Part One – There
(Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER SEVENTY EIGHT – THE LAST YEAR AT HOME: LIFE BEFORE LEAVING
The most surprising thing was the change in the rules of emigration. Previously, people moved out, literally broke out, anywhere (to Vienna, Rome) and then headed wherever they wanted, if they could. I really didn’t like the stories about the annual queues to leave Rome: people did not work, were engaged in trade and speculation, and I would like to avoid all this. And as if to meet my desires, a direct entry to close relatives in America opened up. This just concerned my case, because Dad already lived in New York.
First of all, the whole family began to study English. Ana went to see our neighbor, an English teacher, uncle Khodash’s sister, remember, the one who caused the Khodashs, and most importantly, Asya, to cool off towards me. Asya’s daughter also went to English classes with her great-aunt, and she and Ana became friends. Asya came to us for tea, discussed the problems of emigration with Lilya, while the children were studying the language, in a word, our friendship was renewed.
Lilya and I went to study English with a talented young teacher who brought a new type of textbooks from the States and taught English successfully. These lessons were especially important for Lilya, since she had never learned English in her life, but knew a little French.
I asked the teacher where he learned English so well.
“It’s just a memory,” he said, “I read only one book in English, but I remembered every word and every speech turn in it.”
Perhaps this was the case, but later I decided to practice myself by studying English with my students. There were a lot of people around, the time had come. And I worked through the first volume or two of a textbook from America with the beginners, the same one that I studied two or three months ago.
Another field of activity was documents. Dad sent a request, and we submitted an application to move to the United States to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as to the US Embassy. This became known in the city, and dozens of people reached out to me for information – how to fill out forms, how to get an application from America and even… how to find close relatives there?
I could not refuse to help people, and often, all day long, I sat at the head of the table, at which a dozen people questioned me and even took notes on my answers. Sometimes funny things happened. Somebody asked,
“How should I fill out the application form for the US Embassy, in block letters or in capital letters?”
I already knew from experience that you cannot answer: “It’s your business, as you please!” It is forbidden. People don’t believe you, they think that you don’t want to disclose information that is important for applying documents, and they simply pester you with new more detailed questions. It was much easier to say one thing, specific, for example,
“In block letters!”
Usually this calmed the “people” down, and the process moved on. But not always.
“Please tell me,” said a particularly insightful visitor, “Should the first letters in sentences be highlighted in a larger size or not?”
In addition to current affairs – classes with penguins, English classes and documents, we went out of town on weekends to fairs, where people bought and sold various things, mainly clothes. But even new suitcases had to be obtained somewhere, not in stores, where they were not available!
Unexpectedly, Sasha arrived in Tbilisi. He had already lived in America for ten years, achieved great success, opened his own company and introduced advanced methods for calculating electronic circuits. And since computers and the electronics industry were much more developed there than in the USSR, Sasha’s company flourished. And at home, the mood of perestroika flourished, that is, either departure or making business, and Sasha was besieged day and night by visitors with “business proposals.”
“Look,” he showed me his room in the Intourist hotel.
On the floor were bottles of cognac of all brands from Georgia and Armenia. Three hundred pieces. It was difficult to walk across the room.
“Everyone brings me a souvenir,” said Sasha, “and offers to take out and sell a wagon of the coal, or two wagons of the manganese. I wouldn’t mind hearing a business proposal, but that’s the only way how they understood business here.”
“One of my friends, Maia’s classmate, asked to meet with you. He wanted to know what he needed to learn to successfully emigrate as a technical person.”
“Great question! I don’t have time for a meeting, but I promise to write a preparation plan, remind me it on the plane.”
We celebrated Sasha’s visit with a colossal banquet, and I flew to Moscow to see him off. He, as promised, made a plan for my friend. And the friend carried it out, and recalled with gratitude all the years of his successful work on Wall Street.
In Moscow, I again attended a banquet given by Sasha to his mathematician friends. Some then emigrated and worked in his company in the USA, while others in a branch in Russia. In those years, the currency ratio made it possible to throw a feast for money that would be ridiculous in America, and the “foreign look” captivated both men and women. In American clothes, “Moscow things” simply did not give me a passway.
I met with my colleagues from the Central Hospital. When they found out that I had “soaped up” in the USA, they immediately invited me to a drinking party in the steam room, where they hung out with familiar authorities: the director of the grocery store, the head of the meat distributor and with other important persons of Soviet reality. The very fact of submitting documents made me a local celebrity, but a couple of years passed, and almost all the people from both the banquet in Tbilisi and the booze in the Moscow steam room left the Soviet Union, and it itself ceased to exist.
An interesting incident happened to me in Moscow. I tried to sell my favorite book by A. Kruchenykh “500 Witty Remarks and Puns by Pushkin” from 1924. It seemed to me that she had nothing to do in the USA, and let her please the lover of Russian literature. But in second-hand bookstores they gave negligible sums for it. Unexpectedly, a friend offered five hundred rubles. I immediately exchanged the book for money, but in the evening my friend called in confusion,
“Nick, I’m terribly sorry, the deal must be canceled if you still have the money, otherwise I’m in terrible trouble.”
I took pity on him and exchanged the book back for 500 rubles. Out of joy, he told me the story of the book and his unsuccessful operation. Kruchenykh was not only a poet and writer, but also an artist. Having published his book in a circulation of two thousand copies, he decorated the title page with a color engraving, which he authorized, that is, he applied paint differently to each reprint and signed it. The specialist offered my friend two thousand rubles for the book, since the main value was not Pushkin’s puns, but the Kruchenykh’s engraving. But my friend didn’t know that the title page had long been lost, so he bought the book as is from me for five hundred rubles and, pleased, took it to resell. Alas, the buyer doused him with a tub of ice water. The deal collapsed, and the unlucky second-hand bookseller rushed to call me. But I, like Leo Tolstoy from the literary anecdotes of Daniil Kharms, was not a monster – I handed over the book and thought: “Pass by, poor fellow.”
And then I decided, I’ll take it with me, what am I afraid of? I’ll put the book in the inner pocket of my jacket and take it abroad, since there is no demand for it among bibliophiles. So I did. And I’m always glad that I didn’t sell my little printed friend.
Gradually, the moving plans became a reality. We flew to Moscow and had an interview at the US Embassy. I held myself there independently.
“Are your neighbors persecuting you based on your ethnicity?” they asked me at the interview in the US Embassy.
“No,” I said, “Just like I don’t touch them.”
“What awaits you if you don’t leave your city?”
“Anything,” I said honestly, “From prosperity to death under the blows of Special Forces sapper shovel blades.
We received our status and could now actually pack our bags, buy tickets and go to the USA.
We went to Leningrad and Sukhumi and said goodbye to our favorite vacation spots. Desolation and stagnation reigned all around, despite the “perestroika”. Sukhumi looked especially sad…
Life was also not candy in my hometown. There were thefts and robberies. I always remembered Uncle Abel’s story about how, fifty years ago, on a dark stormy night, the bell suddenly rang at the gate of their old Baku house, in the basement of which the janitor and drunk Vanya had lived since the revolution. Vanya jumped out into the yard and was stunned – behind the bars of the gate, in a karakul burka (coat) and karakul hat, stood the former owner of the house, a noble and rich man who had fled to Iran.
“What’s up? Is the house intact?” asked the former owner, entering the janitor’s closet.
“Alright, unharmed! As always, I look after it.”
“Do you mind if I take something of mine?”
Vanya looked around his meager surroundings; there was nothing to take.
“Take whatever you want, master. It’s all yours here!”
The owner stood on a stool, unscrewed the bronze cone on the chandelier’s shade and turned it over into the hat he had placed. The precious stones rang and sparkled.
“Goodbye Vanya, this is for your service,” the bei handed the crumpled three-ruble note to the janitor and disappeared into the darkness of the night.
And since then Vanya has gone crazy, started breaking walls and looking for treasures, until he was taken to a psychiatric hospital for treatment.
But could this be considered a robbery? But they really operated in our city.
They robbed the Volkovs and found a secret safe under a painting by Aivazovsky, where wonderful emeralds were kept – Beba’s inheritance. My aunt Ella was robbed. Her family had no plans to leave. They were well off, but bandits came to them, rolled the child into a carpet, stood him upside down and this way they found out the hiding place where the valuables were kept.
This streak also affected us. Lilya’s grandmother’s bracelet made of colored gold has disappeared. She didn’t see it for a long time, then she confessed to me, and I even asked if she had left it in our friends’ bathroom at New Year’s Eve, when she was washing her hands there. I asked the friend if there were any finds in the bathroom of his communal apartment.
“No,” he said, “They weren’t. But to be honest, those who are looking for a New Year’s loss in the spring do not need it.”
Later, Lilya remembered how our neighbor Ira, Shahe’s wife, came to visit her and asked Lilya for cold water from the kitchen. The bracelet was in the sideboard…
Of course, this is not the proof, although sending for water and stealing something is a well-known thieves’ trick. If this is so, then the bracelet did not bring them happiness. The eldest daughter was severely electrocuted, then the youngest daughter was choked fumes to death. Then Shahe stabbed Ira with a knife, and died in prison from tuberculosis bleeding. Sad stories of the old city…
Both dads helped us with our departure as best they could. My dad wrote a letter to his former partner from the RYBOKHOT factory, the husband of my mother’s cousin Lina. “Thanks to the fact that I paid off the collective debt of all those convicted, you are now free to emigrate. So maybe you can throw some money to my son?”
Well, the fact that nobody gave me money is clear. But the fact that my aunt was offended by my mother and stopped talking to her for this is another thorn in my mother’s heart.
My father-in-law and mother-in-law also helped as best they could. We received as a gift a silver German dish and a broken cigarette case made of colored gold. In return, I promised to sell a bar of gold for my father-in-law. It was his father’s inheritance, which was to be divided between my father-in-law and his cousins, who were raised in his family as his siblings.
Every item has a story. The simplest one happened with a silver dish. It was acquired by the secretary of the district party committee or her son-in-law, a business man. Well, it was enough for my wife to buy a leather jacket. The situation with the cigarette case is worse: Lilya’s cousin’s husband took it in for repairs. He said he knew an amazing master. Well, the master really amazed us. Instead of soldering the broken parts, he dipped the cigarette case in some kind of acid, causing the product to fall apart. But the master did not know how to solder colored gold. I had to sell the gold as scrap. Well, I had enough for a leather jacket.
The most interesting story is the sale of a gold bar. How to determine how much gold is in a bar smelted from ore at the mines? But fortunately for me, Denis worked in the X-ray structural analysis laboratory. He did an analysis, and using the alloy formula, just the size for a torah scroll, I calculated the percentage of gold in the alloy. The rest turned out to be a matter of technique. I firmly warned that there would be no bargaining, everything is absolutely certain. The jewelers immediately believed my formulas and calculations. I don’t know what their chemistry showed, but they paid for the gold bar without hesitation. Well, it came enough for “three or four leather jackets”…
A funny story happened at the house management office. For international passports, you had to take a document from the house management stating that you were living at such and such an address before leaving, and then you would automatically be discharged and would not be able to apply for an apartment. I took a bottle of cognac for a gift and went to the manager. In his youth, he studied at the University Department of Philosophy, left the third year, did not finish his studies, but managed to get a position in the profitable “business”. But I never fed him, I used connections in the authorities. The house manager read my documents and asked melancholy,
“How many years did it take you to expand and build the apartment? And you never asked me for help. Have you come now? I won’t sign any certificates for you.”
“In vain,” I said, “The apartment manager doesn’t issue the apartment, but he does the certificates. If you don’t, I’ll find someone who sign it for me. But the certificates are precisely the business of the building manager, and not the district and city committees, that’s why I want to give you cognac, not them. Let’s part on friendly terms.”
He thought, took the cognac and signed everything I needed, and then sighed and asked,
“Why are you leaving? Do you want to get rich?”
“Of course,” I was delighted with the ready for me answer.
Then the house manager pondered and issued a maxim,
“In order to get rich, you don’t need to leave, but… you need to get rich!”
“Still, the university past cannot be erased from either me or him!” I thought, and I’ve been recollecting the words of the house manager to this day.
Before leaving, our neighbor, Aunt Eva, the owner of Besik the cat and the old antique buffet with Atlases, whom I used to go to call on the phone, fell and, as happens with many elderly people, broke her hip. She flatly refused to go to the hospital. For treatment at home, it was necessary to establish bone traction – this was very familiar to me. One problem is sterile instruments. I got Kirschner’s pins, needles, syringes and instruments from the Institute of Traumatology, but the drill was an ordinary, technical one. The pins were boiled in a huge saucepan, and I decided to test the drill. I inserted the pin and, accompanied by the sadistic screech of the drill, drove it into the wooden floor. Besik meowed hysterically.
“Like this, into the Aunt Eva?” said the nephew and lost his consciousness.
After which Aunt Eva agreed to be hospitalized, and pins were driven into her leg in the absence of witnesses – people and cats.
I must say that she recovered, the fracture healed, but that was the last time I saw her…
In September we finally went to the sea. To a boarding house in Gagra. A friend’s mother helped us to find vouchers for the rest. She was very grateful to us for sending luggage for her son. He recently left with his wife for America and stayed there. And we were traveling officially and had the right to send luggage in boxes, but we were not going to send anything. In general, luggage had no meaning, except in the cases of antiques that I had seen. But people were worried about where they would get their essentials, and they sent everything.
So we went to Gagra. The boarding house was located on the mountain, and unfortunately for us the lift did not work. This was connected with the republican tragedy. In the summer in Tbilisi, the leading cable of the cable car to Mount St. David broke, and both cabins rushed down the cable to the station on Main Avenue. All passengers in the cabins fell to their deaths against the wall of the building. Of those who jumped from a height of almost twenty meters, two survived, landing on the sloping city roofs…
Because of this tragedy, all cable cars in the republic were temporarily closed. We had to climb up and down every day, but we finally had a good rest. Ana, despite her asthma, too. She had already used steroid inhalers, improved significantly, and by breathing, she discovered a world of delicious food and began to gain weight.
We met the CFI (Club of the Funny and Inventive) team of the city of Odessa, performing concerts on the coast. I had good friends there among the team and we spent a couple of fun days together.
We met Lilya’s uncle and his wife, vacationing in a sanatorium of the still powerful KGB. We went to a jewelry fair, where Lilya sold a bunch of her trinkets.
“Great, great!” said the buyer, “But I don’t prefer amber!”
The Russian language was still revealing its facets to me, but there was very little time left for this.
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