Last Night of the World

by Joyce Wayne

  I was weeping by then. Elka was out of the practice of revealing so much.

  “I’ll tell you the rest the next time you come to visit,” she said.

  The next day, I walked over to Elka’s hut again and lured her back to ours with the offer of freshly baked sweet buns.

  “I suppose you can’t wait to talk about your brother Simcha?” she asked, sitting on the sofa in our screened porch.

  “Tell me.”

  Vine was hiding in the next room. He didn’t want to face Elka, but he wished to listen in on what she had to report about my brother. He remembered Simcha from when he was a boy in Nesvicz. Vine was fond of him, recalling that Simcha was a bright child who asked the rabbi insightful questions during cheder. “He thought he could understand God’s mind, by asking the rabbi questions like, why children must obey their parents when sometimes children were smarter,” Vine reminisced. “I’m sorry about what happened to him,” he said, putting his right hand over his heart.

  “Does it hurt today, your heart?“ I inquired.

  “No more than usual.” He looked so small, as if he’d shrunk to half the size he was in Ottawa. If Simcha had survived the Nazis, as Elka claimed, I wondered if he’d remember Vine.

  Elka, who couldn’t see Vine but kept gazing at the corner of the porch where he was hiding, crossed her legs. She was wearing mud-caked work boots though the forest was dry. “I’ve been fishing,” she explained as I inspected her footwear. “You should try it. The fish are getting huge. You three could feast on one for days.” She held out her arms to show me how long the fish were, more than two feet. “Big heads on them. It looks like they have ears. Be quiet as a mouse when you’re fishing for them.” She was trying to scare me.

  “Vine prefers beef,” I said calmly, but she countered by reminding me that red meat wasn’t prescribed for heart patients.

  Elka uncrossed her legs to put her boots up on the crates in front of the sofa. She was taking over.

  “Get on with what you know about Simcha,” I said.

  “After he left the partisans, Simcha returned to Łódź to find his wife and two children. It was 1942, early in January. Word has it that he arrived on New Year’s Day. There were more than two hundred thousand Jewish prisoners stuffed into four square kilometres in the ghetto. It was a hellish place, worse than Warsaw or Minsk where community leaders with good intentions tried to make life easier for the captives of the ghettos.

  “That rich Jew, the leader chosen by the Nazis in Łódź, Mordechai Rumkowski, he was corrupt. He and his cronies kept the best food and medicine in the ghetto for themselves. He worked the other Jews to death; he starved them, children too. He forced them to work in makeshift factories. Freezing in the winter. Slave labour. When Simcha arrived, he was immediately detailed to the shit brigade.”

  I didn’t want Elka to continue, so I put up my hand, but she didn’t quit.

  “He and others collected the shit in tanks to pull outside the ghetto walls where they poured it in empty fields. It was important work. So many people, in such a tiny space. You can imagine. The men pulled the tanks themselves, not horses.”

  “The deportations to the Chelmno Death Camp began days after Simcha arrived. His wife and girls had been strong. They’d survived for more than two years without him, but they weren’t good for much by the time he found them. The girls were young and exhausted from labouring in Rumkowski’s factory. They and their mother were among the first ones sent to Chelmno. Of course, they were exterminated.

  “Simcha remained at Łódź. He worked for Rumkowski and the other devils who tortured the starving Jews. Unlike Warsaw or Minsk, there was no rebellion, no uprising in Łódź. Rumkowski made certain of that.

  “Your brother, from what I’ve heard, collaborated with Rumkowski. He helped him. Just before the ghetto was liquidated and the remaining residents joined the death march to Auschwitz, Simcha disappeared. He must have run away when he was dumping shit in the field outside the ghetto. Maybe he was burying the dead. There were lots of jobs for those who were willing. You must take into account how thorough the Nazis were. There are no photographs, no films or audio recordings of the exterminations in the ovens. Someone had to destroy the evidence of what happened in the Łódź Ghetto. Maybe Simcha helped them.”

  “What are you saying? That he was a collaborator? What proof do you have that my brother destroyed evidence or anything else?”

  Elka was enjoying her moment. “People talk, they remember things.”

  “That doesn’t make it true.” For a moment, I thought back to what I knew, about Fred Rose, about Gouzenko, about what Zabotin and I had done back in Ottawa more than forty years ago. “People remember things in different ways.” It was impossible for me to accept Elka’s verdict. I wanted to slap her. Next to beg forgiveness from her. I held my head in my hands.

  “Ask him yourself. I told you, he’s alive.”

  I looked up at Elka. “Do you mean to tell me that he is actually alive? That you aren’t making this up to torment me?”

  Elka wasn’t surprised by my response. “You can find him if you try. Reunite the Linton family. Somehow the three Linton children made it. Masha has known all along where your brother is.”

  All I could think of was finding Simcha. I was ashamed of him, but he was my kin. At first, I hadn’t believed Elka, but her story was detailed enough that I couldn’t discount it, although she couldn’t recount exactly what Simcha had done. She wasn’t inventing simply to wound me or was she? What would she have done in my brother’s place; what would anyone of us have done that we can be so sanctimonious?

  In Pripyat, before the disaster, I’d met Jews who’d remarried after the war. Their first families, their wives and children, had perished in the war and they’d managed to re-marry, usually a landsman, a friend from their old community, the shtetl now devoid of Jews. It was impossible for them not to search for someone who remembered what life was once like. Surely, that was the connection between Vine and me. We could recall the colours of the lopsided houses on the laneways of Nesvicz, the crooked windows that wouldn’t open in summer or keep out the cold in winter; the doors which would not close properly. And the singing. The singing in our shul on the Sabbath, the melodic sound of the cantor raising his voice in honour of God.

  “Those who collaborated with the ruling elite, some survived. Don’t look so shocked,” Elka chuckled. “There are always survivors.” She enjoyed taunting me. “Look at you and your men friends. Survivors.”

  Simcha was the weakest among my parents’ children. He was clever, but he preferred lies to the truth. It didn’t matter how small the lies were or how big. My mother would ask him if he wore his hat and mittens on a cold winter morning and he’d assure her he did, although I knew he hadn’t touched them. He lied about his grades from cheder, or when he fell into trouble with the rabbi. He never admitted to doing wrong. I wondered how he’d changed or if he and Masha and I were essentially the same people we’d been in Nesvicz. She was the obedient one and although I was quiet, I was the rebel, at least in my mind. Even before Vine had knocked on the door of my father’s house, I’d wanted to experience life beyond the borders of little Nesvicz. Simcha was the naughty one, but that didn’t make him a coward or a collaborator.

  When Vine poked his head into the screened porch, Elka was eager to greet him. She stood up and introduced herself. Vine moved back. He’d overheard her tale about my brother and wanted to know what he’d done, how he’d survived, but Elka had moved on from Simcha to Vine. She said I should contact Jewish Social Services in Kiev, the same organization that’d rescued her when she was about to drown herself after the war. She emphasized she didn’t wish to become involved in Simcha’s case or associated with his name in any manner.

  “Before the accident, didn’t you try to collect a minyan at the old synagogue in Chernobyl?” Elka asked Vine.

  Vine was surprised that she knew about his efforts and that he’d moved there after I’d s
ettled in Chernobyl. He was proud of returning to the faith and of trying to pick up where he’d left off when he first disappeared from Nesvicz. He felt he owed it to his parents and his meagre beginnings.

  “It goes back hundreds of years, the Jewish community in Chernobyl,” Vine said, earnest as ever. “I tried my best. Every Friday night and Saturday morning, but often we ran short of a minyan. I haven’t been successful in my life. I made too many mistakes. I should have let Freda remain in Nesvicz instead of forcing her to travel with me across the ocean. She’s resented me ever since. She’s never forgiven me, and I’ve never forgiven her for making me want to be a hero. I forgot how to be a human being.”

  Finally Vine was uttering what we’d been afraid to say to each other. Our shared secrets belonged only to us, a noose around our necks, along with the other disasters we rarely admitted. Not one member of Vine’s family survived the war. They were either murdered by the Nazis in the ravine behind our shtetl or died fighting in the Great Patriotic War. And because he didn’t know the dates of their deaths, he’d say Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, on July 22nd, the day the Germans slaughtered the Jews of Nesvicz.

  Elka revealed that she’d been to Sabbath prayers at the old Chernobyl shul once or twice, sitting above the men, high in the balcony, in the separate section for women. “It was dicey in Chernobyl after the war. Not many Jews were alive and those who survived, didn’t care for religion,” she said. “Makes sense, after what they’d been through. Mostly scientists came to Chernobyl, people of exacting reason and irreproachable ethics. They intended to build the perfect Communist state and to make up for how backward Russia was. The research into atomic matter appealed to them, and to me.” Elka chuckled again and leaned back. “You and Freda and your friend, Comrade Zabotin. The three of you were employed by the Soviet state at Chernobyl for many years, weren’t you? The reactors were considered a beacon of light, a source of pure Communist energy.”

  Vine retreated to sit at the kitchen table inside the cabin. “Creative Communism,” he added, loud enough that we heard him.

  I was ashamed for my brother and for myself. Although we were isolated in the forest, all I thought about was hiding Elka’s revelations about Simcha. Immediately I understood why Masha never spoke about him before. I might have spread the word that Simcha was alive and that would look bad on her particularly in front of her comrades who’d fought courageously against the Nazis. It would shame her, diminish her in their eyes, so she pretended he was dead, even to me.

  I offered Elka a sweet bun that I’d baked that morning. “It’s just flour, sugar and lard, nothing fancy, but they’re tasty,” I said, passing the plate.

  “Good for you,” Elka said accepting the pastry. “Continue baking and cooking. That’s the way to survive this life.” She packed two more buns in her knapsack before departing.

  Zabotin wasn’t curious about what Elka had to say about my brother. He left for a swim in the river before she arrived.

  As for Vine, his interest was piqued. “Do you believe her, that Simcha collaborated?” he asked. “Surely, Masha would know if Simcha did that and if he survived. She would have told you.”

  “Not necessarily. I can’t believe Elka, but I can’t ignore her. I want to see Simcha if he is alive. If he collaborated, is that worse than dying? It was so close to the end. The Germans were losing the war. He must have realized the Allies would liberate the camps and the ghettos.”

  “Maybe,” Vine said. He wasn’t trying to hurt me.

  “Imagine,” I wondered, “if we’d never left Nesvicz, if Zabotin hadn’t been the commanding officer in your mother’s kitchen? What would have happened to us?”

  “You know as well as I do. We’d be dead.”

  “Or not. Masha prospered and Simcha…”

  “I’m not so sure we would have stayed in Nesvicz. You like to take risks,” Vine reminded me. “I can imagine you in Moscow or Leningrad. We wouldn’t have avoided the war. No one did. Not even us.”

  “Look at us now. What’s the difference?” I asked. “It’s much worse here than it was in Nesvicz before the Revolution. The Soviet Union is crumbling outside our door.”

  “For most people, it’s better. You and I were caught in the storm. The tornado, as you prefer to call it, on the night Gouzenko defected. We did our best. Now democracy is coming to Russia. These changes take time.” For all his complaining, Vine remained the optimist.

  “What if Russia had opened up without the wars? If democracy developed gradually, without bloodshed? I’d learned about Lenin arriving by train at the Finland Station during the winter of 1917. How he, so devoted to the proletariat, defeated lesser men, the ones not certain that years of violence was the answer to the czar’s crimes.”

  “It’s in God’s hands,” Vine said, which meant the question was closed. He no longer wished to discuss the difference between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. Or how desperation turned to revolution when the Cossacks refused to cut down the St. Petersburg demonstrators on the Nevsky Prospect and themselves turned on the czar. Those arguments were over for him once he transformed back to his former pious self.

  As for me, I was among the lost after hearing about Simcha. How could I make sense out of what happened to my family? Mama, the devout Jewish wife: perfect, obedient, disinterested in modern thinking. Papa belonged to the Enlightenment. He was the new Jew who saw a breaking sophistication in Jewish literature and art and in the language itself. I was neither, nor did I have Vine’s affinity for religion or Zabotin’s taste for outwitting the Communist ideologues. People like me floated above the earth, half way between heaven and hell. Neither the sky nor the earth would take us. I didn’t want to be like Elka, but she was fast moulding a Freda who was like her.

  My brother Simcha was another story. I tried to imagine what he’d seen, what he’d felt watching his wife and children perish, knowing he could not save them. Why did he bother saving himself I wondered. On some level the answer was easy. Life is sweeter than death. I relish my days in the Chernobyl forest. The reactor seems millions of miles away on summer days like today when the trees are a lush verdant green and the sparkling river flows slowly toward the sea.

  I asked Vine if he thought Zabotin had known all along that Simcha was a collaborator and that he was alive.

  “He never mentioned it?” Vine inquired.

  “Never. But that doesn’t mean a thing. Masha survived. It was the old Count and Countess who, in their own way, protected her. Of course, they were not innocent, either. They’d allowed the others in my family to perish. He would have known that, but never let on when I worked for him in Canada. He did not tell me about Masha until Gouzenko defected. By then, he needed me about as much as I did him.”

  “Why not tell you before?”

  “Zabotin believes the more he keeps from me, the more he can control me. He believes he can protect me, keep me from harm’s way, if I know less than he does. I must believe that or…”

  “Or you’d be left with me?” Vine quipped. “I suppose he allows me to stay with you to keep you distracted.”

  For the second time since we’d moved to the forest, Vine sat beside me on the old couch. He’d grown so frail. He placed his arm around my shoulder and we sat together until we heard the sound of Zabotin’s old Lada approaching. Vine tiptoed back to his room and I pretended to be asleep when he entered the hut. I was trying to work out why Vine and I came apart as soon as we landed in Canada. It might seem ridiculous that an old woman reflected on love, and how Vine had treated me in Toronto and how I’d retaliated. That was love of a sort.

  How I came to find my feelings of devotion for Zabotin wasn’t any more straightforward. How could they be, after he plundered Nesvicz? His treatment of me in Ottawa was criminal. If he’d loved me from first sight, as he claimed he did, why did he force me to seduce so many men? His faith in Communism had already shrunk to nothing.

  The memories resurfacing about my brother were as convolut
ed. I’d favoured Simcha as a child, much more so than Masha, who was the dour one while Simcha was adorable. Yet he’d abandoned his wife and children only to see them transported to the crematorium. He survived by joining forces with the collaborators, dragging shit from the ghetto’s cisterns to the fields. Or worse. If there’d been no war, I could imagine Simcha as a lawyer, taking over from Papa, running a lucrative business. Simcha would have become a big shot, a macher, in Nesvicz, married to a beautiful pious bride, father to well-behaved children who respected him. Is that really how it would have turned out for my brother, a born liar? Or for Zabotin and me? If we’d remained in Nesvicz, I’d be the Jewish girl from the shtetl, someone who would never dare enter his home, except as a servant. He’d try to make me his mistress, at best, and that’s how I might have survived the war. Or would he defy his family, the engrained wishes of the noble Count and Countess, fallen on hard times in the midst of revolution and war? Had the Bolsheviks ever made Russia such an egalitarian paradise that Zabotin and I could be together as we are in the contaminated Chernobyl forest?

  I needed to understand how my brother survived, while so many others perished. How had he managed to live with himself? Maybe he’d gone mad with shame. For now, that was the best answer I could come up with.

  PART THREE

  Chapter Nineteen

  February 1946

  Ottawa

  It was the dead of winter. Snowbanks reached the second floor balcony of my flat on Florence Street. I’d been waiting for months to be arrested, but it was so quiet in Ottawa in February, it was difficult to believe that anything out of the ordinary could happen, even to me.