Red Winter

5

Everything about her demeanour had made me think she was a man. Only when she spoke did I realise that her imposing profile had deceived me. She had the almost lazy bearing of someone who had nothing to lose; someone for whom violence was a part of life. A certainty. And when she took a step into the church, the muzzle of her rifle pointed at the floor, she looked comfortable and without fear. I’d seen young men hold a rifle with trepidation, even after training, but this woman held it like she meant to use it.

‘What have you got there?’ She inclined her head to one side. ‘Behind the seat? You’re armed?’

‘I am.’

She nodded as if she had expected as much. ‘And you killed him?’ She glanced at Alek, lying in front of the altar.

‘Not really.’

The woman studied me, perhaps looking for lies, but it was hard to see her expression. She had the advantage of the light behind her, so her face was in shadow, like a closed book.

She came further into the church, taking another two or three steps along the aisle between the seats, until she was no more than an arm’s length from me. At this range, her rifle would be of little use to her. We were so close that the length of the barrel would prohibit her from raising it enough to shoot at me.

Despite the cold, my fingers sweated on the pistol grip, and my skin felt clammy, but I was ready to use it if I had to.

‘You’re alone?’ she asked.

I didn’t answer.

‘You are alone,’ she said. ‘We’ve been watching the village since first light.’

‘We?’

The woman nodded and raised her hand to point behind me.

For a moment I didn’t move. I wondered if it was a trick to make me look away. I used to do something similar with Misha and Pavel at dinnertime, a ruse to steal food from their plates. When someone spoke from behind me, though, I knew it was no trick.

‘We’ve been right through the village from the other end.’ The voice betrayed some tension in the speaker. A touch of barely restrained hostility. ‘As soon as we saw you leave the house with him. Where’s everyone else?’

I turned to see another woman standing behind me and guessed she must have come in through the back while I was watching the other. I cursed myself for having been so easily duped.

‘You’ve been following me?’ I wondered if Alek and I had been right when we’d thought there had been eyes watching us in the forest.

‘Not following, watching.’

‘Where are you from? Not here.’

‘No. Not here.’

This woman was slight in build, wearing trousers and a long winter coat. At this angle, I could see her more clearly than the other woman: the light was on her face. She wore a dark lambswool hat, like a Kuban Cossack might wear, pulled low on her forehead with just a hint of blonde hair hanging below its rim, the fringe cut short and straight. Cold blue eyes gave away none of her thoughts, and her angular, handsome features were set in a permanent frown. Brow furrowed, lips pursed tight, jaw clenched, she had the appearance of someone whose expression was a product of the experiences she had lived through.

She wore a rifle slung over her shoulder and held a commissar’s pistol in her hand, but there wasn’t any surprise in seeing armed women any more than seeing armed men. Some of the strongest soldiers I’d known had been women.

I looked for any evidence of affiliation but saw nothing to suggest which army or ideology held her allegiance, other than the pistol in her hand.

‘Where did you steal that?’ I asked. ‘Or has it always been yours?’ If it belonged to her, and she had shed her uniform, then perhaps she had been in the Red Army, like me.

‘Mine?’ She shook her head. ‘No. I don’t remember where it came from.’ But I didn’t believe her. If it wasn’t hers, then she had taken it from a body – either one she had found or one she had killed – and that was something she’d remember.

I looked down at my revolver, sensing the woman’s tension as I turned it. ‘No reason for anyone to get hurt,’ I said, returning the weapon to my pocket. I had no intention of giving it up to them, but I wanted them to see I was not a threat. They had me at a disadvantage, so it was in my interest to give them the impression of submission without appearing weak.

‘I agree,’ she said, sitting on the altar step in front of me, resting her forearms on her knees so that the pistol dangled between them.

The woman behind me moved away, finding a distance more suited to the long weapon she was carrying. She’d done her job distracting me and now her duty was to protect the woman in front of me.

‘So you’re in charge?’ I said to the woman in the lambswool hat.

‘In charge of what?’

I shrugged. ‘The rifle behind me. Any others you might have outside. How many do you have outside?’

‘Who are you?’ she asked.

‘No one.’

She smiled, but it didn’t change her face much. It didn’t touch her eyes; it was just a movement of her mouth, those full lips turning up at the corners, a hint of teeth too white for a common peasant. ‘Just like me. No one.’ She inclined her head toward Alek. ‘And him? When my comrade asked if you killed him, you said, “Not really.” What did you mean by that?’

‘I meant no.’ I looked down at Alek and wished I could have done more for him. It had been my decision to run like that, even though he was hurt. It was the best time, the only way to make it work, but if we had gone back, things might have been different. Alek might still have been alive. ‘He’s my brother,’ I said.

‘In arms?’

‘In blood.’ I looked at the woman. ‘My name is Kolya. This is Alek.’

‘Kolya.’

I nodded.

‘Then you can call me Tanya. And this is Lyudmila.’ No patronymic. No surname.

With the pistol in her left hand, she reached into her pocket and took out a small leather pouch. She contemplated it, realising she needed both hands, so rested the pistol beside her and opened the pouch. She removed a cigarette paper, which she put on her thigh to keep steady while she took a pinch of dry tobacco between finger and thumb. To my eyes, her fingers and hands seemed too delicate to be those of a farmer’s wife or a soldier, but they looked firm enough when they were wrapped round the handle of her pistol.

There was something precious about the softness in the bend of her wrist when she sprinkled the tobacco along the paper, and when she had rolled the cigarette and licked it to stick it down, she tore the corner from an empty booklet of papers and made a small tube with the scrap. She inserted this makeshift filter into the end of the cigarette in an odd and affected quirk I’d never seen before. There was something about her I couldn’t quite put my finger on. She was somehow different from the usual peasants and soldiers I dealt with.

She put the cigarette in the corner of her mouth and was in the process of replacing the pouch in her pocket when she stopped. She looked up and then leaned across, offering it to me.

‘Thank you,’ I said, taking it.

Alek and I had been travelling alone for close to three weeks. The journey had been long and difficult. Some days, we hadn’t moved at all, only daring to travel at night through the forest, when it was almost impossible to navigate. Other days, Alek had been too weak to go far. We had come a long way from our unit after what happened, living on the sparse supplies we had, bolstered by whatever we could hunt and forage. We kept to the forest as much as possible, avoiding the roads and the search parties that used them. The tobacco had run out after the first week.

I rolled one for myself, and when I handed the pouch back, she struck a match on the step and leaned across to offer me the flame. I glanced at the weapon by her side, thinking I could take it. I could kill her in a blink, but there was a rifle trained on my back. I was quick, but maybe not quick enough, and I wasn’t inclined to fight right now. I was here to bury my brother.

I accepted the light, and the first drag on the cigarette was like a blessing. I realised how low I had fallen for it to be such a singular pleasure. Other than the warmth from the oven last night, it was the closest thing I’d had to comfort for longer than I cared to remember.

I tipped my head back, blew the smoke at the ceiling and stayed that way for a while. I closed my eyes and ignored the women as if they had never been there. Then I remembered Alek lying at my feet. He would have enjoyed this moment, and an image came to me of the times we would go to the lake at dawn to fish because it was the best time, and we would sit in silence, smoking and listening to the water washing the shore. What happened to Mama didn’t stop us; we couldn’t allow it to. The lake had ugly memories, but it had beautiful ones too. Memories of Alek. Memories of being there in the summer with Marianna.

The lake gave life just as it took it away.

‘Where’s everybody else?’ Lyudmila asked. ‘There’s no one here.’

‘You tell me.’ The memories faded into the grey light.

‘What have you done with them?’ Her insistence suggested she didn’t know what had happened here, and I had seen so many lies and betrayals that it would take a good act to fool me. My training and experience had shaped me into not just a soldier capable of great cruelty but also into a reasonable reader of intentions.

‘Nothing. This is my home. I don’t know where—’

‘Are you a soldier?’ Tanya asked.

I opened my eyes and looked at her.

‘Which colour are you?’ The pistol was in her hand again. The barrel was pointing to the floor, but all she had to do was move it a hair’s breadth and she could put holes right through me. It was not a threat, but she was ready for whatever might come.

‘Which colour are you?’ I asked.

Tanya showed me the non-smile again and shook her head. ‘It doesn’t work that way.’

‘I’m on my side,’ I said. ‘Yours. No one’s.’

‘But you’re a soldier. All men are soldiers, aren’t they? For one side or another.’

‘Red or White makes no difference to me,’ I said. ‘Nor Black, or Blue, Green.’ There were too many colours to keep track of. The Black Army of anarchists in Ukraine, spontaneous Green armies rising out of the peasantry to protect their lands and livestock, and the Blues spawned from the uprising in Tambov.

‘I don’t care about those things,’ I said. ‘I just want to bury my brother.’

‘He’s really your brother? Your real brother?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, smoke encircling her face. ‘Where are you from?’

‘I already told you. This is my home. But what about you?’ I asked. ‘Where are you from? How do I know you didn’t have something to do with what’s happened here?’

‘What has happened here?’ Tanya looked at the woman behind her and there was a flash of something difficult to read in her expression. Recognition? Fear? Perhaps both.

‘You know something?’ I asked.

‘About what?’

‘About where everyone has gone,’ I said. ‘About the dead man lying back there in the forest.’

‘Dead man?’ She stood and I could see from her reaction that she didn’t know about Galina’s husband. ‘Show me.’

I dragged on the thin cigarette and glanced at the pistol in her hand. ‘You don’t need that.’

‘Tell me where the man is and—’

‘Put that away,’ I said, ‘and let me bury my brother.’

‘No, you need to—’

‘Let me bury my brother,’ I insisted. ‘Then I’ll take you.’ I was eager to press on too, but the thought of what I might find was unsettling me, and I had to honour my brother; I couldn’t leave him here like this.

Tanya considered the pistol for a moment before she looked up, nodded once and holstered it. When she did that, I knew our dynamic had shifted. I had something she wanted and she had just complied with my demand, soft as it was. She was less of a threat to me than I had first thought.

I turned to see that the woman behind me had followed Tanya’s lead and lowered her rifle to point at the floor.

‘The ground will be hard,’ Lyudmila said, ‘for a burial.’

‘I have an axe. It won’t take long.’ I stood up, making Tanya lean back and reach towards the pistol once more.

I raised both hands in front of me. ‘Please. Trust me.’

‘Trust is a hard thing to come by these days,’ she said.

In some ways, it was good to have the company. Galina had been too touched by madness to offer any companionship, and Alek had been incoherent for much of our journey. His wound had festered and I had done what I could, but it hadn’t been enough. I couldn’t help but blame myself for that. Perhaps if we had stayed with the unit, our medic, Nevsky, could have saved him. There might have been something he could do.

‘I’m not a threat to you,’ I said. I needed to get back to the lake and look for my wife and sons. I had to find some clue of what had happened to them.

‘Where are you going to go?’ she asked. ‘After you bury him. Back to your unit?’

I ignored her and went to my brother.

‘No. I think you’re avoiding that. You’re a deserter.’

It was the first time that word had been thrown at me – a word laced with betrayal and disgrace – and it cut me more deeply than I expected. I knew what I was, and deserter wasn’t the worst of it, but I was reminded of the men I had hunted for the same crime, men whose only real offence was to want something better.

I clamped the cigarette between my teeth and the smoke stung my eyes as I crouched beside my brother to put my hands under his arms, turning him over and pulling him across my shoulder. I struggled with him, wishing I were stronger, wishing he were alive, wishing so many things, but none of it helped me and I felt myself weakening. My brother was dead, and my family was lost, and I was alone.

‘You came home and there’s no one here, is that it? I want you to tell me what happened.’

‘Later.’ I grunted as my strength failed me and I laid Alek on the floor and sat beside his body, trying to forget the women were there. I bit hard on the cigarette and fought back the shame and the guilt and the fear that threatened to overwhelm me. I had no time for it. I couldn’t afford it. I had a job to do and I needed to do it quickly. I would finish my duty to my brother and then I would do my duty to my family.

I steeled myself once more and prepared to lift my brother again.

‘Let me help you.’ Tanya came round me and crouched by Alek’s bare feet.

‘I can do it.’

‘I know. But it’s easier with two.’

She pushed back her hat and looked at me through the hair that fell across her brow, and in that fraction of time, I had a glimpse of the woman she might have been before the war. The look in her eye softened to one more sympathetic, as if she had read my emotions. The frown faded, her jaw softened, and I saw what might be the real Tanya rather than the mask she wore. She wasn’t beautiful, but there was something attractive in her features – the way her lips bowed, the upturn of her nose, the sharpness of her cheekbones.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

We carried Alek through the church, to the plot where the people of Belev had always buried their dead. A small area surrounded by a failing fence and a thicket of trees that shaded the cemetery in the summer. Picking through the simple wooden grave markers, we shuffled to a place close to the back and put Alek down.

In the field on the other side of the fence, two horses grazed at the wintry grass and it surprised me I hadn’t heard them approach. The women must have kept to the softest ground and I had been inattentive, but their tactics would have left prints in the frost that could be found and followed by anyone who might be tracking me. I’d seen no concrete evidence yet, but the constant sense of being trailed refused to leave me, and two riders on horseback could easily be mistaken for Alek and me.

I stretched my back and took a last drag on the cigarette before pinching away the glowing end and putting it in my pocket. It would be greedy to smoke it all at once, so I would keep the rest for another time.

‘This is where my parents are buried.’ I pointed at the two markers in front of us. They were simple, like all the others; just wooden orthodox crosses painted white, faded and cracked by the weather. If the markers were to be removed, there would be almost no sign at all that anyone was buried here.

Lyudmila, the woman with the rifle, had followed us into the cemetery with her weapon in one hand and the axe in the other. I removed my coat and jacket, took the axe from her and began to break the earth beside Mama and Papa, swinging the heavy tool backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.

As I worked and the women watched, the sky blackened, and when a rumbling cracked in the distance, Tanya looked across at her comrade. ‘Thunder?’

‘Or artillery?’

‘Thunder,’ I told them. ‘Just thunder.’

By the time I had shovelled out the loose soil and dug a grave deep enough for my brother, the first of the sleet began to fall. Down and down.

Thick and cold, it pelted us, so Tanya and Lyudmila went to the overhang at the back of the church and sheltered from the worst of it, while I struggled to put Alek in the ground. Their sympathy did not stretch as far as allowing themselves to be soaked, but I would have done the same. Cold and wet was no way to be at this time of year, and if they were going back out there, on the road, it could mean a long, slow death.

The black dirt loosened into a dark rain as I threw it over my brother, showering across his lifeless body, and I watched as he disappeared from the world. The patter of the soil on his body was the saddest sound I had ever heard, and the hardest shovelful was the one that hid his face. It settled into his nostrils, his eyes, on his lips and across his pale skin. And then Alek was gone.

I put on my jacket and picked up my coat and satchel, walking back through the crosses and memorials towards the women.

‘I’ve nothing to mark his grave,’ I said, as the sleet fell around me.

‘That can’t be helped,’ Tanya replied.

I nodded and stopped to stare at the place where I had buried my brother. He was gone now, but would always be with me.

‘Now I’ll show you what you want to see,’ I said, turning from the grave and walking away without looking back. ‘Then I’m going to find my wife and sons.’ Perhaps I would have to bury them too.

I had entered the church before Tanya called after me, but I didn’t stop. I had done my duty to my brother now, and I wanted to get back to the lake, to the forest, to follow the call of the crows. I had delayed too long already.

‘Hold on,’ Tanya said, following behind me.

I passed through the church, putting on my coat, and was close to the front door when Tanya came alongside me, walking quickly.

‘What do you mean about finding your wife and sons?’

I continued out into the empty road.

‘What did you mean?’ she asked again.

‘Come with me if you want to see.’