by Joyce Wayne
We left the bar to walk across Rideau Street to the Château Laurier, where Zabotin asked for his usual room with a view of the Ottawa River. White light burned through the shuttered windows of the grand lobby while the overhead fans kept the halls cool. The gilt mirrors shimmered in the late afternoon sun. I was to take the key, as I usually did, inspect the room and then ring down to the house telephone in the chandeliered lobby if it was clean. Zabotin picked up the receiver at the appointed time.
In the room, there was more vodka and caviar for affect. Then he made love to me. I could sense he wasn’t putting his heart into it that afternoon. Not once did he cry out swearing that he loved me. But he did want to talk. How strange that men wish to reveal themselves, to tell all, after the act. I suppose they are all lonely.
“The other day when we were in the park, you said we must stop deceiving ourselves about the past?“
“And you told me we have no past, only the present,” I replied.
“No, you were correct. Where do the deceptions end? When I joined the Red Cavalry it was the only way to protect the Zabotin name. Do you understand?”
I understood. “By destroying Jewish villages inside the Pale? That protected your good name?”
“We always end up in the same place, Freda. You accusing me while I grow frustrated. Don’t forget it was my parents who saved your sister.”
“Forgive me. Of course, I am grateful.”
“You have never done anything you are ashamed of doing?” he inquired.
He knew the answer. “I am ashamed of my entire life,” I replied. “Everything I’ve done from abandoning my family, to working as a whore for the Party. That’s enough, isn’t it?” I was coming to terms with the truth.
Zabotin pulled me down until I was completely covered by his long body. “It’s a risk what we’re doing. If the Director discovers that you know about Fuchs’ drawings, you’ll be escorted to the Soviet Union and detained. You will be expected to betray me, which you will, after they’re done with you. Everyone breaks. You must promise me that you won’t inform Vine that I failed to send the atomic diagrams to Moscow.”
“I’d prefer not to deceive him,” I said, pulling myself out from under Zabotin.
“That’s not your decision,” he said. “Make up your mind. If you tell Vine, he’ll report me. You know that.”
“You make it sound like I have a choice. That giving the drawings to the GRU will end the world.”
“You do have a choice. I won’t force you to do anything against your conscience,” he said. “This time, let’s save ourselves while protecting our countrymen. Stalin has waged war against his own people. They die, not him, if there is nuclear war.”
It was much too late for me to disregard his words. I knew too much to run from Zabotin.
“Grierson will help, I assume. He’s a good man, an innocent, in love with you. He and Ellery can get you out of the country when the time comes, or better yet, I’ll figure it out. I’ll make my own way back to Russia. Freda, I promise to protect you.”
I was beginning to convince myself that this daring man cared for me and that he would abandon Lydia for me. His intention was to outfox Gouzenko. Zabotin wouldn’t betray him to the Director before he defected. The intelligence in the stolen documents would tell their own story, a story Zabotin wished the world to know. What he didn’t wish the world to know, he would release in time or never.
It was a fantastical ploy. Zabotin allowed Gouzenko to steal the documentation that would implicate our small band of Communists in Ottawa. But the drawings for the bomb would remain in his hands, as well as the critical information in the cables from Homer, at least for now. In a sense, he’d leak the information as he chose, and by his own methods. Gouzenko was just the conduit. The great Zabotin had decided he could save the world from nuclear annihilation. When he invited me to join him in this scheme, I accepted. To this day, I believe it was the right choice. The only choice.
My life changed that Sunday afternoon. I began to realize the clandestine work I’d done for years was a waste. In the end, what information had I gathered that changed history or even saved one life? I’d lured men to my bed for their secrets. How important were they, these contorted confessions?
That afternoon I asked myself how the second world war had escalated into a bloodbath where millions upon millions of innocent civilians died. Men and women like my father and mother, and my brother Simcha who’d done nothing to deserve what befell them.
Somehow Masha survived. I would find her with Zabotin’s help.
It was possible that Zabotin was the last reasonable man on earth. He was starting to exist beyond ideology, perhaps above loyalty to any cause, no matter how enticing.
He’d left me no option but to side with him. But I also asked myself what happened to people like me, those who have devoted their lives to a cause that turned out to be the opposite of what it preached? I didn’t know if I could let go of the person I’d become and then re-imagine myself as a free being, unencumbered by the commandments that guided my life. First it was Judaism, then Communism. I had no idea how to live outside a strict regimen of thought. To re-invent myself.
In Russia, Jews from inside the Pale went over to the Communist side. It didn’t matter that our villages were decimated during the civil war. For we Jews, it was the moment to escape the dark fate of our ancestors and join the Revolution, where we would be equals among comrades and encouraged to act outside the strictures of Hebraic law. There was a sense of relief and recklessness, of lawlessness when throwing off the confines of the Orthodox faith. It took years to realize that by taking up a new cause, we’d only exchanged one set of rules for another.
To Zabotin’s way of thinking, you took sides as the circumstances dictated. When situations changed, he altered his thinking. I wasn’t certain I could accept that there were no absolutes. It was in my bones to believe there was a right way and a wrong way. It was detestable to change sides. I’d done it once before when I’d joined the Party and my life was transformed. Now I was intending to change sides again, to help Zabotin keep the atomic bomb out of Stalin’s hands.
Years later, when I met Elka in Chernobyl, I understood what happens to someone who fails to reconstruct her life after her worst fears come true. It is the descent into nothingness. I wouldn’t stand for that. Not even in Chernobyl where the hopeless congregate and the afflicted die a painful death, I scratch my own way out of the darkness.
* * *
Chernobyl journal
1988
During my second visit with Elka, Zabotin unexpectedly knocked on her crooked door. The bottom hinge had come off and she had no one to repair it.
Elka pretended that she didn’t hear the knock, but I knew better.
“It’s Zabotin, my friend. He’s hunting me down,” I assured her. I always knew when Zabotin was searching for me.
Elka smiled knowingly. “You answer the door,” she said. “He’s your comrade, not mine.”
Each time I saw Zabotin, I was gleefully surprised. How well he’d aged! How the thick curls, now white, cascaded down his straight back. How erect he held himself. The forest air intensified the brilliance of his ice-blue eyes and rose-coloured lips. His years in the gulag had only temporarily diminished him. To me, he now looked like the man he was in Ottawa. Handsome and defiant.
“How did you find me this time?” I asked.
Zabotin grinned. It was late August, the same time of the year when he’d followed me on my walk along the Rideau Canal in Ottawa, days before I threw my lot in with him, put my life in his hands, and betrayed the Soviet Union.
We both remembered that day with utter clarity. “This time, I’ve come on Vine’s behalf,” Zabotin admitted. “Not for myself. It’s his heart. He needs his medicine.”
More than forty years later, Vine still depended on me. When the Pripyat’s People’s Hospital was evacuated, I broke into the pharmacy to collect as much nitroglycerin as I could carry
in my satchel. Nitro, morphine and glass syringes, the outdated kind that the hospital kept in circulation before the accident. I boiled the syringes to disinfect them before I injected Vine with morphine. Of course, the water was radiated from the accident but there are things that can’t be fixed. Vine suffered from congestive heart failure and when the pain in his chest became too much for him to bear, I squirted nitro under his tongue to open the arteries and morphine into his veins to quell the pain. He wasn’t able to inject himself. Zabotin refused to learn how to use the needles.
“You’re on call?” Elka asked.
“In a manner of speaking. My other friend isn’t well.”
Elka didn’t expect me to introduce her to Zabotin formally, although she knew who he was. She was only pretending that she didn’t recognize him. She did, however, invite me to visit again and I promised I would.
Zabotin and I walked back to our cabin. He held my arm. “If you ask me to fix her door, I won’t,” he declared. “She doesn’t deserve my help or yours.”
I thought about the weeks directly after the accident at Reactor Number Four, when Zabotin hitched a wagon to the back of his Lada. We loaded the flatbed, he and I, with fine furniture from the chief councilman’s house and made numerous trips back to the lumberyard for tools and supplies. No one stopped us, not even the head of the Chernobyl Communist Party whose house we also rummaged through. I never cared for the bureaucrat. He reminded me of a mafia boss, the swarthy type I saw in the American movie The Godfather, when the film reached Kiev in the 1980s.
During those early weeks in the forest, Zabotin and I built a large screen porch attached to the back of our cabin, one that faced the river and protruded into the green foliage of the ravine. The trees were birch, with slender white trunks, and round leaves that resembled silver dollars. The wind whistling through the forest was like silk brushing against the clouds. I could stare at the birches for hours, listening to the wind’s song.
On the screen porch, we installed a ragged leather pullout sofa from the council member’s house and that’s where Zabotin and I slept in summer. Once the porch was ready, we dozed most of the day, during that first summer after the accident, believing our time had come and we’d be dead within months. It didn’t happen that way.
The next time I saw Elka, she was lurking about our screened porch. I noticed her from my vantage point on the sofa where I was reading. I made weekly trips to the Pripyat Library, where the collection remained in pristine condition. Zabotin drove me to town in the Lada to exchange my library books, which I neatly stacked on the library’s shelves for the next patron. I didn’t want to steal books. They belonged to the people, I remarked to Zabotin, and he laughed, his belly laugh, the one I’d come to cherish.
Elka was as hesitant as a feral cat when I opened the screen porch door for her, but eventually, after some coaxing, she came through the portal. We drank coffee made from chicory, with a little peppermint schnapps I’d taken in Pripyat. I prepared a cucumber and onion salad picked fresh from my garden. “What do you normally eat?” I asked.
“This and that,” was her cagey response. Elka was wearing a red paisley babushka around her head. Her green eyes sparkled when she grabbed my hand, and I was astonished by the strength of her grip. She was lean, but not emaciated. She didn’t appreciate it when I asked her questions, although she felt she had the right to ask me anything.
“I know your brother, Simcha,” she suddenly said.
Although I thought about Simcha every day, I’d never spoken about him to anyone in Chernobyl before or after the meltdown. Only Masha and I remembered Simcha, and Masha didn’t like to speak about the past. She spared so few words about Simcha, and I couldn’t force her to tell me more. How could Elka know who I was mourning?
My face turned red. “He’s dead.”
“Who told you that? Don’t believe it,” Elka stated.
It had been sixty-seven years since I’d seen Simcha. When I returned to Europe I discovered that he’d been in the Łódź Ghetto. “He must have perished on the death march to Auschwitz-Birkenau before the liberation. No one saw him after that,” I said sternly, “or I would have been informed.”
“I don’t believe so,” said Elka. “I remember Simcha quite well. He looks like you. Good looking. Same grey eyes. Red hair, though. Fine manners. He speaks a polished Yiddish.”
My hands went numb with excitement. Simcha would be in his late seventies, only a few years younger than me. “Where did you see him last?”
“Do you really want to know or would you rather go on believing he died a honourable death?”
I wanted to tell her to stop right there, but how could I resist knowing the truth? I’d always feared that Simcha had been tortured by the SS, or something unfathomable that no one talked about, or more likely that he dropped dead on the prisoners’ march to the death camp. There were no records of him, but then so many dead from the war remained anonymous.
My sister Masha claimed that she lost all contact with him after the Nazis invaded Poland. He’d moved to Łódź with his wife and children and died in the ghetto or during the death march. That’s all she knew. After Elka’s claim, I wondered if Masha had held something back but didn’t wish to cause me pain. Many people couldn’t talk about their wartime experiences. They were trying to forget or just get on with their lives.
As for Masha, she was residing in a suburb of Kiev. Zabotin claimed his parents saved her, but the real story turned out somewhat differently. When the Nazis marched the villagers of Nesvicz to the ravine behind the synagogue, they shot them. One by one they fell into the ditch or were pushed, but Masha wasn’t in Nesvicz on that day. Count and Countess Zabotin had taken her on as the laundress at their dacha. Masha was healthy, a good worker, and they chose her.
The Zabotins appreciated her diligence and her honesty. She survived because of them. Masha did not steal from the count and countess. During the Nazis invasion, she faithfully scoured the countryside for food for the aged couple. After the liberation and under Soviet rule in the Ukraine, Masha became a security officer, who rose up quickly in the local Party hierarchy. When I first returned to Europe, she rescued me and it is because of her that I am alive. In 1988, she remains a true believer; even after the nuclear accident, Masha considers herself a good Communist. The only time she’d doubted the Party was when the Director ordered her to take me under her wing after Gouzenko’s defection.
Elka sat beside me on the sofa, balancing a plate of salad on her knee. She was itching to tell me more. There are people like Elka, who feed off other’s pain, but I wasn’t prepared to give in to her.
I wanted her to leave and I told her so. “I’m busy Elka. I have better things to do than listen to your nonsense rumours about my brother.”
“Your choice,” she said and departed within seconds.
Elka didn’t visit for a long while after that, and I believed she’d learned her lesson. I wasn’t someone to be tampered with.
As with so many who’d survived the war, and its aftermath, I intended to be brave and good and honourable as long as I was alive. Yet there were certain things at my advanced age, I did not wish to know. Those closest to me, who remained loyal to Communism, saw themselves in a similar light. During the most dreadful times, they’d stayed true to the cause. Sybil and Rose never wavered, not like Zabotin or I. Vine returned to Judaism after seeing what the Nazis had done to Nesvicz. Each of us acted on our own without orders from on high. We all went our own way after Gouzenko.
Upon my return to Europe after the war, I met a Jewish couple from Poland. German SS officers had occupied their Krakow house after hearing that the wife was an extraordinary cook who could bake Sacher torte as well as the experts in the fabled coffee houses of Vienna. The woman looked after the Germans, and they brought her the best meat and vegetables to prepare for their sumptuous meals. Every night, the table in their elegant dining room, adorned with velvet drapes and crystal chandeliers, was decorated with t
all candles and rare bottles of wine from the couple’s private cellar. The husband descended from a wealthy merchant family. He’d inherited the house, but joined the Party shortly before the invasion and told me he had always intended to offer it to the Party as long as he and his wife could continue to live there.
By the time I met him, he wasn’t so sure the Communist government was on the right course, but he remained in the Party because it was what he understood. He worked in the military police, and the couple received the treatment accorded to senior Party apparatchiks. They survived the Great Patriotic War; no one blamed them for what they’d done during the bad years, not even the small, remaining Jewish community in Chernobyl where this man and his wife ended up when the Party confiscated their home. As I said, the wife had talent; she was a celebrated cook, and the Party brass at the reactor wanted her to make the meals in their private canteen.
People did what they had to. They stopped asking questions. If the Party ordered them to relocate, they did as they were ordered. Everyone, like the couple from Krakow, had a story to tell. First the famines and then the show trials, followed by the Nazis, and finally by the long years of crushing bureaucracy. After the accident at Reactor Number Ffour, the husband, who’d been about to retire from his position as a security guard at the nuclear plant, joined us for a few short days in the forest, but he couldn’t stand the primitive conditions, the aching discomfort. He and his wife immigrated to Israel, where I assume they adjusted to an entirely different life. I know I have; adjusted, that is.
It was easy to judge. Elka was itching for me to ask her more questions about my brother. Her tone when she spoke about Simcha was odious, as if he’d commited unspeakable acts. After the war, survivors were suspicious of each other. How did some make it while so many perished? Elka’s distrust was understable, but whatever she might accuse my brother of doing to stay alive, I was certain he’d had his reasons. I wasn’t going to allow Elka to destroy my golden memories of that clever little boy, although I was longing for the truth.