The Last Secret, page 38
“There’s a woman swimming out in the waters of Houston Passage—” Jeanie’s interrupted when two of Rumboli’s officers pass them, dragging a reluctant Pat. “Kay strangled Marko Kovacs,” she continues. “And both nurses…violated his body.” The sergeant frowns and uses his walkie-talkie, directing someone to call the coast guard.
“Lies,” Pat shouts. “Jeanie murdered Marko Kovacs.” She rears away as an officer claps a pair of handcuffs around her wrists. “You’re making a mistake!” When the officer begins reading her her rights, Pat glances back at Gladsheim, the house she’d already considered her own. “You’re arresting the wrong person,” she insists. “Jeanie’s insane.”
Jeanie reaches for Taras’s hand, but the officer has already wrestled Pat into the backseat of another police car. When two of the cruisers pull out and disappear in the trees, Jeanie takes a deep breath and turns to Sergeant Rumboli.
“The body in the water,” she tells him. “Kay shot him before she dove into the sea.”
Rumboli’s eyes rest on Savka, who seems to hesitate.
“That’s right,” Taras adds. “I saw her do it.” Kay admitted murdering his father, and men in Africa, what does it matter if another body, a Russian monster, is added to her list of crimes?
Rumboli nods and seems more concerned that the three of them will be inconvenienced by the presence of two officers on the beach, who, he tells them, will remain until the coroner collects Ilyin’s body. He scratches something in his notebook, then flips to a fresh page. “Now which one of you wants to make a statement first?”
Mama leads him into the house, sending a small, brave smile at them over her shoulder, passing Tuna, who has ambled down the hallway to investigate.
“There’s a body on my beach,” Jeanie says, running a grateful hand over Tuna’s dark coat. “Yet he’s still smiling.”
Taras laughs and scratches behind the dog’s ears. “Tuna knows this was our last fight.”
Jeanie turns her face to the sky, where a patch of pure blue opens like a window into another world. The rain has stopped as quickly as it began, the clouds scudding off to the west.
“We might fight over who gets the Sunday comics first,” she says, leaning her head on his shoulder, “or if we should finally retire Aunt Suze’s old rowboat.”
“Aunt Suze’s boat definitely must go,” he insists with a grin, feeling as if he’s come to the end of a long road on which he’s been walking his entire existence, a road that led him to Salt Spring Island and the woman who lived in a bright and radiant house by the sea.
55
JEANIE
Salt Spring Island
may 1973
“how divine,” Octavius Karbuz breathes over my finished French landscape. He turns to regard me like a father would a daughter—with pride and gratification. “It’s an honor to finally meet you, my dear. I was stunned that you answered my call.”
My art dealer wears a smart herringbone suit and square-shaped tinted glasses. His salt-and-pepper beard contrasts with an almost bald head that catches a ray of spring light blazing down through the skylight high above us. I took a long break after the events before Christmas, but finally returned to my studio to paint more abstracts and to face the French landscape. Better late than never. When Octavius hadn’t heard from Pat about the commission, he called last week from the gallery in Brussels. He was so thrilled to finally speak to me in person that he’d gotten on a plane and arrived two days later.
“Pat told me you wouldn’t let me come here.” He adjusts his glasses, that keep sliding down the bridge of his nose. “She swore you were a recluse.”
I steam a little, not surprised at Pat’s lie. She not only kept thrill seekers at bay, but also the rest of the world—for her own benefit—and made me feel like I was a recluse by choice. It was Pat who ate away at my self-esteem, reducing me to a drugged puppet she could control, churning out art for her to sell and profit from. Pat who locked me in my own room at night and accused me of insanity.
Pat, who’s now wearing prison overalls, denied bail and awaiting trial.
Octavius has wandered over to the stacks and is flipping through the abstracts I’ve painted for fun in the past five months. He makes a high-pitched noise of excitement. “Darling, why have you been hiding these?”
“Hiding what?”
“The most remarkable abstracts!”
I look at him in amazement. “Pat said you hated them.”
He gazes at me, puzzled. “When Pat sent me one, years ago, I begged her—when is Jeanie going to do more? She said it was a one-off piece.”
“Pat always told me I was an unremarkable artist who painted unremarkable landscapes,” I say, surprised. “She said you refused to sell it—that you’d thrown it in the garbage.”
“Well, I did sell it—for an unprecedented amount.”
I’m stunned. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Would I lie to you? Jeanie Esterhazy is one of my top earners.”
This explains the substantial amount found in Pat’s bank account. Apparently, she’d been skimming from the very beginning of the career I didn’t know I had. Pat had been amassing a tidy little nest egg. With me out of the way in a sanatorium, she and Kay planned to live off the proceeds of the sale of Gladsheim.
But Pat isn’t the worst culprit in my story. It was Kay who murdered Marko Kovacs, then escaped to Africa in the guise of nurse, angel, and savior. The coast guard found her—hypothermic and exhausted—on North Secretary Island, where she’d swam ashore. Canadian authorities reported Kay’s admission of misdeeds in her clinic to the World Health Organization and the Congolese government, but the crimes she committed there could not be pursued because of her two convictions in Canada—strangling Marko Kovacs and shooting a Soviet spy.
I tune back in to what Octavius is saying. “Your landscapes fetch a decent price—better than decent—but you could have made more money with your abstracts. I never understood why Pat insisted you only paint landscapes and seascapes.”
The answer hits me like a hammer. “Because it made me miserable. She didn’t want me to be happy.”
After Octavius leaves—wrapping up and taking the French landscape and every abstract except the one I’d done of Taras—I crank up some blues and start on a new work I’ve been planning, slashing away memories of the many years I painted ocean and mountain scenes, so that Pat could keep me in servitude. Late afternoon sun is filtering through the skylight when I suddenly realize that I’ve never started a single abstract with the fear I’ll get it wrong.
There’s a knock at the door and a voice, “I saw Octavius leave. Are you ready for lunch?”
“I’m always ready for lunch.” I turn to find my husband standing in the door to my studio. “You don’t have to knock, you know.”
Taras grins. “I didn’t wish to bother you.”
I pat my growing belly. “I think you’ve already done that, Taras Ivanets.”
He comes into the room bearing a sandwich and a cup of tea. After drawing me in for a kiss, he hands over the plate and peers at the new canvas. “Beautiful.” As Taras studies my new work, realization, and then tears come to his eyes. “You have captured her.”
“I’ve been sketching her for days.”
He crosses to the window. “She’s been out there since first light, come and look.”
I follow him, munching on my sandwich, and we gaze down, the three of us, at Savka on her knees in the old vegetable bed near the house. After she weeded it out, a local gardening center trucked in soil and she planted every seed under the sun, getting her hands into verdant earth again.
Taras smiles. “She’s in heaven.”
“We’ll have a harvest for the first time since Aunt Suze built this place.”
Taras steps closer and slips his arms around me from behind. “In more ways than one.”
I’m five months pregnant, due in September. A harvest baby. Taras has not left my side since the nurses and Belyakov were arrested. I think of how much my life has changed. No more deadlines, no more dodgy medication combinations, and Pat and Kay telling me what to do so they could live off the proceeds of my slavery. Less than a year ago, I was drugged with antipsychotics, and desperate enough to mount suicidal gestures. I once felt trapped here, unloved and unwelcome in my own house, sure that I owned it only in deed alone. Now it’s mine for the first time. My “burn family” have left Gladsheim for good.
The day Taras came into my life I stood here in front of a dreaded blank canvas, feeling trapped, isolated, and sure that I was nothing to no one.
Now I’m a wife, about to become a mother, and I’ve inherited a mother-in-law and a sister-in-law. A true family. Gladsheim was once my prison, but now it’s my refuge, where Taras, Savka, and I live in peace and safety, a place to grow. And a place for my husband to write anti-Soviet missives in Pat’s old room, which we’ve converted to his office.
I put down my brushes for the day, and Taras and I leave the studio. We convinced Savka that she must move into the guest cabin, and that at age fifty-nine she never had to work again. She’s in the process of clearing out her apartment in Vancouver and Taras and I are urging her on, but she’s still traveling back and forth, complaining that it’s a massive task to sort through a lifetime of junk—Marko’s and hers—and it will take time.
Taras and I are heading toward the house, Tuna ambling along behind us, when a car comes down the driveway. Savka straightens in the garden, waving. Zoya parks and leaps out, laughing and running her hands over my belly. “The baby has grown, matką być.”
I laugh with her. “This baby will speak many languages.”
Savka joins us, brushing dirt off her hands. She puts her arm around me when Zoya turns, speaking to Taras in either Polish or Ukrainian.
“English please,” he says, smiling at me. He’s doing a lot more of this in the past five months. I lost count after the first few grins—when he said we would no longer have to fight anyone for our right to survive, when I told him I was pregnant, and again when we were married in a simple ceremony on the headland, under the Garry oak tree where we’d first met. With a nod to Aunt Suze, I wore her white Japanese kimono and a beautiful, beaded necklace that Savka had brought all the way from Ukraine.
I’ve learned a few words of Ukrainian from Taras and Savka. Dorohotsinnyy, for one—precious—a word they use when referring to my pregnant belly. I watch them laugh together. My baby is someone to these beautiful people. I am someone. Although I lost many things to fire, although I lived so long a victim, although Taras and Savka and Zoya were born half a world away, into war and abuse and famine, I’ve found my love, I’ve found my family.
56
SAVKA
Vancouver
MAY 1973
savka knelt on the shag carpet in her Vancouver apartment, thumbing through family photographs. She was here to clean up and go through the last boxes that had been in the downstairs storage locker for decades. It was impossible to resist turning the album pages—the few old snapshots she’d had of Zoya as a child, and more recently, of Taras and Jeanie’s wedding and their honeymoon in Italy.
She gazed around the rooms where she’d lived with Marko when they’d first come to Canada in 1949, where Zoya had grown up, the home where Taras had recovered from twenty-eight years in Siberia. The old furniture was gone—donated to Goodwill or taken to the dump. Nails protruded from the walls, the cheap framed pictures gone, too, leaving ghost-like squares from where she’d hung them long ago. Savka hadn’t been happy here, so why was it difficult to finally say goodbye? Jeanie and Taras had made the guest cabin her own and Savka loved being on Salt Spring Island, spending every waking moment in the garden, her first one since the house in Deremnytsia.
Her life in Ukraine was a distant memory and so vastly different from the life she’d made here. Each beet and cabbage seed she’d planted in her new garden was in homage to her family—Mama and Lilia, her father, and Andriy, lost to the war and Belyakov’s violence.
There was movement at the door and Savka flinched. It had been five months since the police had taken Belyakov away. Detective Jaeger had told her he’d been extradited to Russia and they’d lost track of his fate in a complicated tangle of Soviet red tape. Over the years, Belyakov had appeared so many times when she thought she’d escaped him. Was it possible that he was finally gone from her life?
“Your storage locker is now empty!”
Savka carefully placed the photo album into a box marked “Salt Spring Island” and smiled up at Lev Podolyan’s shining face. “What are those?” she asked, glancing at the boxes he held in his arms.
“They were buried in the back of the locker. Looks like they haven’t seen the light of day in years.” He set them down in front of her. Lev pulled the yellowed tape sealing a box labeled “Tax Records” and began flipping through its contents. “Why did Marko keep every one of your tax returns?”
“Oh?” she said, lifting her head. “How many are there?”
“Some go back to the Middle Ages,” he laughed, emptying the box of files onto the carpet. “They should all go in the garbage.”
She sighed at the sight of folders labeled by year. Marko had done their taxes before he disappeared, and she’d only had her own to bother with since then. “We should go through them; some might be important.”
Lev raised an eyebrow. “Tax records from the fifties?”
He got on his knees, his leg companionably against hers. She felt herself color like a schoolgirl. In the months after the events on the beach, she found herself struggling with her decision to shoot Ilyin. If anything, the man had haunted her dreams with that last look he’d given her, daring to smile. A few weeks ago, she’d finally screwed up the courage to call Lev, fearing he’d moved on with another woman in the fourteen years they’d been apart, but he’d come over immediately after hanging up the phone. They’d been circling each other—brushing hands and sharing looks of secret yearning—but had yet to take it further.
“Are you ready?” Lev grinned as he surveyed the mess of files and old receipts on the carpet. They dove in and soon had a mountain of papers destined for the basement garbage bin. Lev ran a hand through his now silver hair. “Will our children care to keep anything when we are gone? That is what I want to know.”
He went downstairs to pull his car up to the front of the building, and Savka stood, surveying the remains of her old life. Her eyes lighted on the pile of papers and brightly colored tax files. A document had slid loose from one of the folders, and it now lay face up on the rug, yellowed with age and decidedly out of place. She stooped to slip it back into the file, and suddenly she was back in 1947. Savka’s hand reached for the nearest wall before her legs gave way beneath her. Fingers shaking, she brought the document closer, shocked tears blurring her vision.
It didn’t seem like anything much, this ten-page typewritten military document of names in alphabetical order, validating birthdates of each soldier in the Fourteenth Waffen-SS Division, and the villages in Ukraine where they’d been born. The list felt like fragile parchment in Savka’s hand, the names of men the KGB still wanted dead for taking up arms against the Soviet Union. She held it against her pounding heart, the list she’d spent half a lifetime looking for, this testament to the fight against oppression and tyranny that still raged on the far side of the world. The document was watermarked and worn by twenty-seven years of devotion, and it bore signs of the long journey it had taken—stolen from a British commander’s desk in the Rimini prisoner of war camp, and stashed, most likely in the lining of her husband’s coat, sailing on the troop ship through the Mediterranean and across the English Channel, then brought to Canada, hidden by Marko in places that had eluded her and three KGB operatives tasked to find it by Stalin himself over continents and decades, only to land here, in an old tax folder.
The Rimini list.
Marko had hidden it so well it had taken a move for her to find it.
Heart in her mouth, she went into the kitchen, to the old stove where she’d cooked thousands of meals for Marko and Zoya. Where she had stood for so many years of her life, tired and aching, grieving for things known and unknown.
Turning the large front element on high, she waited while it heated up, finally glowing red as a poker. Touching the edge of the Rimini list to the burner, she watched it smoke, then catch fire before she tossed it into the sink, where it blackened, the names obliterated as it burned to cinders.
She heard the door open again and Lev’s voice from the hall. “Where are you?” He popped his head into the kitchen. “What’s burning?”
Savka turned and smiled. “I’ll tell you later,” she said, and picked up the remaining box that constituted the best memories of her life.
Lev threw the files into a large green garbage bag and opened the door. He wedged the bag against his hip, lifting a hand to smooth her hair. “When you wouldn’t take my calls, I thought I’d done something wrong.”
“Far from it.” She gazed up at him, her eyes brimming with tears. “Come out to the island,” she said. “I’ll show you my garden.”
Lev touched her arm, bending to kiss her, and she felt her heart race with possibilities. He drew away after a delicious moment and smiled. “I’ve never seen you so…”
“Happy?” Savka laughed, a little breathless at the sweet burn of his lips on hers, and at the sight of his face, wavering in reflection, as though he looked down at her in the underworld and all she must do was finally emerge from the shadows of the dead, breaking the surface with a stunned cry for all that she had missed.
