Eight Pieces of Empire Read Online Free PDF Page B

also studying at university, and was not paying a cent to stay at Nina Nikolaevna’s (unless you consider “rent” the two tins of hard-to-find cinnamon and some other simple gifts brought from the United States). Food and other staples in 1989 Leningrad were dirt cheap by Western standards. In other words, I could probably live more economically in the USSR (including airfare) for a summer doing nothing than working and renting a flat in the States doing some summer job.
    “Perhaps we could help you?” smiled Valery. “I mean, it is very expensive to visit the USSR. Perhaps next summer, you could work with us? You could even work here, in the OVIR office?”
    I stammered something incoherent, wanting to disbelieve what was happening. Valery the KGB man, who insinuated that I was on some deep-cover mission posing as an indigent American student without the brains to register his residency on time, was now trying to recruit me as a double-agent mole, implausible as it was. Or at least he believed I was valuable enough to recruit as a KGB mole, though I could offer nothing in the way of information or contacts. I was dressed in sneakers and had no job and not much money. I was living in a rundown communal, and not out of some hippie let’s-all-be-poor wish. I had no connections, no ties to any government, real or imagined. The whole scene was too ridiculous to be true. I pinched myself, hoping that it was just the cognac, gone to my head.
    It wasn’t. I was being interviewed by a suave Soviet state security man who, after befuddling my brain, was now getting down to the real point.
    “Tell us about the exiles,” Valery gently prodded. “You know, the daughter and son-in-law of the woman you are staying with.”
    “Who?”
    “Aw, you know!” exclaimed Valery with a smile. “Viktor and Mila, your teachers in the United States. “How are they? What do they say about the Soviet Union these days?”
    I could not deny that I knew them—it was Mila who had arranged for me to stay in her mother’s communal room.
    “They recall with pleasure their days in the Soviet Union,” I blurted, sounding ridiculous even to myself. The sentence was as clumsily bookish as it was absurd. Eight years after being exiled, Viktor only mentioned Communists in tandem with expletives.
    “Really, with pleasure?” said Valery with a knowing smile, while twisting his shot glass slowly with his fingertips. “This is odd, because as you must know, their departure from here was rather … bitter.”
    BITTER? THE SELF-DESTRUCTIVE dissident Viktor had to be practically pried out of the empire because he refused to leave the same place that many other dissidents were desperate to get out of. One day in 1981, Viktor and Mila were summoned to the same OVIR office, where a lady clerk handed them a stack of forms.
    “Your poor auntie in Israel is sick. Of course, you need to go help your poor auntie in Israel,” said the clerk. “We are going to arrange exit visas for you both at once.” Viktor shook his head in the negative. “We don’t have any relatives in Israel.” He laughed at the incredulous clerk, who acted like she was speaking to a man turning down a winning lottery jackpot.
    “You’re the first ones to laugh about this,” remarked the clerk.
    “Just fill out the paperwork and get it back to us by tomorrow,” she insisted, shoving the forms at Viktor.
    Once they arrived back at the communal, Viktor realized that he didn’t even have the name of his nonexistent Israeli “auntie.” He had the gall to ring the clerk up on the telephone.
    “ Devushka [young lady], what’s the name of our Israeli auntie?” he asked.
    “Are you screwing around, fool?” came the clerk’s response.
    “Well maybe we won’t be going to Israel after all …,” answered Viktor laconically.
    “Ummm … Just bring the damn documents yourselves. We’ll take care of your aunt’s name ourselves,” came the clerk’s irritated reply.
    FOR