To Catch a Traitor

by Shuster, D. B. ;

  “She said she’s going to fatten him up,” Kolya said, his voice slightly muffled by the bookcases. “And that she can make him handsome.”

  Vera rolled her eyes. “She also said to ask you to bring some sugar. She’s running low.”

  Sofia was surprised her mother had asked Vera to pass the message. The request had precious little to do with needing actual sugar, but she doubted either Kolya or Vera suspected. They had both been carefully insulated from what Sofia thought of as the family business.

  Neither could be trusted yet. Vera too easily telegraphed her thoughts and feelings, and no one could predict what a young boy might tell his friends or teachers.

  She wondered why her mother hadn’t phoned. They had long suspected a wiretap, but it had never stopped them. The KGB wouldn’t know they were up to anything out of the ordinary, especially if Sofia actually delivered a container of sugar along with what was really wanted.

  She and her mother had become adept at using routine to hide their other activities.

  Unlike the men in her family, save for Edik, Sofia and her mother didn’t have regular KGB escorts. Sofia stuck religiously to the humdrum routines of visiting family, going to work, and shopping for groceries. Occasionally, an agent would follow, but the KGB seemed to think that watching a housewife stand in line for bread and sugar or catch the metro home after work hardly rated their close attention.

  The Soviets didn’t seem to imagine a mere woman could cause them any real trouble. Sofia exploited this blind spot as often as possible.

  Mendel returned before they left. He had a brown paper bag in his hand and a hammer. He gave a terse greeting to her and to Vera and asked after Kolya.

  Kolya emerged, his white shirt buttoned and tucked neatly into his dark trousers. Kolya’s gaze slid away from his father, but Mendel stared at him as if soaking in and memorizing every detail.

  “All set?” Kolya asked Vera, as if he were eager to leave.

  “You should wear this,” Mendel said, and he pulled a black skullcap from the bag in his hand. He pushed the round piece of cloth at Kolya. Kolya took it and inspected it warily.

  “Are you crazy?” Vera balked. “You can’t make him wear that thing.”

  “It will draw unnecessary attention,” Sofia agreed.

  She didn’t like the idea of little Kolya wearing a yarmulka. In school would be bad enough, but he also had to ride the city bus. Muscovites could be very anti-Semitic. They might not care that he was just a child. She didn’t want any trouble for him. Or for Vera.

  “It will protect him. God will protect him,” Mendel said.

  God? They had never before talked of God.

  “Protect him?” Vera objected. “You might as well paint a target on his back.”

  “Don’t tell me how to raise my son.”

  “Mendel, she’s right,” Sofia said.

  “She’s a child,” he said, dismissing them both.

  “I’m like a mother to him. I spend almost every day with him,” Vera said with bristled dignity. “You’ve been home one night.”

  “I’m his father!” Mendel roared.

  Kolya moved close to Vera in solidarity. He handed the skullcap back to Mendel. “I won’t wear it.”

  “You’ll do what I say. This is for your own good.”

  “No,” Sofia said firmly. Mendel looked at her with surprise, as if he’d forgotten she was there or hadn’t expected any argument from her. “Vera’s right. It’s not safe for him to wear the skullcap outside.”

  Mendel opened his mouth to argue, and she held up her hand. “No.”

  He regarded her silently for a moment. The man she remembered could be bullheaded, but maybe he remembered that she had never let him trample her.

  “Inside then,” Mendel said staunchly. “When you get home from school.”

  “I’m going with Vera after school. Like always.” Kolya stared mutinously at his father, and Sofia expected this was the beginning of a drawn out battle.

  “We don’t need Vera,” Mendel said, and Vera drew back as if he’d slapped her. “You’ll come straight home now that I’m here.”

  Sofia reached out and squeezed her sister’s shoulder. She tried to soften Mendel’s ungracious treatment. “You’re always wanted,” she said. “But these two do need a little time to get used to each other again.”

  Vera pressed her lips together and gave a tight nod, bottling up her obvious hurt. Sofia had always thought Mendel’s homecoming would be a cause for celebration and joy. She hadn’t expected it to be so painful an adjustment for all of them.

  After Vera and Kolya left to catch the bus, Mendel went to the kitchen with his paper bag and hammer clutched tightly in his hands.

  “What do you have there?” Sofia asked as he opened the bag and gingerly placed the contents on the kitchen table.

  He held up a small rectangular object with a Hebrew letter on the front. “It’s a mezuzah,” he said and took two more from the bag.

  “A what?”

  “Inside this case is a scroll with a prayer on it. Words of God,” he explained. “We are commanded to teach them to our children, to recite them when we wake up and go to sleep, and to put them on our doorposts,” he said. “I’ll put them up for protection. On the door to every room, except the bathroom. The scroll helps safeguard the home.”

  “How? And from what?” The little boxes certainly wouldn’t offer any protection should the KGB decide to bang down her door, not unless they contained explosives. And even then.

  In fact, to her eye, the rectangular cases looked like the ideal vehicle for spy gear. She couldn’t help but wonder if, like her key fob, they contained tiny cameras or other surveillance equipment. They were certainly the right size and shape.

  Mendel changed the subject, not bothering to explain what kind of protection he thought the objects offered. “The rabbi gave them to me and also the yarmulka for Kolya. To welcome me home.”

  “When did you see the rabbi?”

  “Yesterday. And then this morning again. At the synagogue. I went to pray.” His answer surprised her. The Jewish community gathered at the Moscow Choral Synagogue every Saturday, but most people stayed outside, flocking to the synagogue as a cultural center, not a religious one. Almost no one in the Soviet Union was religious. Good Soviet citizens reserved their fervent beliefs for the State.

  While Mendel had never been a model citizen, in all of the years she had known him before his arrest, he had never ventured inside the synagogue building. Now he had been there twice in less than twenty-four hours. And he had spoken to the rabbi.

  She reached behind her and turned on the faucet to drown out the sound of what she wanted to say. Even if the objects had surveillance in them, she could make it hard for their audience to decipher her words.

  “I don’t understand. You used to say the rabbi was our enemy. A puppet for the Kremlin.” Behind her, the faucet noisily sprayed water into the metal sink.

  Mendel had strongly argued that Moscow’s rabbi didn’t represent Jewish interests in the USSR, but rather undermined efforts to highlight their plight.

  “I was idealistic and foolish back then,” he said. “I thought anyone who disagreed with me was an enemy.” The rabbi had not supported their desire to leave the Soviet Union for Israel or their social activism for human rights.

  “I know better now,” he said. “I’ve seen the true face of evil.”

  “In the gulag?” she asked.

  His whole body tightened as if she’d hit him with a live wire, and she was sorry she’d asked.

  “Yes,” was all he said.

  He turned abruptly and picked up a mezuzah and his hammer. He stalked from the kitchen to the front door, and she couldn’t tell if he was angry at her for poking at a topic he’d made clear he didn’t want to discuss or haunted by what had happe
ned to him.

  She heard him near the front door, intoning what she recognized as a Hebrew blessing. She inspected the two cases he’d left on the table. They had removable backs. She slid the back off of one and peeked inside. As he’d said, there was a parchment scroll inside the box’s compartment.

  Mendel banged the hammer, ostensibly to affix the mezuzah to the front doorpost, but she didn’t go to see. Instead, she carefully picked up the thin parchment and inspected it. It was wound around a black object the size of a thick kopek. A listening device?

  She nearly dropped the scroll in her surprise. She had never actually seen one of the KGB’s bugs before.

  Did Mendel know the bug was in there? Did the rabbi?

  The hammering stopped. She hastily popped the scroll and listening device back into the compartment.

  Maybe Mendel knew. Maybe he’d made a deal with the KGB. Or maybe he’d been duped and was installing the bugs without knowing they were there.

  Either way, he was helping the KGB spy on her and her associates. She had to be careful. More careful than usual.

  She always assumed someone was listening in. Now she knew for sure.

  What she didn’t know was whether her husband, the man who used to be her comrade in arms, was willfully complicit.

  Chapter SIX

  VERA

  “YOU’RE COMING TO my party, aren’t you, Masha?” Larissa asked loudly with a sly glance at Vera.

  Vera wasn’t invited to the party, and Larissa wanted her to know it. The other girls in the classroom quickly got on board with the new scheme, and they chatted excitedly about the party, casting haughty looks in Vera’s direction.

  Vera sank lower in her seat and doodled in the margin of her notebook. She pretended she wasn’t listening to them, that being excluded didn’t bother her.

  But she stank at pretending. She could feel the heat in her face and knew her red cheeks easily broadcast her distress to everyone. She could feel her teacher’s gaze raking over her, and she didn’t dare look up to meet the woman’s eye.

  Larissa, the other students, even their teacher all seemed to enjoy being cruel to her. They just didn’t know that they didn’t have to aim all that precisely today to pierce Vera’s heart.

  Mendel had already done that.

  We don’t need you, Mendel’s words echoed in her head, breaking her heart all over again. She’d spent every afternoon with Kolya and sometimes Sofia for years. Other than her parents, she had no one else. No school friends. No boyfriend.

  Now she had nothing to fill her time after school, other than her own studies.

  She focused on her notebook. She had written Gennady’s name there again, not that he ever noticed her, and circled it with hearts and flowers. She retraced the design now, digging into the paper with her pen until the paper ripped.

  She crumpled the page into a ball and got up from her desk to throw it out, grateful to have something to do, some reason to move away from Larissa and the taunting conversation about her upcoming party.

  “Tovarish Soifer,” her teacher called in a deceptively sweet voice. “Come here.”

  Vera dropped her paper in the trash and shuffled to the teacher’s desk. She knew that tone, and it didn’t bode well for her.

  “Did you see the paper this morning?” Her teacher waved a copy of Pravda in her face.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And I suppose you read the article about Israel?” She blinked at Vera from behind lenses that made her eyes appear huge.

  Vera swallowed hard. She hadn’t read the article, but her father had railed about it. “Lies, all lies,” he had cursed and thrown the paper in the trash in a fit of disgust.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I’m surprised. Given that you want to trade in your citizenship to move there.”

  That wasn’t what Vera wanted. It was what her parents wanted. What Mendel had convinced them to want.

  She had only been a young girl when her sister married Mendel, but she well remembered the way he had relentlessly argued with and cajoled her father, the way he had painted a vision of leaving for the Jewish homeland.

  He had convinced the entire family to embrace their Jewish identity and request to emigrate to Israel. And Vera, only a child then, had had no say, just like Kolya had no say.

  The family hadn’t been allowed to leave, and now they were no longer Soviet citizens either.

  And it was all Mendel’s fault.

  “Why would anyone want to give up Moscow for a third world desert?” Larissa piped in. “Israel’s a horrible place. Full of savages. Always ready to wage war on their peaceful Arab neighbors.”

  Larissa was the teacher’s obnoxious little pet and gleefully regurgitated the slurs she’d made on other occasions.

  “Here, Vera. Enlighten all of us about Israel. Read the article to us.” Her teacher forced her to read aloud to the class.

  “Israelis taught Nazis genocide,” the headline read. The article went on to detail how top-ranking Israeli officials had been involved in teaching the Nazis how to slaughter millions of people with smooth efficiency.

  Vera choked on the words. That her father insisted they weren’t true was no consolation right now. Her classmates looked on her with horror, and she burned with embarrassment and shame as she stumbled through reading the many horrific atrocities detailed in the article.

  “Take a close look, class,” the teacher said, standing. “See Vera here? She’s a traitor. A Zionist. A Jew.”

  “A Nazi sympathizer,” one of her classmates added.

  There was nothing she could say. She couldn’t fight back, or they might kick her out of the school, just months shy of graduation. She knew she had been privileged even to be allowed to stay in the prestigious math and science school. Her teachers and the other students regularly reminded her that her slot should have been given to someone more deserving.

  The students booed and shouted insults, and Vera was crying by the time her teacher finally let her go back to her seat at the back of the room.

  She wished she could be anywhere but here, but not Israel. The place sounded like a nightmare. So uncivilized and foreign, a land of tyrannical zealots like her brother-in-law.

  She still couldn’t believe Mendel had tried to force poor Kolya to wear a skullcap. To school. Kolya would have been lucky to survive the day without a black eye and a broken nose. He wasn’t a girl, and so he wouldn’t be spared the physical violence the way she was.

  And she hated to imagine him being shunned and shamed as she was. She cried a little harder, for herself and for him.

  She knew Sofia wouldn’t have cried. Her sister would have lifted her chin in proud defiance.

  But Vera wasn’t tough like her sister.

  She hunched in her seat, shoulders stooped under the weight of her misery. If only she could fit in here. If only she could be like her classmates. She loved Moscow. It was one of the best cities in the world. She wanted friends and a future here, not this terrible limbo of waiting for permission to go to a country she’d never seen, a country she’d only ever heard terrible things about.

  She wrapped her arms around herself and stared at her desk. She couldn’t bear to look into the malicious faces of her classmates. The teacher instructed them to take out their notebooks and present their homework. She walked up and down the rows, inspecting each student’s work and doling out praise.

  When she stopped in front of her desk, her teacher didn’t say a word. She merely dropped a folded piece of paper on Vera’s desk. A note.

  The teacher walked back down the aisle to her desk and sat down. Vera felt the eyes of the other students on her as she unfolded the note.

  It was from Petya, another one of their classmates. “Dear Vera,” it began, “You are one of the best student in our class, and I need your help.” His so
licitous flattery put her on guard. No one gave her compliments.

  She was tempted to stop reading and crumple up the note. But curiosity made her continue. It seemed he needed a tutor, and he wanted her.

  She was leery of this request for help. Maybe it was another prank, timed perfectly to kick her when she was down, right after her teacher’s harangue.

  Maybe the plea was real. Everyone knew Petya had been ill. He’d already missed weeks of school, and he was absent again today.

  Or maybe this was a nasty trick. Like the time she’d been invited to a picnic in the park and showed up at the appointed time to find everyone leaving for home, the picnic over.

  In her mind, she could hear the echo of her classmates’ laughter over her disappointment at being excluded yet again, of having her nose rubbed in how much they hated her.

  She folded Petya’s letter back into a neat rectangle. Maybe she should refuse the invitation and rob them of their amusement.

  But what if Petya really needed her? She would like the opportunity to be helpful, to spend time with someone her own age for once, to maybe make a friend.

  She would brave the risk, she decided. What was a little more laughter at her expense?

  Chapter SEVEN

  SOFIA

  LATER THAT MORNING, Mendel went out onto the balcony to smoke. Knowing Mendel would be occupied for at least a little while, Sofia took the opportunity to sneak into the crawl space unobserved.

  The crawl space looked like a wide, wooden cabinet set into the upper third of an otherwise empty stretch of wall in the kitchen.

  She climbed onto a kitchen chair, opened the hatch, and levered herself up into the storage area. Only a few feet high, there was no way to stand. Boxes full of an interrupted life cluttered the space. They belonged to Max, Irena, and Nadia, Mendel’s sister’s family, who had all been shipped off to the gulag. Sofia crawled to the back corner, behind the boxes, where she hid her own secret things, including her mini cameras.