Volodya thought that he had been assigned originally to Tsokto-Khangil, but months later he discovered that by law, he could have chosen to stay in Aginskoye, a fairly large town with a sizable Russian population. He had not been informed that exile meant only that he could not vote or leave the district and had to appear once a week to register in the local militia station. Probably the KGB had told the militia of Aginskoye that they didn’t want him living among so many Russians and to send him to the village.
It was early afternoon and turning cool when they arrived in Tsokto-Khangil. The entire village was actually a kolkhoz, a collective farm. The deputy chief of police brought Volodya to the one cafeteria in the village and treated him to a full meal. Then he took him to the office of the head bookkeeper of the kolkhoz, who was expecting him.
Volodya had no clothes, no money. The bookkeeper led him to the only hotel in the village; the dirt road that ran parallel to the village went on to Mongolia, and truckers used the cafeteria and the hotel for food and rest stops. The one-story hotel had four rooms. Slanting floors. A sink in the corridor. The water closet, with no running water, outdoors. He was given a small room with a bed. The bookkeeper advanced him one ruble against his future earnings and told him to report the following morning to the kolkhoz office.
The chronicles record Volodya’s initial response to his village of exile, to its dirt roads, enormous sky, the rush and hiss of wind across the endless steppes. He felt, in his words, “bewitched by the purity of the air and the songs of the birds.” The sensation did not last long.
He had traveled about five thousand miles, during which he had been entirely cut off from the world beyond etap. He asked if he could send a cable to his wife from the post office. He had no money for the cable and borrowed ten rubles against his future earnings. In Moscow neither the Interior Ministry nor the KGB had informed Masha of Volodya’s final destination. Hearing nothing from him for so many weeks, she had begun to fear he might be dead. He cabled that he was in the village of Tsokto-Khangil, Aginskoye District, Chitinskaya Province, and asked that she send him some money. Shortly afterward she called and told him about her trial and sentence.
Later that day, with the money he had borrowed, he bought a pair of heavy work boots, strips of white cotton cloth to use as socks, two sets of underwear, a flannel shirt, cotton pants, and a cotton-padded jacket. He was now dressed warmly enough to withstand moderately cold weather.
He reported to the kolkhoz chairman, a Mongolian who happened also to be a deputy to the Supreme Soviet. He was not pleased to have an enemy of the people on his kolkhoz and lectured Volodya sternly about his behavior as an exile: He expected him to work hard and not cause trouble. He assigned Volodya to a job in the granary. Months later Volodya discovered that according to law, he could have chosen his job and changed it at will. But no one had informed him of his rights as an exile, and there were no lawbooks available in prison.
The next day two hundred rubles arrived from Masha. Two days later she phoned again to tell him that his father had died.
All her life, as far back as she could remember, Masha had a sense of herself as an amulet; others used her for their own good luck. Often her mother had called Masha “my amulet,” “my good-luck charm,” and in 1976 Bertha purchased a red, blue, and yellow enamel amulet in a shop in Jerusalem, had the back of its metal case engraved with the Hebrew words le-masha me-ima (“To Masha from Mother”), and asked an American tourist to deliver it to Masha in Moscow. Near and distant friends would beg Masha to accompany them to the OVIR office when they went to submit their applications for exit visas. More often than not their visas were granted, and they were certain it was because of Masha’s presence. She accepted as her destiny the uncanny probability that she was alive to serve as the good fortune of others, but not her own.
In September 1978, some days after the funeral of Solomon Slepak, she and Volodya-aided by impatient KGB agents who had grown weary of watching them wait in endless lines in the crowded Moscow airport-managed to buy tickets for one of the usually sold-out direct flights to Chita. They arrived before sunrise and took a cab to the bus station, which was closed.
It had been hot in Moscow when they left, but it was quite cold in Chita. Buryats stood around in silence. The bus arrived: old, rickety, twenty-five seats. Chita lay in an enormous valley surrounded by forest-covered mountains. A river, the Chitinka, ran through the city. Masha saw small houses, fences. On the seat beside her, Volodya slept.
The bus, swaying and rattling, left the city and began to climb. Tall evergreens lined the narrow asphalt road. Huge, polished boulders lay among the trees. They kept climbing, the road now chiseled out of the side of a cliff. A broad valley below and mountains like a theater backdrop stretching to the horizon. The sun rose, bathing one side of the valley in a pale light and leaving the other in blue-green shadows. A river snaked through the valley, houses and fields along its banks. Masha thought it all a beautiful sight and remembered that Chekhov, in his account of his travels to the island of Sakhalin, had described the region as “Russia’s Switzerland.”
Gradually the road turned narrow, rocky, dangerous. It dropped to a dusty valley. They rode through a silent village of wooden houses covered with gray dust and stopped briefly at a coffeehouse in a valley burned by the sun. Along the horizon lay forested hills. After four hours of travel they reached the Trans-Siberian Railroad crossing just as a train was passing. A sign on the side of each car: MOSCOW-PEKING. The railroad Volodya and his family had once taken on their way to China and back. No villages on these steppes, no people. Short, thin, stunted trees, with few branches. Six hours on the road and now, along the horizon, houses on the hills and the town of Aginskoye. A bus station at the edge of the town, a well-lighted waiting room.
Masha and Volodya recovered their belongings and stood on the ticket line for the bus to Tsokto-Khangil. The bus was due in from the south in two hours. In that region Aginskoye was the last town with a large presence of Russians. Southward extended the land of the Buryats-Asian people of the steppes, nomads, Buddhists.
The bus to Tsokto-Khangil was older than the one from Chita. The road, unpaved and rutted; the terrain, an infinite desolation. The doors on the bus couldn’t be closed entirely; dust powdered the driver and passengers. The Buryats in the bus gazed curiously at Masha and Volodya; they did not often see Russians traveling this far south. Trembling like an old horse, the bus made its way up and down hills, and on what seemed the highest hill it stopped, and the Buryats climbed out to pray. They offered money as bribes to evil spirits and candies and cookies to good spirits. Twenty minutes of prayers and offerings. They climbed back on the bus, and now along the road ran a dry riverbed in which grew scrawny birch trees with crooked trunks the thickness of an arm and bent to the ground as if permanently overwhelmed, defeated.
The village of Tsokto-Khangil sat in the middle of a valley that was about thirty miles long and seven miles wide. Low hills fenced in the valley; the sun rose, burned its way across the valley, and set. About three thousand men, women, and children lived in the one-story wooden houses of the village. There were nearly two hundred houses, each with a backyard in which nothing grew.
In the village square stood the administrative buildings of the kolkhoz: the kolkhoz office, on the first floor of which was the village telephone center; the House of Culture, with a concert hall; the post office, with a telegraph, an international telephone line, and a bookshop. Nearby were a medical aid station staffed with a Russian nurse; a maternity ward; a veterinary aid station; a machine and tractor station; the hotel where Masha and Volodya first stayed; a department store; a restaurant; a child care center; a boarding school for the children of Buryat shepherds; a yard for agricultural machinery; another food shop; a greenhouse; a bathhouse; sheds for cows. The entire village was a collective farm that raised pigs and cows and was domesticating the Buryats, attempting to get them to sever their ties to the seminomadic traditions of their ancestors, who had lived off sheep, and to settle into the life of sedentary shepherds bound to a Soviet kolkhoz.