by Joyce Wayne
“Don’t ask silly questions,” Vine said, annoyed with me. He left me to walk home alone along Dundas Street, where the rough-voiced men called out foul words to me from their front porches. As I hurried away from them, I could smell their cigar smoke lingering in the night air.
I was ashamed that I was abandoned to walk home by myself. The next night, I didn’t bother coming for Vine. In retribution, he didn’t return to Beaconsfield, and I slept by myself, for the first time in my life. Afterward I felt stronger.
When Vine did appear early the following morning, it was only to shave and change into clothes suitable for cutting the heads from squawking chickens. I was in bed. “If you get up make sure not to get in my way,” he said, standing at the little basin in our kitchen. “Make the tea, I’m in a hurry.”
I wound a sheet around my naked body, since I had no dressing grown, and allowed the front to slip down exposing my breasts.
“I’ll always care for you, don’t worry,” he said, dropping his razor to kiss my neck and caress my breasts. “But the Party wants us to lead separate lives for now.”
I grew impatient with Vine, not understanding why he was so diligent, so subservient to the Party. He needed to idolize someone more than I did, or to rhapsodize over a cause, be it Judaism or Communism. I kept my judgment reserved and would remain that way.
As summer turned to fall and Camp Naivelt was closed for the season, Vine spent fewer and fewer nights sleeping on the cot in the kitchen while I grew accustomed to my own company. Most days I was alone. Vine was my only connection to the past. I had nothing to occupy my days until a woman from the Party came to visit me on Beaconsfield. She said Mrs. Meretsky was concerned about me, that I wasn’t leaving my room until late at night to go to the speakeasy. The woman promised she would enroll me in secondary school at Harbord Collegiate. My English was good enough to start my Canadian education.
I was sixteen and terrified that the other students would make fun of my English pronunciation and the way I looked, but that’s not how it turned out. There were other Jewish girls who wore lipstick to school and short pleated skirts called kilts. These girls had crossed the ocean with their parents fleeing from the Communists and they invited me into their circle.
My new friend, Rachel, tried to convince me that “it was much worse back there than it was in Canada,” but I could hardly believe her.
If she was forbidden to stay out late at night drinking and smoking with her boyfriends, she did anyway. Rachel’s parents were permanently exhausted from working at the Tip Top Tailor garment factory near the market. Her father and mother also gambled at all-night poker tables with the fancy Chinese men on Huron Street. Like me, she was on her own. Many of the girls were in similar circumstances. They hardly saw their parents who worked long shifts at the garment factories; unlike Nesvicz, where the family took three meals together, day in and day out.
At school, I excelled in English while at the same time discovering that it was becoming more arduous to write home in Yiddish. Since arriving in Canada, I wrote to Mama and Papa weekly, assuring them that I was safe, residing in the back room of the rabbi’s house. His wife, I claimed, was supervising my every move. I told them that Vine visited me every day and that he continued to study at the Yeshiva in Toronto. I was ashamed to reveal to my parents how I was behaving now that I was becoming a Canadian girl, staying out late at night, joking with my classmates under the streetlights in Kensington Market.
When Rachel became pregnant, she was sent away from school and I never saw her again. Mrs. Meretsky explained to me that’s what happened to girls who took risks. Next day, she took me to her doctor who fitted me with a rubber suction cup to insert before having relations, as she termed it. I told her that I’d do that after I married and not before, but Mrs. Meretsky insisted.
As for my parents, they, wrote to me every week. Their letters were held at the Soviet border and then again by the Canadian postal service. At times, I would receive five or six on the same day and Mrs. Meretsky would shout up to the third floor, announcing that letters from Nesvicz had arrived. I cherished my parents’ letters, but it took time for me to understand that my family was hiding as much from me as I was from them. They never complained. Occasionally they asked me if I could convince the rabbi to send them cloth for coats, and when they did, I approached the leaders in the Party, who wondered aloud why my parents needed anything from me, being that they were residing in a Socialist paradise.
Vine stayed with Betty of the gorgeous voice, who kept a room above a shop on College, just north of Kensington Market. As far as I was concerned, living without him had its advantages. Let her take care of his every need, make his tea in the morning, boil him an egg and iron his shirts. To my mind, I was becoming an independent woman, with opinions of my own and better things to do than cater to Vine. I knew from Mrs. Meretsky that the Party brass had plans for me. It was my landlady who repeatedly confirmed that I was more useful to the Communist movement as a single woman than as Vine’s wife. I was only eighteen when I was selected to befriend men on behalf of the Party. It was weeks after Mrs. Meretsky took me to her doctor for the fitting. After that the leaders flattered me, and explained that they couldn’t afford to waste my beauty.
“Don’t be shy,” Party leader Tim Buck instructed me. The woman who’d enrolled me in high school came to my room with Buck and convinced me to drop out. At the school, she posed as my mother, claiming that her husband was injured and I needed to work to help support the family. Then she instructed me on how to behave around older men, and to never act childish in their company.
When I asked Mrs. Meretsky if she thought I was doing the right thing, befriending men, she turned away and I could see there were tears in her eyes. “It’s not for me to say what’s right or wrong,” she replied. The way Mrs. Merestsky uttered those words tipped me off that she was against the party’s orders, but it was not possible for members to go against our leader.
I was not so naïve that I couldn’t decipher the direction the leader was pushing me. At first I didn’t believe I would actually need to sleep with men to turn them into sources of information, or that it would become my profession, my enduring contribution to the Revolution. I’m not certain any girl who enters this line of work does. Not the first time at least. I thought I could just talk to men, have coffee or drink some Canadian whisky, and they would open up.
In Nesvicz a bride didn’t meet her groom until the marriage was arranged. If I’d stayed there, my father would not have chosen Vine for me. His parents were poor, and my father had ideas about me. Papa never said anything in front of Mama. He was a lawyer, smart in the ways of the world, and he mentioned to me, just before the pogrom that I would excel at the gymnasium, the secondary school for clever adolescents in Russia. I never had that opportunity to find out.
I’ve often wondered if Vine fully understood the Party’s intentions for me, or if he set me up. He knew I had been schooled to never think of being with a man who wasn’t my husband.
The first older man I befriended was a Jew from Odessa. He owned a haberdashery on Augusta Street in the market. His store was crowded with well-to-do Jews who came to him for tailored suits. I was under orders to find out if he was connected to the rebel Whites back home.
“They are class traitors who oppose Stalin,” Buck told me. “Find out if there are Jews, living in Toronto, who are sending money to fund the White’s cause. Find out who the courier is.”
It didn’t take long with the Odessan before I discovered that men were willing to tell me their ugly truths and their exaggerated lies at the drop of a hat. The haberdasher was a master tailor. He’d lost his wife years ago in an accident and never remarried. I’d hang around his shop when he was closing and ask him for work. I told him I was alone in Canada and I needed to support myself.
“I can do anything. Mop the floor. Iron the suits.”
He knew from the beginning what I was angling for, but couldn’t fathom
why. Mr. Klopot didn’t hire me, but after I spent a day with him in the shop, polishing the display cases, he escorted me back to his apartment. It was two blocks from his shop, a drafty place atop the local dentist on Augusta Street. He asked me to undress although he came to bed with his clothes on except for his trousers. Afterward, he was apologetic. “I had no idea,” he said, seeing the stain of blood left on the sheets.
We drank coffee and nibbled on sugar cookies from a tin he kept beside his bed. Klopot paid me. He invited me to come back twice a week, every Wednesday after his store closed and again on Sunday afternoons when the market was deserted.
When I returned to Beaconsfield, after that first encounter with Klopot, it was very late. Mrs. Meretsky, who was listening to the radio in her kitchen, had waited up for me. She turned down the music as I approached her, but she didn’t want me to kiss her cheek as I usually did before going to bed.
“You could have warned me. Right from the beginning you knew where this was headed,” I said to her, my face flushed with shame.
I didn’t start to cry until I was under the covers in my bed. If I hadn’t run from Nesvicz, I would be married, living with a husband and a child by now. My parents would be down the road to help me whenever I needed them. I hated Vine for bringing me to Canada, and then, leaving me to fend for myself. Who would want me now that I was spoiled? At eighteen, my life was ruined. There was no getting away from the sin I committed.
I did my work for the Party and didn’t complain. When I ran into friends from high school, I either pretended I didn’t see them or manufactured stories about living with my uncle and aunt in an enormous house in the Annex, a luxurious part of the city. I even had the street name and number of this imaginary haven memorized. Supposedly, I’d dropped out of school to tutor their little children. If anyone asked me for my telephone number, I lied and said the phone company was changing it and would they mind giving me their own number first. “I’ll ring you,” is what I promised.
The person I’d become was someone I couldn’t have imagined just three years earlier. I’d be walking along Spadina, peering into the shop windows overflowing with ladies’ dresses and I’d need to stop and catch my breath, feeling that my heart was about to stop. The world was one I didn’t understand. I couldn’t believe who I’d become, seducing men for information the Party wanted. The Leader found me one day leaning against a dress shop window. “You’re pale as a ghost,” he said.
“I am a ghost,” I replied. Tim Buck didn’t bother inquiring what I meant. He took me for a drink, saying it would put the colour back in to my cheeks.
I did try to find my high school friend Rachel, who’d disappeared after getting pregnant, but no one in the market had seen her. Like me, she was spoiled before she’d even started.
Chapter Six
Klopot’s bedroom was painted red and decorated with a shiny black satin bedspread and gilt lamps with flowered shades. He said he liked the colours because they reminded him of Odessa.
“Do you still have associates there?” I asked him.
“Not many, a few,” Mr. Klopot said, blinking up at me.
We were lying in bed smoking cigarettes and drinking Coca-Cola from the bottle. Klopot had presented me with a beautiful red silk Japanese kimono to wear when I was with him. He liked to pull apart its silky folds and to put his head on my breasts when we talked. “Do you help them out, with money?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “Life is hard in Odessa. People are starving.”
I encouraged him to talk. It wasn’t difficult. He created a role for himself that was much more important than it actually was. All he did was collect cash from his wealthy customers. A fellow with a heavy Russian accent came to his apartment to pick up the cash. He carried the money back to the Black Sea port. I never knew exactly who Klopot’s allies were and why they mattered, but the Party was ecstatic when I gave them the dirt on Klopot. He was a dupe for the Whites, Tim Buck assured me. I could even name the courier. After that, I was ordered to forget about him and move on to bigger fish.
Months later I was buying bread from the bakery on Augusta Street when I bumped into the haberdasher. He admitted that he wasn’t surprised that I’d disappeared from his life but seemed oblivious to the real reason. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known,” he said softly. “I knew it wouldn’t last.”
After my victory with Klopot, the Party brass started to include me in their important meetings. All their dreams for me were coming true.
As another reward for naming the courier, I was allowed to return to Harbord Collegiate. The Party thought it best that I sound like an educated girl rather than an ignoramus. After I graduated from high school, the Party Leader found me a well-paying job as a finisher in a coat factory east of Dufferin Street and south of King Street. I could afford an apartment at the Inns of Court, a four-storey building with ornate balconies facing east toward the morning sun. A tiny elevator sporting a brass-grate door carried the tenants from floor to floor. My apartment was across the road from Mrs. Meretsky’s lodging house, where Vine continued to pay rent. His girlfriend, Betty, had moved to Detroit where she sang in a choir.
I asked him if he missed Betty. “No, I have more important things to think about than women,” he assured me. Vine was working for the Party, learning to be a leader.
Now that I had my own place, he visited me from time to time. Vine knew what I was doing for the Party, but we never spoke about it. I fixed home cooked meals for him rather than the fried hamburgers and greasy potatoes he usually ate at the diner around the block. We toasted the Revolution with shots from the bottle of Russian vodka I kept in the cupboard above the icebox.
I demanded more from the Party after my next encounter with an older professor of Russian history. More respect and more compensation for my talent. The first thing I did with the extra money was to buy white linen drapes. At Mrs. Meretsky’s I’d never been able to sew curtains for the windows. Those rooms were dowdy and I always felt it was Vine’s place more than mine even though he was rarely there. He made me feel that I was beholden to him, by incessantly reminding me: “Where would you be without me? Back in the dark ages in Nesvicz, that’s where.”
On my own, I shopped where the Canadians shopped, at Simpson’s department store at Yonge and Queen. An extremely gallant salesman, showed me how to select a quality sofa, and two matching armchairs, not the junk the furniture dealers sold in the market. The upholstery was tasteful and the manufacturing solid. I ordered a tall wooden bookshelf for the books I intended to collect. The Party paid for everything, the furniture, the books, and the new clothes I purchased whenever I wanted to look fashionable.
It would have been understandable for me to sink into a melancholic state if I’d compared the new me with what I had been brought up to be: a devout, modest girl with no need to feel important or look special. But what choice did I have as an immigrant? Vine had all but vanished from my life, I had no family in Canada and I knew no one except the comrades in the Party. If I’d tried to speak with Mrs. Meretsky, and beg her to help me, she’d decline. She was loyal to the cause.
I convinced myself to enjoy the stylish furnishings and my fashionable outfits. I told myself that one day I would either return to Nesvicz and take up where I’d left off or I’d meet a good man, my own age, who would get me out of the state of servitude I was in. But over time, instead of trying to find a way out of the Party, I just dug myself in deeper. By forgetting the rules of my upbringing in Nesvicz, or by dismissing the true nature of my work, I convinced myself that I was doing the right thing for the Party. I was sewing the seeds of revolution. It helped that I was constantly praised and coddled. I became a big macher, a big deal, in the tightly-knit inner circle of the Party, the ones who knew what my job entailed and who communicated my discoveries to Moscow. Before long, I was allowed to leave the coat factory and concentrate on my duties for the Party.
During the third summer in my apartment, I board
ed the trolley to Sunnyside beach whenever the weather permitted. My days were free. I worked for the Party during the night. It was safe shallow water in Lake Ontario, but not for Jews. On the beach a sign declared, “No dogs or Jews,” but I went into the water anyway. I swam out until the bathers on the shore became black stick figures outlined against the sun.
No one ever again could accuse me of being a timid, uncouth greenhorn. As I floated out atop the lake water, I thought of myself as a rebel and a trailblazer. I reminded myself how fearless and committed I’d become in Toronto and how I was willing to grab at any chance to make a better world. For the first time I started to wonder what could happen to me if I was exposed, if I was betrayed to the authorities. I realized, as young as I was, I could be deported for collecting secrets for the Communist Party. I pushed the notion to the back of mind and left it in the dark for years to come until I was forced to face the truth.
On a steaming hot day in July, Vine accompanied me to the beach. He wore bathing trunks, but he’d never learned to swim and wouldn’t venture into the water past his ankles. Instead he sat on a blanket under an umbrella to ensure his pink freckled skin didn’t burn while mine turned nut-brown.
He was watching me, so I swam out devilishly far, testing fate. A big wave pulled me under the current until it pushed me back against the rocky shore. My legs and arms were scratched when I emerged.
“Why don’t you sit by me?” he asked as I was moving my own blanket away from him. “You’re dripping in blood.”
“I don’t want to sit in the shade,” I replied. “Why don’t you try to wade in? Don’t be a chicken!” I’d heard the older boys swimming in the lake, calling out to the smaller ones, the ones afraid to venture out. They called them chickens and mama’s boys.
I closed my eyes to lie flat on my blanket after brushing off the sand and wiping the blood from my arms and legs. But Vine tricked me; he didn’t appreciate it when I called him a chicken so he snuck up beside me and kicked sand on my face. Bits of it landed in my mouth and nostrils. For a brief moment I couldn’t breathe. Then I grabbed the pail from the little girl playing next to me and dumped lake water on Vine’s head. He sputtered like a drowning cat.