by Joyce Wayne
Zabotin’s and my fears turned to how the Soviets would punish us when the full implication of Gouzenko’s defection hit them. They wanted the plutonium and would be amazed by Fuchs’ drawings, but I wasn’t certain it would be enough to satisfy them, not after what we’d done. The new conflict had turned into a race for atomic weapons, and Zabotin, with my knowledge, had kept back the key intelligence the Soviets needed in order to catch up with the Americans. For that reason, we were more afraid of Moscow than Ottawa.
Our only hope was that the rezident still had connections to officials in the Party and in the military. General Zhukov, who’d won the war for Stalin, was his chum from military college. They’d served together during the Revolution. Zabotin believed that Zhukov would do his best to defend him. Keep him out the Lubyanka and away from the gulags. I wasn’t so sure.
Vine was outside, standing across from the embassy, in a vacant lot when Zabotin and I were alerted to the number of comrades’ disappearing during the night. I asked Zabotin for permission to bring Vine in, fearing he would be picked up outside the embassy gates, but Zabotin hesitated.
“In here, with us?”
“He’ll freeze to death if we leave him out there. He has nowhere else to go. If they find him, he’ll be arrested. You’ve said so yourself.” I was begging him, this one last time, to rescue Vine.
“Why must you?”
But I cut Zabotin off. “It’s a matter of loyalty. Why can’t you understand?”
“It’s a matter of love. Or something worse. Obsession. Let him go.”
I reminded Zabotin that we’d just made a deal. I wouldn’t leave the country without Vine. I couldn’t. Zabotin knew that before we’d even spoke. That’s why he painted Vine into the picture. If he did this for me, I promised I would never forget his kindness.
Zabotin walked across the room. His collection of pipes was lined up neatly in their stand and he began to fill one with tobacco, tamping it down and then holding a match over the barrel. “I want you for myself, Freda. If you can’t forget Vine, I need to know now.”
It was a fair question. If I were honest with Zabotin, I’d tell him that Vine was my first love. Each of us has one; the person we dream about when we’re coming into consciousness after a deep sleep. If Zabotin rescued me this time, I would let Vine go, my Adam from the garden.
There were other good reasons as well, but I didn’t know them at the time. Once I returned to Europe, I met couples who’d married days after being released from the death camps. Most had lost a wife or husband to the crematoriums, and when they discovered a landsman, a survivor from their village, they married, trying to quickly resume a life that no longer existed except in their minds. Vine was that person for me. I knew we would never be together as man and woman; not now, not after what I was promising Zabotin and what he was offering to do for me.
I walked over to Zabotin and took the pipe from his hand. I sat on his lap, a childish gesture, and wrapped my arms around him, as if he were my papa. “I promise you, I’ll let him go after we return to Russia. No more of this, I promise.” In a moment of vanity, I wondered if he’d engineered the entire escapade, including Gouzenko’s defection, to tear me away from Vine, but I didn’t believe in myself that much, no woman does, if she’s being honest.
I wanted to ask him if he’d divorce Lydia now that we were to be together and if he wanted children since I was young enough to bear them. The normal questions that a woman asks when she agrees to tie herself to one man for the rest of her life. And I believe Zabotin had questions for me, not just about Vine, but embarrassing questions like how many others I’d been with. Too many to count, but before now, it hadn’t mattered. We were beginning our ascent to normalcy, to becoming lovers who had questions that lovers ask just for the sake of knowing and not for the good of one country over the other.
Zabotin believed in me. I understood that as we kissed in the enveloping warmth of the embassy parlour. Whenever he looked at me, he saw the pretty young girl I’d been in the kitchen of Vine’s house in Nesvicz and he continued to dwell on my innocence and my strength, no matter how far I’d strayed from his ideal. I was his Eve.
That night we made love, quickly and with true passion. It was many years before we would be together again.
When Zabotin escorted me down the stairs to the grand foyer of the embassy, he called for a pair of sturdy woman’s boots. The staff was awake, waiting for his orders, so it only took minutes to locate a pair of brown leather boots in my size, fur-lined with thick laces. The heels were rubber like the tires on the giant plows that cleaned Ottawa’s streets after a snowfall. I was in my stocking feet, the silk stockings, shredded around the knees that were scraped raw from hurtling on the ice. “You’ll be fine,” he said. He sat me down, reclined on his haunches and pulled the boots over my feet. Then he tied the laces, making certain there was a double knot at the top. “I’ll get you out of the country. I give you my word.”
He sent me outside to collect Vine. I spotted him across the street and to my eyes, unaccustomed to the darkened night, he looked like he was suspended between heaven and earth, as if he was dancing on a string and I was holding him down, preventing him from floating up to the sky. I knew the feeling. It’s the same one I had on the ship when I thought Vine would die and I would be left alone in a new world I knew nothing about.
Tears began cascading down his cheeks when he saw me coming toward him. His nose was raw from crying in the cold. “We could disappear, Freda, run far away. No one would look for us in the wilderness. There are islands off the coast of British Columbia. We’d build a cabin, live off the land, be farmers.”
We both knew it wasn’t possible. We were never meant to become farmers. Vine would never manage the isolation or the monotony of the work. Before long, he’d tire of me, drive into town in our worn-down pick-up truck, strike up a conversation with the good-looking woman behind the bar and convince her she needed to be with him for the night. By morning, he’d be searching for a cause to join, any cause that would take him outside of himself and away from me.
Vine was afraid; he’d always been afraid. Only once had he beaten down the fear: with the village doctor in Nesvicz, proving to Zabotin that he was worthy of admiration. That February night in Ottawa, his bare hands, sticking out from the sleeves of his coat, were turning white with frostbite. How could he have forgotten his gloves in such weather? Or had he thrown them away in the snow? We survivors, how we find the will to continue, is a miracle. Vine is the smartest one of us, but he is weak. In Chernobyl, we each make sense of the days left, living with the ghosts of old and new regimes, and the memories of grandiose self-deceptions, but Vine complains, about the dampness, about the heat, about the food. He’s never been able to get over himself.
“Come in from the cold,” I coaxed, holding his numb hands in mine and kissing them. “Let me do the talking.” Finally we were even.
A tall young woman met us at the door. “Irina,” I said.
“Zabotin’s gone to bed,” she said. “His orders are with me.” Irina and I had worked together at TASS since the beginning of the war.
She separated Vine and me immediately. He was to go downstairs where a room was prepared for him. Irina led me up to the third floor. Persian runners lined the stairs and potted aspidistras sat on the stairwells. She led me to a small, but well-appointed bedroom. There was an adjoining private washroom. My case was sitting on the single bed, as well as a heavy woolen coat with a fox-fur collar and hood.
“You’ll freeze in your own coat up at Chalk River.” Irina told me to take off my boots and dress and put on a plain green smock. “Have you ever dyed your hair?” she asked, taking a large bottle of peroxide from the bathroom cupboard.
“I thought I would be wearing a wig,” I said. I covered my head with my hand, but Irina asked me to be reasonable.
“It will grow out in no time,” she assured me. “No one will recognize you as a blonde.”
When it was
over, she dried my hair with a towel and brushed it. I was to sleep for a few hours, then Irina and I would be taking the bus from the Ottawa station to Chalk River, after changing in Renfrew. She’d be with me all the way. Alan Nunn May would meet us with the sample of plutonium in the village café.
I lied down on the bed, and got under the covers. I was too exhausted to ask where Vine was or if I’d see Zabotin before leaving for Chalk River.
In the morning, Irina brought me breakfast on a wooden tray. A soft-boiled egg, two slices of toast, an orange and coffee. “What if I don’t wish to go through with it, if I change my mind?” It was a stupid question. I hardly meant it.
Irina pursed her lips.
I didn’t see Zabotin before we left the embassy. A blue Pontiac sedan delivered us to the station and we waited for an hour, among the mothers, children, and elderly women waiting to catch the bus to Renfrew. Our bus followed the milk run, stopping at every hamlet along the way. The road was plowed, but during the night the wind had blown snow across the two-lane highway. The driver stopped the bus in front of each mountain of snow and he and the male passengers donned their toques and gloves, grabbed the shovels stored in the luggage compartment and dug us out.
Irina and I didn’t talk along the route. Most of the passengers ate sandwiches and drank tea from thermoses. Some of the men brought beer and beef jerky for the ride. In my purse, I checked to make sure that Fuchs’ drawings were safe. I wanted to believe that Irina was with me as protection, not to police me, but I wasn’t certain that Zabotin trusted me completely at that point. I knew Zabotin loved me, but love and trust are two different things.
The driver dropped us off on the main street of Renfrew. It was dark by the time we arrived and the shops had closed for the night. There were three parked cars and a few horse-drawn wagons, driven by lumberjacks in red and black-checkered jackets. They whistled when they noticed two blondes standing in front of the general store, waiting for the next bus to Chalk River. One man, who spoke English with a Quebec accent, invited us to join him and his buddies at the tavern. I was hungry and thirsty so I agreed, but Irina said no. “Don’t be foolish,” she chided me in Russian.
The temperature was dropping. It was already minus 23 Celsuis. To protect ourselves from frostbite, we wrapped scarves around our nose and mouth and stamped our feet as we waited for the bus to arrive. A yellow school bus was the only transportation between Renfrew and Chalk River. In a few years the laboratories at Chalk River would grow to employ hundreds. Canadian Pacific would lay tracks from Ottawa so the scientists and their families could travel in comfort. But back then, it was wilderness as far as the eye could see, just pine trees and the enormous grey and purple rock formations of the Northern shield, and the air so cold I inhaled it deep inside my lungs. The cold air helped me to choke back the tears. Although I was Russian, I had no idea how to survive out here.
The same dark blue Pontiac, driven by the same burly man from the morning escort from the embassy, picked us up from the bus stop in Chalk River. He was wearing a fur hat, the flaps drawn down over his ears, and I recognized him from my rendezvous with Vine at The Party Palace. He’d been at the diner drinking his coffee and listening to the announcement. He was Zabotin’s plant.
He spoke directly to Irina. His orders were to escort us to a cabin in the bush, north of the nuclear laboratory. Plans had changed. Nunn May would be there, not at Chalk River’s only café. We were to spend the night in the cabin after which he’d drive us to Montreal’s Windsor Station. From there, I’d be boarding the train to Halifax. I asked if Vine would meet me in Montreal or Halifax, but the driver said he couldn’t be expected to know and that it was better not to ask.
Irina turned her head, not talking, and stared out the rear window into the starless night. The warm air from the Pontiac’s heater wasn’t reaching the back seat where Irina and I reclined. As she began to blow on her hands to warm herself, the driver removed a flask from the glove compartment. He took a swig and handed it to Irina.
She sniffed the mouth of the flask. “Brandy. Try some, Freda. You before me,” she said in a kindly tone. “You’re going to need it.”
The brandy tasted good. I took another sip and passed the flask back to her. When Irina pulled a tissue from her handbag to wipe her mouth before drinking, I saw the glint of a revolver. The car bumped along the uneven dirt road following the steep pine-covered hills leading to the cabin. It was a frozen landscape devoid of people. The only light shone from the Pontiac’s headlights. One wrong move and we’d skid on the ice and down off the road into the black ravine below.
The laneway to the cabin wasn’t wide enough for the Pontiac to pass through, nor was it plowed. We hiked the last kilometre to the front door. It was snowing hard, in steady wet lumps that stuck to our clothes and hair. The driver gathered two ropes from the trunk and tied one around my waist and the other around Irina’s.
“You get lost in snow,” he said.
I couldn’t see six feet in front of me. Irina argued that she’d make it without being tied to a rope, but the driver insisted.
“Don’t get any ideas,” the driver shouted.
As we approached the cabin, I sighted a kerosene lantern flickering in the window. We followed the light to the tiny cabin. Inside, along the back wall, stood a wood stove with a caste-iron door that wouldn’t shut. The cabin was filled with smoke. There was no electricity and no running water. The owner, a man named Jack Brown, offered to take our coats, but Irina and I declined. He laid out uncooked oats and maple syrup for dinner along with four brown half-rotten apples.
“I slaughtered the pig before Christmas so from February on it’s been oats or canned beans, three times a day. You didn’t happen to bring supplies with you? Jam or lard.” The driver shook his head., handing Jack Brown his flask.
We were sitting at the table when a stranger arrived. He removed his coat, but kept his toque pulled down over his silver hair. His suit was navy with pin stripes. He wore leather gloves.
“I’m Alan Nunn May,” he said, reaching out his hand to me. “I suppose you’re Freda.”
“I am, and this is Irina.”
Nunn May shook her hand and the driver’s. He didn’t acknowledge our host, who was shovelling oats into his mouth. “I’m delighted to meet you. I’m certainly looking forward to our travels together,” he said to me. “I was told you’re a brunette.”
“I used to be. Now I have a new identity,” I replied.
Jack continued eating, uninterested in the conversation. “It’s cabin fever,” Nunn May explained as if the distracted fellow wasn’t in the room. “Common up here. But extraordinary! Men living alone in the bush for the entire winter.” His accent was the same as John Grierson’s and it turned out they’d been at Cambridge together in the thirties.
Nunn May refused the paltry meal, preferring to keep his gloves on and sit perched near the wood stove. The room was overheating and the smoke was blinding. Everything was covered in a layer of black soot and we were all coughing.
“Unfortunate really, the isolation, the cold, the darkness in winter, drives these loners to the brink of madness and sometimes beyond,” Nunn May continued, analyzing the situation.
“I’m certain you know how it feels, Doctor, all alone in the wilderness,” suggested Irina. “Chalk River can’t be much better than this place.”
“Not much better,” he conceded.
Irina was smarter than she behaved at the TASS office in Ottawa, where she giggled and ran errands as the girl Friday.
The outhouse was forty metres up the snow-covered hill behind the cabin, but the driver instructed us to “do business outside door.” Irina and I were to sleep on a mattress on the wooden floor and to share a blanket for warmth. At night the fire would die out and it would begin to freeze inside the cabin. The driver brought in my case and Irina’s as well, but we slept in our clothes under the down-filled bag. Nunn May sat in the chair throughout the night. Jack Brown and the drive
r shared the bed in the corner of the room. They fell asleep immediately and within minutes they were snoring in unison.
The driver apparently didn’t think it was necessary to keep watch over me or Nunn May throughout the night. The temperature gauge outside the cabin read minus 28 Celsius. The night “cold and black as a witch’s tit,” was how Jack Brown described it.
Irina and I huddled together for warmth. “Zabotin promised me that I could accompany you by train from Montreal to Halifax. From there we’ll board a flight to London and then on to Moscow,” she whispered.
“It will be good to be home,” I replied.
I was guarding my handbag with Fuchs’ atomic drawings under my arm. I opened the bag to assure myself they were safe and offered Irina a peppermint. I suspected Nunn May had the plutonium for my locket, but he hadn’t revealed it yet.
“Why on earth do you want to return to Russia?” she asked.
“Don’t you?”
Nunn May began gibbering from chair, where he sat with his head
“No. Are you crazy? I want to stay here. My husband died in the war and so did my family. Starved to death during the siege of Leningrad—my mother and father and three sisters. There’s nothing for me at home. Besides, I like it here. The freedom. How about you?”
“Perhaps one day I’ll return to Canada.” I spoke softly in Irina’s ear. “My sister is alive. I’m going to find the other members of family, if it’s the last thing I do. Zabotin will help me.”
“Do you believe him?”
“Most days.”
We snuggled closer. The fire was burning out in the wood stove. Only a few embers remained and the room was clearing of smoke.
“Why don’t you run now?” Irina asked.
