by Joyce Wayne
“I don’t wish to leave Ottawa for good,” I said. Our thighs were touching now, sitting on the bench in the Kent Street Park. “It will only be for a short time. To find my family. Then I will come back to you.”
Zabotin rose to his full height. Gingerly, he placed the Panama boater on his head and pointed the brow downward. How dashing he was, how irresistible! Once, not that long ago, it had all appeared so straightforward. The Soviets and the Allies were the best of friends. The Fascists their common enemy. But it was all so fleeting. Now a new phase had started. The Russians and Americans were jockeying for territory on the bloodied European continent.
Zabotin put his hand on my head and ruffled my hair. “As an officer, I want you to know how much I respect what you are doing for the Soviet Socialist Republic, for Communism, for our people. Without you, I couldn’t go on. Moscow needs you.”
I remained silent.
“After midnight tomorrow let us meet to spend the entire night together,” he cajoled. “I won’t leave until dawn. The house on the canal is empty.”
The Soviet safe house was on the west side of the Rideau Canal, not far from the government’s experimental farm on Dow’s Lake. In summer it was a lush, green place with placid water for swimming. I’d secured the house from a Canadian career diplomat now serving his government in Buenos Aires. The ambassador, mild-mannered with a healthy apple-cheeked face, was remarkably easy to turn when we walked together along the water’s edge under a full moon.
Grierson, my contact at the Wartime Information Bureau, assured me he would be. Always willing to do his bit for Moscow, was the enthusiastic diplomat. Now Zabotin advised me that the ambassador didn’t expect payment from the Soviet Embassy for the use of his lavishly appointed home. It was a gift to the people.
Recently, the ambassador had reported to Zabotin that Nazis were pouring into Argentina and the Americans were helping them to escape. Many were scientists and engineers who’d worked on the bomb in Germany during the war. A few had already been collected from Buenos Aires and deposited at Los Alamos where they were busy inventing a bigger atomic bomb than the two dropped on the Japanese.
“The old Nazis prefer the warm, dry climate of New Mexico. Chalk River is too cold, which leaves me with exactly nothing to give the Centre,” Zabotin murmured more to himself than to me. “All the action is at Los Alamos.”
Perhaps it was not the war’s end, but the bomb that was changing everything and making it so complicated and so deadly. If I had to choose sides at that very moment, I couldn’t say who I would choose. I was accustomed to the Russians, as was Zabotin, and I hated the Americans for aiding the old Nazis and sickened by how readily they’d annihilated two Japanese cities. But now the stakes were different.
Soon I would be required to choose once again, to try to be on the right side of history. As chickens do before an earthquake, I felt the earth stirring.
Upon returning to my flat, I still wondered if Zabotin would help me to re-unite with my family, my parents and my sister and brother, or if he was humouring me. With all the talk about atomic secrets, my first duty was to my family. I’d neglected them long ago when I left Nesvicz and I couldn’t allow myself to make the same mistake twice and live with the shame of abandoning them. Harry Vine had forced me to leave them during the revolutionary war in Russia. This time I’d accept whoever would help me find them. I was certain I couldn’t do it on my own.
In fact, for twenty-four years, I’d remained amazed that Harry Vine had forced me to abandon my family. True, I’d set my sights on him, even though he was older than me. He was handsome in a pointed fashion, with intense hazel eyes that met my own without trepidation and red hair, as bright as a sprouting poppy, combed straight back under his yarmulke. When he knocked on my door back home in Nesvicz, he was pulling himself up, as tall as he could, holding a bouquet of purple and white wildflowers. He was my first and only crush. I’ve never entertained another, having learned how dangerous a girlish crush can be.
I’d mustered up the courage to invite Vine to my sister Masha’s piano recital. She was playing Chopin. Girls did not encourage boys in my shtetl— we waited for them to approach us. I was different, and I realized he was, too. Different from the other young men who would remain in Nesvicz and eventually die there, never straying from the ancient traditions of our kind. From the very beginning, I realized that Vine was not warmhearted. No, it was the totality of his reverence for God, his seriousness, or so I thought, that won me over just as I was starting to question my own girlish devotion. My mother was a supplicant to God, so free of doubt as I watched her reciting the blessing over the candles the night before the recital, while I wondered if her lack of curiosity was a flaw, like a blot of ink spilled on a white tablecloth.
On the particular Saturday afternoon we disappeared from Nesvicz, the afternoon of the ransacking of our village by the Red Cavalry, we found ourselves walking all the way to Danzig in our best Shabbos shoes. At the Baltic Sea, me, fourteen years old, speaking only Russian or Yiddish, and not a single word of English, Vine and I boarded the ship to the New World. It was Vine’s decision, and I complied. What choice did I have but to leave my parents behind, even if I was to be eternally punished for my disloyalty?
I could never have foreseen what would happen to the settlements within the Pale and how they would be decimated, no worse than that, erased by the invading Nazi army. As our ship bound for Canada sailed out of the harbour, I was more frightened for myself than for my family. I told myself that a life obsessed with tradition and strict devotion to Talmudic law would continue for them as it always had in Nesvicz. The invading Cossacks would disappear after a few days of plunder, as they had before. All the Jews in Nesvicz could recount tales of the centuries of pogroms. I imagined the rabbi saying, “The Red Cavalry are not the first, and they won’t be the last.” Vine, on the other hand, pulling me behind him, as we fled our village, promised to protect me and give me a different life in the New World, not one where we sat waiting for the next pogrom. I didn’t know how to question him or to think for myself.
When he came down with typhus on the ship, I held him close in my arms and beseeched God to save him. During the darkest moments of Vine’s illness, I recited the little Hebrew I’d memorized from singing the blessing over the candles with Mama. “Lord, our God, King of the universe … ” improvising as I went. “I implore you to give Vine the strength to survive,” I sang, tilting my face upward toward the sea-grey sky. Without him I would float up to the heavens above the cold Atlantic. Surely I would surrender my ties to the earth.
Chapter Three
1921
Nesvicz
Everything in Nesvicz was lopsided. The baker’s shop was missing the top step leading to the store, and so you had to enter from the window. The tailor was forced to board up the windows at the front of his shop after the last pogrom, so the only way to enter was through the kitchen at the back. Even the three Talmud Torahs, and the eight synagogues, were worn crooked by the biting cold, the layers of snow breaking through their roofs each winter.
The houses of Nesvicz were one or two storeys and made of wood, painted blue and yellow and even crimson. Wooden shutters framed the small windows, where lace curtains hung askew. Some houses were surrounded by uneven peg fences. Most families kept a cow and a donkey in a rickety stable. Behind the barn, the outhouse was hidden. In summer, the mamas cooked in lopsided lean-tos covered by green canvas awnings, remains of the last Great War. The insects were the only creatures that were big. I recall the homes, the shops, the animals, even the people being small. Nesvicz was a village of the little, and of the unassuming.
My house, however, was different from all the rest. It was three storeys tall, constructed of red brick, with a cement basement. In the cold room, Mama stored the burlap satchels of apples, potatoes, carrots and cabbages; the bottles of cherry and strawberry jams; the salamis and pickled meats and a variety of preserved dills and peppers that fed our f
amily. On the main floor, the kitchen walls were adorned with white porcelain tile, and grey flagstone covered the floors, not wood or dirt as in the other homes. My papa had installed running water. And off the scullery, we kept a huge enamel tub placed near the cast-iron stove. It operated on coal rather than wood.
An orphan girl came in from Sunday noon to Friday sunset to do the heavy cleaning and help Mama prepare our hearty meals. The laundress, a young, slender widow with three tiny ragamuffins, picked up the baskets of soiled clothes and linen every Monday morning and deposited them, neatly ironed and folded by Tuesday evening, weather permitting. In spring and summer, the sweet-smelling sheets were still warm when my bed was made. Mama often placed a sprig of lavender under my pillow, for good luck. “Pu, pu, pu,” she would say, spitting on the knuckle of her index finger. “May your dreams always be free of demons.”
We were as happy a family as most. Papa was strict, but not unkind. My little brother Simcha was Papa’s main concern. Simcha was unlike me or my sister, Masha, who obeyed his every word. When Papa arrived home, I would run to pull the boots from his feet while Masha brought his fur-lined slippers. He’d pat our heads, like the little yapping dogs we were, and we adored him for his attention. Simcha was different. He often hid when Papa returned from work or from playing chess in the village square. Too often, my brother was in trouble with the rabbi at cheder and he’d come home from school with a disciplinary note.
Why must Simcha question the Lord’s edicts? Why did he disagree with the rabbi’s interpretations of the Torah? Why doesn’t he acquiesce to the rabbi, as the other boys do?
When these letters would arrive, Papa removed the belt from his trousers to beat Simcha. Mama pleaded with him to stop, but the beatings became worse as Simcha grew older and more unruly. For days on end, Simcha was sent to his room, where he ate alone, ordered to dwell on an appropriate penance, all the while shunned by Papa.
By the time of the pogroms, Simcha spent more time outside the circle of our little family than in it. Still, I remained devoted to my brother through it all, bringing him treats of freshly baked rugelah or, better yet, Russian books that Papa ordered from Minsk. Simcha loved to read and we enjoyed reading aloud to each other, playing parts from Chekhov.
My sister didn’t appreciate it when I helped Simcha. “Don’t fall for his escapades,” she said whenever I climbed the steps to his bedroom with a new book in hand. “He’s bound to get you in trouble,” she cautioned. Masha was too dour for my liking, practicing her music day and night; worse, she competed with me for Papa’s affection. But I was the eldest child, and nothing could come between Papa and me, no matter how diligently Masha tried to outperform me.
When the Red Cavalry arrived, they broke the windows of our home, smashed the grand piano and cut my sister Masha’s angelic face with a sabre. Always a quick thinker, Vine pulled me down the basement stairs and out the trap door from the cold cellar. All the way to his house we ran, while I wept hysterically.
How could I abandon my family? How could he leave his? All these years later, it still haunts me.
At Vine’s home, his mother hid us in an enormous wicker trunk in the attic, praying that the Cossacks, exhausted and starving, wouldn’t bother climbing the narrow steep steps to our hiding place.
Vine’s papa was a shoemaker, the best in Nesvicz. He ran his business from a storefront attached to their house. He was hiding under the counter when the cavalry officer with the golden curls whipped him with the butt of his pistol.
Vine’s mama was right to fear the soldiers who were exhausted from war and plunder. When the Cossacks found her, they threatened to beat her head to a pulp in front of her youngest children if she didn’t light a fire in the huge ceramic stove. Vine heard his mama’s pleas for mercy from upstairs and leapt from the attic trunk to race down the stairs. Yitzhak, his older brother, the Yeshiva boy, was stowed inside the stove.
“Do you think I’m not wise to the tricks you Jews play?” the golden-haired cavalry officer roared when the stove was opened. His voice was so loud it echoed up the stairs to my hiding place in the attic. “Get out of there,” he shouted at Yitzhak, “or I’ll shoot you.”
I was shaking with such intensity inside the wicker trunk that I thought the entire house was rattling. I didn’t know if the invaders were Reds or Whites, but I did know whoever was down in the kitchen was sure to murder me if I didn’t do exactly as ordered and then more. In what I thought were the last moments of my life I asked God why I hadn’t had the sense to remain with my own family rather than running to the shoemaker’s cottage with Vine. Surely, my papa would fend off the Cossacks with his fine tongue and the bulbous leather satchel of kopeks he kept hidden in the attic.
Why hadn’t I remained by Papa’s side? But there I was, stuck with Vine in the poor shoemaker’s house. Vine suddenly began shouting for me, demanding that I come out from hiding. “Come downstairs,” Vine ordered me. “Now.”
Covered in dust from the musty trunk, shaking and whimpering, I stood in the kitchen beside Vine. The colonel was amused by my timidity.
When Vine took a step toward the officer to offer him a full bottle of cherry schnapps, I thought the Cossack would kill him. Instead, he smiled.
“Get your mother to feed us,” he ordered Vine while his eyes turned to me.
Vine’s mother, doing as she was told, set a table of salted fish and roasted chicken, sweet noodle pudding and bread from Friday’s night Shabbat dinner. The Cossacks ate until there was nothing but a few crumbs of bread remaining on her white tablecloth.
“Now, it is your turn, to do something else for me,” the colonel, sated with food and wine, said to Vine. “You seem like a clever young man. Go and collect the village doctor and bring him to the railway platform where my wounded men are dying. We must have a doctor, and you, my fine young man, friend to the people’s revolution, you are going to lead him to us.” He was pointing a silver pistol to Vine’s temple. “If you bring your Jewish doctor to the station, I won’t kill your brother, the one we found hiding in the stove. Perhaps I should have my way with your pretty girlfriend instead.” The colonel pointed his silver pistol away from Vine’s head and turned it toward me. “You Yids think we don’t know your tricks?”
I began to sob while pulling my shawl tightly across my chest. I still believed the colonel would murder us all, no matter how hard we tried to appease him. The doctor, who was a selfish man, would never agree to follow Vine to the railway platform. But Vine was adamant that we try. “Stop crying,” he ordered me in Yiddish, which the colonel appeared to understand.
Vine looked at the colonel and then at me.“Can’t you see the soldiers need our help?” he roared. That was the moment I saw Vine change. A man so devoted to God suddenly wished to be a part of the grand struggle. By the look on his face, I also knew he wanted the approval of the colonel more than he had wanted anything in his life.
Vine grabbed my arm and pushed me toward the door. As we were about to cross the crooked stoop, he shouted back to the officer. “The girl comes with me. I won’t leave her.”
The colonel smiled his wide grin and stood before me. “You should remain with me. I’ll take care of you,” he murmured, loud enough for me to hear him.
I shook my head in absolute terror. “Let me go,” I begged.
The colonel thought twice then slapped Vine on his slender back, sending him out across the stoop and into the chaos outside. “You win.” The air smelled of burning timber, horseflesh and death.
We headed to the doctor’s house and, as much as I resisted, Vine would not let me escape his grip. “Don’t look back,” he shouted above the bedlam of soldiers destroying our village, dwelling by dwelling, storefront by storefront. “Can’t you see how that colonel looked at you?”
I’d never again witness anyone display such bravery, such chutzpah, as Vine did then. He had been destined for rabbinical school before everything changed for him that night, as it did for me. I walked untouc
hed through the village with Vine, his head held high, yelling, “The colonel has sent me to fetch the doctor.” And he did. He found the doctor hiding beneath an enormous stack of discarded cornhusks and potato peelings piled next to his summer kitchen. Vine tied a rope around the doctor’s waist, grabbed the medical case beside the front door and pulled the doctor, in his Sabbath slippers, to the railway platform.
Wounded soldiers were lined up in rows on the platform at either side of the ramshackle station house. It was on the outskirts of the village, with the tracks winding into the forest. I couldn’t see where the lines of the wounded ended, there were so many, cursing or crying out for their mothers. Some were screaming in pain; others suffered silently, a cigarette dangling from a torn, blood-soaked lip.
When the colonel appeared on the platform, Vine was helping the doctor to staunch the bleeding of a soldier whose leg had been blown off. I turned away, but I could hear the colonel and Vine talking. “You’ve got the idea now, my boy,” the colonel said. “Join the modern age. Be a man. Do you want to be a shtetl Jew all your life?”
I saw the eagerness in Vine’s eyes that all but answered the question.
The colonel paused to take in the gory mess laid out across the station’s floorboards before he continued. “You can’t stay here. Go,” he said, pointing to the shadowy woodland that edged the village. “Things are changing. There will be nothing here for you by morning. If you leave now, you should make it. Take her with you, the girl,” he ordered, pointing to me.