JERUSALEM — Natan Sharansky excused himself to admit the man who had come to reconnect the gas. You know how it is with Israeli utilities, the former Soviet dissident told his interviewer apologetically. They had cut off his service without warning. And only when he telephoned to complain did he discover there was an outstanding, year-old bill for the equivalent of $10.
Sharansky still isn't sure who goofed, he or the gas company. But he has been here long enough to know that while it might be of academic interest, the issue of fault was the least of his problems: "As a rule, to reconnect is a long, long story."
Not this time.
"Oh! You're Natan Sharansky!" the gas company representative had exclaimed when he explained the situation. "Don't worry about a thing. You pay when you can and I'll send you a man right away."
Still in the Limelight
The incident was symbolic of Sharansky's new life in Israel almost 28 months after his release from nine years in Soviet jails and prison camps. There are brief moments now when he can blend in with his surroundings--for better or, in the case of an unpaid gas bill, for worse. But his name and face don't allow him to remain out of the limelight for long.
"There are some encouraging signs," said the 40-year-old activist with a good-humored glint in his eye. "Only today I was coming with Avital (his wife) in a taxi from the hospital and the taxi driver told her: 'You know, your husband looks very much like that Jew who came from Russia.' He was sure I have only a slight resemblance. So . . . maybe at some moment in the future we will have some privacy."
At the same time, he understands that his fame can still help him accomplish some of the many things he wants to do. The arrival in bookstores next week of "Fear No Evil," Sharansky's memoir of his struggle with the Soviet system, is a personal benchmark, he said. And soon, he hinted, he will throw himself into new projects dealing with the struggles of Israel, his adopted homeland.
"It so happens that at this moment I can speak, and I am speaking, with a much broader spectrum of people than, unfortunately, many Israelis do," Sharansky said. "One of the things that concerns me most is precisely the lack of tolerance, the lack of dialogue. And that's exactly where I want to contribute."
In February, 1986, Sharansky's was probably the most famous voice in all Israel after he was freed in a prisoner exchange and flown here to his people and to the wife from whom he had been separated since a day after their Moscow wedding 12 years before.
To then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who towered over the diminutive dissident at an airport welcoming ceremony, he was the "unbreakable" hero, living proof that "you can arrest a body but you cannot put in prison a spirit."
The Jerusalem Post greeted him as "the man who was bigger than the myth."
Traveling the World
Since then, he has traveled the world on behalf of the Soviet Jewry movement, meeting presidents and prime ministers, annoyed some American Jewish leaders by insisting on following his own, independent agenda, and steered clear of that hero-destroying institution known as Israeli politics.
The Israeli press reported on his trouble sleeping, speculated on whether he would be "preempted" by religious and politically right-wing friends of his wife, recorded the birth of their first child, Rachel, and followed him through basic training in the citizen army.
He wanted to be a paratrooper or some other "romantic" army assignment, Sharansky said with his characteristic self-deprecating humor. "But they checked my heart. They checked everything and they said: 'Only in the next life!' " Instead, he will do his mandatory 30 days a year of reserve duty lecturing other soldiers on his experiences.
He moved his family into a large and comfortable, but not ostentatious, apartment in a pleasant residential section of West Jerusalem, about a 15-minute drive from the Old City walls. It's the kind of quiet, tree-lined neighborhood where he can don one of the baseball caps that have become his trademark, join Avital, newly pregnant for the second time, and take Rachel for a relaxing stroll uninterrupted by people clamoring for his photograph.
Besides his public appearances on behalf of Soviet Jews still refused permission to leave that country, Sharansky's first big project here was writing his memoir, which he will launch in Anaheim next week at the American Booksellers Assn. annual convention, the beginning of a monthlong book-promotion tour.
Sharansky's book rates highly as a piece of prison literature, providing a vivid picture of the inside of Soviet jails and camps. But it is all the more remarkable for its intimate portrait of a strong-willed man forced by circumstance to find ever deeper sources of strength within himself.
