She easily found the twine and paper package where she kept a stack of rubles, once as thick as a hardcover book. Her store had been depleted over the last several months, but she trusted it would be replenished after her next drop.
Moving quickly, she took a pile about a centimeter thick, stacked with bills worth a few hundred rubles, and replaced the rest in the package.
When she finally shimmied out of the crawl space, less than a minute had passed. Following a familiar pattern, she took the opaque canister she used for sugar from the cabinet. She poured most of the sugar into an empty bowl, placed the money in the cannister, and then poured the sugar back inside to cover the rubles.
Eying the mezuzah Mendel had placed on the kitchen doorway, she called her mother on the telephone. “Vera said you wanted us to come over today.”
“Yes, how are things with Mendel?” Renata asked.
“Some things haven’t changed,” Sofia said. “He’s outside smoking.” It was a habit she had never liked. She hadn’t missed the stale smell of cigarettes in her apartment.
She felt petty for even thinking of it now, though. She should just be happy he was home.
“But other things have changed?” Mama asked meaningfully.
“You’ve seen him.” She couldn’t voice her suspicions over the phone. Even in person, she would have to be very circumspect. Most of all, she couldn’t let Mendel know she suspected him.
“Do you still need sugar?” she asked.
“Yes. Can you spare a cup?” Her mother asked, playing along, acknowledging the coded request.
“Konechno,” Sofia said as Mendel poked his head into the kitchen. She told him, “I’m on the phone with my mother.”
“Ask him what kind of cookies he likes now,” Renata said, and Sofia relayed the question.
“Oatmeal raisin,” he said. Renata heard him. “Ah, that hasn’t changed either,” she said. “I’ll start on them now. Don’t forget to bring me more sugar.”
“No problem,” Sofia said, but she had a niggle of worry. In the years she had been delivering these weekly installments of cash to her parents, she had never been stopped. Not once.
But she had always run the errand alone. Now she would have Mendel and his KGB entourage in tow.
“Your yarmulka might attract attention,” she said as they put on their coats to leave.
The last thing she needed was for them to call attention to themselves. Carrying that much money around wasn’t as dangerous as toting the Tropels, but it could still land her in hot water.
“You might want to take it off for when we walk through the neighborhood.”
“No,” he said.
“Cover it with a hat then? It’s cold out, and that won’t keep you warm,” she suggested, pulling on her own knit cap.
“No,” he said firmly. “And that’s final.”
She didn’t argue with him, and a few minutes later they exited their apartment building together.
Two agents sat on the bench by the door, waiting for them. One had a paper folded in his lap, the other a cup of coffee, but their casual air didn’t fool her. Like snakes lazing in the sun, they could strike in an instant once stirred.
She glanced nervously over her shoulder at her husband. He glared with undisguised hatred at the KGB men on the bench. Maybe he wasn’t working with them after all, she hoped. Or maybe he was being coerced into cooperating.
Maybe she hadn’t lost him. Maybe there was hope he was still on her side.
The new addition to his wardrobe set him apart, and the people they passed on the street ogled him and muttered. Mendel held his head high, in proud defiance of the interest he drew.
His arrogant display of Jewishness offered sufficient provocation for the agents to harass him, if their anti-Semitic neighbors didn’t lash out first.
Did he imagine this flimsy piece of cloth, like the scroll on the doorpost, would protect him from harm?
She was glad Kolya wasn’t wearing one.
The two agents fell into line behind them, silent and keeping an almost respectful distance, just as they had last night.
Knowing Mendel had, wittingly or unwittingly, recently installed bugs in their apartment, she had to wonder whether the tail was just for show and their non-interference stemmed from knowing he was their creature.
When she and Mendel reached her parents’ apartment, Mendel’s KGB agents joined up with her father’s. No one interfered with them or even made a rude remark.
Something was off.
Renata greeted them at the door and fussed over Mendel. “You poor thing! You’re so thin. They didn’t feed you at all. Well, don’t worry, I’m going to make all of your favorites. I just put the oatmeal cookies in the oven.” Her mother turned to her next, kissing her on both cheeks. Renata smelled of cinnamon and vanilla. She asked Sofia, “Did you bring the sugar?”
Sofia extracted the canister from her handbag.
“Let me go put this away,” Renata said. “Ilya, Sofia and Mendel are here,” she called over her shoulder and bustled to the kitchen.
“Molodetz.” Her father, Ilya, rose slowly, heavily from his easy chair, pretending it was an effort to come greet them, when in reality he was giving Renata cover to hide the canister.
Like her, her parents were always acting for an audience, aware the KGB or their army of informants were watching and listening.
They always had to be careful. The information they shared or concealed had implications for so many other people. Like other Soviet Jews, her parents had both lost their jobs when they declared their intention to emigrate. Her mother, once a respected surgeon, now worked as a lowly dishwasher and her father an elevator operator on the late shift in a hotel. Unlike others, though, they were at the heart of Jewish resistance.
Renata tended to the members of the community and judiciously doled out the money, medications, and medical supplies the community received from their friends abroad, while Ilya’s samizdat published and disseminated reports on the persecution of Jews, especially the mistreatment related to the seemingly regular arrests, trials, and imprisonments.
For her part in the family plot, Sofia, along with her cousin, Edik, fenced black market goods provided by their western contacts. She led her parents to believe the money she delivered every week came entirely from these sales.
“Come, Mendel, maybe you want some tea? And some cookies, too, of course. We need to put a little weight back on you.” Renata had always loved to dote on Mendel.
“I’ll have some tea,” Mendel said, gracing Renata with a shy smile he had yet to bestow on Sofia.
As Mendel followed her mother to the kitchen, Ilya pulled her aside. He led her into the living room, where the TV played at full volume on a station full of static, her father’s favored technique for foiling the KGB’s attempts to eavesdrop.
“Did the agents give you any trouble?” he whispered directly in her ear.
“No.”
“Surprising,” he said. “I wonder why.”
“Maybe they think prison scared him out of causing more trouble?” she suggested, even though she had other, stronger suspicions.
Ilya scowled at her. “He was an activist, a known troublemaker. Do you really think they’re that stupid and lazy that they wouldn’t do their best to intimidate him, at least for the first few months after his release?”
“No,” she admitted.
“We have to be extremely careful around him,” Ilya said. “He can’t be trusted.”
“I know,” she said. For a brief moment, she squeezed her eyes shut, her heart rebelling. She envied her parents their partnership. They shared their secrets, while she hoarded all of hers. For five years, she had told herself everything would be different when Mendel came home.
She had imagined she wouldn’t be alone anymore.
Spying was a lonely business. She felt the pressure of all of those secrets building inside her. Sometimes she wondered how long she could remain self-contained without bursting apart.
She hadn’t survived this long by blinding herself with denial and hopeless wishes. Her life depended on being clear-eyed about the dangers and risks she faced. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes.
The time for wishing was over, and she splashed back into her frigid reality.
“He seems to have allied himself with the rabbi,” she said.
Ilya raised a bushy eyebrow as he contemplated this news. “Does he know about the money? Or the lists?”
“No, I haven’t told him anything.” And she hadn’t told her parents the whole truth either.
“Keep it that way,” Ilya advised.
Chapter EIGHT
VERA
VERA CLUTCHED HER schoolbooks nervously and waited for Petya to answer the bell.
She waited a long time at the door. She rang the buzzer a second time. Anxiously, she moved from foot to foot.
Finally, the door opened. She was greeted, not by the skinny boy she knew or a laughing gaggle of classmates, but by her own fantasy man.
He was real enough, flesh and blood, not a daydream. Petya’s older brother had been the heart throb of the school until he graduated two years ago. Vera vividly recalled the girls’ fighting over whether Gennady had glanced at one or another of them, posturing over who could and should win his favor. Since he was the best at everything in school,—math, science, language, sports—the girls had decided that whichever of them he chose must also be the best.
The interest had continued even after he had left them for university. His commuting schedule still put him on the city bus with a large group of them, and Vera had gathered he sometimes hung out with Petya and his friends.
Of course, she had never been invited to join the fun.
Her cheeks flushed at the sight of him. She was embarrassed by the juvenile fantasies she herself harbored, of the way she sighed over his yearbook picture and drew foolish hearts around his portrait, of the way her breath caught when he got on the bus in the morning a few stops after hers. Her infatuation was so obvious that even her seven-year-old nephew had caught on, and yet she doubted Gennady even knew her name. He had never spoken to her.
She hovered in the doorway and looked down at her feet. Maybe Petya’s invitation was a cruel joke after all. Maybe someone had glimpsed the hearts and flowers in her notebook and dreamed up a new way to torture her. If the invitation were a prank, it would be ten times worse now, the humiliation so much more poignant if it happened in front of Gennady.
She summoned enough courage to mumble, “I’m here to see Petya. He said he needed help with his schoolwork.”
“He doesn’t really,” Gennady said.
“Oh.” She bristled inside. She had made a mistake coming here. She fell for the same tricks again and again, always hoping this time would be different.
She was about to turn away, bolt back down the stairs, and pretend the whole thing had never happened, pretend she had never received Petya’s prank of an invitation.
Gennady opened the door wider. “I’m sure he just used that as an excuse to spend some time with a pretty girl.”
Wait! He thought she was pretty? No one had ever told her she was pretty before. No one really ever paid her much mind, not even her parents.
“If I were in his place, I would have sent a note to lure you here, too,” he said. “Are you going to come in or what?”
“I—” She found herself tongue-tied and deeply flattered. He seemed to shine so brightly before her. She couldn’t look directly at him.
He took her by the arm and relieved her of her textbooks. “Come inside, Vera,” he said gently. “I had no idea you were as shy as you are pretty.”
He knew her name!
And he thought she was pretty.
She felt as if she were floating in a dream as she followed him into the apartment. She hung her jacket on the stand beside a glossy hall table. There weren’t many decorations in the apartment, but she noticed that everything was of the highest quality.
A gilt-framed photograph in the hall showed a man who looked like Gennady, probably his father, in military regalia, decorated with all manner of insignias and medals, standing beside General Secretary Andropov.
She quickly looked away, pretending to herself that she hadn’t seen it. She had forgotten that Petya and Gennady’s father was a high-ranking general in the army. Her father, with his longstanding hatred of the Soviet government, would never have approved this visit. He would say she had let some petty flattery go to her head and lure her right into the enemy’s domain.
But there couldn’t be any real danger to her here, even if Petya did plan to embarrass her. She had never run afoul of the authorities, and she never would.
“Vera!” Petya called. “I’d come greet you, but I don’t want to get you sick.” He sat at the dining room table with his books spread out before him and a pile of crumpled tissue and sheets of paper at his side. “I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve been struggling over these math problems for the last hour.” He sounded nasal, and his face was pale. Dark circles ringed his eyes, and his cheekbones were more pronounced than usual.
She supposed that on a better day Petya might be as handsome as his older brother. The other girls had shifted much of their attention his way once Gennady had graduated. But to her, there was no comparison. She had an incurable crush.
“Why didn’t you ask your brother to help you?” she asked.
“What makes you think he didn’t?” Gennady placed her books on the table across from Petya. “The truth is, I’m a terrible teacher,” he said. “I know things, but I can’t explain how I know them.”
“But you can. Right, Vera?” Petya encouraged. “I’ve seen you with your nephew. You’re a natural teacher.” The little bit of praise suffused her system like a drug, making her feel warm and loose.
“I can try,” she said, and the nervous tension, the awful suspicions, eased out of her. Petya really did need her and want her here. “What are you working on?”
She sat down at the table beside him, and they started to discuss the math problem that had been eluding him. Gennady left them alone to work, and she relaxed even more. Slowly, her self-consciousness fled.
She enjoyed the role of teacher and, more than that, the company of someone her own age. Petya was a quick study. His issues stemmed from missing the material the teacher presented in class rather than from any lack of understanding.
She didn’t know how much time had passed before he started to yawn. She had so enjoyed this stretch of time with Petya, even though all they had talked about was math problems and the quirks of their teacher. She glanced up at the window and noticed it had grown dark outside.
“I’m sorry,” Petya said. “I’m so tired all of a sudden. Can you come back tomorrow?”
Her paranoid father would undoubtedly disapprove of her being in General Morozov’s home to help a boy who was an erstwhile friend at best. But she pushed the niggling feeling of wrongness aside.
“I guess,” she said, pretending nonchalance, even though this new invitation made her giddy. Tomorrow was a school day. In the past, she would have had to babysit Kolya, but Mendel didn’t want her hanging around.
She was free. But the luxury of having no responsibility didn’t give her any satisfaction. She was eager to accept his invitation to fill the time. To avoid being home all alone for hours with no one to talk to while both of her own parents worked, when other families, normal families, might be having dinner together.
At least for this little while she had mattered to someone and wasn’t all alone or invisible. She wondered, when Petya finally returned to school, would he acknowledge her the way the others wouldn’t?
She collected up her books. He rose from the table, and she saw that he had lost a significant amount of weight. His slacks hung loosely from his frame. He had always been slim, but now he looked as Mendel did, as if he’d been starved.
“Sit. Sit.” She waved him back into his seat. “You look exhausted. I can see myself out.”
He sank back into his seat, seemingly grateful that he needn’t exert himself. “Thanks,” he said. “I really mean it. It was good of you to give up your afternoon for me. And I know it’s selfish of me to ask you to come back again. You’re a true friend.”
“It’s fine,” she said because she couldn’t tell him how grateful she felt for this reprieve from solitude. “Try to get some rest.”
She hugged her books to her and headed for the door, happy for the first time in as long as she could remember.
Gennady had called her pretty, and Petya had called her a friend. Deep down, she knew it wasn’t much, but she savored those little crumbs as if they meant everything.
Chapter NINE
SOFIA
IN THE MORNING, Sofia climbed up on a chair and threw open the fortoshka, the small ventilation window in her bedroom.
The open window was a signal to her contacts that she wanted to meet. She needed to leave the window open for an hour, from nine to ten in the morning.
Mendel came into the room. “It’s chilly. Why’s the window open?”
“I like the air,” she said. “Especially when I’m folding laundry.” She gestured to the basket of clean laundry she’d just brought up from the machines in the basement.
The prospect of folding laundry was enough to send him fleeing to the other room. “Should I shut the door?” she called. “So you don’t feel the air?”
“No,” he said, and she couldn’t help feeling he wanted her to leave the bedroom door open so that he could keep an eye on her activities.
She folded the laundry and put everything neatly away and still had time to spare. She made the bed and folded the blankets Mendel had left in a nest on the floor. He had vacated the living room for the bedroom at night at Kolya’s request, but he slept on the floor.
To Catch a Traitor Page 5