The Last Secret, page 14
“The bunker was high on the mountain?” Ewa asked, her voice oddly calm. “Near Deremnytsia?”
Savka hesitated. A good insurgent would die before revealing even a vague description of a bunker’s location. But this was Ewa, another revolutionary, and now Savka trusted her implicitly. “Very cleverly hidden on the east face of the mountain, in the spruce tree forest. There was a creek nearby, I remember hearing it—”
She broke off as Natalka’s parting threat rang in her ears:
If you don’t kill your handler, I’ll come for you. I’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth.
Ewa’s voice pulled her back into the room. “I hope the NKVD hasn’t got to them.”
Savka smiled to herself. “Kuzak and his insurgents will hold out forever.”
17
DANEK
Salt Spring Island
december 5, 1972
up on the headland, Danek Rys watches as Nurse Pat O’Dwyer takes a few moments to compose herself. He has seen this kind of person many times before. A liar and a thief.
But he’s been lying, too. He’s come to Salt Spring Island on a mission. He is no better than the nurse.
Pat steps closer. “Jeanie suffered a traumatic accident at the age of seventeen. She was in the hospital for two years, and on heavy drugs. There are no memories in that daft, vacant head. Do you know what the papers called her? Wait, of course you do.”
Dan notices that Jeanie has come to an abrupt stop on the path to the house, thin shoulders bowed, as if she’s heard these hateful remarks.
His gaze returns to Pat. “You told police you saw Marko Kovacs last, heading for the back stairs of your hospital ward. Another man arrived soon after this, says he is Mr. Kovacs’s brother and runs down the hall after him.” Dan waits while Pat stares at him, obviously angry that he’s dared bring up the police report. It has been difficult tracking her down, but now that she’s standing in front of him, he waits for her to admit the truth.
“He didn’t run, but you could say he was in a hurry.” Pat folds her arms across her chest.
Dan hides a smile. Now he’s got her. “What does the man look like?”
“How should I know? A hat hid his features.” She frowns. “And it was many years ago.”
“Did he have an accent?”
“Like yours, you mean?” Pat narrows her eyes. “You know, Mr. Rys, maybe you’re in on it.” She takes a step toward him. “Maybe I should call the police.”
“Mr. Kovacs vanishes into thin air after this,” he presses her, watching those dark eyes for a hint of reaction. “His car is left in the parking lot. You have seen or heard something.”
Pat snorts with derision. “Kay and I saw nothing.”
Jeanie is inching back toward them, dejected and shivering, and he suffers a fractal image of dark figures hunched in a long line before him, snow blowing so hard they cannot see. He shakes his head to rid himself of the memory and focuses on the young woman. Before his visit to the island, he read several articles about Jeanie Esterhazy on the microfiche in the Vancouver library, about her dreadful accident and how she disappeared after an art show in 1966. Beyond that, there was only speculation as to her whereabouts.
“…and the baby,” Pat is saying. “Poor thing never stood a chance. Even a house cat possesses better sense and proper instinct than Jeanie did that night.”
He scratches this into his notebook: Baby? There was no mention of it in the articles. He feels a tentative hand on the sleeve of his coat, and he jolts, unaccustomed to touch. It’s the artist. Jeanie is obviously terrified of Pat, yet she’s managed to creep past her caregiver to stand next to him. Her long hair, the color of a raven’s wing, blows across her lower face. She smells of the wind and salt, she smells of the sea. He stares into her luminous green eyes. Intoxicated, he forces himself to look away, dropping his gaze to Jeanie’s hands. Her fingers, runnelled with scars, are strangely beautiful.
“Could you leave your card, Dan?” she says, her voice a whisper. “I’ll call you if I remember anything else.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Pat says loudly before Dan can respond.
He stands dumbly for a moment. He’s prepared for any eventuality but didn’t think of having a business card made. How bad he is at this. Dan quickly scribbles his telephone number on a blank page of his notebook then rips it free. Pat leaps forward to take it, but he deliberately hands it to Jeanie, who folds it in half and in half again.
Pat looks more furious than ever, and Dan is confused. Why would a caregiver be so uncaring? She’s turned to lead Jeanie down the path toward the driveway. He follows, intent on pressing Pat further.
When they near the house, she tells Jeanie, “Take a hot bath and get into your pajamas.”
Jeanie stubbornly shakes her head. “I won’t let you talk to him alone.”
With a tight smile, Pat slips an arm around her charge and steers her to the door. Jeanie resists. After a brief struggle she gives up and shuffles inside with a final glance back at Dan. He opens his mouth to say something, but unsure of what those words should be, he stops himself.
Pat turns and looks at Dan, her smile gone. “As you can see, she’s fragile,” she tells him. “You coming here, bringing up that traumatic time in her life—it’s devastating to her.”
He watches the nurse intently. “She would be dead now if I did not come.” He turns and gestures to the rope hanging from the tree.
“You think Jeanie would try to kill herself? That’s all performance! She’s gone mad. I have to hide anything sharp for my own safety.” Pat lifts her sleeve and shows him her bandaged arm for emphasis. “Even her craft scissors.”
He files this away, though he only feels sympathy for the artist. Any attack was undoubtedly the act of a broken-hearted woman with no other choice. “And yet you left enough rope for her to die.”
Pat’s eyes flare with indignation, and he knows he’s struck a chord. “Jeanie is a sick individual. Strong drugs have affected her mind.”
He’s silent for a moment. “She survived a terrible accident,” he says finally. “She is no coward.”
Pat laughs, as though she suddenly finds him amusing. “You’re foreign, aren’t you? What’s your name? What miserable country gave you those scars?”
“You don’t remember me?” he says, for she deserves to be put in her place. “I come from your nightmares.”
Pat rears back and glares at Dan, her eyes and tone sharp. “You’ll never show up here again to upset Jeanie.”
He glances up at the house and spots Jeanie’s lovely, pale face hovering in a window. She lights up when their eyes meet, but he tries to keep his expression neutral. He hasn’t had much experience with women, yet there’s something about this one that compels him. His eyes shift back to Pat. What is she hiding? “You are lucky to live here, in paradise.”
“Lucky?” Pat’s face contorts in anger, a hand to her hip. “This is not paradise. Far from it. You try taking care of Jeanie! Do you know Kay and I were her two vigil nurses? We held her close when her mother and aunt died in a car accident Jeanie’s second year in the hospital. Her father’s been out of the picture since she was a child.” She pauses, clearly agitated. “When Jeanie got out of the hospital, she was nineteen. She needed someone familiar with her care, the medication. She got me. And I’ve sacrificed more than she—” Pat clamps her mouth shut over these last words.
He gives her an appraising look, eyebrows raised. What else did she mean to say?
There is only a foot between them, but he steps closer to Nurse O’Dwyer and slips one hand into his pocket to caress the leather sheath that holds a knife he made long ago with a surgeon’s scalpel, the handle wrapped in a compress bandage and wound tight with an old shoelace. He’s kept this blade for one purpose—to sing across the neck of the one he’s been hunting with singular focus. Pat looks too smug, too sure of her place here. “What will happen to you if Jeanie is successful in…what do you call it? Performance?”
Pat stumbles back and he sees he’s scored a hit. “You seem a little too invested in this cold case,” she says. “Who was Marko Kovacs to you?”
Dan remains silent. Pat doesn’t need to know that he’s been obsessed with Marko for many years. He’s tracked his actions in Europe with the Fourteenth Division and with British Intelligence in England. When he finally traced Ivanets to Canada, he was surprised to learn that the man had changed his name to Kovacs, and he’d disappeared without a trace in 1959. Dan doesn’t believe it. He suspects there is something else behind Marko Kovacs’s disappearance. And he’s here to find out just what that is.
Pat is staring at him. “Show up here again and I’ll call the police.”
He turns and walks up the drive, Jeanie’s declaration, “Don’t you think you should have to fight?” ringing in his ears. What a question. He has never heard anyone put his own experience into words quite like this. During the war, he fought with everything in him to survive. Yet, parts of him are dead. His heart or his spirit? He still doesn’t know. Glancing over his shoulder, he can still see her woeful face in the window, like an animal in a cage, watching its only chance for escape leave forever.
It’s clear he’ll get nothing further out of Pat O’Dwyer. The nurse had claimed on the phone that she’d never heard of Marko Kovacs. She can’t be trusted. The police had questioned both nurses, the only ones who worked on the ward at the time Kovacs disappeared. They’d not questioned the patients. Jeanie is the true lead, the only one he’s got. He’ll use her to get to Pat, find out what she’s hiding.
But Jeanie has already been used.
He puts this away from him, surprised to feel a moment of pity, of attachment. Some part of him desperately wants to run back, grab Jeanie and take her away from this place.
Jeanie is the key—she has all the answers in her head. And he must get them out. Surely she will remember hearing something the night Marko Kovacs disappeared. And when she does, she’ll call and tell him why her old nurse lied. Or he’ll return and show Pat just how far he’s willing to go to find Marko Kovacs.
18
SAVKA
Kraków, Polish People’s Republic
january 19, 1947
“is there a parade, Matka?”
“Yes, Paweł.” Savka smiled at the little boy. “A parade just for us.”
Ewa’s son held Savka’s hand with a grip stronger than any three-year-old she’d known. The image of Taras at that age, his own precious hand in hers, invaded Savka’s memory and her heart ached. My son, where are you?
She pushed away the grief and steered Paweł and her own small daughter, Zoya, into the doorway of a cafe just as a Red Army battalion marched through the entrance of St. Florian’s Gate at the center of Kraków, where, since the twelfth century, Polish armies led by kings and princes had passed through in processions of victory to Wawel Castle.
As she watched the Soviet soldiers file into Market Square to the ugly shouts of their captain, Savka’s scarred wound throbbed, a perpetual reminder of the day she lost Taras. She tried to stay calm as she took in the distinctive puce-colored Red Army uniforms and this alarming display of force on the day of country-wide elections. One of the soldiers was tall, gangly, and her heart briefly soared with hope. She’d not stopped frantically looking for her son in the face of every young man on the street, nor had she stopped asking herself questions that hung like vapor in the frigid air:
Has he been tortured? Does he get enough to eat? And in her lightless moments: Is he still alive?
Her son was fine, she convinced herself. Healthy, safe. Taras has his own room in a beautiful dacha—riding horses, and with access to a library filled with books. She took a deep breath, the glacial smell of melting ice from the Vistula River in her nose and an eerie foreboding in the air, as if a ghost cello played in the streets of Kraków on Polish election day.
This morning, Ewa had been eager to arrive early at the polling station to vote. “Stalin is finally permitting the democratic election he promised the Allies at Yalta,” she’d said excitedly, getting ready to leave after breakfast.
“And you trust he will deliver this promise?” Savka had been wiping buckwheat porridge off Zoya’s face. Her own dark experience living in Soviet Ukraine made her skeptical, yet Ewa was optimistic that democracy would rule.
But that had been hours ago, and as Ewa’s absence stretched into late in the afternoon, Savka had come out with the children. Now she could see the polling station in the corner of the square, Polish voters in neat lines, doing their best to ignore Soviet soldiers and their bristling Papasha submachine guns. Savka worried that Ewa had run into trouble.
The Russian soldiers goose-stepped in front of Savka and the children, and past a massive banner of Stalin that fluttered in the chill breeze. She searched the crowd for the old gray hat that Ewa wore all the time, even indoors in winter, blissfully indifferent to its shabby condition. Where was she? Surely her friend had not anticipated so many Soviet soldiers here to intimidate voters.
Little Zoya flinched at a sudden shouted order from the captain of the Soviet battalion, and Savka picked her up, burying her face in her daughter’s dark, curly hair. The miracle of carrying a child to full term had almost made the loss of Taras and Marko bearable.
Almost.
Savka glanced around the square, expecting to see Ewa’s grim and stormy face. Surely her friend had now accepted that this election was a façade. Stalin cared not a whit for decency and democracy. The strong military presence was not here to protect Poles’ right to vote, but to demonstrate that only one person was in charge—an evil warlord who hunched like an ogre in the dark stronghold of the Kremlin.
The clock in the watchtower of St. Mary’s Basilica struck five, and the hejnał hourly trumpet call sounded. Savka listened as the plaintive melody lofted over the Gothic spires that rose into a cloudless sky. It was a haunting Polish anthem that ended abruptly—symbolic of a time when a trumpeter in the thirteenth century had spotted an invading Mongol horde and sounded the alarm, only to be interrupted mid tune when he was shot in the throat by an arrow.
She felt a sudden pain in her own throat and the eerie sense that she was being watched. She spun on her heel to look behind her. Stop it, she told herself. Who could be watching? Lieutenant Belyakov, the brutal NKVD officer who’d shot her? Ever since that day three years ago, she couldn’t stop looking over her shoulder, wondering if he stood right behind her. But it was impossible that he’d been assigned to Kraków alongside an army sent by Stalin to enforce communist rule in his new vassal state. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he loomed closer than ever.
It’s grief that haunts you, not a random Soviet agent.
Savka was lucky. If there was such a thing as luck anymore. Millions of Ukrainians had not survived the war. Families were torn apart. Survivors had limped away and struggled to recover. When the Allies had liberated many Ukrainians from German forced labor camps, they became displaced persons. And what of those who’d been beaten, raped, or murdered by the Russians? Savka brushed away a sudden tear at the thought of Mama and Lilia. She’d written many times to the house in Deremnytsia, but each letter was returned. Submitting a tracing request to the Red Cross had been her only hope. After the war, she had also made inquiries into the fate of Marko’s Fourteenth Division, but her husband was missing in action and presumed dead. It had been impossible to find information on how he’d died.
A biting wind came off the river, and Paweł shivered in his threadbare coat. “I’m cold, Matka.”
She smiled down at him. Paweł and Zoya called her and Ewa Matka. Mother. The children shared a cot on the floor of Ewa’s bedroom, and the two women still slept in the same bed, no longer turning to each other at night. They’d put aside their brief affair and were simply companions now, responsible mothers. There was little time for misguided passion among two best friends trying to keep their children safe.
Savka glanced at her wristwatch. Too close to curfew. She couldn’t endanger the children further, hoping to find Ewa in this crowd. They had to head home. Reluctantly, she led the children through one of the Renaissance arches in Cloth Hall. Shopkeepers piled rationed items like bread and tea in the same stalls where traders had sold exotic spices and silk hundreds of years ago. A hand on her arm set her heart pounding. He’s found me. Bracing herself, and still gripping the children’s hands, she turned, prepared to face Belyakov. Savka gasped with relief when she saw that it was Ewa, her bright blonde waves peeking from beneath the old woolen hat.
“Let’s get out of here,” Ewa said, her face flushed with anger. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“What do you mean?” Savka’s heart was still hammering in her chest.
“I tried to vote, but my name has been struck from the electoral roll. A filthy Russian told me I was an anti-government bandit.” Ewa glared at her. “The propaganda they spew—in my own country!”
Savka grabbed her coat sleeve and pulled her friend close, waiting until Ewa’s breath slowed. Ewa couldn’t lose her temper, not in the presence of the filthy Russians all around them. Criticizing the regime was dangerous. Still, she whispered in solidarity, “Yalta and its empty promises. The West can’t control Stalin. He’s a criminal, a beast.”
“These thugs,” Ewa said, twisting away to look over her shoulder at the Red Army battalion. “Poles have been arrested. At a democratic election.”
Savka composed herself for the children’s sake. “The dark wizard in the Kremlin has added Poland to its slave states, another spoke in the wheel of the USSR,” she said softly. “Poland will be eaten, just as Ukraine was.”
“I will not let it be eaten,” Ewa said, her teeth clenched.
Savka hesitated. A good insurgent would die before revealing even a vague description of a bunker’s location. But this was Ewa, another revolutionary, and now Savka trusted her implicitly. “Very cleverly hidden on the east face of the mountain, in the spruce tree forest. There was a creek nearby, I remember hearing it—”
She broke off as Natalka’s parting threat rang in her ears:
If you don’t kill your handler, I’ll come for you. I’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth.
Ewa’s voice pulled her back into the room. “I hope the NKVD hasn’t got to them.”
Savka smiled to herself. “Kuzak and his insurgents will hold out forever.”
17
DANEK
Salt Spring Island
december 5, 1972
up on the headland, Danek Rys watches as Nurse Pat O’Dwyer takes a few moments to compose herself. He has seen this kind of person many times before. A liar and a thief.
But he’s been lying, too. He’s come to Salt Spring Island on a mission. He is no better than the nurse.
Pat steps closer. “Jeanie suffered a traumatic accident at the age of seventeen. She was in the hospital for two years, and on heavy drugs. There are no memories in that daft, vacant head. Do you know what the papers called her? Wait, of course you do.”
Dan notices that Jeanie has come to an abrupt stop on the path to the house, thin shoulders bowed, as if she’s heard these hateful remarks.
His gaze returns to Pat. “You told police you saw Marko Kovacs last, heading for the back stairs of your hospital ward. Another man arrived soon after this, says he is Mr. Kovacs’s brother and runs down the hall after him.” Dan waits while Pat stares at him, obviously angry that he’s dared bring up the police report. It has been difficult tracking her down, but now that she’s standing in front of him, he waits for her to admit the truth.
“He didn’t run, but you could say he was in a hurry.” Pat folds her arms across her chest.
Dan hides a smile. Now he’s got her. “What does the man look like?”
“How should I know? A hat hid his features.” She frowns. “And it was many years ago.”
“Did he have an accent?”
“Like yours, you mean?” Pat narrows her eyes. “You know, Mr. Rys, maybe you’re in on it.” She takes a step toward him. “Maybe I should call the police.”
“Mr. Kovacs vanishes into thin air after this,” he presses her, watching those dark eyes for a hint of reaction. “His car is left in the parking lot. You have seen or heard something.”
Pat snorts with derision. “Kay and I saw nothing.”
Jeanie is inching back toward them, dejected and shivering, and he suffers a fractal image of dark figures hunched in a long line before him, snow blowing so hard they cannot see. He shakes his head to rid himself of the memory and focuses on the young woman. Before his visit to the island, he read several articles about Jeanie Esterhazy on the microfiche in the Vancouver library, about her dreadful accident and how she disappeared after an art show in 1966. Beyond that, there was only speculation as to her whereabouts.
“…and the baby,” Pat is saying. “Poor thing never stood a chance. Even a house cat possesses better sense and proper instinct than Jeanie did that night.”
He scratches this into his notebook: Baby? There was no mention of it in the articles. He feels a tentative hand on the sleeve of his coat, and he jolts, unaccustomed to touch. It’s the artist. Jeanie is obviously terrified of Pat, yet she’s managed to creep past her caregiver to stand next to him. Her long hair, the color of a raven’s wing, blows across her lower face. She smells of the wind and salt, she smells of the sea. He stares into her luminous green eyes. Intoxicated, he forces himself to look away, dropping his gaze to Jeanie’s hands. Her fingers, runnelled with scars, are strangely beautiful.
“Could you leave your card, Dan?” she says, her voice a whisper. “I’ll call you if I remember anything else.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Pat says loudly before Dan can respond.
He stands dumbly for a moment. He’s prepared for any eventuality but didn’t think of having a business card made. How bad he is at this. Dan quickly scribbles his telephone number on a blank page of his notebook then rips it free. Pat leaps forward to take it, but he deliberately hands it to Jeanie, who folds it in half and in half again.
Pat looks more furious than ever, and Dan is confused. Why would a caregiver be so uncaring? She’s turned to lead Jeanie down the path toward the driveway. He follows, intent on pressing Pat further.
When they near the house, she tells Jeanie, “Take a hot bath and get into your pajamas.”
Jeanie stubbornly shakes her head. “I won’t let you talk to him alone.”
With a tight smile, Pat slips an arm around her charge and steers her to the door. Jeanie resists. After a brief struggle she gives up and shuffles inside with a final glance back at Dan. He opens his mouth to say something, but unsure of what those words should be, he stops himself.
Pat turns and looks at Dan, her smile gone. “As you can see, she’s fragile,” she tells him. “You coming here, bringing up that traumatic time in her life—it’s devastating to her.”
He watches the nurse intently. “She would be dead now if I did not come.” He turns and gestures to the rope hanging from the tree.
“You think Jeanie would try to kill herself? That’s all performance! She’s gone mad. I have to hide anything sharp for my own safety.” Pat lifts her sleeve and shows him her bandaged arm for emphasis. “Even her craft scissors.”
He files this away, though he only feels sympathy for the artist. Any attack was undoubtedly the act of a broken-hearted woman with no other choice. “And yet you left enough rope for her to die.”
Pat’s eyes flare with indignation, and he knows he’s struck a chord. “Jeanie is a sick individual. Strong drugs have affected her mind.”
He’s silent for a moment. “She survived a terrible accident,” he says finally. “She is no coward.”
Pat laughs, as though she suddenly finds him amusing. “You’re foreign, aren’t you? What’s your name? What miserable country gave you those scars?”
“You don’t remember me?” he says, for she deserves to be put in her place. “I come from your nightmares.”
Pat rears back and glares at Dan, her eyes and tone sharp. “You’ll never show up here again to upset Jeanie.”
He glances up at the house and spots Jeanie’s lovely, pale face hovering in a window. She lights up when their eyes meet, but he tries to keep his expression neutral. He hasn’t had much experience with women, yet there’s something about this one that compels him. His eyes shift back to Pat. What is she hiding? “You are lucky to live here, in paradise.”
“Lucky?” Pat’s face contorts in anger, a hand to her hip. “This is not paradise. Far from it. You try taking care of Jeanie! Do you know Kay and I were her two vigil nurses? We held her close when her mother and aunt died in a car accident Jeanie’s second year in the hospital. Her father’s been out of the picture since she was a child.” She pauses, clearly agitated. “When Jeanie got out of the hospital, she was nineteen. She needed someone familiar with her care, the medication. She got me. And I’ve sacrificed more than she—” Pat clamps her mouth shut over these last words.
He gives her an appraising look, eyebrows raised. What else did she mean to say?
There is only a foot between them, but he steps closer to Nurse O’Dwyer and slips one hand into his pocket to caress the leather sheath that holds a knife he made long ago with a surgeon’s scalpel, the handle wrapped in a compress bandage and wound tight with an old shoelace. He’s kept this blade for one purpose—to sing across the neck of the one he’s been hunting with singular focus. Pat looks too smug, too sure of her place here. “What will happen to you if Jeanie is successful in…what do you call it? Performance?”
Pat stumbles back and he sees he’s scored a hit. “You seem a little too invested in this cold case,” she says. “Who was Marko Kovacs to you?”
Dan remains silent. Pat doesn’t need to know that he’s been obsessed with Marko for many years. He’s tracked his actions in Europe with the Fourteenth Division and with British Intelligence in England. When he finally traced Ivanets to Canada, he was surprised to learn that the man had changed his name to Kovacs, and he’d disappeared without a trace in 1959. Dan doesn’t believe it. He suspects there is something else behind Marko Kovacs’s disappearance. And he’s here to find out just what that is.
Pat is staring at him. “Show up here again and I’ll call the police.”
He turns and walks up the drive, Jeanie’s declaration, “Don’t you think you should have to fight?” ringing in his ears. What a question. He has never heard anyone put his own experience into words quite like this. During the war, he fought with everything in him to survive. Yet, parts of him are dead. His heart or his spirit? He still doesn’t know. Glancing over his shoulder, he can still see her woeful face in the window, like an animal in a cage, watching its only chance for escape leave forever.
It’s clear he’ll get nothing further out of Pat O’Dwyer. The nurse had claimed on the phone that she’d never heard of Marko Kovacs. She can’t be trusted. The police had questioned both nurses, the only ones who worked on the ward at the time Kovacs disappeared. They’d not questioned the patients. Jeanie is the true lead, the only one he’s got. He’ll use her to get to Pat, find out what she’s hiding.
But Jeanie has already been used.
He puts this away from him, surprised to feel a moment of pity, of attachment. Some part of him desperately wants to run back, grab Jeanie and take her away from this place.
Jeanie is the key—she has all the answers in her head. And he must get them out. Surely she will remember hearing something the night Marko Kovacs disappeared. And when she does, she’ll call and tell him why her old nurse lied. Or he’ll return and show Pat just how far he’s willing to go to find Marko Kovacs.
18
SAVKA
Kraków, Polish People’s Republic
january 19, 1947
“is there a parade, Matka?”
“Yes, Paweł.” Savka smiled at the little boy. “A parade just for us.”
Ewa’s son held Savka’s hand with a grip stronger than any three-year-old she’d known. The image of Taras at that age, his own precious hand in hers, invaded Savka’s memory and her heart ached. My son, where are you?
She pushed away the grief and steered Paweł and her own small daughter, Zoya, into the doorway of a cafe just as a Red Army battalion marched through the entrance of St. Florian’s Gate at the center of Kraków, where, since the twelfth century, Polish armies led by kings and princes had passed through in processions of victory to Wawel Castle.
As she watched the Soviet soldiers file into Market Square to the ugly shouts of their captain, Savka’s scarred wound throbbed, a perpetual reminder of the day she lost Taras. She tried to stay calm as she took in the distinctive puce-colored Red Army uniforms and this alarming display of force on the day of country-wide elections. One of the soldiers was tall, gangly, and her heart briefly soared with hope. She’d not stopped frantically looking for her son in the face of every young man on the street, nor had she stopped asking herself questions that hung like vapor in the frigid air:
Has he been tortured? Does he get enough to eat? And in her lightless moments: Is he still alive?
Her son was fine, she convinced herself. Healthy, safe. Taras has his own room in a beautiful dacha—riding horses, and with access to a library filled with books. She took a deep breath, the glacial smell of melting ice from the Vistula River in her nose and an eerie foreboding in the air, as if a ghost cello played in the streets of Kraków on Polish election day.
This morning, Ewa had been eager to arrive early at the polling station to vote. “Stalin is finally permitting the democratic election he promised the Allies at Yalta,” she’d said excitedly, getting ready to leave after breakfast.
“And you trust he will deliver this promise?” Savka had been wiping buckwheat porridge off Zoya’s face. Her own dark experience living in Soviet Ukraine made her skeptical, yet Ewa was optimistic that democracy would rule.
But that had been hours ago, and as Ewa’s absence stretched into late in the afternoon, Savka had come out with the children. Now she could see the polling station in the corner of the square, Polish voters in neat lines, doing their best to ignore Soviet soldiers and their bristling Papasha submachine guns. Savka worried that Ewa had run into trouble.
The Russian soldiers goose-stepped in front of Savka and the children, and past a massive banner of Stalin that fluttered in the chill breeze. She searched the crowd for the old gray hat that Ewa wore all the time, even indoors in winter, blissfully indifferent to its shabby condition. Where was she? Surely her friend had not anticipated so many Soviet soldiers here to intimidate voters.
Little Zoya flinched at a sudden shouted order from the captain of the Soviet battalion, and Savka picked her up, burying her face in her daughter’s dark, curly hair. The miracle of carrying a child to full term had almost made the loss of Taras and Marko bearable.
Almost.
Savka glanced around the square, expecting to see Ewa’s grim and stormy face. Surely her friend had now accepted that this election was a façade. Stalin cared not a whit for decency and democracy. The strong military presence was not here to protect Poles’ right to vote, but to demonstrate that only one person was in charge—an evil warlord who hunched like an ogre in the dark stronghold of the Kremlin.
The clock in the watchtower of St. Mary’s Basilica struck five, and the hejnał hourly trumpet call sounded. Savka listened as the plaintive melody lofted over the Gothic spires that rose into a cloudless sky. It was a haunting Polish anthem that ended abruptly—symbolic of a time when a trumpeter in the thirteenth century had spotted an invading Mongol horde and sounded the alarm, only to be interrupted mid tune when he was shot in the throat by an arrow.
She felt a sudden pain in her own throat and the eerie sense that she was being watched. She spun on her heel to look behind her. Stop it, she told herself. Who could be watching? Lieutenant Belyakov, the brutal NKVD officer who’d shot her? Ever since that day three years ago, she couldn’t stop looking over her shoulder, wondering if he stood right behind her. But it was impossible that he’d been assigned to Kraków alongside an army sent by Stalin to enforce communist rule in his new vassal state. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he loomed closer than ever.
It’s grief that haunts you, not a random Soviet agent.
Savka was lucky. If there was such a thing as luck anymore. Millions of Ukrainians had not survived the war. Families were torn apart. Survivors had limped away and struggled to recover. When the Allies had liberated many Ukrainians from German forced labor camps, they became displaced persons. And what of those who’d been beaten, raped, or murdered by the Russians? Savka brushed away a sudden tear at the thought of Mama and Lilia. She’d written many times to the house in Deremnytsia, but each letter was returned. Submitting a tracing request to the Red Cross had been her only hope. After the war, she had also made inquiries into the fate of Marko’s Fourteenth Division, but her husband was missing in action and presumed dead. It had been impossible to find information on how he’d died.
A biting wind came off the river, and Paweł shivered in his threadbare coat. “I’m cold, Matka.”
She smiled down at him. Paweł and Zoya called her and Ewa Matka. Mother. The children shared a cot on the floor of Ewa’s bedroom, and the two women still slept in the same bed, no longer turning to each other at night. They’d put aside their brief affair and were simply companions now, responsible mothers. There was little time for misguided passion among two best friends trying to keep their children safe.
Savka glanced at her wristwatch. Too close to curfew. She couldn’t endanger the children further, hoping to find Ewa in this crowd. They had to head home. Reluctantly, she led the children through one of the Renaissance arches in Cloth Hall. Shopkeepers piled rationed items like bread and tea in the same stalls where traders had sold exotic spices and silk hundreds of years ago. A hand on her arm set her heart pounding. He’s found me. Bracing herself, and still gripping the children’s hands, she turned, prepared to face Belyakov. Savka gasped with relief when she saw that it was Ewa, her bright blonde waves peeking from beneath the old woolen hat.
“Let’s get out of here,” Ewa said, her face flushed with anger. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“What do you mean?” Savka’s heart was still hammering in her chest.
“I tried to vote, but my name has been struck from the electoral roll. A filthy Russian told me I was an anti-government bandit.” Ewa glared at her. “The propaganda they spew—in my own country!”
Savka grabbed her coat sleeve and pulled her friend close, waiting until Ewa’s breath slowed. Ewa couldn’t lose her temper, not in the presence of the filthy Russians all around them. Criticizing the regime was dangerous. Still, she whispered in solidarity, “Yalta and its empty promises. The West can’t control Stalin. He’s a criminal, a beast.”
“These thugs,” Ewa said, twisting away to look over her shoulder at the Red Army battalion. “Poles have been arrested. At a democratic election.”
Savka composed herself for the children’s sake. “The dark wizard in the Kremlin has added Poland to its slave states, another spoke in the wheel of the USSR,” she said softly. “Poland will be eaten, just as Ukraine was.”
“I will not let it be eaten,” Ewa said, her teeth clenched.
