Winter Palace (32 page)

Jeffrey found immense pleasure in changing the subject. “Gregor said the very same thing.”

“Did he, now. When was that?”

“While he was here in London.”

“And what was it that he found so riveting about his past?”

“He was recalling your escape from Poland after the war,” Jeffrey replied.

Gray eyes sparkled brilliantly. “Did he, indeed?”

Jeffrey nodded. “Could I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“I was wondering what happened when you disappeared like that toward the end of the war.”

“That is just like Gregor. He knows the story well, unless his memory is fading with age.”

“His memory is fine. He was involved,” Jeffrey hesitated, then finished, “in another story.”

Alexander sobered. “Zosha?”

“Yes.”

Alexander sat in reverie for a long moment, then drew the present back into focus and asked, “It was hard for him, going back to the grave site?”

Jeffrey nodded. “But he was glad he did it.”

“That is good. I would not like to think I asked him back to London, then forced upon him yet another painful duty. So. What did he tell you of those days?”

Jeffrey related the story. “I was wondering what happened when you disappeared for so many months before returning home. All he said was that, with the Red Army's arrival, one by one the AK soldiers began to vanish.”

“Indeed they did.” Alexander settled back in his chair, his gaze centering upon the distance of vivid memories. “Our officers said nothing outright. It was all still too new, and the full extent of our betrayal during the Warsaw Uprising was as yet unknown. The Germans remained our primary enemy, and although they had been pushed from Polish soil, the battle for Berlin still raged. But within a few days the evidence was too stark; we were forced to accept that the Russians had begun eliminating the Polish Underground's survivors.

“I decided, along with three of my closest friends, that we needed to beat them at their own game. The Soviets had
begun recruiting Poles to join them in the battle for Berlin. We signed on, under false names, for Red Army training.”

Alexander's voice held a mere shadow of his former strength, yet some of the old determination and drive came alive through his recollections. “After just eleven days of the most rudimentary training imaginable,” Alexander continued, “we heard that we were to be shipped to the front. My friends and I realized that we were meant to serve as nothing more than cannon fodder. So using that most universal of Soviet currencies, vodka, we bribed our way into the tank training school. We hoped that those six weeks of further training would be enough to see us through in safety until the end of the war.

“But it was not to be. The conditions at the camp were horrid, worse than anything I had known since my imprisonment at Auschwitz. Our food was watery gruel for breakfast, gruel for lunch, and gruel for dinner, served with whatever insects and filth happened to land in the pots while it was being cooked. Our second week, the entire camp refused to eat a particularly bad breakfast. There was no discussion; the food was simply inedible. We were then marched out onto the parade ground, where the commanding officer accused us of mutiny and ordered that every tenth man be taken off and shot.

“A few days later, or nights rather, I was waked from a deep sleep by a bright light in my face and the order to dress and follow in silence. I did not need anyone to tell me that this was the work of the NKVD, as the Soviet secret police were then known. I was taken to a metal-lined room and subjected to a most brutal interrogation. They had word that some of the new recruits were former AK, and they wanted names. I somehow managed to convince them that I knew nothing about the underground army, and I was eventually released.

“The next night, my friends and I escaped under the wire and joined up with an AK outfit operating from the forests not far from the training camp. I stayed with them, fighting the
invasion of this new enemy, until it became evident that the struggle was in vain and that to remain meant certain death. I then decided to leave my beloved Poland behind. I returned home for Gregor and my family, and there I met Zosha.

“I wish you could have known her, my young friend. She was truly not of this world. The first time I met her was the night of our escape, I suppose Gregor told you that. Yes, after a seven-month absence, I arrived back to my family home in the dark hour before dawn, chased by any number of ghosts, both seen and unseen. Gregor was there to meet me, as I hoped, and with him was a woman. At first sight I thought she was an angel who somehow had hidden her wings. After all these years, I am still not sure I was wrong.

“Her face was luminous, Jeffrey. Lit from within by the love she held for my cousin. She would look his way, and the room was bathed in a light that touched the farthest recesses of my cold heart. I have never in my life felt unworthy, save for that moment. I watched them share their glances of otherworldly love, and I knew that here was something that was forever beyond me.

“Still,” Alexander continued, his voice filled with gentle yearning, “I was blessed to know her as I did. The ruling force in my life at that time was a desire for revenge. Then I would speak with her, or see her with my cousin, and I would know that if I were to be worthy of even the smallest place in her life, I would have to cast my hatred aside. It was hard, so very hard, but even so I did it. For her.

“Zosha, Zosha,” he sighed, his vision cast to another time, a different world. “Even to be loved as a friend by her was more than one man deserved. I suppose she was beautiful, but I am not sure. I believe her hair was somewhat dark, and perhaps a bit long, but it matters not. Even then, when I was away from her, I could not recall how she looked. Her heart gave off such a blinding light that I was unable to see anything else about her very clearly.

“When she died—” he began, and had to stop. After a
moment he went on, “When she passed on, the world's light was dimmed. A candle passed from this earthbound home to burn more clearly in a heavenly sanctuary. Although we never discussed it, my cousin and I, this thought held me intact through those first dark days after her departure: that she was never meant for this world. Her place, in truth, was elsewhere. Her heart was made by heavenly hands to serve in other, more holy lands. Angels such as Zosha possessed hearts too great to ever be held for long in a fragile earthly vessel.”

Chapter 30

Ivona stopped outside the Kuznetahny Market's main entrance to button her purse inside her jacket. As she rejoined the jostling crowd, she passed a relatively well-dressed young man who stood on an empty wooden crate and called to the crowd in an official-sounding voice, “Watch out for your valuables. There are pickpockets at work in the market.”

Ivona watched as men patted their pockets and women clutched tighter to their purses. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted two other youngsters who noted the motions and passed the information on to a series of runners. They in turn sped off to tell the pickpockets which newcomers looked to be paying less careful attention and where their money was kept. It was a ploy introduced several weeks ago by the Uzbeki mafia, who now controlled Saint Petersburg's largest market. She had been warned of the danger by the person she was here to meet.

There was now an alternative to the endless Russian food lines. At least, there was an alternative for those with money. Free-enterprise markets, they were called, stalls tended by greedy babushkas and unkempt men charging vastly inflated prices. An average Russian's weekly wage for a bag of lemon-sized oranges. A pensioner's entire monthly check for five kilos of beef. Meanwhile, rats feasted on refuse at the stallholders' feet.

Health regulations were becoming the source of numerous jokes, humor remaining the populace's safety valve when facing problems out of their control. Out of anybody's control, in truth. The government remained in a state of flux, with inspectors' wages set at the old levels and prices now out of sight. Most could be bought with a pittance.

Stallholders sold food tainted with salmonella, used contaminated chemicals for canning, mixed poisonous
mushrooms with safe, offered botulism as a main course. Cats and dogs were disappearing from the streets. Butchers dangled lit cigarettes over their work and used ashes as a universal spice. People bought meat pies from street vendors, then waited for them to cool before taking the first bite; if it was a genuine meat, like beef or lamb, the fat solidified and became visible. Food poisoning was so prevalent in hospital emergency rooms that orderlies were taught basic treatment. Outside the major cities, epidemics of hepatitis and meningitis and amoebic dysentery worsened daily. Authorities were powerless to take protective measures.

Laws were left at the market gates. Restaurants and bars did a booming business in empty whiskey and brandy bottles, which enterprising stallholders purchased and refilled using grain alcohol colored with old tea.

The word for street market was
tolkuchka
, which translated literally as “crush.” The word applied as much to the trash that formed borders around the poorly policed areas as it did to the hordes that crowded the rickety stalls. Chinese brassieres, French cosmetics, Russian T-shirts, Spanish faucets, German shoes—the wealthier stall owners offered smatterings of whatever they had managed to pick up from unnamed sources. Hunting knives glinted beside stacks of disposable diapers. Plastic cola bottles shouldered up to rat poison.

Next to the professional stallholders crouched old-age pensioners, whose social security payments no longer kept body and soul intact. With the ruble's tumble from financial power, Russian old-age support was set at forty-seven U.S. cents per day. The result was a forced sale of whatever was not desperately needed. They at least escaped the mafia's control, at least so long as not too many of them appeared.

Ivona passed an old woman crouched on the curb, offering two rusty cans of imported hot dogs. An old man sold sweaters not required in the summer heat; winter worries could be left until after today was survived. An elderly couple offered
cracked flower-pots, a container of oatmeal, three boxes of matches, and a pair of expressions locked in silent desperation. A woman held up a second pair of shoes with her only pair of laces; the ones on her feet were roped to her ankles and lined with newspapers. One offered a half bottle of old hair dye, another a ratty pullover with one sleeve unfurled, yet another a battered kitchen pot. The meager possessions on display were a loud condemnation of the crumbling regime.

Years of chronic scarcity had taught Russians to barter whatever was not needed. But today was different. The tone of pleading was not one of simple need. Despair and panic overcame the shame of begging. Hunger contaminated voices. Men and women alike shouted silent accusations with rheumy eyes. Medals tarnished with bygone glory hung listlessly from lapels in a declaration that here, this person, this one who had sacrificed and risked all, now deserved better. Was owed more. No matter what the regime, they should not be left to know such shame.

The stallholder Ivona sought sold fresh fruit, the produce of fine Ukrainian orchards brought here because, even after the mafia took its share, the profit was ten times what the husband-and-wife team would earn at home. They paid the mafia's price and counted themselves lucky to have a place in the market at all. Ivona picked up and examined beautifully fresh apples. “Yours are the nicest in the entire market.”

“You touch, you buy,” the woman declared harshly. “Four hundred fifty rubles a kilo.”

Ivona could not help but gape. “That's twenty times what the state stores charge.”

“You want state produce, go stand in line,” the husband said loud enough for the benefit of passersby. “Here you pay the price.”

Ivona fumbled inside her jacket for her purse. “A half kilo, then. It is all I can afford.”

“More than most,” the man replied, more quietly now as
the crowd before them thinned out. “You see what they did to Tortash?”

“Who?”

“Next stall but one. The man with the bandaged face.” Ivona spotted a man bearing a heavy white gauze strip running from eye to chin. Around the edges of the bandage peeped a violent rainbow of blue and black bruises. “He had two bad days in a row, sold almost nothing, and didn't pay on time,” the shopkeeper told her softly. “They have men who like that kind of work. Call them brigadiers.”

Ivona accepted the package. “I understand. Your information is safe.”

“Nothing is safe,” his wife grumbled as she stacked fruit. “To live in these times is dangerous, to say what you know is worse. Better your eyes do not see than to speak.”

“Yet I have seen,” the husband said, placing a trio of pears upon the weighing machine. He waited for a shopper to pause and ask prices and shake her head and walk on, then said, “I saw a crate of paintings at the warehouse when I went for my fruit.”

“When?”

“Four days ago. And another of icons. In gold. Old, or so they looked.”

“And did your mind not scream danger?” His wife crumpled an empty packing crate with violent motions. “Did you not have a care for your children?”

“There were more boxes, but smaller and closed,” the man went on, twisting the bag closed and handing it over. “And in the office when I went to pay there were people. Dangerous people.”

“And still you speak,” his wife hissed, her eyes darting everywhere. “Still you risk speaking. And for what?”

“For the church,” Ivona said softly, handing over money her eyes could not even count. “For us. For our children and their heritage.”

The woman faltered, turned sullen. “Say it then. Be swift.”

“Southerners,” the man said. “Some of them, anyway. Of the Chechen clan. From the Tombek family. Senior men.”