Waiting For America: A Story of Emigration

2 The Manchurian Trunk

36 2 The Manchurian Trunk The middle of June, 1987. We were leaving Vienna by the night express . The entire train had been chartered by JIAS to transport a group of about 150 Soviet refugees to Rome, the next station on our journey. Vienna had been our entrance to the West, a perfect place to experience a culture shock, especially if you were twenty, as I was at the time, and had spent an entire life behind what they used to call the “Iron Curtain.” (I write this not without some embarrassment, but let the fat sheep of rhetoric graze the Alpine slopes I would cross on the way to Italy.) Although we had been in Vienna for about ten days, the time has been lengthened in my memory, every day’s finite time multiplied by innumerable “firsts”: first cappuccino, first porno film, first taste of Nazism, first ride in a Jaguar, first. . . . The platform of the Süd-Bahnhof where we boarded the Italybound train was guarded by blond lads my age who held tommy guns like village bread loaves. Their guns looked like toys compared to the AK-47s that, at high school military training in Moscow, I had learned to disassemble and reassemble in some ridiculously short time—how short, I can no longer recall. All of us refugees had been warned to be careful and vigilant, although the JIAS officials weren’t telling us exactly what to fear. The refugees stood on the platform, vaguely anxious, the word terrorist dancing in our minds. The refugees discussed a possible terrorist attack at the Vienna train station. I remember my father talking with a bearded mathematician from Novosibirsk about the eleven Israeli athletes killed by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics of 1972, and about a 1981 bomb explosion in a square in Ostia outside Rome, where large groups of Soviet Jews would socialize in the evening. Palestinian The Manchurian Trunk 37 terrorists, the Red Brigades, and Basque separatists were mentioned. On some perverse emotional level the word terrorist at the time possessed a romantic aura in my imagination. Even as I write this, the purple dusk of a Boston winter afternoon hanging outside my windows, I recall, with a rush of blood that accompanies a recognition of one’s past self, reading in Soviet high school about the terrorists tossing bombs at the tsar’s carriage. None of us had tickets for the Vienna-Rome express. A JIAS official stood on the platform with a clipboard and list of typed names. This was the same self-absorbed official, a native of Bessarabia and a Holocaust survivor, who had earlier interviewed my family at the Vienna JIAS office while petting a Pekinese lapdog. Dressed in a colorful sport coat with a yellow tie, he was now reading names out loud and marking them off his list. His gold teeth sparkled in the gentle rays of the setting Central European sun. Everything was aglitter: the roofs of Vienna, the spire of Stephansplantz, the silver trays in the pastry shops. The nymphs of Graben, those Viennese ladies of the night, were combing their golden hair. I was thinking, would I ever see them again? As we waited on the platform, Anatoly Shteynfeld, the former classics professor, came up and greeted us. We hadn’t seen him since the day we’d all flown into Austria. “Have you enjoyed your visit to Vienna?” he asked in phrasebook English. “Thank you,” father replied, also in English, unsure of what Shteynfeld had asked. “I heard they’d put you up at some God-awful dormitory outside Vienna,” Shteynfeld said, still in English, now addressing my mother. “In the Vienna Woods, wasn’t it?” “Yes, in the country,” mother replied, voice soaring. “You’re so lucky. I so wish we’d stayed in Vienna.” Mother adored the English language and was eager to practice it. “Well, I simply loved Vienna,” Shteynfeld said, straightening a red paisley ascot that looked brand new. “You’ve even managed to do some shopping, haven’t you?” mother asked him, with a grammatical playfulness that struck me as 38 Flight oddly coquettish. Father stood there, looking none too pleased. He was quite insecure about his English, but he also didn’t want to appear inane. Thus he chose not to speak at all, either in English or in Russian. Then Shteynfeld’s name was called, and he...