Last Night of the World Read online

  “Now you and I spend every minute ensuring the Soviet Union survives. Now more than ever, with the Americans dropping the A-bomb. Yet you seem…”

  He was perpetually surprised when I hit upon his truths.

  “Don’t be afraid. Disenchantment is normal. We each have a job to do and mine is to get the correct formula for the bomb so Stalin can use it at his will.”

  I looked up the ceiling. “The room is bugged,” I said.

  “Not tonight,” Zabotin assured me. “We can talk freely.”

  I blushed in front of his frankness. He removed the glove from his right hand and I stared at the mutilation of bone and flesh.

  “Now undress. Enough talking.”

  I turned my back to remove my blouse.

  “Except for your garter belt and the silk stockings, leave them on” he ordered.

  “Do I ever refuse you?” I asked him.

  “Never. You wouldn’t dare.”

  He was completely aroused by the time I was naked except for the black garter belt and stockings. He sat on the bed and pulled me down by my waist. I was to face the wall as he entered me, holding one breast in his swollen hand. With his good hand he rubbed between my legs until I cried out. It never lasted long, these sessions with Zabotin.

  The ashes of his cigarette glowed in the room, illuminated by the street lamp suspended outside the window. “Why won’t you admit it to me, say that you love me? Don’t I satisfy you?” He was reclining on the pillows, stroking the flesh of my inner thighs. He was so proud of himself.

  It was the right question to ask me. Over and over again, I’d asked myself the same one. If I told Nikolai I loved him, would he leave his wife? What would the Party say? Moscow was no longer interested in free love. They claimed it was “bourgeois.” I could be in hot water if the Centre blamed me for a divorce. Appearances counted in the diplomatic service, even the Russian one.

  Instead I uttered the wrong thing. It didn’t matter what I said or what I did. I couldn’t erase the past. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d left behind. I couldn’t decide if I deserved to survive. Why was I alive when so many disappeared? For all my manoeuvring in Canada, I was beginning to admit that my contribution hadn’t saved a single soul, certainly not one Jew.

  “I won’t tell you I love you,” I said, and Zabotin took offense. “Your Cossacks killed every young Jewish male they could get their hands on. Or kidnapped them into the Red Cavalry. I can’t forget Nesvicz —what you did, what you did to Vine’s brother. I can still see you, the dashing young officer, dressed in the crimson uniform with the silver stripe winding down your pant leg. You gloried in it, battled against terrified undefended Jews.” Hadn’t he conquered enough? Why did he need to add me to his empire of accomplishments?

  Zabotin was surprised. I’d never spoken to him in such an impudent manner. It was difficult to tell if he respected me for it, or wished to punish me as only he could. But by then, I knew so much about the Ottawa operation that I counted on my belief that he wouldn’t dare expose me. It would only open the entire espionage ring to scrutiny and implicate Zabotin himself. Like Gouzenko, he’d be heading back to Russia with not much to show for his time in Canada. How did he expect to collect the nuclear plans for the scientists back in the Soviet Union? He needed my help.

  “I saved you, didn’t I?” he asked. “You and your boyfriend, Vine. Don’t forget it was me who set you free from the shtetl and all that religious nonsense your people worshipped.”

  “And your family didn’t bow down to Orthodox icons?”

  He chuckled. “We’re not going to get anywhere arguing whose religion is more ridiculous.”

  I admired him, but I couldn’t let him off that easy. “I’ll never forget it, how you and your men galloped into Nesvicz. It was you, no, who whipped Vine’s papa with the butt of your pistol? It’s the same one you keep beside the bed. I’ve seen it.”

  Zabotin stared at me, as if I were a ghost. “I’d forgotten that old cobbler,” he admitted. “Why must you bring everything back to Vine? A shoemaker’s son.”

  I didn’t know myself why I did it, enrage Zabotin. I loathed Vine for forcing me to follow him to the shoemaker’s house on the day of the pogrom, but I couldn’t let him go, either. I wasn’t content unless both Vine and Zabotin were in my range, and sometimes I believed they felt the same, that they needed each other as much as I counted on them. Our affinity was based on what we’d forsaken and not on our expectations for the future. I realize this now, living together in the Chernobyl forest, how much we still need each other. Survivors cling to each other and can never let go. It’s all that we have of our former selves, before everything dear to us was destroyed.

  I pulled my camisole from the collection of clothes on the floor. “You promised Vine that you’d leave his older brother, Yitzhak, alone, but you kidnapped him into Budyonny’s Red Calvary. How did he perish? Of exhaustion? Or did you fling his ravaged body in the forest and leave him to freeze in the snow? Did that make you feel like a man?”

  If Zabotin was who he pretended to be, I’m certain he would have shot me. The silver pistol was pointed toward my heart. He’d removed it from the night table drawer beside the bed and cocked the trigger.

  “Why have you bothered with me?” I cried. “It would have been better for me if you’d shot me in Nesvicz instead of putting me through this charade.”

  Zabotin aimed the gun at the floor.

  I knew then he was ashamed of how his men in the Red Cavalry had decimated Nesvicz. He was smart enough to understand that the pogrom was part of a system of terror that would never end in our corner of Europe. Stalin’s excuse for a government was the secret police. Zabotin was tired of excuses. We both were, but couldn’t admit it to each other. If we were truly honest, we’d have to try to stop the Russians from getting the atomic bomb before they used it against Stalin’s enemies.

  “You are impossible,” Zabotin said. “Nothing is good enough for you. You find a way to spoil it.” He placed the silver pistol in the drawer beside the bed. This time he wouldn’t murder me.

  What was my life worth? Since seeing the news, I wished to put myself in harm’s way. Why should I live when so many had died? When the cause I’d devoted my life to did not stop the slaughter. I wondered how anyone who lived through the war could ever be themselves again or make themselves whole.

  I changed the subject, not willing to consider what measures I would need to take to make Zabotin hurt me. Vine was a superior choice if that was truly what I wanted; he’d behave ruthlessly if I got in the way of Stalin’s plans to tame the western countries.

  “Talk to me of pleasant things,” I said to Zabotin.

  He put his hand over my eyes. “Neither of us can change what is. Let’s talk about my dacha. It’s north of Kiev and lovely in late August. The climate is much like it is in Ottawa. It would suit you, the dacha.”

  Zabotin wished to forget about the war, the one that began for him in 1914 and continued until the Bolsheviks defeated the Whites. He wished to forget about the humiliation of the Ukraine when half the people starved to death because the commissars confiscated the kulaks’ seed grain. Through the black market and his high ranking in the Red Cavalry, he’d kept his parents alive in their dacha. By the end of the Nazi occupation, they were dead. Even he could not save them. Zabotin wanted to dissolve into the landscape in a place where no one would remember what he had done to survive. I was beginning to understand who he was becoming.

  “Why do I bother talking to you?” he asked suddenly, as if his story was over.

  “Continue, please.” I grabbed his head in my hands. There were more streaks of grey among the golden curls. “Tell me everything. If I am to love you, I must know who you are.”

  He sat up; his large feet perched on the carpet. The feet were discernably Russian, wide with bulging big toes. Not unlike my own. We are all peasants. With his back turned to me, he declared, “We could just live, as we once did, as humans
.”

  In the darkness of the safe house, Zabotin told me of his dacha in the woods, but he did not twist his long body to face me. He spoke softly as when he made love to me.

  “The walls are wooden, made of polished pine. The windows open like hawk’s wings onto the green yew trees. There is a ceramic stove where Baba keeps the samovar boiling and the blue porcelain cups ready for the steeping tea. There are always fresh lemons candied with caster sugar and cookies made of sweet dough and almonds.”

  He might have broken down. If I could have seen his face, I’d have known if his blue eyes were clouded with tears. Zabotin continued after a long pause.

  “The wooden planked floor is always water stained after the winter melt. When I enter the cabin for the first time in the spring, the horsehair sofas are damp although they are covered in fox fur rugs and Baba’s crocheted woollen throws. The feather beds sag dreadfully. I don’t mind. It is always warm and cozy under the layered quilts.

  “Inside the pantry is a huge meat locker where my father stores the kill from the hunt. The brothers plan our spring hunt as soon as we arrive.

  “My mother’s books cover the walls although they, too, are stained by the melting ice of the spring thaw. Matushka has taken to reading and rereading Chekhov.”

  I loved it when Nikolai referred to his mother by the old-fashioned and polite term for Mama.

  “Matushka knew before Papa that the end was near. Just before the Revolution, she arranged for a production of Uncle Vanya on the verandah of the dacha, but our neighbours, the gentry of Kiev, didn’t appreciate Chekhov’s prescience, or Mama’s for that matter.

  “I noticed the broken snow skis and tins of wax left open from the previous winter. Remnants. Throughout the performance of Uncle Vanya the dogs barked. Old Victor Alexievich, he served us faithfully from before time began, he could not quiet them, the dogs objecting to the play as much as our guests. During the Revolution, Victor was shot for being a class traitor and the dogs starved to death. Some say the animals ate Victor’s rotting flesh before they, too, expired. It was during the great famine when nearly everyone perished. Poor Victor had no idea how to survive without the count and countess.”

  I wrapped my arms around Zabotin and kissed his neck hidden by his golden, greying curls. I pressed my breasts into the curves of his fine, straight back. I kissed the shoulder scar where the bullet aimed at his heart had emerged. “But your parents were lucky, they survived the famine.”

  “Only by trading on the black market. Until the Nazis came, they survived.”

  “Tell me more about the dacha.”

  “In the corner cupboard, Papa keeps his vodka and cognac. The crystal chandelier hangs in the centre of the room. After the civil war, I discovered it was miraculously still intact, the candle holders caked with wax from before the Revolution.”

  Perhaps if we’d made love one more time at that very moment, Zabotin would not have revealed his worries to me. “You must know that important papers are missing from the cypher room, Freda,” he said, covering his bad hand with the good one. “Some filled with the usual nonsense that Gouzenko encrypts for the Centre about the Party’s victories in Canada. But others are from the Centre’s mole in Washington, wired to me, to forward to Moscow. Hundreds of cables.”

  “What else?” I asked.

  “You know about the diagrams for the bomb that Vine brought back from Fuchs at Los Alamos in the spring?”

  Zabotin was testing me.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I’m certain Vine would have revealed that to you by now.” Zabotin understood everything about Vine and me. He always had.

  “Did Gouzenko wire Fuch’s diagrams? The instructions Moscow needs to build the bomb? Did Gouzenko send them to the Centre?” I could hardly believe I was asking Zabotin these questions.

  He shook his head and said, “No. I haven’t sent the diagrams to the Director. No one but me and Vine have seen them.”

  “So, Gouzenko never saw them, the diagrams for the bomb?” I asked again.

  “Freda, always one step ahead,” he said. “No, I didn’t order Gouzenko to send them to Moscow.”

  “Why not?” I inquired.

  “It was too early for the Kremlin,” he explained. “At first I waited until after the bombs were dropped on Japan and afterward, the destruction, it was beyond what could be imagined. That’s why the Director is hounding me for a sample of plutonium. He needs plutonium to make a bomb like Fat Man, the one that vapourized Nagasaki.”

  “You decided to wait?” I was incredulous that Zabotin would take matters of this nature into his own hands. “Why did you wait?” If Zabotin were recalled to Moscow for this crime, he’d be labelled an enemy of the people, stripped of his wartime medals, and ordered to stand before a firing squad at first morning light.

  “The original information from Fuchs might have been flawed,” he said clutching his bad hand in his good one. “I’d be crucified for sending the wrong formulations. I didn’t want to take that chance in June. That’s why Vine will need to verify the formula with Alan Nunn May at Chalk River. And to retrieve an actual sample of plutonium. Then I can courier the package to Moscow.”

  I wasn’t convinced by Zabotin’s story. He was covering his tracks, concealing the reason why he had not immediately sent Fuchs’ diagrams to the Director. Fuchs was the most reliable Soviet mole inside Los Alamos. He was close to Oppenheimer. There was no reason why Zabotin would doubt Fuchs’ recipe for the bomb, nor was there a reason for concealing it from the Director, for holding back.

  “Why did you wait until after Nagasaki? How would you know the timing?”

  “Homer, ” Zabotin said.

  Back then, I didn’t understand fully how desperate the situation was. I couldn’t have known that Zabotin acted as the crucial link between the GRU’s key operative in Washington and the Director in Moscow. The operative’s code name was Homer. He was a Cambridge man who operated on behalf of the Soviets. When it appeared that Churchill would not bolster Stalin’s effort to defeat the Germans on the Eastern Front, Homer cautiously lobbied for the Soviet war effect. At the same time, he spied for the GRU. Once the war ended, Homer provided the Director with all the latest news about atomic advances at Los Alamos. Homer’s information was first passed to Zabotin in Ottawa where it was encoded and transmitted to the GRU. If Homer was exposed, Soviet atomic espionage would crumble, and it would be on our heads.

  “Why did you wait? Why didn’t you send the diagrams to Moscow immediately?” I demanded to know. “It might have changed the course of the war. The Americans might not have bombed the Japanese if we’d had our own bomb.”

  For the first time, Zabotin looked frightened. “You’re wrong. Our scientists aren’t close enough. They couldn’t have pulled it together between June and August even with Fuchs’ diagrams. Only now will Stalin be devising a plan to bomb the West, now that the war is over.”

  “And Gouzenko never saw the diagrams?”

  “Let’s hope not,” said Zabotin.

  Neither of us mentioned what would befall us if the Canadians got their hands on the hundreds of cables from Washington or learned about Fuchs’ diagrams. First Ottawa would alert the Americans and next the British. All those working for Zabotin would be implicated in the conspiracy to steal the formula.

  I kissed away the tears from Zabotin’s face. We both recognized that he could be sent to the Lubyanka prison for retaining documents of such shattering importance. Vine would be under suspicion at the same time. He had brought them back from Los Alamos, so he too was implicated by their delay.

  “Was there music at the dacha?” I asked, not able to continue.

  “Oh, yes!” Zabotin was openly weeping by now. “A gramophone. Matushka adored Schubert.”

  How he longed for the old Russia! Whatever drew him to the Red Cavalry was something I’d never understood before. Like Vine and me, caught in the mayhem of the civil war, he wished to survive, but Zabotin was already pow
erful before the Revolution. His family could have escaped Russia unscathed and lived in Paris as exiles. Perhaps that was it. He couldn’t tolerate deserting Mother Russia when she needed the bravest to fight for her. Zabotin yearned for something beyond simple survival.

  “Mine as well. Schubert was her favourite,” I said, recalling Mama sitting at the grand piano in the drawing room playing Schubert in our beautiful home in Nesvicz.

  “You see, Freda, we are not so very far apart. Both of our mamas loved Schubert.”

  To comfort him, I suggested that the secret cables from Homer in Washington, alerting him to the bombing of Japan, might have been destroyed, burned, and not stolen, but he retorted that only he could have given that order.

  “Lydia,” I suggested.

  “My wife does not have the key to the cipher room,” he said, clearly annoyed at the mere suggestion it could be his wife. “Only myself and, Gouzenko have keys. We are the only ones.”

  When Zabotin turned his body to kiss me, I allowed him to hold me in his arms for a long time and then I said cautiously, “I think you must keep me in the dark on Klaus Fuchs or Alan Nunn May, and nothing about the atomic bomb. It is too dangerous…”

  “Dangerous, yes… well.”

  “Do you think it is Gouzenko who stole the papers? Is that why he’s being recalled to Moscow? Is there anyone else you suspect?”

  “Look, if you don’t wish to know, don’t ask so many questions. And do not, under any circumstances, let Vine know that I just couriered the diagrams to Moscow. Can I trust you?”

  It was a naïve question, and one he probably didn’t believe. We both understood how impossible it was to trust anyone, not even each other.

  “Have you couriered them, Nikolai? How can I believe you? You want me to tell Vine that Fuchs’ formula, the one he risked his life to bring to you, is in the Director’s hands. I don’t trust you. You are making things up for me to relay to Vine. You fear that he will go above your head, and expose you.”