by Joyce Wayne
“I will not,” Masha replied.
I could hardly see her face entrapped in the helmet.
“Look at us,” Zabotin exclaimed. “Two years in the forest and we’re healthier than ever. I’m a million times better here than I was in your gulag.”
Masha retorted that it wasn’t her gulag. “You got off lightly,” she told him.
“Ahh… if it were up to you, you’d have me executed.”
“No more talking, Zabotin,” she commanded. “I’ve come to take you and Freda to Kiev. I’ve found a flat for the two of you, and I’ll put you on a worker’s pension and disability from the Chernobyl episode.”
“Is that what you’re calling it?” I gasped. “An episode?”
Zabotin shook his head in disbelief. “Leave us alone,” he told Masha. “What business are we of yours? We’re like the rats who survived the bubonic plague.”
“Or the mice who survived the experiment,” I added. Then, hearing a rustling beside the open window, I shouted, “You can come out now, Elka! I know you’re hiding in the bushes. You wouldn’t miss this family reunion for the world.” I squeezed Zabotin’s hand.
“Your sister is very brave,” Zabotin said to Masha. “Braver than you. And you, too, Elka!” he shouted, opening the door for our neighbour to enter. “Now you can hear everything,” he said, putting his hand to his ear and mocking her.
Masha was disappointed. I could tell because she sat down on our damp, tattered sofa with a deep, resentful sigh. She’d protected me from the secret police, from the Director of the GRU himself, and now, forty years later, she expected to be lauded and admired, maybe even loved. Once again, I was disappointing her, as only I could.
“I want to see Simcha,” I demanded. “You must know where he is.”
Masha agreed that she did, but said she hadn’t visited our brother for decades. Not since the war ended. Not once since I’d returned to the Soviet Union.
My fear of Masha was subsiding. I’d grown strong of mind since I’d started living in the forest. “I want to see my brother,” I shouted at her and stamped my feet.
“Fine,” Masha replied. “I’ll take you to him, Freda. Today. Get your things. You, who are so delighted with this world, overwhelmed with the goodness of humankind. You, who are in love with this traitor,” she shouted, pointing at Zabotin. “You of all people should hear our brother. Then you will know what this world is about.” My sister raised her arm to me.
As if on command, the guards reached for their revolvers, but Masha motioned them to put the guns away. Then she departed our cabin, her two officers trailing close behind.
No matter how frightened I was to see Simcha, to listen to his story, I knew it was worth the risk of discovering the truth. And so, on my sister’s command, I grabbed my suitcase, the one under my bed that was always ready to go, and briskly walked the forest path to where Masha was waiting for me.
When I reached her, I said, “Elka claims it was you who gave the command to evacuate Pripyat. Why didn’t you do it right away, in the early morning hours before the radiation worsened?” I demanded. “Why wait for Moscow?”
“It will take all night and half of tomorrow to get to Nesvicz,” Masha stated, ignoring my question and still speaking through her helmet. “Get in the vehicle,” she ordered. “And try to be quiet.” The Geiger counter in her hand was chirping much louder than the chattering birds that circled above our heads. “Nesvicz is where your brother lives, so we’d best not lose more time.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
1988
Nesvicz
It had been thirty-nine years since I’d seen my little brother, Simcha, but it was easy to recognize him, even though he’d aged profoundly. White hair, once red, sprang in every direction from his head. His beard, streaked with bits of food and stained by tea and whisky, tumbled to his chest. He recognized me immediately, too. We’d been the best of childhood friends. I’d favoured him over Masha, protected him from Papa’s belt. Those are things that no brother or sister can forget.
I must admit to feeling sorry for Masha, as the three of us stood inside the old shoemaker’s house, where Simcha scraped by. There was no time to waste with regrets. Masha had informed me that I had only a few hours with Simcha and then it was straight back to Chernobyl, no diversions along the way.
Simcha offered us sweetened tea and cookies baked by the neighbour lady. He invited Masha’s two guards into the front room to offer them the same. When I glanced about Vine’s old house, it looked like a dollhouse.
“Are you a shoemaker?” I inquired.
“No, I gave that up years ago,” Simcha replied. “Vine tried before me, right after the war. I knew it was him, but I kept my distance. I was ashamed.”
Masha cleared her throat. “As you should be.”
“Now I teach music to the local children,” he said. There was an upright piano in the corner of the room.
“You what?” Masha was disturbed by this revelation. “You. Teach music. You can’t even read the notes!”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Simcha corrected her, covering his eyes with his hands. “I learned, after I forgave myself for what happened.” His fingers were long and surprisingly elegant. “Sit down, sit down. All of you. I’ll make the tea. Freda, you bring out the cookies. And Masha, you must play for us. Please,” he coaxed, arranging the piano bench for her. “Once you begin, you will remember.”
Surprisingly, Masha sat down and put her hands to the keys. Simcha pulled out a triangle from a cupboard crammed with sheets of music.
Masha began to play the same Chopin étude she’d chosen for her recital on the day of the pogrom. I remembered every note although I had not heard this melody since her recital so long ago.
Once the samovar was prepared, Simcha raised high the triangle. As his wand tinkled one side of it, the sound brought more to mind than the delicacy of Chopin’s Études or Simcha’s perfect touch. My vision in Ottawa of the little musical band, dressed in black, crossing the river that flows through Nesvicz, and how I’d described it to Sybil when I first learned that Gouzenko had stolen cryptograms from the Russian Embassy in Ottawa, came rushing back to me. There was the elderly rabbi, with his long white beard, leading the musical troupe through the blowing snow. The kosher butcher who carried his cello over his shoulder, and the plump baker banging his tambourine with gusto. Only the skeleton that had once walked beside the rabbi had disappeared. The red-haired young triangle player at the rear of the troupe was Simcha, I now knew. He’d lagged behind, but he’d made it.
“I’m happy you survived,” I spoke with resolve to Simcha, putting my arms around him. Masha continued to play.
Tears streamed down Simcha’s face. “I made a choice. When the guards came to take away my wife and little girls, I might have tried to stop them. The girls had only cloth shoes and spring jackets for transport to the crematorium, no hats or gloves. They would freeze within hours. My children hadn’t grown since I’d seen them last, and my wife was emaciated. She gave most of her food to our girls.”
Masha stopped playing and ordered Simcha to be quiet, telling him, “I don’t want to know. I’m ashamed.”
But Simcha ignored her. “I knew they would perish during the transport,” he said softly
I sat very close to Simcha, my hand in his stronger one, as he continued to speak.
“Yes, I might have thrown myself in the way of the guards, tried with my bare hands to beat them back. They would have shot me, and my family would face their demise, with or without me. It’s almost impossible to grasp, but nothing I could do would have saved them.” Simcha covered his eyes again as if were reliving the moment in the Łódź Ghetto when his wife and children were torn from his grasp. “For a moment I stood tall between my wife and the guards, clutching them, but they threw me across the room. I was healthy and strong from fighting with the partisans in the forest. I could haul the shit wagons for miles into the empty fields outside Łódź. The gua
rds were instructed to keep me alive—I was useful. As for most who survived, I served a practical purpose. So few had the strength I did, and someone had to unload the shit.”
Simcha was grinning, more a grimace than a smile, as he recited his confession.
“After the war, I returned to Nesvicz. Every Jew was dead—not one survived the Nazis. When Vine came back from Canada, he made an attempt to start up again in his father’s shoe shop, but the villagers shunned him. They were afraid, as was I, to face him, a Jew, after what we’d witnessed and after what we’d done.”
“You should be ashamed…” Masha piped in, but her words were drowned out by a group of children bursting into the house.
“These are my students,” said Simcha proudly, introducing each one by name. There were ten.
“Enough for a minyan,” Simcha joked.
The children crowded around Simcha, pulling at his beard and groping in his pocket for the candy they appeared certain they would find.
Simcha asked the children to sit and to listen. “I am ashamed of what I saw and what I did,” he said to all in the room. “But I have forgiven myself, as you should, Masha, and you too, Freda. We’ve each done unspeakable things, deserted our families, worshipped false ideologies, admired the wrong people and wounded those who truly love us.”
The children became as quiet as little mice.
“When the world goes mad, to survive is not a crime,” said Simcha defiantly.
I moved to sit next to Masha and she allowed me to take her in my arms. Her body was as hard as a young soldier’s, but her heart was the most fragile of the three Linton survivors. Simcha rose to kiss her sweetly on the top of her head. Masha covered the scar on her face with her hand. She would need to be treated with delicate kindness as she recovered from the long nightmare that began the day the Red Army cavalry ransacked our little village of Nesvicz.
Today the restoration begins.
Afterword
My father, whose Yiddish name was Aaron, was born in Nesvicz, Belarus, and his stories about the Red Cavalry galloping into that village during the Russian Revolution have reverberated with me throughout my entire life. After arriving in Canada, Aaron joined the Communist Party, where he worked as a labour organizer in the Montreal garment factories until revelations about Stalin’s reign of terror filtered into Canada.
My father never recovered from the disappointment of learning how Stalin and the secret police treated the Jewish population in the Soviet Union. He left the Party in 1947. Many of my relatives remained stalwart members until their deaths. The demise of Fred Rose was a much-debated topic of conversation at family gatherings, and the one which planted the seed for this novel.
Members of our family who remained in Nesvicz after the revolutionary war were murdered by the Nazis in July 1942 when the liquidation of the Nesvicz ghetto began. During the 1920s, my father’s older sister, Dvora, moved to Moscow after he and most of the family immigrated to Canada. Dvora endured physical hardship, starvation and religious persecution. Her husband was executed during Stalin’s reign of terror, and her children and grandchildren, who were living in Kiev at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, were exposed to the radioactive fallout from the reactor.
At times when writing this book, I’ve allowed oral testimony and storytelling to take precedence over historical record. My intention has always been to be true to the fictional narrative of this particular story.
In my book, John Grierson is portrayed as an operative for Soviet military intelligence, and I do believe he was under the influence of the Soviets during World War II. Igor Gouzenko’s cache of documents, stolen from the Russian Embassy in Ottawa, implicated Grierson, and that is why he left Canada after testifying at the Kellock—Taschereau Commission (officially the Royal Commission to Investigate the Facts Relating to and the Circumstances Surrounding the Communication, by Public Officials and Other Persons in Positions of Trust, of Secret and Confidential Information to Agents of a Foreign Power). Grierson was, of course, the founder of the National Film Board of Canada.
More information about the illusive Freda Linton can be culled from FBI and MI6 files. I recall my father describing her as a great beauty and the bravest of women.
Acknowledgments
Sandy von Kaldenberg, my husband, is the reason why I continue to write. Together we pulled through many drafts of this novel. My daughter Hannah’s enthusiasm inspired me. She insisted that Freda, Zabotin and Vine’s story come to life. I am indebted to a tight-knit circle of remarkable writers and original thinkers: Rob Delaney, Maheen Zaidi, John Choi, Sandra Rossier and Terry Leeder. Each helped guide me through the process of writing this novel. I would also like to thank Howard Aster and Matthew Goody at Mosaic Press for their unflinching support and encouragement. Not only are they my publishers, they have become friends. Lindsay Humphreys, who copyedited this novel, is a marvel.
I am grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for their support.