Vancouver
october 12, 1959
her womb was melting from her slowly, drip, drip, echoing in a deep, icy mine shaft. Taras’s voice came to Savka from tunnels that opened on all sides of the shaft, but when she stumbled blindly from one entrance to another, desperate to find him, she encountered only inky darkness.
She awoke with a start—panting and dry-mouthed. It was night and she was in a hospital bed, her head propped up on pillows. By the low illumination cast by a lighted recess on the wall behind her, she could see a shadow at the end of her bed. A dark remnant from her dream.
If only it were Lev. But she’d broken his heart. A low table had been rolled over her bed, and she reached for a plastic cup of juice on the dinner tray, setting off a terrible pain in the incision area in her lower belly and sending dishes rattling. Vaguely, she remembered someone—a Nurse O’Dwyer—bringing the tray earlier and explaining that Savka had an emergency hysterectomy. She’d been too groggy to eat anything, devastated by memories of her collapse that morning and her frantic shouts to Lev—I don’t love you! Leave me alone—as he ran behind the stretcher in Stanley Park. Tears tracked down her cheeks. Would Lev visit her, even after her cruel parting words? She would tell the nurses no visitors. And if he called when she returned home, she would hang up the phone. She’d stop going to the Ukrainian Cultural Centre, Zoya would no longer dance with the troupe. Savka had to save someone, if not herself.
She sipped at the juice, raising a hand to wipe away her tears, and the dream figure moved in the shadows; it lifted something to its mouth and drank deeply. She watched, fascinated. What kind of painkillers had the nurse given her to make her hallucinate like this?
The creature drew a vicious hand across its mouth. “You filthy whore.”
She started violently, the sound of his voice flaming along her nerve endings. Belyakov.
With shaking hands, she set her glass of juice back on the tray, unable to look at him, her usual vulnerability made worse by this hateful waking in a hospital bed after surgery. She summoned her voice. “How dare you call me a filthy whore when you ordered Ilyin to rape me in the forest.”
Belyakov seemed unnaturally agitated as he prowled around her bed. “You would deny a soldier his reward?”
“Reward?” she gasped. “You couldn’t attack Marko—so you attacked me.” Her body was nothing but a hilltop in war, the conqueror taking his spoils. She ground her teeth to keep from screaming. “Why are you here?”
He moved closer. “Yeleshev…” Belyakov paused, his voice breaking. Savka’s eyes widened with astonishment. She’d never seen her Russian handler unmoored, upset. “Yeleshev…followed you and Lev Podolyan to the zoo.” Belyakov straightened and seemed to get hold of himself. “Imagine his surprise to find Marko spying on you, with that woman. Later, Yeleshev called me from a payphone across the street from her apartment building.”
Savka got her hands under her on the mattress. Trying to sit up was impossible, and she collapsed against the pillows when an agonizing pain shot from her lower abdomen and into her heart. What did she care if Belyakov had come to share his distress? She would not suffer the outrage of a man who had invaded not only her country, but her body, her soul, her mind. And left them dying.
“Marko gave this…woman, this bitch, something in the car.” Belyakov continued, unaware that Savka despised him with every inch of her being. “Yeleshev said he thought it might be the list—he was going to follow her.”
An image of the woman hanging on Marko’s arm in the parking lot, petite and hiding her face under her hat, obscured Savka’s own devastating memories. She felt a sudden crawling feeling between her shoulder blades. And a voice from her long ago past.
If you don’t kill your handler, I’ll come for you. I’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth.
Savka squeezed her eyes shut. She suddenly knew the identity of the woman she and Lev had seen with Marko—the woman with the defiant smirk.
Natalka had made good on her threat, somehow tracking her to Vancouver and seducing her husband. She imagined the banderivka after she’d climbed the stairs to her apartment ahead of Yeleshev, her head bent to the task of fitting a key into her locked door and turning to find a KGB agent behind her. Savka shuddered, her voice reduced now to a whisper. “Did he…?”
Belyakov lunged forward, so close now, she could smell his familiar sour odor and dizzying waves of alcohol fumes. He was drunk, or high on his little white pills. “When Yeleshev did not return,” he said, “Ilyin and I went to find him.” As Belyakov rummaged blindly in the inside pocket of his coat, Savka wanted to cover her ears. Lifting his flask once again, he drank deeply. By the dim glow of the recessed lighting, she could see his Adam’s apple move as he gulped vodka like it was water. She thought of Yeleshev, the man she’d first seen in the Carpathian Forest, the tall soldier with mournful eyes and baritone voice who had taken out pliers to pull out her fingernails. “Yeleshev was lying…” Belyakov stuttered, “…on the floor of her apartment. Blood everywhere—”
He lowered the flask, a defeated gesture. “Before she died, that bitch fought like a cat. She turned on him with a knife—stabbed him again and again.” He broke off abruptly, gripping the bed rail, as if Yeleshev had been his own son. The intensity of her Russian handler’s reaction set the blood pounding in her ears. “Ilyin and I will avenge him.” He made a wild cutting motion with his hand. “We will finally slit Marko Ivanets’s throat.”
She faltered, momentarily speechless. “He will never tell you where the list is under torture.” Had it really become her job to talk this brute, this criminal, off a cliff’s edge? “When you kill him without getting the list, Moscow will send someone to take you out.”
“Fuck Moscow!”
She looked away from Belyakov’s tragic expression, his raging grief. This is the end, she thought, I can’t survive another day under his thumb.
But there was more. There was always more.
A rattling noise startled her. Belyakov’s hand crept along her bedrail. “Do you know when I questioned Marko in Rimini, he refused a luxury apartment in Moscow for you and him, and your son?” His voice had grown louder. She licked her chapped lips. He’s lying. Yet Belyakov continued his relentlessly destructive report. “When I mentioned his wife and son, your husband laughed and said he would not trade you for eight thousand Ukrainian men.” He paused, watching Savka with a sick smile on his face. “Marko placed your safety below that of his compatriots.”
The air in the room felt suddenly cold and her skin chilled. “Not Taras,” she whispered. “He loved his son.”
“You could have been a family again, Savka. But your husband was quite clear—neither of you would make him give up his men.”
Her head drooped to the side. She was too tired, too ravaged to hold it up and look Belyakov in the face. Some part of her grieved for the life that she, Taras, and Marko could have had in Moscow—alive, together. Fifteen years she’d missed, fifteen years of her son’s life. What a wonder and a privilege it would have been to watch him grow to be a man, even under the watchful eye of Stalin.
“You have not been in Moscow.” Belyakov’s voice betrayed a sudden note of melancholy. “It is beautiful.”
“You knew—in Poland.” Her Russian handler didn’t answer, and the pain from the old shoulder wound snaked its way down her arm. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Would you have gone to Marko in England?”
Savka remained silent, too stunned to utter a response. Why had he waited to share these details when she lay helpless in a hospital bed? A crazed and unbearable anguish scaled its way from the depths of her like an old ghost. Slowly, her fingers curled into fists on the bedcovers. On that fateful day in Ukraine, Belyakov had dragged her below the waves of a vast ocean, and she still drifted there, in a kind of trance, deep beneath the surface.
It should be Marko you rage at, she thought, feeling numb, shattered, and achingly aware that the signs had been there all along, if she’d only chosen to see them. Her husband had made cutthroat decisions to save his men over the lives of his wife and son. To hurt her, he took Natalka as his lover. Yet Savka had made her own devastating choice during the war to spy on Marko for the KGB—a choice that, in peacetime, seemed abhorrent. But she’d done it to save Taras. Something Marko had refused to do when faced with the opportunity.
“Why tell me this now?”
Belyakov was silent, back to his usual intractable self, and Savka already knew the answer. He’d come to unload his grief and anger, and he did it in the one way he knew would crush her.
She suffered another image of Natalka’s bloodied body on the floor of her apartment. Despite the banderivka’s threat and her betrayal with Marko, she’d not deserved to be murdered. She pictured Marko finding her, devastated. He would surely run straight to New York. Shaken, Savka thought of Belyakov ruthlessly ordering the raid on Kuzak’s bunker. “How dare you use Kuzak’s files to exterminate every bunker in Ukraine!”
Belyakov stared blankly down at her, as though attempting to switch gears. Suddenly, he made the connection. “You think we raided the bunker because we needed Kuzak’s files?” he scoffed, insulted. “Everything in code and when you break it—anything of use? Nyet! Careful interrogation of captured bandits—that is how we exterminated every bunker in Ukraine.”
The door had opened and Nurse O’Dwyer stood silhouetted in the hallway, light playing over her crisp white cap, and a uniform that bound her stocky form like a sausage casing. “What’s going on here?” She stiffened at the sight of the black-coated figure standing in the near dark beside Savka’s bed. “Visiting hours are over,” O’Dwyer said, stepping into the room. “Your wife needs to rest.”
Belyakov stormed past the nurse without a word and disappeared, like the sick phantom he was, leaving her standing with hands on her hips, glaring after him.