He took a train to Vilna, first making certain to shake off any possible KGB tail, something he had been doing since the age of thirteen. He did not have time to purchase a train ticket. On the train he paid the conductor, who pocketed the money and let Leonid sleep in his compartment.
In the early spring of 1978 he returned to Moscow from Vilna with a high fever and in near-delirium. Clearly in need of a physician, he went directly to the apartment on Gorky Street, where his mother tended to him. As soon as he was well, he left.
That was a tense period. The KGB was closing down the entire Helsinki Accords Monitoring Group. Orlov had been arrested. Shcharansky was in prison. Leonid’s father, spearheading a worldwide campaign to free Shcharansky, was a prime KGB target. Leonid went to friends in Armenia. Later that spring he was back in Moscow, staying in the apartment of close friends. His girlfriend, Olga, whom he loved, showed up to tell him that his parents had been arrested for staging a demonstration from his and Sanya’s balcony. Leonid, nineteen years old, suddenly aware that he was alone and might have no one to care for him were he to be arrested and exiled, asked Olga to marry him. She agreed. At considerable personal peril, he visited his mother in the hospital where she was undergoing tests and treatment for her ulcer. To apply for the marriage license, he needed his internal passport, which she was keeping for him. Masha was appalled when she saw him; the hospital was full of KGB informers. She gave him the passport, and he fled.
He and Olga applied for their marriage license in her grandmother’s little town outside Moscow, and were married. When his father was sentenced to exile, Leonid reasoned that the danger to his own person had lessened considerably. The international furor over his father’s sentence was enormous; the KGB would not want to add to it by arresting the son as well. Besides, he, Leonid, was really not much of a dissident; until turning eighteen, he had never participated in petitions or demonstrations because he was a minor, and since eighteen he had been on the run. It made no sense for the KGB to arrest him now.
He returned to the apartment with Olga. From there he went to see his parents in February 1979, and he flew back with his mother to await the birth of his child, which occurred on April 2. On April 8 Leonid went to the hospital to bring home his wife and infant son. Later, on the way into the apartment with his new family, he checked the mailbox and saw the postcard from OVIR: He was to appear at the OVIR office on April 16 to pick up his exit visa.
When you reported to receive your exit visa, you yielded up your internal passport to the authorities. But Leonid needed his internal passport to get on a flight to Chita; he wanted to see his father one final time before he departed. The April 16 deadline for the exit visa was too soon.
Masha accompanied him to OVIR the next day; he remembers she wore the amulet purchased by her mother in Jerusalem. He informed the official that he had come for his exit visa. But, he added, there had been a change in his status since the time of his original application: He had a wife now, and an infant son. And his father was in exile. He would have to write a new application.
The official gave him the necessary papers to fill out and said his visa would be extended only until May 12.
The following day Masha was informed that Volodya had been taken seriously ill. She left immediately for Chita. It seemed that after one of his twenty-four-hour shifts at the furnace, Volodya, drenched with sweat, had walked out into a freezing April morning and was soon in the hospital in Aginskoye with double pneumonia.
By the end of April, with Masha present, his condition had improved, and he returned to the village. When Leonid arrived in Tsokto-Khangil in the last week of April, his father looked pale and was breathing with difficulty. He spent five days with his parents in their apartment, kept Volodya company during his boiler room shifts, slept nights on the floor in a fleece-lined bag, which he left behind when he departed.
He and Volodya talked at length about Israel. Leonid had warm feelings about Israel, but his second language, which he could read and speak fluently, was American English. Since the age of twelve he had been meeting five to fifteen visiting Americans every day in the Gorky Street apartment, translating their conversations with his mother. He knew American movies and pop music, had spent time with American girls, au pairs in the apartments of American diplomatic personnel. Yes, he liked Israel, but he wanted to live in the United States.
Volodya said, “You must go to Israel; otherwise you will damage the image of the movement and my image in particular. I am sure you will go on tour, campaigning in America, to raise money for the movement. Then you can choose where you want to live. Why are you choosing now? You don’t know about Israel. Maybe you’ll like it. Go to Israel, be there awhile, do the campaign, everything will settle down, and then you’ll decide where you want to live.”
Leonid listened in silence. That was their only serious conversation during those days in Tsokto-Khangil. He would normally never talk about matters somber or sentimental with his father. With his mother, yes, but with his father-much rather discuss the nail in the wall, play chess, just be in each other’s presence. Leonid and Volodya parted with the hope that they would meet each other after the exile. He and Masha boarded the morning bus to Aginskoye. Volodya stood on the side of the road, watching them leave.
That was the first of May. There followed frantic days in Moscow: document-collecting, farewell parties, packing. On the evening of May 9 the Gorky Street apartment witnessed a large, joyous crowd. Leonid’s friends, his parents’ friends: Jews, Russians, dissidents, refuseniks, journalists. The next evening was quiet, with a small and intimate family gathering.
On Friday, May 11, Masha accompanied Leonid and his wife and infant son to the Moscow airport and watched them take off for Vienna. Leonid and Olga and little Eugene stayed in the transit camp in Vienna over the weekend and on Monday, May 14, arrived in Israel. A week after being reunited with his grandmother and other relatives there, Leonid found himself in the United States, traveling with an Israeli passport given him by Nechemyah Levanon, talking about the plight of his parents, seeking political support and raising funds for the cause of Soviet Jewry. Sanya had met him on his arrival at Kennedy Airport in New York and then returned to the University of California in Santa Cruz, where he was attending veterinary school.
By the time Leonid arrived in Israel, Masha was hurrying back to Tsokto-Khangil. A week after she and Leonid had left for Moscow, Volodya had suffered a relapse of the pneumonia. In the hospital in Aginskoye the illness would not respond to penicillin, and his fever was dangerously high. Zalya, Masha’s brother, came to visit him, but could do nothing. The doctor said to Zalya, “If the penicillin can’t help him, it may be cancer.” Zalya put in an emergency call to a family friend in Moscow, Dr. Eugenia Gural, who had just received permission to leave for Israel. Instead of getting her exit visa, she bought a ticket to Chita and arrived at Volodya’s bedside in the Aginskoye hospital with a new British antibiotic. She remained for three days, administering the antibiotic to Volodya and at the same time saving the life of a senior nurse who was allergic to a different antibiotic, with which she was being treated by her colleagues. A week later Volodya was able 1:0 return to the village. In the meantime Dr. Gural had flown back to Moscow and shortly afterward left for Israel, where she now lives and practices medicine in Jerusalem.