A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka: A Memoir Read online




  Copyright © 2014 by Lev Golinkin

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred Music for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” words and music by Pete Townshend, copyright © 1971, copyright renewed by Fabulous Music Ltd. Administered in the United States and Canada by Spirit One Music (BMI) o/b/o Spirit Services Holdings, S.a.r.l., Suolubaf Music and ABKCO Music, Inc., 85 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10003. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.

  Jacket design and illustrations by Michael J. Windsor

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Golinkin, Lev, author.

  A backpack, a bear, and eight crates of vodka : a memoir / Lev Golinkin.

  pages; cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-53777-3 (hardcover)—

  ISBN 978-0-385-53778-0 (eBook) 1. Golinkin, Lev.

  2. Jews, Russian—Ukraine—Kharkov—Biography.

  3. Jewish refugees—United States—Biography. 4. Jews, Russian—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  E184.37.G655A3 2014

  947′.004924092—dc23

  [B]

  2014005408

  v3.1

  To Jeff, Bettie, Amanda, and Dr. V

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  The Best Parades in the Whole Damn World

  The Black Witch Comes to Kharkov

  Oleg and the Mirror

  Disarming the Adversaries

  A Marked Mikhail Will Destroy Russia

  Something Was Different; Something Was in the Air

  Land of Endless Twilight

  $130, Two Suitcases, One Piece of Jewelry, Nothing of Value

  Into the Steppe

  PART TWO

  Dozens of Sentinel Grandmas

  Where People Have No Names

  The Forester

  Waking the Nomads

  Pennies and Peach Slices

  A Layover in Purgatory

  Eva

  A Bleak, Man-Made Horizon

  Nineteen Million in the Hole

  The Bosnians Don’t Come Out at Night

  A Simple Request

  PART THREE

  This Ain’t Ellis Island

  Refugee Sponsorship for Dummies

  Where Else Does She Belong?

  Unfinished Business, Part I: Getting to America

  Where the Weak Are Killed and Eaten

  There Are No Cats in America

  Where Am I and Why Do I Smell Like Bananas?

  Unfinished Business, Part II: Staying in America

  Alicia

  One Man, One Jacket

  Kilcoyne

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book was born from a need to understand my past, and as such, everything recounted here is as accurate as memory, research, and reflection can allow. But this is not only my story: the narrative takes place in the context of a massive refugee movement and includes accounts of numerous individuals, some of whom weren’t eager to publicly embrace a turbulent past. In light of this, and in the spirit of not being a jackass, I have changed the names of those who asked to remain anonymous or weren’t available to provide consent.

  PROLOGUE

  Chestnut Hill, Mass., May 2003

  It was a hot day and the metal bleachers of Alumni Stadium channeled the sunshine directly into the center, where the graduates and I melted in our black gowns. The commencement speaker, a blind man who had climbed Mt. Everest, spoke about the journey of life, and ways to overcome obstacles, and the many lessons of college. He said other stuff, too, but I don’t remember what it was. I couldn’t listen. I needed to move. I needed a cigarette. I needed a pack of cigarettes, I needed coffee, extra-large coffee with cream and no sugar, and most of all, I needed to walk.

  People and places I hadn’t thought about for years—that I’d refused to think about—flashed through my head, drowning out the mountain climber. I had to find Linda, and Peter, and Eva, and the bald hotel owner, and the Bosnians. I had to find the pudgy man who pulled us off the Vienna train station and the blond girl from the house with the red door who gave me a jacket on a cold February evening when the wind howled down the Danube. There were others I had to find. Unfortunately, I didn’t know their names, or where they were, or what they looked like, which was going to make looking for them a bit problematic.

  The speech ended, everyone clapped, and we broke up by schools and shuffled off to various parts of the campus for the second half of commencement. On the way, friends swapped congratulations and contact info, and I made a mental note to clear my phone book and disable my e-mail account. Boston College was kind enough to let me participate in the graduation ceremony, so I crossed the stage and was handed a giant envelope with a little printout explaining why there was no diploma inside and I would therefore not be going to med school. I smiled and shook the dean’s hand, Dad took a picture, and I scampered back to my seat without further thought on the matter. The only thing preventing me from graduating was a one-credit physics lab. I could earn my diploma in a month, and then apply to med school … or not apply to med school. At this point it wasn’t important.

  Commencement ended and the countdown began: we had to empty our dorms by 5:00 p.m. I hadn’t packed and by the time Dad and two family friends scraped me out of my room and into a van, we were right at the deadline. Dad, a meticulous packer, was rechecking straps and calculating optimal suitcase alignment when I excused myself, ran back to the dorm, shut the bathroom door, and turned on the faucet. The water helped, for some odd reason. Even though there was no one else in the dorm, the rushing sound made me feel more alone. I’ve always needed that moment before the plunge, to stand and gather, and I’ve always preferred being alone by myself to being alone in a crowd.

  The Soviet Union was waiting. The largest country in the world, a country the size of North America. The land that worshipped the embalmed body of a bald monster, the land that banned God, the land of black cars, illegal radios, crooked mirrors, and underground bakeries, where missiles and tanks rolled under the red flag. The guards were waiting, and the gas masks and the refugee camps. From the moment I stepped on American soil I had dedicated myself to forgetting, ignoring, and burying them, and still they waited. I felt my hands clenching the porcelain sides of the sink, felt the familiar panic radiate from my chest, crawl up my neck, choking me, urging me to run, get a new address, new goals, new friends, move, disappear, be somewhere else, but for the first time in my life, being terrified didn’t matter. I had to go back, to Indiana, to the refugee camps in Austria, to talk to people, walk around, and reconstruct something resembling a past. College has many lessons; I stood with the blind man on that one. Some I’d forget, some I’d already forgotten, but the one thing that finally sank into my head is that you can’t have a future if you don’t have a past.

  A thin film of vapor coated the mirror by the time I turned off the water and walked back to the van, where Dad was pacing. It was past 5:00 and the campus was nearly abandoned. The faculty had driven off to embrace the
summer, and the grounds crew was stacking chairs and folding pavilions in a rush to move on. Maroon pennants with the BC logo flapped from lampposts making me think of other red banners flapping in other winds, in a country that no longer existed. Lanky shadows of campus towers chased the van down Commonwealth Avenue, like giant Gothic windshield wipers clearing away the school year, and then I passed out, and when I woke up we were getting gas at a rest stop in Jersey.

  I spent the next two years walking.

  Part One

  We’ll be fighting in the streets

  With our children at our feet

  And the morals that they worship will be gone

  And the men who spurred us on

  Sit in judgment of all wrong

  They decide and the shotgun sings the song

  —“Won’t Get Fooled Again” by The Who

  THE BEST PARADES IN THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD

  Kharkov, Ukraine, USSR, September 1987

  Parades were the gold standard of the Soviet Union. Workers’ parades, women’s parades, Revolution parades, the Great Patriotic War parades, we had them all. We had perfected parades; we had the best parades in the whole damn world. St. Patrick’s Day? Thanksgiving? Please. Macy’s has balloons. We had intercontinental ballistic missiles rolling through Red Square. Parades were of paramount importance and attendance was mandatory, rain or otherwise. On April 26, 1986, the year before I entered first grade, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (located less than three hundred miles from Kharkov) exploded, spewing a radioactive cloud over the Ukraine. Other, weaker countries would’ve had their citizens hunkering indoors and popping iodine tablets. But May 1 was International Workers’ Day, canceling the parade was unthinkable, and so on we marched, blissfully unaware, soaking in the sunshine and the radiation. The reviewing stand was mostly vacant, of course, since local Party leaders had been alerted beforehand and had long evacuated the area, but the parade went off without a hitch. That’s commitment.

  The year after the radioisotope-enriched May Day festivities, Mom grabbed my hand and we walked to the September parade for the start of first grade. Aside from the occasional tram rattling by, Moskovskyi Prospekt was quiet: there were no lines outside the Kharkov Department Store, which hadn’t received shipments in two weeks; the morning shift was already in the factories; and the babushki were staying indoors, cooking supper and complaining about the weather. Even the discarded newspapers that usually spun and danced in the wake of traffic clung to the pavement and slowly dissolved in the puddles. Mom and I passed by the Plaza of the Uprising, lined with maple and chestnut trees, turned left after the Hammer and Sickle stadium, and arrived at Kharkov School Number Three, where the parade was already under way.

  This procession didn’t have placards announcing how many tons of wheat had been harvested by the city’s collective farms, or proclamations of the Malyshev Factory’s churning out thirty tanks ahead of schedule for the millionth year in a row, or lists of proud citizens nominated for the Order of Labor Glory, Second Class, award. It was a quieter, smaller affair held outside the brick school building where Mom and I watched the teachers, followed by the fifth-graders through second-graders. Encouraging production statistics and Orders of Labor Glory aside, everything was immaculate: the sky was pure, dark steel; frigid rain poured down, but no one felt a drop. It was as if they were marching hundreds of miles away, in a sunny Cuba full of warmth and light. Unfazed, undazed, and firm strode the students, girls smiling with shy optimism, boys practicing to be the soldiers they would become. I clung to Mom’s leg, covered partly by the umbrella, partly by her long white shawl.

  The last soggy red pennant streamed by, and I straightened my uniform and went to check in with Anna Konstantinovna, my first-grade teacher, a tall woman with gray hair and a gray face that matched her gray blouse. First she taught us how to sit, because without proper posture, learning was impossible. We sat at our desks, backs stiff, eyes on the chalkboard, arms folded, right over left, fingers straight. (In the event of a question, the right arm was to pivot ninety degrees until perpendicular to the desk, but at no point were the fingers to separate.) Anna Konstantinovna paced down the aisles. She didn’t so much teach as remind, as if I, the two brothers in front of me, and the rest of my classmates already knew everything we needed to know, and her job was merely to jog our memories. A photographer trailed her. His duty was to document and report that the new generation of Communists was ready to enter society. Anna Konstantinovna paced, the photographer clicked, and I sat, issuing silent orders to my squirming fingers.

  The lesson on posture was followed by a two-hour briefing, which reaffirmed that as the children, we were indeed the future and would soon shoulder the burden of improving our glorious society and fighting the belligerent Capitalists. Our perfect Union wasn’t always perfect, after all. It had been achieved only through the relentless work and genius of Lenin, but Lenin was dead now and it was up to us to pick up the torch. Everything from Pushkin to multiplication made up the arsenal we would utilize to spread happiness to workers and peasants around the globe. The responsibility dangled over our desks like the sword of Damocles.

  To aid us in the upcoming struggle, we were taken to the cafeteria and fed milk and sandwiches. Hating milk is probably the first lasting decision I made, but, Anna Konstantinovna was quick to remind me, without its life-giving power, how was I going to stand up to the Capitalists? “Milk is strength. Milk is strength, Lev,” she said, and I quickly gulped down the curdled mass in my cup. Everyone had to sacrifice for the common good.

  Following lunch we were returned to the classroom, where Anna Konstantinovna sat at her desk, back straight, eyes fixed ahead, and making it look easy. I watched her arm drop down to her desk drawer, then reemerge with a small metal box. She tilted her wrist, scattering the box’s contents, and I squinted. Our teacher’s desk was covered with stars. Tiny metal stars.

  Like all good dictatorships, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union recognized the importance of early-childhood indoctrination. The moment a child entered first grade he was fed into a finely oiled propaganda machine, the first tier of which was the Little Octobrist group. October was the month of the Revolution, and it held special significance for the Party (October saw parades galore; October parades made the other parades look weak, like St. Patrick’s Day). It made sense to have first-graders begin at the beginning, at the origin of the Revolution. We became Little Octobrists by donning the official star pin. Symbols are crucial to both elementary education and totalitarian propaganda (the two have much in common), and a tried-and-true emblem of the USSR was the five-pointed red star. Every star on Anna Konstantinovna’s desk had a cherubic Baby Lenin embossed in the center, and the golden, curly-haired child looked like a perverted version of the Baby Jesus pins that people in America put on their car visors to keep them safe. Anna Konstantinovna fastened our pins, and we walked to the Grand Assembly to watch the third-graders become Pioneers.

  Pioneer was the next level after Little Octobrist, and it was a big deal. Being a Little Octobrist didn’t entail much beyond wearing the pin: the Pioneers got to step forward and start serving the Motherland in earnest. Enrollment began in third grade, and it was optional. They didn’t want to pressure us. They wanted it to come from the heart, and if the occasional child was too stupid or immature to join, they would eventually be forced to do so by the fifth grade.

  To reflect the sobriety of Pioneer enrollment, the day’s ceremony took place in a Grand Assembly, mini parade-like procession and all. Red kerchiefs, the symbol of the Pioneers, were everywhere, and banners emblazoned with slogans like ALWAYS BE READY TO FIGHT FOR THE WAY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE USSR! and A PIONEER IS EVER VIGILANT! swung from the rafters. One by one, the third-grade inductees rose and recited the Solemn Pledge of the Pioneers:

  “I, [last name, first name], joining the ranks of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization, in the presence of my comrades solemnly promise: to love and protect
my Motherland passionately, to live as the great Lenin bade us, as the Communist Party teaches us, to always carry out the laws of the Pioneers of the Soviet Union.”

  After tying on a red kerchief, each newly knotted Pioneer was paired up with a first-grader. My Pioneer was a pretty girl with very tight ponytails who gave me a book about some jackass named Don’t Know Anything who found a flying car and decided to travel to the sun, where, after numerous misadventures (I vaguely recall an incident with an elephant at the Sun City Zoo), he finally learned that he really belonged back home, working hard with his fellow citizens to build a better society. The girl told me how Pioneers had these organizations called Squads and Watchgroups, and you got to be part of Committees, and be Friends with other Pioneers, and learn important Communist Skills and Pioneer Songs, and other great stuff. She asked if I knew the alphabet, and I said yes. “That’s good,” she recited. “The alphabet is the beginning of all beginnings; even Lenin began with it.” (It sounds better in Russian; it’s a rhyming couplet.) I just stared at her ponytails and at the canary-yellow book jacket, which showed Don’t Know Anything revving up his flying car, ready to wreak havoc on Sun City. Then the older Pioneers embraced their new comrades and lined up in Squads and Watchgroups and marched away, and that was my first day of school.

  * * *

  The olive-green gas mask over my face is a remnant from World War II—the Great Patriotic War, as people on the radio call it, or simply the War to everyone else. The mask is too big and is made of old, tough rubber, and Anna Konstantinovna had to really tug on the straps to make it stay on my head. The round eyepieces are also too big and encompass not just my eyes but also my cheeks and eyebrows. We’re all wearing the masks, and our left hands grasp long, flexible hoses that end in some sort of tin filters. I’m in uniform: a starched blue suit, the dark red Baby Lenin pin twinkling from my lapel. Everyone has their Lenin pin. All the boys wear navy suits, and the girls wear brown French maid outfits and have large white bows in their hair, but today you can’t see the bows because they’re squashed under the gas masks.