Stateless (12 page)

The car came to a stop and Judita leaned towards the window to ascertain where they had arrived. It was a place she'd been many times before in her youth, and she had played there as a child the few times her mother had had the time to spend with her and her brother and sister. She turned to Anastasia. ‘What are we doing here?'

‘You're a Muscovite; you should know well enough why people come here. To walk and talk and enjoy nature.'

‘What do you want me to do?' asked Judita, her training instincts making her focus and gain clarity on the situation and
her orders.

Anastasia's face and body didn't move but her lips parted just enough to say, ‘I want you to kill someone.' Then she stepped out of the car.

Judita tried to hide her shock, but she had known such a task would one day be asked of her. She'd been trained for it. But knowing the moment is coming and feeling the moment's arrival were very different things. Shooting targets and distant bottles on rocks wasn't the same as shooting a human being in cold blood. But Judita had no time now to ponder and quickly pushed the car door open to follow Anastasia.

The two women stood at the front of the vehicle. Before them was the enormity of Gorky Central Park. It was surprisingly empty, except for two people sitting on a bench about two hundred metres from where they were standing. Judita glanced at the couple, and then back to Anastasia.

‘Who are they?' she asked.

‘Does it matter?' replied Anastasia. ‘I'm about to order you to kill an enemy of the State. That's all you have to know.'

Judita nodded. She knew that this was the only answer expected of a loyal officer of the State.

But Judita did look closer. Her keen eyesight, so well used to rifle sightings, traced the figures across the park and observed their movements. She was familiar with the way they sat, moved their arms, inclined their heads. She'd known them since she was a baby. Her heart sank. Her childhood flooded into her mind as she blinked, trying to remove the distant man and woman from her view. But they remained. Even from this distance she was certain of who they were from the way the woman held her head at a slight angle to the ground and the man appeared to be telling her what to do.

For a moment she forgot herself and turned to Anastasia. ‘But it's . . . they're my . . .'

It was all she was able to say before her tongue fell silent and
her gaze went quickly back to the couple.

Anastasia, to Judita's surprise, put her hand on her back, the closest thing to an embrace from the woman who was at one time her friend, but now her commander.

‘Where lies the highest duty of every child in Mother Russia?' Anastasia asked in a near whisper.

‘To Comrade Stalin. To the Supreme Soviet. To the State. To the Praesidium.'

‘And this is your order. This is your command from the State, from the Supreme Soviet. And from me.'

Judita's eyes didn't leave her parents, sitting on a park bench in the distance. ‘You want me to kill them? You want me to kill my mother and father?'

‘Your order is to kill one of them. One only.'

‘Which?' A simple but horrifying question.

‘Of that there is no order. Only choice. Your choice . . .'

As if on cue, the chauffeur approached them with a Mosin–Nagant sniper rifle and a telescopic sight. It was the weapon that had been made famous by snipers during the Nazis' siege of Stalingrad, and it was a weapon Judita knew well. But as the chauffeur thrust the rifle into her hands, it suddenly felt foreign and awkward, like holding something she had never seen before.

The chauffeur disappeared into the car and so too did Anastasia, leaving Judita alone.

With a strange panic rising inside her, Judita tried to remember her lessons. Detachment. Personal feelings must never count. The object was the wellbeing of the State, and nothing else mattered. But while these mantras focused her for the act of killing, they did not help her with the choice. If it had been an abstract scenario for class debate in her lessons, she might have reasoned between knowledge of the father's alcoholism and violence against his sole ability to support the
family. If the mother was to die, the father could still work and feed the children. To kill the father would be to make paupers of the whole family.

But as she positioned herself on the ground, flat on her belly with the rifle snug against her shoulder, she found the rational practicality ill at ease with the reality of the choice. She had hated her father and grown to resent her mother, but as her gun sight framed them both, the choice was impossible.

Judita drew upon the steely determination she'd shown in all the other tests she'd been given. She bit the inside of her lip, and felt the rifle in her hands, cold and indifferent. She adjusted the telescopic sight until both of her parents were clear and sharp. Then she aligned the cross-hairs until her father's chest was filling the entire circle, the intersection of the black lines crossing his heart.

She paused. Thoughts of her siblings, of their life without the income of a father, came to her and almost without physical intention her gun sight shifted so that it was in place over the heart of her mother.

Was living with violence better than dying of starvation? Was this the choice Anastasia was asking her to make? Was this the purpose of the test? No doubt Anastasia knew about her father, his violence, his drunkenness. No doubt her handlers might even know more about Judita's childhood than even she remembered. This was a test, but what was it testing and what was the answer?

Judita steadied herself again but the cross-hair drifted – from the heart of her mother to the heart of her father and back again. The order was clear but the choice was not.

By reflex Judita found herself saying a short Jewish prayer. Something she had not recalled in what felt like a long time, but something imprinted onto her soul. She drew in a breath, holding it as she was taught, feeling her heart's pulse in her
temple.

She remembered hiding under the table, she remembered her childhood fear, her mother's cries, the bruises on her face . . .

The cross-hair centred and held firm over her father's sunken chest and she squeezed the trigger.

But there was no sound. No percussive pop, no kick in her shoulder from the recoil; only a dull metallic click. Through the viewfinder her father, still sitting there, talked animatedly at her mother's bowed head. She pulled the trigger again, but still the dull click. Suddenly she felt the presence of a woman, warmth and perfume enveloping her. Anastasia reached down and took the rifle from her hand.

‘Come, Judita. No more tests. You've passed. And I'm so very sorry to have had to put you though this. Your loyalty is unquestionable. It's time to go, my little dove . . .'

Inside the car, threading back through the Moscow streets, Anastasia and Judita sat in silence until finally Judita could bear it no longer.

‘Don't you want to know who I chose?'

Anastasia turned to her, and put her gloved hand on hers. ‘I trust you made the choice that was right for you.'

It was at that moment that Judita knew she was capable of anything.

Passenger ship Agon,

Palestine, January 1945

J
udita Ludmilla Magidovich looked at the distant shoreline of the city of Haifa, a hillside dotted with lights and a dockside ablaze with illumination. She stood amid 160 other men, women and children, many of them elderly and horribly emaciated after their lives in Nazi Europe. And now most of them were also rendered seasick during their journey from Trieste, through the Adriatic, into the Mediterranean and finally to the shores of Palestine. Judita watched with a focused eye so different from her fellow travellers as their ship was dwarfed by a British battle cruiser escorting them through the waters.

The British warship had sailed out of Haifa after a telegraph from Cyprus warning the authorities of the illegal refugee ship headed their way. The battle cruiser met the small Greek passenger liner some fifty nautical miles off the coast of Palestine and had transmitted a radio warning to the Greek captain that they would board and arrest him and his crew, and confiscate his ship, unless he put himself under British orders and sailed with them into the port.

He had no alternative. There were numerous examples
preceding him of ships trying to smuggle Jews from the desolation of Europe into Palestine being boarded and impounded. He had been well paid by rich Jews from England and France, knew the risks and had taken them anyway. But he would not risk lives and so he shrugged his apologies to the passengers, and followed the directive.

The ship docked at the port and without delay the refugees were pushed and shoved down the gangplank onto the dock. They were a ragged group. Wearing old clothes that they hadn't changed in weeks; exhausted, lice-infested, many of them emaciated from hunger, children limp in the arms of mothers, and sons supporting their elderly parents, most barely able to stand. They stood in the boiling sun under the dispassionate gaze of the British soldiers, waiting for the arrival of the commanding officer.

Many of the women were sobbing, their hopes and prayers of freedom from the Nazi terror of Europe, and now the hopeless aftermath of starvation and confusion, suddenly dashed by British soldiers. Several had fainted, and others had gone to their aid. When they moved, the British soldiers shouted harsh warnings for them to remain still. But these men and women were used to Nazi soldiers, and despite the raised rifles the British were no Nazis. So the passengers ignored the orders, knelt down, and gave comfort and water to the weakest of their own.

Eventually, the army commander, a self-important diminutive man called Lieutenant Colonel Pickford, roared up to the dock in a roofless military car. He stood up in the well of the passenger side, and turned to address the group. There was a babel of languages among the refugees but English was rare. To the predominantly German, Hungarian or Russian speakers, his words were gibberish. Judita, however, understood every word. And in that moment she was torn. Her training told her to remain quiet, unnoticed, unremarkable. To blend in and
be nondescript. But her time on the boat with these desperate people compelled her to speak and calm their rising fear and panic. She began to whisper a translation into German for those standing closest her. Then into Hungarian, then Russian.

‘He's saying that we're illegal immigrants who have violated international laws by travelling to British mandate Palestinian waters without approval. Because we're illegal, we'll be taken to an internment camp and processed. From there we may be sent to another country in the Mediterranean, or else sent back to where we came from.'

The men and women standing around her looked at Judita in horror. But she continued with her translation, as Colonel Pickford, bellowing through a megaphone, continued to shout at the refugees.

‘Men and women will be separated and sent to different camps for processing. Children will accompany their mothers. This will happen immediately. This is a naval dockside and needed by the British navy for the war effort . . .'

As she finished the translation a dozen armed British soldiers walked towards the huddle of refugees, their rifles pointing at them from waist height, and began barking further orders. Judita lowered her gaze and shrank into the crowd, hoping she didn't stand out. She had been carefully prepared for the journey, her NKVD handlers believing the best way to make connection with the Jewish rebel groups would be to arrive as a refugee with a clear backstory validated by fellow passengers. And yet for all her carefully rehearsed story, Judita could not physically hide the fact that she had not suffered through the horrors of Nazi Europe: she was healthy, her skin not drained of colour like all of the other people on board. Conscious of this, she pulled her scarf tighter around her head and shoulders.

From either translation or inference, the refugees now largely understood what they had to do and most of the men and women
began to separate. They picked up their battered suitcases or bundles of possessions tied together in tablecloths or sheets, and followed a soldier away from the dock, forming long lines. Some women, however, screamed in their native language that they wouldn't leave their husbands, and when this happened the Tommies moved in and forcibly separated them with the barrel of their rifles. The refugees were then marched to waiting trucks, where they were loaded in to be driven inland to a camp that had been created months earlier to deal with the increasing numbers of illegal Jewish immigrants arriving in Palestine.

As the people climbed on to the trucks, Judita moved from where she'd been standing outside of the group, translating the colonel's instructions, and fell into line at the end of the queue of women. In front of Judita, an elderly woman was panicked in confusion and slumped to her knees. Judita knelt beside her and asked her where she was from, first in Russian and when that received only blank looks, she tried German and then Czech. The final language flared recognition in the old woman's eyes and she clung to Judita's arm as she was helped to her feet. Czech refugees were rare on this boat and the woman was travelling alone.