A God in Ruins

by Leon Uris

  “Media y media. Dan, Siobhan, and Father Sean are the only family I’ve ever known. I feel detached and floaty.”

  “You’re very close to completing an American wonder work. You’ve restored a lot of faith, and you’ve come through intact.”

  “Am I, Rita? All that clean? I knew when I sent Greer and Mal to Chicago to negotiate the debate with Darnell Jefferson that one of them was going to threaten him with Pucky’s dirty laundry. I warned them not to and I fired Mal, but I was not all that unhappy with what he did.” “From the moment you shared your darkest and most dangerous secrets with me, I realized you were the only whole man I ever knew or was apt to meet. Hey, you haven’t presented yourself to the voters as all silver-plated and shiny. You’ve told people a lot of things they didn’t want to hear. They get it. You don’t hide behind the Constitution, you stand in front of it. Your failings, your unbelievable courage in admitting to them—that is what they want.”

  Quinn established a mini-office near his mother’s bedside. Even in those times when she was alone with her terrible pain, she seemed to know of his nearness.

  Duncan and Rae alternated in bringing him messages.

  “I need Greer,” Quinn said.

  “Headquarters has made contact with her charter. She’ll be on your cell phone,” Rae said.

  Quinn jotted notes on the communications, handed a couple for Rita to take care of. He looked from his mother to his son to his very pregnant daughter-in-law to his daughter ... to his wife. God help me, he thought, it’s mad, but Rita looks so sexy!

  From the whine over the phone, Quinn knew the caller was in an aircraft.

  “Quinn,” he said.

  “It’s Greer. How is Siobhan?”

  “She’s hanging in. She asked for you, Greer.”

  “Look, I’m going to fly directly into Grand Junction. I’ll be there by noon. Have a car meet me. Something extremely important has come up.”

  “Can you say what it is?”

  “No. We should have a secure room to talk in.”

  “I’m at Mal’s. His studio will be safe.”

  From the studio porch of Maldonado’s villa, Rita could see to the cutoff road from Troublesome. A motorcycle escort led a car up their hillside.

  Greer emerged with a stranger. Quinn and the man stared at one another.

  “Come in, Mal, you’re a part of this,” Greer said, closing them all in a place flooded with sketches and wire statuettes and a work that had been in progress until the campaign began.

  “I want you to meet Mr. Horowitz,” Greer said.

  “Sir,” Quinn said, extending his hand.

  “Governor O’Connell?” the man asked.

  i(r >J

  Yes. “I am your brother, Ben.”

  THE SOVIET-POLISH BORDER, 1945THE

  END OF WORLD WAR II

  In the mid-twenties after Lenin died, Stalin took power. The Communists set out to destroy Jewish communal life. Religious life, educational institutions, the theatej-, the press, were forbidden. Jews were reduced to second-class citizens.

  The Soviet borders were sealed, and tragic isolation ensued. Would there be an identifiable Jewish community at the end of World War II?

  Small groups of Zionists in Russia kept a thin thread alive to the outside world. Zionism was a cardinal crime, akin to treason. The Zionists, the only Jews to survive intact, were mostly in partisan units in the forests.

  Yuri Sokolov was a teenager when he escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and found his way to Jewish partisans operating in White Russia, east of Warsaw. At the time the war ended, he was twenty-two and in command of four companies, and a whispered legend.

  Yuri knew about the liquidation of the ghettos, the massive slave-labor camps, and, later, of the genocide. As a surviving Zionist, his mission changed to finding remnants of his group and starting them on the perilous journey across Europe, then running the British blockade into Palestine.

  Marina Geller was not yet twenty when she met the fabled Yuri. She had survived the war more easily. She had been taken in by an aunt in Minsk who had married a Christian and converted.

  Marina had also come from Zionist stock. At the instant of peace, she set off to find her parents and brothers and sister. After a futile search, she realized her family was just another tiny blip among the millions of murdered Jews.

  Marina threw herself into working with the small Zionist units who were now desperately engaged in getting the survivors out of the graveyards of Russia and Poland.

  She established a safe house near the Polish border, at Bialystok. They came in twos and threes at first, mostly Zionists who had fought the Germans as partisans.

  Now and again the trickle included an orphaned child or one too ill to continue the hellish journey. She turned part of the house into an orphanage, giving a cover to the emigrant running operation. Marina was able to cull food and medicine as a “legal” orphanage. Soon she had twenty children.

  Yuri and Marina were married in a partisan wedding, and even before their passion was spent, they went back to their bitter work.

  They vowed, as couples vow, that if Yuri was ever captured by the Soviets, she would make a run to Palestine and wait for him.

  It happened in quick order, by the hatred of an informer. Yuri was captured, taken to Moscow, and charged with Zionism. It was a good day for the Soviets, for Yuri Sokolov’s name was known far and wide. He would serve as an example to the Jews that they had to conform with the regime and not attempt to establish Jewish contact on the outside.

  Although viciously tortured, Yuri refused to stand down. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in a labor camp in the Gulag Archipelago, a frozen waste on the White Sea. He was swallowed up, vanished, and all contact broken.

  The time came to close the orphanage in Bialystok. An illegal emigration agent, a Palestinian Jew named Shalom Katz, set up a daring plan to evacuate Marina, her two helpers, and twenty children.

  They rode out of Poland in a closed passenger car ostensibly holding high-ranking German prisoners. By the time they had reached the Czech border, the ruse was discovered, but they dashed into Czechoslovakia.

  The Soviets demanded the return of the train to Poland. The British demanded the escapees be taken to refugee camps. The Czech president, Jan Masyryk, son of the father of his country, refused and granted safe passage through his country.

  Marina arrived in Palestine by refugee boat just as the Palestine Jews declared independence and were attacked by the Arab nations.

  Marina was a rarity the wife of a great Jewish hero, a hero in her own right. Ben-Gurion himself and Golda Myerson believed she would best serve in America, to wake up that nation’s Jews.

  Marina traveled the American landscape endlessly to spread the message of the Holocaust and to plead for help in getting survivors to Israel.

  Her husband, Yuri, had disappeared in the tundra of the north. Only the occasional rumor surfaced, but no direct word.

  Traveling in America on the low side in 1948, she had the same mildewed hotel room, seemed to meet the same welcoming committee, speak to the same small but earnest audience, eat the same homemade meal, fly in the same jerky little airplane, until it all looked like a blur. San Francisco blurred to Oakland blurred to Los Angeles blurred to Phoenix. In those days before jet travel, none of the grand airports had been built. It was a smattering of daredevil pilots’ shows at jerkwater landing strips. The roar of the jet lay yet in the distant future.

  She traveled with a huge, neatly wrapped poster depicting her husband,

  which was unfurled and hung across the back of the podium. Her

  open-ended tour took her into small towns in Pennsylvania and Oregon, where the few quiet Jewish families wanted to listen.

  A year passed during which Marina made over four hundred appearances, building a small but active following. She simply burned out. Her life had been one long struggle. And God only knew what news of her beloved Yuri.

  A friend from th
e Israeli embassy convinced her to remain in America. When she had gotten her vitality back, she would be a strong resource among the Jews. For now she just wanted to be alone.

  Marina resumed her maiden name of Geller and vanished into a studio apartment in an area of New York City known as the Village. She was unable to make ends meet on her dole. Her knowledge of the Russian language and Russian history made her attractive for a position when she applied at New York University.

  Professor David Horowitz, head of Slavic studies at New York University, thought that Marina was an excellent find.

  Safely housed and able to meet her bills, Marina allowed the wonderment of New York to seep in. A bit of anticipation arose whenever she knew she would spend a bit of time with David Horowitz. Kind .. . soft .. . his smile and concern penetrated her depression. Soon it was lunches together, right? Just lunches. A social meeting.

  Lunches expanded into dinners. Marina was exposed to the gem shows that played in shoe-box off-Broadway houses that dotted The Village. Four months into their acquaintance, a new sound emerged when she broke into laughter during The Fantasticks.

  David was much the scholar. No siblings, both parents gone. He had married, had a child, and divorced. His three year-old son, Ben, was his weekends.

  What reached Marina most deeply was the sense of peace that emanated from David. He was so unlike her bombastic Yuri Sokolov.

  “Why am I comparing?” she cautioned herself. She had known a few men when she was on her speaking tour, but always awakened in the sludge of guilt. What was stirring her up about David was putting her into a compromising situation. She was married and promised, and promised to return to Israel.

  Word reached her that all trace of Yuri had vanished. One of his fellow prisoners thought surely that Yuri was dead.

  The woman was on the brink of madness when David Horowitz took her into his arms tenderly and led her into a safe place. Yuri was a fighter. David was a lover. She required love.

  David’s loft in the Village was a little kingdom of laughter and music and heated scholarly discussion. Teachers knew the place. Students knew the place.

  David’s great, great friend was a rogue priest, Father Mario Gallico, who taught Latin and ancient Greek at the university. Father Gallico was at their table twice a week, uninvited but always welcome.

  Cardinal Watts of the Brooklyn diocese wanted desperately to mend his priest’s wayward ideas. The cardinal needed him as a strong arm in Brooklyn, a fixer. After watching Father Gallico make a non-pastoral advance at an adoring secretary, the cardinal shipped him to Manhattan and the lady was returned to her husband.

  Marina had completely lost her mantle of freedom fighter. David totally filled her. Thoughts of marriage, of children, were not possible. When his son Ben came for Sunday visits, she hugged and loved him like her own .. . but was that enough?

  How many years had gone by without a single word from or about Yuri? Over five years. The promise to go to Israel to meet her husband had lost its rationale. Must she grieve forever for a corpse? She became pregnant, and she and David chose to have the baby.

  Alexander was born to them in 1950. The bliss of being, of existing, was theirs. On the weekends and for short trips, Alexander’s half brother, Ben, was there. The four seemed family, close and loving.

  “Marina!” a man’s voice called.

  She turned to see Shalom Katz coming toward her. She smiled and greeted him warmly, covering up her apprehension. He took her arm and pointed at a park bench in Washington Square.

  “It’s been years,” she said. “Are you still running emigrants?”

  “I’ve retired from Alyiah Bet,” he said, referring to the central underground organization. “I’m an Israeli diplomat at the United Nations. Second secretary, or something like that, in the mission.”

  Marina smiled. Shalom was a cop. Cops looked like cops and acted like cops. The Israeli underground cops were a tough bunch.

  “What to do?” Marina wondered. Tell him about her new life, as if he didn’t already know? Surely he was bringing her the news of Yuri’s demise. At the same time she wept for Yuri, she would scream out her new freedom.

  “Why am I so honored by your visit?” she asked.

  “With a real government, we are able to accomplish things impossible in the old days. I can speak to you, of course, completely confidentially?”

  She nodded.

  “We captured a high-ranking Soviet KGB station chief in Jerusalem. He was disguised as a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russians wanted him back. I was a negotiator. I gave him a list of Zionists they had imprisoned to exchange. Yuri Sokolov is alive.”

  She leaned against Shalom and shook. “How long have you known this?”

  “I wasn’t going to inform you until we got an absolute confirmation. We are going to bring out Yuri and two others in exchange for the KGB spy.”

  “How is he?” she asked shakily.

  “The gulag neither killed him nor broke his spirit, but he is a badly damaged man. He has been brutalized. It is a question of your being in Israel to meet him.”

  “Meet me here tomorrow, same time,” she said, and moved away quickly.

  Damnable Russian tragedy, the mournful music, the endless dull winters, the bleakness, the walls of cold stone, weeping women in babushkas, the drunk on the street, the listless eyes of a thousand men and women on the escalator coming out of the Metro underground.

  Oh, David, what have I done to you? You are my love, greater than anyone. Yuri brought us together, and now he is taking us apart.

  Yuri! I have been an unfaithful wife. I have betrayed you. When I had David’s child, I wanted to hear news of your death. What the hell, David and Alexander and Ben were nothing more than a dream. Russia is real. No matter what, she had to keep her rendezvous with Yuri in Israel. This great man could not be further broken with a scandal. Secrets had to be kept.

  The safety of the child was a need greater than Marina and David’s agony. Alexander had to be put up for adoption, and she would return to Israel. But how? Through the Jewish agencies her name would surely be discovered.

  Father Gallico was now Monsignor Gallico, a strong servant for Cardinal Watts. His relationship with David Horowitz remained.

  “My dear friend, my dear, dear friend,” Gallico comforted him. “So, here we are. I will see how I can get it done.”

  Alexander was a year old when Marina handed him over to Mario Gallico.

  The child would disappear inside the Catholic bureaucracy.

  From that moment on it seemed that death played a hand in silencing those people who had knowledge of the plot.

  First to die was Marina Sokolov. She and Yuri knew a moment of peace.

  They were given respite on a beautiful kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee.

  But Yuri was a wreckage of a man, blind in one eye, one leg amputated, violent headaches from his beatings. Marina poured her life into him, but as she did, her own life ebbed from her. She continued to live the big lie, frightened every day that her secret would be discovered. Always wracking her, the terrible longing for Alexander and her beautiful lover, David.

  Marina went silently, they said of congestive heart failure. It was a broken heart. Unable to go on without her, Yuri followed her to his grave a year later.

  The little convent of St. Catherine held many secrets. One of their unspoken duties was to care for certain “nameless” orphans. Sometimes, these were children of priests and now and again a nun. Other children were sent there to protect them from the notoriety of revelation.

  The less the mother superior knew, the safer for the child. “Baby Alex,” without a surname, became “Baby Patrick.” Parents, unknown. For the next two years Patrick was a centerpiece of the convent, a greatly gifted and adored infant.

  During this time the priest Scan Logan had pleaded with Monsignor Gallico for a special child for his sister, Siobhan O’Connell, and her husband, Dan, to adopt.

  David H
orowitz, sucked of will to live after the loss of his lover and child, succumbed to pneumonia, brought on by neglect of himself.

  At first Quinn didn’t want to hear the story, felt invaded, exposed in a manner that would bring the walls down on his head.

  As Ben spoke, it changed. It turned into a moment he had dreamed of and played out ten thousand times. That moment! That exact moment!

  “I was thirteen when our father died,” Ben continued. “We had become very close, although any mention of Marina and Alex was simply forbidden. Grief wore him out. Guilt finished him off. He knew nothing about where you were, who you were with, how you were faring. The last year of his life was pitiful. When I reached my bar mitzvah, he revealed to me the circumstances of your disappearance, and he told me that Marina Sokolov had died in Israel, bearing their secret.”

  “Hell of a bar mitzvah,” Greer said.

  “Our father told me that I was a man now, and had to assume a man’s burden. I only remembered my half brother in veiled tones, and somehow the name of Alexander stuck in my mind.”

  The melting away of fear in Quinn changed to a flooding gladness as Ben stopped for a drink, noting that the altitude made him dry. He took a small photograph album from his overnight bag and opened it.

  “This is our dad.”

  Quinn felt Rita’s hand grip his shoulder as he stared, and said nothing.

  Ben drew a deep breath, turned the page. “This is the only photo I have of your mother.”

  Quinn spun out of his seat and turned his back to them, mumbling to himself in a jerky voice. Ben gulped another glass of water.

  “I’m sorry, Ben, I’m being very selfish. Lord, what you must have gone through.”

  “I knew I’d find you. The search became the hub of my life. I went into police work to specialize in missing persons. After I made detective lieutenant, I joined the faculty of John Jay College for Criminal Justice. For years only cold trails—here are my kids, two boys and two girls. Well, they’re not kids anymore. And these are the grandchildren.”

  “I’m an uncle. God, that’s strange, Uncle Quinn. And I’m going to be a grandfather, and my daughter will have cousins and an aunt and an uncle .. .”