The Last Secret, page 6
“I’ll be seeing Dr. Reisman,” Pat says turning back to the sink, “when I’m in Vancouver next week.”
Right, I’d forgotten she was seeing my old doctor, now in private practice as a general practitioner. I’ll be left alone, which has its pros and cons. I can roam freely with no one to lock me in at night, yet Pat’s absence will simply make me think of Kay, whom I miss more than life itself.
I wouldn’t have met these two nurses if Gynecology hadn’t been the only ward where a private, sterile room could be outfitted with my massive Stryker frame. When I was discharged from the hospital, I’d been a nineteen-year-old girl all alone in the world, heir to my Aunt Suze’s beautiful house on Salt Spring and a generous monthly disability cheque. I needed live-in care. But Kay, my favorite nurse, joined the World Health Organization, so it was Pat who jumped at the chance to be my caregiver. I would never have chosen Pat as a friend, much less a roommate, but I had no choice. We’ve struggled to make things work, and after thirteen years, the massive differences in our personalities are reduced to small battles we fight daily. Who better to understand your fateful past than the person who nursed you through it? Even if that person liked to remind you of her sacrifice every goddamn day.
Kay and I have stayed in touch over the years she’s been nursing in the Congo. In her last letter, she said she was returning to Canada for a break, so I wrote back and urged her to come to Salt Spring and take on my care. It’s a big ask, I know that, but I trust Kay. We forged a bond that went beyond friendship. She gets me, and I need a loving presence in my life. Bad. But months have passed with no reply from my beloved nurse.
“I set up a new canvas,” Pat announces, drying her hands on a tea towel.
“Thanks,” I say, sure she’ll miss the sarcasm. “I’ll get to it in January.”
“You have to finish it by Christmas.”
I drop my spoon. “Christmas? I’m taking December off.” I need to read and be left alone, to feel so quiet and inward it might almost seem like I’ve ceased to exist. But I feel panicked that Pat dares threaten this dream of mine.
“You have to keep painting.” Pat slams the offending pot into the other sink.
“Why?” I’m trying to keep my voice measured even though I feel like screaming.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky with this next one.” Pat grabs the broom and begins her daily attack on the blue-glazed Mexican tile floor.
I’m tired of painting canvases that so often don’t sell. Yet what can I do but doggedly paint as if my life depends on it? Because it does. We only get so much per month from disability cheques and Aunt Suze’s estate, and as Pat’s employer, I’m responsible to supplement that somehow. But I don’t care. “I refuse to paint out of guilt and vague, misplaced hope that this next one might sell,” I say stubbornly.
Pat turns to face me. “Do you think you’re some famous artist? You’re mid-level,” she says, her eyes narrow, “your work derivative of other painters who’ve gone on to the highest pinnacles of success. You’ll try again, and you’ll like it. We’re in the poorhouse as it is.”
A surge of desperation lights my rage and I push away from the table, almost upsetting my chair, and make a dramatic exit, Pat’s threat echoing after me.
7
SAVKA
Deremnytsia, Reichskommissariat Ukraine
february 25, 1944
dark was falling when Savka followed her mother into the house. She froze in the doorway. An SS officer was seated at the table, face obscured by the bill of his service cap and the lengthening shadows in the room. Her son Taras stood at his side, in the act of drawing the officer’s gun out of its leather holster.
Savka braced herself, waiting for the man to tell her that Marko Ivanets had been killed in battle. Thankfully, Lilia had stayed to gossip around the fire in the village square. Savka didn’t think she could bear her sister’s gloating presence in the face of such news.
The officer struck a match and lighted a candle on the table. He stood, lifting his head. “Have I changed that much, Savka?”
With a startled cry, she flew across the room, burying her face in her husband’s broad chest. His wool greatcoat scratched at her cheek, and he smelled of woodsmoke and sweat. “Let me look.” She moved her hands along his arms and shoulders, feeling for wounds. Was he really here after a year of war, without a scratch on him? She laughed with relief, brushing away tears. “Tell me that gun is not loaded,” she said with a glance at Taras, who trembled with excitement to have the sinister-looking pistol in his hands.
“The safety is on,” Marko replied with a smile. “And I removed the magazine.”
“Tato’s been wounded,” their son said, his hair burnished bright from last year’s sun, and ears still too big for his head.
Savka tilted her husband’s chin to examine an angry red gash on his cheek. “It’s infected.” She reached for the hook where she usually hung her kit, then remembered that Natalka had just stolen it for the bunker.
Marko’s fingers closed around her wrist. “It’s nothing,” he said with a grin.
Taras could not take his eyes off his father. “Was it a Soviet knife, Tato?”
Marko nodded. “On a reconnaissance mission in Ternopil.”
“You’re on leave?” Savka asked. Although she was elated to see him—Marko, alive!—she was furious that he’d endangered them all by coming to the house. She forced a smile and reached to take off his cap. A wink of candlelight shone on the SS death’s-head insignia, and she dropped the cap as if it had burned her.
Marko laughed and stooped to pick it up. “My battalion is camped in the forest.” His sandy hair was cropped short in the manner the German officers wore it—shaved close above his ears and the shorn top standing straight up, like a cockscomb.
“Did anyone see you?” Mama asked nervously. She had quickly shut the door behind them.
He snorted. “Of course not.”
Savka kicked off her sodden boots and unwrapped the shawl from around her ears. “You took a great risk coming here,” she said, trying to keep her voice neutral.
Her husband’s face darkened and there was a quiver of something in his eyes that made her look away. “What are you afraid of?” he asked. “Five hundred soldiers of the Reich are camped in the forest.”
“Which the Red Army will soon take back.” Savka didn’t want to argue, not when they hadn’t seen each other in so long, but he had no idea what the last year had been like in the village, starving and forced to be polite to Nazi tank officers.
“Tato?”
Marko turned to answer an earnest question from Taras, and Savka studied her husband as if it were the first time. He’d shaved off the moustache and beard he’d grown while in the underground, and his bare upper lip looked somehow cruel and unfamiliar to her. He’d surely killed Soviet partisans—she could smell it on him, like rotting fruit—to avoid being killed himself. Could she get used to this new version of Marko?
As if reading her thoughts, he looked at her. “You have become distrustful.”
She opened her mouth and closed it again. There was good reason for distrust. Savka perched on one of the long wooden benches lining the room and peeled off her thawing flannel leggings, glancing at Marko shyly as he spoke to their son.
Wind gusted against the house, and she could feel a draft at her back, storming cracks in the old wooden walls, despite their best efforts to pack them tight with clay and horse manure. She undid her braid and finger-combed her hair, then wrung river water and mud from the flannel strips into a pail near the door, telling herself to enjoy this moment—her family together again, if only for a moment. Crossing herself, she murmured a prayer of thanks to the St. Nicholas and Mariia, Mother of God icons that hung on the far wall directly opposite a wood stove covered in tiles that had been hand painted by her grandfather. “We suspect our neighbor is an informer,” she said, feeling her heart jump. “She might tell an NKVD unit she’s seen SS officer Marko Ivanets visit his wife and family.”
Marko smiled. “NKVD are miles away yet.” Turning to empty the contents of his rucksack on the table, he glanced back at her, unable to hide a lopsided smile. “I’ve brought you something.” Forcing a smile of her own, Savka padded to the table in damp stocking feet, and stood on tiptoe to peer over his shoulder, her mouth watering at the sight of two loaves of gray bread, a can of leberwurst, a bag of sugar, and other impossible riches.
Savka’s mother regarded a twist of butter with a gleam in her eyes. She snatched up a tin. “Milk! Where did you get it?”
“SS rations.”
Hearing the commotion, Sofiy, Lilia’s six-year-old daughter, opened the door of the back room, dazed at the sight of her uncle in an SS uniform.
Mama threw more wood into the stove and set to frying some back fat Gerhard had left from his own SS rations—back fat that Lilia had been saving for his return. After Savka’s and Lilia’s husbands had joined Nazi divisions, and their houses had been designated for the use of Fifth SS Panzer Division officers, the women had moved in with Mama to avoid being forced to live along with their children in a barn. Due to her age and infirmity, Mama was allowed to remain in her own little house. When Gerhard was here, he took the back room, which had once belonged to their grandparents. The rest of the family slept on the wooden benches lining the walls, Mama’s bed closest to the stove.
Marko had taken off his greatcoat, and Savka noticed two braids on the shoulder boards of his tunic, and a different rank insignia—four diamond pips instead of two on his left collar. “You’ve been promoted?”
“I’m the only Waffen-Sturmbannführer among the Ukrainian officers.” Marko glanced at her and she felt herself blush like a young girl. She’d forgotten the seductive pull of those clear blue eyes. “We’re our own army,” he declared, “avenging those we lost.”
Revenge for the great Ukrainian famine, Savka thought.
She looked away, abandoned to her dark and bottomless memories, but Taras still clutched his father’s gun with a look of fascination. “Is it a Luger, Tato?” He’d been only a babe in 1932, when Stalin began to starve Ukraine. A savage smell still filled her nose, the stench of bodies rotting in the fields, in the street. Would her heart always ache for her younger sister, Halina, and her grandparents, who’d starved and died in their beds? By the end of 1933, millions of Ukrainians had perished—murdered by the Russians. In retaliation, Marko had followed Stepan Bandera, leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, and he had risen through their ranks.
“Yes, it’s a Luger,” Marko said, as Taras ran his finger over two letters etched into the wooden stock. “It came with another SS officer’s initials, so I carved my own over his.”
“Put it down, Tarasyku,” Savka said, chilled that Marko was carrying the gun of a German who’d been killed in action. She was reaching for it when the front door flew open. Lilia, smelling like woodsmoke from the village drum fire, stood motionless for a moment, obviously confused to see Marko, but her expression soon morphed into one of defiance. “You’re here while Gerhard fights Soviets on the front lines?”
Marko lighted a cigarette. “Who’s Gerhard?”
Savka shared a glance with her sister, the two of them in silent agreement to hide Lilia’s forbidden romance from Marko. Lilia strode forward to drop a kiss on her brother-in-law’s cheek, wisely deciding to ignore his question and put aside her anger. She beckoned to Sofiy, who ran to her mother’s side and hid her face in the folds of her skirt.
Taras had unbuckled the dagger hanging from a short chain on his father’s ammunition belt, and Marko drew out the evil weapon.
“You see that?” The wooden hilt was emblazoned with the Nazi eagle.
She smiled, watching her husband and son—with the same golden hair and blue eyes—leaning over the candle flame to examine the knife hilt. Taras had one hand on Marko’s arm, his face lit up to be with his Tato again. The memory of Bohdan’s festering wound, Natalka’s insolence, and Savka’s fear over losing Taras retreated to the back of her mind. The smell of frying back fat filled the air, and for a moment, it was as if the war did not exist.
Taras read the etching on the blade. “Meine Ehre heisst Treue. My honor is loyalty.” He was good with languages, speaking Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish fluently.
Marko cut his eyes at Taras. “Where are you learning German?”
Savka said, “We were forced to billet an officer.” She threw another glance at Lilia. “He’s teaching Taras German and English,” she added, anxious to head off any more questions about Gerhard.
Marko accepted this with a shrug and grinned, the red gash on his cheek somehow making him even more handsome. “That blade is issued only to SS officers,” he said to Taras.
Mama arranged the fried back fat, along with a slice of the bread Marko had brought, on a plate, then handed it to him. Lilia had taken off her wet wool stockings and was hanging them on a hook to dry. When she turned back to the table, she noticed what was on Marko’s plate. “We were saving that for Gerhard,” she blurted, and Savka felt her throat constrict with worry.
Her husband ground out his cigarette in a dish on the table and took up a fork, sending Lilia a dark look. “Gerhard is the mysterious German you are billeting, who dares teach my son his terrible language and provides you back fat?” He speared a piece of bacon. Lilia kept her eyes down and crossed to the stove. She snatched up an old dish towel next to a ceramic bowl they used to wash up.
“Gerhard’s a tank commander, Tato.” Their son beamed. “He let me climb into his Tiger One and take the battle con.”
Marko looked at him sharply. “What unit?”
“The Fifth SS Panzer Division.” Taras stroked the dagger handle with one hand and fiddled with the ties on his vyshyvanka with the other, a tunic Savka had embroidered herself to protect him from evil.
“That division was surrounded by Vatutin’s army near Lysianka,” Marko said between eager bites of his dinner.
Lilia clutched a cup she’d been drying, her eyes wide. “When?”
“A week ago. Heavy casualties. If your Gerhard survived, his tank didn’t.” The cup dropped from Lilia’s hand, and they watched it roll across the floor. When it came to a stop near Marko’s boot he looked up at her and said quietly, fiercely, “Lilia, never forget, to the Germans you are ein untermensch, a subhuman they’ve been sent to starve and enslave.”
“Marko,” Savka began, noticing her sister’s eyes had filled with tears, although she quickly composed herself.
“The SS swear an oath to Hitler,” Taras interrupted, unleashing one of his glorious smiles and breaking tension in the room. “Say it for us, Tato.”
But Marko ignored the question, and Savka watched, breath caught in her chest, as he drew a hand over his son’s brush cut, then, out of a pocket in his rucksack, took several items, which he passed around. A small but deadly looking knife for Taras. Hairpins for Lilia, Mama, and Sofiy. Savka waited patiently as he lifted out a silky women’s undergarment and handed it to her.
She blushed as the silk slip flowed like water through her fingers. It was beautiful, a soft rose color, and light as a feather. Had she ever owned anything so lovely? Even her wedding dress had been sewn together using old dresses Mama had saved for the purpose. At any other time, Savka would love to wear this for him in the privacy of their own home, but she felt her anger rise again. Did Marko think this expensive gift made up for his long absence? And where did he get such a thing? She’d just spent hours on her knees in the mud and snow, her stomach growling as she foraged for stinking roots, then rushed off with a submachine gun-wielding banderivka to treat a wounded insurgent in a war zone. Finally, she’d cowered outside Marko’s SS camp because Natalka had shamed her into stealing German medical supplies. And she’d returned with no hope of a decent meal at the end of the day, besides a cup of sour goat milk and some gristled chestnut tubers boiled in water. Before she could stop herself, she burst out, “Fine for you, taking off the last year, too busy to write.”
Marko closed his eyes, as if she exhausted him. “You think I had time—”
“And eating SS rations.” Breath heaving, she paused, willing herself to stop before she said something she would regret. Cherish this moment, she thought. Do not ruin it.
“We eat soup made of roots,” Taras said, screwing up his face. “And acorn flour bread.”
“You will eat better when the Germans win.” Marko pushed away his plate and smiled up at Savka. “Come here.”
Mama, ever sensitive to the needs of others, beckoned for Lilia to herd Sofiy and Taras toward a bench near the stove, where she started in on one of her stories. “The olden times were not like the days we live in,” she said, her gnarled hands resting on her grandchildren’s heads. Even Taras, too old to be coddled, seemed captivated as she continued dramatically. “In the old days, all manner of evil powers walked among us…”
Slipping a shy arm around her husband’s neck, Savka let herself be drawn into his lap, and into the secret universe that was Marko. The first time she’d set eyes on him, his charismatic smile had knocked her senseless. Now, a pleasant, familiar glow bloomed across her chest, as she felt the beating of his heart—that so familiar heart—beneath her hand, and the smell of him as she grazed her cheek against his stubble. There was his old, impish grin, but also something else…Marko—familiar, yet different. Was it his long absence or had he changed irrevocably fighting with the Nazis, wearing this uniform that she still couldn’t see without a lump of terror forming in her throat? Did every wife look at her husband’s hands when he returned from war—which she did now, as they stroked the inside of her wrist—and wonder what they’d done? Kill Soviet partisans in self-defense. That was as far as she would go in her imagination.
