Chapter Ten

Icherished my flat on Florence Street, which was only a mile or so south of the Parliament Buildings. My books were piled high on roughly hewn boards balanced on mustard yellow bricks. Alone in my flat, I felt Bohemian, what I might have been had I arrived in Canada and not joined the Party. I’d painted the entire flat white to make the space appear larger, except for the galley kitchen, where I’d inherited purple-wisteria-decaled wallpaper from the old woman who lived here before me. In the mornings, it suited me and reminded me of Nesvicz; of my mother’s little desk beside the stove where she wrote Yiddish poetry to read to me and sister Masha.

In my apartment, a window opened outward from the kitchen. Ivy grew clinging to the wooden frame and stretched across to my bedroom window. By August the windows were overgrown with dark green foliage that kept the rooms cool. My friend Sybil, who shared an apartment in my building with her mother, had crocheted a blanket for me, and I kept it spread across my bed that summer. It was such a hot summer, the nights smelling sweetly of pine and roses, the blanket was all I needed to be cozy. Under the mattress, I hid two hundred dollars alongside the code names and numbers of the comrades I would call if the time came. I also kept a picture of my family that Masha had sent before the Russian post stopped for good.

My bed was a feather mattress on an iron frame, but it was all that I desired. Rarely did I bring my contacts back home. It was much too plain and I never knew when Vine would turn up. Although it seemed now that I shouldn’t be expecting him to drop by anytime soon. That morning, after Vine and I had spoken about the missing cryptograms, he decided to stop speaking to me, as if it were my fault that they’d gone astray.

Sybil lived below me on the main floor of the building, and when she would enter my flat, she used the fire escape. Her flat was a two bedroom that overlooked the garden. She and her mother had entered Canada illegally, after the Canadian government slammed the door on those fleeing Hitler. Sybil and her mother Zsuzsa were Romanian and stalwart members of the Party. I think Zabotin liked the idea that the two kept on eye on me when he couldn’t, although I wasn’t certain how accurate their reports were to my handler on my nocturnal comings and goings. At the same time, Sybil, who was fond of Vine, knew instantly when there was trouble between us, like she did that morning when she came up via the fire escape.

“Yowzah,” she said and whistled through her teeth. Sybil was like a carny barking from the big top. “What gives with you two?”

I entered the front room, where Sybil’s head poked through the window.

“Can’t you two stop talking and let a girl get a word in edgewise?” she shouted in her greenhorn English. She sensed there was trouble between Vine and me whenever the room went silent. This wasn’t the first time Sybil had found us at odds.

As she descended from the wrought-iron fire escape to lower herself to the living room floor, neither he nor I uttered a word. Sybil’s kimono rode high over her generous hips. I was dressed for the office and Vine, who wasn’t on speaking terms with me, offered a polite hello to our visitor

“Why don’t you join us for a nosh?” she asked us. “Mama’s made cherry blintzes with sour cream and sugar.” Sybil’s hair was chestnut, lush, and tied in a swirling chignon. Now in her cabin in the Chernobyl forest, she wears a babushka over her thinning grey hair, but that morning in Ottawa she wore a pink silk kimono decorated with flowers. I remember it because she brought it to Europe with her from Canada.

“You skipped dinner last night,” she said to me. “Fred was here and Vine too, weren’t you, fella? Mama made chicken paprikash and veal roulade and potato knishes. You should have been here. Fred says you’re too skinny.”

I looked kindly at Sybil, who enjoyed her mother’s food.

“C’mon downstairs,” she said. “I’ll pack you a lunch of leftovers from dinner.” She sounded as if she’d just stepped off the boat, and there was something about her openness about her past that reminded me of the way we’d talked back home.

Until that day, I’d never spoken publically about the people I’d left behind in Europe, and I couldn’t understand why Sybil felt the need. Her father and brothers were captured by the Fascists and drowned in the Danube. It was better to remain silent and to be strong. Tim Buck taught me that when I joined the Party.

“Give the leftovers to Vine,” I said.

Without looking at me, Vine knotted his tie tight while standing in front of the mirror above the gas fireplace. “I won’t be having breakfast this morning, thank you,” he said to Sybil while ignoring me completely. “Or lunch, for that matter.” He claimed he had important writing to do and didn’t have time to eat or gossip with women. I followed her down the fire escape to her apartment.

Sybil’s flat, unlike my own, was awash in colour. Landscapes covered the walls. She painted them when she wasn’t fussing over Fred Rose. Most of the canvasses were dreamy depictions of the Gatineau Hills, northeast of us and across the river, in Quebec.

“How is Fred doing in the House of Commons?” I asked Sybil as we sipped Turkish coffee and nibbled at chocolate halvah at her dining table.

“Vey iz mir!” she shouted, holding her head in her hands. “Busy. That man will perish slaving for the Party. In the summer, he can’t breathe. His asthma. He can’t sleep.”

“Vine doesn’t sleep. I hear him crying at night.” The words tumbled out of my mouth.

Sybil put her hand to her heart.

Her mother’s grand piano stood in the adjoining drawing room dominating the apartment. Before the war, she was a rather famous concert pianist in Bucharest. Her husband, György Romanescu, owned the city’s finest department store. Before the Nazis took over, he shipped the piano from their luxurious home to Canada. He wanted his wife to play after his demise.

“Last night I was with Zabotin,” I confessed to Sybil.

“Lucky you.”

“He promised to help me return to Europe. To find my mama and papa, my sister and brother. I shall board a ship to Danzig and go by train to Minsk. From there it is not far to Nesvicz. Zabotin will arrange for passage. He promised.”

Sybil looked at me disapprovingly.

“He gave me his word,” I dissembled.

“Gay, guzunta hiat.”

Sybil spoke Yiddish when she was vexed or frightened. It was the perfect language to talk of catastrophes. It annoyed me that she lapsed into Yiddish so often and didn’t attempt to enlarge her English vocabulary. I was perpetually reminding her to speak in English. I wanted her to be more Canadian than she cared to be.

Sybil spent her days caring for her mother or scurrying between the apartment and Fred Rose’s office in the centre block on Parliament Hill. She ran errands for him, often to Montreal, with instructions for the comrades who were also engaged by Zabotin and the GRU. Rose didn’t need to pay Sybil. The Romanescu women had money. It was rumoured they had smuggled diamonds into Canada sewn inside the hems of their skirts.

“Aren’t you scared to go back there?” she asked, making a face and running her index finger across her throat.

Before I could respond, Zsuzsa Romanescu swept into the room. Unlike her daughter, she was petite and small-boned, elegantly wrapped in an ivory sateen dressing gown that perfectly matched her tinted hair. “Are you out of your mind, Freda?” she asked, jumping into our conversation, on which she clearly had been eavesdropping from the next room. “Give it a few years, and the Soviet flag will be planted on Polish soil. Then you can go safely. It’s too dangerous for a woman on her own right now.”

“Thank you for your advice, Madam Romanescu,” I said politely. “But I must leave soon. I can’t wait. My family might be alive. I could get them out. Zabotin wouldn’t arrange the trip if he didn’t believe I would be safe.”

Zsuzsa clicked her tongue.

“I have to go. Nesvicz haunts my dreams,” I spoke softly to the women. I didn’t wish to alarm them, but I couldn’t control myself. “It’s all I see at night.” The two woman said nothing and I continued. “I am standing at the kitchen window with Mama and Papa. A little musical band of Jewish men, dressed in black, is crossing the icy river that flows through the village. Our elderly rabbi with the long white beard is leading his troupe through the blowing snow. Some of the players are smiling, some frowning. The butcher is carrying his cello over his shoulder. The baker is smoking a pipe as he taps his tambourine. A black bird flies overhead. Beside the rabbi walks a skeleton, but the band members take no notice, not even the red-haired young triangle player who lags far behind.”

Sybil put her hand on my shoulder. “Vey, vey. What are you talking about?”

I stood up to leave.

“How about a bisl poppy seed cake from last night?” Zsuzsa offered, an ocean of her concern floating in my direction. “Sit, sit. You’ve been working hard. Too many assignments, too many long nights.” She sighed and looked toward the heavens where the God she didn’t believe in must reign.

Sybil noticed Vine first. As soon as I saw him kneeling on the fire escape landing outside the Romanescu’s apartment, I sank into a chair and turned my back to him. I was not able to face him. He was on his hands and knees while he listened to me recall my dreams, his ear next to the open window. His face was white and I could tell he knew exactly what I meant about the skeleton, marching behind the rabbi. He never admitted it, but I knew he’d snuck in the cinema to watch the newsreels of the walking skeletons released from the camps. I heard him through the thin walls of my apartment, calling out for his mother and brother in his sleep.

On those nights I covered my head with a pillow to block out the noise. I slept fitfully and could not fall back asleep in the wake of Vine’s nightmares. I imagined the pictures in his mind when he cried out, but I, too, carried visions in those days before I knew with certainty what had happened to my family during the war. I never comforted him in the night. I couldn’t. If I had gone to Vine, sat on the side of his bed, placed my hand on his forehead, wiped his tears away, my world would stop. I would crumble.

I was late for work. I forced myself to stand up straight and walk out the door. I reminded myself that some got away, all of them unsuspecting, never knowing why they’d cheated death. Why couldn’t my family be among the chosen few?

* * *

Chernobyl journal
1988

In the forest, I met a woman named Elka who looked much older than me although she must have been ten years younger. She dyed her white hair with henna until it turned a ghostly pinkish grey. Her face was a map of Eastern Europe, indented with smallpox scars deep as ravines. The lurid blue veins in her nose ran wild in all directions.

During the war, Elka had fought alongside the partisans, existing in makeshift shelters in the forest, summer and winter. She sided with the Communists since they were the only ones unyielding enough to outlast the Fascists. Only the Communist cadres could muster up the unbreakable courage to confront the Wehrmacht, she repeated many times.

She told me that when she returned to her village after the war, not one Jew had survived so she decided to walk into the Dnieper River to drown herself. Admittedly it was an act of cowardice, she said, one the Party would condemn; but for that moment, she soared above politics. A young Soviet officer pulled her from the current just as she was going down for the third time. He threw her in prison where she languished for weeks until a stranger from Jewish Rescue Services discovered her and sent her by ship to the port of Haifa.

Elka couldn’t stand the Levantine heat or be bothered to learn the Hebrew language. It was impossible for her to share in the optimism at the founding of the new state of Israel where she lived with a small sect of religious Jews. They took her on, more as a matter of conscience than as a convert.

“They sensed that it was too late for me and God,” she said. “Because I was good at solving puzzles they sent me—on a scholarship for survivors—to the Teknion in Haifa where the most clever physicists and engineers were working on the atomic bomb.”

After five years—she had managed to stick it out for that long—she booked passage on a ship to Piraeus. Athens delighted her. She longed to visit the Acropolis, having seen pictures of it in a book as a child. In the Plaka, she discovered a lodging house where everyone ate bacon and mixed milk with meat, something she missed doing in Haifa. After two months exploring the Plaka, she carried on to Kiev, satisfied that she’d finally experienced the louche life while schooling herself in the architecture of the ancient world.

“La guerre n’est pas finie,” I responded when we first spoke in the forest, but Elka disregarded my warning with a brush of her hand. “I’d fought enough by the time I arrived in Greece. It’s one of the reasons I left Israel,” she said firmly. When I asked her what happened to her partisan comrades, she clamped her lips shut and drew a line across her neck with her forefinger.

In Kiev, she had continued her studies in nuclear physics at the university. She claimed that she preferred the climate in the Ukraine to that of Israel and relished hiking in the woods on her days off from the lab where she helped to build the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

“I’ve had a life,” she said in her matter-of-fact way, as if what she’d experienced wasn’t much at all. “Not that I’m complaining. It doesn’t pay to whine. I’ve never wanted jewels,” she added, stretching out her bare, gnarled fingers for me to inspect. “I’ve never needed a husband or children. They slow you down. I prefer it this way. No ties.”

Elka asked me if I’d ever made love in the snow, and when I said I had not, she prodded me to try it. I thought it ridiculous that two old crones were discussing sex in the snow, but Elka insisted on giving me the details.

“I’m resistant to the cold,” she said. “Nothing bothers me after spending long winters in sub-zero temperatures with the partisans. The winter of ’42 was the coldest on record. God had forsaken us in more ways than one. How about you? Could you have stood it, the cold?”

“I doubt it,” I admitted. “When my friend Zabotin first took me to his dacha, I was freezing even though there was a wood stove and fur blankets.”

Elka thought it necessary that I toughen up if I intended to remain in Chernobyl, and when I argued I was tough enough, she smirked and I could see the gaps in her broken teeth.

She was excited by my mention of Zabotin’s dacha. Her eyes became slits. “Are you referring to Nikolai Zabotin, the count who became a Red Cavalry officer? The one who ended up in Canada and then returned to Chernobyl of his own free will?”

“Not quite of his own free will.”

“Ah. I thought there was more to the story.” Elka clenched her teeth, satisfied she’d been correct all along. “I can’t see him as the comrade he should have been. Wasn’t he at Reactor Number Four when it blew?”

How did she know so much about Zabotin? It made me suspicious. I wanted to question Elka, but I was afraid.

The other day I bumped into her picking mushrooms in our Chernobyl forest. The plants were enormous, as broad and succulent as watermelons. Elka was intending to boil up a mushroom pudding on her wood-fired stove. She’d learned how to cook while in the forest with the partisans, she informed me.

There’s a rocky path above the forest’s steepest ravine overlooking a squalid hut. When it rains, mud creeps down to the water that collects in the crevice of the ravine. Elka squats in that hut, smaller than mine, and more Spartan because she chooses to live alone. The walls are covered with portraits of Soviet leaders, beginning with Lenin and ending with Gorbachev. She invited me in for nettle tea and blackberries, and I agreed to partake of her hospitality.