Nothing Is Forgotten_A Novel

by Peter Golden

  I knocked back the espresso. “They’ll be at the cemetery in fifteen minutes. Usually your father goes alone—he and Emma had a gravestone put in for you and Alexandra. But Sister Bernadette will be there. She was very fond of Emma and is anxious to meet you.”

  Darya set her cup in its saucer. “I am grateful to you.”

  “Hey, I want a family, too.”

  She smiled, and I paid the bill. As we climbed the narrow stone stairways up toward Castle Hill, Darya, who was in a sleeveless yellow jersey dress, paused to slip into the white cardigan she had tied around her waist. “Michael, you never say my name.”

  “I wasn’t sure which one to use.”

  “My friends and some of the nurses and doctors I work with read about Hildegard in the papers, and they seemed embarrassed for me. Didn’t mention it and could hardly look at me. And some writer already phoned the school. He’s doing a book on Joost and Hildegard. If I spend my career as Dr. Freya Becker, I can imagine my colleagues and patients saying, ‘I’ve heard that name. How do I know you?’ So before starting my residency, I’m going to sell Hildegard’s house, donate the proceeds to a survivors’ group, and legally change my name. When I get to Boston, I’ll be Darya Gak.”

  “Aunt Darya. I like it.”

  She laughed, but there was more weary resignation in her laughter than joy.

  Sister Bernadette was standing outside the gate, and before I could make the introductions, she said, “Bonjour, Misha. And you, you are Darya.”

  The nun stared at my aunt, her chubby cheeks quivering, and I reckoned that it was only a lifetime of devotion and self-denial that prevented her from falling apart.

  “You are the image of your mother. Go now, go see your father. But say nothing about Emma. He never asks about her, and there is no need to burden him with the truth.”

  I hadn’t planned to join Darya, but she hesitated, looking at me, and I led her toward the bench where Gak was sitting with his hands on the knobs of his walking sticks. Darya stopped, gazing at the old man with white hair flowing out from under a black beret, white Vandyke, and black suit.

  She knelt before him. “Papa, c’est moi, ta fille, Darya.”

  Gak had been focused on the pearly slab of granite that marked the graves of his daughters, and he shifted his gaze to the kneeling woman.

  “Papa?”

  Gak let go of his walking sticks. They clattered on the ground.

  She held one of his hands. “C’est moi, Darya.”

  Something flickered in his eyes, like the sudden flare of a match that dies just as suddenly in the wind.

  “Alexandra est morte, mais Darya est vivante Je suis Darya.”

  “Darya?” His voice was as raspy as a plane shaving wood.

  “Oui, Papa. Je suis Darya.”

  Sunlight was falling across Gak, and I saw tears, like rivulets of quicksilver, dribbling into the lines of his face.

  With her thumbs, she brushed them away.

  Gak pressed her hands to his face. “Ma fille?”

  “Ta fille.”

  Gingerly she put her arms around him. In the bright, relentless light, they might have been a faded snapshot. Gradually the photograph came alive. It was a movie, not a picture trapped in time. Gak slipped his arms around his daughter, and Darya let out a sob and another and finally a string of them, rapid, high-pitched, and then Gak was sobbing too, a deep, gasping sound, as though his lungs were unaccustomed to the air.

  I left them to their private grief, walking past the memorial building with the urns of ashes and soap, and out the gate, past Sister Bernadette, and across the road. Down below, I saw palm fronds waving in the wind and the metallic gleam of cars and buses on the Promenade des Anglais and the emerald-sapphire sparkle of the Baie des Anges with the long curve of the beach, the pebbles dazzling white in the sun, and the apartment buildings and houses with orange tiled roofs, and above the sea beyond Nice, the hills as dark as shadows against the pale blue sky.

  I stood there, waiting for Darya, and wondered if I would ever see Yuli again.

  58

  South Orange, New Jersey

  April 24, 1965

  At night, Yuli thought the gas lamp on the corner of Montague Place shone like moonlight in a jar. She was seated behind the wheel of her Rambler, farther down the street, watching Michael’s house. Except for a light in the living room, the windows had been dark for five nights, and Yuli surmised that Michael had gone to Nice with Darya.

  With her hair under a kerchief, she got out of the car and walked to the house, going in the walled backyard and letting herself into the den with the spare key Misha hid under the milk box. Flicking on a flashlight, Yuli went to the kitchen and unscrewed the receiver of the wall phone to make sure a mike and transmitter hadn’t been planted, and she performed the same check on the phone in the bedroom. Yuli was tempted to leave Michael a smiley on a pillow, drawing the mouth with a Magic Marker and using her bra for the eyes. That she contemplated doing this, as she searched for bugs behind picture frames and in table lamps, was a symptom of her loneliness and how rotten she felt fleeing the hospital. Misha was bound to feel abandoned, and Yuli hoped he trusted her enough to realize that she had taken off to protect both of them.

  The newspaper accounts had noted that Pyotr Ananko and Hildegard Ter Horst had shot each other and described Yulianna Timko and Michael Daniels as innocent bystanders, but that didn’t mean they were safe. A KGB analyst at the Lubyanka headquarters in Moscow, who was acquainted with her past, might recognize the name Yulianna, then dig into the files for any reference to Michael and find that he had been in Otvali on a student visa, and put the story together. If the KGB or Stasi came looking for her, Misha would be watched, and if he exhibited the slightest sign that he knew her whereabouts, he would be snatched, interrogated, and killed.

  Even before Michael told her the man from the CIA had said she could be in danger, Yuli planned to disappear. In the false compartment of her suitcase, she had the three thousand dollars from the East German, another four thousand she had brought from Otvali, and a forged driver’s license for Natalia Adamik, who was born in Poland and emigrated to Chicago after her entire family had died in the war. On a cafeteria bulletin board, she had seen a flyer for efficiencies to rent a mile from the hospital, and in the gift shop she had bought a magazine about used cars and a newspaper. After slipping out the rear of St. Joseph’s, she got into a taxi and had the cab wait while she went in to meet the landlord, an elderly gentleman with a hearing aid. He showed her the place, apologizing that it got no sunlight. Natalia Adamik replied that she didn’t mind and gave him three hundred dollars for three months’ rent and her most fetching smile when she asked him to hold her mail until she made her final move to L.A.

  At a car lot on Hollywood Boulevard she paid eight hundred dollars for a black two-door 1959 Rambler American and fifty-six dollars for a year’s insurance. Down the boulevard she bought an atlas at Pickwick Books and plotted a random course to see if she was being followed. First stop, Arizona, where in a roadside shop she purchased a flashlight, extra bulbs and batteries, a decade-old .38 snub-nosed revolver, and a box of ammunition. Then it was up to Utah, into Colorado, across Kansas and Missouri, south to Tennessee and north to Kentucky, West Virginia, and Maryland, north again to Ohio and Pennsylvania, across New York State, down through New England, over the Tappan Zee Bridge to Manhattan, and, after eighteen days of traveling, through the Lincoln Tunnel to the Garden State Parkway.

  Since then, Yuli had gone past Michael’s every day at irregular intervals from nine A.M. to nine P.M. The azaleas surrounding the house were in bloom, a pink fire that reminded her of the bikini she bought in Santa Monica and the look of wonder on Misha’s face when she stood before him naked, the bathing suit in her hand. Yuli changed her motel every day, bouncing around the state, and she had not seen anyone tailing her.

  At last, on this evening, she figured it would be wise to sweep for bugs. She worked quickly, pausing on
ly to look at the drawing Picasso had done of her and Michael in Saint-Tropez. It was framed and hanging in the den, and Yuli felt wistful seeing it, and the wistfulness stayed with her even after she determined the house was clean and went back to the Rambler and tuned in Cousin Brucie on 77 WABC. Listening to the music, she decided to wait another month before returning to Michael, maybe two. Three months tops. If the KGB wasn’t hunting her now, by July she could scale back her worrying. Papka was gone and Yuli was never going home, so she was scarcely worth the attention KGB agents in Western Europe and the United States would attract from the CIA and FBI and the drubbing the Kremlin would receive from leaders and the press in democratic capitals if Yuli were assassinated in America. As for the East Germans: even if a connection was made between her and the dead agent, the government of East Germany didn’t fart without an okay from Moscow, and if the KGB chose to leave her alone, the Stasi would be forbidden from pursuing her.

  Of course, eventually, Yuli could take another name. No big deal. What’s in a name? Juliet asked Romeo. Natalia didn’t feel right, but Juliet, that was a pretty one. Perhaps Yuli would become Juliet, and everyone would call her Julie. Yuli to Julie. Close enough.

  And honestly, who remembers names? The names of the innocent who died at Stalin’s depraved hands? Or the millions of souls who vanished, like clouds swept away by the wind, in the Great Patriotic War and the Holocaust? Men, women, and children who were laughing, weeping, running, crawling, yelling, whispering, praying, hiding, marching, fighting, until they were silenced and transformed into bone and ash. Hardly anybody remembered their names. Even memorializing the names in granite didn’t help. Who bothered to read them? Unless the name belonged to someone you loved. And it wasn’t the name you remembered, was it? No. It was the love. The name was a code, a cipher for the love you carried with you until you yourself were gone and your remembering was done.

  On the radio, the Drifters were singing “Under the Boardwalk” and Yuli was imagining dancing with Misha when his Plymouth Fury came down Radel Terrace and turned into the driveway. In the dark, Yuli couldn’t see him, but the garage opened, and with the interior light she caught a glimpse of Michael carrying a suitcase. The garage closed. Aching to be held by him, Yuli folded her arms across her chest and rubbed her shoulders, a poor substitute.

  A minute later, the floodlight over the front doorway lit up, the door swung in, and Misha stepped onto the stoop. He was wearing his navy-blue Brooks Brothers blazer. Yuli liked him in that jacket; it widened his broad shoulders and narrowed his waist. He was looking straight up at the sky, with its silvery spray of stars, until miraculously he gazed in her direction. He seemed to stare at her through the windshield. She was almost convinced that he could see her in the starlit night, and any moment he was going to walk toward her.

  Michael disappeared into the house, the door shut, the floodlight died, and it required every ounce of her discipline not to run to his yard and yell for him to come back.

  Three months, Yuli told herself, throwing the car into gear. That was it—if everything went well. Then she would return to Michael. To Misha.

  Three months.

  And then her life would begin.

  Acknowledgments

  Nothing Is Forgotten is the most difficult book I’ve ever written. I began hearing about vanished members of my family as a child, and the stories told by my grandparents and great-grandparents have been with me ever since. I thought about these relatives as I wrote, but their presence was rarely comforting. Ghosts, it seems, have a well-deserved reputation for haunting us, and the memory of the Six Million, and the millions more who died in history’s worst convulsion, will be with me, I discovered, for as long as I live.

  Still, I’m grateful to have had the chance to tell this story. A number of people who assisted me were thanked in the Sources section, but there are many more whose help was invaluable.

  My agent, Susan Golomb, was her usual wise and steady self, along with her assistant, Mariah Stovall; and the rights director and rights manager at Writers House, Maja Nikolic and Kathryn Stuart.

  At Atria Books I was fortunate to benefit from the sound literary judgment of editor in chief Peter Borland, and editor Daniella Wexler, both of whom made this a far better novel.

  Also at Atria Books, I’d like to thank publisher Judith Curr; associate publisher Suzanne Donahue; art director Albert Tang; cover designer Laura Levatino; assistant director of publicity Ariele Fredman; publicity manager Milena Brown; managing editor Kimberly Goldstein and assistants Paige Lytle and Luqman Hamaki; production editor Isolde Sauer; copyeditor Nancy Inglis, proofreader Andrew Goldwasser, and editorial assistant Sean Delone.

  Comments by early readers of the manuscript were invaluable, beginning with the incisive suggestions of Marlene Adelstein and ending with the frequent phone calls from one of my oldest friends, Howard Dickson. Others have also been of immeasurable assistance: my sister and brother-in-law, Frann and Eric Francis; Susan Novotny, owner of the Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza and Market Block Books; Kathie Bennett and Susan Zurenda of Magic Time Literary Agency; my friends: Tracy Richard, Carol and Joe Siracusa, Ellen and Jeff Lewis, and David Saltzman; Paul Grondahl, director of the New York State Writers Institute; and the extraordinarily versatile author James Howard Kunstler, who guided me through the history of architecture and modern art.

  I’d also like to send a heartfelt thanks to all of the owners and salespeople I met as I visited bookstores, and to Kathy L. Murphy and her Pulpwood Queens for their enduring love of books.

  Once again, I found Facebook to be a rich source of photographs and scraps of history. For instance, one friend, Bob Masin, sent me a video clip of the Columbia High School Thanksgiving football game from November 28, 1963, which helped illuminate the darker corners of my memory. Another friend, Bob Moore, posted his candy-store memories from South Orange in the early 1960s, and I matched them against my own while I created the fictional Sweets.

  These groups have been particularly helpful: Memories of Living in South Orange, NJ, or Maplewood, NJ; Columbia High School Alumni; Gruning’s Ice Cream; I Miss Don’s; Vintage New Jersey; Old Images of New York; Paris Photo; America in the ’60’s; Baby Boomers 1946–1964; Baby Boomer Lives; Baby Boomer Memories from New Jersey; Holocaust Studies; Holocaust Book Reviews Discussions; Echoes of the Holocaust; Holocaust Educators of America; The Holocaust Memorial Foundation; Free Voices of Children of Holocaust Survivors; US Holocaust Memorial Museum; and Study of the Holocaust.

  As a wristwatch plays a role in this novel, I had some research to do, and I learned quite a bit from Tristano Geoffry–Michele Veneto, founder of the Urban Gentry YouTube channel, and the members of his Facebook group; and Jake Ehrlich and his website, Jake’s Rolex World.

  Finally, a tip of the hat to all of my Facebook friends who followed my posts during my research trips. Your comments and questions not only helped me clarify my thinking across a range of subjects, but were a relief from the lonely pursuit of writing this novel.

  Sources

  This work is a fictional treatment of the Holocaust and the Cold War. To re-create this history with the accuracy it deserves, dozens of sources were helpful, but the following most of all.

  Russia

  1 Brainerd, Elizabeth. “Marriage and Divorce in Revolutionary Russia: A Demographic Analysis.” In Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution 1914–22, Book 3: National Disintegration and Reintegration. Christopher Read, Peter Waldron, and Adele Lindenmeyr, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2017, 1–29.

  2 Collins, Naomi F. Through Dark Days and White Nights: Four Decades Observing a Changing Russia. Washington, D.C.: SCARITH/New Academia Publishing, 2007. The itinerary of the train trip from Munich to Rostov-on-Don was informed by Dr. Collins’s 1966 trip into the Soviet Union and can be found on pages 9–10.

  3 Damm, Katherine. “Soviet Denim Smuggling: The History of Jeans Behind the Iron Curtain,” September 14, 2014. www.heddels.com/2014/09/sovie
t-denim-smuggling-history-jeans-behind-iron-curtain. Retrieved November 17, 2015.

  4 Eaton, Katherine B. Daily Life in the Soviet Union. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004.

  5 Fainberg, Dina. Notes from the Rotten West, Reports from the Backward East: Soviet and American Foreign Correspondents in the Cold War, 1945–1985 (unpublished, Rutgers University, 2012). This is a marvelous doctoral dissertation. Professor Fainberg also took the time to Skype with me from London and to discuss the experiences of Soviet journalists in the United States during the 1960s.

  6 Hixson, Walter L. Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.

  7 Loscher, John D. The Bolsheviks, Volume II: How the Soviets Seize Power. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2009. The characterization of Govnyuk as Lenin’s favorite profane word is on page 455.

  8 McDowell, Edwin. “Exodus in Samizdat: Still Popular and Still Subversive.” New York Times, April 26, 1987.

  9 Parker, Stephen Jan. “Hemingway’s Revival in the Soviet Union: 1955–1962.” American Literature 35, no. 4 (January 1964): 485–501.

  10 Plokhy, Serhii. The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story. New York: Basic Books, 2016. The gas gun used by my character Pyotr Ananko is a documented method of assassination used by the KGB; see pages 43–44, 48, 50–51, 63, 65.

  11 Raleigh, Donald J. Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation. New York: Oxford University Press, reprint ed., 2013.

  12 Von Bremzen, Anya. Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing. New York: Broadway Books, reprint ed., 2014. Stalin’s reference to Sovetskoye Shampanskoye as “an important sign . . . of the good life” is on page 69.

  13 Woodhead, Leslie. How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin: The Untold Story of a Noisy Revolution. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2013. Nikita Khrushchev declaring the Twist and other modern dances from the West as “unseemly, mad,” and Soviet officials blaming rock and roll for “delinquency, alcoholism, vandalism, and rape” are quoted on page 63.