(11 of 19)
The second man kept assuring me that his friend really was a first-class marksman. Then the man with the gun started to shout, "I'll show you what Afghanistan's really like! I'll turn this apartment into an Afghanistan!"
While this was going on, Lusia's friend Natasha Gesse, who was looking after me while Lusia was gone, caught sight of the pistol and told the landlady, "Pretend you're taking out the garbage and go tell the policeman that drunks are in the apartment and that they've got a pistol."
The landlady was gone a good while, but when she returned, she pretended she'd misunderstood Natasha. She had to be sent a second time. At last, several policemen appeared and led the "drunks" away.
A Theft in Gorky
The KGB never let things settle into a stable pattern; from time to time, they would commit a new outrage.
Whenever I left the building, my KGB tails would shadow me. I came to know many by sight. When I walked in the woods, I more than once flushed an observer hiding behind a tree, who would then dash away. We were prevented from making long-distance calls; whenever we went to a post office to do so, the phones were "out of order" -- KGB shadows had been there ahead of us. Once I managed to make a call by carrying out a trash can, dropping it off and continuing to a post office. From that day on, a policeman accompanied us when we took out the garbage.
The KGB did more than supervise my quarantine. From the first days, we detected signs that strangers were entering our apartment. We would find our tape recorders, radios and typewriter damaged and had to repair them many times. At first, we assumed that some of the policemen were letting the KGB agents into our apartment; then we realized it was the landlady. Whenever I went out, I took irreplaceable notes, documents and books with me.
The KGB never gave up its pursuit of my bag of documents. In March 1981, I visited a dental clinic where I was having some work done. The dental technician insisted that because this was a surgical office, I'd have to leave my bag outside. When I went to reclaim the bag, it was gone. The KGB had struck a powerful blow: I lost notes on scientific matters and current events, personal documents and letters, my diary for the past 14 months and three thick notebooks containing the manuscript of these memoirs.
I began to reconstruct the book from memory. Once or twice a month, Lusia would take what I'd written to Moscow and send it on to Efrem and Tanya in the U.S. How she accomplished this is a story that cannot yet be told. By April 1982, I had finished another rough draft. But on Oct. 11, 1982, the entire manuscript -- 500 typewritten pages Lusia had brought back from Moscow and 900 handwritten pages I had recently completed -- was again stolen, this time by what can only be called gangster methods.