Last Night of the World

by Joyce Wayne

The farmers’ stalls at the Byward Market were closed for the season with only the little storefront shops remaining open. Smoke rose from the wood stove at the butcher’s where I bought my supplies. Most nights, I roasted chicken, not bothering to change my menu from day to day. Chicken, a potato and a half can of peas. When I ran out of peas, I substituted boiled cabbage. The cold kept me indoors. My boss, Comrade Tabachnick, at the TASS office, didn’t expect me to come in every day. Parliament wasn’t sitting and news was scarce. That winter I’d learned how to stay warm, putting on layer after layer of clothing when I did venture outside. Wool socks in my boots over my silk hosiery made me feel clumsy, but on the coldest of days, I wore whatever would keep my feet from freezing. I stopped caring how I looked or who noticed me.

  Zabotin carried on with his duties at the Soviet Embassy as if nothing had happened, except for his attitude toward Rose and Vine, who he declined to see. Fred Rose believed that the Canadian government would cover up the stolen cryptograms. He was in Montreal at his constituency office. Vine was hiding out in Toronto, moving from one comrade’s sofa to the other, still on the run from the Mounties who he was certain would arrest him. It was only a matter of time, according to him.

  After the farce on the day of the defection, the RCMP scurried Gouzenko away to a military base, Camp X, near Trenton, a small town nestled along Lake Ontario. The Americans hadn’t forced the prime minister to expose the spy ring yet so Zabotin convinced me to sit tight. As usual, I’d obliged him. Obedient Freda. Desperate Freda. Romantic Freda. Perhaps Zabotin was looking out for my best interests.

  Since mid-September, Zabotin maintained that the Soviets and the Americans would come to an agreement about what to do with the cipher clerk. The deal would be brokered by Preston Ellery. A blind eye would be turned to Zabotin’s band of spies, and on him, the mastermind, who had engineered a new era of world peace. That’s how he saw it playing out. He actually believed Ellery could quell the noise the defection was making in intelligence circles.

  Grierson continued to run the Wartime Information Bureau. He expected to be interviewed by the Americans for the director’s job at their new documentary film centre, but the months passed and no one called to invite him to Washington. He told me that Truman had scolded Mackenzie King, but he was loathe to publicize the secrets Gouzenko’s defection had uncovered.

  The FBI hadn’t exposed Homer, although I knew the Gouzenko papers must have implicated him. Either the Venona encryption project had gotten far enough that they already knew who Homer was before the defection or they were waiting for the perfect moment to release the information. Zabotin’s theory was that the Americans hadn’t yet managed to unravel the Soviet wartime code and the cables from Washington to him were in their original code. Why they didn’t ask Gouzenko to decode them was unfathomable. Perhaps they didn’t trust him.

  Neither the Soviets, nor the Americans, wanted another war with atomic bombs dropped on civilians, or at least, that’s what Ellery stated at Christmas when he invited Grierson to dinner at his home in Rockcliffe Park, a swanky neighbourhood in Ottawa. At dinner, Ellery made an impromptu speech about how the great powers were devoted to creating a lasting peace even with nuclear weapons in their arsenals. Zabotin, who was invited to Christmas dinner, said that he thought exactly the opposite. He believed that the longer the Soviets went without the bomb, the better the chances that a nuclear showdown wouldn’t erupt. He told me after the dinner that the other guests thought he was drunk or having them on.

  Back in Ottawa, Ellery hadn’t been offered the job of Secretary-General at the UN. He claimed he needed to spend more time with Patsy who was forever ailing. On New Year’s Eve, he hosted a party to celebrate a lasting peace. Patsy got drunk and passed out, but all of Ottawa’s A-list attended and no one minded that Ellery’s wife was carried off to her bedroom or that he hadn’t gotten the top job in New York.

  After midnight, Zabotin asked me to meet him at the Château Laurier. We toasted the New Year, 1946, after which he fell asleep. I ordered an English breakfast at dawn and left before Zabotin rose from bed. The more we tried to analyze what the Americans would do next, the more dispirited we became.

  His wife, Lydia, returned to the Soviet Union. She tried to find their son, but he had disappeared, as did so many soldiers after the war. Neither she nor Zabotin ever saw him again.

  In February, Vine phoned. I was meeting Zabotin at the Elgin Theatre that night, so I told him to call back tomorrow. He didn’t argue with me, agreeing that another day wouldn’t matter at this point, and hung up.

  When I met him at the Elgin that night, Zabotin was wearing his officer’s uniform, as were the other soldiers in the theatre. We walked down the aisle to our seat, and the Canadian soldiers nodded to Zabotin. He returned the honour. Gouzenko’s disclosures hadn’t made the news. Not yet. Only a handful of us knew about the damage he’d done to Soviet intelligence. That night we were viewing a documentary about the atomic destruction in Japan. This time it shone a light on Nagasaki. I clutched at Zabotin’s bad hand. He squinted but did not pull away. An artist had drawn a pattern over a map of the city, with rings superimposed over the parallel lines of the roadways. The rings were marked with “total destruction,” “severe structural damage,” “moderate structural damage” and “light damage.” Most of the city was covered by total destruction with only a few edges determined to be light damage.

  We remained in our seats until the theatre emptied. Zabotin wished to walk along the canal although the temperature was below zero. In the park, there were footprints in the snow: a solitary walker, and the rounded paws of a small animal.

  Under the winter moon we could see each other’s faces. “We stopped that from happening again,” he said. “What we saw on the screen.”

  “For now.”

  “Good enough,” Zabotin shot back.

  I wondered, then, if what we’d done had actually slowed down Soviet progress on the bomb. “If you provide the Director with Fuchs’ drawing, before he detains you, this nightmare will end for you. You could stay on in Canada, as the rezident.” I sighed. “The rest of us are in limbo. We still don’t know what the Americans will convince Mackenzie King to do.”

  “The Americans are watching Fuchs by now,” Zabotin replied. “He’s no good to us at this stage. No one gave me better intel. Unless I send Vine to Chalk River for the sample of plutonium, the Soviets are no farther ahead than they were months ago when Gouzenko defected. They need both to make the bomb: the drawings and the plutonium.”

  “It’s not about taking sides, is it?” I asked, not quite able to let go of years of servitude to the Party. We both had come to the conclusion over the last few months that Stalin might use the bomb if he had it and that the Americans would fire back. “It’s better that only one side has it,” I said, recalling the scenes from the newsreel.

  “We’ve all turned into murderers at Hitler and Stalin’s behest.” Zabotin grabbed my hand and kissed it.

  I was surprised that Zabotin made such an admission to me. The rampage at Nesvicz occurred years before Hitler. He understood I’d never recovered from that. Perhaps the war really began earlier, in invisible places like my little village, where men and women were forced to act under pointless orders from a higher power. I was beginning to imagine another kind of place where people followed their consciences and not an ideology, or religion, no matter how perfect it looked on paper.

  Of course, I never imagined we would end up in Chernobyl forest, where there was nothing but free will and the odd wistful glance back at the fateful dreams of the past. Back then, I was only concerned with escaping the dreadful consequences Zabotin and I were fast heading toward.

  “Stalin isn’t going away,” I said. “You couldn’t possibly believe he could be overthrown. A coup.”

  “Don’t sound so defeated. All regimes fall eventually. Hitler was defeated.”

  “Not by his own people.”

  “There are pockets of resistance
even in Soviet Russia.”

  We walked under the moonlight until I couldn’t stand the cold. My feet were numb. We were more like apparitions than real people. We were forcing ourselves to give up on everything we’d hoped Communism could be.

  The snow was piled in mountains along the Rideau Canal embankment, so high I couldn’t see above them. The maple trees were bare and the evergreens swayed with the weight of the heavy, white, glistening snow. It was so cold that I felt I was roaming through another world, a strange planet, where creatures combed the frozen wilderness searching for shelter. Under the bridge, two men in beaver parkas lit a campfire to try to stay alive. An abandoned kitten cried into the night, crazy with the cold; a wolf howled from across the park. The moon hid behind the looming silver clouds.

  Not able to bear the temperature, we slipped into a café beside the canal. We drank from mugs of tea laced with rum, and Zabotin offered to get me out of Canada. “It’s now or never, Freda,” he said, delighted by his choice of words in English.

  “Everything will change in the next few days and you must be prepared. Don’t warn Vine,” he said to me, shrewdly. “Close the door to your apartment and walk away. Leave it as it is. Take one small suitcase, nothing else. I’ll arrange for your transport to Europe, you can hunt down your family in Russia or what’s left of it. I told you Masha is there. Maybe you could bring her back with you one day, to settle here.”

  Even I didn’t believe that would be possible. Not after Gouzenko.

  “Here’s a copy of Fuchs’ drawings. Hold onto them. You may need them to save yourself,” he said, holding up a small manila envelope, one that contained the fate of the world.

  “Or to rescue you,” I replied. “Are you intending to disappear with me?”

  He shrugged his shoulders, the way only a true aristocrat could. “Not yet.” Zabotin held out the envelop to me, and I accepted it. I shouldn’t expect anything else from him.

  “How are you going to get the plutonium?” I asked him.

  Zabotin took my hand. “It’s either you or Vine that must take it to the Director. If you won’t put him in harm’s way, it must be you. Think about it before you give me your answer.”

  I would be returning to the East alone. Zabotin’s terms were the most dangerous I could imagine, but if I could find my family, re-unite with Masha, it would be worth the risk. Zabotin was always the first one to know when things were about to go awry. He’d done what he could to warn me and I was beginning to trust him.

  On Saturday Vine phoned again. He was in Ottawa and asked to meet me the next night. I couldn’t refuse. By telephone he told me that Drew Pearson, the American journalist, would be breaking the Gouzenko story on the radio. Fred Rose, who was already holed up in his office in the centre block of Parliament, had informed him. Sybil was with Rose. Vine thought it appropriate that we listen together, but felt it was safer if we met in public, at The Party Palace, a late-night diner, the only eatery in Ottawa open past midnight.

  If the life had not been so tantalizing, if I’d been offered any other choice in Canada, I might have disappeared earlier, before these troubles. I could have deserted Vine when we lived on Beaconsfield, and made my own way back to Nesvicz, to the place where I once belonged. Home. If I’d stayed with my family after the pogrom, I might have been able to read the signs early enough and escape long before the Nazis invaded. I might have saved them, before the catastrophe. I was the oldest child. It was my responsibility. If only I’d taken heed of Masha’s letters and paid less attention to the propaganda fed to me by Party brass, or to my own wild ambition.

  When Vine noticed me walking toward him, I was gliding briskly in my black patent, open-toed, three-inch heels along Elgin Street, slipping here and there on the mounds of ice that would remain rock solid until the end of April. I wanted to look pretty for him.

  From across the street I waited for the light to turn. Vine was pacing in the cold outside The Party Palace’s foyer, drawing on a cigarette.

  “Stand you for a cup of coffee, beauty?” Vine offered in his thick Russian accent, the one he’d never managed to erase after decades of living in Canada. He reached out to cup my face in his hands as if we’d seen each other yesterday. But it had been months. I could sense, as I always could, that he’d been with another woman earlier in the day. I could smell her on him when I kissed his cheek, but I didn’t push him away.

  I kissed him again, this time square on the lips and whispered in his ear that I needed him, as I had since the first day we landed in Canada. I placed my gloved hand on his heart. “Where’ve you been, Harry?”

  Inside the diner, the other Soviet, American and British agents were sipping coffee and smoking. I surmised that their handlers had alerted them to Drew Pearson’s broadcast.

  Solange, the blonde all-night waitress, who was bored by conversations about the freshly carved city of Berlin, wiped her hands on the backside of her blue-striped nylon uniform. In her apron was a book by John Dos Passos.

  “Back booth for you two?” She didn’t need to ask. She’d seen the look in our eyes many times before at The Party Palace. Those who were in a desperate hurry to go nowhere.

  “If we run now, tonight, we could make it out of the country,” Vine spoke rapidly and under his breath once we were facing each other in the booth. He’d removed his grey-felt fedora, unwound his striped silk tie and tore open the top button of his white-starched shirt. I can see him still today, how careful he was with his appearance in Canada. He always wore an expensive tie and a finely pressed shirt, so that people would respect him, or that’s what he claimed. We both liked to dress up. Behind round steelrimmed glasses, his heavy-lidded eyes were fearful.

  “Where do you propose we run?” I asked. He hadn’t planned that far ahead.

  I gulped down the coffee. Vine grew quiet and I tapped on the Formica tabletop. My nails were manicured and the red polish shone under the overhead light. Cigarette burns scarred the ersatz gold-speckled surface of the diner’s table. The glass pepper shaker was empty and the creamer was stained chartreuse with drips of congealed liquid.

  Bing Crosby was crooning on the wireless perched on the top shelf above the glass jars of red peppers and grey pickled eggs.

  Would you like to swing on a star

  carry moonbeams home in a jar

  and be better off than you are

  or would you rather be a mule?

  I was accustomed to frequenting swankier joints than this one, but tonight was a special occasion, an emergency. Zabotin would never take me to a diner. We only went to the best places. By then, he didn’t care any longer who saw us together.

  “Do you honestly believe that after everything we’ve done, they’ll just let us disappear? Who are you kidding?” I snapped my fingers in Vine’s face. “If one side doesn’t come after us, the other will.”

  Vine believed he’d been the most loyal of comrades. Party leader Tim Buck had told him so. He had no idea why the Soviets would punish him for Gouzenko’s defection, but I knew better. Zabotin wanted him out of the way. He wished to send Vine to Chalk River to collect the sample of plutonium and either the Soviets or the Canadians would catch him and accuse him of being on the wrong side. Zabotin would make certain of that, unless I went myself. No one would suspect a woman.

  “We’re outlaws in Canada now,” said Vine. He understood that I wasn’t taking to his idea. “I’ve been on the lam for a long time. I’ve survived,” he said, trying to reassure me. “It’s not that rough.”

  “You prefer that life. I do not,” I told him.

  The waitress poured more coffee into our empty cups. We were waiting, like the others in the diner, for Drew Pearson’s broadcast about Gouzenko.

  “Let’s go home,” Vine said. “I’ll marry you if you return to the Soviet Union. Make an honest woman out of you.”

  I didn’t laugh.

  “Don’t doubt me,” he pleaded. “When we get back, we’ll find our families, yours and mine, and
we’ll move into your house. It’s big enough for all of us.”

  He was losing his mind. “What if they’re dead?” I asked. “Murdered by the Nazis. Neither of us has heard from our families since 1939. It’s been almost seven years. Zabotin says that there aren’t many Jews left in our part of Russia, not near Minsk or Kiev.”

  Vine wouldn’t hear of it. “The Red Army smashed through the Nazi line in Minsk, on its way to Kiev. They marched through the Pripyat marsh. It was tough going all the way, but they made it.”

  “Our people were probably dead by the time the Red Army reached Nesvicz.” I had no intention of mentioning Masha.

  “Don’t talk like that,” said Vine. “You believe Zabotin? He’s trying to trick you. Not everyone died. Soldiers who fought in the Great Patriotic War are alive. Our brothers could be living in Nesvicz. Rebuilding.”

  I’d drawn the same scenario for Zabotin, but he’d never allowed me to believe that even my clever brother Simcha could have survived the Nazi bloodbath, let alone Mama, Papa. Only Masha managed to outwit the Germans. “Do you believe Stalin? That he saved the Jews?” I was whispering, afraid that the NKVD had its own agent in the diner.

  “Of course I do,” said Vine. “The Soviet Union won the war. The West will never forget how the Soviet people beat back the Nazis. Stalin never waivers. It’s others that I’m worried about. Zabotin is caving in. Fred Rose agrees our rezident isn’t as courageous or committed as he pretends to be. After tonight, he won’t protect you.” Vine was trying to win me over. My handbag carrying Fuchs’ drawings was nestled under my arm.

  “Where do you suggest we run tonight? Stowaway on a tanker to Europe? Who’s going to do that? Not me.” I recalled how Vine had come close to death when we crossed the Atlantic twenty-four years earlier. I’d been afraid that I would float up to the heavens, if he was not by my side to protect me. How childish I’d been back then.

  Just before ten, Vine and I gripped hands under the table. The waitress, who knew more than she let on, turned up the volume on the radio. It was the CBC announcer in Ottawa reporting on Drew Pearson’s revelations to the American public. A CBC newsman spoke in a tremulous voice. The patrons at the diner, most of them wearing felt fedoras to conceal their faces, turned toward the radio.