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In the Aftermath of One Hijacking
In my earliest memory, the world is the size of one cramped room, the room that I recognize in retrospect as my father’s study in our house in Riga. I had barely turned three years old when my father abandoned my mother and me and ran away to Leningrad. The warm glow at the center of this memory issues from a wood-burning stove lit in the evenings, when my father was home and working. There is another source of light: a pale green lamp on top of his enormous wooden desk, illuminating the books and papers stacked on the floor around and underneath his desk. Books, my fortress and a cruise ship at once; I was allowed to stay in his study as long as I kept quiet and didn’t move. (Was he already planning his escape?) “Sit here, son, and play quietly.” The few words I still remember in Russian: “Sidi i molchi, Zhenya! Sidi i molchi!” My father: a pair of oversized boots of wool felt —valenki in Russian—he wore them inside the house because his feet were always cold, despite the heat that radiated from the stove, the heat that made my cheeks burn like a pair of hot embers. Those boots that were the only part of him I could see from my fortress of books beside his desk. Those boots, size 41, a number so tremendous I could not imagine growing this big myself, made it seem like his feet were permanently attached to the floorboards, that they were a part of the building’s structure, as immovable as the stove or the walls. The walls I remember as well: ornamental teal arches zigzag on the bronze field of wallpaper, the arches intertwine with one another and run across and away, into the darkness where the rest of the room is hidden. How to reconcile this image from my childhood with that of the unemployed alcoholic, the man I knew in my teenage years? Six years after my mother and I had come to Israel, he reappeared in our lives, a complete stranger. My father: the unsuccessful immigrant, unable to learn the language of the country that had graciously accepted him, for years just getting by on one security guard job or another, leeching off his friends, begging my mother for money years after they had split up. He stayed in the basement of the house that my mother was paying for with the money she earned as a software testing engineer, even after Pierre, her boyfriend, moved in. My father? This stranger who dared to yell at my mother—he got drunk and yelled at her, faulting her for failing to teach me Russian. But it had not been my mother’s decision, I told him, it was my own. Why would I want to learn the language of the country that expelled us, that robbed me of my father, and robbed both of my parents of any chance to become the most they could be? His friends kept saying to me, your father is a great man, a poet, a thinker, and they patted me on the shoulder, and gave him money, every year less and less. And he spent all of it on alcohol, bottles of the crudest vodka. (When they say there was no alcoholism in Israel before the Soviet immigrants arrived, they are right.) My father stayed in his basement and leafed through the few volumes of poetry he had managed to bring when he was finally allowed to come here. He said he could remember all he needed to know, and at times tried to recite it to me by heart: burya mgloyu nebo kroet... but I did not understand, and eventually he would falter and break it off. And now this new information from my father’s would-be biographer that he was a dissident, a refusnik. My father: a mastermind of an airplane hijacking plot? At least, not the mastermind. One evening, a woman shows up at the door of my mother’s house, saying she wants to devote a chapter of her book to my father’s life. The word “hijacking” makes me shudder. Hijacking—isn’t it what terrorists do? My father’s name, the woman says, does not appear with the top two dozen defendants in the legal abstract. At a trial, the Soviet prosecutor ascribed to my father the minor job of having managed the finances. After considerable pestering, my mother decides to “come clean” about it. Come clean? —“Well, your father was a criminal! He and his friends decided they could hijack a Soviet plane and take it to Israel.” “Only because they weren’t allowed out! He was a political enemy of a criminal state!” the visitor argues. “My son was too little to understand this at the time.” The six years, the time it took him to join us in Israel—apparently, he was in the labor camps. “In Siberia?” I ask. My mother wants this conversation over, and almost pushes the woman out the door. “No, in Vologodskaya oblast. It’s not too far from Leningrad.” I gather the details online. In 1970, a few Soviet Zionists and dissidents from Riga established a connection with a group in Leningrad and decided together to hijack a small plane and fly it from Leningrad to Sweden. Why Sweden? Because hijacking a bigger plane would have been considered criminal not only by the Soviet government but by the larger international community the dissidents wanted to impress. And you couldn’t fly to Israel on a biplane. So, Sweden. Why not? Any point on the map outside the red line would do. The participants named their plot “A Wedding,” because they bought up all the seats on the regional flight they were going to reroute, and they did so under the ruse of a wedding party. (But, in fact, all of them left their families behind.) The biographer is going to have no trouble gathering information even without my mother’s help; the story is well documented. The KGB got them before they boarded the plane. When the story broke, and the would-be pilot and the first mate were accused of high treason and sentenced to death, several world leaders intervened on their behalf, including Golda Meir. The Soviet leadership was pressured to open up the borders, to allow Jews to immigrate to “their historical homeland,” to Israel. I map this information on the plot of my own life and wonder. At the time when I sat in my fortress of books in Riga and watched my father’s felt boots, was he already involved in this conspiracy? Could he already have been corresponding with “the bridegroom” and deciding to join the wedding party? In my memory, this scene of our last winter in Riga is lodged so firmly, as if I had spent the long winter months playing silently by his side, whereas my mother claims that he had left for Leningrad as early as October and stayed there. Moreover, she insists that even before he left, I’d come down with strep throat, then progressed to scarlet fever and eventually to pneumonia, and did not fully recover until the next spring. The prospect of losing his only son didn’t stop him, she says. His eyes were set on other priorities. (My mother is still bitter about that, and I don’t blame her.) Should I be grateful that my father’s hijacking plot helped my mother and me and so many others to escape the USSR and come to Israel? In 1970, only 900 Jews were allowed to leave the Soviet Union. In 1971, after the trial, the number increased to 12,000. My mother and I were among them. When my father joined us six years later, I was ten years old. (If his plan had been to abandon us completely, it failed worse than the hijacking plot.) I had forgotten most of my Russian by then, and I did not want to believe he was my father. He wore giant glasses that covered most of his face and hid his small red eyes behind the massive lenses. His clothes hung loosely about his body, and his back was stooped, as if he were a hundred years old. My mother had trouble recognizing him. They’d only known each other a short time before they were married, and by this point had lived apart twice as long as they’d spent together. My father? I did not know him. I prefer to think of him in the collective sense, as just one in a number of my forefathers. All the men who made me the person I am today by virtue of their absence. We do not have a common language, my forefathers and I. We do not believe in the same things. If I had been in their place—it is a moot point of course, but if I had been in their shoes—then what? Would I have stayed in Riga, in the Soviet Union? I remember that comfortable room with the hot wood-burning stove, and the bronze wallpaper, and the desk, my fortress, and I know that I wouldn’t have left. I would not fool myself with the grass is greener kind of thinking. I would find other means of protest. I would stay put. I would care the most about the people closest to me. I would not let myself become an old man, haunting my ex-wife’s basement, drinking my life away until the only thing I have left are fragments of obscure poetry ringing in my ears.
Olga Zilberbourg is a fiction writer and editor traveling between San Francisco, California and St. Petersburg, Russia. Her second Russian-language collection |