He checked his e-mail. There was a message from Cass–she must have sent it when she got back the night before. He frowned. She’d taken a risk sending that from home. Cass lived with someone, and the last thing Jake wanted was for that relationship to go up in smoke for what was, after all, just a casual fling for both of them.
He opened her message and gave a half-smile as he read it: Was that Pole-ish enough for you? His current commission was about as Polish as it got. He was writing a series of articles for a monthly journal on immigration into the UK. The final one, which he was currently researching, looked at the experience of wartime immigrants. He’d put the story of the Jewish immigrants to one side–that warranted an article of its own–and instead focused on the Eastern Europeans: émigré Poles, Russians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians. A motley crew, some of whom had made their escape after the Nazi invasion and fought on the side of the Allies, others who had survived the occupation and had arrived after the end of hostilities. He’d spent the last few days interviewing old men, teasing the information he wanted from the welter of disconnected recollections.
Jake’s interest in the occupation of Eastern Europe had begun a few months ago when he’d covered a story about a Lithuanian refugee called Juris Ziverts. Ziverts had been accused of collaboration in the Holocaust, and Jake had befriended the old man. Now, months later, two things stuck in his mind. One was the level of ignorance that existed about the events of Eastern Europe in the last war. The other was the man Ziverts himself.
On Jake’s desk next to his computer was a wooden cat. It was black, half-crouching with its tail raised. It was a replica of one of the statues from the roof of the Cat House in Riga. Ziverts had carved it from memory as a memento of the city he had left behind. He had given it to Jake on their last meeting, pushing it towards him with emphatic nods. It was a gift, made in thanks, though what Ziverts thought he had to be grateful for, Jake didn’t know.
He stood watching the early light on the water, his eyes narrowed in thought, then he shrugged, and sat down at the desk. The clock on his monitor told him it was seven twenty-nine–a minute before his planned start to the working day. He had an interview at eleven with Marek Lange, a Polish expatriate whose story should be interesting. Pole-ish enough…
Most people thought of the émigrés as lumpen factory fodder. Jake knew the stereotype–vodka-swilling, brutal and stupid. In fact, they had entered British society at all levels: artists, scholars, teachers, philosophers, entrepreneurs–and criminals. The country they had chosen to make their home was substantially different because they had come here. Lange was the archetype of the entrepreneur, and Jake needed his story. But, as always happened with any project that had gone smoothly, the last bit was proving the most difficult.
Setting up the interview had been hard enough. Lange didn’t answer his phone and didn’t respond to messages. But something must have got through, because suddenly Jake had Lange’s daughter on the phone who had told him brusquely that her father did not want to be involved. Jake had been planning to give up on Lange–there were other people who would fit the profile he wanted–but this opposition aroused his interest. He’d been prepared to persist, but then Lange himself had phoned, apologizing for his earlier silence and agreeing to an interview. Maybe the daughter had been laying the law down there as well, in which case, Jake owed her thanks. He opened the relevant file on his screen and read through the information he’d managed to get hold of:
Marek Lange
Born: 1923 Place of birth: Litva, Poland Father: Stanislau Lange Mother: Kristina Lange
Arrived in UK 1943. Joined Polish Free Forces Marital history: married 1955, divorced, 1961. Ex-wife died, 1963
Children: Katya Lange, born 1959
He tapped his fingers on the desk. There was plenty of material relating to Lange’s interests after his arrival in the UK, the period he wanted for the article. Jake would have no problems writing a gung-ho profile of a man who’d acquitted himself bravely in the last years of the war and had worked hard and successfully afterwards. But his life before 1943 was frustratingly vague. And this part of Lange’s story might tie in very well with the new book Jake had embarked on shortly after his first meeting with Juris Ziverts.
Ziverts’ dilemma had opened Jakes eyes to the other refugees, those who had arrived quietly, camouflaged among the thousands who were trying to escape the chaos of Europe and rebuild their shattered lives, those whose papers were in suspiciously good order, and who talked little about their past. These were the people with something to hide and it was their stories that Jake wanted.
Eastern Europe had suffered under the sway of two ideologies: Stalinism and fascism. The storm that had erupted when the two systems collided had been terrifying in its intensity and its brutality. Thirteen million people had died in the war years alone. The millions who had died under Stalin had never been accurately counted, and the majority of the perpetrators had never been brought to book.
Jake didn’t want to write about the lost chance for justice–victors’ justice, many would have said. He wanted to tell the story of the human cost. His work had given him access to the people who had lived with the Soviet behemoth to the east and the rising darkness of fascism to the west. He needed a hook on which to hang his story, and Juris Ziverts had led him to it: the story of Minsk.
Minsk, a city with a history going back to medieval times, had suffered the worst that both regimes could offer. North of the city, on its outskirts, was the Kurapaty Forest, where 900,000 people had been systematically slaughtered by Stalin’s soldiers. And the city itself had been devastated by the Nazi occupation. By the time the Nazis were driven out, a quarter of the population was dead.
Belarus, or Byelorussia, or Belarussia–it was a country with more names than a fugitive. He’d dug around a bit. And he had unearthed a Belarusian émigré living in Manchester. Sophia Yevanova was an invalid who had been housebound for several years. He’d gone to see her with no great expectations. What could an ailing babushka have to tell him? But he had come away from their first meeting captivated and enthralled, as had, he suspected, every man who had crossed Sophia Yevanova’s path for most of her seventy-five years.
Illness confined her to her room in the spacious old house she shared with her son, the eminent historian, Antoni Yevanov. She was sharp, she was witty, she was unnerving and she was beautiful, and she had woven stories for him that had captivated him for far longer than the hour he had assigned to the meeting. She was from Minsk, and had lived through what may have been one of the most horrific occupations of the 1939-45 war.
At thirteen, she had endured Stalin’s terror. At fourteen she had joined the partisans fighting against Hitler’s armies. She had ended her war in a concentration camp, but she had survived. And she had made it to England to give birth to her son, the child of her partisan lover who had died in the camps. Jake wanted to tell her story. He wanted to tell the story of the city that she had described with such passion and such regret–the sweep of history focused through the eyes of one woman.
Her son, Antoni Yevanov, was a recent catch for the city’s university. It was the articles heralding his arrival that had first drawn Jake’s attention to Sophia Yevanova. Yevanov, an expert in international law, had been involved in setting up the war crimes hearings at The Hague. What the mother had experienced in one era, the son was trying to redress in another.
Jake opened his work file and scanned the draft of the chapter he’d been working on the evening before, before Cass’s arrival had interrupted