October, 1943
Tashkent
Rachel marked the anniversary of Igor’s death by going to her studio to continue working on the painting she had devoted all of her time to over the past twelve months: a huge depiction of the Talsi massacre. The work consisted of five panels, each one larger than any canvas she had previously attempted.
The theme of the painting was the thirst for power, and she discovered its most cogent expression in Zip Uk’s personality. In preliminary sketches she portrayed the Ukrainian in all his ruthlessness; his face, hands, wrists, neck, even the way he breathed. All of him was concentrated on the need for more power. Yet the sketches also revealed that underpinning the rest was fear, of himself and of humanity in general.
The Nazi executioners and their Stalinist victims all had the same fear in their eyes and faces, their rigid backs: Zip Uk’s fear of freedom and free will. The men and women of her village she painted realistically, powerless victims caught between two monstrous aberrations. Her father she painted at the moment of his death, his artistic vision intact, clinging to his belief in the unknown, the uncontrollable, the imagination.
To protect herself from an unannounced visit by Zip Uk she had, with Mitya’s help, built a studio within a studio. For her actual painting, she used a narrow closed area that she could convert in minutes to look like a storage space. The outer studio was a stage replete with all the usual artistic props. The illusion had never been tested, but she continued to improve it; to that end she had even gone so far as to paint part of a phony version of her Talsi mural, similar to her posters, depicting the Nazis as evil and the Communists as innocent victims. This she kept on display as a work-in-progress.
As yet unsolved was the problem of her finished works, close to five hundred in number. These she had described and listed by title and number so that when she finally found a secure storage location she would already have them catalogued. But the canvases were still stacked against the walls of her studio in plain view, vulnerable to seizure and destruction.
She went directly to her closet studio that morning, but she found that the memories of a year ago couldn’t be shunted aside. She never forced her talent to work against herself so she went out to the false studio and sat, remembering Igor and, for the ten thousandth time, wondering about Lily. Mitya would tell her only that she was safe and that he would contact her if Stephen appeared.
“I don’t want you to be put in a position of having to protect her,” he asserted.
“What about you?”
“I’m nobody. What happens to me is of no importance to the world.”
She had learned to laugh at such comments. She and Mitya had long since fallen into a pattern of good-natured carping at one another. He still pestered her to make a run for the border; but even Mitya now realized that she was too well known for such a haphazard escape. The N.K.V.D. could easily send agents after her. They were both aware that as final victory over the Nazis drew ever closer, the danger to her increased.
Late one afternoon, Rachel was working in her real studio when she heard a bang on the door to the fake studio. Mitya normally gave a light tap when he wanted to come in.
It could only mean that Zip Uk had come.
She repositioned herself before the work-in-progress, and then answered the knock.
Mitya stood in the doorway. She nodded to indicate she was prepared
“You have a surprise visitor. Zip Uk. If you have a free minute; otherwise he’ll come back some other time.”
“No. I’m delighted.” They had decided that when he came they would carry out the charade to the letter, even though he wouldn’t be taken in. Their hope was that seeing their obvious disingenuousness, he’d fall victim to the studio illusion.
Rachel went out to greet her adversary. They hadn’t spoken to one another since the memorial service for Igor. At that time, going through the condolence ritual, his hatred toward her had leaked out from behind his words like a poison gas.
“At last,” Rachel said, “I was beginning to wonder if you’d forgotten about me.”
“You were on my list,” he replied agreeably. “A long one, unfortunately.” He appeared to be taken aback by her appearance. The months of sun-filled days had streaked her hair more blonde and freckled her nose and cheeks. “The climate agrees with you,” he observed.
“I’ve never lived anywhere I’ve liked more.”
She spoke without listening to what she was saying. Visceral hatred gripped her.
“Why don’t I show you my studio?”
Zip Uk followed her inside, closing the door behind him. Immediately he gestured toward the hundreds of canvases stacked against the walls. “Very impressive,” he said. “All yours?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Rachel could feel his mind devouring her work, absorbing her paintings into his paranoia. She didn’t want to show them to him for she could predict their effect: he would be terrified by them and his fear would cause him to be more antagonistic toward her.
She directed his attention to the phony painting of the Talsi massacre. “This is my obsession.”
She stood aside as Zip Uk viewed it up close. He then went to the opposite end of the room and studied it from a distance.
“Most remarkable,” he observed. “A few more such as this and no one will ever accuse you of being a Zionist.” He paused. “Or attempting to leave the country illegally with a known Zionist conspirator.” Zip Uk turned and faced her. “You are fortunate, indeed, that Mr. Orloff is dead.”
“Dead?!”
She saw that he savored her shock and cursed herself inwardly for having exposed herself to him.
“Not by us. The Germans.” He walked toward the door.
Deny it, she told herself. If you don’t say anything, you’re admitting it’s true. She struggled to formulate a simple denial but her mind wouldn’t function. She met him at the door.
Zip Uk smiled, obviously enjoying his advantage. “We don’t know the details, yet. His name turned up on a list we recovered in Leningrad.”
“Michael Orloff was my fiancé. I know nothing about any illegal attempt to leave the country.”
“Of course you don’t.” He seized her right hand. “I look at yours and then at mine, and I wonder how so much could be given to one so small and so little to one so large.”
He left and she sat on the floor, her legs sprawled in front of her.
She didn’t look up when Mitya came in. He sat beside her and put a flabby arm around her shoulder.
“What on earth did he say to you?”
“He said,” she choked, “that Michael is dead. That the Germans killed him.”
“What else? He must have told you more than that to reduce you to this.”
“That he was a Zionist conspirator and I was attempting to leave the country illegally with him. His name was on a list they found in Leningrad.”
Mitya scoffed. “You believed that nonsense! Since when do the Nazis make lists of their victims. If they did they’d have to convert all their munitions factories to making paper.”
“Not a German list, Mitya.” She looked up at him. “An N.K.V.D. list. It’s true, Mitya. Michael was a Zionist and we were going to leave Latvia and go to Palestine. He was probably arrested by the N.K.V.D. with false papers on him—in my name too.”
“If they had the documents, they’d arrest you. All they have is a list—and his name was on it, not yours.”
“You can be my lawyer when they come for me.”
“The man’s a fiend!” Mitya said. He looked about the studio. “The question to be answered is why he told you this now. He wanted to upset you for some reason.”
“I don’t know.” She pressed her fingertips to her forehead. “I can’t think right now.”
“I can.” Mitya got up slowly and went over to the phony mural. “What did he say about this, our esteemed art critic?”
“That’s what started it all. He looked at it for awhile without saying anything. Then he told me about Michael.”
“Just like that. Didn’t that strike you as odd?”
“I didn’t look at it that way.”
Mitya walked back to her. “What about now?” Rachel tried to think, but her mind was like a thousand pound boulder. “He had a reason for getting you upset,” Mitya continued. “My guess is he wanted to stop you from working.”
“On that?” Rachel gestured at the mural. “Why?”
“No. On the real mural. He saw right through our prop.” He stood directly over her. “It could be he’s afraid you’ll disappear before he can satisfy his superiors that you should be arrested. He might be thinking of using the mural to extract a confession from you.”
“He could just as easily use my other paintings.”
“Wouldn’t you sacrifice all the others to save the mural?”
“Yes.” The painting of the massacre was the culmination of her artistic life up to this point. She would do anything to save it.
“You know Zip Uk’s mind. What will he do next?”
The answer came to her without thinking. “He’ll come back to see if he was right.”
“Yes. He would have gone ahead today except for his not wanting to risk making a fool out of himself. You being who you are, he has to confirm his suspicions first.”
Mitya was right. He would do the same thing to her mural that he had done to her clothes. She extended a hand to Mitya and he pulled her to her feet.
“We can’t simply carry them out of here,” Rachel said. “He’ll have people watching us.”
Rachel thought for a moment and clapped her hands.
“What?” Mitya looked at her. She smiled gleefully. “What hiding place have you thought of?”
“A place that devil would never think to look.”
“Where?”
“Have you ever read Edgar Allen Poe?”
A few hours later the panels of the uncompleted mural had been taken from her closet studio and hung on the walls of Mitya’s poster area. They left her closet studio exactly as it was, except they emptied it of work materials and filled it with detritus. The poster artists stopped working and rushed to look at each of the panels, then broke into loud and sustained applause.
Rachel went about, tears in her eyes, personally thanking each of them.
“We’ll all leave together at our usual time,” Mitya announced. “You’d better stay with me tonight,” he advised Rachel. “He’s going to have a titanic fit when he can’t find them.”
“With you, Mitya?” Rachel said in a prudish tone, wrinkling her nose.
“Yes. And the five others who share my room! We can put our heads together and figure out a place to hide all your paintings.”
* * *
Rachel couldn’t believe her eyes.
It had only taken Zip Uk one night, and he had left behind a path of destruction as unique as that of a tornado tearing a path through a village.
He had gone straight to her inner studio and emptied it, flinging the buckets and materials into the fake studio.
Finding nothing, he had smashed his fist into the walls, raging along them like a caged animal, breaking through as though searching for a way out.
From the inner studio he had stalked about her fake studio, smashing the walls, kicking everything in his path. Empty-handed, he had torn through Mitya’s workshop, knocking aside the tables and easels, smashing the walls, looking beneath the paintings for a hiding place.
He had found nothing.
He had grabbed a hammer and returned to the walls of her inner studio, lashing out, destroying the walls, leaving only the frame and chunks of plaster.
He had gone back to the fake studio and then to the workshop, wielding his hammer, striking with reckless abandon, leaving hammer imprints everywhere.
His fury had bloodied him; his blood was splattered onto the floors and what remained of the walls. The hammer lay in a corner of the main workshop, its handle soaked with his blood.
Rachel stared in amazement at the walls, now bearing an eerie resemblance to the backdrop of her fake version of the massacre, a post office wall riddled with bullet holes.
She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In the midst of his explosion, Zip Uk had taken all the paintings down from the walls. She gathered together the panels of her mural and stacked them behind her other paintings. For now they were safe, but she had to find a place for them. One that would elude discovery for a hundred years, if need be.