I hope you enjoy the story of Saul Holiff and Johnny Cash.
PROLOGUE
The sun was setting as Saul Holiff crossed the living-room floor, his shadow falling on the neatly packed bookshelves as he rounded the corner and entered his study. He looked trim in his tailored black slacks and cashmere sweater; his stride was smooth and purposeful. Despite his seventy-nine years, he was in fairly good health, aside from a heart condition that was controlled with medication. Pulling a set of keys from his pocket, he unlocked the top drawer and pulled it open. He removed the kit from a small black leather bag and placed it on top of the desk. Methodically, he began to remove his jewellery and place it in the drawer.
First he slipped off the slim Piaget watch from his left wrist, then the thin gold wristband from his right. He struggled to loosen the wedding band that had been a fixture on his hand for forty years. The wallet was last.
He reached for the keys, just as he had done in every practice run. But something had changed. He studied the keys in the palm of his hand. Locking the drawer was pointless. He dropped them into the drawer and closed it.
The curtain of dusk began to fall. As he returned to the living room, he flicked on a single lamp, which threw off just enough light to see. The leather sofa squeaked slightly as he sat. The kit, he placed in the centre of the glass coffee table in front of him.
He went over his checklist:
Sit in an upright position (check).
Eat a little food to prevent vomiting (check).
Drink a small amount of alcohol to augment the action of the drug (check).
He unzipped the kit and parted it against the surface of the table. A television flickered in the corner but was silent. The bottle of pills clicked as he placed it on the table. He removed a black garbage bag and a large elastic band.
He separated a number of gelatin capsules and lightly tapped their contents into a crystal glass, forming a mound of fine reddish powder. Using a long spoon, his actions measured, he mixed in a liberal amount of Stolichnaya, his favourite vodka, and topped it off with a splash of orange juice. Then he lifted the glass to his lips and drank its contents without stopping.
The garbage bag lay beside him, edges rolled up carefully over the elastic band. This part, he had practised a number of times, unrolling and re-rolling the bag until it could be brought down over his face in one smooth action. His wife, Barbara, was on the couch next to him. He turned to meet her eyes and spoke his last words: “Remember what we agreed. You stay in the bedroom and don’t come out, no matter what, until this thing is over.”
He pulled the bag over his head and filled it with air, before quickly placing the large elastic band around his throat to create a seal.
Barbara was in the bedroom when she heard the noise. Perched on the edge of her mattress, plucking at a stray thread on the bedspread, she raised her head at the sound, hoping she had just imagined it. Straining to listen over the pounding of her heart, it came again, a muffled shout. The third cry brought her to her feet, and instinct forced her out the door and into the living room, toward the sofa. Do not leave the bedroom, no matter what. His last words echoed in her mind. She froze.
The Seconal, a fast-acting sedative used to calm patients before surgery, was beginning to hit his bloodstream in a vodka-enhanced flood. Barbara watched in horror as Saul’s arms rose and lagged in the air. She wanted nothing more than to tear that wretched thing off his head, if only to stop the sound he was making, a sound that was now etched into her mind.
She stood rooted to the carpet for a moment, her hands trembling, then turned mechanically and walked back into the bedroom. The lamp on her bedside table remained dark. She turned her wedding band around and around on her finger. I promised I wouldn’t interfere. If I revive him and he ends up a vegetable, or maimed in some way — no, it is impossible, he would never forgive me. As night fell, the patches of silence in the living room expanded until their edges bled together seamlessly. It was over.
It was March 17, 2005.
After what seemed like hours, Barbara emerged from the room. The slumped figure on the couch did not stir. She knew everything had to be left exactly as it was, so she touched nothing except to gently hold her husband’s hand, already cooling to the touch. She remained there for a moment, feeling the tears on her cheeks. Then, she slowly rose and called the police.1
1
THE WHITE COAT
Two girls huddle in a modest wood-framed house in the village of Dmytrivka, not far from Ukraine’s capital city of Kiev. The shouts of men on horseback grow louder, and soon they hear the sound of hooves in the mud outside. Then the screams, as the house next door erupts in flames.1 “It’s time to run,” their mother says in Yiddish, and throws each of them a coat — one white, one brown.
The screen door claps shut behind them, and they tear off toward the cornfields that lie flat and green on the horizon. The youngest, Ann, sees the men on horseback out of the corner of her eye as she runs. There are seven or eight of them. The sound of a gunshot cracks through the air. Her sister falls. Ann keeps running.
For four days Ann hides amongst the cornstalks with the other children, drinking cow’s milk from a makeshift cup and subsisting on what grain and scraps are around until she can return home. Schuncha, her older sister, survives, but not for long; the bullet wound in her stomach becomes infected. About a month after she was shot, she dies.
“It could have been me,” Ann said later. It was the coats; they were accidentally switched. “I got the brown one; she got the white one. There was only a year and a half difference between us, so either one would have fit. And that’s when she was shot, because the white coat stood out.” It was a sentiment also echoed by her aunt, who murmured, “Isn’t it too bad that the beautiful child had to be taken?” when she thought Ann was out of earshot.2
Ann’s father was an intellectual, she was told. He worked as an advocaat, something like a lawyer. This made her proud. When the shadow of the First World War loomed, her father, Joel Holiff, was one of a flood of villagers who abandoned their dwindling shtetl to avoid being conscripted into the army. He left his homeland and travelled across the ocean to build a new life for his family in Canada, and his attempt to find work there was executed with single-minded determination. Not long after his departure, Jews in the Ukraine were pummelled by large-scale anti-Semitic pogroms and brutal raids that ground on in the lead-up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and continued for years after. Tens of thousands of Jews were murdered by Bolshevik armies and Ukrainian nationalists.3
It would be almost eight years before Joel’s wife, Esther, and daughter Ann were permitted to join him in Canada. During that time, life for Ann and her mother was simply a matter of survival, as the sound of horses drove them, breathless, into hiding among the dusty feed bags. The fear of discovery hung dark over their days like the sacking over the broken windows. The men would ride into the village and take over, stay a day or two, get drunk, rape and terrify the villagers, and then move on. Ann watched silently one afternoon as a man went into her house carrying a scythe and entered the bedroom where her grandmother lay dying. In a senseless act of cruelty, the man swept the weapon across the old woman’s nightstand and sent all of her medicine bottles shattering to the floor. It was incomprehensible to Ann, who replayed the scene in her mind for years after. My grandmother didn’t do any harm to him, she thought. She didn’t even open her mouth.
The underground shelters weren’t much better. At first they would make their escape carrying a few household items, uncertain how many days