“WHAT A wonderful thing it is, Mr. Gouzenko,” Grampa Rip is saying, “that we live in the very same apartment that you did. What a great honor it is. You are a great man!”
“Enough!” says Mr. Gouzenko. “The honor is mine! You are too generous. I come for nostalgic. For memory of old days!”
“Of course. Welcome! Come into the living room and sit down. I’ll put on the kettle! Better still, Martin, will you put on the kettle like a good lad?”
“Is grandson?...”
“Well, yes and no...”
In the kitchen I can hear the talking back and forward. When Grampa Rip asks me to put the kettle on he really wants me to make tea. I put on the kettle and get out the cups and the milk and sugar.
Might as well put out some bread and butter while I’m at it. Maybe slice up some cold roast pork and set a jar of hot mustard and some pickles and salt and pepper on the table. And the homemade applesauce and there’s some potato salad left over from supper...
While I’m doing this I try to listen in to what they are saying. Some of it is about me. Grampa Rip is telling Igor about how I came to live with him and how I felt so small when I first came here, and how the doctor said that a big boy like I was shouldn’t be feeling so small and that I’d better not be going to school in such a condition — have to feel big again before I’d go back.
“He was pretty sick when he first came here,” Grampa Rip says, “but he’s a lot better now.”
Now Igor is talking about how he’ll never, ever see his parents again. He’s heard his mother is ill and he can’t communicate with her. They will never see him again. To lose your parents. Very sad.
Now there’s a long silence.
A silence to be sad in.
A strange man this Mr. Gouzenko.
The first thing he did when we brought him in was he fell face first to the kitchen floor and did ten pushups with only his fingertips touching. Inside his baggy suit his body was straight and stiff as a steel beam.
And when Grampa introduced me to him and while I shook his powerful hand, he held it a little longer, looked in my eyes and said, “Ah! A young man in love!”
How did he know that? There must be pictures of Gerty McDowell in my eyes.
The kitchen table looks good with the huge wooden legs carved like giant bowling pins holding up the tea and the pork and the potato salad.
Grampa brings Mr. Gouzenko back into the kitchen. He’s carrying Cheap. They’ve made friends. Cheap doesn’t make friends that fast, usually. Igor Gouzenko must be a nice man. He’s stroking Cheap’s head.
“Where is ear?” he asks Cheap. “You are like Russian cat. Communists take other ear?”
While we eat, Mr. Gouzenko keeps lifting up his teacup to click it against ours. Toasting.
Grampa Rip and Mr. Gouzenko can’t stop talking about everything. What it was like right after the war when he lived here with his wife Svetlana and his little boy. And when he exposed the spies in Canada and how the Russians, his countrymen, tried to kill him.
How he escaped with his family. Then they talk about the old days before the war on the farm, how Grampa Rip’s old-time farming in Canada was almost exactly the same as Igor Gouzenko’s was back in Russia. How they had no telephones, no electricity, no tractors, only horses, and how hard they worked and what fun they had.
And while we are finishing eating, Mr. Gouzenko looks at his watch and points to our radio on top of the icebox.
“May I turn on radio?”
Then he fiddles around the dial until he finds what he wants.
“Toronto Symphony,” he says. “Tonight Tchaikovsky!” And soon the radio has a huge orchestra with every instrument playing, and Igor Gouzenko is standing at the table waving his arms like an important conductor, conducting our radio on the icebox.
While Mr. Gouzenko conducts the radio, Grampa Rip goes up high in the kitchen cupboard and takes down a bottle of whiskey.
“Ah, Jameson!” says Igor. “My favorite! After vodka, of course!” And now everybody’s laughing and the radio’s back being off and Grampa and Igor are talking about the good old days without electricity and Igor is saying something about moths...
“The moths, at night. Before lightbulbs, only flames in lamps. Moths must be careful. Fly around flames. Dangerous.” He’s looking at me. “Too close to flame, wings get burnt up. Must be careful!”
“Our friend is talking about the moth and the flame, Martin. Young love. Dangerous. ‘Thus hath the candle singed the moth. O, these deliberate fools!’” says Grampa.
“Poetry! To poetry!” says Igor, and up go the glasses again.
“Man who loves poetry is man I trust. You have education. Is good! You go to university when young?” Igor asks Grampa Rip.
“University! No, I didn’t go to school at all! Not for long, anyway. Just long enough to learn to read and write. But my grandfather, Hack Sawyer, set me on the road to learning. He showed me how to educate myself while working. I had many, many jobs that required no brain at all. Hack showed me how to memorize poems while digging a ditch. How to read great novels while I ate my lunch. How to study the encyclopedia while standing on an assembly line with the other robots! Hack Sawyer was a genius!”
I’m proud of Grampa Rip, how he explains to Igor about his past.
And now, about Igor.
He lives somewhere with his family in Canada. A secret. Nobody must know. Dangerous for him and his family. The Russians still want to hurt him.
And now they are talking about danger and how dangerous it was for Igor that night and other nights when the Russians were looking for him and they would have killed him if they’d found him because he told Canada how many spies they had spying in Ottawa for the Communists.
And Igor tells how to protect yourself if you’re in danger.
“Distract, then act! Distract, then act,” Igor says. “Just like in nature. Do what mother partridge does when fox comes too close to nest. Pretend to be wounded and limp away. Fox will follow. Then when fox is far from nest — fly to safety.”
Now quiet. Now glasses raised.
Really quiet now.
Igor leans closer to the table.
We all do. Lean in. Heads close. Something coming. “I have confession to make,” he says.
It’s 3:00 A.M. in the morning. Everything is so quiet. Even the oil furnace isn’t saying anything.
“I am not here for nostalgic, memory of old days. I apologize. I lie. But now I trust you. I tell you truth.”
Mr. Gouzenko tells us about that night. How the Russians broke down his door. Our door. How he hid in another neighbor’s apartment. How he escaped. How he came back. How he gave papers in English to the police. How the government moved his family. How he became a Canadian hero. How he still lives in a secret place somewhere in Canada. How he needs money.
“...and why come back here?” Grampa whispers.
“To get something. Something valuable. Something I can sell for money for my family.”
“Something?”
“Papers. Papers in Russian language.”
“Where?”
“Here. In apartment in floor.”
“Where? What floor?”
“In bedroom.”
We go into the bedroom.
“Under bed.”
Under the bed is Grampa’s strongbox. We move the big bed. We slide the box out from the wall. Igor is almost as strong as both the movers Frankie and Johnny.
With Grampa Rip’s hammer and crowbar we take up some floor boards.
There’s a cloth bag with wood handles. Igor takes it carefully up and opens it. He takes out a handful of papers tied with a cloth ribbon. He unties the ribbon. Flips through the papers.
He looks up. His face is tight.
“Important pages missing. Nine pages. Package is not worth much money without complete pages. Rare historical documents to sell to archives. I need money. For my family. I am discouraged. Almost worthless unless complete.”
My mind is a merry-go-round. Randy’s place. A dirty book shelf filled with old newspapers and magazines. A dusty, stopped clock. A folder on the top shelf.
There’s something fluttering its wings inside me. These words come out of my throat like spring birds chirping.
“I know where those missing pages are.”
Have I grown another head?
You’d think so, the way Igor and Grampa Rip are staring at me.