Among the hundred and fifty prisoners in our camp with whom I served time, Grisha Feldman was the most cheerful and energetic. In 1982, he was arrested for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda and was sentenced to six years imprisonment. He was Jewish, had graduated from high school, and worked as an electrician at the hospital for railroad workers in the city of Konotop in the Sumy region of Ukraine. He hadn’t committed any crime—it’s just that he was a Jew, and in the war with the Arabs, he’d rooted for Israel. It was all he talked about, before his arrest and after.
If you happened to ask him how he was doing, he’d answer vigorously: “We have assault rifles, we’ll get bullets, and then bang, bang, bang go the Arabs!”
That virtual assault rifle was obviously in very experienced hands, and the virtual location of the Arabs was correctly chosen from an ideological point of view: Grisha would aim at the propaganda wing of the administration building, which was covered with wise billboards—among them such pearls as “Bread is the head of everything!” (although no one could ever figure out the connection between this piece of wisdom and state criminals) and “It is better to think before than after. Democritus.” As a specialist in ancient literature, I can assure you that Democritus never said anything even remotely similar to that, but the prison administration, and especially our father of ideology, Colonel Ganichenko, had their own ideas. The colonel loved the name Democritus for several reasons: first, because it belonged to an ideologically acceptable materialist, as opposed to, for example, the bad and gloomy Heraclitus; second, this name evoked associations with democrats and, in the camp, this was our ironic nickname: The members of the administration mockingly called us prisoners convicted for anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation democrats. This is how Boris Manilovich, a psychologist and a respected convict, explained this pseudo-quotation: “Democritus teaches us that if you plan to collaborate with the Soviet security forces, it’s better to do so before your arrest rather than after.”
During evening roll call in the prison yard, Grisha always looked upward. Usually as soon as the prisoners gathered, pigeons would fly onto the roof of the barracks and start cooing, and Grisha would give them a warm and teary-eyed look. Everyone knew that he was an adventurous glutton. That’s why no one was surprised when we heard that Grisha had killed and eaten a pigeon. But the technicalities interested us—how he’d snuck up on the bird, what he’d used to kill it, how he’d dressed it, and, finally, whether he’d boiled or fried it. This last detail was of special interest: Did he fry it or boil it, or did he boil it first and then fry it? None of those questions was ever answered. One group of prisoners saw this episode as clear proof of man’s natural instinct for self-preservation, an attempt to save one’s life, while another more intellectual group saw it as yet another sign of man’s moral degradation. But most importantly, neither group believed that Grisha should be punished for his deed. Everyone felt that way until Fredrich (Fred) Anadenko, a prominent Ukrainian socialist and author of the well-known anti-Soviet treatise From Lenin to Brezhvev, gathered together for an evening talk those of us he considered reliable inmates, the “initiated.” That conversation happened during our routine back-and-forth walk in the prison yard, when Fred, with good diction and proper emphasis, read us his letter to the State Prosecutor of the Soviet Union:
To Alexander Mikhailovich Rekunkov
Prosecutor General of the USSR
Comrade Prosecutor General of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Alexander Mikhailovich,
We would like to bring to your attention the fact that Grigory Zinovievich Feldman, a convict in the institution ZhKh 385/3-5, unlawfully stole and ate a pigeon or pigeons (the number of victims is unknown). This is unacceptable because it is well-known that a pigeon is a close relative of the dove, which is a symbol of peace. Taking the abovementioned facts into consideration, I hereby request that you take immediate appropriate measures.
Disrespectfully yours,
The unjustly convicted political prisoner
Fredrich Filippovich Anadenko
The discussion that followed in the courtyard was initiated by Polyakov, who, while approving the courageous phrase “disrespectfully yours,” remarked with unconcealed irony that the whole idea might be lost on the addressee because the concept of a dove as a symbol of peace comes from the Bible, to which Comrade Rekunkov, as a devoted Marxist, communist, and socialist, must have a somewhat conflicted relationship. (Polyakov placed special emphasis on the term “socialist” because, as a true liberal and democrat, he did not approve of Anadenko’s affiliation with socialism.) Anatoly Yankov—a mathematician and topologist, a polyglot and all around very smart man—stated that humans routinely eat symbols, as cows, pigs, sheep, birds, and various fish have assumed different symbolic meanings in different cultures. Here, Yankov was about to share more of his vast knowledge on the subject, but Anadenko got annoyed with us and, with a shaking hand, placed a stamp on the envelope. He then defiantly dropped the letter into the mailbox on the wall of the administration building. My last comment was that we shouldn’t overlook the selflessness of Anadenko’s action, sacrificing one whole stamp for a public act. Since there was a severe shortage of postage stamps and envelopes in political prisons, the more experienced prisoners reacted favorably to my humble comment.
We don’t know whether the letter ever made it to its addressee, but Grisha Feldman got away with eating a symbol of peace, no problem. And this wasn’t the end of his gastro-culinary odyssey. As a professional electrician, Feldman was always fixing his toaster oven, which he’d placed at the back of the bathroom with eight sinks, nicknamed the “smoke shack.” That oven served the entire camp well until the prison administration took it into their heads to remove this invention of our modern Prometheus, who had shown such concern for his prisonmates.
Once during the New Year season, all the independent culinary-gastronomic groups in our prison were taking stock of their raw and ready-to-eat products. I should explain that the culinary-gastronomic groups were unofficial collectives of prisoners running joint gastronomic operations. For example, there was the Jewish “Kibbutz,” the Christian Federation of South Caucasian Nations, or “Christofed,” the Lithuanian-Latvian “Union,” and the Ukrainian “Kinship.” Well, during that inventory check, Rafael Papayan, a member of Christofed, fished out a two-liter jar of homemade lamb kaurma, or stew, that his wife had brought on her last visit a year and a half ago. The kaurma had been kept in our shared warehouse, called the “stores,” patiently awaiting the moment of its consumption. Eventually, however, that endless waiting had to come to an end—it was the kaurma’s time. All the federation members, Berdzenishvili, Lashkarashvili, Khomizuri, Altunyan, and Papayan, anticipating a culinary miracle, were present for the opening ceremony. The two-liter jar had a screw-top lid, and when Papayan opened it on his third attempt, the jar started making scary gurgling noises. Very soon the barracks were filled with such a stench that the WWII veteran, German policeman, and ex-hero of Socialist Labor of the USSR Verkhovin began screaming: “Watch out! Mustard gas! We’re under attack! Everyone out!” And the entire barracks poured into the prison yard.
Grisha was the last to leave the barracks. He came out with the jar of kaurma and asked what we, the members of Christofed, were planning to do with it—throw it away, perhaps? After receiving an answer in the affirmative, he carried the jar over to the smoke shack, to his toaster oven. This was followed by a rapid exodus of prisoners from the smoke shack. Grisha claimed that his oven could reach a temperature of four hundred degrees Celsius, and that this would kill any living bacteria, never mind the bacteria in the lamb kaurma. He boiled that stinking kaurma for an entire hour, then took the pot outside, sat in the middle of the courtyard, and, in front of all the prisoners, calmly and methodically polished off the entire thing. No one, not even the camp administration, dared to approach the poisonous gas-emitting kaurma within a thirty-yard radius. I’m almost positive that after the kaurma episode, Fred Anadenko wrote the Prosecutor General a new “disrespectfully yours” letter, but he never let us read it.
Soon after the kaurma episode, Grisha was transferred to another camp. As we learned later, they took him to Saransk, the capital of Mordovia, and put him in solitary confinement. For a long time, we didn’t have any information about Grisha. He didn’t write to anyone, and there was no news about him from the outside. Four months passed, and one fine day Grisha came back—he’d put on some weight, had longer hair, and looked pale. It was very easy for us to tell how long someone had been in solitary just by the color of his skin. Feldman’s facial hue suggested that he’d spent a whole four months there, and that the only contact he’d had with the sun was on his daily one-hour walk. Once the most cheerful and chatty member of our camp, he now seemed somehow faded. He no longer talked about Arabs and assault rifles, and, if you can imagine, he gave up his extreme culinary experiments. Even more surprising, he didn’t even think of setting up his famous toaster oven.
A few people drew some probable conclusions about his behavior, but no one had any convincing evidence.
I must admit that Georgians make good prisoners. By that I mean that Georgians don’t whine and, more importantly, they’re a paragon of physical stamina. Despite this reputation, I, along with several other prisoners, came down with a high fever in the fall of 1986, when a flu virus was making its way through the prison. I lay in bed in the barracks for several days, and the doctor said that if my fever didn’t drop in two days, he’d transfer me to the hospital and put me on a special diet. (In prison, diet is a very good word.) Anyway, it’s nine o’clock in the evening and I’m lying in bed near the entrance to the barracks with a hundred-and-four-degree fever. There’s no one else in the barracks except for Grisha and a couple of old Lithuanians. Suddenly, Zhora Khomizuri runs in with the sensational news that our Grisha would be appearing on the TV news program Vremya. I got up, wrapped myself in a blanket, and went to the dining room, which also served as our rec room. The TV set was high on the wall so that all one hundred of us could see it while sitting at the long tables.
First, Vremya informed us about a plenary session of the Communist Party Political Bureau, then, pictures of plants and factories, industrial complexes and tractors flashed by like images in a kaleidoscope. Then came the cultural news. The sports and weather forecast were about to begin when the anchor Balashov interrupted the broadcast and the entire screen was filled with Gregory Zinovievich Feldman, a political prisoner convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. And Grisha was saying:
Israel is a scary state. They torture poor Arabs over there, shame on them! Day and night, they talk only about the Holocaust, but they’re organizing their own genocide for the Arabs and Palestinians. And I can’t even imagine anything worse than Zionism. As for the prison where I’m serving time, it makes me nauseous to think about the other inmates; so many criminals in one place—what a disaster! Soviet people, please, forgive me, though I can’t be forgiven and don’t deserve your forgiveness in the first place!
Grisha’s face turned back into sports and the weather, and the stunned prisoners returned slowly to the barracks. Wrapped in my blanket, I hurried back to bed. Three yards away from me, Grisha, fully dressed and in his boots, was resting on his cot. After some commotion outside, a group of three people entered the barracks and approached Feldman. It was the “delegation of shame” led by Fred Anadenko, flanked by Misha Polyakov and Zhora Khomizuri.
“Gregory Zinovievich, what can you say in your defense?” Anadenko asked in a low voice.
“What can I say in my defense?” Grisha repeated with a phony Ukrainian accent. “Here is my defense!”
Grisha turned around and mooned the delegation, and then his ass produced a sound so thunderous that it would have surprised even Rabelais, the esteemed author of Gargantua and Pantagruel.
“You’re not human,” said a crestfallen Anadenko, and the committee left the barracks.
From that day on, Grisha became a political pariah; no one would approach him. He quickly gave up and let himself go. The prison Jews took Grisha’s disgrace especially hard. They felt that this Arab sympathizer had brought shame upon them as well.
Grisha was pardoned and released on February 9, 1987. Five days later, on February 14, the last “democrat” left Barashevo Prison. Perestroika had brought the period of political prisoners to an end. For a long time, Israel refused to accept Feldman. They said that the Mossad was involved in his case. I can’t rule out the possibility that his ex-cellmates prevented his Aliyah. For twenty years, Grisha tried in vain to woo his insulted countrymen, and then, in 2006, he got his wish—an exhausted and worn-out seventy-year-old man was finally allowed to enter the promised land. Upon taking his first step on Israeli soil after embarking from the plane, Grisha yelled loudly in Russian “Forgive me!”—and right there in the Tel Aviv airport, he drew his last breath.