Chapter Fifteen

Sunday morning
September 2, 1945
Ottawa

During the early hours of the morning it stormed, a torrential Ottawa Valley downpour with the branches of the trees tearing at the latch of my bedroom window until it broke open. Rain seeped onto the floor. Shards of lightening, followed by bellowing thunder, turned the night into a violent display of natural force. The electricity went out. I hid under the covers.

After the storm passed, a waft of fresh, dry air streamed into my room. I turned the covers down and inhaled as if it was my first breath. The air smelled sweetly of the green Gatineau Hills on the other side of the river in Quebec. I wondered how Grierson and the Ellerys had weathered the harshest storm of the summer. I imagined Patsy Ellery wandering the rocky shore of Pink Lake under the booming crackles of thunder with a bottle of gin in her shaky hand.

I’d hardly slept during the night. Vine hadn’t called. I considered going to the Party office to see if Zabotin had arranged a drop for me, but thought better of it. What if Gouzenko had already defected?

Instead I took down the wireless transmitter, stored in a suitcase on the top shelf of my closet, behind a box of hair curlers, to send Zabotin a two-line coded message. Meet me at 3 p.m. at the railway station bar, it read. Then I waited. It was impossible for me to fathom what Zabotin would do next, if he’d attempt to talk sense into Gouzenko, or if he’d confront him to frighten him into giving up. I secretly hoped he would alert the Director immediately and be done with the cipher clerk.

My options were limited. Being without Zabotin or Vine to lean on forced me to imagine what it would be like without them. Refreshing, like the northern breeze at my window, but lonely. For hours I felt that I was living in a bubble, disconnected from the tangible objects surrounding me. The desk was not real. The chair, a figment of my imagination. I could melt objects with a touch of my hand. I forced myself to drink a cup of black tea and settle down.

When the transmitter sounded with Zabotin’s reply, I dressed. He would meet me at three at the agreed location. I figured that the train station would be close to empty, but when I arrived tourists were milling around aimlessly.

Zabotin met me at the entrance to the darkened bar. We sat at a table in the far corner of the room above the tracks where the trains pulled into the station. He ordered two double martinis and a plate of warm olives, as he always did. From the second-floor bar, we peered down at the tourists standing at the ticket wicket, clutching their children with one hand and their overstuffed suitcases with the other. How I wished to be one of them.

The tall lead-paned windows in the station were closed after last night’s storm and the air inside was still sultry. Across the road from the station stood the immense Canadian Pacific Hotel, the Château Laurier. For years, Zabotin and I met behind the walls of that great pile of stone, marble and northern Quebec timber. It was the most beautiful building I’d known. There were mirrors lining the great halls and when I looked at myself, I felt beautiful and important, as if I were making a difference. I assured myself that Zabotin and I were on the right side of history and we would come through the war as good, conscientious people in a spectacularly improved world. I thought of myself, then, as a decent person who did what I did for a just cause. We all did, at the time. Until everything changed.

That afternoon in the station bar, Zabotin didn’t act like a good person. He was not in an agreeable mood. At first we smoked cigarettes instead of talking. When Zabotin stubbed out his cigarette to speak, it was to order me to attend the Labour Day celebration. “Cancelling the event is the worst thing we can do,” he said gruffly. “The celebration will be held at the Gouzenko’s as planned. We must behave as if nothing is awry, as if we know nothing about the stolen cables. No cause for suspicion. Correct?”

“I don’t see why we must meet at the Gouzenkos’ apartment. Having us all there at once. It’s too dangerous. What if he alerts the authorities?”

“He won’t. I’ve spoken to him.”

“He has the cables? Is it him?” I wanted to trust Zabotin, but I couldn’t help myself from checking that his story hadn’t changed.

“Yes, it is Gouzenko,” Zabotin said. ”Don’t look so shocked. We knew it would happen one day. That we’d be betrayed.”

“We did, but I didn’t think it would be that little worm.”

“I already know that Homer believes that the Americans are decrypting the Soviet wartime code. The project is called Venona. When the Nazis lost the war and their necks were on the line, they turned over the encryption key to the FBI. That was the bargain between them, the Americans and the Nazis.” Zabotin had a funny way of telling the truth, as if he’d invented it.

“Ellery wants you to understand that Homer is coming undone. If the FBI discovers that you’ve been sending his reports from the Joint Committee on Atomic Advances to Moscow, you’re done for,” I said as calmly as I could. “Ellery knows so much, too much for my taste, and he’s hinting Homer will break down if he’s interrogated.”

Zabotin ordered another martini. “ I’m not concerned about Ellery or what he thinks. We used him when we needed him. Now his career is on the line. I could betray him, and Grierson.” The rezident looked smug.

“Why would you do that?”

“He’s not useful to us anymore.”“

“Useful—I loathe that word,” I said.

“The situation is more complicated than it first appeared. As you guessed, I’m holding back Fuchs’ drawings from Moscow. I’m only trying to protect you. As for Homer’s information, I’m not even certain our Gouzenko has his hands on Homer’s transmissions. I might have kept them out of the cipher room. For my eyes only. What he saw wasn’t very important. I made certain of it. I wanted Gouzenko to have only so much information.”

Zabotin was vague about details but certain of final outcomes.

“When we were at the safe house, you tried to convince me that Homer’s cables were of utmost importance and that they’d been stolen,” I said.

“Things change,” Zabotin said curtly. He wanted to keep me off balance, shooting at a target shrouded in shadows and fully reliant on his direction. “Keep in mind that Homer did not transmit the technical drawings of the atom bomb. Yes, he kept Moscow updated on the progress at Los Alamos. Yes, he could tell the GRU and the NKVD about the amount of uranium used in the Little Boy bomb, but not the exact formula. He doesn’t have the new drawings for Fat Man and now he won’t receive them, at least not from me.” He was hedging. Not wanting me to see the picture as clearly as he did.

“But you have the formula for Fat Man,” I said. “Vine brought Fuchs’ formula with drawings back from New Mexico.”

“Of course, but I didn’t pass the drawings to Moscow, as I’ve already confessed to you. Gouzenko never saw the drawings. From Homer’s information, the Americans were predicting the number of bombs their factory could build—and from that, the Director would know how many the Soviets needed to build to keep pace with them. Tit for tat,” he said. “I still hold the key to building those bombs. The all-important drawings.”

“Why didn’t you send them to Moscow?” Zabotin was clever. By that time, he realized what mattered were the drawings. What shocked me was how easily he was slipping into a different persona. As the embassy’s rezident, his ultimate duty was to ensure the Soviet Union would have its own atomic arsenal before it became impossible to catch the Americans in the race to world domination.

Zabotin looked at me closely. “Do you wish to survive, my darling? If you do, you must never repeat a word of this to anyone, not to Vine and certainly not to Grierson.”

I drank my martini. I was more terrified than I’d ever been, more than when I was standing in the Vine’s kitchen back in Nesvicz afraid that Zabotin would hurt me.

“I interrogated Gouzenko and I extracted a promise from him,” said Zabotin. “He’ll defect the day after Labour Day. To be exact, in the early morning hours following the celebration. If he refuses, I’ll have our boys pick him up before he can get to the Canadian police.”

“Couldn’t Gouzenko run now?” Zabotin was certain about how it would play out, but I wasn’t so convinced. “How do you know he hasn’t already?”

Zabotin lit a fresh cigarette with the one he was finishing. “Freda, you must understand that Gouzenko has a wife and child. I have his apartment building surrounded.”

I took another cigarette from Zabotin and waited for him to light it.

“The information in his stolen papers is essentially dribble,” he sighed. “It’s enough to incriminate us, but the papers don’t reveal what Moscow really wants. They are Vine’s overblown reports of my operation in Ottawa.”

“Why do you call them overblown?” I asked.

“By the time the Director received Vine’s reports, they were old news. The only piece he wants is the nuclear one. The ins and outs of Canadian Parliament are not that shocking.”

“So why bother with us at all? Have me squeezing information out of petty bureaucrats?” So many wasted years. “Why bring me here from Toronto?”

“Grierson, of course. We needed him.”

“And now?”

Zabotin took a drag on his cigarette. Little people milled around below us. Some were eating sandwiches and drinking milk. They had no idea, no idea. More than ever I wished to go home, back to Nesvicz.

Zabotin placed his good hand on my knee. “You must understand how this will work,” he said. “I ordered Gouzenko never to keep a copy of Homer’s cables in the embassy safe. I made certain of that by making my own handwritten copies and destroying the originals. When he’s debriefed, he’ll remember little of the exact details in Homer’s notes. What he’ll say to the Canadian authorities is that Zabotin was receiving information from a high-placed mole in Washington. That’s all.”

Zabotin’s confidence in his plan told me that he‘d been planning this escapade for months, to trap Gouzenko, who was the most vulnerable person at the embassy. When did he decide to go over to the other side, if that was what Zabotin was doing, after devoting his life to the cause of Marxism and the Soviet state? “Are we safe?” I asked him.

“Don’t be silly. We’re never safe. With or without Homer’s cables both the Canadians and the Russians will want my head, certainly yours and your comrades. Our operation will be exposed and eventually Canada will be forced to take action, however reluctant its sleepy prime minister is.” He looked directly into my eyes. “I’m going to need your help to pull this off. You, too, can make it out of this mess.”

“I’m listening.”

“Your sister, Masha, is alive,” Zabotin said, letting the information sit with me before he continued. “She lives in Kiev.”

“How do you know this?” My eyes clouded over with tears. Masha. Alive.

Zabotin took his handkerchief from his pocket, but I pushed it away. “How do you know?”

“The other night you begged me to help you find your family, so I began the search. She survived.”

“How?”

“Masha remained in Nesvicz. She wasn’t far when the Germans invaded. My family helped her. Without the Zabotins she would have perished as the others did.”

“My mama and papa? My brother, Simcha?” I was wringing my hands.

“I have no idea about them,” he said gently, lifting my hands to his lips. “You can repay me now, for Masha, for all the count and countess did to keep her alive. I need your promise you will not say a word of this to anyone. Not one word about how Gouzenko came to defect. And there is more.”

“What do you need?” I asked, praying that he would leave me be, if just for a minute. I wished to contact Masha, and figure out how I could return to the Soviet Union to be with her.

“You’ve always been clever,” Zabotin said. “Think this through. This is the last mission I will assign you.”

He was forcing me to hold my tongue and to contain my excitement over his news. If Masha was alive, perhaps the others were as well. A million questions welled up inside up, the first being how I could travel to Kiev. I wanted to leave that very day but I understood the game. God knows, I’d been in it long enough to never expect Zabotin’s help until I performed for him. I must stick to the issue at hand and make his plans succeed.

“Where are Fuchs’ drawings?” I asked.

“I have them,” he told me. “If I send them to Moscow now, if Stalin sees them, there will be a war, the magnitude of which we’ve never imagined—a war of total destruction. Comrade Stalin will never hold back, not after what Russia sacrificed to beat back the Germans, and to stay in power. You must agree to join me. You know about the purges and the show trials and the gulags. We all do. We just can’t admit they are real, how our grand experiment has gone wrong. Everyone we admired back home is dead. I haven’t told you, but my brothers are missing, probably sent to the gulags. If Stalin didn’t murder my friends in the Party before the war, the Nazis finished the job. It’s over.” Zabotin drew hard on his cigarette before extinguishing it.

At that moment, I couldn’t distinguish with certainty if Zabotin was betraying his country or if it was something beyond loyalty to one ideology that drove him. Russia had turned into Stalin’s nightmare, fraught with paranoia, an open wound emitting blood and pus. I thought about my own family and how they must have suffered first from the Soviet regime and then from the Germans. Masha would tell me everything once I found her, no matter how painful, and she would forgive me for deserting her and little Simcha, along with our beautiful mother and proud father.

For years they were my private concern and my shame. No matter how many times I convinced myself that what I did for the struggle was admirable, acts of bravery and principle, the gnawing doubt that I agreed to the Party’s terms to feed my own desire for recognition, never disappeared.

I looked down to see Oleg standing at the foot of the stairs. I figured that if I didn’t agree to Zabotin’s terms, he’d take me back to the embassy for questioning. I must support Zabotin. If it was true the count and countess helped Masha to live, I owed him that.

“What about Nunn May? Didn’t Vine mention the scientist in his reports?” I asked, trying to focus on what I needed to do.

“I’ll have Nunn May out of Canada as soon as possible. It will take some time for the Canadian authorities to put two and two together. In Vine’s reports there are snippets from the scientists at Chalk River, not much, but enough to implicate Nunn May.” Zabotin’s demeanour toward me changed. He knew he had me. “Together we can pull this off. ”

“What will happen to us?” My life was in his hands.

“Moscow will react to Gouzenko’s defection by recalling me. The Americans will have Homer’s cables if or when Venona decodes them. The crisis will escalate, that is for sure, beyond Nunn May or you and me. The Director will blame me,” he said, pounding his own chest. “He will want to interrogate me in the Lubyanka. I’ll perish there and Lydia can put flowers on my grave.” Zabotin shrugged. “If Venona takes more time, six months or a year, as I believe it will, Moscow will zero in on Gouzenko and the release of his worthless information. We will be able to buy some time. We might be able to escape. Or better still, perhaps I can cut a deal with Moscow.”

“Do you want the Soviet Union to fail?” I asked him plainly and looked away.

Zabotin banged the table with his good hand, but thankfully the bar was deserted and not even the bartender took notice. “If I pleased, I could betray Gouzenko today and he’d be done for, but I don’t wish to. You know that. My men could pick him up and escort him back to Moscow tonight. I have all the evidence to show the Centre that he was about to defect. Instead I prefer to watch how my plan plays out,” he said, satisfied with himself and his manoeuvrings. “In my own way, I’ve given that little cipher clerk enough rope to hang himself. If he defects, he’ll never be a free man. He will spend the remainder of his days in Canadian jail or tucked away in a remote hiding place. If he doesn’t have the nerve, he’ll return to Russia where eventually the GRU will blame him for the loss of Fuchs’ drawings. It’s too bad. I always found him hilarious.”

We left the bar to walk across Rideau Street to the Château Laurier, where Zabotin asked for his usual room with a view of the Ottawa River. White light burned through the shuttered windows of the grand lobby while the overhead fans kept the halls cool. The gilt mirrors shimmered in the late afternoon sun. I was to take the key, as I usually did, inspect the room and then ring down to the house telephone in the chandeliered lobby if it was clean. Zabotin picked up the receiver at the appointed time.

In the room, there was more vodka and caviar for affect. Then he made love to me. I could sense he wasn’t putting his heart into it that afternoon. Not once did he cry out swearing that he loved me. But he did want to talk. How strange that men wish to reveal themselves, to tell all, after the act. I suppose they are all lonely.

“The other day when we were in the park, you said we must stop deceiving ourselves about the past?“

“And you told me we have no past, only the present,” I replied.

“No, you were correct. Where do the deceptions end? When I joined the Red Cavalry it was the only way to protect the Zabotin name. Do you understand?”

I understood. “By destroying Jewish villages inside the Pale? That protected your good name?”

“We always end up in the same place, Freda. You accusing me while I grow frustrated. Don’t forget it was my parents who saved your sister.”

“Forgive me. Of course, I am grateful.”

“You have never done anything you are ashamed of doing?” he inquired.

He knew the answer. “I am ashamed of my entire life,” I replied. “Everything I’ve done from abandoning my family, to working as a whore for the Party. That’s enough, isn’t it?” I was coming to terms with the truth.

Zabotin pulled me down until I was completely covered by his long body. “It’s a risk what we’re doing. If the Director discovers that you know about Fuchs’ drawings, you’ll be escorted to the Soviet Union and detained. You will be expected to betray me, which you will, after they’re done with you. Everyone breaks. You must promise me that you won’t inform Vine that I failed to send the atomic diagrams to Moscow.”

“I’d prefer not to deceive him,” I said, pulling myself out from under Zabotin.

“That’s not your decision,” he said. “Make up your mind. If you tell Vine, he’ll report me. You know that.”

“You make it sound like I have a choice. That giving the drawings to the GRU will end the world.”

“You do have a choice. I won’t force you to do anything against your conscience,” he said. “This time, let’s save ourselves while protecting our countrymen. Stalin has waged war against his own people. They die, not him, if there is nuclear war.”

It was much too late for me to disregard his words. I knew too much to run from Zabotin.

“Grierson will help, I assume. He’s a good man, an innocent, in love with you. He and Ellery can get you out of the country when the time comes, or better yet, I’ll figure it out. I’ll make my own way back to Russia. Freda, I promise to protect you.”

I was beginning to convince myself that this daring man cared for me and that he would abandon Lydia for me. His intention was to outfox Gouzenko. Zabotin wouldn’t betray him to the Director before he defected. The intelligence in the stolen documents would tell their own story, a story Zabotin wished the world to know. What he didn’t wish the world to know, he would release in time or never.

It was a fantastical ploy. Zabotin allowed Gouzenko to steal the documentation that would implicate our small band of Communists in Ottawa. But the drawings for the bomb would remain in his hands, as well as the critical information in the cables from Homer, at least for now. In a sense, he’d leak the information as he chose, and by his own methods. Gouzenko was just the conduit. The great Zabotin had decided he could save the world from nuclear annihilation. When he invited me to join him in this scheme, I accepted. To this day, I believe it was the right choice. The only choice.

My life changed that Sunday afternoon. I began to realize the clandestine work I’d done for years was a waste. In the end, what information had I gathered that changed history or even saved one life? I’d lured men to my bed for their secrets. How important were they, these contorted confessions?

That afternoon I asked myself how the second world war had escalated into a bloodbath where millions upon millions of innocent civilians died. Men and women like my father and mother, and my brother Simcha who’d done nothing to deserve what befell them.

Somehow Masha survived. I would find her with Zabotin’s help.

It was possible that Zabotin was the last reasonable man on earth. He was starting to exist beyond ideology, perhaps above loyalty to any cause, no matter how enticing.

He’d left me no option but to side with him. But I also asked myself what happened to people like me, those who have devoted their lives to a cause that turned out to be the opposite of what it preached? I didn’t know if I could let go of the person I’d become and then re-imagine myself as a free being, unencumbered by the commandments that guided my life. First it was Judaism, then Communism. I had no idea how to live outside a strict regimen of thought. To re-invent myself.

In Russia, Jews from inside the Pale went over to the Communist side. It didn’t matter that our villages were decimated during the civil war. For we Jews, it was the moment to escape the dark fate of our ancestors and join the Revolution, where we would be equals among comrades and encouraged to act outside the strictures of Hebraic law. There was a sense of relief and recklessness, of lawlessness when throwing off the confines of the Orthodox faith. It took years to realize that by taking up a new cause, we’d only exchanged one set of rules for another.

To Zabotin’s way of thinking, you took sides as the circumstances dictated. When situations changed, he altered his thinking. I wasn’t certain I could accept that there were no absolutes. It was in my bones to believe there was a right way and a wrong way. It was detestable to change sides. I’d done it once before when I’d joined the Party and my life was transformed. Now I was intending to change sides again, to help Zabotin keep the atomic bomb out of Stalin’s hands.

Years later, when I met Elka in Chernobyl, I understood what happens to someone who fails to reconstruct her life after her worst fears come true. It is the descent into nothingness. I wouldn’t stand for that. Not even in Chernobyl where the hopeless congregate and the afflicted die a painful death, I scratch my own way out of the darkness.

* * *

Chernobyl journal

1988

During my second visit with Elka, Zabotin unexpectedly knocked on her crooked door. The bottom hinge had come off and she had no one to repair it.

Elka pretended that she didn’t hear the knock, but I knew better.

“It’s Zabotin, my friend. He’s hunting me down,” I assured her. I always knew when Zabotin was searching for me.

Elka smiled knowingly. “You answer the door,” she said. “He’s your comrade, not mine.”

Each time I saw Zabotin, I was gleefully surprised. How well he’d aged! How the thick curls, now white, cascaded down his straight back. How erect he held himself. The forest air intensified the brilliance of his ice-blue eyes and rose-coloured lips. His years in the gulag had only temporarily diminished him. To me, he now looked like the man he was in Ottawa. Handsome and defiant.

“How did you find me this time?” I asked.

Zabotin grinned. It was late August, the same time of the year when he’d followed me on my walk along the Rideau Canal in Ottawa, days before I threw my lot in with him, put my life in his hands, and betrayed the Soviet Union.

We both remembered that day with utter clarity. “This time, I’ve come on Vine’s behalf,” Zabotin admitted. “Not for myself. It’s his heart. He needs his medicine.”

More than forty years later, Vine still depended on me. When the Pripyat’s People’s Hospital was evacuated, I broke into the pharmacy to collect as much nitroglycerin as I could carry in my satchel. Nitro, morphine and glass syringes, the outdated kind that the hospital kept in circulation before the accident. I boiled the syringes to disinfect them before I injected Vine with morphine. Of course, the water was radiated from the accident but there are things that can’t be fixed. Vine suffered from congestive heart failure and when the pain in his chest became too much for him to bear, I squirted nitro under his tongue to open the arteries and morphine into his veins to quell the pain. He wasn’t able to inject himself. Zabotin refused to learn how to use the needles.

“You’re on call?” Elka asked.

“In a manner of speaking. My other friend isn’t well.”

Elka didn’t expect me to introduce her to Zabotin formally, although she knew who he was. She was only pretending that she didn’t recognize him. She did, however, invite me to visit again and I promised I would.

Zabotin and I walked back to our cabin. He held my arm. “If you ask me to fix her door, I won’t,” he declared. “She doesn’t deserve my help or yours.”

I thought about the weeks directly after the accident at Reactor Number Four, when Zabotin hitched a wagon to the back of his Lada. We loaded the flatbed, he and I, with fine furniture from the chief councilman’s house and made numerous trips back to the lumberyard for tools and supplies. No one stopped us, not even the head of the Chernobyl Communist Party whose house we also rummaged through. I never cared for the bureaucrat. He reminded me of a mafia boss, the swarthy type I saw in the American movie The Godfather, when the film reached Kiev in the 1980s.

During those early weeks in the forest, Zabotin and I built a large screen porch attached to the back of our cabin, one that faced the river and protruded into the green foliage of the ravine. The trees were birch, with slender white trunks, and round leaves that resembled silver dollars. The wind whistling through the forest was like silk brushing against the clouds. I could stare at the birches for hours, listening to the wind’s song.

On the screen porch, we installed a ragged leather pullout sofa from the council member’s house and that’s where Zabotin and I slept in summer. Once the porch was ready, we dozed most of the day, during that first summer after the accident, believing our time had come and we’d be dead within months. It didn’t happen that way.

The next time I saw Elka, she was lurking about our screened porch. I noticed her from my vantage point on the sofa where I was reading. I made weekly trips to the Pripyat Library, where the collection remained in pristine condition. Zabotin drove me to town in the Lada to exchange my library books, which I neatly stacked on the library’s shelves for the next patron. I didn’t want to steal books. They belonged to the people, I remarked to Zabotin, and he laughed, his belly laugh, the one I’d come to cherish.

Elka was as hesitant as a feral cat when I opened the screen porch door for her, but eventually, after some coaxing, she came through the portal. We drank coffee made from chicory, with a little peppermint schnapps I’d taken in Pripyat. I prepared a cucumber and onion salad picked fresh from my garden. “What do you normally eat?” I asked.

“This and that,” was her cagey response. Elka was wearing a red paisley babushka around her head. Her green eyes sparkled when she grabbed my hand, and I was astonished by the strength of her grip. She was lean, but not emaciated. She didn’t appreciate it when I asked her questions, although she felt she had the right to ask me anything.

“I know your brother, Simcha,” she suddenly said.

Although I thought about Simcha every day, I’d never spoken about him to anyone in Chernobyl before or after the meltdown. Only Masha and I remembered Simcha, and Masha didn’t like to speak about the past. She spared so few words about Simcha, and I couldn’t force her to tell me more. How could Elka know who I was mourning?

My face turned red. “He’s dead.”

“Who told you that? Don’t believe it,” Elka stated.

It had been sixty-seven years since I’d seen Simcha. When I returned to Europe I discovered that he’d been in the Łódź Ghetto. “He must have perished on the death march to Auschwitz-Birkenau before the liberation. No one saw him after that,” I said sternly, “or I would have been informed.”

“I don’t believe so,” said Elka. “I remember Simcha quite well. He looks like you. Good looking. Same grey eyes. Red hair, though. Fine manners. He speaks a polished Yiddish.”

My hands went numb with excitement. Simcha would be in his late seventies, only a few years younger than me. “Where did you see him last?”

“Do you really want to know or would you rather go on believing he died a honourable death?”

I wanted to tell her to stop right there, but how could I resist knowing the truth? I’d always feared that Simcha had been tortured by the SS, or something unfathomable that no one talked about, or more likely that he dropped dead on the prisoners’ march to the death camp. There were no records of him, but then so many dead from the war remained anonymous.

My sister Masha claimed that she lost all contact with him after the Nazis invaded Poland. He’d moved to Łódź with his wife and children and died in the ghetto or during the death march. That’s all she knew. After Elka’s claim, I wondered if Masha had held something back but didn’t wish to cause me pain. Many people couldn’t talk about their wartime experiences. They were trying to forget or just get on with their lives.

As for Masha, she was residing in a suburb of Kiev. Zabotin claimed his parents saved her, but the real story turned out somewhat differently. When the Nazis marched the villagers of Nesvicz to the ravine behind the synagogue, they shot them. One by one they fell into the ditch or were pushed, but Masha wasn’t in Nesvicz on that day. Count and Countess Zabotin had taken her on as the laundress at their dacha. Masha was healthy, a good worker, and they chose her.

The Zabotins appreciated her diligence and her honesty. She survived because of them. Masha did not steal from the count and countess. During the Nazis invasion, she faithfully scoured the countryside for food for the aged couple. After the liberation and under Soviet rule in the Ukraine, Masha became a security officer, who rose up quickly in the local Party hierarchy. When I first returned to Europe, she rescued me and it is because of her that I am alive. In 1988, she remains a true believer; even after the nuclear accident, Masha considers herself a good Communist. The only time she’d doubted the Party was when the Director ordered her to take me under her wing after Gouzenko’s defection.

Elka sat beside me on the sofa, balancing a plate of salad on her knee. She was itching to tell me more. There are people like Elka, who feed off other’s pain, but I wasn’t prepared to give in to her.

I wanted her to leave and I told her so. “I’m busy Elka. I have better things to do than listen to your nonsense rumours about my brother.”

“Your choice,” she said and departed within seconds.

Elka didn’t visit for a long while after that, and I believed she’d learned her lesson. I wasn’t someone to be tampered with.

As with so many who’d survived the war, and its aftermath, I intended to be brave and good and honourable as long as I was alive. Yet there were certain things at my advanced age, I did not wish to know. Those closest to me, who remained loyal to Communism, saw themselves in a similar light. During the most dreadful times, they’d stayed true to the cause. Sybil and Rose never wavered, not like Zabotin or I. Vine returned to Judaism after seeing what the Nazis had done to Nesvicz. Each of us acted on our own without orders from on high. We all went our own way after Gouzenko.

Upon my return to Europe after the war, I met a Jewish couple from Poland. German SS officers had occupied their Krakow house after hearing that the wife was an extraordinary cook who could bake Sacher torte as well as the experts in the fabled coffee houses of Vienna. The woman looked after the Germans, and they brought her the best meat and vegetables to prepare for their sumptuous meals. Every night, the table in their elegant dining room, adorned with velvet drapes and crystal chandeliers, was decorated with tall candles and rare bottles of wine from the couple’s private cellar. The husband descended from a wealthy merchant family. He’d inherited the house, but joined the Party shortly before the invasion and told me he had always intended to offer it to the Party as long as he and his wife could continue to live there.

By the time I met him, he wasn’t so sure the Communist government was on the right course, but he remained in the Party because it was what he understood. He worked in the military police, and the couple received the treatment accorded to senior Party apparatchiks. They survived the Great Patriotic War; no one blamed them for what they’d done during the bad years, not even the small, remaining Jewish community in Chernobyl where this man and his wife ended up when the Party confiscated their home. As I said, the wife had talent; she was a celebrated cook, and the Party brass at the reactor wanted her to make the meals in their private canteen.

People did what they had to. They stopped asking questions. If the Party ordered them to relocate, they did as they were ordered. Everyone, like the couple from Krakow, had a story to tell. First the famines and then the show trials, followed by the Nazis, and finally by the long years of crushing bureaucracy. After the accident at Reactor Number Ffour, the husband, who’d been about to retire from his position as a security guard at the nuclear plant, joined us for a few short days in the forest, but he couldn’t stand the primitive conditions, the aching discomfort. He and his wife immigrated to Israel, where I assume they adjusted to an entirely different life. I know I have; adjusted, that is.

It was easy to judge. Elka was itching for me to ask her more questions about my brother. Her tone when she spoke about Simcha was odious, as if he’d commited unspeakable acts. After the war, survivors were suspicious of each other. How did some make it while so many perished? Elka’s distrust was understable, but whatever she might accuse my brother of doing to stay alive, I was certain he’d had his reasons. I wasn’t going to allow Elka to destroy my golden memories of that clever little boy, although I was longing for the truth.