Russian Jews Don’t Cry

By Uri Norwich

Only one man can't fall asleep at that late hour on board of Chinese jumbo jet heading to New York. It seems that the entire universe found peace with itself, slowly revealing unfamiliar constellations behind the window. Something is bothering him. Usually a sound sleeper, he didn’t require much to drift away, but not on that night. He doesn’t know what it is... Maybe, it is all just a dream...

If reality can turn into bizarre fantasy, and the fantasy can morph back into reality, then a twilight transition may exist somewhere on the way.
“A border patrol officer stamped my Exit Visa with a big, blue, round seal. ‘Released!’ I had been released from the most Evil Empire. I had been released from slavery. I had been released into the Free World! The sweetest release of them all — stateless, penniless but free! At that moment, I didn’t care about tomorrow. I didn’t care that I only had eighty dollars to my name, some clothes on my back, and a couple of suitcases. One thing I knew for sure I would never be a slave again.”

The story is written as told by a young man in his twenties, bouncing around the world as a boat set loose in a stormy sea, trying to find his place in it. He hits the biggest jackpot of his life and lets it go away so easy.

The Author had lived through and experienced firsthand situations and places reflected in the book. Author lives in a New York City suburb, still enjoying every moment of novelty being a free man, even after so many years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Uri Norwich
• Release date: Mar 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301718061

Uri Norwich

Author has traveled to, and lived in some, places reflected in the book. Currently, author lives in a New York City suburb.

Book preview

Russian Jews Don’t Cry

URI NORWICH

Smashwords Second Edition

Copyright © 2012-2016 Uri Norwich

All Rights Reserved.

Published by highwood publishing new york©

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, now known or to be invented, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a connection with a review written for inclusion in a newspaper, magazine, on-line publication or broadcast.

For information regarding permission, contact [e-mail]

Cover and Back Cover Design by URI NORWICH

ISBN–13: 978-1301718061

Manufactured in the United States of America

Also By Uri Norwich

The American Deluge© 2014

If I Was Real... ©2013

DEDICATION

To Alexandra, who never believed my stories,

and,

To my Son, who tried hard to believe them, giving me encouragement,

and,

To my Daughter, who was skeptical, yet supportive.

There is a fine line between fantasy and reality.

The trick is, not getting caught on a wrong side.

Contents

Prologue

1. My Lucky Day

2. Back To The Future

3. Hello Moscow, Goodbye Evil Empire

4. The Crossroads of Freedom

5. Ascend

6.Transformation of Reality

7. The Sixteenth Republic

8. About Danny and More About Me

9. Ulpan - The Absorption Center

10. Welcome To The Tribe

11. Descent

12. The Greek Odyssey or The Seven Wonders of The World

13. Descent Continues

14. Benvenuto In Italia or the Best Meal I Ever Had

15. The Eight Long Days of Transit Through Italy

16. A Little Shtetl In Italy

17. The Summer of Discontent

18. Mosaic of Ladispoli

19. A Big Move

20. New Life, New Friends

21. Mosaic of Rome

22. The Summer of Content Or The Taste of La Dolce Vita

23. Bella Italia!

24. The World Is Small Enough

25. From Vatican To Milan

26. Matrimonio All'italiana

27. Lessons In Italian

28. Luigi Francese

29. More of The Wedding Bells

30. The Road Home

Epilog

Footnotes

Disclaimer

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, and places is entirely coincidental. However, some names of my own family members were preserved as they were.

Prologue

Dark clouds covered the ground forty thousand feet below. Tired passengers wandered around a tired Jumbo jet, trying to find anything to do besides stretching their legs. Although stretching legs felt great, no one was looking forward to the thirteen-hour flight from Beijing back to New York. Here and there in the aisles and in the bulkhead, I could hear an occasional start of a conversation. By the most part, it faded away as soon as it began. Nothing meaningful — only a polite exchange of impressions of the country people had just visited.

I kept glancing at the wall screen, tracking our flight’s dotted line over China. With every passing moment, we relentlessly pushed closer to the Evil Empire’s¹ territory. A big river floated underneath. Gray clouds cast their dark shadows on its silver water. The sun was setting down far in the distant horizon. All of a sudden, all clouds were gone. Mountain ridges gave way to the endless forests below. Just like cracks in the wall, frozen streams, healed by fresh ice, cut deep scars through dark woods. It was still early October, but that unforgiving land had been already deep into winter sleep. I was looking down from the warm comfort of the airplane, and couldn’t help but think that some thirty five years ago, this frozen land could’ve been my own grave. That land below could’ve been the end of the line for me…

I was standing on a high Amur River bank, looking out and across through the fading twilight. The same river, we just have flown over. I could still see the other shore — the Chinese side — getting blanketed slowly by lifting fog of the falling down night. Two border patrol boats, one Soviet and one Chinese, were lazily shadowing an imaginary line in the middle of the mighty river. At that moment, my thoughts were far away from my cold vantage point. Somewhere, across the vast land of China, across the Pacific Ocean, lay the land of Freedom. What would it take to swim across Amur, braving these muddy and cold waters, and crawl up on the other side? What would it take to make my way through China to a ship crossing the Pacific Ocean? Would I be able to survive that journey? The answer was simple and sobering: China was just another communist country, going through its own turbulent time. It would be only a matter of days before they captured me, even if I managed to cross the river. There was no way out through those parts.

How ironic, I thought, here I was, flying over the same forsaken land — a free man now. I got up from my seat and walked to the bulkhead. A few passengers were standing there sipping beer. I poured a cup of hot green tea from the galley and stood by the airplane emergency door, looking down through its window. We were crossing over snow ridges, and deep into Eastern Siberia.

I heard a voice, almost into my ear — a man was standing next to me. He asked if I knew what was there, down below. I knew. This was the Gulag’s² territory. This was Russia’s oil and diamond’s land. Half of the world’s diamond came from down there. If you were so unfortunate to end up there, that simply meant the end of you. No one ever was able to escape or survive in those mines below. I went back to my seat thinking how true that saying was your number did not come up yet.

I was born shortly after Stalin’s death. Everything was ready to set up in motion a process of exterminating of the Russian Jews. What Hitler had not finished, Stalin had every intention to conclude. The ax was ready to fall down, when the Father of all nations dropped dead. My family and thousands of others had been spared from ending up in the land I was flying over now.

Then, nineteen years later, I had tried my luck again. I had applied to leave the workers’ paradise for good. Yet again, I had managed to escape the land slowly drifting past underneath us. For the next two years, I had been walking on thin ice, not knowing when that knock on the door could come. It never did.

At the time, I had considered myself just lucky, so very lucky.

"My number did not come up yet."

Little did I know… Someone had been watching over me all that time. Someone had been watching over me all the time, and beyond.

*****

1. My Lucky Day

Islowly opened my eyes. Warm, morning August sun was spilling over my face through the branches of old oaks lining up the street outside my window. Here it is. It has finally arrived, I thought. My last day in this room, in my parents’ apartment, in this town.

It had been just two years since we moved into this apartment. Everything still smelled exciting new smells of fresh paint and shiny fixtures and appliances. It was a spacious and bright place. On the third floor of a brand new nine-story building. That new apartment was a very big deal for my parents to obtain. Everyone of us had own bedroom — that was beyond a big deal! That was very rare. It had two big enclosed balconies, called lodges. The amazing thing was that our small development of just three buildings had been built just a fifteen-minute-ride away by a trolley from downtown, and not somewhere in the far outskirts of a city with a million and a half inhabitants.

I was never much of a late sleeper. But today, today it was a special day. Come tomorrow, I would leave behind almost twenty years of my life. I was about to jump into unknown, and I was so much looking forward to it.

I was still lying in bed, moving only my eyes around the room. Here were two bookshelves hanging on the opposite wall. An unusually enlarged copy of the Beatles Abbey Road cover was tucked in between sliding glass. The longhair idols of my childhood were perpetually walking across zebra stripes. Maybe one day, I would get to cross over there too. I would love to just stand there, right in the middle of the crossing, and close my eyes for a moment, pretending I was with them…

In the far corner, right underneath the shelves, a big tape recorder — the size of a small TV — was prominently perched on top of a box standing on the floor. That was my stereo system. I was already in the engineering school, when I had made it myself. Parts were hard to come by, but a big reward was a crisp and precious sound coming out from playing copies of black-market Western records.

Like a pair of wide-open eyes, two round cassettes rested on the face of the tape recorder box. They were filled with dark brown magnetic tape. It was still a novelty in the Soviet Union — that distinctive sign of yesterday’s Western technology. Only a few years back, in my senior year of high school, I had to convince my mother to buy me that electronic marvel, so I could be a cool kid. At the time, to be cool meant to have a tape recorder and listen to bootlegged copies of the Beatles, the Doors and the Creedence Clearwater Revival.

The tape was quite brittle. Any abrupt stop or movement could cause its rapture. I got pretty handy at fixing that broken line of sound. All what's required was a bit of white vinegar and a lot of patience. The trick was not to cut too much, move fast, so vinegar didn’t eat the tape alive. Then align the ends straight. If I messed up and failed a perfect connection, the tape would break next time passing through magnetic head. Then, the process had to be repeated again. Finally, if not done right after the second attempt, I was standing to lose some sound bites. That wasn’t cool at all, when presented to a company of my connoisseur-of-the-Western-music friends.

Ironically, and right next to that electronic marvel of yesterday, still packed with vacuum tubes, huge capacitors and transistors a size of a small mushroom, was a tiny black box shining in the sun. That was the latest of the Western tape recording miracles — not bigger than a half of an ordinary shoebox — it was my pride and joy, my new Grundig.

*****

I closed my eyes again, remembering cold, winter Sundays when I rolled out of warm bed before dawn and made my way to a tram stop. The apartment was still quiet. The entire building was quiet. It seemed that the whole universe was quiet at that way-too-early hour. Not a sound around, not a peep. The neighborhood buildings stood completely dark somewhere across our large yard. It was so quiet that even frozen swings on the playground didn’t want to move. An occasional window pierced through the black night with a yellow light behind its frosted glass. I always wondered why those people were up so early. The only sound I could hear at that hour was steam puffing its busy way through hot radiators, making the apartment pleasantly warm. It was -20⁰F behind double-paned windows.

It wasn’t a long walk to the tram stop. But just for this occasion, I was wearing special winter boots, called валенки (valenki), a type of a winter felt footwear worn usually for walking on dry snow in frosty weather. The name valenki literally means made by felting. No one really knows the origin of these boots. Like anything else, Russians staked their claim on inventing them first. However, the nomads had been known to wear these traditional felt boots, long before Russians became aware of them.

Traditionally, valenki were made of wool felt. They were not water-resistant, and were worn often with galoshes, to keep water out. Shoemakers had a lovely little business for themselves just in time for the beginning of each winter. They were happily attaching rubber soles to protect valenki from quick wear and slush of the melting snow. Young people wouldn’t be caught dead wearing valenki; forget about galoshes. And yet, valenki served perfectly well for a place I was heading to on those dark wintery Sunday mornings. I couldn’t care less if I was judged by my footwear.

There were two more uses for valenki, I have to mention. The first was quite gruesome. Someone could be severely beaten with something heavy put inside of a valenok (a single boot). Usually, that something was a steam iron made out of heavy black metal. There were no bruises left on a poor bastard’s body. Criminals, as well as the Soviet authorities, used this effective tool to their advantage when needed.

"Stupid as valenok!" was the common expression of frustration with someone’s brain capacity. That was the other lovely use of valenki.

Each step of mine over sidewalk firmly packed with snow sounded like a small explosion in the frozen morning air. The sound bounced off dark apartment buildings and long reverberated behind me. My heavy winter coat and a fur hat securely separated me from unfriendly elements of nature. It was so cold that I could see my breath hanging out in the frozen air. It was coming through a wool scarf tightly wound around my neck, and covering my face like a ski mask.

Soon, I could see a strong beam of light cutting through morning frost. I could hear screeching sounds of steel wheels against the rails, and blue electric arcs lightning up the night. Right then I knew my tram was coming. I had to elbow my way inside of a frozen car and find a warm spot to lean against a window or a wall. I was squeezed by the fellow riders, dozing off, hanging up in the air. Tram’s windows were gradually steaming up, and the car was surprisingly quiet for these many people packed inside. Screeching sounds of frozen wheels and lightning sparks coming from underneath the tram were the only signs of us moving through the dark cosmic space. A meager light outside the windows kept growing brighter-blue until at some moment the frost from condensation on the inside started sparkling from the rising and cold sun. The crowd inside the tram started to get slowly excited, shaking off the pre-dawn slumber in anticipation of coming to something they were trying so hard to get to. I could float forever like that, until finally, we would reach our destination — a huge open field outside the city.

As much as uncomfortable the ride was, I still didn’t want to get out in the cold from the car warmed by the people’s breath. Although trams had heaters running along the floor, the warmth coming out of there was barely enough to melt snow on my valenki. Outside, there was a sea of people as far as the eye could see. Waves of human mass were rolling in steam rising up from the thousands breathing into the frozen air. I always wondered if all these people ever slept at all. No matter how early I would come, the field was already packed. Monotonous, colorless crowd, mostly dressed in black, was in the stark contrast with the fresh white snow, deep blue sky, and bright-red disk of the sun slowly rising above all. Here they were en masse, thousands strong, with the first rays of a cold winter Sunday morning, deeply entangled in a free market enterprise.

These illegal, spontaneous black markets were called Барахолка (ba-ra-khol-ka), or Junkyard. If someone ever tried to compare them to Western flea markets — they would be absolutely and utterly wrong. They were not even close. There were no stalls, creating orderly flow of people moving along. There were no tables for sellers to display their goods. Only an amorphous mass of people, moving back and forth, just like froth on the sea surface moving with the tide. More importantly, these markets were not entirely legal. They were legal on Sundays only, when the authorities allowed them to happen. And the only legal things the authorities allowed to sell there was used stuff! At least, half of the merchandise sold there was new!

Another colorful word for these gatherings was "Tолчок " (toll-chock), loosely translated as a mass of people moving around the same place over and over again, pushing and hustling around each other. There was no organized direction in people circulating around. Just like melting snow creating unpredictable passageways for the running water, people wandered in all directions in hope to find anything. Time and time again, they ran into same gray faces, timidly smiling sometimes, or just nodding in a great disappointment. But sometimes, in their many gyrations, a new face would pop up, and a possibility of a trade could arise.

The origin of these markets could be traced to the days after the Russian October Revolution in 1917. Desperate people congregated on street corners or open squares to exchange their meager belongings for whatever food they could fetch. With the years passed, the authorities gradually kicked them out of city corners to remote outskirts. The new mass-construction, pushed them even further out, until they found themselves so removed from city downtowns that many stopped bothering with traveling that far. Unless…, unless there was a need.

Usually those gatherings happened on Sundays, when the Soviet people had their only day off. Even with Saturdays added later as the day off, the tradition remained to hold junkyards on Sundays, as it always had been before.

By the most part, people traded their old belongings, thus these markets came to be known as junkyards. The authorities always looked upon those markets through double vision lenses: as the eyesore, and as a source of their own illegal income. The local authorities always could have their fun hustling the population for money, especially out-of-towners. However, most people were left alone. It was the only outlet left for their entrepreneurial spirit.

By the time I discovered those markets, very few of them still existed around the vast country. The junkyards had been kicked out of the major Soviet cities entirely. And here it was, one of them still remained in the city where I lived.

With the time, a nature of the traded goods changed. Although old things, like shoes, coats, household stuff, still remained a big part of the market, a brand-new Western merchandize had found its way in. Sailors and sportsmen, tourist, and the lucky ones allowed to work abroad, like party bureaucrats who had been sent to spread their socialist wisdom among rotten capitalists, spent their meager allowances and brought back Western clothes, electronics, and music.

And then, there also was a tiny sliver of the population of the German and Jewish origin. Some of the Germans who had ended up here after the last Great War had discovered that they still had relatives in the West. Occasionally, they would receive a parcel or two from West Germany.

Jews had a different story. Isn’t it always that way? I had first learned about Jews being different from other folk when I was a small kid in a grade school. Beside being constantly reminded about my Jewishness, my family, like a lot of other Jewish families, harbored a dark secret — relatives living abroad. That was never discussed at a dinner table. That was a taboo; a huge no-no. But that was exactly how I was able to get my hands on the Western goodies. Sometimes parcels arrived in pristine order. But some other times, a lowlife KGB inspector felt like cutting a package open and stealing from those dirty no-good Jews. For a lot of Jewish families that was the main source of existence.

There were different sections in our Junkyard, known only to people trading their type of goods. These spontaneous areas were formed by people with the same intention of exchange or trade a specific merchandise. An experienced visitor would know where to go in search of whatever he was looking for. No signs, no markings, no stands or stalls, just a windswept open field.

There were large areas where only auto parts were traded. There were no foreign parts there, because there were no foreign cars. I would know that place even without getting in the thick of it. From far away, I could spot men dressed in soiled overcoats. Greased hands would pull out from underneath of the dirty coat their wares: spark plugs, carburetors and brake pads. They would give their merchandise just enough daylight for buyers to inspect. Then put it back, just as fast, to hide from unwanted looks. Most parts for sale were used. Some were new and stolen from their work place. Those would present the most danger if the sellers got caught by undercover police. People selling old greasy parts were not afraid to lay them openly down on tarps spread on the ground. But sellers of new parts — they better be watching out!

There was a section where most out-of-towners chose to congregate. Those were guests from the Southern Republics of the widely sprawled Soviet Empire: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and such. We called them the Stans. Some other out-of-towners came from Georgia and Armenia. They all came over here for one simple reason — they couldn’t conduct their business in any other cities of the vast Union. There were no more junkyards left.

Locals in my city called them Choorkies. This was an offensive word; this was a derogatory word, and a dangerous word; this was a bad word to use. The consequences were unpredictable, and yet, in Russia, people widely used it, well knowing it would go unpunished because the authorities didn’t care. Reaction from the receiving party was widely unpredictable, but no one really cared. Everyone knew that they were visitors here, and no matter, what could happen, they would always end up on a losing side.

To refer to these people as Choorkies would be as bad as calling a black person in America a nigger. It also had a deep ethnic demeanor, implying not only a second-rate citizen, but a stupid, illiterate and a dumb one. Choorka was a Russian word usually referred to a wood log cut to two-foot long pieces, easy enough to ax later for use in a wood burning stove. One really had to have a wild imagination to draw parallels between a log of wood and a human of a different ethnicity than Russian. By a strange fate, proper and literary Russian word for a black person was негр, translated literally as nigger. Go figure.

And yet, Choorkies continued coming to trade their wares in Russia. People from the Stans brought usually food, fresh berries, grapes, and especially, dry fruit and nuts. In the fall, they schlepped our way trucks full of melons and watermelons. At that time, the city-fathers allowed them even to sell those on the streets and squares, right from tarps spread on the ground. Someone on the authority side was getting free watermelons, and most likely some coin too. People from Georgia and Armenia were known mostly for bringing clothes and shoes to our junkyard.

Lately, a new breed of sellers entered the fray. Russian slang word for them was Пижон (pee-jon), which would loosely translate into something like a dandy, or a fop. The origin of that word was most likely French, just like the other multitude of words in the Russian language. The French word was pigeon. Perhaps, once upon a time, pigeons were exotic birds, before they had transformed into flying rats, polluting all over the place. Perhaps at that time, pigeons were dandies of European cities. One would never know the mysterious ways how a French pigeon had morphed into Russian fop. If I had to match a bird to this new breed of people, the closest and most appropriate bird would’ve been a peacock.

True, they were stand-outs in the crowd. Forget about valenki… They were always dressed in nice clothes not customary to the Soviet gray surroundings. They always showed their colorful selves, and were the latest addition to the junkyard crowd. Even on the coldest of the cold days, they showed up dressed in light and stylish autumn coats, wearing summer leather loafers, with long, wound around neck wool scarves, and no hats. Their scarves were made of a very thin and gentle matter commonly called Maher. The belief was that it was produced of the finest lamb wool. Sharp and freshly ironed dress pants completed the ensemble. Lately, the pants were replaced by blue jeans. Oh… those Western blue jeans! They deserve a special place in the story. I will get to them later.

The fact that pee-jons never wore any hats was always the most amazing and puzzling to me. While everyone around had to cuddle in warm coats and long-eared Russian fur hats, our fops stood bareheaded. They rubbed their hands against each other and blew on them from their mouth. On especially cold mornings, they wrapped their hands around their red noses, relieving temporarily that vital organ from falling off their faces. Their domain was a newly created section of the junkyard. It wasn’t yet an official certain place, it was still developing and finding its spot among the crowds. But everyone knew where to look for Western records, blue jeans and Marlboro packs. Look for the bareheaded fops.

Usually, I elbowed my way through the crowds to the Jeans Section, or sometimes, made my way first to the Coat Section, and quickly executed my sales. Then, I headed to the Record Section, and traded my music there. I didn’t fit in the fop’s category by any stretch of imagination. So, many of them were surprised to see an ordinary schmuck, wearing valenki, intervening with their trades. The first suspicion always was, and rightfully so, I was a KGB man. That very first time, when I showed up in their midst, pee-jons scattered around in a hurry. They tried to disappear, as quickly as they could. The bravest ones stayed behind, though, and they were rewarded for their courage handsomely.

The ever nagging feeling of being watched by Militzia (Soviet police) was always on the back of everyone’s mind. But the animal spirit of free enterprise overwhelmed and pushed deep down that fear. Nevertheless, every participant in this market was ready at a moment's notice to hide their illegal wares under their oversized coats. These coats were specially made for this kind of trade, with many pockets and compartments, allowing to extract and quickly hide back a precious merchandise.

*****

My half-open eyes kept moving slowly across the window and on to the next wall where my desk was lodged in the corner. Many late nights, I burned the midnight oil filling out countless papers and appeals to secure my way out of the country. But now, right now, on top of my desk, there it was! That priceless piece of green paper — The Exit Visa from the communist paradise. While people of free countries needed just entry visas to travel to foreign countries, the Soviet Union required their citizens to get the exit visa first.

The Soviet population was tightly controlled and kept out from the outside world. Generations upon generations were brought up on the idea that traveling abroad was not available. It did not exist, thus it was not an option. The very simple mantra of the Soviet authorities always was … you have here everything what you would ever need! Out there, in the so called free world, the masses are exploited by the capitalist pigs, and don’t have anything. The Soviet society was so brainwashed that the idea of traveling abroad wouldn’t even occur in the population. Except for very small segments: Jewish and German. Even in their case, the authorities would create myriad obstacles not to grant the exit visa. The authorities would make the way to freedom as long and difficult as possible, so other people wouldn’t follow suit. The government decided who would go to prison or who would be worth of throwing out of the country. To be thrown out was the biggest luck in that crooked communist society. People would give their lives just to be thrown out. Very few people would even dare to think asking the authorities for a permission to travel abroad for lack of any reason.

And there it was, that precious piece of paper… No more than six inches high and four inches wide, it had two more unfolding pages inside. The front page was a light green, with a passport size photograph of a lucky holder, and also contained his personal information. That was the only Soviet document which didn’t clearly state nationality of a lucky bearer.

In the Soviet society Nationality had an entirely different meaning from the way it was understood in the West. The communists had created Nationality as a way to identify, divide, persecute, and kill people. In the Soviet Union, Nationality meant the Religion. Since religion was prohibited in the Soviet society, it meant the Ethnicity. Just for that purpose, they had an internal passport system. Every citizen had a passport identifying that person by name and by other personal data. The fifth line was always named Nationality. It contained the person’s ethnic belonging. Anywhere a person would turn, they could know his ethnicity. That was an easy way to discrimination and prosecution, if needed.

On top of it, the internal passport had a special section called Residency. Every citizen of the free socialist society was required to have a stamp from the local police station identifying his residency. It was against their crooked law to travel anywhere within the country for more than three days and not being registered with a local cop at the destination. That was how they controlled their free people against uncontrolled movements around the country. It was also the great way to control population in much desired places to live. People simply couldn’t obtain a permanent residency in the big cities like Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev. A way around it was to get married.

And so it was, that greenish piece of paper, my gateway to Freedom. Two unfolding pages, now blank, were destined for many stamps to be collected on the way. They would contain entrance and transit visas to many countries lying ahead of me. I started imagining a red dotted line running through the map. It led first to Moscow, then to southern Ukraine. It crossed the border, and out of the Soviet Union into Czechoslovakia. The red dots kept crawling further up and into Austria… They started appearing and spreading out in all different directions, until I lost them all together.

My eyes rested briefly on some other stuff on the desk: meager eighty US dollars, given me by the government in exchange for hundred rubles, one-way train ticket to Moscow, and a list of things to do before the departure. That list sounded very final, as if it was meant for a person exiting the life itself.

My eyes finally had nowhere to go. I had completed the circle. Behind me was my empty wardrobe, all my clothes already packed into two suitcases. Here I was… Today was my lucky day! Come tomorrow, I would be far-far away from my familiar life. But today, today I had to say my goodbyes.

*****

My mother knocked and leaned through the door into the room. It was time for breakfast. Her face aged in these few days since I got my Exit Visa. Vibrant and full of life, energetic and good looking middle aged woman, looked tired now. The expression on her face was as if someone died in the house. It seemed to me that she lost control of something. It seemed to me that she was grasping at straws, trying to prevent me from leaving. She was the managing director of a food processing factory, known to her three hundred employees as powerful and authoritative, controlling and imposing. Now she wasn’t any of it.

Up until that very day, my mother did not believe I could ever get the permission to leave. The product of the Soviet system, she was genuinely convinced that people in the West had been dying on the streets of starvation. Only a very small elite group of capitalist pigs was prosperous, riding on the backs of working people. She was strongly convinced that it had been just another period of my life, growing up. It would blow over. She knew how dangerous my undertaking was. She knew it very well. She did not let that feeling get close to her, but she always knew that one night we might hear a knock on the door. It never came. The past two years had been very trying for her.

My father, on the other hand, had been cheering for me. Although he was the product of the same system, he had a very different life experience. As an army officer, he had survived the War. He had reached Austria, met the American soldiers over there, and returned three years after the War’s end, just to find that he had lost his entire family. It had given him a different perspective on life. Since the wartime, he had learned that the system he had been fighting for, was quite rotten. He knew it was the fight for survival only. He had been encouraging and supporting me, in spite of my mother’s disapproval.

My father greeted me in the kitchen. It seemed he didn’t care much about today’s day. We expected some friends stopping by. He was more interested to know about my yesterday’s visit to the local military district center. A retired officer himself, he kept in touch with our local military authorities. It had some benefits. Food benefits, mainly. As a veteran, he was able to get special vouchers for scarce goods: meat cuts, cold cuts, occasional chicken, or sometimes, even a better Christmas tree.

Christmas was not celebrated in the Soviet atheist society. Christmas had been replaced by New Year’s celebration. The Christmas tree had been replaced by the Fur Tree, and was a centerpiece of every living room for four weeks around that time. Gifts for children were carefully laid under the tree right after the last child went to sleep. It was a magical time for us children on that night of every December 31. We couldn’t wait till the next morning. The only problem was, the gifts were very hard to come by. But what did we care? We were just children then, we expected Grandfather Frost (Santa Clause had been replaced in the Soviet Union too) to bring us presents from our wish list.

Every Departee, as we were known, had to go through The Exit Process. That process would usually start long before the actual exit could happen. Sometimes, years before the actual visa was granted. The authorities were making sure that the process wouldn’t be a walk in the park for the ones who decided to betray Mother Russia. The purge from the Youth Communist organization Komsomol or from the Communist Party itself was a part of this process, depending where a Departee belonged to. Everyone had to belong to one or another. To be a member of theKomsomol, one had to be younger than twenty-eight-years of age. If a Departee had outgrown that age, but was not a member of the Communist Party, they still purge him as if he continued to be a Young Communist. On some occasions, if they could not tie a Departee to one or another, he would be purged from a trade union. No one really knew, if they existed, until the day of the purge.

Companies where the culprits were employed were required to have open meetings, publicly shaming the traitors. If a culprit happened to be a military officer, public shaming discharge from the Soviet Army was performed. That happened very rarely, but it did nevertheless. Many people had been fired from their positions as doctors, engineers and other professions. In many cases, they had been left without any livelihood and means of existence. Luckily, the junkyard came to the rescue. Parcels with clothes from the West had been supporting people awaiting their green piece of paper, sometimes for years. That same lucky piece of green paper was resting now on my desk. That was gold. That was more than gold. That was the ticket to Freedom!

So the day before, I went to the local military district center. They left it for the end of the exit process — a cherry on top. I had to turn in my military credentials earned in college. I was an officer of the Soviet Arm Forces. The system was designed the way that higher education kept a man spared from the draft. The payback was that for almost three years of engineering school, I had to go through military education for one full day a week. The girls had an extra day off, and quite enjoyed it. Upon the graduation, the university had bestowed on me a rank of an officer — lieutenant.

I was apprehensive, and rightfully so, walking through the doors of the District Military Command building. I was ushered to a room and greeted by a young looking colonel,

Well, well, well.. So…? We are going to be on different sides of the fence now… We are going to be enemies… We are going to fight against each other… He started from the get-go.

A few years ago, when I was in Vietnam as an advisor to our North Vietnamese friends, of course, I had always admired those brave Yankees, but never understood why they had to fight for those no-good-gooks in the South. We would shoot rockets, the same ones you just studied in college, and occasionally, we could get a Tomcat. Then, we would drink for days. The North Vietnamese couldn’t learn a thing… Imagine, they had to wait for us to get sober and start shooting rockets again. They could never shoot down even one Yankee plane on their own… If it wasn’t for us… Well, well, well, So… Are we going to be on different sides of the fence now…?

He finished his monologue and sat down, holding his head with both hands and staring at his desk with an empty look. I could hear him breathing heavily and getting red-faced. It wasn’t a good sign. He didn’t lift his head up, but said,

Don’t answer… I wish you all the best… Hope, we would never face each other on the battlefield… Good luck.

I put my military ID on his desk. He handed me the release paper, not even looking my way.

*****

The doorbell rang and the first batch of friends came in. These were my three high school and college buddies. Gradually, the apartment filled in. Many of the present had been waiting to leave the country themselves. Some, came only to see me off. They just wanted to be close to a lucky one who was finally going to the West. They just wanted to be close for a brief moment to someone who might see their children, departed some time ago. They wanted to touch me; they wanted to hold my hands, and perhaps, they hoped I would hug their children for them.

It took a lot of courage for those staying behind to come to say goodbye. Everybody knew perfectly well that they were watched. The ones in waiting — they really did not care. They had been marked already, and watched for a long time. But for the ones with no intention to leave, or without any means to emigrate, for them, it was a big deal.

The party slowly progressed through the day, and by the nightfall, we were all exhausted. It was a very strange party. No gifts. Everyone knew I couldn’t take much with me. The government defined the amount of stuff each person could take out of the country. It seemed that the authorities were worried we could take with us something of a value and deprive the remaining people. Two suitcases per soul, some carry-on and a permit to ship by a slow boat a small wooden crate of limited dimensions, those were all worldly possessions allowed by the government to take out. That was everything what people could take with them and show for their entire lives in the Soviet Union. That was it!

I had taken a full advantage of the limits imposed by the generous Soviet government. I had prepared, as it was known, the Standard Departee Set. They were items carefully selected by previous emigrants. The items were put on the list according to their order of importance. Emigrants, who went before me and had already made their way to countries of their destination, relayed their instructions through letters from the West. The letters, somehow, seeped through. For us remaining behind, each letter from someone out there was a golden nugget. That was the only way of communicating with the West. Neither the Internet, nor e-mail had been invented yet by the notorious future vice president. Although the telephone had been invented already, and had been in use in the Soviet Union forever, calls from the West couldn’t get through. On the other hand, the letters, miraculously escaping censors, brought precious grains of information to our world behind the Iron Curtain. Those letters were told and retold endlessly, from mouth to mouth, from one person to another. The writers had to be careful not to upset the censors and wrote mostly about nothing, sprinkling a useful nugget here and there. Many letters had never reached their intended families. Through the past few years, we were able to put together a complete picture about a given subject by connecting different pieces of information gathered from different letters, addressed to different families, and at different times. Many Departees came to know each other through the word of mouth, or meeting each other at a gray government office where we applied for exit visas. These ties were carefully preserved and maintained even after someone’s departure. People kept a tightknit network of connections and exchanged information picked up from the letters received from abroad and from severely jammed Western radio stations. We were surprised that sometimes a letter with a blunt open truth about the West could get through. Yet, the most innocent letters about nothing would be lost to the censor.

The sacred Departee Set was defined by a collection of makeshift handwritten, and sometimes typewritten, pages carefully put in a plastic protective pouch. Copy machines were illegal in the workers’ paradise. These pages were passed over from a leaving Departee to someone who was considered to be most likely departing next. It was an unwritten tradition to pass these pages to a thought to be next. Sometimes, that was wrong. Sometimes, it was unbearable to see someone waiting and waiting for their turn while others were leaving before them. In many instances, those others had been long gone to the West, and the ones waiting for many years still had been left behind in suspension. They were the keepers of these priceless papers. They knew the papers by heart, line by line, and waited patiently for their turn.

Each item in the Departee Set had very specific purpose. It carried a certain importance along an immigrant journey. The hot items to be sold in Rome at a flea market were linen sheets and pillow cases, linen tablecloths and napkins, and stainless steel silverware. Owners of small family restaurants in Italy, Trattorias, were crazy for this stuff. Cameras, big lenses, binoculars and telescopes were very popular there too. Although back in the USSR, I couldn’t figure out why people in the Western country like Italy would buy underdeveloped, low tech stuff from immigrants. The only explanation I could come up with was that the Italians were not that rich to afford good Western gadgets. As I found out soon enough, I wasn’t that far from the truth.

Soviet Matreshka dolls, wooden spoons and bowls were also in high demand. Lacquer, hand-painted jewelry boxes were the big hit. They originated in a Russian village of Palech, and were known under that same name as Palechs. And then, there were turntable vinyl records of famous Russian opera singers, and the entire operas.

All these items were a must-have. These items would provide a newly arrived immigrant to the West with some quick cash, supplementing those meager eighty dollars the Soviet government generously allowed to take out. I packed one suitcase with all that stuff from the list, and the other — just with my own clothes to wear.

I also managed to put together a small crate to be shipped by ground. My mother insisted that I must take with me some pots and pans, some bedding and blankets, and some winter clothes. I didn’t have any room left in my suitcases, so I had to procure a crate. That wasn’t an easy task. There were no UPS or FedEx stores; there were no places like that at all. There were no special services for that either.

One late evening, I went to a neighborhood furniture store. The store was about to close for the day. Being a good student of the Russian black markets, I brought with me a bottle of vodka and a jar of sour pickles. I packed a better vodka, Stolichnaya, hoping for a better result. To my surprise, a couple of warehouse workers didn’t get upset with me leaving the country. After the first toast to my success in America, the crate was started right in front of my eyes. They promptly sacrificed a piece of a good furniture from the back. Between the second and the third shots, the crate started taking shape, and it was ready soon. When the bottom of the bottle appeared in our sight, I was assured that I would find the crate by my doorstep the following morning.

And there it was, just as they promised. The brand new and shiny crate arrived at my door, ready to cross continents and seas. Someone would not buy a credenza that day. The only thing left for me to do was to stuff it, and nail the top down.

I put in that wonderful and expensive looking crate all the stuff my mother insisted I take with me, and some. I still had a lot of room to spare. I could not let that precious space go to waste… So I stuffed my road bicycle inside. I still had plenty of room left. But that was it. I didn’t have anything else. So I nailed the top cover down.

It was a very strange party. It looked almost as I was attending my own funeral. At the time, I couldn’t put my finger on it. I couldn’t explain what was going on. Now, looking back at that day, it seemed as if my spirit, my own soul left my body and was hovering just above everyone gathered there. And yet, my outer shell was going through the day, just following the motions.

My mother was busy with making food and serving guests. That kept her mind off dark thoughts. We all collapsed by midnight, as soon as the last guest left the apartment.

For the last time, I turned my transistor shortwave radio on and started scrolling through my favorites: Russian broadcast of the Voice of America, BBC, Radio Liberty and the Voice of Israel. For the past few years, these stations kept me and many other wannabe emigrants informed about the outside world. Even during the worst jamming, commies could not keep all of them silenced. There always was at least one station finding its way through. These stations kept our spirit alive. These stations helped many people to weather the worst abuse by the Soviet authorities. These stations were a breath of fresh air and the source of moral and physical support.

That night, the Voice of America got its break. I started listening. A man was telling me about a hot summer in New York City, and how wonderful it would be to get away for the upcoming weekend. My last thought before I drifted asleep was, perhaps, one day that could be my biggest worry in the world…

The next morning was as bright and sunny as the one before. Everything seemed to be going on autopilot now. My mother was exhausted by anticipation of my imminent departure. She was still hoping that I could change my mind… We said brief goodbyes, and a cab took me to the Central Rail Station.

My train was waiting on the main platform number one — an honor reserved only for the name-trains. The name of this one was The Siberian. I will come back to that later. But for now, I found my car and located my compartment. I tucked the two suitcases underneath one of the two bottom sleeping shelves, seated myself by the large window and prepared to go. The door was closed. No one came in and joined me in the compartment. Three more people could’ve held tickets for the remaining shelves.

I did not notice when the train started moving. I got out of my compartment. The conductor was busy running around, making his charges comfortable. He asked if I wanted a cup of tea. I shook my head and started making my way to the very last car. My car was in the middle of the train. I had to pass through five or six cars. Everywhere, people were settling in. Everyone was in a good mood and smiling in anticipation of a pleasant journey. After all, it was summer time. It was vacation time, and people were getting away. Finally, I reached the very end. There were no more cars to go. I stood at the last door leading to nowhere and separating me from the city quickly disappearing from my sight. I pressed my nose against the glass. The rails kept falling behind in two endless lines. The only sound I could hear was a soft, monotonous song from the wheels. I stood motionless, and kept staring down, mesmerized by the rails running relentlessly back to the city where I grew up. With every passing second, I was taken further and further away from the place I once called home.

*****

2. Back to The Future

There were three different types of train cars in the Soviet railroad system. The first type was known as a common car. Inside, it had a long middle aisle. On both sides of that aisle were open compartments, separated by thin walls, almost like cubicles in modern office buildings. Except, each compartment contained three benches, on each side of the wall — one above another. Amazingly, six people could be packed in that confined space, and sleep there through their long journeys. Each car like that could contain hundred and fifty people traveling together for days through the vast Communist land. That car was like a one big family. People shared their space, people shared their food, people shared their vodka, and people shared their life stories. Two times a day, the conductor went around with a tray, serving hot tea in tall, thick glasses framed into silver, stainless holders. Soon, the entire car would start smelling like a deli counter. People got out their sandwiches, wrapped in layers of yesterday newspaper. The paper was greasy, with big stains of fat coming through it. Canned food came out from bags, and was opened, adding some colorful stench to a palette of other funny aromas floating through the car. Food was spread on the small table, hanging under the window, and was eaten by a newly formed family of six strangers, whose paths crossed by an unlikely chance.

Along a long journey, stretching sometimes into days, people could buy fresh food at small stations from local farmers, meeting passing trains to sell their wares. For travelers on a meager budget, brief train stops in the middle of nowhere were a life support. All long-distance trains had a dining car. But people traveling in common cars did not bother going over there. They were not used to restaurant service, and wouldn’t even consider it as a meal option. Passing through those cars on the way to the diner, I always felt that most people actually enjoyed that camaraderie, that closeness, that innocent sharing of their simple food. Sometimes, it seemed to me that the entire car was having a party, where in reality, they were just getting drunk together.

There were some accidental passengers, who got in the mix by a sheer bad luck of not being able to procure a better ticket. I could see how uncomfortable and out of place they looked. I would’ve felt the same way. They tried to ignore some crude jokes flowing their way. Those jokes didn’t mean any harm — just a drunk showing off. One thing people always could count on, it was safe traveling by trains. No misbehavior was tolerated. A culprit was thrown off the train at the next station, and right into waiting Militia’s (Soviet Police) hands. No one was looking forward to something like that happen on a long trip.

The second type of the Soviet train cars was known as a soft car, named for soft benches doubled as beds. It contained a dozen of separate rooms called in a French manner cupét. They were lined up along the car’s corridor, leaving plenty of room outside for walking. Thick, sliding doors kept people inside of each compartment private and cozy. Each compartment was for four occupants. These were nice and clean cars, with plenty of room and clean bathrooms at each end of the car. Sometimes, people from common cars could sneak in there unnoticed, to enjoy for a brief moment much better amenities than their own car had to offer.

The last type of the train cars was defined by a very special status of a train. Each major city in the Soviet Union had a so called brand-name train, connecting that city to Moscow. These trains were faster, cleaner and better served. The city I grew up had such a train, called The Siberian. Instead of the usual three night journey to Moscow, The Siberian had been making it in two. All cars in that train were soft.

The only common thing between all train cars was their color — dark green, except for trains originated in Moscow. They were red, of course. Somehow, green color conveyed always the warmth, hominess and desire to hop on board and travel to the end of the land.

The common car trains had wooden benches, called by travelers shelves. Passengers had to pull skinny mattresses out from under the bottom shelf to make their overnight beds. Although soft cars could do without mattresses, they all had them anyway, neatly stored in a special place, hidden out of sight, above the entrance door to a compartment.

No matter how fancy a car was, it had two common toilets at either end of the long corridor. I felt some weird attraction to that confined place on the train. I loved train toilets. It may seem gross, but I looked forward to every trip over there. The most fascinating part about train toilets was that the discharge from them was flushed straight down on the train tracks. Whether it was number one or number two, it did not matter. I really enjoyed stepping on that small pedal at the bowl’s bottom on the floor and watching the sh*t disappearing under the train. I always wondered how bad the tracks smelled. I liked staring down the open hole, looking at the ground rushing by. The strong creosote smell filled the small space, making me feel dizzy and forget about the time, until someone outside started to impatiently shake the handle.

I always loved trains. I loved traveling for days, watching changing scenery, changing nature, and changing cities. I was accustomed to long train rides. It took two nights to get to Moscow from the city where I spent my youth. And if we went to the Black Sea in the summer time, it took us three nights and almost four days by train. My favorite was the top shelf. I could gaze for hours into passing distance, lost in my own thoughts. My favorite time was dawn. The car was dead quiet. All passengers were still asleep. From my perch, I could watch a blanket of fog lifting from still dark fields. Just like a rising curtain, it opened for me yellow hay stacks, mysterious woods, and early farmers riding their horse buggies on dirt roads. I could spot some other farmers trying to start their tractors, and the blue plumes of smoke rising lazily up. Some of them would’ve already given in to the frustration and sat down to have their breakfast — the first cigarette of the day. Tiny villages blinked by in front of my eyes, even before I was able to focus on anything. Railroad crossings zipped past with that familiar sound of an approaching train. My ears were still ringing long after the crossing was left behind. I always wondered who those crossing attendants were, standing in the middle of the night with a lantern and a raised flag, signaling to the engineer that everything was all right over there, ahead.

I always liked sounds of a waking up train, and the passengers wandering around the narrow corridor. I could hear compartment doors, sliding open, and people passing by our shut door. I was lucky, I had always traveled in the soft cars. My parents had enough means to afford the better ride. Perhaps, that was why I enjoyed the trips.

But now… Now, I was standing at the very end of the train, pressing my face hard against the dirty glass of the last door leading into nowhere. I was looking at the disappearing rail lines, and thinking,

"Would these two seemingly endless rails ever cross anywhere?

Was there ever a crossing point, where these two rails would come together, perhaps, opening a new road? A new