then he came across the stamps.
Some kind of form or certificate was needed to get the stamps out of the country if they were more than twenty-five years old. My father had been collecting since he was a small child and had stamps from before he was born. I could never understand what he liked about them. Stamps in Russia were badly printed and looked faded as soon as they were issued. The younger customs officer told my mother matter-of-factly that we could not take them with us.