Odd Jobs (100 page)

During her visit here, amid her operations and travels and maternal and grandmaternal activities, she wrote a book about herself and, especially, her recent years as the persecuted, isolated wife of Sakharov.
Alone Together
is understandably a hurried, fragmentary production. Footnotes by the translator clear up many minor mysteries of cultural allusion and personal history. An appendix of nine documents, including reproductions of Elena Bonner’s father’s death certificate and her own service record as a nurse in “the Great Patriotic War,” sheds additional light—indeed, a reader might do well to begin this book with the eighth item, a letter from Sakharov to the president of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences on October 15, 1984, which sets out the history of Bonner’s health and the couple’s travails more consecutively than her own account. The steps that led Sakharov himself from a privileged position high within the Soviet scientific establishment to that of a determined public dissident are not discussed. His letter states in a brief paragraph:

Nor does Bonner disclose much of the ideological journey that has placed her, at Sakharov’s side, in such a marginal and precarious position within her society.

In refutation of a defamatory article that she quotes at length, she rather grudgingly offers a few pages of autobiography. She was born in 1923. Her father, Gevork Alikhanov, was a leading Armenian Communist, who was arrested and imprisoned as a traitor in 1937, officially died of pneumonia in 1939, and was rehabilitated in 1954, the same year that his death certificate was issued. Bonner’s mother, Ruth Grigorievna Bonner—who at the age of eighty-six lives in Newton with her grandchildren—was also arrested in 1937. Elena Bonner and her younger brother thereafter lived with their maternal grandmother in Leningrad. She writes, “Never did I believe—either as a child or as an adult—that my parents could have been enemies of the state. Their ideals and their internationalism had been lofty models for me, which was why I joined
the army when war broke out.” She became a nurse; in 1941 she suffered a concussion and other wounds at the front and was hospitalized for some months before being reassigned. In 1945 she was promoted to lieutenant and demobilized as “a group 2 invalid,” with almost total loss of vision in the right eye and progressive blindness in the left, as a result of the concussion. Despite her eye problems, she enrolled in 1947 at the First Leningrad Medical Institute and graduated as a doctor in 1953. She worked as a district doctor and pediatrician and in Iraq on assignment for the Ministry of Health of the U.S.S.R. Along with her medical career, she was active as a writer, a journalist, and an editor. Though a member of the young people’s Komsomol, she did not join the Communist Party for many years. “Neither while in the army nor in subsequent years did I feel a psychological right to join the Party as long as my parents were listed as traitors to the homeland.… After the criticism of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress, and especially the Twenty-second, I decided to join the CPSU, and in 1964 became a candidate and in 1965, a member. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 I considered this step a mistake and in 1972, in accordance with my convictions, I left the Communist Party.” She dissents, then, from deep within the system—the daughter of an Old Bolshevik who has paid her full dues as a Soviet citizen.

She married Sakharov in 1971. Her love life up to the age of forty-eight had not been barren. She had had a girlhood romance with Vsevolod Bagritsky, who was killed in the war and whose poems and diaries she helped compile for a posthumous volume. One of her attackers accuses her, in print, of “a wanton life.” Her own book includes a rakish photograph taken of herself in 1949, wearing a broad-brimmed hat: “I decided to publish the picture in this book, even though I know it smacks of middle-aged coquettishness! ‘I was never beautiful, but I was always damned cute.’ ” At medical school she met Ivan Semyonov, the father of her two children, Tatyana (born in 1950) and Alexei (born in 1956). Bonner and Semyonov separated in 1965. She does not describe when and how she met Sakharov, but Sakharov’s letter to the Academy president spells out a pattern of their marriage:

The appendix includes extracts from the Soviet news agency TASS, which describe Bonner as a potential “leader of the anti-Soviet scum on the payroll of Western special services,” a “NATO-ized provocateur,” and a basically healthy person who has used the pretense of poor health to travel abroad and profitably engage in “out-and-out anti-Sovietism.” She supposedly motivates her husband’s hunger strikes and would willingly see him dead: “It was Bonner who planted the idea of Sakharov going on a ‘hunger strike’ in order to feed the propaganda organs of the U.S.A. About the health of her spouse she worried least of all, acting on the principle: the worse the better.” Bonner is part Armenian and part Jewish, and anti-Semitism adds to the propaganda campaign against her. An article by Nickolai Yakovlev in a 1983 issue of the widely circulated magazine
Man and the Law
, entitled “The Firm of E. Bonner and Children,” asserts that “One of the victims of the CIA’s Zionist agents is Academician A. D. Sakharov.… Provocateurs from subversive agencies pushed him and keep pushing this spiritually unbalanced man.… A horrible woman forced herself on the widower Sakharov.” Letters arrive in Gorky advising Sakharov to “divorce the Jewess” and “live by his own mind, not Bonner’s.” In a train compartment, she was once assailed by her fellow passengers: “They shouted things about the war and about Jews.… I kept wishing I had a yellow star to sew onto my dress.”

She has written this book, her foreword states, “to tell about what has happened during the last three years.… I had to recall and write, not the way things seemed, but the way they were. All this will be of help to Andrei, so I consider it my duty. No one else was with him, and Andrei himself is so efficiently isolated in Gorky that he cannot tell this story.” Much of her intent, then, is to contradict the official Soviet version of their joint ordeal, and to place on the record facts and documents that have otherwise been suppressed. The American reader who has not followed the Sakharov affair closely, and who places no great trust in Soviet press handouts anyway, may find her detailed protestations less interesting than her general picture of what it is like to be a distinguished political prisoner within the Communist system. I was struck by the solemn legality with which vengeful and disciplinary trials are conducted, by the brazen use of medical services as instruments of state intimidation and torture, and by the prodigious amount of manpower expended in surveillance.
Not only did teams of KGB men accompany Sakharov and Bonner everywhere they went, leaping in whenever they attempted to pick up a hitchhiker or telephone a television repairman, but her mother’s empty apartment in Moscow warranted round-the-clock guards. “Night and day—they even had a cot so they could rest in shifts.” No one, however, troubled to close a window that had blown open, and when Bonner and her friends tried to make the place briefly habitable again they were forbidden the use of a cleaning service and of a man—any man. Only some female friends of Bonner’s were allowed in to shove the furniture around. A certain prankishness flavors the state’s chastisements. “Whenever the authorities did not like something, it was our car that suffered. Either two tires would be punctured, or a window smashed or smeared with glue.” Sealed envelopes arrived empty at their Gorky residence, and out of one package of scientific reprints “a dozen huge cockroaches scrambled.” In their apartment, books, toothbrushes, glasses, and even dental bridges disappeared and then reappeared: “This whirlwind of moving objects creates a feeling of a Kafkaesque nightmare on the one hand and on the other that you are on a glass slide of a microscope, that you are an experimental subject.”

The subjects of these particular experiments have not been broken, though both are in fragile health.
^‡
Bonner admits to a sharp tongue and a hot temper, and describes a number of shouting matches with her guards and judges; we can guess that in any society she would be constructively critical. She was not especially impressed by some of Sakharov’s supporters in the United States: “Almost all are ready to sign something … and yet many know very little. And not only about Sakharov’s problems.” Intellectuals who “talk about nuclear winter, star wars, pollution [and] all the horrors that await mankind” appeared to her paradoxically confident and future-minded in their own prosperous lives. “And they sleep peacefully. They do not notice that they have depressed and ruined the sleep of millions of other people.” For many Americans, her courageous and suffering husband is only “a symbol, a game, politics.” At the White House, she is taken through a back door—“in Russian,
we sometimes say a back alley”—and in a small room was received by three people, of whom the greatest, none other than Admiral John Poindexter, reassured her that the administration “was profoundly worried about the fate of my husband and many others, but at the present time it felt that the best way to help them was through quiet, nonpublicized actions.” She expressed disappointment, and explains: “Quiet diplomacy in the defense of human rights is such an old song.… Academician Sakharov considers publicity the main weapon in the struggle for human rights.” She did not see the President, nor did she ask to. But her book includes photographs of herself with Prime Ministers Thatcher and Chirac of England and France, and she writes wryly, “I’m sorry I didn’t see the famous Oval Office, or the garden where the President signed a proclamation declaring Andrei Sakharov Day. I won’t be able to tell Andrei what they look like, but I will certainly describe the backstairs to him.”

Americans who imagine that just by being their well-intentioned, freedom-loving selves they have won the admiration of persecuted Communist dissidents will be disappointed by
Alone Together
. A reception at Stanford, even though it included “nice people, delicious hors d’oeuvres, flowers, grandiloquent words, Joan Baez singing about freedom,” displeased Bonner because the university had recently also warmly received Marat Vartanian, who is “implicated as one of the chief figures in the misuse of psychiatry for political purposes.” The organization of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which received the Nobel Peace Prize ten years after her husband did, arouses her ire: “Aren’t some of the people who tortured my husband members?” Her standard of excellence and rectitude is very specific—Andrei Sakharov—and few measure up to it. Her recurring impression that Americans do not very well understand Sakharov’s case, or very much care, is probably accurate. In these last years, even under a conservative administration and in spite of the usual Cold War spy cases and murderous international meddling, there has arisen the sensation that the Soviet Union is not the enemy. Its political religion has fallen flat; free enterprise is creeping in even into its own sluggish system; as a nation, it is soggy with internal problems, and some of them resemble ours. Perhaps radical Islam is the threat, or, from another angle, Japan; but Russia, like a gruff old chess foe who has grown corpulent and distracted over the years, seems an almost comfortable neighbor in the global village. This could change, but for now it seems, to quote Sakharov himself,
that “The world is further away from war than it has been in a long time.” War between the two superpowers, that is. And therefore Russia’s internal victims, its silenced and incarcerated writers and artists, its captive refuseniks, its isolated and slandered Sakharovs, are less interesting than formerly to practitioners of quiet diplomacy and to purveyors of our own propaganda.

Dr. Bonner is independent-minded, and not sentimental even about her own grandchildren, who are American: “Perhaps because Gorky is so distant—not geographically, but distant in other ways—I had pictured them differently. I feel uncomfortable being with them, and a certain … not disappointment, but perhaps disillusionment in not finding what I had expected to find. They are not what I had imagined them to be—not worse and not better, just different. They need a lot of getting used to, but I don’t have that kind of time.” America itself she takes as it comes, making a few scattered observations about the seriousness with which people shop, the size of Los Angeles, the abundance of yachts off Miami. She celebrates her sixty-third birthday at Disney World, and says, “Music is playing somewhere, everything here seems to be carefree, and the flowering trees confuse me—where’s the winter?” While sitting alone on the beach in Miami, she is approached by a twenty-seven-year-old bearded beach bum. They manage to converse, in spite of her imperfect command of spoken English and her growing suspicion that he is stoned, and have this concentrated exchange:

So a victim of thought control and totalitarian oppression meets a victim of freedom—one who longs, his implication seems to be, for society to be more watchful and directive. He yearns perhaps for Russia, where there is much less ocean. Bonner does not go out of her way to flatter the United States, nor does she succumb to the commonly intense Russian nostalgia: “I find nostalgia a form of playacting.… I am returning. Why? It’s not that I miss the birches, the
beryozkas.…
About émigrés. You see many living in difficult circumstances. Our close friends, almost total strangers, and many elderly émigrés—all sometimes speak of their hardships. But there wasn’t one among them who wanted to go back.” She does not look forward to the return; of her previous returns to the
Soviet Union, she writes, “As soon as I crossed the border, such a heavy fog, such darkness befell my soul that it is impossible to describe.… It takes incredible willpower to force yourself to learn once again how to breathe without air, swim without water, walk without ground.” She is returning, only, because her husband is there. And he, this book reveals, would leave if he could. Sakharov does not martyristically avoid foreign exile and its lowered profile; when in 1983 the Norwegian government offered him permanent residence, he accepted with gratitude. The Soviet authorities, however, claiming that his mind still holds military secrets from his work on nuclear weaponry twenty years ago, deny him exit.