Last Night of the World

by Joyce Wayne

  Zabotin laughed his grand, hearty laugh. “You are too clever for your own good,” he roared and then pulled me down harshly upon the rumpled sheets.

  And after making love again, he tried to fool me into believing that he was sleeping soundly, a look of calm spreading across his spectacularly handsome face. But I was wise to Zabotin and his blatant tricks. Perhaps he realized that he’d recounted much too much to me about the missing cryptograms and about the bomb.

  I was wide awake. I moved from the bed to the dressing table and then back under the quilt to lie beside him. In the diffused moonlight, I saw him barely open his Slavic eyes.

  “You are a disembodied spirit,” he said to me. “Pretending to dance the dance of the living.”

  “Didn’t we die many years ago?” My mind descended to dark places.

  Silently and to each other we wondered how many more splendid nights we would enjoy together before the entire ruse was up. Perhaps this might be our last.

  By early morning I fell into a deep, dream-laden sleep and when I woke Zabotin was standing naked, a silver tray in his good hand, a linen napkin folded over the other. On the tray was herring in dilled cream sauce, black bread and tiny bubbles of caviar spread artfully across crisp round toasts. He’d cracked a raw egg for us to mix with the black sturgeon eggs from the Caspian. He placed the linen napkin on a round table beside the bed, set the tray upon it and helped me to sit up. I wore only a peach-coloured camisole, which I knew displayed my complexion to its fullest.

  “Your eyes are cloudy,” he said. “How did you manage last night?” Zabotin brought an Imperial porcelain demitasse filled with steaming espresso to my lips.

  “Perfectly.” I’d dreamt about Nesvicz and a small boy I was tutoring in Russian literature before we escaped from the civil war pogrom. The boy wore a broad black felt hat whenever he appeared on my doorstep. I could barely see his eyes, hidden under the brim of the fedora, but they were the brightest eyes in the world and a smile that mixed sublime innocence with mischief. His carrot-coloured hair fell in traditional ringlets framing his freckled heart-shaped face. He reminded me of my younger brother, Simcha, the little devil, the teller of tales. If only he could be as real as the red-haired boy in my dream.

  As I sipped the luscious coffee, I closed my eyes, imagining that the boy was dead, buried in a mass grave, the one that the Soviet liberators would unmask at the edge of Nesvicz, as they had done in so many of the shtetls inside the Pale.

  Zabotin swept back the drapes. “Open your eyes, Freda,” he ordered. “Come back to the land of the living.”

  On the streets below, industrious public servants rushed to work. Some pedalled their bicycles, trousers neatly encased in wire clips, some with bulging briefcases scurried to catch the morning’s first Bronson Street bus. Canada was a new country teaming with boundless post-war opportunity.

  “Would you help me find my family?” I asked him plaintively. “I have pictures in my handbag that my family sent me. The old street address in Nesvicz. Perhaps our brick house is still standing.”

  Zabotin looked at me as if I was talking nonsense. “How can I be of assistance?” he asked, buckling the metal belt on his trousers and sitting beside me on the unmade bed.

  For a moment I wished to cover my eyes in shame, to pull the quilt over my head, to hide from his sympathetic gaze. “I’ve written to Mama, so many letters. Never a word.” I imagined an enormous pile of unopened envelopes burning in an open field. Black shards of feathered parchment floating up to the heavens. “I am the oldest of the three children and it is on me to return to Europe to find the others.”

  I pictured my mother, the loveliest woman in Nesvicz, with her dark eyes, white skin, a tiny nose and high cheekbones. Long fingers that babied the keys of the piano, as she babied her children.

  “Open your eyes,” ordered Zabotin once again. He grabbed my chin and pointed my face toward him.

  “That might prove difficult,” Zabotin said. “Displaced persons are scattered in refugee camps across Europe, across Russia all the way to Alma Ata. Try to be realistic.”

  The living graveyards, I thought. But he was calling our home Russia. It would always be Russia to Zabotin. And to me. What had happened to Russia during the war was too terrible to investigate, but for my family, the least I could do was to find out if any one of them was still alive. Zabotin must understand. His brothers were in Russia, as was his only son, and he ached to see them again now that the war was over.

  “Try to help me. You are connected to all the Soviet embassies.”

  “It would be like finding a needle in haystack,” he said, attempting not to be cruel. He and I both understood that only a few lucky Jews had survived the Nazis: an inventive forger, a brilliant machinist, an original dressmaker, or a talented violinist, who by chance served a purpose in the camps.

  “You are pleased with my work, with my sources, aren’t you? I’ve done everything you’ve ever asked of me. I know so much. No one can criticize the stories I file for TASS. I am, as the Americans say, a star reporter. Who else but me could wrangle interviews with the most important men in this town? For God’s sake, I’m friendly with Drew Pearson, the American journalist with ties to the White House.”

  “I know that, but don’t threaten me.” Zabotin shook his head. “I’ll see what I can do, if there is anything at all to do. Don’t expect too much.”

  “Whatever you say. Forgive me. But shouldn’t I be able to hope that I might reunite with my family?”

  “Don’t apologize for wanting what we all want,” he said curtly.

  Zabotin rang the embassy, calling for the limousine. As in capital cities across the world, diplomats were ferried about in black limousines every hour of the day and night. Surely no one would notice him leave the safe house as he slipped into the back seat, holding the morning edition of The Ottawa Citizen up to his eyes.

  Before leaving, he ordered, “Lock the door behind you and hide the key. You may need it some day.”

  * * *

  Chernobyl journal

  1988

  In the contaminated Chernobyl forest, there are no limousines, only broken down Ladas, the Soviet Union’s contribution to the automobile industry. Nikolai keeps one running, for his own use, a yellow-two door with one working headlight, for when he wishes to hunt at his dacha or visit old friends in Kiev. When I accompany him, we often talk about our days and nights in Ottawa, the luxury of the safe house on the canal, the starched white sheets, the black caviar and Turkish coffee. How we’d tried to fool ourselves into believing that our louche life in Ottawa could continue. Now we drink ground chicory root in the mornings and wash our rough linen in the river.

  From the bedroom window of the cabin, I watch the huge grey-stained raindrops fall from the trees. The thick foliage is so intertwined that it camouflages our home. We haven’t bothered cutting down the flowering bushes or the burgeoning branches of the birch trees. The grass is overgrown. The birds are free to hop from their perches high in the trees to peck at the rubbish littering the ground. When we are feeling energetic, we bury the garbage, but most days it sits atop the radioactive earth.

  There is an enchanting variety of birds I have not seen anywhere else: huge muscular birds, colourful, coated with fat and feathers and chirping deliriously joyful songs. A mother deer and her babies feed by the window. The smallest colt has only one eye. It is either heaven or hell in Chernobyl, depending on your point of view. The sound of the rain lulls me back to my memories of Canada.

  Chapter Nine

  August 31, 1945

  Ottawa

  On that Friday morning in the safe house I didn’t bother summoning a taxi, although Zabotin left me ten dollars on the armoire. Generous to a fault, but indiscreet. When he told me that he’d been withholding information about the atomic bomb from the Director in Moscow, he was putting his life in my hands. Why hadn’t he sent the diagrams to the GRU earlier, the minute Vine brought them from Los Alamos? Even
knowing about the stolen cryptograms was out of line. I couldn’t be certain if he needed to confide in me, if he trusted me that completely, or he was drawing me into the abyss with him. I was certain the Director would discover that Zabotin had held back the diagrams since June, a critical time since the Americans had only tested their first atomic bomb that July in New Mexico.

  I left the safe house through the servants’ door. On one of the last Fridays of summer it was the best kind of August day: shining blue sky, hot and dry, with the faint scent of a northern wind bristling in the air. I had plenty of time to return to my flat, wash, drink more coffee and apologize to Harry Vine. To be with Zabotin, I’d skipped out on dinner with Vine and the other comrades who lived in my building. I’d neglected to let Vine know in advance I wouldn’t be joining them. When I returned he would be waiting for me, figuring that I hadn’t come home because I was with Zabotin. Vine didn’t care for Zabotin anymore than the rezident appreciated him.

  And, still I deferred to Vine’s moods. For years, I wasn’t certain why I did, but what I figured was in some corner of my mind, he made me feel smaller than I was, as if he owned me. Without him, I’d never have survived the invasion of Hitler’s army. He got me out. Stories of entire villages of Jews rounded up and shot were circulating. Without him, I’d be nothing. I’d be dead. Another ghost.

  In some way, I also admired Vine and his undying devotion to the cause. When the Communist Party of Canada was declared illegal, Vine lived on the lam, only coming out of hiding after the Soviets declared war on Germany. After that, he continued to sleep wherever a comrade offered a sofa, not wishing to find a permanent home.

  Now that the war was over, Vine couldn’t adjust. He never admitted that he relished his unconventional life, but he did say he couldn’t imagine living any other way.

  Only yesterday, he’d sighed, half smiling, “Too old to change now.” None of us knew how to return to normal, if there was such a thing for old hands like us. The temptation was to make matters worse, more dangerous, rather than fading into the woodwork of a typically serene Canadian existence. The more I came to learn about what happened to the Jews in Europe, the more vulnerable I felt; less innocent, and more indebted to Vine.

  I’d suggested to Vine that he could change, get a job and start a family. “It’s never too late,” I told him.

  He shook his head as if I were a madwoman gibbering nonsense. “What makes you think the Party would even allow it?” he asked me.“You want to try it, settling down? One of your contacts must be looking for a good wife.”

  After leaving the safe house, I walked along the canal all the way to the lift-iron bridge, the one I’d crossed with Zabotin a few days ago, before he’d told me about the atomic diagrams and how he’d concealed them from the Director. I continued on to Elgin Street. Smug-looking men and women were rushing into government offices, civil servants with safe jobs and humdrum lives. For a moment, I felt the old sensation I’d had when Vine and I were first in Canada. I wanted to be seen. I wished to scream that I’d slept with dozens of men, strangers to me, on behalf of the Party, on behalf of peace.

  I carried on across Somerset, crossed at the light at Bank Street and over to my second-floor flat on Florence. The walkway to my apartment was shaded by a canopy of pink climbing roses in the final blush of summer. I felt like an unfaithful bride returning home to her cuckolded husband. As always, I was the guilty one.

  Vine made me feel that way. Under his critical eye, I felt shame, unworthy of his praise or even of his companionship. No matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t good enough to stand on the same carpet as Harry Vine and his great martyrs to the Revolution. How could I continue to pretend that I hadn’t contributed to the mayhem? That I was innocent of the evil that had overtaken the world?

  When I turned the key, he was waiting for me in the vestibule. Either Vine had been peering through the keyhole or he heard me climb the steps and scrambled to meet me.

  He was shorter than me by a few inches. Small and wiry, with the same straight hair, as fiery red as it had been on the day we left Nesvicz. Now he combed his hair directly back from his high forehead. Steel-rimmed spectacles didn’t begin to camouflage his critical eyes.

  Vine didn’t ask me where I’d been. It was not in his nature to inquire or implore. Long ago, we’d established that it was dangerous for either of us to know the precise details of each other’s clandestine work. That was the way it was between us. His eyes did not meet mine, nor did he address me directly. He’d never admit to being jealous of Zabotin, but I knew he resented my special friendship with our rezident. He believed that Zabotin was interested in me only because of my work for the Party, and that the personal attention he paid to me was false and without true feeling.

  “You are making a fool of yourself, with Zabotin,” Vine said as I entered the living room of the flat on Florence. He sneered at me. “Is this why I brought you out of Europe?” he scoffed as if he was newly scandalized by my activities, as if I was the dirty one and he was above the sacrifices the Party ordered us both to undertake. “Zabotin is using you.”

  “You think you are so much better than me?” I asked him.

  On the wooden table in the living room that served as a desk and a dining table, a coal-black Remington typewriter sat uncovered. Vine had been up all night, as he often was, composing Fred Rose’s next speech to be delivered in the House in Commons.

  We were amazed when Rose took the Montreal riding of Cartier for the Party. When the election results rolled in, I thought it was a mistake. The first Communist Member of Parliament in Canada! We adored him for winning and for his affable and humble manners. Fred didn’t frighten people the way Vine did, but it was Vine who wrote his speeches and weekly radio broadcasts for the Montreal riding that voted Communist. In fact, it was Vine who engineered the entire election campaign. While Rose was occupied with Parliament and his frequent meetings with Zabotin, it was Vine who condensed the missives of our clandestine ring into intelligible, and I must admit, creative reports for the rezident who handed them over to Gouzenko to encrypt and submit to Moscow. That was how the chain worked throughout the war.

  While Vine was up nights interpreting our cell’s activities for Moscow, Zabotin and Rose were found drinking vodka together in the bar at the Château Laurier. Zabotin enjoyed Rose’s humorous tales of life in the Montreal Jewish ghetto. When I was sitting at a separate table with a contact in the Château’s bar, neither Rose nor Zabotin paid me any attention. They only waved and looked the other way. It was crucial that they not appear to be in cahoots with the reporter from TASS.

  When there was a dangerous mission, it was Vine who Zabotin chose, sending him to Los Alamos and Chalk River to collect information about the bomb for the Director.

  “Sit down,” Vine said, pointing to the straight-backed chair he’d used throughout the night. “Why do you resent me, Freda?”

  “I don’t. This is childish. What do you want?” I needed to get ready for work. I was late already.

  Vine sat in another chair facing me. He pulled it close. “You think it would have been better for you in Nesvicz?”

  “Different. I’ve sacrificed everything for the Party.”

  “You would have married a Yeshiva boy and had eight children, of which at least two would die or be taken in the army as my brother Yitzhak was. Your life would be small—no, minuscule, living inside a backward community that was bound to be destroyed.”

  There was truth to what Vine said, but instead of acknowledging it I replied by saying, “ Your Yitzhak was a Yeshiva boy. Maybe a young man like that would have been a kind and faithful husband.”

  Vine was on the verge of a confession, but he was holding back. “He died. Either Zabotin killed him or riding with the Cavalry did him in. He was never strong and I’ve noticed that you prefer strong men.”

  He was right. Weaklings didn’t do much for me.

  “You can sit back here and wonder all you want about what happe
ned in Nesvicz, but I’m going to find the truth. I’m going to find my family. Don’t try to talk me out of it.”

  I’d kept secret from Vine, my plan to rescue my family. I believed he would denounce me, his index finger in the air, demanding that I do my duty in Canada working for the Soviets.

  Instead Vine looked at me incredulously, and a little sadly, as if I were a naughty child. “How might they have survived the war? Aren’t you reading the news? What happened over there, it can’t be changed. You think you’ve sacrificed everything, but what have you done?”

  Vine didn’t want to understand. He could never admit that I’d done as much for the Party as he had. More so, he was afraid of finding out what actually happened to our people back home.

  “In Nesvicz, you and your little children would be dead by now,” he sighed. “You are dreaming of a world that no longer exists.”

  “Then what are we fighting for?” I asked. “I’m going to find them.”

  Vine pulled his chair closer to me, so near I could feel his breath on my face.

  “You are still beautiful.”

  I thought he would take me in his arms after so many years of resistance, but instead he said, “I can smell Zabotin on you. Go wash. Get to work.”

  When I rose to leave, my face flushed, he squeezed my hand. “I’ve already spoken with Zabotin. He’s called off my trip to see Nunn May at Chalk River. He says it’s too delicate now. Too dicey. What do you think? Is he lying?”

  Zabotin had ordered me not to mention anything to Vine, but it was impossible. “He is telling the truth. Don’t go now. Don’t get any crazy ideas to disobey his orders either.” Vine needed to know about the missing cryptograms, about Gouzenko. It would stop him from acting on his own.

  I couldn’t be sure if the rezident had enlightened him. They were always at odds and lately it was worse. It was Vine’s idea to bring back the formula for the atomic bomb from Los Alamos. Zabotin only directed Vine to report on the activity in New Mexico, but he came back with the prize in his hand. If he was searched at the border, how would he have explained the drawings? But Vine returned safely with them. I expected Zabotin to treat him like a hero, but he did nothing, not even send the diagrams to Moscow.