Winter Palace (15 page)

Gregor patted his arm. “If you will take one additional word of advice.”

“Anything.”

“Do not fall ill,” Gregor said in utter seriousness. “You would do well to guard your health wherever possible. To test the Russian medical system with an emergency would truly be gambling with the rest of your life.”

“Katya's already warned me about the water.”

“Heed her words well. Drink nothing that has not been taken from a bottle opened before your own eyes or boiled twice within your own sight. And eat only what appears truly clean. And take nothing—”

“You're about to get me worried,” Jeffrey protested.

“Better frightened than ill.”

Olya barked out an impatient word. Gregor smiled and offered his hand. “You go with my prayers surrounding you, my boy. Take care and return as you are now, only richer. Especially in wisdom.”

Chapter 16

The road to Rzeszow was decorated with horse-drawn hay wagons and roadside fruit and vegetable stands. The villages were a stream of tired sameness. Forty years of Communist rule, and the Nazis before them, had ground out all charm and individual character. Summertime greenery added splashes of color to the occasional relic of bygone glories—a palace, a vast cathedral, a stolid ministry outpost. All suffered from universal neglect.

Yet everywhere, even in the smallest of villages, were signs of new wealth—satellite dishes sprouting from gray-faced apartment buildings like strange metal flowers, houses under construction, lighted storefronts, billboards, Western cars, fresh paint. They stuck out like beacons of hope for a tired and drained people.

Between the villages, fields bustled with haymaking. Whole families gathered for the task. Grandmothers stood surrounded by tumbling piles of happy infants. Vast spreads of food and drink anchored white swatches of cloth. Crowds of boys and girls labored around horse-drawn rigs while their elders tended machine-driven equipment. Heavily laden carts were pushed and pulled toward distant barns.

On the outskirts of Rzeszow, great black crows began to flock in the freshly cut fields. Their beaks were the largest Jeffrey had ever seen, fully as broad as his hand and almost as long. Olya noticed the direction of his gaze, and said, “Russki.” She then clasped hands to her throat and made choking sounds. Jeffrey recalled Gregor's words about a drought and nodded his understanding. The birds had been driven West by thirst.

Their hotel was a concrete clone of the high-rise hotels all over Poland. The foyer was vast and gloomy and lined with fake marble, the lighting distant and dim, the air stuffy and
perfumed with cheap disinfectant. As Jeffrey signed in, a bus pulled up outside and disgorged a milling stream of dirty, exhausted passengers. Again Olya offered her single word of explanation—Russki. The bus idled outside the entrance, dusty and swaying in time to the diesel's unmuffled clatter. The vehicle listed to one side. The windows were cracked and stuck half-open, the curtains knotted out of the way. Passengers wearily moved toward the reception desk, free hands kneading overworked backs.

The elevator was loud and cranky and the size of a small closet. Outside his room, Yussef pantomimed for Jeffrey to wash thoroughly. Jeffrey recalled the stories of Russian drought and complied.

Dinner was taken in silence, save for short spurts of conversation between Yussef and Olya. When their food arrived, they ate with great appetite but little gusto. Jeffrey had a mental image of them storing up reserves against leaner times ahead.

When they were finished, he bid them good-night and retired to the cramped confines of his room. He lay in the darkness listening to the sounds of violent revelry that echoed up and down the hallway. Finally he fell asleep, hungry for the feel of his wife's loving arms.

They started very early the next morning. Each Polish village on the way to the border had its market, and at each either Yussef or Olya pointed and announced, Russki. The markets sprouted wherever space was available—on stairs leading to a church, along a wall, in tiny triangular parks, in the middle of parking lots, even on traffic islands. Each vendor sat or squatted before a patch of bright fabric and displayed what he or she had to sell. It was never very much. A few handmade sweaters. Some swatches of cloth. Bottles of shampoo or individual cigarettes or perhaps a liter or two of vodka.

Boredom fought with the heat for domination of the
borderlands. A seven-kilometer line of trucks and cars sweltered under a cloudless sky. Olya drove them up to the first fencing and waited while Jeffrey and Yussef pulled their bags from the trunk. She then bid her husband a curt farewell, and deftly swung the car back around to return to the end of the line. Piles of refuse lined the roadside, and bodies sprawled wherever could be found a fraction of shade. Kerchiefed babchas tended scrawny children sucking from soda bottles fitted with rubber nipples. Little wooden huts played old disco hits and plied a booming trade in soft drinks and Western snacks. Beefy truck drivers in filthy T-shirts and shorts celebrated successful entries into Poland with beers drained in one long sweaty swallow.

The border crossing came in four stages. First was a stop at the outpost where arriving trucks and cars had to show their proper documents. Jeffrey and Yussef joined the line of heavily burdened pedestrians and walked on through. Then came the Polish station, a brief glimpse of shade and sultry breeze before the guards passed them along. As they departed, the officer who had inspected his passport muttered something to his neighbor and nodded toward Jeffrey. An American crossing the border on foot. Jeffrey felt eyes on his back as he walked toward the Ukrainian station.

Outside the Ukrainian post, the wait began. Ratty buildings displayed hastily scraped-over Soviet stars replaced by new Ukrainian flags. The air tasted hot dry, metallic, sooty, as if baked in an industrial oven. The breeze was fitful and acrid. People moved slowly to and from the border station carrying satchels and shopping bags scarce inches above the ground. They waited in lines for inspection, waited in line to have their passports checked, waited to pay, waited to complain, waited to move on to wait yet again.

There was a moment at the border when time stood still for Jeffrey. He was shuffling along in line, pressed in on all sides by reeking humanity, when suddenly the world came
into sharpest focus. His mind became utterly still, caught by an unseen power as he took in all that surrounded him.

Surly border guards ignored whining pleas as they rifled bags and carry-sacks and demanded customs duties, which were simply stashed away. Other bored soldiers pushed people forward, maintained order, and kept careful watch over how much their fellow guards were pocketing.

As Jeffrey inched forward, he could sense all the wailing cries, all the dust, all the chatter and horns and blaring speakers and thousands of smoldering cigarettes all gathering together and drifting upward as a rank incense on an unclean altar.

He took another step and felt unseen vestments slip from his shoulders. His cloak of security had vanished. Jeffrey's turn came then, and he set his bag down on the long metal bench. He shrugged a reply to the guard's surly bark, heard Yussef reply for him, and thought there had never been a time when he had felt so exposed.

Ivona Aristonova waited beside her car within sight of the Ukrainian border station, smoldering from more than the heat.

She glanced at her watch, sighed, and swiped at a wayward strand of hair. Eight o'clock in the morning and the day was already sweltering. This was by far the hottest summer she could remember. And the driest.

In lands where summer temperatures seldom rose above the mid-eighties, and never for more than a day or so at a time, scores of days came and went where temperatures hit a hundred degrees by three hours after dawn. Weeks melted into months under blistering, cloudless skies. Crops trained to grow on little sun and regular rainfall withered and browned. First streams, then rivers, and finally lakes and seas fell below any levels known in recorded history.

And still the heat continued.

As much talk focused on the coming winter as on the
present heat. Babchas told tales of other hot summers, followed by winters where unending snows fell upon an earth hard as iron. Many told stories of hunger as well. Elders argued over whether the famine winters of 1917, 1918, and 1919 had been as bad as those of 1944 through 1947. Younger people wondered if, in their own time, they would sit and argue over the winter that was to come.

Corn rose stunted, with ears the size of middle fingers. Lavender, one of the region's major cash crops, refused to bloom at all. What should now have been seas of ripening wheat were graveyards whose dried husks whispered omens in the arid breeze. Potatoes baked in the ground a month before harvest. Vegetables sent up slender sprouts that wilted and fell in surrender. Village squares became anvils where farmers gathered to be hammered by the merciless sun. They stood and searched the empty sky for clouds. They spoke of omens, and of money and the lack of it, and of governments unable to help in this hour of great need, and of possible calamities yet to arrive.

But more than the heat was troubling Ivona this morning. Something about this whole plan unsettled her, and in a way she could not identify. This unreasoning unease troubled her immensely. She did not like such challenges. Life had trained her to distrust the unseen, for here lay the greatest threats to the established patterns of her existence. She held on to these habits with the same rigid insistence that she had applied to the task of learning languages. Ivona was nothing if not disciplined.

Ivona stiffened as she spotted Yussef's slender form. She returned his wave and scrutinized the tall young man walking alongside her nephew.

The American called Jeffrey was everything she had feared. He was far too handsome for his own good. His face was as fair and fresh and unmarked as a newborn's. His bearing was overly confident, utterly untested.

At that instant, it came unbidden, like a fragrance wafted
upon an unseen wind. Once again, against her will, she found herself recalling the past, and the power of that memory stripped her bare.

****

The cold was indescribable that first northern winter. That she recalled much more clearly than the snow. The week before the first frost, temperatures were as high as forty degrees centigrade. Then one afternoon, the first week in October, winds came down from the north, and overnight the temperature fell to minus fifty-two degrees centigrade, a ninety-degree shift in less than twelve hours. Overnight the ground, the trees, even the grass and leaves turned to stone.

Food was very scarce that winter. To buy it, Ivona's parents sold everything they did not absolutely need. Wives of local Communist Party leaders bought several ball gowns her mother had carried on that long train trip north. After everything was sold and the money was gone, all they had to eat was what the local canteen fed them—porridge in the mornings and in the evenings a stinking fish soup. The smell of that soup, and the rotting fish from which it was made, was so strong it stayed in their clothes and bedding and hands and skin throughout that long, endless winter.

All children were required to go to school in the wintertime. That made the polar winter seem so much longer, sitting in the room next to that stinking kitchen day after day. The sun always rose late and set very early, so they arrived in the dark and left in the dark. All they saw of the day was a line of light that traced its way across the floor. Hour after hour their teachers drilled them in Communist doctrine. Ivona found the lessons a torture as harsh as the cold.

They lived in huts of raw logs with moss stuffed in the cracks. Thankfully, there was plenty of wood, and they kept a fire burning in their little stove day and night. In their settlement were eighty Ukrainian families, over a hundred Polish families, and perhaps half that many Jewish families.
Fewer than a handful of those families survived that first winter intact.

In May spring finally arrived. The river outside the village lost its covering of ice in explosions that sounded like a new war beginning. The village was there only because the river was there to float logs down to a sawmill.

Before long, berries appeared; gathering them was the children's job. Those raspberries were their only source of vitamin C. By this time, of course, the whole camp suffered from scurvy. During the winter, they followed the local villagers' example and brewed pine needles in water, letting the concoction soak overnight and then drinking a cup very fast. The taste had been beyond horrible, but it had provided enough vitamins for them to retain most of their teeth.

The children on their gathering trips also found mushrooms and sorrel, from which Ivona's mother made a lovely soup. After a winter of porridge and rotten fish stew, the raspberries and her mother's soups provided a taste of heaven.

Another winter and another spring went by before Stalin proclaimed one of his famous Friendship Treaties with local leaders in the Ukraine. For no apparent reason, Ivona's family received a permit to leave the camp. Most of those who had been forcibly resettled, especially those in the far north, never returned home. Ivona never learned why her family was selected to leave, but they were.

In time Ivona and her family made their new home in Lvov, leaving behind the cold of Archangelsk. But never the memories. Never, no matter how hard she tried, the memories.

As she stood and watched the pair approach, Ivona became certain that the painful act of remembering was somehow tied to the arrival of this young man, this Jeffrey Sinclair. This utterly illogical notion shook her to her foundations. She pushed hard at the thought and the lingering pain that always accompanied her memories. Then she stepped forward to greet her nephew and his companion.

****

The car awaiting Jeffrey and Yussef as they came through the borderlands was a boxy, gray-green Lada, the driver an overly thin, gray-haired woman. She replied to Yussef's exuberant greeting with a single word. She then turned to Jeffrey. “You are Mr. Sinclair?”