The Child Thief

24

When I woke, I was in darkness. For a second I thought I was blind and there was a brief moment of panic before I saw the faint light sliding beneath the door. There were voices too, quiet but insistent, and someone’s hands were on me, but they weren’t there to inflict pain.

‘He’s waking up, I think.’ It sounded like Kostya, the man who was imprisoned for making a joke about our great leader.

‘I’ m fine,’ I said, pushing the hand away, sitting up and moving back to lean against the wall. ‘Leave me.’

‘You’ve been asleep for a while.’

‘How long?’

‘It’s hard to say.’

‘Hours? A day?’

‘Much of the day. At least I think it’s day. They brought food a while ago, and I think that usually comes in the morning.’

I touched the side of my face, feeling the split in the skin, the hardened crust of blood. There was a graze across my forehead that was rough and dry, and my head was pounding like I’d drunk a whole bottle of horilka myself.

‘Here.’ I felt a hand on my own and I tried to pull away, but the grip tightened.

‘Please,’ Kostya said. ‘Take this.’

I remained tense for a second, untrusting, then relaxed and allowed Kostya to take my hand, open my fingers and touch something to them. Something metallic.

‘Drink it,’ he said.

I took hold of the cup and lifted it to my nose to sniff it.

‘Water,’ Kostya said. ‘It’s a little stale, but it’s water.’

‘Where…’ I began to ask, but my mouth was dry and my tongue was swollen. My lips were thick and fat from where the policeman had hit me.

‘They give us water once a day,’ said Dimitri Markovich. ‘We all save a mouthful to make it last. There’s a little bread too. Take it.’

‘This is all of it,’ Kostya said.

‘I can’t—’

‘Drink,’ he said, and I felt his hands touching me again, finding the cup and pushing it towards my mouth. ‘You need it.’

I put the metal cup to my lips and tipped it, the warm liquid moistening my mouth. I kept it there, savouring the feeling, then took it away, not wanting to drink it all at once. There wasn’t much more than a drop left.

I fumbled the crust of bread that Kostya pressed into my hand, feeling its hard edges, the softer interior, and I remembered I hadn’t eaten for a long time. I’d taken the child thief’s parcel, thinking it would be my next meal, but the thought of it now filled me with revulsion. That small piece of meat wrapped in paper.

‘Eat,’ Kostya said, touching my hand. ‘Eat.’

I pushed aside the image that dirtied my thoughts. I pictured not the flesh nor the wound, but the girl. Dariya was safe and she was alive; that’s what was important. And if I was to have any chance of helping her I needed to be strong. I needed to eat.

I bit off a small piece of bread with my front teeth and tried not to feel the guilt of taking the last of the food and water.

I wanted to see the faces of the men who had given me everything they had. Men who knew nothing about me and yet offered everything. And it struck me that in these hard times there were small moments of kindness which lifted us above the filth and the death. With these tiny acts, we were still human, still able to have faith in one another. There was still something good left in the world.

‘Thank you,’ I said to the darkness. I drank again and somewhere outside I heard a garmoshka begin to play. The music went on for a few bars, a melancholy tune, and then someone began to sing. A deep voice, the words sung in Russian.

‘Always this song,’ said Dimitri. ‘He always plays this song.’

‘To stop us from sleeping,’ said Kostya.

‘His awful Russian songs.’

‘Russians. They’re all drunkards and thieves,’ said Yuri.

I let the water slip down my throat and I leaned my head back on the wall and listened to the song. A Russian folk song, about a man imprisoned for telling the truth. He escapes his prison one dark night and comes to Lake Baikal, where he takes a fisherman’s boat and sings a sad song as he crosses the lake to his mother. When he reaches the furthest shore he embraces his mother and asks for his father and his brother. But his father is long dead and buried beneath the damp earth, and his brother is in chains in Siberia.

When it was finished there was silence for just a few moments, probably for someone to take a drink of vodka, and then the music began again, this time a faster tune, someone clapping along.

Inside our prison a quiet voice began to sing ‘Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished’ – the anthem of what was, for a short time after the revolution, the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The song had been banned ten years before by the Soviet regime, but many still knew it by heart. Evgeni’s voice was weak and hoarse and almost drowned by the Russian song outside, but I heard the words: ‘Ukraine has not yet perished. The glory and the freedom.’

Kostya joined his brother, mumbling the words. There was no hearty bellowing of the song, just a jumbled pride and defiance, no one daring to sing too loudly.

‘Still upon us, brave brother, fate shall smile.’

I had heard it sung during the war and even afterwards, more recently, around the oak that stood in the centre of Vyriv. The oak that had seen too few good summers and too many bad winters.

‘Our enemies will vanish like dew in the sun.’

The oak which had borne the awful fruit of Dimitri’s mob.

‘We too shall rule in our country.’

Their singing was quiet – barely more than a whisper – but outside the garmoshka had stopped.

‘Soul and body we will lay down for our freedom.’

Then a loud banging on the door. ‘Do the counter-revolutionaries want to stand naked in the snow?’ It was the slurred voice of Sergei Artemevich Lermentov.

The singing stopped and there was silence.

‘That’s what I thought,’ Lermentov said to the dead wood. ‘That’s exactly what I thought.’

‘I don’t know what he wants me to tell him,’ I said to Kostya.

‘What does it matter what you tell him? He isn’t investigating anything; he’s humiliating you, making you something less than human. The OGPU, their job is not to discover crimes but to arrest people.’

‘The one with the beard,’ I said. ‘He’s not OGPU. He’s more like a farmer. Is he from your village?’

‘Anatoly Ivanovich,’ Kostya said, and it occurred to me that it was Kostya who spoke more than the others. It was he who had given me the water. Either he was a planted informant or he had earned these men’s respect in some other way.

‘You know him?’ I asked.

‘Of course. We all know each other – those of us that are left here, anyway. Anatoly is a lazy man. He didn’t have any land of his own, he just worked for those who did. They paid him money when they had it, or sometimes in food.’

‘And now he sits at the table with the OGPU.’

‘Yes.’

‘But he doesn’t like it,’ I said. ‘I can see the shame in his eyes.’

‘He protects himself,’ Evgeni said.

‘He says the right things,’ Kostya added. ‘He uses the language they like. He talks of “workers” and “proletariat” and “kulaks”. He denounces those who ever employed him and sees them arrested for being wealthy farmers.’

‘And you?’ I asked. ‘You never employed him?’

Kostya laughed. ‘We never had enough land to need him. And the others, they had almost nothing either. A pig maybe, a few acres of land, and now they’re on their way to labour camps or lying in a trench in the forest. Who knows.’

‘The trench would be better,’ said Yuri. He was sitting close to me but hadn’t spoken for some time and I’d almost forgotten he was even there. There was something about him I didn’t like, something to do with the way he had questioned me about my past.

‘Better?’ I asked. ‘It’s better to be dead?’

‘Of course. Taken away in cattle trucks like animals, fed only salted fish and given nothing to drink, then dropped in some godless place where the cold is deeper and hungrier than it is here. Siberia maybe, the White Sea. There are places where people are made to work so hard and for so long that they cut off their own hands and feet just to get some rest.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Lermentov.’

‘Why are they doing this to us?’ Evgeni asked. ‘Why must they beat us and humiliate us?’

‘For a confession,’ said Yuri.

‘All they have to do is arrest us and send us away and be done with it. Why waste time with confessions?’

‘Maybe it makes this man Lermentov feel better,’ I said.

‘Feel better?’

‘He’s just doing his job. If he gets a confession, it probably makes it more legal for him. More right. Like he’s punishing a criminal instead of a man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

‘It makes no difference,’ Evgeni said. ‘Enough beating and we’ll tell them anything. Admit to anything. Denounce our own neighbours. And all we do is sit here and let them treat us like this.’

‘What else can we do?’ said Kostya.

‘We can tell them to fuck themselves,’ Dimitri shouted. ‘What have we done? I tried to help a little girl. A little girl. And now I’m what? A counter-revolutionary? An enemy of the state?’

‘Shouting does no good,’ Kostya said

‘At least it means they know what we think.’

‘They already know what we think,’ I said. ‘And that man out there – Lermentov – he’s probably just as afraid as we are. You think he’s exempt? They can put him on a train to Siberia just like they can put us on one. He does what he has to.’

‘You want us to feel sorry for him, Luka?’

‘No. I’m just telling you how it is.’

‘So we do nothing?’ Yuri asked. ‘We just wait to be deported?’

‘Put a gun in my hand and I’ll shoot him, but other than that…’ I let the words trail away and thought back to the moment on the road when the soldiers had approached me. I wished now that I had tried to do something – shot them from their horses and dragged their bodies away from the track. ‘I have to get out of here,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe it’s come to this. I shouldn’t be here. It’s not where I’m supposed to be.’

‘Where are you supposed to be?’ asked Yuri. ‘Out there with your sons?’

‘Yes. There must be a way to get out.’

‘There’s nothing,’ Kostya said. ‘No escape.’

I shook my head in the darkness and thought about my sons out there in the cold, wondering if they had followed my tracks to the village. There was a small part of me that hoped they would bring their rifles and shoot every one of the soldiers in this village; that they would hand me a pistol so I could put it against the head of this man Lermentov and spill his brains all over the snow and the dirt. But my sons were not soldiers, and I prayed they had turned around when they realised my fate. I prayed they had returned home to Natalia and Lara. I even allowed myself a vague smile as I imagined them arguing about what they were going to do. I pictured them outside the village, hidden among the trees, watching, discussing.

Viktor would want to fight while Petro would pull him back, try to make him see sense.

I closed my eyes and wished I could remember my last words to them. I tried to see their faces.

Still the music played outside in the church. Lermentov’s repertoire was a mixture of old folk songs and songs of the revolution and labour and the motherland, but it wasn’t long before he was playing the same tunes again. Every now and then there was a lull in the music and I could hear the murmur of voices talking, sometimes loud laughter, and I guessed the policeman had drunk most or all of the horilka I had taken from the cabin where the child thief lay dead. At least I had that satisfaction. The child thief would take no more children.

It was warm and close in the room and I felt sleep beginning to take me. I didn’t know how long I slept for, perhaps until night, perhaps not, it was impossible to tell, but I was roused by the sound of the door being unlocked.

The dim light crept in, and I braced myself for the hands that would drag me from this cell. I waited for the soldiers to grab me and pull me to my feet, but they came past me and went to Kostya.

They stooped to grip his thin shoulders, and when they lifted him, I saw how light my new friend was. The soldiers pulled him up with little effort and took him from the room, slamming the door closed behind them.

‘God help my brother,’ Evgeni said, the only words any of us spoke for some time.

Through the solid door I heard the muffled voices as they interrogated Kostya. I couldn’t make out any of the words, so it was still possible that he’d been put inside the cell to trick me, but any doubt was dismissed by the sound of Kostya’s beating.

When the interrogation was over and the church finally became quiet, I let out my breath as if I’d been holding it for the duration and waited for Kostya to be returned to us. But the door didn’t open again.

‘He was a good man,’ Evgeni said into the silence. ‘My brother was a good man.’

And when Lermentov began playing the garmoshka again, we knew Kostya would not be coming back.