The Last Secret, page 29
She’d filed the report and learned from a detective that the nurses had noticed a man come in shortly after Marko had left her—most likely a Nazi hunter, who might have chased her husband down the back stairs and into the night. Belyakov was right: there had been a car and accomplice waiting. But not a friendly one. Marko had likely been forced inside, driven somewhere remote and been tortured to give up the list. Refusing, he would have taken a bullet to his head for daring to join the Waffen-SS. The list was lost forever, and Marko’s body buried in a shallow grave.
Savka went through the front door of her building, pausing to listen for the distinctive click of the lock behind her before she checked her mailbox, breath held, still looking for a letter from Taras. Of course there was no letter, and she climbed the stairs to the third floor. Grief for Marko did not lie heavily on her heart, but grief for Taras? It was a never-ending spiral. She was afraid that her husband had been right, their son was dead. Perhaps Belyakov—no longer in need of his bargaining chip—had simply let her son perish in prison.
“A smart woman would rent a smaller apartment, on a lower floor,” she muttered to herself as she gained the first landing, breath now coming in gasps. To keep her loneliness and grief from overpowering her, she often talked to herself. Sometimes Savka wondered why she still held on to an apartment she could ill afford. Perhaps to give Zoya a place to move back into when she left her boyfriend. Savka approved of her daughter’s job—she was an X-ray technician—but not that she lived with a welder in West Vancouver, with no talk of marriage.
After Savka had put away the groceries, she took out the varenyky dough she’d made that morning, and the mixture to fill them—potatoes she’d mashed with cheese and onion. Weariness settled in her bones as she rolled out the dough, and a sharp pain in her heart, remembering Mama making hundreds of varenyky at a time in the old kitchen in Ukraine, and how Taras would wait beside the stove, eager for a first taste. Tears in her eyes, Savka cut circles in the dough with the rim of a glass and folded the stuffing into the dumpling rounds, pinching the edges to seal them. After her nap, she would boil them for her lunch.
Savka had just filled a hot water bottle when there was a knock on the door. She froze at the sink. On her days off, Belyakov sometimes ordered her to follow certain people—targets he called them—on buses around the city, reporting back to him in detail of where they went, what they did. He still considered her an asset and would never give her peace, not until she was dead.
But Belyakov had never turned up at her apartment door. It could be a vagrant, with his hand out—at times, other tenants would unwittingly let one slip in behind them into the lobby. She stood still in the kitchen, waiting for this person to go away, but the knocking had become a delicate, questioning tap.
Could it be Lev Podolyan? No. It had been thirteen years since she refused to answer his calls or gone to the Ukrainian Cultural Centre, and he’d finally given up. She’d imagined his hurt, she imagined it, still.
The knock sounded again, more insistent. Angry and ready to blast whoever had dared disturb her, she stalked to the door, yanking it open.
A man—or what approximated a man—stood in the hallway. He was emaciated, haunted, a walking corpse among the living, and she swayed on her slippered feet, sorry she’d opened the door to this homeless beggar. As he reached out to her, she moved to slam it shut.
Until he said something in Ukrainian.
She hesitated, breathless with fear—had one of Natalka’s compatriots hunted her down? But then the strange man suddenly whispered, “Mama.”
Savka’s heart came to a jolting stop, and she fell to her knees. Mama.
The ghost of her son stepped into the apartment and closed the door behind him. These were his hands, weren’t they, gently hauling her to standing? These were his eyes, glancing at her shoulder. “I am sorry.” His lips moved, that dear mouth she remembered. “Does your wound still hurt?”
“Taras,” she cried, falling into him. He smelled of the hard road that had brought him there—rain and cigarette smoke and sorrow. She held onto him, clutching his wasted body to her—so thin!—and finally held him at arm’s length, hardly able to believe her eyes that Taras stood before her in Vancouver. How she had dreamed of this moment. “I thought you were…dead!” Her voice rose from a whimper to a terrible cry that shook her body in convulsive sobs.
Her son awkwardly wiped away his own tears. “For the first years, in the camps, I thought you had died on that mountain—”
Fearing she might faint, Savka took his arm to steady herself. Still shaking, she drew Taras into the warm kitchen and eased him into a chair at the table. “But how…”
“I learned you were alive in 1950, when your first letter arrived.” Taras looked up at her with wounded eyes. “How happy I was to know you were in Canada, that I had a little sister, and Tato had survived the war. But after 1953, your letters stopped coming. I thought you were all dead. I would not rest until I could prove it for myself.”
She faltered, momentarily speechless. Why, after only a few years of her writing letters to Taras, had Belyakov simply stopped sending them on? How she hated him. If he were here, she would kill him with her bare hands. She shook her head, taking in her son’s lean form and the gut-wrenching scars on his cheeks. What had happened to him? It no longer mattered, for Taras was here, safe. He had not looked away, and she saw there was a kind of desperate madness in his eyes, a disjointed sorrow. The Gulag had stolen his spirit and left him a shell of the son Belyakov and his men had stolen from her.
“Thank God you got my letters,” she cried, raising her eyes to the ceiling. “I prayed and prayed, and here you are. Tarasyku, when were you released?”
“Last year,” he said haltingly.
Her mouth dropped open in disbelief. “Why did you not send word?”
“At first, the Soviets would not issue an exit visa. When they discovered I was writing for the underground newspapers in Kyiv, they let me go, not wishing political prisoners in Soviet Ukraine stirring up sedition. Now I am an exile.”
To hide her tears, Savka put on a pot of water to boil and went to the fridge, taking out the varenyky, lined up in rows on a baking sheet. “You should eat,” she said, intent on putting meat on her son’s bones.
“Where is Tato?” He glanced around the kitchen, as if he expected his father to appear at any moment.
She left the sheet of dumplings on the counter and sat beside him, taking his hand in hers. “He disappeared thirteen years ago.”
Taras stared down at the table, blinking. “Where did he go?” he finally asked, his voice quiet.
“The last time I saw your father, he visited me in hospital, after I had an emergency hysterectomy.”
“Where did they find his body?” he asked, his eyes brimming with bitter tears he would not shed.
“They didn’t. I filed a missing person’s report with the police.”
“Then there is hope,” he said, stubbornly.
“His car was in the parking lot,” she whispered. “He wouldn’t have left it. The police thought a thief might have surprised your father when he came out of the hospital, a fight ensued, and the thief accidentally killed him, disposing of the body.” But that was all she said. Savka would move heaven and earth to prevent her son from learning that his father had surrendered his wife’s and son’s fates to Belyakov in Rimini. She would never tell Taras what Marko had become after the war, nor that she had spied on him for the Soviets. Never that.
The look on her son’s dear face broke her heart. Fingers trembling, he took out a baggie that held tobacco and papers and began to roll cigarettes. She returned to the stove and spooned varenyky into the pot of boiling water. Taras appeared at her side, handing her a cigarette. She placed it between her lips and let him light it, inhaling a long first drag. “Where is the police station,” he asked, “where you filed the missing person’s report?”
Savka coughed, so that she would not burst into tears at the sight of his ruined fingers. The tips had been lost to frostbite, most likely early in his incarceration, for there were still nails on the ends of his stunted fingers. “The case has gone cold.”
“Cold,” Taras said, surprising her with English. “How could this case go cold?”
“Your English is good. You hardly have an accent.” She forced a smile, watching the dumplings float to the top of the boiling water while he explained that he’d learned more English from other political prisoners in the camps, and had taken lessons in Kyiv after being released, working hard to lose his accent.
“Why did you wish to lose your accent?”
He took a deep pull on his cigarette. “I will not be mistaken for a Russian,” he said quietly, exhaling. Savka regarded him with an anxious eye. If Taras knew how close his mother had been to one particular Russian, how he still kept her on a long leash, he might run from her and never return. She must now guard him with her life. If Belyakov caught wind that Black Eagle authorities had released Taras Ivanets without the KGB’s knowledge, he would rage. But incredibly, he could now do nothing. Finally, she thought, I am free of my master. She had her son back, the bargaining chip was no longer in play. Still, she would protect Taras with her life, and somehow prevent Belyakov from learning he was here in Vancouver.
Scooping half a dozen varenyky out of the water, she arranged them on a plate with a little fried onion and set them in front of her son. She watched in disbelief as Taras stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray. It seemed impossible that her child was now a man. Back in Ukraine, she’d often thought of how handsome Taras would look fully grown, and she was right. Despite the horrors of the Gulag and Black Eagle, he looked so much like a younger Marko, her heart throbbed with memory.
As her son ate, the two of them filled in the blanks of their dual history like two people working a puzzle long abandoned, finding pieces that had suddenly appeared before them. While she’d been delirious with fever in Kuzak’s bunker, Belyakov had put a terrified Taras on a train for Moscow, where he spent a month in the massive Lubyanka prison. A shiver went down Savka’s spine when her son said he was charged with counterrevolutionary terrorism and sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labor in Siberia. Despite Belyakov telling her that Taras had been sent to the Black Eagle penal colony, she did not feel any less horror when Taras related that he’d spent years there, somehow holding his own against some of the worst serial murderers in the Soviet Union.
Savka shared how she’d crawled down the mountain, pregnant with Zoya, and been saved by a Ukrainian doctor. Then, her voice wavering, how she’d ended up in Kraków. The knife Ewa had plunged into her back in 1947 was still there, twisting in painful reminder of that betrayal. When Taras lifted the fork to his mouth with the last dumpling, Savka noticed a set of still-red scars visible below the cuff of his jacket. “What’s this?”
“Tattoos I got in Black Eagle. I am…removing them.”
“How?”
“A razor.”
She tapped ash from her cigarette into the tray, imagining, with anguish, her son using a razor to scrape at his own skin. With every tattoo scoured away, she suspected he was also burying his past.
In halting words, Savka related how she’d stayed three years in Poland, when a sudden ache in her old gunshot wound spoke to her: Tell Taras the truth. But she couldn’t reveal the secrets she’d held on to for so long. “Kraków,” she said finally. “That was where I learned your father was in an Italian prisoner of war camp.”
Taras looked up. Was that suspicion in his eyes? “How did you find him?”
“I made inquiries. I contacted your father in Rimini. When the British moved him to England, he sent for us.”
“The NKVD officer,” Taras said, as if sensing a connection. “Comrade Belyakov—he visited my camp once.” Eyes burning with intensity, Taras set down his fork and took a leather sheath from his pocket. In a move he must have perfected over the course of years, he quickly withdrew a crude knife from the sheath and placed it on the table. “When I got out, I meant to kill him with this. But I could not find him.”
Savka stared down at the odd and dangerous-looking weapon—a shiv that Taras had somehow fashioned out of what looked like a surgeon’s scalpel, the handle wrapped in a bandage and tied fast with a weathered shoelace. Her eyes crept again and again to the knife as he told her of overhearing Lieutenant Belyakov demand that Taras receive extra food, which made him a target of the criminal prison population, who couldn’t understand why a lowly Ukrainian political prisoner was kept alive when others perished with the hard work and thin gruel they called rations.
Tears ran down her face. Her sensitive boy had survived twenty-eight years in prison because Belyakov had needed his bargaining chip alive. She said, “You will move into Zoya’s old room.”
“I need to work,” he said.
Savka thought of the work her son had done in the mines and then the camp hospital and felt suddenly ashamed to gripe at having only one day off a week. Already, she worried for Taras. Who would hire a forty-one-year-old man without a work history? “You don’t need a job,” she said. “Rest and sleep.”
“I must buy a car,” he said, clearly agitated.
“There are buses—”
“I need a car. I need to find out who killed Tato.”
She held her breath, regarding him with dismay. “Your father was different after the war—complicated and unpredictable. He received an injury.”
“You were happy together,” he said, a new kind of despair haunting his features. “I remember.”
“Taras, what do you know of marriage?” She cut herself off, but not before seeing his hurt. She’d wounded him, and he had very little reserve left.
“It’s true,” he said, his voice flat and emotionless. “I know nothing.”
Part of him had closed off to her and she regretted her words. “There is still time—you will find a woman.”
Taras glanced sidelong at her. “I have no love in me.”
“I remember the boy who loved his family, his country.”
“He has died.”
Her heart spasmed with grief and she reached her hand across the table, but he would not take it. By the determined look on Taras’s face, she realized he would unravel the mystery of his father’s disappearance if it were the last thing he did.
And that was unimaginable.
Taras had escaped the Soviet system that broke him. He could not enter that world again, for investigating Marko’s disappearance would take him down a dark path. Her son was too vulnerable. He wished to see his father as a hero, and she would preserve that memory at all costs.
39
DANEK
Salt Spring Island
december 10, 1972
On Jeanie’s guest house porch, Dan leans against one of the posts, smoking. He’s taken off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, hearing Kay’s voice from earlier today: I surprised her in the hallway. I asked if she was family, if she was going in. But she ran back down the hall. We didn’t see her after that.
Today, he was so sure a Soviet assassin or Nazi hunter had killed Marko Kovacs, but now he can’t stop thinking of Zoya Kovacs.
He can almost see a young girl—only fourteen at the time—cowering outside her mother’s hospital room, listening as her parents fought viciously. But something isn’t adding up. Why did Zoya run away when Kay asked if she was going in? What was she afraid of? Her own father? Did she wait in the stairwell for him to leave and perhaps then saw him standing in Jeanie’s doorway, and hit him over the head? If so, she could have run off in a state, perhaps when the Russian assassin happened along. He’d obviously finished the job. But how were the nurses involved?
Pat O’Dwyer had stated in the police report that a man came in after Marko Kovacs had been told to leave. And Kay confirmed this same man—with a foreign accent—had chased Kovacs down the back stairs. Had the nurses lied to the police?
Dan lets out a frustrated sigh. He’s desperate for a look at the gun with strange initials engraved on it, but Jeanie refused to drug her old nurse, and Pat was apparently arriving on the first ferry tomorrow morning. Kay had rung Pat and told her of his visit, he’s sure of it. The last time he’d seen O’Dwyer, she’d promised to call the police on him if he returned. If he stays to confront her, will she make good on her threat?
There’s movement in the garden and he tenses, relaxing only when he sees Jeanie crossing the boardwalk, carrying a pile of white towels. He imagines his hands on her warm skin, losing himself in her…Stop, he thinks hopelessly. These are useless fantasies. You are damaged and she is innocent. She can’t be touched by your darkness.
Dan survived those years with a stoic resolve that has never been broken; they broke other things. How strange that only here, in this free land, he feels unhinged, damaged beyond repair. Here he wakes out of nightmares in a cold sweat. His limbs tremble with the anticipation of violence.
Now Jeanie stands on the porch, her eyes gleaming in the moon’s light. He stubs out his cigarette in a metal ashtray on the railing and takes the towels she holds out like an offering. “Guests don’t come often,” she says, “or…let’s face it, ever—so I forgot these.” Dan nods, afraid to say anything, afraid to break this tenuous enchantment that hangs in the air between them. “I did it,” Jeanie suddenly admits. “I put one of my sleeping pills into her water.”
