Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story

10. Taking Leave

284 10 Taking Leave It was al r ea dy th e beginnin g of Apr il , past the point of no return for the Russian winter. OVIR, the Office of Visas and Permissions, was still silent. We had no choice but to remain a thorn in the side of the authorities. My father decided to hold a solo six-day demonstration in the same place where he had given an interview to CBS’s Wyatt Andrews in the summer of 1986. He planned to read from his poetry and fiction right in front of Tolstoy’s monument in the courtyard of the Union of Soviet Writers, something almost unprecedented since Solzhenitsyn’s “calf” head-butting the Soviet “oak tree.” This time father sent letters of notification to the Union of Writers, the Moscow Soviet (City Government), and a number of newspapers and magazines. He also notified foreign journalists and diplomats. My father drafted a statement, typed it up several times with three rounds of carbon copy paper, and mailed off the statements along with copies of the notification. My mother translated the statement into English and read it by telephone to an American contact. In preparation for his readings, father shared his plans with refusenik friends and acquaintances. Not all of them were supportive of his new action. Some felt that further refusenik political protests, however peaceful , would irritate Gorbachev. “David, don’t do it. Your action would be flying in the face of their glasnost and perestroika,” I remember a distinguished aeronautics designer, a virile Mediterranean-looking man whose head had grown completely white after a decade of refusenik living, telling my father in our kitchen. The logic that, after everything we had been through, we should give Gorbachev’s policies a chance seemed completely backward to us. Takin g Leave | 285 On 8 April 1987, just two days prior to the first date of my father’s planned demonstration, we got a call from the Office of Visas. It was in the afternoon, I was walking leisurely across the campus toward the University Metro station. I loved this time of the year in Moscow, the sooty wind, the opening buds, the undone coats. It felt so good to be outside after three lectures and a lab. I was contemplating a longer walk, perhaps with a stop at the university book shop and another stop to drink a glass of watery coffee with a rum baba. There were payphones outside the wrought-iron fence of the Moscow University campus. From those payphones I often called home after classes to check in before taking the Metro downtown, where I would meet Max and other friends. “We just got a call from the Office of Visas,” said my mother’s voice from the heavy black receiver. And then my mother’s voice halted, choking on the unpronounceable words. “They said they would be ‘granting our request,’” mother’s voice laughed and cried into the heavy black receiver. “Yes, ‘granting,’ that’s what they said. I called papa at the clinic, but couldn’t get ahold of him.” “Mamochka, I’ll get a cab, be there soon. . . .” I ran across the street and flagged down a mud-covered yellow Volga. “Hurry, please, I’ll take care of it,” I said to the cabbie in some other person’s voice. The driver cocked back his hat, looked at me through the rear-view mirror, and nodded, a smoldering papirosa dangling in the corner of his grubby mouth. He ended up speeding the whole way and got me home in just over half an hour. My father had been visiting a sick patient when I had called home, and he had just gotten home when I walked in the door. Mother immediately filled me in on the details. The caller said he was from the OVIR and identified himself as “Andreyev.” He said that we would be getting our exit visas in ten days. There was one hook, however. The person who called my mother requested that my father cancel his demonstration. For many years my mother had been preparing herself for this conversation. “I just ignored his words,” she told me as the kettle whistled on in the kitchen. “Instead I told them I wouldn’t leave without my sister, mother, and niece.” The voice of the man from the OVIR changed from frostypolite to fuming. “Don’t you tell us what to do,” barked “Andreyev,” but my mother said she heard...