The Yermakov Transfer. Derek Lambert
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days, only anti-Zionism. Jews are getting places at universities if they toe the line like everyone else.”
“Perhaps,” Gopnik said thoughtfully, “you’re not a Jew at all. If you were you’d understand. The persecutions of the past, the attitudes of the present – they all count. But they’re not the end-all of it. I want to go to Israel because it is my land.” He paused. “Because it is written.”
Pavlov stood up. “Then you shall go.” He began to walk towards the car scuffing the leaves with his bright toe-caps. Unconsciously, he was taking long strides, hands dug in the pockets of his coat.
Gopnik hurried beside him, scarf trailing. “What do you mean?” His voice was agitated. “I don’t want any trouble. None of us want trouble.”
Pavlov walked quicker as if deliberately trying to distress Gopnik. He spoke angrily. “You don’t want trouble? What the hell do you expect to achieve without trouble? The Jews didn’t want trouble in Germany.…”
Gopnik panted along beside him. “You don’t understand. If we cause trouble we’re lost. The pogroms would start again. Back to the Black Years. The way things are we’re winning. More and more Jews are being allowed to leave. Soon, perhaps, we’ll all go.”
“All three million?”
“They don’t all want to go. But the policy’s changing. We’re winning.…”
“Grovelling,” Pavlov snapped. “Forced to crawl for a character reference from your employer, permission from your parents – or even your divorced wife, suddenly given fourteen days to get out which is never long enough, body-searched before you leave, paying the Government thousands of roubles blackmail money. Is that victory?”
“It’s suffering,” Gopnik said. “It’s victory.”
They passed some boys playing football, a couple of lovers arm in arm. A jet chalked a white line across the blue sky above the soaring Cosmonauts Obelisk. There didn’t seem to be much oppression around this glittering day.
They reached the car. A militiaman in his blue winter overcoat was standing beside it. He pointed at the bodywork. “One rouble fine, please,” he said. “A very dirty car.”
Pavlov let out the clutch savagely and headed back towards the Kremlin. “I’ll get you out,” he said. “Don’t worry – I’ll get you to Israel.”
Gopnik said: “Please leave me alone. Let me find my own destiny.”
“By crawling?”
“Don’t you think we’ve been through enough without hot-heads destroying everything we’ve worked for?” He wound down the window to let in the cold air, breathing deeply as if he felt faint. “Who are you anyway? What do you think you can do?”
“I’m a man,” Pavlov said, “who thinks there is more to be done than writing letters to the Prime Minister of England, the President of the United States and Mrs. Golda Meir.”
“What can you do?”
The Volga swerved violently to avoid a taxi with a drunken driver.
“I can show the world,” Pavlov said, “that we have balls.”
* * *
They met mostly in the open air, on the Lenin Hills, or in the birch forests to the west of the city where Muscovites went swimming from the river-beaches in the summer and cross-country ski-ing in the long winter.
Sometimes they met in a small apartment near the junction of Sadovaya Samotetchnaya and Petrovka. While they talked about Moscow Dynamo football team, mistresses and money they systematically searched the room for microphones. De-lousing it, they called the process. So far no bugs had been found.
They only met three at a time to avoid arousing suspicion. On this evening there was Pavlov, Yury Mitin, poet and State prize winner, and Ivan Shiller, a journalist on Pravda specialising in Jewish affairs. Each had cultivated an anti-Zionist front; none had Jew on his passport.
Each was fierce in his belief, none more so than Shiller, his anger fomented by the daily betrayals he had to perpetrate in his newspaper. Yesterday he had finished rounding up fifty prominent Jews and ordering them to sign a letter condemning Israeli aggression in the Middle East.
The letter also referred to emigration. “We were born and bred in the Soviet Union. It is here that our ancestors of many centuries lived and died. There is no reason why we should go to Israel. And, anyway, how is it possible to ‘return’ to a place where one has never been?”
“And do you know” – Shiller spoke with bitter contempt – “that some of them were quite happy to sign?”
Shiller was second-in-command of the Zealots who took their name from the 960 Jewish martyrs who killed themselves rather than surrender the citadel of Masada to the Romans. Death before dishonour. The Masada Complex symbolised the spirit of Israel: it symbolised the spirit of Russia’s small band of Zealots.
To avoid detection they used code-names each having a trade beginning with the letter P in the English language. Pavlov was the Professional, Mitin the Poet, Shiller the Penman.
Shiller was a gaunt man with a muddy complexion, hollow cheeks and bad teeth. His repressions were even stronger than Pavlov’s because, unlike Pavlov, he was a practising Jew. His greatest temptations came at such times as the New Year and the Atonement or the days when Yizkor, the prayer for the dead, was offered. Then he wanted to visit the Synagogue; but if he did he would alert the police. Even to be near the synagogue on Arkhipova on the Sabbath was dangerous because it was under K.G.B. surveillance. So Shiller prayed in private, ate his matzos in secret, recited the Passover prayer “Next year in Jerusalem”, and waited.
In one way Shiller was weaker than Pavlov: he was too religious to be a ruthless killer: Pavlov had no such inhibitions. But if there was ever to be any rift, any struggle for power, it would be between these two men.
The apartment belonged to Mitin the poet. He made coffee while, on a rickety table covered with linoleum, under the benign gaze of Lenin framed on the wall, the other two men played chess. A get-together of old friends should the 1 a.m. knock on the door be heard.
Shiller said bitterly: “Last week I helped to arrange the publication of a statement from our religious leaders. “Like citizens of other nationalities, Jews enjoy all the rights guaranteed by the Constitution, including the right to profess their own religion.”
He knocked aside one of Pavlov’s pawns with his bishop. “I got six so-called Rabbis’ signatures on that statement.”
“Shit on the Rabbi,” said the poet. He was a slim young man with a pale face, a monkish fringe of hair and a foul mouth. Whereas Shiller would have liked to smuggle Bibles into Russia, Mikin would have liked to smuggle Soviet literature out. His frustration found a small outlet in profanity, the brutalising of his love-affair with words.
Pavlov said: “We mustn’t get impatient. We’re all making sacrifices. We are getting nearer our goal every day.” He moved one of his own black bishops and called: “Check.”
“What goal?” Shiller asked. He frowned at the wooden board and pieces made in a labour camp. “Since when have we had a goal?”
“Piss on you,” exclaimed the poet. “We’ve had an ideal for years, a goal for months.”
“Ah,” Shiller muttered, “that goal. I apologise. I thought for a moment Pavlov meant we had a way of achieving it.”
Shiller moved his knight and Pavlov said: “You’re in check. Perhaps you misheard that as well.”
Shiller took back the knight without apologising. “How are we getting nearer our goal?”
Pavlov took a sheet of paper from his pocket. It had eleven names on it. Pavlov read out the first name, adding the data from memory.
“Skolsky.”