The judge read the sentence: three years in a labor camp, with probation. The sentence could be appealed within seven days. The trial was over. Masha and her friends were overjoyed at the outcome.

Volodya and Masha believe that her sentence was suspended because of her poor health and also because there was nothing to be gained from imprisoning her; the Kremlin authorities had isolated Volodya and knew that Masha would want to follow him into exile.

Now Masha lived in the apartment with Olga, Leonid’s girlfriend. The police sergeant and his wife had left two years before the balcony demonstration. In their room now were a middle-aged woman who was a postal clerk and her teenage son; they had been given a telephone of their own and warned not to let the Slepaks use it or it would be disconnected.

Masha’s family was shattered. Leonid in hiding to avoid prison for refusing to be conscripted, moving from apartment to apartment in Moscow or journeying by train-not plane; you had to give your name and show your internal passport when you traveled by plane-to friends he could trust in Leningrad and Vilna and Armenia. Sanya in Israel and traveling often to Europe and England and the United States under the sponsorship of the Israeli Foreign Office and Jewish organizations, to meetings and conferences, where he spoke to small groups of influential people and large crowds, pleading his parents’ cause, raising funds. And Volodya traveling by railroad with other prisoners under tight guard to his place of exile. None of the officials with whom Masha met could tell her his final destination.

At the end of August, Solomon Slepak, who had spent the summer in a small country house outside Moscow with his second wife, returned home. Astonishingly, he knew nothing of what had transpired with Volodya and Masha and was informed by his nephew Anatoly of Volodya’s arrest and sentence. He suffered a heart attack.

Solomon’s Russian wife later told Masha and Leonid that the old man spent the last days of his long life seated on the sofa with his hat on his head, swaying slowly back and forth and mumbling words in a language she could not understand. Masha thought the old man might have been praying in Hebrew.

Solomon Slepak was eighty-six years old when he died on September 2, 1978. Two days later he was buried in a Moscow cemetery reserved for party members only two ranks below those interred in the Kremlin wall. Volodya doesn’t know and can’t even conjecture who might have authorized his father’s burial in that cemetery. Present at the funeral were relatives, a few friends, and a representative of the local Communist Party committee. The representative delivered a brief speech. KGB agents hovered in the background. The coffin was nailed shut.

After being petitioned by Masha some days before, a high official of the Interior Ministry, acting in compliance with Soviet law, had approved her request that Volodya be allowed to attend his father’s funeral, on condition that while in Moscow he not visit with refuseniks or speak to correspondents or meet any foreigners.

Four days after arriving in his village of exile, Volodya received a telephone call from Masha: His father was dead. She added that she had obtained permission for Volodya to return to Moscow for the funeral. Volodya, shaken and profoundly sad, told himself: What a tragedy. He never understood me, and I’m not sure I ever understood him. His communism turned everything upside down. But he was my father. At the regional office of the militia, Volodya procured the necessary papers and returned by bus and plane to Moscow. He arrived in time for the funeral.

His father’s Russian wife, mortified and outraged by Masha’s arrest and by Volodya’s arrest and exile, would have nothing to do with them. She regarded herself as a patriotic Soviet woman and refused to let Volodya have his father’s personal papers. Years later, after her death, Volodya tried to obtain the papers through the children from her first marriage. But they had thrown everything away. Volodya was left with nothing of his father’s library, nothing of the Old Bolshevik’s letters, manuscripts, notebooks, the intimate record of his lifetime of work for the party.

Masha had requested and was granted leave to accompany Volodya into exile.

On September 8 they set out on a 5,000-mile journey to a village in Siberia that lay about 150 miles south of the city of Chita and some 200 miles from the region of China where Solomon Slepak, sixty years before, had fought as commander of a Bolshevik partisan division during the Civil War.

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.