The Buryats had never before lived with an exile in their midst, indeed had been informed by the authorities that these Russians were enemies of the people and were to be shunned. But Masha invited the Buryats who lived in their building to join them for tea and cookies, and finally, after repeated invitations, some came and sat in silence, looking around the apartment, sipping the tea, nibbling on the cookies. Volodya had earlier explained to her that Buryats were of Mongolian stock and were called Buryats on this side of the border and Mongols on the Mongolian side. Mongolia, Masha of course knew, was a puppet client state of the Soviet Union. The Buryats invited by Masha into the Slepak apartment later invited the Slepaks into their apartments. Masha and Volodya noticed they had covered their windows with curtains, and their floors with cartons and plastic, and their doors with felt.
Volodya built a lamp for the kitchen and a wall desk and a desk lamp for himself. On the wall over the desk he hung photographs of Andrei Sakharov, Natan Shcharansky, Ida Nudel, Iosif Begun, and Yuri Orlov. Near their bed were photographs of Sanya and Leonid.
To his delight, Volodya discovered that the bookstore in Tsokto-Khangil-stocked with the usual pens, pencils, maps, notebooks, periodicals, children’s books, and adult books-also had on its shelves volumes difficult to obtain even in Moscow. Masha began to buy children’s books, intending to send them to her grandchildren abroad so they could read and not forget the Russian language. The family chronicles offer Volodya’s attempt to clarify the odd presence there of those books: “It was one of the paradoxes of the socialist system that when a book was published, copies would be distributed to bookstores in the Soviet Union, not on the basis of demand but according to population.”
They had brought with them from Moscow a small shortwave radio. But in Tsokto-Khangil the Voice of America was being successfully jammed. They were able to buy a small television set, but the satellite signal gave them only three or four hours a day of watching. The isolation they felt was nearly overwhelming.
Their difficulties with the people of the village did not involve language-all spoke Russian-but culture: They were sophisticated urbanites in the midst of a world of erstwhile seminomads, core Muscovites among border Buryats, Jews who dreamed of distant Israel living with Asians whose homeland was nearby Mongolia. Even had the KGB not insisted that they be separated from any sort of communal life in their place of exile, they would still have felt thrice imprisoned: exile, Jew, Russian. In a prison state called the Soviet Union.
Slowly they came to know some of the villagers. A chance encounter here, an affable greeting there. Word spread: The Moscow couple didn’t seem so menacing, indeed were friendly, helpful; the man an engineer, the woman a doctor. Why are you here? We are Jews and we want to go to Israel, and they won’t let us. No one in the village had ever seen a Jew, though many knew of Israel. Twice over the years they were asked to Buryat weddings. Party bosses came from Aginskoye and scolded the Buryats for hosting enemies of the people. The Buryats listened quietly with impassive faces. One day one of the Buryat men said to Masha and Volodya, “Why do you want to go to Israel? It’s so far away. You’re good people. Stay here with us. We’ll give you a dozen sheep, two dozen, if you want.” Another said later in a confiding tone to Volodya, “Listen, your wife is too old. If you want, we’ll find you two young ones.”
The dirt roads and lifeless steppes froze to the hardness of iron as the temperature dropped to forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. At night the cows and pigs fell silent and the air was still save for the occasional barking of dogs in different corners of the village. The sky cloudless, myriad stars would shine coldly and clearly. During the day Masha and Volodya took frequent walks through the village and along the steppes. The winds were harsh. On the steppes a herd of horses roamed freely, and sheep grazed on the winter grass.
One day every family in the apartment building abruptly left to join their relatives in the wooden houses throughout the village. A fierce storm was coming, they said. Masha and Volodya had no place to go. The village became very quiet. A haze covered the sun. The wind began to rise, a sound like someone blowing through a pipe, high-pitched, then howling. The sun, hidden by the haze, grew darker. Wind blowing and whistling and howling shrilly outside. Snow mixed with sand striking the windows and the balcony door. The door and the metal roof of the apartment house rattling. Very dark outside and the storm growing more fierce and suddenly no electricity and cold in the apartment. They put on heavy clothes. Colder and colder. Volodya lit the kerosene lamp, a small, shuddering flame. They wrapped blankets around themselves, but it was impossible to fall asleep; something kept clanging and banging outside.
The storm lasted fifteen hours. When day came, they saw a vast landscape of snow, and electric poles down in the snow amid a tangle of wires, and the barely visible roofs of nearby houses, and on the steppes little mounds where sheep had died. It took bulldozers five days to clear the road from Aginskoye to the village, which remained all that time without water, telephone, mail. Masha and Volodya lived off the food and water they had stored in the apartment.
That February, Leonid, still avoiding conscription and living on the run, decided to fly from Moscow to Siberia to see his parents. By flying, he risked discovery, but his parents desperately needed certain foods and medicines and the heavy parkas brought to Moscow as gifts by visitors from Canada.
Direct flights from Moscow to Chita were booked far in advance, mostly by army officers and government officials; Chita was a large military center. Leonid used a plastic shopping bag full of pens, chewing gum, and women’s stockings to persuade one of the high-level Moscow airport personnel to get him a ticket at least as far as Irkutsk. From there he got on a local flight to Chita, an old commuter plane with about twenty passengers. One of its windows, warped and not fully closed, let in arctic air. A man tried to shove a rag into the crack, with no success. The propeller-driven aircraft lurched and bounced in the gusting Siberian winds. Someone had taken a goat on board; there were other animals as well. People vomited. Leonid had with him a large backpack and two enormous bags of food, medicines, and other necessities. In Chita he was told that the bus to Aginskoye had departed and the next bus was in the morning. He spent the night on the floor of the bus station and left the following day. Six hours on that winding road in an old bus with almost no shock absorbers. It was nearing dark in Aginskoye when he arrived. None of the cabdrivers wanted to take him to Tsokto-Khangil. He offered money to some men who were standing around. They didn’t want money. They had plenty of money; there was nothing to buy with it. He held up two packs of Marlboro cigarettes, and a fight nearly erupted over who would take him. On the road to the village in the pitch-dark night, the driver asked where exactly he was going, and Leonid told him, and the driver said, “Ah, that couple from Moscow. The word is they’re nice people.” He knew precisely where Masha and Volodya lived and left Leonid off at their door.
His parents had not seen him in months, did not know he was coming, and greeted him with excitement and disbelief. He was able to stay only briefly and flew back to Moscow with his mother.
In order for Masha to retain her Moscow residence permit-Volodya’s lapsed during his exile-and the registration for the apartment, it was necessary that she return regularly, be seen in the apartment building by neighbors, and keep her air tickets as proof that she had traveled back to the city.