June, 1941
Moscow
When they arrived in Moscow, Rachel accompanied Lily to the Swedish embassy. Life in the capital appeared unaffected by the onset of war; she was surprised by the crowded restaurants and shops.
They were given a bed for the night, and Lily cabled her father, asking him to wire money. His reply was brief and unequivocal: she was to leave Russia. He had made arrangements for Lily to fly out with the remaining wives and children from the embassy staff the following afternoon.
“Any room in your baggage for a stowaway?” Rachel asked.
“You don’t think I’d go, do you!”
Rachel shook her head. “I don’t want you to stay on my account. It’s too dangerous. Your father’s right. You should go home.”
“This is my home as long as you and Stephen are here.” Lily put her arm around Rachel. “I loved your mother as much as my own. I’m part of your family now.”
Rachel rested her head on Lily’s shoulders. She closed her eyes and recalled Elizabeth’s face and voice, her touch.
“I can’t believe she’s gone. I want her to be alive so much.”
Lily rocked her. “She is alive. In you. And in Stephen. And I won’t leave either of you behind.”
In the morning before breakfast, Lily cabled her decision to her father. In a flurry of cables he urged her to reconsider. True to her word, she refused to budge, and Rachel was relieved when he wired her ten thousand rubles.
“We’re getting ourselves a hotel room and then we’re going shopping!” Lily declared.
Rachel started to urge more caution, but she was swept away by Lily’s exuberance. Anything is better than stewing in misery and pain, she told herself.
Lily took a suite at the Metropole and bribed the hotel manager to let Rachel register as her sister. They went to a store restricted to foreigners, where they each bought five dresses, underwear, shoes and boots, and cosmetics. They also bought canteens for their inevitable journey. After a sumptuous dinner at the hotel, at Lily’s insistence, they went to the theater on Pushkin Street and heard Lemeshev sing.
Over breakfast Rachel suggested it was time to face reality.
“I don’t know what to do next,” she said. “If we try to contact Stephen directly, we might all be arrested.”
“What about that artist friend of your father’s you told me about?”
“Vladimir Avilov. I don’t think we can trust him. He’ll turn me over to the N.K.V.D. in a second to save his skin.”
“I can try to leave a message for Stephen. We know where he is, after all.”
“As long as I don’t exist. It’s still dangerous. They may be watching him to see if I show up.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. You can’t go on being my sister because there’s no record of your having entered the country. Why not use your mother’s maiden name and tell them you lost your papers?”
“All they have to do is check the records.”
“What records? As long as Latvia is occupied there won’t be any available to them.”
“So I can be anyone I want.”
“Sure. But use as much of the truth as you can to make it easier to lie about the rest.”
“You have a devious mind!”
“All it takes is a little practice.”
Even after caviar omelets, fruit, and smoked fish, they still had room for cinnamon buns with their coffee.
“Well, if I go looking for Stephen, what are you going to do?”
“I can go ahead and join the poster unit.”
“What!”
“What better way to make military contacts?”
“Do you think you can risk drawing attention to yourself?”
“We already have.”
“But not as an artist. Right now we’re two rich girls on the loose. They know where our money is coming from so they know we’re not spies. That’s a lot different than being an artist with your talent.”
“You think I should forget about art for the rest of the war.”
“Yes. Pretend you can’t draw a straight line.”
Will I feel liberated or shackled, Rachel wondered, if I stop creating and take on a whole new identity? The notion repulsed her. She didn’t want to suppress her talent during what could be her most fruitful years. If the war dragged on, she might never regain what was lost to time.
“I can’t do that. I can’t deny myself.”
Rachel saw a flash of annoyance in Lily’s eyes. I know, she thought, I sound like my father.
“Let’s do whatever we have to do in order to find your brother. Hopefully we can get out before anyone figures out that you’re David Hirschfeld’s daughter.”
Rachel nodded, relieved that Lily hadn’t challenged her decision.
* * *
The address given to Rachel by Captain Panofsky proved to be a warehouse near the river. She was met at the entrance by a guard. She handed him the envelope and asked him to give it to Mitya.
A young man in paint-splattered clothes came down to meet her. They went up on the freight elevator, which opened to a skylit floor occupied by a dozen artists, all in their twenties, working at drafting tables. As her guide led her across the floor, Rachel felt out of place in her new dress; the pungent odor of fresh paint and turpentine was intoxicating and she yearned to don studio clothes and get to work.
At the opposite end was a glass-walled office without a door. Standing inside, watching her approach, was a man in his late thirties with a paunch and a moustache. His gaze was direct, but warm, and he waved for her to come in. On his desk was Panofsky’s letter.
“I’m Lieutenant Mitya Vodogolin. Sit down and tell me how you know my dear friend Panofsky.”
From that first encounter, Rachel felt at ease in his presence. There was something about him that made her laugh inwardly; yet she knew instantly that she would be able to trust him once she gained his confidence.
Using her mother’s maiden name, she described her flight from Talsi and her experience at the Pskov station, taking care to describe Panofsky in detail.
“Before you go on,” Vodogolin interrupted, “let me show you a sample of the work we do. If you’re still interested we can talk further.”
He spread a stack of posters on the floor. Two of them caught Rachel’s eye. One depicted a siren-red Russian tank crushing a grotesque black crab with Hitler’s face. The second showed a Russian soldier ramming his bayonet down the throat of a Hitler-faced rat. She was arrested by their frenzied use of violent color, owing much to the German expressionists.
“You like those, eh?”
“Very much.” She was hesitant to talk about the posters’ Germanic roots.
“My favorites also,” Vodogolin commented. He winked at her. She nodded and they both smiled.
“Why don’t you do a quick sketch or two for me?” He took a pad and pencil from his desk and handed them to her. He stood behind her. “Do a portrait of yours truly.”
It was as though she had known him for years, so easily did the image come to her fingertips.
“I’m very impressed.” He looked at her curiously. “Do you want a job with us? It might be boring for you.”
“I want to work for you.”
“All I need are your papers.”
“I don’t have any. I lost them.” Rachel maintained a steady gaze into Vodogolin’s keen black eyes.
He was dismayed. “But I can’t permit you to work until you’ve registered with the Moscow authorities.”
Had it not been for her certainty that she could trust him, she would have left the studio and hoped that in a few days he would forget all about her. But she was sure that he wouldn’t report her to the N.K.V.D.
“I can’t.”
She didn’t flinch as Vodogolin searched her face for any trace of guile. She knew it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility for Stalin’s agents to use such a decoy to flush out spies.
“Let me see your drawings from the train station.”
“I gave them all away.”
“All of them?”
“Except the ones in my head.”
He gestured towards the sketch pad. “Put one or two on paper and then we’ll talk.”
Two hours later she returned with a single drawing, a self-portrait in which she was standing on the wrong side of the fence at the Pskov station.
“Who are you?” His eyes were touched with awe and wonder.
She told him.
“I shouldn’t be surprised. A talent such as yours doesn’t come from a dry well. But why did you change your name? If anything, they’ll make your father into a socialist hero.”
“My name is probably on an N.K.V.D. list. It’s likely my fiancé was arrested as he was coming to meet me. We were going to be married and then leave the country.”
“And he had phony papers.”
She nodded. “He was a Zionist, and we were going to Palestine. I don’t know for sure, but he may have been killed.”
Vodogolin looked at the drawing. “I shouldn’t have asked. This is all I needed to know.” He sighed and muttered under his breath. “You can work for me. But we’ll have to be careful.”
“Thank you.” She would have hugged him had they not been in a glass-walled room.
“Not yet. Not until you’re safely out of this insane asylum called Russia.” He thought for a moment. “Where are you staying?”
“At the Metropole. With a family friend. She’s a Swedish citizen. I’m posing as her sister.”
“I’ll find you a safer place. Not as comfortable, but more out of the way.”
* * *
Lily was waiting for her when she arrived back at the hotel. From her expression, Rachel could see that she had not been successful.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I went to the university and found the compound where he and the other athletes live, but it’s guarded like a prison. They wouldn’t let me in and I couldn’t even find out if he’s there.”
“Did you leave your name?”
“Yes. I told them to have him leave word at the embassy. But the guards didn’t make any promises.”
“We’ll be lucky if they even give him the message.”
“What are they protecting him from?” Lily said.
“You. Me. Anyone who’s not part of the Soviet apparatus.”
“Now what?”
Rachel recounted her meeting with Vodogolin and his insistence that they move. “If he’s worried, then we ought to be.”
“Let’s go,” Lily said. “The sooner the better.”
* * *
True to his word, by the end of the week Vodogolin had found them a room in a boarding house for women. It had a single bed, a chest of drawers, and one armchair. The window faced a brick wall, and they shared a bathroom with the others on their floor, most of them young women from the country who had come to Moscow to work in factories. Lily dubbed the place the nunnery.
From her first day at work Rachel experienced a cathartic release. A torrent of violent imagery flowed from her to the paper. Her own need perfectly matched the government’s insatiable desire for fresh propaganda to bolster confidence in the Red Army and to arouse hatred for the invaders. She soon saw her creations on walls throughout Moscow.
Even that wasn’t enough. She stayed late every night, using the solitude to make foundation drawings for a series of paintings of the Pskov station. She was determined to capture the terror of those left behind before her memory faded. She discovered in their despairing faces a metaphor for the dilemma of those like herself who were trapped between the twin monsters of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.
Although the city seemed normal on the surface, suspicion was apparent to an increasing degree in the city at large. The theaters, restaurants, and shops remained open and crowded, and it appeared to be a typical summer, but Rachel saw that hysteria had begun to seep through the populace. Any foreigner was suspect, as was anyone dressed in an unusual manner or who wasn’t accompanied by a large group of friends.
One morning, Rachel was walking to work when she overheard a man talking to his female companion in English; their clothes were unquestionably foreign, and within seconds a crowd formed around them, shouting questions at the couple. Rachel wondered if the Muscovites thought they had been speaking German. The crowd grew uglier as the man began arguing with his interrogators. A shoving match ensued, and the man was set upon as the woman screamed for help. Military police came on the scene and broke it up, but not before the man had been kicked and beaten.
Thankful that she spoke fluent Russian, Rachel hurried to her destination, afraid to look up from her feet. She realized then that she and Lily could go no further in their efforts to contact Stephen. One too many questions would lead to her arrest.