1.
Here are the facts, dry, bare, like skeletons of rats that long ago took shelter in the filing cabinets on Lubyanka, in Langley, and at an undisclosed location in Tel Aviv—until now hidden, unseen.
Oksana Moskvina and Viktor Moroz met across the street from the Moscow Choral Synagogue, the scene of multiple demonstrations by individuals petitioning to leave the USSR.
They met on November 28, 1975. It is known that Oksana, then twenty-seven, kissed Viktor, twenty-nine, before she knew his name, and that on January 13, 1976, following a courtship that lasted six weeks and three days and that they believed to be unbearably long, Oksana stands beside Viktor, his bride.
The bride wears plaid. The groom is in American dungarees paired with a dark-blue sweater by Dale of Norway, with a red stripe and a band of large white snowflakes stretching across the chest. A Danish journalist gave him the sweater at a press conference at Sakharov’s last winter. The dungarees are from a care package from American Jews.
Viktor is slight, shorter than Oksana by three centimeters. He looks like a man who forgets to eat. His oversized lower jaw, with a slight overbite on the right, balanced by an underbite on the left, is another distinguishing characteristic. It creates the false impression that this little man can be a source of grave physical danger.
Oksana is a woman of a difficult-to-place otherness. People notice her in a crowd of any size, seeing her and no one else—one Oksana Yakovlevna Moskvina and 183 others. It could be about the wild emanation of tightly curled hair that frames her pale, freckled face.
The dress is an interpretation of a cowboy shirt—a kovboyka in Russian—reaching three centimeters beneath the knee, a length known as midi. The fabric, a loosely woven polyester, combines brown hues. Voluminous, spongy, it begs to be rolled between the thumb and the index finger. The dress has snaps on the pockets, a bow to authentic Western shirts. Her boots are tall, shiny, deep purple, with gold zippers, Czech, like the dress. This ensemble and the fashion sense that assembled it would hold up well in Prague, but also in London, New York, Paris. In Moscow, where store shelves are bare, it stuns.
Dates matter. November 28 is the first night of the Jewish holiday of Chanukah. January 13 is the Old New Year, what New Year’s Eve used to be before the Bolsheviks switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian. When you ring in the Old New Year, you negate history.
But how would you deny that January 13, 1976, comes fifty-eight years, two months, and one week after the Great October Socialist Revolution? None of the guests—and neither the bride nor the groom—know how Jewish weddings are performed, especially in the absence of a rabbi worthy of being allowed into a decent home.
* * *
Viktor has been unable to locate his copy of The Laws of Jewish Life,* a do-it-yourself guide to Judaism. The booklet is published in Russian in Montreal, smuggled in by tourists, and distributed by activists who risk prosecution under a distasteful provision of the Russian Republic’s Criminal Code—Article 190–1, “Systematic dissemination by word of mouth of deliberate fabrications that defame the Soviet political and social system.” Religious propaganda fits under this article with room to spare.
The Laws is small enough to fit into the back pocket of the uniform of a refusenik—Levi’s, or as they are nicknamed, Levisa, with the accent on a. Does the booklet contain directives for conducting a wedding? Viktor doesn’t know. It seems increasingly likely that his copy was confiscated at a KGB search a month and a half ago.
A booklet is a poor substitute for the living memory. Fortunately, one of the guests—Albert Schwartz—has promised to bring along three old men who remember how weddings were performed in their shtetleh. A Jewish wedding—a khasene in shtetl—creates its own context, even here, even in Moscow, even today, on January 13, 1976.
The old men—alterkakers is the Yiddish word, “old shitters”—will take the ritual through the paces, mumble the right blessings in Hebrew, sing something in Yiddish when it’s over. There is a prescribed number of blessings—seven. Viktor has read that in a novel, Feuchtwanger probably.
Nothing to worry about—Albert Schwartz and the alterkakers will make it happen. Schwartz is what’s known as a пузырь—pronounced puzyr’, a “bubble”—little, round, full of air, always on the surface.
In this volatile life, one thing is certain: the man can eat! If you set out the food and tell no one, just set it out, sit down, and wait, Albert Schwartz will show up. It’s been tested.
* * *
Elrad “Erik” Rudol’fovich Barkin, an artist known for sculpting war amputees and archetypal Jungian beasts, hosts the wedding. (He and the groom have a business relationship.)
Like the majority of Muscovites, Barkin believes that the organs of state security rig telephones to serve as listening devices, obviating the need for bugs, but you can defend yourself by winding the dial halfway and inserting a pencil into one of the finger holes below the stopper—5 is a good number; it’s in the middle—and freezing it in a partially wound position.
Tonight, a graphite pencil broken in half stands upright in the dial. Any pen or pencil, any thin sticklike object, will do. Barkin uses a reddish Khudozhnik* pencil, a splendid product of the Sacco and Vanzetti Pencil Factory here in Moscow. Some double down and cover the telephone with a pillow. Others place the pillow in a cooking pot and encase the telephone in a sarcophagus of feathers and aluminum. Barkin doesn’t fear the KGB, but he doesn’t believe in making their job easier. Make them earn their ruble.
Jellied meat—kholodetz—is on the table, next to homemade horseradish, two kinds, with beets and without. A bowl of “Provençale cabbage,” which has no known relationship to Provence, but which achieves greatness by demonstrating that cranberries, plums, and a dash of oil have a legitimate place in the context of marinated cabbage, is positioned next to a larger bowl of salat Olivier, an inspired mixture of boiled potatoes and carrots, chopped hard-boiled eggs, peas from a can, morsels of ham, pickles, canned crabs, if you can get them, and Soviet mayonnaise. Vodka has never had a better friend than salat Olivier. Eggplant caviar, a delicacy that presents no threat to unborn sturgeon, is at the center of the table. Nobody can tell you why store-bought eggplant caviar tastes better than homemade. It’s one of the great and enduring achievements of the Soviet culinary enterprise. Hungarian fatback, which owes its ethnic assignment to a thin coat of paprika, is present as well. No finer zakuska than Hungarian fatback reclining upon a bed of sour rye has ever existed or can exist. Ukrainian fatback, which owes its whiteness to a coat of coarse salt, should not be neglected, and is not. Cans of sprats in oil, sardines in brine, perch in tomato sauce, herring with a beet salad and sour cream on top, also known as “herring under a fur coat,” and chopped herring, Jewish-style, represent the bounty of the sea. Also, mushrooms—maslyata, Suillus luteus, to be exact, which Latin allows us to be. Marinated, they are slippery, oysters of the forest. Drink a glass of chilled vodka, swallow a Suillus luteus, and emit a tear of joy!
Be it Solichnaya or be it Ekstra, vodka’s functions in life include triggering blasts of emotion. Beloved, it has acquired a suffix, vodochka. If you don’t love vodochka, if you are scandalized by the presence of two varieties of fatback, Hungarian and Ukrainian, and a hammed-up and crabby salat Olivier at a Jewish wedding, please address these questions in this precise order: One, how is this not a legitimate life-cycle observance? Two, who made you the judge? And, three, why don’t you go mind your own business?
An hour has gone by, it’s 9:15; still no Schwartz, still no alterkakers. By 10:00, the glasses have been raised three times. First: “To the bride and groom.” Second: “To all of us, and fuck them,” a political toast. The third toast—the sacred one—has taken place, too: “To those who aren’t with us.” In this life you can make light of many things, but not the third toast, or why would you be here? To those who fought, to those who made the sacrifice, including but not limited to the ultimate, to their freedom and yours. To Yulik Daniel’, to Andrei Sinyavsky, to Lara Bogoraz, to Tolya Marchenko, to Pasha Litvinov, to Andrei Amalrik, to Alik Ginzburg, to Yura Galanskov, to Seryozha Kovalyov, to writers, to poets, to citizen journalists who bang out The Chronicle of Current Events.
Where in the hell is Albert Schwartz? Should he not have been the first to arrive? And where are the alterkakers? Is there another way to know how Jewish weddings were done? There hasn’t been one in nearly six decades, as far as anyone knows.
Calling is futile. Schwartz lives in a big communal flat on Chistoprudnyy Boulevard. He used to have a personal phone, in his room, but it was turned off two years ago. There is a shared phone in the water-stained hallway. That big, heavy-duty, wall-mounted apparatus hangs there unanswered, conjuring the aesthetic of a steam engine. It would bite a chunk off any pencil you might stick in its dial. No incoming calls are accepted. You use it only if you must, to call ambulances for the dying.
No Schwartz—no alterkakers. No alterkakers—no Jewish wedding.
“I’ll go get him,” volunteers Viktor.
Others around the table see the logic in the groom’s offer to cab over to Schwartz’s.
Would anyone insist on going in his stead?
Barkin, the sculptor, has been stepping away from the table to take soulful swigs straight from the bottle, his supplemental fortification, for in this city a mystic must stay drunk; a sculptor, too. He doesn’t volunteer to go get Schwartz.
Vitaly Aleksandrovich Golden, a Pushkinist who, owing to a childhood bout of tuberculosis, is as pale and gaunt as a politzek, doesn’t volunteer.
Father Mikhail Saulovich Kiselenko, a leonine apostate famous for reeling godless members of the Moscow intelligentsia into the Russian Orthodox Church, doesn’t volunteer.
Professor Yakov Aronovich Moskvin, a cancer biologist, the father of the bride, and an erstwhile paratrooper with a half-empty right sleeve, doesn’t volunteer.
Marya Barkina, drunk as a sculptor’s wife should be, doesn’t volunteer. Oksana, the bride, wouldn’t be expected to volunteer, and does not.
Viktor will be the one to go get Schwartz and the alterkakers.
A cab ride to Schwartz’s—at 17 Chistoprudnyy Boulevard—will take ten minutes, maybe. It’s nearly eleven. The groom will return in forty minutes at the most. He will settle into his rickety chair and this delightful bedlam will transform into a Jewish khasene, with Schwartz, with the alterkakers, with the seven blessings.
2.
Viktor walks out of Bol’shoy Karetnyy, the winding side street where the Barkins live, and emerges onto the expanse of Sadovaya-Samotechnaya, on the Garden Ring. There is little traffic. Not a taxi in sight.
He turns right, heading in the direction of Tsvetnoy Boulevard, the “boulevard of flowers” in translation.
No taxis. It’s late in the night; cold, too.
Viktor walks past the dark granite-faced monolith of a high-rise occupied by foreign journalists. Located on Sadovaya-Samotechnaya, the place was christened Sad-Sam, or Sad Sam, by English speakers. In the context of this story, Sad Sam will be the preferred version. In Russian, the word “sad” doesn’t connote sadness. Sad is a garden—the gardening theme is big in this part of Moscow. Sam is not short for Samuel—it’s short for a river’s flow.
Sad Sam is a connection to the world outside, a vortex, and Viktor, because of his mastery of English, is the de facto chief communicator with the press corps. It’s an important function, which he performs for the Jewish refuseniks and, increasingly, the not necessarily Jewish human rights activists.
If you are a dissident or a refusenik and your name is unknown in the West, you can be plucked from the street, and no one will notice. If the people at Sad Sam know about you, if they wrote about you, if you have been seen coming and going, and if your voice is captured on recordings made covertly at these apartments, the guardians of state security will think twice before ordering you gone, especially now, eight days before Kissinger comes to town to plan out the next phase of strategic arms talks.
People who live at Sad Sam buy Barkin’s sculptures. Barkin treats this segment of the market as souvenir trade, selling only his rejects—derivative dreck, experiments gone awry.
Viktor does gigs at Sad Sam, too—sometimes a translation, sometimes acting as a Seeing Eye dog, guiding a reporter through complexity, geographic and otherwise. He has learned the English-Latin phrase describing such arrangements: “an unspoken quid pro quo.” “Unspoken” is the key word; Viktor knows. You help a correspondent on a story, and, through this above-mentioned unspoken quid pro quo, he will look more favorably at a story you want to plant.
George Krimsky, an Associated Press reporter who speaks Russian almost like a Russian, smokes three packs a day, loves vodka, and is the greatest guy you’ll ever meet, lives here. He is a friend of Viktor’s, and Barkin’s, and Golden’s, and Father Kiselenko’s. He was invited to the wedding, except he is on home leave, celebrating Christmas, skiing in the state of Vermont, town of Stowe, not too far from Solzhenitsyn’s house, presumably. Bob Toth, from the Los Angeles Times, is a great guy, too. He turns to Viktor for leads and story ideas sometimes.
Madison Dymshitz, nicknamed Mad Dog, lives here as well. Mad Dog is not universally loved by either dissidents or refuseniks, but he has at least one redeeming characteristic: he uses translators, and he pays. If you have a story to plant, you go to Krimsky and Toth first, to Christopher Wren at The New York Timessecond. You go to Mad Dog only when everyone else is out of town, on leave for Christmas—like now. They will return in nine days, to stand ready like bayonets on January 22, when Kissinger arrives. Until then, Mad Dog is the only American correspondent in town.
Viktor likes these people, Mad Dog, too. Knowing them, helping them, being invited to their apartments, is an escape, a partial exodus.
Viktor turns right, walking alongside Tsvetnoy Boulevard, toward the Moscow Circus. You can find a cab there, even this late at night. He hasn’t seen Paris, and unless something changes dramatically, never will. Should he get to the City of Lights, he will note the similarities between the boulevards, the green arteries that flow through Paris and Moscow. The boulevards of Paris are lovely indeed. Moscow’s are lovely, too.
There is indeed a cab directly in front of the circus steps. Viktor knocks on the glass of the passenger door, and the driver beckons him in. It’s warm inside, reeking of cigarettes. A small portrait of Stalin in generalissimo regalia is attached with sticky tape to the dashboard. You don’t see this often. In Tbilisi—maybe. It’s a Pride of Georgia thing, a shoemaker’s son who made good. In Moscow, Stalin is Lucifer.
Seething under the generalissimo’s contemptuous gaze, Viktor reaches into his coat pocket and begins to count change, adding coins as the numbers climb on the meter. Unlike your typical Moscow cabbies, this one drives in silence.
As he counts coins—a kopek, two, three, five, ten, fifteen, twenty—Viktor thinks of the dollop of salat Olivierthat occupies the center of the plate awaiting him at the Barkins’. A half-eaten square of kholodetz smeared with red horseradish leans against Olivier’s side. There is a pickle as well. And a morsel of Hungarian fatback, and black bread, buttered.
It’s crass to ask why this wedding is taking place, but the question is fair and will be answered. First, let us consider what this marriage is not and what it will not accomplish. The Soviet government will not recognize this ceremony, this contract. As far as the authorities are concerned, this is a dinner party, a sabantuychik, pirushka. Residency papers that would entitle Viktor to live in Moscow legally will remain out of his reach. It’s not an affirmation of Jewishness, either. The Orthodox Jews, who have declared themselves the final arbiters of such things, will not recognize Oksana as a Jewess.
This leaves one explanation for the wedding: Viktor and Oksana want to marry because they are in love, because they feel so complete in each other’s arms, because this is a feeling neither of them has known before. Also, they don’t give a rip about what the laws, Communist or Jewish, decree to be kosher and treif.
You may have noticed that the mother of the bride and the parents of the groom are absent from the celebration. Oksana knows her mother’s address, but the two aren’t in touch. This is because Oksana took her father’s side, even though he isn’t her biological father, even though he was technically the one at fault.
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