Esperanto (Originalo)

Siberian Memories

In Memory of Leonid Brezhnev

The Zionist Who Shot Bobby Kennedy

A Siberian Memory

translated from the original Esperanto
by the author

Leland Bryant ROSS

Soviet Flag
As I recall it was the second evening before Moscow and the locomotive was pulling us without difficulty up into the Urals. We sat in our compartments, reading or playing chess or gazing lazily out the window at the passing highlands. The only other American on the train — a diplomat en route from the Bangkok embassy to a posting in Moscow — had locked himself in with a new friend, a professor from Novosibirsk, for a night of serious imbibing. The train's radio played music and, regularly each hour, a little news, only in Russian, of course. Nothing was happening; "all quiet on the Siberian front".

Suddenly, people could be heard in the corridor; louder and louder. Knocking on the compartment door. My father stood up and went to the door, opened it. What a shock! The corridor was stuffed full of people, a crowd like none we'd ever seen in the Soviet Union. As if they were a bunch of Tokyoites ready for the subway. We didn't speak Russian. I hadn't yet learned Esperanto. The only people on the train who knew both English and Russian — the US diplomat and the Novosibirsk professor — were probably drunk and in any case not available. While my father was digging out his pocket dictionary, some man floundered his way to the front of the crowd, and when Daddy came back to the door, the man raised his hand to his ear, with fingers extended in imitation of a pistol, and said loudly and clearly: "Robyairt Kyennedee, PKHKHYYUUU!" We didn't need a common language to understand the terrible news, just broadcast over the train's radio, that Bobby Kennedy was dead. The pushy mime sat down with my father and together, with the dictionary and a few shared words of German (once upon a time you had to learn German to be a pastor!) Daddy pieced together the news in more detail:

In a Los Angeles hotel Robert Kennedy had been shot to death by some Zionist terrorist.
. . .

When we reached Moscow we tried to find out further details, but we didn't know the phone number for the embassy (seemingly there were no phone books) and the newest foreign newspapers — the French and Italian CP papers — were too old. Only after we got to Helsinki, almost a week after the event, where we could buy the Paris Herald-Tribune, did we find out that the gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, not only was not a Zionist, but had been motivated in part by the sympathy between Israel and Senator (possibly President-to-be) Kennedy.

That summer of 1968 was a nervous time in the USSR and Europe, not just in the Tet-struck USA and Vietnam. Perhaps you recall that not long before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot dead; Czechoslovakia, under the Dubček régime, was experimenting with a humane socialism (and scaring Brezhnev); according to the rumors we could hear in Siberia, it seemed likely that that was to be the last summer of capitalism in Paris ... and yet, plus ça change, plus nothing changed!

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be;
and that which is done is that which shall be done:
and there is is no new thing under the sun.

- Ecclesiastes 1:9
The background music is Polyuška polye-dy (Meadowlands)
(Полюшка поле-ды)
The Soviet Red Army Marching Song
MIDI
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