Last Night of the World

by Joyce Wayne

  We never went to Sunnyside together again, but I still went; still continued to swim out far into the lake and battle the huge waves, taking my chances with fate.

  My work became urgent as the possibility of a second great war loomed in Europe. I was busier than ever before. If I had been an artist I could have made a fortune sketching and selling drawings of men’s bodies. Older men were my specialty, and if I could draw their bulging stomachs, yellowed toes nails, backs sprinkled with moles, ears sprouting with hair and shrivelled penises, I’d be rich.

  By 1935, the Party began testing me with men of serious influence. They concocted a mission where my target was a bastion of society, not like Klopot the haberdasher. I was to befriend the dean of the law school at the University of Toronto. We needed a man of distinction and influence, an expert in jurisprudence, to bring the Party out of obscurity by openly supporting our cause. If I failed, I’d be downgraded to men of Klopot’s calibre. The Dean was a test of my usefulness to the Party.

  In the West, we didn’t know, then, how Stalin was ruining the Soviet Union: the midnight arrests, the show trials, the Siberian gulags. Only a few suspected, and they were expelled from the Party when they raised their concerns. For the rest of us, Russia was nirvana, a land of miracles. Those belonging to the inner circle in Toronto became a mirror of the Soviet Politburo, the pinnacle of a self-made hierarchy, and although we gushed over the ordinary members in the Party, they had no influence over how we operated. Orders came straight from Moscow and if Tim Buck disobeyed, he’d be replaced. My missions were classified. Even Vine didn’t know about the luminaries I was convincing to come over to our side.

  It took many years for me to admit what was actually transpiring in Russia. When my sister Masha wrote to tell me that the famous Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam was arrested for writing a poem that attacked Stalin, it was the first time I started to question things. “Mandelshtam has been punished, sent into exile for three years.” She was stating a fact, so the censors didn’t black out her words. She added, “our brother has moved to Łódź in Poland.”

  “I’m slim as a reed,” Masha wrote in her next letter. “Mama and Papa are also on a strict diet. You should see how active they have become. Mama walks in the forest everyday to gather berries for dinner.”

  I couldn’t discount that they were suffering, but I was powerless to help. In my parents’ letters, there was no mention of the famine. In my mind, I could still picture their gracious home with the enormous cast iron stove in the kitchen and the enamel bathtub off the pantry. Mama was as beautiful as ever, Papa as clever. She spoke a cultured Yiddish, while he roared in his rugged version of the language, overpowering the rabbis when they came to settle the petty disputes that proliferated in Nesvicz.

  After a while the letters from home dribbled to one every two weeks, then every few months.

  “We should go back,” I urged Vine, but he was adamant that we had important work to do in Canada and that Stalin would outsmart Hitler.

  Vine wasn’t lying. He had become the maven of union organizing in the garment factories and made a name for himself, which made me quietly proud of him. I never stopped caring about him, not entirely. He was my only connection to home, although I blamed him for what was happening to my parents. It was not easy to love and hate a man at the same time, to try to make him jealous without revealing a glimmer of interest. I would agonize over him anytime he came down with the flu, and then I would fantasize that he would develop a more serious illness, as he’d done during the crossing to Canada.

  By 1939, when the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed between the Nazis and the Soviets, and the Party became illegal in Canada, the letters from home stopped altogether. I never heard from my parents again.

  * * *

  Chernobyl journal

  1988

  Now that I am an old woman living in a ramshackle cabin hidden deep inside the Chernobyl forest, I try not to condemn myself, both for what I did and for what I didn’t admit to knowing.

  I was used by the men who saw themselves as world leaders, who intended “to take the country,” as soon as Canada was ripe for revolutionary war. Yet I believe, to this day, I made the only choice open to me given the circumstances.

  In the forest, everyone is equal. If you are healthy, you count your blessings. My old comrades, Fred Rose and Sybil Romanescu reside in their own hut across the path from our cabin. She is sick and lies in bed. The radiation affected her more than the men or me. Then again, Sybil always was the weakest link.

  Although Vine and Zabotin barely speak to each other, we’ve discovered a way to co-exist in our little abode. I cook. Vine tidies up when he is able. Zabotin, still spry as a teenager, hunts and fishes. He and I are in remarkable shape for people of our advanced age.

  In early spring I planted my first vegetable garden. The potatoes, cabbage, carrots and onions grow to unearthly sizes, as if they are exploding with the poison in the soil. Nothing, not even the greatest nuclear accident of all time, can kill me. Vine is another story. It is his heart that slows him down. Whenever he walks more than a few paces, he must sit down to catch his breath.

  Fred Rose, who was imprisoned for six years in the Kingston Penitentiary, accused of divulging nuclear secrets to the Soviets during the war, is as healthy as can be expected. He contracted tuberculosis in prison, but he can still walk quickly and play the balalaika for an audience. Before Chernobyl, old comrades from Canada sought him out. They revered him for his great sacrifice and devotion to the Revolution, and as the first and only Communist elected to the House of Commons in Canada.

  We have each returned to type, to the way we would have turned out if we’d stayed on in Eastern Europe and there’d been no Russian Revolution. Zabotin is the charming aristocrat of this godforsaken fiefdom, aged but dignified. He is pleased with himself. Vine is the hesitating shtetl Jew, heavy-lidded eyes pointed downward toward his untamed beard. And I am the old crone; grey mangled hair streaming down my back, gnarled hands, fingernails black from digging in the earth. But when I peer at myself in the mirror, my eyes are as bright and knowing as the stars in the sky.

  Although I have the countenance of an old woman, inside I am as youthful and fresh as when as I came out of Europe. I am dancing on the grave of the ideas that almost obliterated me, all of us. After what I’ve witnessed and what I’ve done, I am one of the lucky ones. If my body is withered and my skin marked with brown spots, dry and thin as rice paper, I remain, brimming with hope for the next generation. I haven’t given up on mankind. How could I when the world might have been destroyed by unlocking the power of the atom? Each time, mankind has stepped back from that precipice, each time good people have made their way through the darkness.

  It’s fortunate that Zabotin’s dacha is exactly sixty-two kilometres from here, just north of Kiev. And although it is still overrun with Party officials from the city, Zabotin drives in his Lada to hunt there, where the terrain is most familiar to him. After the snow flies, when the apparatchiks return to their heated offices, he sneaks into the dacha to nap on the sofa. He maintains that he doesn’t regret joining the Red Cavalry during the Revolution, nor does he have qualms about sending Vine and me away from our home in Nesvicz. He maintains we would be dead if we’d stayed. Zabotin does not apologize for much. About his actions as rezident in Ottawa, he simply boasts: “I saved the world. Who knows what would have happened if Stalin had got the A-bomb in 1945.”

  After Reactor Number Four failed, it was Zabotin who rushed the five of us into his old Lada. We escaped to his family’s dacha on the morning after the meltdown, a full two days before the officials came around to officially evacuate the citizens of Pripyat. Once again, he saved us.

  When I look back, regret is much too simple a word for what I feel. It is a gnawing torment, like the festering of a war wound the doctors can’t heal. My heart is Zabotin’s mutilated right hand. But there is also triumph. I survived it all: the Russian Revolution, the Second
World War and the Gouzenko betrayal—when the entire world was introduced to the fact that I helped the Soviets steal atomic secrets from the Americans. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg fried for it, but not me.

  Chapter Seven

  1939

  Ottawa

  Ilived alone in my apartment on Beaconsfield until 1939 when the Party sent me to Ottawa to befriend the head of the National Film Board, John Grierson. He was at the top of my list, along with a handful of journalists and government insiders. I was thirty-two, and the Ottawa posting mattered to Moscow now that all diplomatic relations between Canada and the Soviet Union had stalled.

  It was easier than I expected to make government men confide in me. I turned out to be the Party’s expert, and the leader, Tim Buck, relied on me. With bureaucrats, those with ponderous titles but insignificant work, all it took was flattery. They were surprised that I was interested in them; me, an exotic and a Russian journalist. They wanted a break from the banality of their monotonous days.

  My first target was a Canadian government official, an assistant Deputy Minister in the Department of Defense. He reviewed the files that the Mounties accumulated on illegal Party members after 1939. It was remarkable how little the Canadians knew about Communism before then. It wasn’t until Comrade Molotov signed the pact with the Nazis in 1939 that the RCMP went into full gear, gathering information about our activities. The Canadian wing of the Party was deemed illegal. To cover my tracks, I was made a reporter for TASS, the Soviet News Agency. I was no longer a card-carrying member so I could continue with my covert activities. In Toronto, I’d done my job well. I’d made friends with the right people. In Ottawa I was run from the Soviet Embassy and I thrived in diplomatic circles. All that mattered was how much information I could squeeze out of my sources and how useful it ultimately was for my handler, Nikolai Zabotin.

  Zabotin took a special interest in my triumphs. “You are a success story,” he said after I obtained some key information from the Department of Defense. “You’re ready to meet John Grierson. You’re the only one who can do it. It will not be easy like some of the others. Grierson is nobody’s fool.”

  By then, the Party was my only connection to those who would protect me from the dangers of a cannonading world. I had no one else, and unlike the way I’d treated my own family, I was willing do anything to keep the comrades on my side.

  Vine was transferred to Ottawa at the same time I was, but I rarely saw him. Zabotin preferred it that way. He never warmed to Vine even though they were landsmen, from the same village, and Vine was assigned to the most perilous operations of espionage. I suppose I was the reason the two men distrusted each other, but apart from their interest in me, their characters were diametrically opposed. While Zabotin was enjoying the comfortable high-flying life of a diplomat, Vine was on the constant lookout for action. He wanted to distinguish himself as a fighter for the cause. Zabotin had already proven himself in the revolutionary war and he was content resting on his laurels.

  My liaison with Zabotin was different, of course, than my other trysts. I worked for him and we had history. Shortly after arriving in Ottawa, I found myself flirting with him at embassy soirees. He was the most attractive man in the room and he took a discernable interest in me.

  At my first Soviet Embassy gathering, I’d recognized Zabotin as soon as he entered the room. He’d changed, the blond curls were greying, and his step was slower. But the beaming smile, the aquiline nose, the aura of power surrounding him was the same as the day he threatened to kill Vine and accost me in Nesvicz. He didn’t even appear surprised, or ashamed to see me.

  I was frightened as he approached, dressed in his full military uniform. I noticed that he wore a glove on his right hand and he didn’t offer it in a handshake when I faced him straight on. “It’s been too long,” he said to me in English as I asked myself what he could do to me now that he was my handler.

  However terrified I was, I looked him in the eyes. Of course, he remembered me, and what he’d done back in my village of Nesvicz. He was the reason I’d fled Europe in the first place, he and Vine. If I mentioned the Red Cavalry pogrom, I was certain he would find a way to hurt me.

  I remained silent, as Zabotin guided me to the bar. We stood together for what seemed like hours, as he recounted his tales of bravery with the Red Army. He was proud of himself.

  “How did you approach that bureaucrat in Defense?” Zabotin asked me after we’d both had too much to drink. “Tell me, Freda,” he said putting his good hand on my shoulder. I shuddered. This man was familiar to me, I knew what he was capable of doing and how he wouldn’t hesitate to harm me if I disobeyed his orders or lied to him, or worse, exposed him.

  “I just talked and asked questions. I’m a curious person. A journalist. I convinced him,” I said, presenting a bitter smile.

  “That’s it? You talked to him.”

  “They are bored, these bureaucrats,” I explained.

  “And…”

  “I could show you, if you’d really like to know.” The words tumbled out of my mouth. He was so powerful; he overwhelmed me. I needed to protect myself and this was the only way I knew how.

  That night we left the embassy together. Vine was at the soiree too and I looked into his startled eyes as Zabotin ushered me out of the room and into his limousine. He took me to the safe house where we were to meet regularly during the next six years.

  Chapter Eight

  August 30, 1945

  Ottawa

  The safe house on the Rideau Canal was three storeys in all and one of the best addresses in Ottawa. The servants’ quarters were on the third floor, the six bedrooms on the second and the massive parlour, dining room and library on the first. That night in August I met Zabotin before midnight, as instructed, entering by the back door on the first floor adjoining the mudroom, where the maids stored their buckets and mops. This is how we did it throughout the war, as the Soviets turned from an illegal enemy to Canada’s ally. Still, Zabotin didn’t want diplomatic Ottawa to know about us, so I dressed plainly, not in heels or a feathered hat, as was my style during the war years. “Without make-up,” he ordered. Then he remembered to add, “You’re pretty enough without being made up.” I wasn’t certain he was being sincere.

  The master bedroom faced east toward the canal. The bay window was constructed of a hundred panes of glass. I relished making love with Zabotin in this room. I came to think of it as our room. It was opulent and different from the bulk of the rooms where I’d operated since spying for the Party. Not seedy, the sheets freshly washed and pressed. The carpet vacuumed. The walls were ivory with blue velvet drapes adorning the window. Many times I’d imagined sharing this room with Zabotin, just the two of us as man and wife.

  But Zabotin had other ideas for us. He’d concocted a script during the war and on that cool, peaceful night, he wished to adhere strictly to the prescribed ritual. I reminded myself that although Zabotin was not an inventive lover, he was an ardent one. I was certain he admired me, but it was entirely possible that he also loved me from time to time, most often when were in bed together. I was moved that he could still feel such a tender emotion, a man who had seen what he’d seen, and done what he’d been ordered to do.

  I tried to concentrate on my performance for him, but my mind wouldn’t keep still. Since our conversation in the park the day before, I understood that Zabotin would be contacting the scientist Alan Nunn May, the Soviet asset at Chalk River, for new intelligence about the bomb to send to the Centre. As usual, Vine would be the conduit between the reticent British scientist and Zabotin.

  Begging his patience, I disappeared into the washroom, stood in front of the mirror and stared at myself. I thought back to the day the Red Cavalry invaded my home, and recalled each of Zabotin’s words to me and Vine. He had allowed us—no ordered us—to run away. “You two will never survive the Bolsheviks,” he’d said, with his silver pistol aimed at Vine. For a moment I had caught his eye and he looked back with a s
mile I would come to know intimately.

  When I returned to the bedroom, he was naked lying on the bed. He toasted the Revolution as he popped the cork on a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

  “Nostrovia,” I said, as we clinked the crystal flutes.

  My handler was the most spectacular person at the Soviet Embassy, I had to admit to myself; not at all like the drab officials that Moscow usually sent abroad. The Centre preferred men who all looked the same: short, stocky, with tight brown curls and a five o’clock shadow.

  “Why did you say that I’d never survive the Bolsheviks?” I asked.

  His mouth became a thin line. “You remember everything,” he replied.

  “I remember what I need to.”

  “In deference to your great beauty, undress.” A cigarette dangled from his lips.

  “Tell me, Nikolai. Please.” I took another sip of champagne. “Why not me? Did you think I wasn’t worthy to build the new society?”

  “You wouldn’t have survived to see it. You’re not the type,” he said. “I could see it in you then. Your earnest boyfriend, Vine, he might have managed. He so wanted to be part of how the Bolsheviks were transforming Russia in our region. He’d have supported the making of the autonomous regions. Ours was to be Polish. But he’s too pure. Stalin would have had him murdered for treason long ago. An enemy of the people. The autonomous regions were blamed on the most dedicated comrades, those who tried to create them and failed.”

  I was stunned. We often talked openly, but not like this. “And I’m not the type because?”

  “Because you want too much. You crave beautiful things. You want romance and intrigue. The Soviet Union is not the place for any of that. You’d wither away trying to turn peasant villages into Party centrals.”