The Last Secret, page 30
Dan exhales in profound relief. Lantern light flickers through the window behind him, and he can feel Jeanie’s eyes tracking the scars on his forearms. He rolls down his shirtsleeves, too raw to face her questions about the only tattoos that remain inked on the three middle fingers of his right hand—Spasi, Otets, Syna—Save me, father, your son.
Like two burglars, he and Jeanie make their way back along the boardwalk. Soon, they’re standing in the living room, behind the couch where Kay reclines, listening to her snore. Certain that she’s fast asleep, they steal up the stairs.
When they’re in Pat’s room, Dan quickly crosses to the bedside table and switches on the lamp. He searches the drawer but cannot find the gun. He’s on his knees now, pawing through Pat’s things, then he lowers his head, keeping his face immobile to hide his anger. “It’s gone.” He leaps to his feet, looks at Jeanie. “Kay came in here and took the gun.”
Jeanie steps back, shocked. “But why would she need a gun?”
Dan doesn’t answer. He’d rather the gun still be in Pat’s possession instead of Kay’s.
When they’re back outside in the garden, he pauses a moment. He’s too aware of his heartbeat—rogue waves surging on a deceptively calm sea. He and Jeanie stand only a few feet away from each other in a long-shadowed palm grove, spiked fronds rising in the moonlight. The sky is indigo blue, sprayed with stars and a mysterious, white-dusted galaxy that wheels over their heads. He can’t see the expression on Jeanie’s face in the near dark; he can only feel the celestial force of her, pulsating outward like a streaking comet.
“I’ll see you in the morning?” she ventures.
A puff of wind rises from somewhere, and the palm fronds rattle like wind chimes. “I wish to show you something,” he says, and turns on the path. When they climb the stairs to the guest cabin, he opens the door wide. The living space is expansive for a guest suite—a double bed against the far wall, a kitchen table and two chairs. Jeanie pauses in the doorway, the blood draining from her face at the sight of the kerosene lamp on the table.
He leaves her side to turn the flame lower and she finally ventures into the room. Her eyes land on his leather-bound notebook, open to a page filled with cryptic scribbles. Beside his notebook is an old photograph. He hands it to her, watching as she leans closer, one wary eye on the kerosene lamp.
“This was taken in 1938,” he explains, hoping that seeing Marko Kovacs’s face will jog her memory. “A year before Germany and the Soviets invaded Poland.”
A few of the men’s faces are blurred, as if they’ve been surprised by the photographer. She points to the unit commander at the far right, a revolver in a holster at his hip, fair hair cut short beneath a ragged cap, face stern and unmoving. “This is him, isn’t it?” Suddenly, she utters a little cry. “He looks just like you…” Jeanie glances up at him, her eyes filled with sudden tears. “Marko Ivanets—Marko Kovacs. He’s your father.”
He stares back at her, astonished, then relieved. “Taras Ivanets,” he says, holding out his hand formally, as if he’s meeting her for the first time. “I am sorry to lie about who I am, but I had to fool Pat.” He turns away. “I didn’t want you to know my past as a convict. I wished to tell you sooner, but I didn’t know how.”
Jeanie lays a tentative hand on his arm. Through his shirt, he can feel her feverish touch flash through his blood. “A convict?” she repeats.
He glances at her. “I have been twenty-eight years in Siberian prisons.”
“Oh, Dan,” she gasps, her hand still on his arm. “…I mean, Taras! Tell me everything.”
He begins to speak of it in a slow halting whisper, telling her how he was captured in a Ukrainian forest in 1944, after the Soviet Secret Police shot his mother. How the NKVD officer sent him to a prison in Moscow, then a work camp in Siberia. It’s then that he’s hit with a startling realization: Every day in the camps he thought of Lieutenant Belyakov. When Taras was finally set free, he assumed the monster was long gone, but what if he’s wrong? Could the NKVD officer be the assassin who’d found Tato and Mama and Zoya in Vancouver? The Soviet had come to make his old victim give up her own husband. He thought of his pure, kind mother. What did the Russian hold over her? It was obviously Belyakov who had strangled his father—perhaps in Jeanie’s hospital room—then disposed of the body and gone straight back to Moscow, robbing Taras of the chance for revenge.
Jeanie is still studying the photograph with a stricken expression, and he thinks back to nine months ago, when he’d turned up at Mama’s door.
The police thought a thief might have surprised your father coming out of the hospital, a fight ensued, and the thief accidentally killed him, disposing of the body. How effortlessly Mama had tried to dissuade him from investigating his father’s disappearance, when she knew exactly who had killed him. Taras looks at Jeanie, painfully aware of the awkward silence that has descended, as if they’re circling each other, unsure of the next step. He thinks of Kay asleep in the living room of the house. Did Jeanie give her enough to keep her out?
“When your father opened my hospital room door,” she ventures, “I think I was afraid.”
“Why?”
“If he was curious, why didn’t he just ask one of the nurses? Why go into another patient’s room, at night?”
Without a good answer to that question, Taras broods silently. Jeanie’s presence has transformed the room. The lamplight flows over her face, the curve of her neck, and delicate line of her jaw. She’s studying him, too. “You see,” he says, “I cannot hide my scars.” Jeanie’s gaze heats his blood, and he doesn’t trust himself to read her intentions correctly. Or his own. There was one woman, a long time ago in the camps, a nurse, but she’d been killed by one of the thieves. Other than that, he has no experience with females. And certainly not a woman like this.
“You must have thought I was crazy,” she says, shaking her head. “The day we met. It wasn’t what it looked like.”
Taras is silent for a moment. “I have seen it before in prisoners. One can rage against injustice for only so long. When I worked at the infirmary, I saw them come—they cut off their own fingers, smashed themselves with stones, swallowed nails and knives.” He draws a deep breath, thinking this is not the way he hoped their conversation would go. “At first, I believe a man did such things to avoid work crews. But this is rage against the enslavers. Throw yourself on a sword to fight the beast.”
A shadow passes over Jeanie’s face. “The promise of suicide as a means of survival.”
“In camps, the politicals—we whispered to each other. Mass suicide, this is what gives us hope—kill ourselves and we controlled our fate.”
“You weren’t a criminal,” she says, edging closer to him around the table.
“But I became one.”
Jeanie hands him the photograph. “An innocent, trapped with all those depraved souls.”
“I’m sure the gun you found in Pat’s drawer was my father’s,” he says. “Before he changed his last name from Ivanets to Kovacs, Tato carved his initials—M.I.—into the stock of a Luger he had in Ukraine.” He traces his father’s likeness with an index finger and suffers an image of Mama—an image he’s endured so many times over the years—of her lying in the snow after she was shot in Ukraine. Why was I taken by the NKVD, Mama, he’d always wondered, and you were left behind?
Jeanie is staring at his damaged fingertip, tears hovering on her lashes. “Did you get frostbite from working in the cold?”
“Yes,” he says, looking up to meet her measured gaze, feeling at once seen and stripped bare.
“You said you planned to escape,” she breathes.
“One time I tried, a few months after I arrived.”
“You were caught?”
He shakes his head. “You should not want to hear—”
“I do.”
Taras carefully considers his response. “Forty days I spent in solitary. I never tried to escape again.” He makes a bitter sound in his throat. “The guard comes to me, takes off his belt. ‘Hang yourself,’ he says, ‘you are not worthy of this world’—” He stops short, afraid that he’s gone too far.
“I hope you told him to fuck off,” Jeanie says with a tremulous smile.
Taras laughs, a soft chuckle of relief. “I did not.” He looks away, so she can’t see the wound he carries with him. “In the camps,” he says, “you trusted no one.”
“You’re no longer in the camps,” she whispers, taking another step toward him. “And you’re not shattered. I’ve never met a more genuine person in my life.”
Taras is overwhelmed by an urge to take her in his arms, to kiss her, yet he stops himself and glances at the closed door. “You should go. Only a monster survives that place.”
But his words have no effect, for she moves so close he can smell her freshly washed hair. It feels like a waft of loveliness, a gift. “Only a hero could live,” she says.
He opens his mouth to protest but is mesmerized when she lifts her hand, like the supplicating statue of a goddess he once saw in a Kyiv museum. Taking it, he carefully places her palm against the scars on his cheek, where it cools his burning skin. “Frostbite,” he says finally, his hand on top of hers. Her touch is so light, so exhilarating, he reaches out, his arm encircling her waist and draws her toward him.
“Before you arrived,” Jeanie says softly, her voice muffled by his shirt, “I thought Gladsheim was no longer my home.”
“Do you still think this?” he says, breathing in her intoxicating smell.
“You changed everything.”
They sway like two trees that have grown together in the same forest, separate but now extending their branches. The top of her head fits neatly under his chin, and she must feel his heart beating wildly in his chest. His hand moves to her hair as she looks up at him.
He brushes her lips with his own. And instead of pushing him away, she stands on tiptoes, her arms around his neck. His hands entwine in her long, silky hair. Taras loses all sense of time as his mouth moves across her jaw, breathing softly into her ear. When she pulls away to take his hand, her eyes dazzling with invitation, he sweeps her up and carries her to the bed, lays her down gently.
She sits up, pulling him down to her. “The lamp,” she whispers.
“I want to see you.”
She shakes her head. Is she afraid he’ll be repulsed by her scars when he has so many of his own? But he obliges her, turning the flame lower still. He draws his shirt over his head and removes his pants and socks, standing naked in the center of the room, daring her to witness his own injuries and his past, to know him completely. In the flickering light he lets her see him, the man he might have been and perhaps would be again. Her eyes travel over the unmistakable white of scars across his flanks, the tips of his toes that he lost to frostbite the first winter of his incarceration. The light in her eyes brings him to the verge of tears. Can a plant that has suffered without water and sun for too long ever come back to life?
The bed creaks under his weight and then he’s in her arms in the near darkness. Long kisses and weightless hesitation. Her sweater comes off with some difficulty and a curse, both of them laughing, and then her slacks and undergarments, their held breaths. She pushes her hips up to him, and he hesitates. “Is it…all right?”
“Hell, yes,” she whispers with a soft intake of breath as his hand moves slowly, questioningly, across her breasts and downward, until she quivers as a tuning fork might, struck against his palm, each cell shimmering to the key of C.
When he enters her, a sob escapes her lips, relief, or the body remembering this delicious falling, the buzz of thousands of bees in his ears and Jeanie a flower, so fragile he fears he might crush her beneath him. But her eyes shine upward in the shadowed dark, her body taut and hands fluttering across his skin, over his arms and back, the sacred ascending between them. Her rapturous incantations shake him to the core, they bring him to the edge of the waterfall and over it, cascading down into anguished release.
The lamp sends flickering shadows as he folds his knees into the back of hers, kissing the tip of her winged shoulder blade in this small bed they lie upon together, a boat on a calm sea. His hand travels over the scars on her back and he whispers, “How many operations for this?”
“I’ve lost count,” she says. “Hundreds.”
Taras turns her gently and traces the raised whorled scars over her breasts. “This is art,” he says as tears roll down her cheeks and onto the pillow beneath her head.
40
SAVKA
Vancouver
december 11, 1972
Zoya threw her sheepskin coat across a chair. “What’s wrong?” she asked her mother in Polish.
Sometimes on Savka’s day off, she met her daughter and son for breakfast at a diner in Richmond. These get-togethers often ended in an argument—always started by Zoya—before they even managed to order their food, so Savka forced a smile. “Nothing,” she insisted.
“I know you, Mama—you’re upset.” Her daughter spread her arms and did a half turn before sitting down. “Is it what I’m wearing?” she said, setting her elbows on the table.
A distinct smell of skunk wafted from her daughters’ clothes. Marijuana, Savka thought, wrinkling her nose. She did not approve of Zoya’s casual and provocative state of dress—this morning it was a form-fitting white turtleneck, a pair of suede knee-high boots, and a miniskirt—nor did she approve of her long, dark hair: straightened with an iron and parted severely in the middle. But she always listened politely when her daughter ranted about feminism. Zoya followed Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem, speaking of things like the women’s movement and their right to reproductive freedoms.
Zoya looked at her watch. “Where’s Taras?”
“Your brother won’t be here this morning.”
“He’s busy?” A flippant smile. “Doing what?”
Savka refused to tell Zoya that Taras had not come home last night. He was a grown man, God knew, but she still felt protective of him. He’d taken a job washing cars and had finally earned enough to buy himself a used vehicle, which was a blessing and a curse. Taras had launched his own investigation based on Marko’s missing person’s report, which had led him to Salt Spring Island, where nurse O’Dwyer had ended up as a caregiver to the Fire Bride, who’d also been on Savka’s ward.
“Pat threatened me,” Taras had said when he returned from the island last week and thrown his car keys on the table, his face like thunder.
Savka was not surprised, remembering the sour look on the nurse’s face as she told Marko to leave the hospital ward, and she couldn’t help feeling dismayed at how good a detective her son had become. “How did you discover where they lived?” She’d listened with a fixed, uneasy smile as Taras recounted how he’d driven onto the ferry without knowing how he might find Pat O’Dwyer’s address, when a man joined him at the railing. Taras said he was looking for an artist who had painted a picture for him years ago. The man had smiled—The Fire Bride? Everyone knows where she lives—and proceeded to tell him exactly how to get to Southey Point, which, ironically, was on the northern tip of the island.
Savka recalled what she’d read of Jeanie, whose tragic history was similar to her son’s—two wounded soldiers who’d been alone far too long. Normally, Savka would have encouraged such an interest, but not with this woman, not with the Fire Bride. And Taras had been interested. Too much so, relating how he’d found Jeanie in a power struggle with Pat O’Dwyer.
Savka looked up at her daughter and smiled. “Your brother has been investigating your father’s death.”
“Why?” Zoya said, pretending to read the menu. As expected, the mention of Marko had set her teeth on edge.
“The thought of his father kept him alive in the camps. He wants to know what happened.” Savka thought with discomfort of the phone conversation with Belyakov only a month ago.
“Why did your son go to the police?” he’d asked the second she’d answered the call. She had blanched, worrying—Belyakov knows of Taras’s return—but Ilyin must have still watched the apartment periodically, hoping Marko might show up. He’d seen her son coming and going. “Taras wanted to see the missing person’s report,” she’d told him. “Wouldn’t you be suspicious if you learned your father had disappeared from a hospital ward and was never seen again?”
“Tell him to stop,” Belyakov had shouted, making her jump.
“I have,” Savka said, heart thumping rebelliously. “He won’t.”
“He is asking too many questions.”
“What my son does is no business of yours.” She’d gloated at the new power she held over her Russian handler. “You no longer own him. Moscow let him out. They issued an exit visa—”
“This fucking country,” he sputtered. “Letting in too many Ukrainians!”
“They let you in, didn’t they?” she’d cried, slamming down the phone.
The diner waitress arrived with coffee and her notepad. After they’d ordered, Zoya smiled as she poured sugar into her cup. Savka’s hope soared. Perhaps her daughter would act respectfully for once. Outside, a determined sun broke through the clouds and washed the diner and its occupants with golden light. Savka had been happily stirring cream into her coffee when she looked up. Her spoon stilled when she realized that Taras had entered the diner without her noticing and stood near the door, a lit cigarette between his fingers.
“Taras,” she cried, still unable to get over that he was in Vancouver now, safe. He walked slowly toward them, wearing the western clothing he’d cobbled together from thrift stores, the style set firmly in the sixties, and more suited to an ageing professor than a man with the rest of his life ahead of him.
