”I`m going back. Natalie can stay here or do whatever she wants, but you`re coming with us,” he told me.
”No way,” I said. ”I`m not going anywhere with you.”
”Well, I don`t care what you want to do or what you don`t want to do!”
he yelled. ”You come with me, and that`s the end of it. I`ll get the cops to tie you up, put you on the plane, and you`re gone, and you haven`t got one damn thing to say about it!”
He was still mentally in the Soviet system. He thought that`s how it works here. I was scared to death, to tell the truth. I didn`t know if the police would really do what he threatened.
As for my mother, I think she had started liking America. She would say,
”Oh, we`ll buy a house,” and really was looking forward to doing it. But when my father said he was going back, she got suckered in, followed him along the way she always did.
”Why don`t you stay?” I asked her. ”If he wants to go back, let him go back by himself. He`ll get used to it.”
”If he`s unhappy, then I`m unhappy,” she said. ”I`m not going to live with you for the rest of my life. I`m going to live with him for the rest of my life.”
She was too loyal to him. Over here, any woman would have said, ”Get lost, leave, I don`t care what you do.”
I don`t know if she ever seriously thought about telling him off. If she had, he would have been sunk because the Soviets wouldn`t have taken him back without his family.
But she wasn`t strong enough, she just gave in. She didn`t care about her two older kids-us. She cared about him more than anything. She`d chase him no matter where he went.
I feel closer to her than to my father, quite a bit closer. But we`re still not close. That`s how people are.
Natalie wasn`t getting along with my parents, either. She was arguing and arguing with them, and the place became a no-man`s land. My parents had one bedroom on one side, and my sister had the other bedroom. My cousin and I slept in the living-dining room. After a while, things got so bad we didn`t even say hi to each other.
Poor little Mikey was in between. He could cross the border zone between my parents` part of the place and ours, run back and forth and play while my parents kept a close eye on him. If we wanted to take him somewhere, they automatically said no.
Mikey would beg or just tell them he wanted to come. It didn`t matter;
they never said yes. They were afraid they were going to lose him, too.
I turned to my cousin, real quiet, and had a talk with him. I told him I wanted to stay here. He said: ”If you really want to stay, I`ll help you as best I can. But I don`t want you to stay here and then a week later start crying that you want to go back.”
I knew I would never change my mind, but I was scared to death that they might send me back by law. I tried to look forward, the way I always do. I told myself, I`m going to stay here no matter what-if I have to sleep in the sewers, hide somewhere, I`m going to stay. I was positive. I had a positive attitude, but so what? I was still scared to death. Then my father started to get really furious with my cousin. He threatened to beat him up, or said things like, ”Maybe something is going to happen when you`re asleep.” He`d carry knives around the apartment, tear through the place, slamming doors. After enough of this, my cousin got out.
Cousin Walter Polowczak picks up the story:
For me, I told them it doesn`t matter if I break stones in the street, as long as the kids have some future. That`s what you came here for, and I want to help. They accepted the idea of it, but it got under Polovchak`s skin pretty quickly.
Meanwhile, Wally was changing fast. The bike, the language, the independence. In Ukraine he was sort of in the mud. Now, it was amazing to watch what was happening. He was very curious. If he saw something in the store, he`d have to paw it. He was getting into everything, going absolutely wild with what he found around him. It was strange to him, but he began to get used to the strangeness, even like it, while the parents never made much of an adjustment. I think that was probably because the father wasn`t going to open his mind to the possibility. He wanted to get back home.
We started taking them to my church, the Baptist church, and the parents came a few times, but it was not to their liking. When the kids continued to come with me, the parents got upset, but they couldn`t really interfere.
Some of my friends came over to the apartment and would show Natalie things she didn`t know-about how women here take care of themselves, things like that. The children weren`t completely isolated; this was not like the Soyuz anymore.
Natalie and Walter`s relationship was changing, too. When they first arrived, they were like cats and dogs, beating up on each other. The whole family was sort of messed up. Half the time I spent with them in the evening was to sit quietly and explain, ”You can`t throw things at each other and beat up on each other anymore.” Then he`d make a face at her, she`d punch him, and they`d be back at it. At times, I had to sit between them. ”If I catch you fighting, I`m going to break both your necks!”
She was older and still stronger then. ”You don`t hit him!” I`d tell her. Fine. Progress. Then he would take advantage, start pummeling her, and she`d beat the heck out of him. If I was in the house, they were fine. As soon as I walked out, they were scrapping.
Then the parents took off by themselves a few weekends, just left the kids without saying a word. They had to look out for each other; they couldn`t go their separate ways, as they had done in Sambir. As time passed, the fisticuffs came to an end. I felt they`d really changed.
Other things were happening. The situation in the whole family deteriorated. The parents almost drew a line down the apartment floor. They didn`t want anything to do with me or their own daughter and son. They only wanted Mikey.
About June Polovchak started indirectly threatening me. He wasn`t going to challenge me directly, but behind my back he began complaining that I was exerting too much influence over his children. He said derogatory things about me to my mother, and she called me, upset.
By mid-June there was no question that Polovchak was going back. There were letters from the Soviet Embassy, he was filling out papers, I could see the phone bill, and I believed that by the end of the summer, he would be gone-with Walter and as much of the family as he could control. At that point, what do you do?
If the Polovchaks had been a close family, it probably never would have happened. But they never had been close. There was a problem long before I got dragged into it. At the point at which the parents wanted to go back and the kids didn`t, they couldn`t do anything to help themselves out of the deadlock. They had no experience dealing with such deep differences of opinion.
It all started to get superserious. I knew enough to predict what would happen: One day they`d just vanish. One day, I said to myself, there`ll be plane tickets, an escort, and they`ll be gone. Period.
It was a time of real tension anyway. The United States was going to boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, and the Soviets were furious. America and half the world had condemned the invasion of Afghanistan, and the Soviets were applauding the Iranian revolutionaries who had taken American diplomats hostage in Tehran. With all that going on, this situation just didn`t feel comfortable to me.
Around June I talked to Natalie about her intentions. She declared, ”I`m not going back.”
Walter was a different problem. ”You understand what`s going on,” I said to him. ”Your father wants to take you back because he says he can`t go back without you.” He nodded. He understood everything very clearly.
When his parents tried to talk him into going, he became more hostile. He would withdraw and say nothing.
One day, I remember, Walter, Natalie and I were sitting quietly when I turned to him and said: ”At a certain point, you have to make a decision. You might only be 12 years old, but you`ve got to do some serious thinking.
”I can`t tell you to go or not to go. You`ve got to decide for yourself. Your father is going. That`s a fact. He has started making out the papers. Your question is: Do you want to go or stay here?
”Don`t decide now. Think about it a day or two, and when you`ve decided, you`d better tell me or your sister what you`re going to do.
”If you decide you`re going back, you`re going back. There`s nothing wrong with that. They`re your parents, and they want you to go back. But if you decide you don`t want to go back, if I`m going to try to help you and see what we can do, you can`t change your mind back and forth. Either one way or the other, you have to decide what you want to do.”
At this point, Natalie said, ”Well, I`m not going back, even if I have to die.”
”Walter,” I said, ”you have to decide.”
About two days later, Walter came to me. ”I`m staying here with my sister. Here in America, and I`m not going back.” That settled it and made things very dangerous because I knew I now had to find a way to save him from being forced to go back.
After years of court battles, Walter Polovchak turned 18 on Oct. 3, 1985. Five days later he was sworn in as a citizen of the United States in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. After the ceremony those present spontaneously began singing ”God Bless America.”
We finished, and people were hugging and laughing, grabbing each other and squeezing me tight, too. It was like a wedding, or the best party I could imagine anywhere, right in sight of the flag, the judge and the Capitol of the United States.
May God bless these people, I thought to myself. And my parents, too. For they had brought me here, and that had changed my life forever. They had never understood, but I was sure they would be proud of me just the same.
