Father granted his permission, carefully worded. It didn't say he'd given me his parental assent to leave the country. Instead, he wrote: “This is to say that I consider myself legally bound never to ask my son for financial assistance irrespective of his domicile.” We applied to the authorities, worried the formulation might not be acceptable. It was. The last four words must have done the trick. The principal applicant was Mother; she referred to me as of no use to anybody anyway, a boy who had to drop out of university due to his weak mind.

Our application to leave the country on the grounds of “humanitarian family reunification” was refused within a few weeks. The reason given was that the family reunification was seen as netselneso'obrazno— a cleverly chosen word with a wide variety of meanings, including inappropriate, inadvisable, inexpedient, unfeasible, unreasonable, unwise, and imprudent. Refuseniks could take their pick.

According to the rules, you had to wait at least a year to apply again.

Father told me that the Deputy Education Minister of Latvia had summoned him and had been quite angry. “We sent him to Moscow,” he said, “we did so following your personal complaint to me, and now he's let us down by breaking off his studies.”

I didn't think it probable that the man had been informed of my application to leave the country by the foreign visas department of the Ministry of the Interior where we'd applied; it was much more likely that Moscow University had informed the Latvian educational authorities of my departure. I don't know what reason my father gave him for my dropping out—I hoped he pretended to have those health problems I was supposed to be helping him with—but I was immensely grateful to him for not making an issue of it.