The Devil's Alternative (2 page)

The sick man’s eyes flicked open, and he regarded Drake intently. After several seconds he asked in Ukrainian, “Who are you?”

“A Ukrainian, like yourself,” said Drake.

The other man’s eyes clouded with suspicion. “Quisling,” he said.

Drake shook his head. “No,” he said calmly. “I am British by nationality, born and bred there, son of a Ukrainian father and an English mother. But in my heart I’m as Ukrainian as you are.”

The man in the bed stared stubbornly at the ceiling.

“I could show you my passport, issued in London, but that would prove nothing. A Chekisti could produce one if he wanted to try to trick you.” Drake had used the slang term for a Soviet

secret policeman and KGB member.

“But you are not in the Ukraine anymore and there are no Chekisti here,” Drake went on. “You were not washed up on the shores of the Crimea, nor of south Russia or Georgia. You did not land in Rumania or Bulgaria, either. You were picked up by an Italian ship and landed here at Trabzon. You are in Turkey. You are in the West. You made it.”

The man’s eyes were on his face now, alert, lucid, wanting to believe. “Can you move?” asked Drake.

“I don’t know,” said the man.

Drake nodded across the small room to the window, beyond which the sounds of traffic could be heard.

“The KGB can dress up hospital staff to look like Turks,” he said, “but they cannot change a whole city for one man whom they could torture for a confession if they wanted. Can you make the window?”

Helped by Drake, the castaway hobbled painfully to the window and looked out at the street scene.

“The cars are Austins and Morrises, imported from England,” said Drake. “Peugeots from France and Volkswagens from West Germany. The words on the billboards are in Turkish. That advertisement over there is for Coca-Cola.”

The man put the back of one hand against his mouth and chewed at the knuckles. He blinked rapidly several times.

“I made it,” he said.

“Yes,” said Drake, “by a miracle you made it.”

“My name,” said the castaway when he was back in bed, “is Miroslav Kaminsky. I come from Ternopol. I was the leader of a group of seven Ukrainian partisans.”

Over the next hour the story came out. Kaminsky and six others like him, all from the Ternopol area, once a hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism, and a region where some of the embers still glowed, had decided to strike back against the program of ruthless russification of their land that had intensified in the sixties and become a “final solution” in the seventies and early eighties for the whole area of Ukrainian art, poetry, literature, language, and national consciousness. In six months of operations they had ambushed and killed two low-level Party secretaries—Russians imposed by Moscow on Ternopol—and a plainclothes KGB agent. Then had come the betrayal.

Whoever had talked, he, too, had died in the hail of fire as the green insignia of the KGB special troops had closed in on the country cottage where the group was meeting to plan its next

operation. Only Kaminsky had escaped, running like an animal through the undergrowth, hiding by day in barns and woodland, moving by night, heading southeast toward the coast with a vague idea of jumping a Western ship.

It had been impossible to get near the docks of Odessa. Living off potatoes and swedes from the fields, he had sought refuge in the swampy country of the Dniester estuary southwest of Odessa, toward the Rumanian border. Finally, coming by night on a small fishing hamlet on a creek, he had stolen a skiff with a stepped mast and a small sail. He had never been in a sailing boat before and knew nothing of the sea. Trying to manage the sail and the rudder, just holding on and praying, he had let the skiff run before the wind, southward by the stars and the sun.

By pure luck he had avoided the patrol boats that cruise the offshore waters of the Soviet Union, and the fishing fleets. The tiny sliver of wood that contained him had slipped past the coastal radar sweeps until he was out of range. Then he was lost, somewhere between Rumania and the Crimea, heading south, but far from the nearest shipping lanes—if he did but know where they were, anyway. The storm caught him unawares. Not knowing how to shorten sail in time, he had capsized, spending the night using his last reserves of strength clinging to the upturned hull. By morning he had righted the skiff and crawled inside. His clothes, which he had taken off to let the night wind cool his skin, were gone. So also were his few raw potatoes, the open lemonade bottle of fresh water, the sail, and the rudder. The pain came shortly after sunrise as the heat of the day increased. Oblivion came on the third day after the storm. When he regained consciousness he was in a bed, taking the pain of the burns in silence, listening to the voices he thought were Bulgarian. For six days he had kept his eyes closed and his mouth shut.

Andrew Drake heard him out with a song in his heart. He had found the man he had waited years for.

“I’ll go and see the Swiss consul in Istanbul and try to obtain temporary travel documents for you from the Red Cross,” he said when Kaminsky showed signs of tiring. “If I do, I can probably get you to England, at least on a temporary visa. Then we can try for asylum. I’ll return in a few days.”

By the door, he paused.

“You can’t go back, you know,” he told Kaminsky. “But with your help, I can. It’s what I want It’s what I’ve always wanted.”

Andrew Drake took longer than he had thought in Istanbul, and it was not until May 16 that he was able to fly back to Trabzon with travel papers for Kaminsky. He had extended his leave after a long telephone call to London and a row with the broking firm’s junior partner, but it was worth it. For through Kaminsky he was certain he could fulfill the single burning ambition of his life.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (and the Tsarist Empire before it), despite its monolithic appearance from outside, has two Achilles heels. One is the problem of feeding its 250 million people. The other is euphemistically called “the nationalities question.” In the fifteen constituent republics ruled from Moscow, capital of the USSR and of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), are several score identifiable non-Russian peoples, the most numerous and

perhaps the most nationally conscious of whom are the Ukrainians. By 1982 the population of the RSFSR numbered only 120 million out of the 250. Second in economic importance and population, with 70 million inhabitants, was the Ukrainian SSR, which was one reason why under tsars and Politburo the Ukraine had always been singled out for special attention and particularly ruthless russification. The second reason lay in its history.

The Ukraine is divided by the Dnieper River into two parts. West (right-bank) Ukraine stretches from Kiev westward to the Polish border. East (left-bank) Ukraine is more russified, having dwelt under the tsars for centuries; during those centuries West Ukraine formed a part, successively, of Poland, Austria, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its spiritual and cultural orientation was and remains more Western than the rest of the region, except possibly for the three Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Ukrainians read and write with Roman letters, not Cyrillic script; they are overwhelmingly Uniate Catholics, not Russian Orthodox Christians. Their language, poetry, literature, arts, and traditions predate the rise of the Rus conquerors who swept down from the north.

In 1918, with the breakup of Austria-Hungary, West Ukrainians tried desperately for a separate republic out of the empire’s ruins; unlike the Czechs, Slovaks, and Magyars, they failed and were annexed in 1919 by Poland as the province of East Galicia. When Hitler swept into western Poland in 1939, Stalin came in from the east with the Red Army and took Galicia. In 1941, the Germans took it. What followed was a violent and vicious confusion of hopes, fears, and loyalties. Some hoped for concessions from Moscow if they fought the Germans. Others mistakenly thought a free Ukraine would come through the defeat of Moscow by Berlin, and joined the Ukrainian Division, which fought in German uniform against the red Army. Others, like Kaminsky’s father, took to the Carpathian Mountains as guerrillas and fought first one invader, then the next, then the first again. They all lost. Stalin won, and pushed his empire westward to the Bug River, the new border for Poland. West Ukraine came under the new tsars, the Politburo, but the old dreams lived on. Apart from one glimmer in the last days of Khrushchev, the program to crush them once and for all had steadily intensified.

Stepan Drach, a student from Rovno, joined up with the Ukrainian Division. He was one of the lucky ones; he survived the war and was captured by the British in Austria in 1945. Sent to work as a farm laborer in Norfolk, he would certainly have been returned to the USSR for execution by the NKVD in 1946 as the British Foreign Office and American State Department quietly conspired to return the two million “victims of Yalta” to the mercies of Stalin. But he was lucky again. Behind a Norfolk haystack he tumbled a Land Army girl, and she became pregnant. Marriage was the an- swer, and six months later, on compassionate grounds, he was excused repatriation and allowed to stay in England. Freed from farm labor, he used the knowledge he had gained as a radio operator to set up a small repair shop in Bradford, a center for Britain’s thirty thousand Ukrainians. The first baby died in infancy; a second son, christened Andriy, was born in 1950.

Andriy learned Ukrainian at his father’s knee, and that was not all. He learned, too, of his father’s land, of the great, sweeping vistas of the Carpathians and Ruthenia. He imbibed his father’s loathing of Russians. But the father died in an automobile crash when the boy was twelve; his mother, tired of her husband’s endless evenings with fellow exiles around the sitting-room fire, talking of the past in a language she could never understand, Anglicized both their names to Drake, and Andriy’s given name to Andrew. It was as Andrew Drake that the boy went to

grammar school and the university; as Andrew Drake that he received his first passport.

The rebirth came in his late teens at the university. There were other Ukrainians there, and he became fluent again in his father’s language. These were the late sixties, and the brief renaissance of Ukrainian literature and poetry back in the Ukraine had come and gone, its leading lights mostly by then doing slave labor in the camps of Gulag. So he absorbed these events with hindsight and knowledge of what had befallen the writers. He read everything he could get his hands on as the first years of the seventh decade dawned: the classics of Taras Shevchenko and those who wrote in the brief flowering under Lenin, suppressed and liquidated under Stalin. But most of all he read the works of those called “the Sixtiers” because they flourished for a brief few years until Brezhnev struck yet again to stamp out the national pride they called for. He read and grieved for Osdachy, Chornovil, and Dzyuba; and when he read the poems and secret diary of Pavel Symonenko, the young firebrand dead of cancer at twenty-eight, the cult figure of the Ukrainian students inside the USSR, his heart broke for a land he had never even seen.

With his love for this land of his dead father came a matching loathing of those he saw as its persecutors. Avidly he devoured the underground pamphlets that came out, smuggled from the resistance movement inside; he read the
Ukrainian Herald
, with its accounts of what befell the hundreds of unknowns, the miserable, forgotten ones who did not receive the publicity accorded to the great Moscow trials of Daniel, Sinyavsky, Orlov, Shcharansky. With each detail, his hatred grew until for Andrew Drake, once Andriy Drach, the personification of all evil in the world was called simply the KGB.

He had enough sense of reality to eschew the crude, raw nationalism of the older exiles, and their divisions between West and East Ukrainians. He rejected, too, their implanted anti-Semitism, preferring to accept the works of Gluzman, both a Zionist and a Ukrainian nationalist, as the words of a fellow Ukrainian. He analyzed the exile community in Britain and Europe and perceived there were four levels: the language nationalists, for whom simply speaking and writing in the tongue of their fathers was enough; the debating nationalists, who would talk forever and a day but do nothing; the slogan daubers, who irritated their adoptive countrymen but left the Soviet Behemoth untouched; and the activists, who demonstrated before visiting Moscow dignitaries, were carefully photographed and filed by the Special Branch, and achieved a passing publicity.

Drake rejected them all. He remained quiet, well-behaved, and aloof. He came south to London and took a clerking job. There are many in such work who have one secret passion, unknown to all their colleagues, that absorbs all their savings, their spare time, and their annual holidays. Drake was such a man. He quietly put together a small group of men who felt just as he did; traced them, met them, befriended them, swore a common oath with them, and bade them be patient For Andriy Drach had a secret dream, and, as T. E. Lawrence said, he was dangerous because “he dreamed with his eyes open.” His dream was that one day he would strike one single gigantic blow against the men of Moscow that would shake them as they had never been shaken before. He would penetrate the walls of their power and hurt them right inside the fortress.

His dream was alive and one step nearer fulfillment for the finding of Kaminsky, and he was a determined and excited man as his plane slipped once more out of a warm blue sky toward Trabzon.

Miroslav Kaminsky looked across at Drake with indecision on his face.

“I don’t know, Andriy,” he said. “I just don’t know. Despite everything you have done, I just don’t know if I can trust you that much. I’m sorry, it’s the way I’ve had to live all my life.”

“Miroslav, you could know me for the next twenty years and not know more about me than you do already. Everything I’ve told you about me is the truth. If you cannot go back, then let me go in your place. But I must have contacts there. If you know of anybody, anybody at all ...”

Kaminsky finally agreed.