Red Winter

27

We left the army behind us as they forged on to Dolinsk and we moved in the opposite direction.

‘Did they say where they were going?’ Tanya asked.

I looked back, but there was nothing behind us except the hoarfrost and the bruised sky streaked with wisps of the palest cloud. ‘Tambov. With the Whites gone, that’s their priority now.’

‘The Whites are gone?’ Tanya asked. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Pushed all the way down to Crimea,’ I said, ‘and across the sea. A man on a train told me.’

‘A train?’ Lyudmila asked. ‘What train?’

‘It’s a long story.’ I didn’t have the inclination to tell them anything. I didn’t mind the company – Alek used to say that a journey of a hundred miles was just a few steps with good company – but they wanted me to think they were holding back from me, so I intended to do the same.

‘And where did the rest of your party come from?’ Tanya looked at Anna.

When I had ridden away to speak to the Cossacks, Anna had kept her distance from Tanya and Lyudmila. I thought she might have taken to them, that, as women, she would have found them more sympathetic or more attractive somehow. I had expected her to want to be with them rather than with me, but that wasn’t the case. She had refused to join Tanya on her horse and had barely spoken to her when I wasn’t there.

‘That’s also a long story,’ I said. There was no good reason to make Anna relive what had happened to her. Tanya didn’t need to know, and she seemed to accept that. She nodded with a slow and thoughtful movement as she watched Anna, and there was a look in her face that I understood. She had children in her life too. Whether or not they were her own I didn’t know, and whether they were alive or dead I couldn’t tell, but the expression was soft and wistful, and there was sadness in her eyes. Wherever they were she missed them.

We covered some of the distance on foot, leading the animals and stopping from time to time to rest them, but other than that, we kept moving. The steppe was expansive, and none of us liked the exposure of being in the open, so we found protection in small wooded areas whenever we could.

In one such area, where we had stopped to rest and eat, I left Anna sitting with Tuzik and went to speak with Tanya, who was leaning against a tree, surveying the steppe. As before, Anna was reluctant to let me leave her side, and both she and Tuzik had tried to follow, but I told her to stay, pointing to Tanya just a few paces away and reassuring her I wouldn’t go any further.

When I was standing beside Tanya, I looked back and raised a hand to Anna. She raised hers in return, but remained sitting upright and unable to relax. I noticed that Tuzik was now between her and Lyudmila, providing a protective barrier. Whether that had been his idea or hers I could only guess.

‘We don’t have to do this, you know,’ I said to her.

‘Do what?’

‘Treat each other with suspicion. Be enemies. We’re all after the same thing.’

‘Are we?’

‘As far as I can tell.’

‘Except you’re Red. I can smell it.’

‘This has gone beyond colours and… ideology. This is about family.’ Commander Orlov had been right about that. He had known what was important.

‘Family.’ Tanya echoed the word and looked at me. She dragged on one of her self-rolled cigarettes and let the smoke drift from her lips.

‘Her mother died from typhus,’ I said, inclining my head towards Anna but keeping my voice low. ‘Years ago. And her father died…’ I had to think about it; the days had blurred into one. ‘Yesterday. He died yesterday.’ An image of Lev’s broken body came to mind. ‘I told her I’d look after her now. And the dog… well, he just came along. Maybe he was looking for a new family.’

Tanya said nothing. She took another drag on her cigarette and contemplated the glowing tip before holding it out to me. I kept my eyes on hers as I accepted it and took a long pull on it, the smoke sharp on my throat, tight in my lungs.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

Standing there, at the edge of the grove, I decided to tell Tanya what she needed to know. If we were going to travel together, the knowledge could prove to be important, and it made sense for us to try to get along, so I gave her the information as both a safeguard and a peace offering. Much like Lev had offered his olive branch of help.

I kept some secrets for myself, but recounted what I had seen in Belev and what had happened at the farm when I met Lev and Anna. I told her about the seven riders, about the bodies we had found on the way to Dolinsk and what Commander Orlov had told me about Krukov and about the prisoners.

As I spoke, Tanya stared into the distance as if she wasn’t listening, and I watched her face for any sign of what she was thinking. She remained composed, blank, questioning nothing, but when I mentioned prisoners, I saw something change in her demeanour. A strained expression as if something had caused her pain, then she looked up and tears glistened in her eyes. She sniffed hard and turned her face so that I could no longer see her.

When I finished speaking, Tanya was silent for a long while before she looked at me.

‘They’re hunting you. I don’t like that. It puts Lyudmila and me at greater risk.’

‘It doesn’t really change anything,’ I said. ‘You and me… we’re following the same trail. We can’t avoid each other, so we might as well be together.’

‘It’s a mistake to think we’ll help if they catch up to you,’ she warned, but she looked back at Anna and I saw the doubt in her eyes.

‘I intend to stay well ahead of them,’ I told her. ‘Lose them, if we haven’t already.’

‘But they’re persistent.’ She turned her face towards me. ‘So I’m wondering who are you, Kolya? Who are you really?’

‘I’m a deserter.’ I shrugged. ‘They hunt deserters.’

‘So you are Red.’

‘I’m not anything anymore. I’m just a man who wants to find his family.’

‘But you’re something more than that. I know it. They don’t send seven to catch one. Not unless the one is special. Dangerous, even.’

‘I’m nobody,’ I said.

‘Don’t ask? Is that it? I don’t ask about you, you won’t ask about me?’

‘It’s better that way. We leave the past behind us; it’s easier for us to be friends.’

‘I don’t think we’ll ever be friends, Kolya, and we can only the leave the past behind if it isn’t chasing us.’ She scanned the steppe as if searching for a glimpse of seven distant riders, and when she looked back at me, I could see she wanted to know more. There were questions in her eyes, on her lips, but things remained unsaid. I didn’t tell her what or where I had deserted from, and I didn’t disclose my connection to Krukov. Those were things she didn’t need to know; things that would almost certainly affect our relationship for the worse and leave one or other of us dead, right there and then in that grove.

While I kept my secrets from Tanya, I knew nothing about her. She gave no information willingly, but there were some things she could not hide and I was beginning to suspect that she was not just a simple peasant. The way she ate when we stopped to rest, the way she rolled her cigarette, the sharpness of her thoughts, the questions she asked, the way she spoke, and the words she used. Everything about her behaviour told me that Tanya was educated. She wasn’t just a farmer’s wife.

‘It seems you’ve learned more about Koschei than I have,’ she said eventually. ‘There’s nothing more I can tell you about him. We’ve been following his signs, looking for the red star and going north, that’s all. But what do you think is drawing him north? Everyone else is going south.’

‘I’ve been wondering the same thing. Maybe the uprising has spread north of here. Maybe something else. They said they had prisoners and that there are holding camps in this area; he could be bringing prisoners here and then he’ll go back.’

‘What stopped him from killing them?’ There was something odd in the way she stressed that last word.

‘It legitimises what he’s doing,’ I suggested, but it was just an idea. ‘The Red Army always needs new conscripts, and the labour camps need filling. There’s a lot of work to be done, so he takes the young ones. But the old men and women…’

He likes to drown the women.

I took a deep breath and tried not to see the images that flooded my thoughts. ‘…It could be that’s why he split his unit. Prisoners would slow them down, so maybe part of the unit went ahead—’

‘For what?’

‘To find more prisoners? Spread more terror?’ I shook my head and speculated about the reasons Koschei might have to split his unit. I thought about telling Tanya that perhaps they hadn’t just split into two. That maybe there was a third fraction of Koschei’s unit. With the intelligence gleaned at the train, I had convinced myself that Koschei and Krukov were the same man, and it would make sense if a part of that unit were now following me. Koschei and his men might not just be in front of us, but behind us too.

‘And I think we should stop calling him “Koschei”,’ I said. ‘It makes him… less than human. Or more than human. But he isn’t. He’s just a man. We should call him by his name. Krukov.’

Tanya looked at me and nodded once. ‘And this commander on the train, he was sure about that? About Krukov?’

‘He was sure.’ When I told Tanya about my conversation with Commander Orlov, I had bent the truth a little in my favour, leaving out the part about him recognising me, so she might not have been as sure as I was, but I was convinced Krukov was Koschei not because Commander Orlov gave the name to a doctor, but because he gave it to Nikolai Levitsky. He had known who I was from the moment he saw me and had made it clear what he thought of me. When he used Krukov’s name in connection with Koschei, he was telling me the truth, and my knowledge of Krukov only concreted my certainty of that.

Tanya flicked her cigarette into the frosty grass and looked up at the sky. Grey clouds were moving across it now, the pale winter blue almost entirely gone.

‘What did he do to you?’ I asked. ‘What did Krukov do?’

Tanya turned her back on the steppe and switched her attention to Anna, who was sitting close to Tuzik, one hand buried in the thick fur at his neck. There was a change in Tanya’s expression when she looked at Anna. Something of the melancholy I had seen earlier washed across her face like an incoming wave. The sudden softening of her appearance showed me something I’d never witnessed in her before, and for the first time, it occurred to me that her eyes were almost exactly the same colour as Marianna’s. Before now, they had always seemed cold and hard, but the softening transformed her.

I felt a stab of anguish, a desperation to be with my wife again, and I stared into Tanya’s eyes as if it would give me just a taste of what it would be like to have Marianna here.

But then the lightness of Tanya’s countenance was gone again, leaving not a trace. It was a sudden and brief transformation, as if she had swept one personality aside and replaced it with another. Now her face hardened.

‘You have children?’ I asked.

There was a furrowing of her eyebrows, a clenching of the jaw.

‘That’s why I want him,’ I said. ‘You know that. I understand what you’re feeling.’

‘You understand nothing,’ she said. ‘What can you understand?’

‘More than you think.’

‘You’re a professional soldier; you’ve got it written all over your face. It’s in the way you walk and talk. Everything. I’ve seen so many damn soldiers, I know what one looks like.’

‘So what would you see if you were to look in a mirror?’ I asked.

Tanya glanced up at me and sighed before turning her eyes to the ground.

‘Whatever I’ve done,’ I said, ‘whatever I am, I’m still a father. A husband.’

‘When did you last see them?’ she asked. ‘Your sons? You have two, right? When did you last tell them you love them? When did you last hold your wife?’

There was anger growing in her voice and I knew that when she looked at me, she couldn’t see me as anything but a soldier. It was men like me who had shattered her life, whatever colour they had chosen.

‘It’s a long time, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Because you’ve been out there, armed, killing other fathers and sons; mothers and wives too, I’d bet.’

Her stare cut through me just as her words did. She was right about me. There was nothing I could say to change that; nothing I could say to make her think differently.

‘He didn’t take them prisoner, did he?’ I asked. ‘Your—’

‘No. He slaughtered them. Everyone. My son, just fifteen. My daughter, not much older than…’ She looked back at Anna and squeezed her eyes shut, determined that her emotion would be anger rather than grief.

‘And you? Were you there? How did you—’

‘My husband and my father with red stars burned on their skin. Do you know what that does to you? Seeing that?’

‘I can imagine it—’

‘No, you can’t imagine,’ she said. ‘You can’t imagine it at all, because it hasn’t happened to you. You have some hope that your family is alive. Hope. That’s what keeps you going. For me, there is only hate. That’s what it does to you – it fills you with hate. That’s what keeps me going.’

I wondered what was different about Tanya’s family that had made Krukov murder everyone while he took the young people from Belev with him. Her son had been fighting age.

Perhaps it was something to do with who she was. I had come to suspect that she wasn’t a common peasant – she had developed a hard look to her, but she didn’t have the posture or mannerisms or speech traits I expected from a worker. I wondered if she had a background in wealth and education that had riled Koschei into such frenzy. Or maybe there had been some change in the way he operated. Or perhaps he had just had a bad day. It wasn’t uncommon for Chekist leaders to lose their minds – perpetrating such horrors, fuelling themselves with drugs and alcohol, it was little surprise.

‘You were wealthy?’ The words came out before I thought about them.

Tanya didn’t reply, but she turned and stared at me with an expression that at least confirmed it.

‘And educated,’ I said. ‘So you’re not a soldier?’

Tanya glanced back at Lyudmila, then turned to look out at the steppe once more. ‘No.’

‘What about her?’ I asked. ‘Lyudmila? What—’

‘If you want to know about Lyudmila, you’ll have to ask her yourself.’

But I had a feeling she would tell me even less than Tanya had.

‘I’m sorry about your family.’ It was a pointless thing to say. Words couldn’t bring them back, and they couldn’t convey my sympathy for her. Tanya was wrong about something, though. I could imagine how she felt, and I understood that there was an important and worrying difference between us.

I was looking for my wife and sons; Tanya was looking only for revenge.

‘When we find him,’ I said, ‘I want to know what happened to my family.’

‘You’re telling me not to kill him.’

‘Not right away.’ It was more important now than ever that we stayed together. I couldn’t afford for her to find Koschei before me.

‘I’ll make him tell you what you want to know.’ She looked me up and down. ‘Though I suspect you’d be good at that yourself.’

I ignored her comment. ‘After that, you can do whatever you want.’

‘What I want is all of them, not just Kosch— Krukov. Not just Krukov. I want all of them. Every single one of his men.’

‘When was it?’ I asked. ‘How long have you been looking for him?’

‘Thirty-seven days,’ she said. ‘And out here, that’s a long time. It changes you. But we’re getting close, I can feel it.’

‘When it’s done? What will you do then?’

‘I haven’t seen that far yet.’ Tanya adjusted her rifle, moving the strap on her shoulder, then took the tobacco pouch from her pocket. ‘But when the time comes,’ she said, ‘I just hope you’re as good at killing as I think you are.’