Sisterchicks in Gondolas! (17 page)

I nodded, feeling a tug at my heart for Sergei’s wife. I knew all too well the feelings of isolation and the need for a female friend who understood. My circumstances over the past few decades may have been different from Sergei’s wife, but the feelings of loneliness were, I’m sure, the same.

“Where do you and your wife live?” Sue asked.

“Kiev. In Ukraine.”

“What mission organization are you with?” I asked.

Sergei said the name in Russian, and I stopped breathing for a moment. My reaction must have been obvious because Sergei said, “Have you heard of us? We are not very large. I do not think we are known in the States.”

Finding my voice I said, “No. I mean, yes. I know your mission. I …”

“Jenna, are you all right?” Sue asked. “You’re turning pale.”

I drew in a steady breath and looked at Sergei with my heart pounding. “I know your mission very well.” My voice was quavering. “I worked at the German office a long time ago.”

“When?” Sergei leaned forward.

“It was a long time ago. Thirty years. I went … I took. It was back when the borders were still closed and—”

“You were a courier?” Sergei finished my sentence for me. His voice was low, as if KGB might be in the other room listening.

I nodded.

His eyes widened.

“Y’all just lost me there,” Sue said. “What’s a courier?”

Both of us hesitated. My training at the mission as a twenty-one-year-old was explicit about protecting the believers in the underground churches. The fewer people we told the fewer chances of putting the persecuted Christians at risk. In the past thirty years I had told only a handful of people about how I had agreed to go with another woman into countries that, at the time, were ruled by Soviet Russia. We made the journey with nothing more than God’s protective hand on us and a memorized address of a believer who was willing to receive our delivery.

“What do you mean by courier?” Sue repeated.

“A courier is a smuggler,” I said.

Sue looked at Sergei and then back at me. “What did y’all smuggle?” She didn’t look as if she really wanted to know. But I told her.

“Bibles.”

“You, Jenna? You smuggled Bibles?”

I nodded.

“What year was it?” Sergei asked.

“I’m trying to remember. It’s been so long.”

“Did you come by train?”

“No, I drove a camper with another woman my age. A young German woman.”

Sergei leaned across the table, looking stunned and then strangely delighted. “You came with Deborah.”

“Yes! Did you hear about us?”

“Of course. You were the two young women who did what many men could not do.”

Feeling as if I could at long last spill the story from my closed-up, alabaster box, I turned to Sue and explained, “Some of the men who worked for the mission were caught at the border when they tried to take in a few Bibles. The mission had more than five thousand Bibles ready to be delivered, but no couriers who could make it through with so many Bibles.”

Sergei added, “Only a few willing couriers worked on the German side. They had their passports stamped too
many times with the same countries of entry. The guards always were suspicious.”

Sue’s mouth was frozen in a dropped open position. She barely was blinking.

“So,” I continued, “the mission office in Germany decided to send women instead. Deborah and I had current passports, and neither of us had applied for visas to the East before. We could travel less noticeably on student visas. So we decided on a Tuesday afternoon that we would go. By Friday of that week we were in Vienna applying for our visas. We planned to drive all the way to Kiev with the Bibles.”

“But you only reached Czechoslovakia,” Sergei said.

“That’s right.” I was amazed that Sergei knew so many of the details. I guessed that our exploit was an urban legend within the mission. I never knew because I returned to the States a few weeks after the trip and didn’t do a good job of keeping in contact with Deborah or any of the other people at the mission after I married.

“We made it through the first Eastern European border into Czechoslovakia without any problems. The guards weren’t used to seeing young women driving a large vehicle into their country, so they acted kind of flirty with us. We flirted back, and they let us go right in.” With a quirky awkwardness I added, “Shows you what Girl Power can do.”

Neither Sue nor Sergei responded to my poor joke. I immediately felt foolish. “It wasn’t Girl Power,” I said
quickly. “I’m sorry I said that. It was God Power all the way.”

Tumbling back into the account, I summarized the rest of my story for Sue. “Deborah and I drove across Czechoslovakia and connected with our underground contact in a small town on the Polish border. He told us it wouldn’t be safe to continue on to Kiev since the contact there recently had been questioned by the KGB and was now under surveillance.”

I swallowed as I remembered for the first time in such a long time the humility of the older man who was our contact in Czechoslovakia. “At great risk to himself, the contact in Czechoslovakia took all of the Bibles from us. We unloaded them late at night in a …” I still couldn’t bring myself to disclose specific locations so I just said, “We helped him hide them in a safe place. Then Deborah and I drove back to Germany. We were detained at the border and questioned, but our guard was distracted, and he let us go through.”

“You could have gone to prison for two years if you had been caught,” Sergei said.

“Yes, I know. But we weren’t caught. I always thought we had it easy. The hard task was for the dozens of brave believers in Czechoslovakia. They risked imprisonment by transporting the Russian Bibles on to Kiev.”

“Two of them were found out,” Sergei said.

I paused. “Did they go to prison?”

“Yes.”

An overwhelming sadness came over me. “What about the underground contact in Kiev? He was the one most at risk. Do you know what happened to him?”

Sergei looked down at his hands.

I turned to Sue and explained, “There was only one contact in all of Western Russia at that time who was willing to work with the mission and to receive such a large shipment of Bibles. I never found out what happened to him.”

“He is well,” Sergei said quietly.

I leaned forward. “Do you know him?”

Sergei looked up at me with an uncomfortable expression. “Yes, I know him. I know him too well.”

Sue blinked away her stunned expression, and in a reverent whisper, she said, “Sergei, it was you, wasn’t it? You were the underground contact in Kiev.”

S
ergei’s humble expression
told Sue and me the obvious answer that had eluded me as I was caught up in telling my side of the story.

“Yes,” he said. “I was the contact in Kiev.”

“Sergei,” I said in a half-whisper. Now I was the one who couldn’t speak.

“And you, Jenna,” Sue said, now that she had found her voice, “you never told anyone, did you? Jack doesn’t know this, does he?”

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

“Because the borders were closed for so many years after I came home. I didn’t want to jeopardize the safety of any of the believers by giving out information that might somehow reach the wrong people.”

“Thank you.” Sergei was visibly moved. “Thank you for thinking of what was best for me and others like me for all these years. If you had told people what you did, you could have been a hero in America.”

“No, not a hero.” I almost laughed. “Sergei, you’re the one who risked everything, not me.”

“Sweet peaches, Jenna!” Sue blurted out. “Did you not hear yourself just tell how the Bibles got through the Czechoslovakian border? If you and Deborah hadn’t done your part, then Sergei wouldn’t have been able to do his.”

I ignored her statement and focused on Sergei. “How did you manage to receive all the Bibles?”

He gave a concealing sort of grin. He still wasn’t telling after all these years either.

“I will tell you one piece of information I think you will find interesting. I waited sixteen months for the signal that the Bibles had gotten through. When at last they came, a rumor had it that two women managed to accomplish what a dozen men were unable to do. I told the Lord I wanted one day to find a way to say thank you to the two women.”

He nodded his head in a firm gesture of satisfaction. “And here you are. And here I am. And so I can tell you face-to-face what I thought I would not be able to say until I met you in heaven. Thank you, Jenna.”

Sue dabbed at the tears on her face. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

I teared up but couldn’t speak. It took me a moment before I could say, “I hope you get to meet Deborah one day, Sergei. I know you will in heaven, like you said, but I wish …”

Sergei grinned. “I know where Deborah is. I found her.”

“You did?”

“Yes. When I had an opportunity many years ago, I traveled to Germany. I went to the mission office where Deborah still was working and …”

Sue and I waited for him to explain why his mouth was curling up in such a funny expression.

“I married her,” Sergei said simply.

I laughed with the merriest heart ever. In the other room, our convalescing bird began to chirp madly.

Sue was still wiping tears from her cheeks. She looked like she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry some more. “I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe it. I mean, I can believe it. I do believe y’all are both telling the truth. It’s just amazing. That’s what it is: truly amazing.”

Sue and I didn’t make it to Murano that day. As it was, we barely had the main meal ready for the returning band of brothers at noon. We sat at the dining room table for several hours talking with Sergei. We heard more about Deborah and all the work the two of them did for the mission now. We saw pictures of their two children and heard a few sparse details about what Sergei’s life had been like during the Soviet years.

When the others returned from San Giorgio Maggiore, a few of them joined us at the dining room table and told us about their experience at morning worship. One of the Benedictine monks who spoke English offered to give them a tour of the facilities. Fikret especially appreciated the behind-the-scenes tour. He said it was time well spent.

Sergei and I kept quiet with the others about our time well spent. My mind was still wrapping itself around the extraordinary experience of meeting Sergei and comparing our stories. In an odd way, the event was so amazing that it felt funny trying to talk about it. Almost as if no one would believe us.

I knew that wasn’t true, but I had so much to process. Sergei had taken me back to a place in my heart and mind that I hadn’t visited in a long time.

Sue seemed to understand instinctively, and she respected my somber contemplations.

After lunch the men decided to take some free time and change their last group strategy meeting to that evening. Right away, four of them began discussing a visit to the museum with the Tintoretto paintings that Marcos had so highly recommended the night before.

Eduardo invited Sue and me to go with them.

“I’m going to stay here,” I said, without offering an explanation.

Sue provided one for me. “She has had an unusually
full morning. But I would love to go with y’all. When are you leaving?”

The art enthusiasts departed in a cluster, with Sue, her map, and her guidebook as their guiding light. I knew they would appreciate her directional skills, and she would enjoy being with them.

Sergei was one of the men who stayed back at the apartment. He called home and invited me to say hello to Deborah. We spoke for several minutes. It was a sweet yet clumsy sort of conversation. The best part was that she and I were reconnected. Living now as we did, in a world of global cell phones and e-mails, I knew we could stay connected easily.

When I hung up, Sergei asked if I would please tell Sam about our tandem history. We went looking for Sam and found him on the narrow balcony off the princess bedroom. Pulling two more chairs out into the fresh air, we talked while small boats floated down the canal below us.

Sam took in our story with a steady smile and nodded his head. “This certainly explains why your name kept coming to mind when we pulled the details together for this retreat. Now I know why. Clearly you needed to be here for something more than stirring spaghetti sauce.”

I smiled.

“I’m beginning to think that 90 percent of what we should be doing as believers is just to show up,” Sam said.
“God’s Spirit takes it from there. I’m glad you showed up this week, Jenna.”

“And I’m glad you showed up all those years ago in Czechoslovakia,” Sergei added.

I looked down at my hands. Now I was the one who had nibbled off two of her fingernails since breakfast. “To be honest, the main reason I agreed to come on this trip was because I thought it would be good for Sue. She needed a break.” I told them briefly about Jack’s car accident and what the past few years had been like for my sister-in-law.

“I wouldn’t have guessed she had gone through so much,” Sergei said.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” Sam spun his gold band around his finger, as he looked down at the canal and contemplated aloud. I could remember watching him twist that same wedding ring around his finger all those years ago when we sat at a table talking after meals in Austria. His familiar little habit was somehow comforting to me in the midst of all the tumbling thoughts of the day.