Nothing Is Forgotten_A Novel

by Peter Golden

  Papka chuckled. “You are a wicked girl.”

  “Who has a wicked Papka.”

  “I taught you too well, yes?”

  “You did, Papka. Bashe was friends with Emma, wasn’t she? And you?”

  “Bashe is from Rostov—from the Street of Jews. Emma and I meet her there.”

  “Where is Bashe now?”

  “Hold yourself a minute.”

  Yuli heard him set down the phone on a desk or table, and what sounded like a door opening and closing. Then Papka came on again. “Bashe is traveling for a month, maybe more.”

  “And when she isn’t traveling?”

  “Atlanta. In the state of Georgia. Her husband owns Jack’s Watch and Clock Repair. The address I don’t have. But in America you can look it up in a phone book.”

  “Bashe lives in America and she never sees Emma after the war?”

  “I never knew Bashe well. We rarely speak. But Emma disappeared during the war. Millions did, and we believed they died. The next time I heard of Emma, right before Michael came to us, she was dead.”

  “Thank you for helping, Papka. And I have something else to tell. When we were in Nice, and now in Amsterdam, I saw Pyotr Ananko.”

  “This is not good, Yulianna.”

  “I agree, Papka.”

  “I will get you two plane tickets for tomorrow—New York or New Jersey, wherever they land—and I will have a friend from The Hague take you to the airport.”

  The Israelis had an embassy in The Hague, and this friend, Yuli knew, would be a member of the security detail assigned to the embassy.

  “We are at the Hotel Americain,” she said, and read him the address and phone number from the matchbook she’d taken from the room.

  “You get a call in the morning with the arrangements. But be careful. Remember, I always tell you: The worst thing that can ever happen to me is if something happens to you. ”

  Her voice breaking, Yuli said, “I will be careful. I love you, Papka.”

  * * *

  Yuli took a cab to the hotel, getting out a block away, and, seeing that the Mercedes wasn’t outside, went in and rode the elevator upstairs. Michael was still sleeping on his side, and Yuli undressed in the bathroom and crawled into bed. It seemed as if she had just drifted off when the phone rang, but as Yuli picked up, she saw daylight filtering through the blinds.

  A man said, “I am Moshe. Two hours for ze plane. I vill be in lobby.”

  Before Yuli could reply, he hung up.

  Michael sat up, his face fogged with his drugged sleep. “Who was that?”

  “I spoke to Papka. And found Bashe.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ll tell you if you will buy me a pizza burger.”

  “Really? In America?”

  “In America.”

  39

  Otvali, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

  February 19, 1965

  What is expected of you? How much of your soul belongs to others? And perhaps the trickiest dilemma—when do you know if you have done enough?

  Der Schmuggler had been asking himself these questions since the conclusion of the Great Patriotic War, and speaking to Yuli in Amsterdam had brought them back with a vengeance. Yet, in the quiet of this ice-clear evening in downtown Otvali, as he sat on a bench next to his empty bottle of Armenian brandy and under the statue of his late fiancée Maria Adaskina, with the earmuffs of a ushanka pulled tight and bundled up in a surplus Red Army wool coat, the answers still eluded him. He had created this town from nothing. Even so, as he looked out at Adaskina Boulevard, which he himself had paved with Belgian block, and the shuttered shops and synagogue and church and school, and the glow in the misted windows of Café Victory, none of which would have existed without him, the fruits of his labor felt inadequate to discharge his obligation to humanity.

  Why should this be? His parents, to start. His mother, with the energy of three women, tended to the less fortunate and never failed to invite them to share the Sabbath meal. And his father, a grain dealer forever studying the Talmud, instilled in his children that while no one must complete the task of perfecting the world, they were not free to refrain from it. And those children . . . Der Schmuggler was the oldest of his seven brothers and sisters. He was off with the partisans that hot, muggy August day in 1942 when the Nazis herded the Jews out of Rostov to the Ravine of Snakes, shooting the men and killing the women and children in gas vans. His whole family had died, and Der Schmuggler had been unable to forgive himself for not dying with them.

  The doors of Café Victory swung outward, and Der Schmuggler heard laughter and saw a young couple stroll out, their arms around each other. Stepping over a snowbank, they came across the deserted boulevard, the woman’s long hair a shimmering black in the aura of the bell-shaped streetlights, and when they disappeared into a side street, Der Schmuggler gazed at the statue of Maria, her lovely face eternalized in bronze, and whispered out loud, “This is not the life I planned.”

  Man plans and God laughs. A mildewed scrap of Yiddish wisdom: Der mentsh tracht un Got lacht. Jews quoted the proverb as though it was the opening verse of the Torah: In the beginning, man planned and God laughed. Oh, the wit! Stalin and Hitler planned to perfect the world, and each of them only had to slaughter tens of millions of innocents on their roads to perfection. Did God laugh then?

  And Taft Mifflin had a plan. To seek justice for the dead. A deluded man, thought Der Schmuggler, who with a bellyful of cognac was inclined to agree with that insect-worshiping scribbler Franz Kafka that the sole meaning of life was that it ends. Regrettably, Der Schmuggler had had to assist the CIA agent. Taft guaranteed his access to American goods, and without those goods he would lose his usefulness to the party bosses and his contacts in the KGB and the Kremlin. Once his usefulness was gone, they would get rid of him as surely as Stalin had sent that Spanish Communist to plant an ice ax in Trotsky’s skull. Taft’s plan had the potential to cause him trouble—not nearly as much as his two latest undertakings, but enough, and the worst part was that to help Taft, Der Schmuggler had to send Yulianna off with the American boy, and his wounded heart told him that she would never again live in Otvali.

  Well, Der Schmuggler thought, watching two men in parkas with fur-trimmed hoods on their heads exiting from Café Victory, life was unpredictable. Maybe he too would one day land in America.

  The men walked toward him across the boulevard, and as they passed, Der Schmuggler noticed that one of them was holding something against his side, and just as he realized that it was a truncheon, a cord dropped over his neck and the hard rubber club landed against his hat. Instinctively, Der Schmuggler tried to slip his fingers underneath the cord to pull it off his throat, but the truncheon hit him again while the cord tightened, and he couldn’t breathe and felt as if his brain were about to explode. Glancing up at the statue of Maria, Der Schmuggler reassured her that he had never loved another woman, certainly not the ones he visited in the brothels on his travels, and as the cord cut into his neck and the truncheon kept striking his head, he stopped struggling, dropping his arms and closing his eyes. A great calmness spread through him, and he was happy that he would be seeing Maria again, a reunion that had filled his dreams ever since the Nazis had hanged her.

  A Buchanka, a van that looked as if four wheels had been glued to the bottom of a steel crate, rolled up toward the bench. A man jumped out of the passenger side and helped the two men in the hooded parkas stretch out Der Schmuggler across the rear seat, and then the men got in, and the van drove away.

  Part VIII

  40

  South Orange, New Jersey

  February 22, 1965

  Snow was settling on the houses along Montague Place and up the hill of Radel Terrace. The silvery flakes spun through the light of the gas lamps and seemed to drift to evenings gone by, when I would sit on these steps and harbor no grander wish than that school would be canceled in the morning. Now it was as if this staircase ran through my present a
nd past. Upstairs, I heard Yuli taking a shower. Downstairs was the doorway to the kitchen, and I remembered chopping carrots with my grandmother to prepare plov—one of her classic winter meals, a chicken and rice dish seasoned with cumin, garlic, and peppercorns.

  Yuli and I had been here for three weeks. The morning after we flew in from Amsterdam, I had phoned Information in Atlanta, got the number for Jack’s Watch and Clock Repair, and called. A man with a heavy European accent answered, and when I asked for Bashe, he replied, “Not here. She come in March,” and hung up.

  I delayed contacting the art dealer in Charleston; we would see him on our drive to Georgia. So for the next several weeks, Yuli and I had the rapturous illusion of living outside of time. Our lovemaking seemed to be without beginning or end, and as the wind blew snow against the bedroom windows, the air around us felt saturated with sunlight—a summery air, sweet as baby oil and briny as the sea. And we were always hungry. We went to Alex Eng for Chinese; Ann’s Clam Bar for steamers; Town Hall Deli for Sloppy Joes; and Gruning’s for hot fudge sundaes. More often than not, Yuli wanted to eat at Don’s Drive-In, where she discovered that pizza burgers do exist and, in celebration of her discovery, devoured two of them.

  A noisy, crowded hangout perfumed by the charcoal grills in the kitchen, Don’s was popular with families, couples on a date, gangs of high schoolers on Friday and Saturday nights, and college kids home on break, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when Birdman and Beryl showed up. It was evident, from their holding hands and the discomfort on Birdman’s face when he saw me, that they were a couple. I’d grown up with the rule that best friends don’t date each other’s exes, but compared to Dmitry’s death, Yuli’s childhood, and the tragedy of Emma, Gak, and their daughters, the rule struck me as less serious than a nursery rhyme. I shook hands with Birdman, and Beryl kissed me on the cheek. I introduced them to Yuli, and they sat at the table next to us. Birdman, a senior at Yale, still resembled a gangly bar mitzvah boy and Beryl could still pass for Barbie—if the doll had renounced her teen queenliness to become a beatnik. Her long blond hair was parted in the center, and she wore a black leotard and black jeans.

  “Where you been?” Birdman asked.

  “Traveling in Europe,” I said.

  Beryl had graduated early from the University of Chicago and was now at the Yale Drama School studying to be an actress, which was how she got together with Birdman, and she dominated the conversation, giving us chapter and verse on how Yale was going to found a repertory theater.

  “In school,” Yuli said. “We had to perform Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard.”

  “Where are you from?” Beryl asked.

  “Ukraine.”

  “Your English is very good.”

  “So is yours,” Yuli quipped.

  Birdman and I laughed. Beryl smiled as though unsure whether it was a joke or a put-down. From what I knew of Yuli, it was both, but all she said once we were in the car was “Your friends are nice.”

  * * *

  The next afternoon, wearing our Paris clothes, Yuli and I went to see Fiddler on the Roof at the Imperial Theatre, another of the Shuberts’ Broadway palaces, with lavishly paneled walls and crimson seats. I think Yuli enjoyed being in the Imperial more than the show, because as the cast took their bows and the audience stood and applauded, she said, “I did not know Jews sang so often in the Ukraine.”

  “Between pogroms.”

  Yuli smiled, shaking her head, and out we went for an evening in New York. Yuli was enthralled by the city. We visited a dozen times, beginning with the typical tourist spots—the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, and the Museum of Modern Art. Usually, though, Yuli wanted to go to Greenwich Village. As a teenager, she had translated the poems of Allen Ginsberg into Russian and read several Kerouac novels, so we strolled through Washington Square Park holding hands, went to the White Horse Tavern for drinks, the Minetta Tavern for dinner, and Caffe Reggio for dessert. Yuli said little during these jaunts, but her eyes darted everywhere, and one night, stuck in traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel, she said, “America is—”

  “Is?”

  We were driving out the Jersey side of the tunnel when she answered, “So much.”

  Interestingly, the place that attracted her beyond all others was Sweets. Almost every day we stopped at the candy store. The Abruzzi thugs were operating the phones in back, Eddie was on his stool at the soda fountain, and his wife, Fiona, was running things. In her plain frock, with her ginger-colored hair pinned up, Fiona appeared to be a nice middle-aged churchgoing Irish lady, but there was a maniacal bluish-green fire in her eyes, and she barked out orders to the two women from her church she hired to help her.

  The first time Eddie met Yuli was on a Saturday, with children jamming the store, and he gave her an appreciative look. “Jesus, you gotta be the biggest movie star in Russia.”

  Fiona was mixing an egg cream and winked at Yuli. “That’s right, Edward. And Yulianna, say hello to my husband, the biggest idiot in New Jersey.”

  “Why am I an idiot?”

  “Because you charged Billy Everts the nickel for his Snickers, and his mother’s alone with five mouths to feed and don’t have nickels for candy.”

  “I set up a charge account for Billy. For lots of the kids.”

  “And they’re going to pay?”

  “Hell no, they’re not gonna pay. I am. But they’ll learn about charge accounts.”

  Yuli was grinning, and she saw a little girl with a pink beret and pigtails at the row of penny-candy jars. Her arm was raised toward a jar, but she couldn’t reach it. Yuli went over and whispered to her. The girl beamed, and Yuli picked her up until she had a handful of Hershey Kisses, and put her down. Then she said to Fiona, “If you tell me what to do, I’d like to help.”

  I led Yuli behind the fountain and taught her the quickest way to make sodas and milkshakes. From then on, she asked to go to the store in the afternoons and on weekends to work an hour or two. At Sweets, Yuli was as happy as I’d ever seen her, and one Sunday, when we were walking home, I asked her why she liked the store so much.

  She stopped. “I always wondered what a happy childhood would look like. And watching those children, I know.”

  Being so wrapped up in my present with Yuli, I’d forgotten her past, and again I was aware of the gulf between her experience and mine. There were so many things I wanted to tell her—for instance, how I admired her courage—but I just looked at her behind the lacy curtain of falling snow, her face lit by a gas lamp, and folded everything I had to say to her into one simple sentence.

  “I love you.”

  It was then that her hand reached through the curtain to touch my cheek, her eyes the slate blue of the late-afternoon sky, and in that moment before she spoke, I felt as though I was watching both of us from the tops of the trees, an improbable portrait done in the softer shades of winter, two lonely people, each with their own losses, who had, through a chain of coincidences, become bound together and now stood on this nondescript street of Colonials with one-car garages and two-family houses, in a small New Jersey town.

  Yuli said, “I love you, too.”

  And I leaned through the icy lace and kissed her.

  41

  The first of March fell on a Monday, but I waited until Wednesday to try Bashe again, and as I got ready to dial, Yuli said, “Let me. I met her. She does errands for Papka.”

  Annoyed that she hadn’t mentioned this before, I listened to her speak briefly to Bashe in Yiddish.

  “She will be in Atlanta until April,” Yuli said after hanging up.

  A blizzard had blanketed the Northeast, so it would be a couple of days before we could get on the road. I went out to shovel the sidewalk and driveway, and later we did laundry and walked down to Sweets. In the evening, we hunkered down on the couch in the den, our shoulders touching, our legs tangled, and watched a movie on television, which was less interesting to me than the moonlight seeping between the slat
s of the jalousie windows and glittering on the mica-speckled gray linoleum. Then I heard music, breathy strings, and Debbie Reynolds, her voice full of longing, confessing that her character, Tammy, had fallen in love. The song brimmed with sentiment, yet that was its power—its defenseless, childlike yearning, the same feeling I had sitting with Yuli. I looked at her, she looked back, and the longing sharpened, then dissolved into a tranquil warmth.

  The song ended, and I sifted through the backlog of mail I’d dumped in a wood crate next to the couch, picking up a copy of Time. Emma could’ve read her magazines at Sweets—a stack was delivered weekly—but she used to say the store was for working, not reading, and it made me sad thinking about canceling her subscription. On the cover was a painting of General William Westmoreland, with soldiers sloshing through a rice paddy behind him. Being out of the country and because my draft board had classified me 4-F due to a heart murmur, I hadn’t followed the fighting in South Vietnam. Now, bored by the movie and intrigued by the chipper expression on Westmoreland’s face—reminiscent of Norman Rockwell’s boys in the swimming hole—C’mon in, the water’s fine!—I skimmed the cover story. With Communist guerrillas attacking our bases and killing our soldiers, I didn’t understand why the general was so chipper. I kept flipping through Time until I saw a page headlined Netherlands: A Nazi in the Canal.

  I was fuming as I finished reading that story, my feeling of betrayal ratcheting up with every word. Yuli was coming back to the couch from turning off the TV.

  “Misha, what’s wrong?”

  Standing, I gave her the magazine. She lowered her eyes to the article, which detailed the killing of Joost Ter Horst on the night of February 1—when Yuli and I were in Amsterdam. The former SS officer had been injected with phenol, a method of execution used at Auschwitz, and thrown into the canal near the Anne Frank House. Two days later, a letter arrived at publications in Europe and South America stating that if West Germany let the statute of limitations expire, Ter Horst would not be the last war criminal to die—a sentence, according to the article, that had probably been carried out by the Mossad.