At closing time, the tavernkeeper ushered his customers out into the village streets. But abject cruelty had already been ignited and kindled. Only the meager light of a crescent moon lit the way as the boisterous group of five inflamed men tramped down Targun Street. They were about to pass a thriving print shop when their leader pointed to the sign in the window. They knew it was owned by a Jew. They followed their leader to the door, locked for hours now. They pounded on the glass until they raised the proprietor and his wife out of their bed, still in their nightclothes. These drunk, angry men forced their way inside.

Their leader, Ramza Damynia, a heavily bearded giant of a man, knocked the proprietor, Maxim Volkov, to the floor with a meaty fist. "Max," a slight, scholarly fellow of twenty-seven with glasses and a neat brown beard, lay there in his pajamas and robe bewildered and unable to move. Ramza grabbed Anya, Max's wife, by her long black hair. Finding her buxom and attractive, even in her voluminous nightdress, he yanked her right up to his hairy face and tried to kiss her. She retaliated.

"Ow, ow! The bitch bit my lip," Ramza yelled.

He backhanded twenty-four-year-old Anya and sent her flying across the room to land at her husband's side. She lay on the floor whimpering, cowering, her dark eyes glazed over with mounting hatred and fear. What kind of hell would be inflicted on them next?

"Smash the presses and burn everything," Ramza raged. "Leave nothing but the ashes."

The five thugs leveled every piece of machinery in the shop with hammers and any other convenient tools they found lying about. Anya held her dazed husband's head in her lap and stroked his fore-head with trembling figures. With horror she watched as Ramza set fire to hundreds of copies of Svoboda ("Free Will" in English), the weekly political opposition newspaper that the Volkovs had writ-ten, edited, printed, and distributed themselves. When the flames licked the paper-stocked shelves and aged woodwork, everything began to burn. The dense smoke drove the instigators out into the street, leaving the two Volkovs to burn up in the flames.

But the alert and determined Anya dragged her unconscious husband to safety through a little-known rear exit leading out into an alley. Max soon regained full consciousness and struggled to stand up. Husband and wife fled from the intense heat. Once they had attained a safe distance from the roaring, crackling flames, the helpless couple watched their print shop, and their precious home on the second floor, destroyed. In less than ten minutes, the intense burning reduced all they owned to blackened rubble, collapsed beams, live embers, and ashes. Even the gold letters on the display window had turned to molten lead lumps. Everything the Volkovs had in this world was gone-except for each other.

Fire engines eventually came, but they were only able to save the adjacent stores. Even the merchandise inside those stores wound up suffering from water and smoke damage. Ramza's premeditated evil had spread beyond its intended bounds, but there would be no punishment for him or his four cohorts.

"We have nowhere to go now," moaned Max. "We have become people of the streets."

"Come along with me, dearest," Anya pleaded, "to Polina's house. She'll take us in."

Max took one final despairing look at the disaster scene. The two dejected souls walked hand in hand through the streets clear across Kharuta to where her sister, Polina, lived with her husband, Zigfried Kuzman, and their two children, Ulyana, five, and Go-sha, seven. It was after midnight when they arrived at the Kuzman front door. "Zig" and Polina quickly stifled their annoyance at be-ing awakened in the middle of the night when they learned of their relatives' plight. The Kuzman children were tucked in to bunk with their parents, and the exhausted, distraught Volkovs moved into the children's room.

Morning came, and the Volkovs had to relive the terrors of the night in the retelling of the details. Polina and Zig listened in horrified silence. Polina's six-foot, 220-pound husband had blond butch-cut hair, a pug nose, and muscular arms and legs. To add to the Volkovs' troubles, Zig had more bad news. He was between jobs. His former accounting boss didn't like Jews, even though Zig insisted he wasn't a practicing Jew. But the devious boss had found out that Zig's mother was Jewish, and that was enough for the man to discharge him.

"Without either of our men being employed, we can't last very long like this," declared Polina, while they ate scant bowls of watery oatmeal for breakfast. "We hardly have enough to feed the four of us as it is." Anya's older sister also had sleek black hair, but in a bowl cut around her ears, cupping a kind face. Creases emanating from her eyes and mouth showed signs of aging and worry.

"What do you expect me to do, woman?" cried Zig. He had been a standout soccer player in high school, but none of that mattered now. "I've been trying to find work. No one wants to hire me."

Max shrugged. "What can we do?"

Anya straightened in her chair, and with a tight jaw said, "It may shock all of you to hear me say this, but we could leave Mother Russia for good. I'm talking about both our families. After what we've been through, there's nothing left to leave behind."

Max slapped the table with the palm of his hand. "That's the God's honest truth. I'll never find another master printer's job in this city or anywhere else in Russia. If I don't find another kind of work pretty soon, none of us will be eating for very long."

"We'd have to obtain travel permits, visas, and enough cash to pay our way," said Anya.

"That's not as easy as it sounds," said Polina. "If it were that easy, we'd be leaving here right along with you."

"You mean you would leave all this and come with us?" asked Anya.

"I would. We wouldn't be leaving all that much behind," replied Polina. "This crappy two-bedroom apartment and a few sticks of furniture." Pitooey. She mock-spit air off to one side of her face.

"Nobody asked me whether I want to go or stay," pouted Zig, playing with his blond mustache. "And everyone else seems to want to leave me behind."

"Oh, Zig. You'd really stay behind if I took the two children and left here?" posed a facetious Polina. Her coffee-brown eyes were gleaming. She knew her husband's dark humor.

"Now that you've put it that way, I think I'll join you," he replied with a wink.

"Seeing that we're all in agreement, what would it take to make this idea a reality?" asked Anya.

"Assuming we could get all the travel permits and visas, and plenty of rubles," replied Max. "First of all, we'd need the means to travel to Moscow or St. Petersburg, our most likely jumping off point from Mother Russia. But we haven't decided where we would want to go next."

"How about Berlin?" asked Zig. "I've got a cousin there, Eygeny Koslova. We were close when we were kids."

"Berlin might be a starting point," replied Polina, "but I'm not happy about the idea of living in Germany or any other European city. I'm thinking farther west."

"You're thinking of dropping us into the Atlantic Ocean?" teased Anya. "Let's think big, my dears. America! I've got a cousin, Katcha Krochenko, who I think lives in New York, but I don't know her married name."

"America! Yes! I love the idea of New York," said Polina. "But how? We've only got seventy-five-hundred rubles left in our savings."

Max squared his narrow shoulders, his dark eyes alert. "We have about twelve thousand rubles in the bank. But even if we pooled our resources, we'd only have enough for airfare from Mos-cow to Berlin. That wouldn't work. We need to find other resources to get from here to Moscow. That reminds me, I had better get to the bank today before they close our account. In this village I'm sure rumors have already spread that we're dead. And perhaps it is best that the authorities believe we are dead, perished in the fire on Targun Street. That way, the Volkov names won't have made it to the no-travel lists.

"We could all drive to Moscow in our car," offered Polina. "That granddaddy of a car would never make it," groaned Zig.

"We'd break down and be stranded in nowhere. Where the hell would we be then? I've got a better idea. That piece of junk still runs well enough for city use-well, barely. If we sell it, maybe we can squeeze out the price of bus fare to Moscow for the six of us."

The very next morning Anya and Polina were at the government building filling out the paperwork for travel permits and visas for their families. Two things were in their favor. First, the Volkovs, who had published all that political-opposition propaganda, were presumed dead. Anya was able to borrow names and identification documents from neighbors for her and Max. Second, their stated travel plan was a round-trip, two-week family visit. Their stated destination was cousin Eygeny Koslova in Berlin. They were de-nied twice on their visa application for lack of minor details, but accepted on the third try. The sale of the decrepit car, plus three of Zig's grandfather's precious oil paintings, brought enough to cover the bus fare to Moscow with some rubles left over.

The bus to Moscow with two fidgety children seemed even longer than the actual twenty-eight-hour trip. Ulyana endured car sickness most of the journey and rambunctious Gosha wouldn't stay put in his seat for thirty minutes at a time. Arriving in the nation's capital city, they found the cost of lodging seriously under-estimated. All they could afford was a crowded two-room accom-modation with no kitchen and a shared bathroom down the hall. They had not made flight arrangements in advance. They had to wait another three weeks to secure six seats on an international airline. Tight quarters, meager meals, and testy temperaments were a daily occurrence during this wait.

They flew to Berlin on an Aeroflot plane nearly a month after they had left Kharuta. They applied at both the British and U.S. embassies for hardship and asylum visas. Again, they were forced to wait, this time for quotas and legal judgments. Cousin Eygeny met them at the airport in Berlin and drove them to his lovely, five-bedroom home on a broad tree-lined street.

At first, their bachelor cousin was delighted to see them and house them in his fine home, but their welcome wore painfully thin during their extended wait time. Eygeny, a tall stately man with a monocle in his right eye and a waxed goatee, was a com-poser of serious music. His profession, requiring extended periods of complete quiet, was continually plagued with two screeching children running about the rooms and sliding down staircase ban-nisters. With so many guests, especially the children, in his neat and prim household, even the maid complained of her extra work. Eygeny endured the chaos for two weeks, then found them a two-bedroom apartment nearby and paid the rent, so eager was he to have them out of his home.

After the families moved into the nearby apartment, Max and Zig looked for work to sustain the two families. Menial labor was all they could find because they didn't speak German that well. Both men discovered muscles heretofore unknown to them. Meanwhile, Anya got a secretarial job, and her salary was set aside for their next big move, the trans-Atlantic Ocean passage. Seven months later, the U.S. embassy notified them that they could proceed to New York and issued them entrance visas.

They secured passage on a Norwegian freighter out of Bremer-haven, Germany. Eygeny drove the six of them to the train station. They took the train to Bremen and then a shuttle to Bremerhaven piers, where the two families boarded. A tiny cabin just above the crew's quarters forward took nearly all the money they'd saved. They ate decently with the crew twice daily, but received none of the comforts nor benefits nor entertainments of a passenger liner.