Red Winter

13

When Lev came back to the table, he poured us another drink.

‘To your daughter,’ I said, raising my cup. ‘You’re a lucky man.’

‘And to your sons.’ He raised his own and drank with me.

I drained the vodka and put my hands on the table to look at them, seeing bloodstains that were no longer there. I was reminded of the wicked things I had made these hands do, in days when I had been blinded by what I thought was the righteousness of my actions. Now there were other things to fill my thoughts, things that crammed into my mind, pushing everything else aside. Never had I felt such fear. Not in fighting a hundred battles or witnessing countless deaths had I felt anything close to the dread and apprehension in not knowing what had happened to my wife and sons, not knowing where they really were. Perhaps they were even dead already.

He likes to drown the women.

Except I could not allow that idea to poison my thoughts. They were dark enough already without that to cloud them further.

‘What’s your story, Kolya?’ He spoke quietly so as not to disturb his daughter. ‘You seem like a good man to me.’

I looked up at him and forced a smile. ‘No one is ever quite what they seem.’

‘Well… a good man is a good man.’

I liked his sentiment but wasn’t sure if I agreed. ‘There’s good and bad in all of us.’ I ran a hand across my face as if to wash away the day’s events. It felt as if I had been awake for weeks. ‘It’s finding the right balance that’s hard.’

‘You look tired,’ he said. ‘How long have you been travelling?’

‘Longer than I want to think about. How about you?’

‘The same. We’ve been here a few days, though. It’s a good place to stay.’

‘But you haven’t seen anyone?’

‘No one.’

The dog grunted beside me and scratched himself.

‘How about two women on horseback?’ I asked. ‘Have you seen them?’

He shook his head. ‘No one at all. The road is further east; we can’t see much of anything from here.’

‘Which means no one can see this farm from the road.’

‘It works well for us,’ he said.

Perhaps Tanya and Lyudmila had passed along that road, and Koschei before them, but for now they were out of sight, out of reach, and might as well have been across the sea in some country where the revolution was just words in a newspaper.

‘So how did you find it?’ I asked.

Lev pulled an empty chair towards him and put his feet on it. ‘We were lucky, I suppose. We kept away from the roads, spotted this in the distance and came closer to see what was here. We were hungry and cold, so it was worth taking the risk.’ It was his turn to look down at his hands now, making me wonder what he had made them do.

‘And it was empty?’ My words caused him to glance up at me, but he didn’t hold my gaze. His eyes shifted to look at the pich where Anna was sleeping, then back to his hands again.

His mouth tightened and he swallowed. ‘Yes. Empty.’ He took the bottle and poured again, splashing a few drops on the table. ‘Who knows what happened to whoever lived here, but they hadn’t been here for a while – months, I’d say. Maybe a husband fighting, a wife who couldn’t look after a farm alone.’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

‘Who knows?’ I agreed, lifting the cup to my lips. ‘To our children,’ I said, knocking it back and feeling it burn my throat.

‘Our children.’ Lev drank it and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand without putting the cup on the table. He stared into the bottom of it.

‘And the horse?’ I asked.

‘The horse is mine.’ This time he looked me right in the eye and I knew it was the truth.

‘But you’re not a blacksmith.’

He placed the cup on the table and picked dirt from under his fingernail. ‘No, not a blacksmith, but we always had horses. My father always had them.’

‘So you’re… ?’

‘I’m a teacher,’ he said. ‘At least, I was a teacher. Mathematics. You think I always looked like this? Like a beggar?’ He swept a hand towards his chest in a false flourish, but when he noticed them shaking, he clasped them together to make them stop. ‘I was always so smart, so tidy. I wore a good suit and—’ He stopped himself as if he were suddenly aware of our differences. A teacher telling a revolutionary how well dressed he used to be. ‘I don’t know what I am anymore.’ He hung his head. ‘The things I’ve had to do to take care of Anna.’

‘I don’t care what you had to do to get here,’ I said.

‘Not even if I killed a man?’

‘Is that what you’ve done?’ I watched him closely, wondering what might have driven Lev to kill, but it didn’t take much to work it out. I had seen how he loved his daughter.

‘I’m a teacher, for God’s sake.’ He tightened both hands into fists. ‘A teacher. And look at me now. Stealing and begging. Dirty and cold and hungry. I used to be smart and respectable and… I never hurt anyone, had never even hit a man until…’ He shook his head.

I waited for him to go on, thought about pressing him to tell me more, but it was better to leave him. It didn’t matter what he had done, and if he wanted to talk about it, he would do it when he was ready.

‘I was always a soldier,’ I said. ‘Well, it feels that way. I thought that was respectable too, but not anymore. Not really. I joined to fight the Great War, and when that was finished, I wanted a better country for Marianna and the boys, so I continued to fight. For them, at first, and then for me, because it was, I don’t know, it was what I did. Sometimes it’s hard to leave the path you’re on.’

Lev wiped his eyes with his fingers, leaving damps streaks in the dirt on his face. Streaks that glistened in the lamplight. ‘And now? Are you still a soldier?’

‘Now I’m a father. A husband.’ I thought for a moment. ‘And a soldier still.’

‘But you left the army?’

‘Deserted.’ The word still felt wrong on my tongue and left a bitter taste in my mouth. ‘I’ve always believed that was a bad thing. Cowardly.’ There were many deserters who had been executed because I once held that belief so strongly, but I didn’t tell him that. ‘Now, though, all that matters is finding my family.’ I told Lev about what I had found in Belev, what Galina said she had done and what she had called the man she stabbed. I had thought it was the ramblings of an insane old woman, but then Tanya and Lyudmila had come and they had known the name ‘Koschei’ too.

And I told him about the star branded into men’s skin, just as he had seen himself.

‘So you think this man Koschei has taken them?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t find them, so I have to believe that, otherwise…’ I smiled a melancholy smile and turned the cup in my hand. ‘Otherwise I’ll need a lot more of this.’ I showed him my empty cup.

‘Your sons,’ he said, refilling us. ‘Are they fighting age?’

‘Depends on your idea of fighting age. Pavel is just twelve…’

‘The same age as Anna.’

‘…and Misha is fourteen, but I’ve known armies take boys as young as ten.’

Lev closed his eyes and shook his head at the sadness of it. ‘And if they don’t take them to fight, they want to send them away to labour camps, right?’

I put my head back and closed my eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to… I was thinking aloud. It was stupid of me.’

‘It’s all right.’ I waved away the comment with the back of my hand. ‘I’ve thought of that already.’

‘So who do you think he is?’ he asked.

‘Well, he might seem like a ghost, but I’m sure he’s no fairy tale.’ I concentrated on the darkness behind my eyelids as I spoke to him. ‘He uses the name to frighten people maybe, but I’ve seen what he leaves in his wake, so he’s real enough. A man.’

‘But who?’

‘The exact man, I have no idea, but the type of man?’ I looked at him. ‘You already know.’

Lev sat back and ran a hand over his head. ‘Chekists?’ he whispered.

I said nothing.

He cleared his throat and stared into the top corner of the room behind me. He couldn’t hide what he was thinking. ‘The worst of humanity.’ He said the words with a quietness that made me shiver. Even here, just the two of us, he was afraid to speak ill of them aloud, such was their reputation.

With Lenin’s sanction, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission – the Cheka – was put together by Dzerzhinsky to combat those who would undermine the revolution. It was a political army to safeguard the toiling masses, the ordinary man, but after Kaplan tried to kill Lenin more than two years ago, Stalin recommended using the harsh tactics he had employed to crush counter-revolutionary resistance in Tsaritsyn. And so the Red Terror was born.

Landholders and the wealthy classes who refused to fall into line were the first targets, but the definition of wealth had become hazy and the Cheka units, made up of Communist leaders and former convicts and soldiers, were left as both police and executioner. Peasants were targeted as often as anyone else, and some units primed themselves on drugs and alcohol before raids, while others used artillery to bombard towns into dust. Dzerzhinsky himself said the units stood for organised terror, to keep the people under control, and with the peasant uprising in Tambov that started in August, the Chekists had been sent out with units to create that terror. They hunted deserters, burned villages, tortured peasants for refusing to give up their crops and gassed rebels who took refuge in the forests. They took young men for recruitment and deported thousands to labour camps across the country. Cheka agents were even secreted in Red Army units to report on their comrades. They were darker and more frightening than any fairy-tale monster.

They were worse than devils.

Lev poured us another drink without speaking. It was as if he was giving us both a moment to deal with the thought of such atrocity, giving me a moment to compose myself after voicing my concern for my family.

When our cups were full, he sat back and cleared his throat. ‘So you deserted before you knew what happened in your village? What made you leave?’ He didn’t ask what unit I had come from.

‘This isn’t a war anymore; it’s just people killing people and I didn’t want to be a part of it. I had to go home.’ He didn’t need to know the rest of it, the real reason.

‘So you ran? Just like that? Don’t the Bolsheviks hunt deserters?’

‘It was early morning,’ I said. ‘We entered a village to… Anyway, we were ambushed by fighters.’

‘You don’t need to tell me.’

‘My brother was wounded.’ I put a hand to my stomach without even thinking about it, remembering the place where Alek had been hit. ‘I tried to make it look as if we were killed in the fighting – swapped our uniforms with men who were already dead, left our papers in their pockets and… it was mayhem. Screaming, shooting, grenades exploding in the houses. People dying. It was all so… so out of control. I couldn’t do it anymore. I had to get away. Undressing the dead peasants was easy, but getting them into our uniforms was hard. We left them in a ditch just outside the village we were fighting in, more or less where they died, but we had to make them unrecognisable. No one could know.’ Of all the things I’d had to do, that was the hardest. Bringing the rock down on them again and again. Over and over. Rubbing them from the world. I pushed the image away and reached for the bottle.

‘What made you do it?’

‘So many things.’ I thought for a moment, trying to put it into words. Alek and I hadn’t ever voiced it so bluntly to one another. For us, it was a succession of utterances, of exchanged glances, of silent understandings. We didn’t dare discuss it, because the illegality and wrongness of it were so ingrained in us. We had punished men simply for thinking such things and knew what would happen to us if we expressed the thoughts aloud.

‘All the killing,’ I said. ‘All the suffering. All the terrible things I’d done.’ I glanced at Lev but couldn’t look him in the eye. I had terrorised people like him. ‘I didn’t know myself anymore. I was…’ I shook my head and let the thought trail away. ‘My brother and I went home six months ago. It was… so good to be there, with Marianna and my sons. Things were hard for them, just like anyone, and Marianna was so strong, the way she took care of Misha and Pavel, but I should have been there for them. That was my place. Being with them reminded me of that.’

‘Marianna persuaded you?’ Lev asked.

‘Without needing to. I felt it. Her need for me, and mine for her and my sons. It was so good to feel something other than the numbness that I had once forced myself to feel but now came like second nature. Like I can be two people. And when Misha, my oldest, started talking about how he wanted to join the fight, I saw…’ I looked away and tried to find the right words. ‘I saw a never-ending war. Children of fourteen taking up rifles and doing the things I had done. It was too much.’

‘And that was the first time you considered getting out?’

‘Not really. The idea had always been there, but I suppose I was too afraid even to think it in case I gave myself away, so I crushed it like I crushed every other feeling. Then Misha asked to join Alek and me when we went back to our unit and I remember looking across the table at my brother and that’s when we knew. If there was a single moment that brought everything into focus, it was that one. I couldn’t take my son into that world to see what I saw. I couldn’t even bear the thought of him knowing the things I’d done. And there, with my family around me, my eyes opened to what really mattered.’

Lev remained silent, but his expression told me that he understood, and when he reached across the table to pat my arm in a simple gesture of sympathy, the warmth I took from that small connection threatened to choke me.

‘If they thought we were dead, they wouldn’t think twice about us.’ My voice cracked as I spoke, but I cleared my throat and composed myself. ‘That’s what we hoped. But once we were in the forest and we finally talked about what we were going to do, things became so complicated. Maybe we couldn’t just go home and be with Marianna and the boys. Maybe someone would come looking for us. Maybe someone would denounce us. Maybe we would have to take them and leave, find somewhere else to live. Alek’s wound made things worse and… there were too many possibilities.’

‘But you had to try.’

‘We decided we’d get to Belev and watch from the forest and make a decision then. Perhaps take Marianna and the boys out under cover of darkness, find somewhere to go. Anywhere.’ I looked up at Lev. ‘Like you did.’

Lev nodded.

‘But my village was empty and my family was gone, and now I’m not sure if our deception worked,’ I said, filling our cups, hands trembling. ‘There have been times, in the forest, when I thought I was being followed.’

Immediately Lev’s eyes went to Anna and I could see his concern.

He watched her for a moment, then took the last cigarette from the packet and lit it, shaking the match and placing it carefully on the table. He sucked the smoke into his lungs, then leaned forward to pass it to me. ‘That’s why you kept looking across the field. You think they’ll follow you here?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know. I was in the forest all day; it would be difficult to track me.’

‘But we should leave.’ His worry was clear to me. ‘It’s not safe for us here anymore?’

‘Maybe I imagined it.’ It was the most I could say to reassure him.

‘You’re not afraid?’

‘I’m always afraid.’

He nodded in agreement, and for a while we sat in silence as we shared the last cigarette and drank to families and peace and to not being found.

‘We ran away from the fighting in Tambov,’ Lev said, wiping his lips on his sleeve. ‘With the war and then the uprising, it was like the world had gone mad. Nowhere was safe, and we had nothing left after the requisitions. We joked that the chickens had been drafted into the war, but it wasn’t funny. Not really. Anyway, I had a daughter to protect and thought if we kept off the roads, we could get to Moscow and—’

‘Why Moscow? That’s a long way.’

He shrugged. ‘I thought there might be work for a teacher or… I don’t know. Maybe I never really believed we’d get there. We just had to get away. Then we found this place and decided to stay for a while. There’s food. Shelter.’

‘And the man you killed?’ I asked. ‘He was here? You want to tell me about it?’

He looked down at the table.

‘Did Anna see? Does she know?’

‘It was about two weeks ago.’ He continued to stare at the table. ‘We were coming through a village and some people tried to pull us off the horse. We hadn’t been on the road long and were looking for shelter, but soldiers had been there and the people were hungry. They just wanted something to eat and… one of them grabbed Anna’s leg and she was shouting for me to do something. More and more of them came, people crowding round us. They were going to pull us down, getting nasty, calling us selfish, and Anna was screaming and I was afraid and…’ He shook his head. ‘I didn’t know what else to do. I shot him. Right here.’ He looked up at me and patted his chest. ‘I didn’t wait to see what happened. The people stood back and we rode away.’

‘Maybe he lived,’ I tried to reassure him.

‘No.’

‘What about Anna?’

‘She never mentions it. I tried to talk to her about it, but she won’t. Maybe it’s better that way.’

I reached across the table and put my hand on his arm. I didn’t know what to say to him. I tried to remember how I had felt the first time I had taken a life, but it was so long ago and so much had come between that I felt nothing.

Lev forced himself to smile. ‘I did it for Anna.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘That’s the only reason to do something like that – for our children.’

I knew that I would do anything to bring mine home. Anything at all. Even if it meant I would burn for eternity.