The Child Thief

22

It was only a matter of minutes before my feet were numb and I felt nothing of the ground upon which I walked. I might have been walking on a bed of feathers or a field of the sharpest nails, it wouldn’t have mattered. And as the sun dropped from the sky, the temperature fell with it and the cold wind plucked at my clothes, finding its way through. I stayed upright, head straight, eyes ahead. I was a soldier. I had marched in the cold before. But I was older and my age punished me as if it were scornful of what I’d become. My steps were laboured. I was exhausted, hungry, and with no feeling in my feet I couldn’t help stumbling from time to time. And every time I fell to my knees, the riders stopped behind me and waited for me to stand and begin walking again. If I took too long, Yakov would edge forward and prod me with the barrel of his rifle, digging at my ribs, my spine, the back of my head. He had learned to poke at the places where the bone was close to the skin.

Ignoring the pain, I focused on the footprints ahead. The only prints on the road. Dariya’s small feet leading the way; her amazing, resilient little feet that had endured so much walking and so much horror and yet walked on. I stared at those prints and kept my mind away from the cold and the snow and the riders behind. I thought of Natalia at home, sitting with Lara, wondering when I would return with the boys. And I thought about my sons following, wondering when I would hear their first shot, waiting for the moment when they would shoot these two men from their horses and come for me.

But when we rounded the last corner and I saw the village ahead, I knew my sons were not going to rescue me.

Dariya’s trail led all the way to the village, where it disappeared in the clutter of a thousand prints crossing and re-crossing the paths between the houses and through the centre of the village. Here the snow was trampled by the feet of many people and horses and carts.

‘Over there,’ Yakov ordered.

I had been to Sushne before, a few years ago, when times were good. It was much like Vyriv, but larger. There were houses arranged around a central space, with others lying behind them. Families had expanded; new people had come to live here during the good years, and so the village had grown and houses had been built. Far to the left a simple church with a belfry that stood empty. To one side of the church’s broken steps, the bell lay on its side, half the height of a man, a great piece smashed from it so it would never ring again. There was evidence of the path it had taken when the soldiers had cast it from the tower, the great weight of a symbol of faith and calling, free-falling to the steps, where it shattered the concrete, powdered the balustrade and fractured.

Two men in uniform, rifles over their shoulders, stood at the base of those damaged steps, leaning against a part of the balustrade that was still intact. They were smoking cigarettes and looking in our direction. I didn’t need to see the man behind me to know this was where he wanted me to go. This was where they had made their jail in Sushne.

I walked on, heading towards the church, drawing no looks because there was no one in the street to watch me. There was no one outside but the two soldiers by the steps and the two behind me on horseback.

The sun had almost set now, the sky was dark with cloud, and there were lights on in some of the windows. Weak lights that flickered and melted the frost that had formed on the glass.

When I reached the steps of the church, the two soldiers came forward, flicking their cigarettes away and moving to either side of me, taking my arms.

‘Put him with the rest,’ said Yakov, and I heard his horse turn and move away.

The soldiers said nothing. They gripped me tight and bustled me up the steps as if I had resisted. One of them put his booted foot against the door and pushed it open.

Inside, the church was dim and smelled of stone and wood. It was a simple building, like the one in Vyriv, perhaps a little larger. From this place of faith, however, all traces of religion had been stripped away. The simple wooden benches, once arranged before the altar, were now swept aside and roughly piled around the edges. Some of them had been broken with boots and axes, kicked and cut for easy firewood. The altar itself had been stripped of its adornment and was now just a sturdy wooden table in the centre of the room. While it had once been pristine and well cared for, it was now functional and basic. Upon it there were no candlesticks, but there were candles, stuck in their own wax to secure them to the uneven surface. One or two of the candles were burning with strong flames that danced in the breeze from the open door, trailing capillaries of black smoke, giving enough light to see the wooden crucifix discarded on the table and dark patches on the walls where icons had been removed. They had been smashed and burned in the centre of the village along with any other symbols of religion.

The soldiers’ boots were loud on the stone floor, the pad of my own bare feet inaudible as we went to the far end of the church, where there was a single door in the wall. We stopped a few feet from it, and one of the soldiers released his grip, running his hands over my clothes, squeezing my pockets, feeling for any belongings. The other stepped forward, taking a key from his belt, and when the first soldier had finished searching me, the second unlocked the door and his comrade pushed me into the blackness.

The door shut behind me and the key turned in the lock.

I stood while my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. The smell was not of wood and stone in there, but of sweat and fear. Of human waste.

The air was thick with it, closing around me.

‘Who is that?’

A single voice in the dark. A man speaking Ukrainian. Then a cough.

The blackness became grey as my eyes took in what light was available, but I could still see very little inside that room. I guessed it was the place where the priest would have prepared for mass, and that it had no windows, explaining the minimal light.

‘Who is it?’ The same voice. Weak. An old man with a dry throat.

‘No one,’ I answered, putting my hands to the door, running my fingers around its edges, feeling its contours. I could hear the receding footsteps of the soldiers and I put an ear to the wood, listening until they had gone. Then I took the handle and shook the door, barely even rattling it in its frame, it was so solid and well set. I felt the keyhole and crouched to look through into the church, but there was little to see other than the table with the crucifix and the candles burning on it. I felt further, testing the large iron hinges, slipping my fingertips beneath the door and trying to find any way it might open.

‘We’Ve all tried it,’ said the voice. ‘Every one of us.’

I stopped, stood, took a step forward, my feet catching on something that moved and pulled away, accompanied by a sharp intake of breath. A person’s leg, outstretched.

‘I’ m sorry.’

‘Sit down,’ said a voice, this one different, but with the same dryness, the same weariness. ‘Sit down before you hurt some–one.’

I touched the section of wall beside the door and put my back to it, sliding down, grateful for the relief in my legs.

Reaching out, I pulled one foot up, lodging it on the knee of my other leg and rubbing some life back into it. Already the feeling was coming back and the intensity of the pain was increasing.

‘You’re from this village?’ said the first voice.

‘No.’

‘What’s your name?’

I hesitated. ‘Luka Mikhailovich.’

‘Ah. Luka. A strong name. You’ll do well. You’ll survive with a name like Luka. It’s the Mishas and the Sashas that find it hard. My name is Konstantin Petrovich. Kostya. That’s a good name too.’

By now my eyes had begun to accept the tiniest light which filtered through the keyhole and beneath the door, and I could see the faint shadow of the man who had spoken. He sat opposite, against the other wall, but he shifted when he spoke his name, and I understood he was holding out his hand.

I leaned forward and took it.

‘Our fellow prisoners,’ he said, ‘are my brother Evgeni Petrovich and my neighbours Yuri Grigorovich and Dimitri Markovich.’

I immediately thought of the man whose daughter I had come to find. My own brother-in-law, Dimitri, lying dead in a field with his wife waiting for him at home, but I turned my head, looking for the dark smudges of the other men, reaching out and shaking their hands in a solemn act of mutual understanding.

‘But there are no formalities here,’ said Yuri Grigorovich. ‘We’re all friends. Call me Yuri.’

‘Where are you from?’ Kostya asked. ‘What village?’

Even here, among these other prisoners, I wanted to protect my home from the men who might destroy its heart. I didn’t know the people with whom I was imprisoned, but I knew of the OGPU and I knew of the activists sent to control our land. Any of these men might be here to gain my trust, find out something that might be of use to them. There were people everywhere, well placed and well trained to turn neighbour against neighbour, husband against wife, father against son. Any one of them might be a spy.

‘No village,’ I said. ‘I live alone with my daughter, close to the forest.’

‘No wife?’

‘No. The famine was not kind to us.’ I hated saying it, denying my own wife.

‘I’m sorry to hear it. You farm?’

‘Nothing to speak of. I hunt for food and skins.’

‘So what brings you here?’ asked Kostya, then he chuckled to himself, a low throaty sound that again made me picture him as an old man, his skin beaten by the weather, his hands hardened by years of working on the land. ‘I think you probably should’ve stayed in the forest.’

‘I’m looking for my daughter,’ I said.

‘Your daughter?’

‘She’s lost.’ I took my foot in my hands and began rubbing again.

‘How does one lose their daughter?’ asked Yuri.

‘It’s a long story.’

‘We have a long time.’

‘She wandered off, that’s all. I was following her tracks when the soldiers found me on the road.’

‘That’s unlucky.’

‘Do you know anything about her?’ I said.

For a while the men were silent. No one spoke.

‘Have I said something to offend you?’ I asked.

‘Tell him why you’re here, Dima.’

I waited for Dimitri Markovich to speak. He cleared his throat, shuffled a little, moved against the hard stone floor.

‘A girl came into the village this afternoon.’ Like the others, his throat was dry, his voice tight in his throat. He sounded as if he had resigned himself to his fate, sitting in that dark room.

‘A girl?’ I asked, sitting up straight. ‘Did you see her? Was she all right?’

‘She came and she stood, waiting for someone to see her, to say something, but no one dared go to her.’

‘Was she hurt?’ I asked, feeling my anxiety rise, but it was as if he didn’t hear me.

‘No one… no one dares to even come out of their home for fear of being brought to the church, or their husband being taken away in the night. Or their children. But I saw her from my window, so I went out. My wife tried to stop me, but I went anyway. You see, we had a daughter and—’

‘Was she hurt?’ I asked him again, wanting to reach over and grab him, shake the answer out of him. ‘The girl who came into the village. Was she hurt? It’s important you remember.’

‘When I got to her, she just stood there, saying nothing. She didn’t even look at me.’

‘I need you to tell me how she was,’ I said, trying to stay calm. ‘Please.’

When he spoke again, there was a low grumble behind his voice. ‘I’m sorry. She had a lot of blood on her. On her face and on her hands and her clothes. In her hair.’

‘Her hair?’ I tried not to think of the scalp we’d seen hanging from the tree. ‘What about her hair?’

‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘But there was blood.’

‘She had her hair?’

‘Yes. Yes, of course, but she was…’ His voice trailed away. He was either remembering or he was reluctant to go on, but my attention had slipped for a moment. All I could think was that the scalp wasn’t Dariya’s. I almost hadn’t dared to believe it before. But now, with Dima’s words, it seemed even more real. That terrible obscenity had not been hers.

‘Tell me what happened,’ I said. ‘Tell me about Dariya.’

‘That’s her name? Dariya?’

‘Yes.’

‘I tried to talk to her, but one of the soldiers came over and shouted at her, asking where the blood was from. She said nothing so he shook her like she was going to fall to pieces. It was like she was switched off. She made no sound at all. No reaction. Nothing. He shook her and shook her, asking who she was, and she stayed silent, her body moving like she was a pile of rags. She just stared ahead of her. Staring and staring like she’d seen something terrible and it was still fixed right in front of her. I wanted to tell him to stop shaking her but I was afraid he would punish me. I was a coward.’

‘No,’ Kostya said. ‘Not a coward.’

‘But then he hit her, slapped her so hard he knocked back her head, and when he raised his hand to slap her again, I felt like my blood was going to boil. Before I knew it, I grabbed his hand and when I realised what I’d done, I begged him not to hit her again. I got to my knees and begged him. So he hit me. He hit me over and over, shouting how could I question a soldier of the state, and when I fell, he started kicking me. He kicked me so hard I don’t remember them bringing me in here.’

‘And Dariya?’

‘I don’t know,’ Dima said. ‘I wish I could tell you.’

‘I have to get out of here.’ I turned back to the door, pulling at the handle, raking my fingernails over its solid surface. ‘I have to find her.’

‘There’s no getting out of here,’ said Kostya. ‘Not until they come to take us out.’

‘I have to,’ I said, trying to find purchase on the door, a way of opening it. Then I turned my fists on the wood, beating it as if with two hammers, venting the frustration and rage that had grown these last few days.

The other men left me to my madness as I rattled the door in its secure frame, and when my energy abandoned me, I stopped, putting my forehead against the cold wood. ‘I made a promise,’ I said. ‘I made a promise.’

‘Sit down.’ Yuri put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Save your energy for later.’

‘Later?’

And there was a silence in the room. I sensed the men turning to each other in the darkness, something unspoken passing among them. But I knew. I’d seen things that would make these men cry out in their sleep, and I knew what was coming later. I understood at least a part of what was going to happen to me.

I reached up and put my own hand on Yuri’s. I patted it and then took it from my shoulder. ‘You’re right,’ I said, turning, sitting once again. ‘You’re right.’

I sat on the stone floor once more, leaning my head back to rest on the wall, my mouth falling open. I thought about poor Dariya and everything she’d had to endure. She’d seen her father raise a rabble to hang a man from the old tree in the centre of the village. She’d become dependent on the man who had stolen her from her family, and she’d eventually murdered him in a most horrible manner. It was little surprise she was silent when she came into Sushne, thinking she had found safety.

‘Thank you, Dima. Thank you for trying to protect Dariya.’

Dimitri Markovich said nothing.

‘And is she really your daughter?’ Yuri asked.

‘Of course. Why would you ask that?’

‘It’s just… you didn’t say why you’re here. Perhaps the soldiers thought you did something to harm her, make her like that.’

‘Harm her? No. I was carrying a rifle; they asked where it came from.’

‘You’re a soldier?’

‘I was a soldier. But I have no allegiance other than to our leader.’ The words tasted sour but I had to say them. I didn’t know these men and I didn’t know what they might say or do to try to improve their own situation.

‘What kind of soldier were you?’ Yuri asked.

‘I was on the front against the Austro-Hungarians and the Germans—’

‘Which army?’

‘What difference does it make?’

‘Yuri was there too,’ said Evgeni. ‘In Galicia. There are people here who think he was a war hero.’

‘You were there in June?’ I asked. ‘For the offensive under General Brusilov?’

‘Eighth Army. But it was July as I remember it. Are you testing me, Luka?’

I stayed quiet.

‘Many soldiers died,’ Yuri said.

‘But not you.’

‘No. Not me. After the fall of Tarnopol we pulled back, making a stand east of Czernowitz, but we were tired and people began to desert.’

‘Did you?’

‘I waited until the very end, Luka.’

‘I waited too.’

‘And then?’

‘I joined the first revolutionary army,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ Yuri laughed. ‘A good communist.’ There was sarcasm in his words.

‘Yes. A good communist.’

‘So they arrest their own now?’

‘Probably. But I’m not with them now.’ I didn’t tell him I abandoned the Red Army during the Crimean mutinies and went to fight with Nestor Makhno.

‘Imperialist and revolutionary?’ Yuri said. ‘One would be forgiven for thinking you don’t know your loyalties.’

I had said too much. It was a mistake for me to have told them anything; any one of them might have been a planted informer. My truth was that I had lost my way. I had fought for one army after another because it was what I had in my blood. I had changed my allegiance only for vague ideals. I had believed the communists offered a better life, but it became clear that what they offered was not freedom. I had defected because Makhno offered self-government protected by a people’s army, but I saw the truth of it now. They had all wanted the same thing. Whether they were Red or White or Black or Green, they had all fought to gain power over the common man. To take what they had, and to keep on taking until there was nothing left but the brittle bones in their bodies. I saw now that only one thing was important, irrespective of colour or ideal, and that was to protect my family.

‘What does it matter?’ said Kostya. ‘We’re all revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries now. There is nothing else. No more individuals. We’re all part of the collective.’

‘Or perhaps you liked the fighting?’ Yuri ignored him. ‘The action? I can understand it. There’s fear and horror in fighting, but when you’ve fought for so long it becomes part of you.’

‘I manage without it. I put those things away.’

‘Is that what you do with your guilt?’

‘There’s no guilt,’ I said.

‘But it’s how you live with the things you saw,’ Yuri said. ‘How you forget the men you killed and the things you did. You put them away.’

‘How do you forget?’

‘Who says I do?’

I looked across at the dark shape that was Yuri Grigorovich.

‘So you lock them away in your mind,’ he went on. ‘You leave them behind a door in the dark. And what happens when that door opens, just a crack?’

‘It never does,’ I said.

Yuri grunted, making a dismissive sound, and the room fell into silence.

There was no way to measure time in the obscurity of our prison. The only light was that which trickled around and beneath the door. The only sounds were of breathing, of bodies shuffling, throats being cleared. We were left to our thoughts, only drawn back to the present by sporadic snatches of conversation.

‘So they arrested you for owning a rifle,’ Kostya said into the gloom.

‘Maybe for that.’ I was glad for the change in subject. Yuri’s direction had been unsettling. ‘Or maybe for fighting in the Imperial Army? For being a tsarist? I don’t know. What reasons do they need? They arrested Dimitri for trying to help a child. And the rest of you? What are you locked in here for?’

‘Maybe because there was no one else to arrest, Evgeni said. ‘Because the soldiers were bored.’

‘So why are they here?’ I asked. ‘The soldiers. Moscow doesn’t send soldiers to every village. Activists, maybe, but soldiers? And this many?’

‘We refused to join the kolkhoz,’ Kostya said. ‘It’s not our tradition; we’re single farmers. We work hard for what little we have, and they tell us to give it away and to move out to one of their farms. They said it would be good for us all, that they would give us tractors and we would grow so much we could feed the revolution. But we said no, and one of their activists came two weeks ago – one of their young men from the city who knows nothing of our lives or the country.’

I waited for him to go on.

‘He came with two soldiers, and they wanted to take our land and our animals. So we slaughtered them.’

‘The activist?’

‘No,’ Kostya half-laughed. ‘That came later. No, we killed the animals so they couldn’t take them for their kolkhoz, so they took our belongings instead, burning what they didn’t want, and then they began to take the men. There were those in the village who called themselves good communists, people who spied on the rest of us, and they pointed their fingers, and there would be a knock on the door in the middle of the night, and people disappeared and didn’t come back. Some of the men, the ones who were left, they protested.’

‘Protested how?’ I asked.

‘By bringing a death sentence on the whole village,’ Yuri said.

‘They went to the house where the activist and the soldiers were staying, and they burned it to the ground,’ Kostya said. ‘But it was a small victory. They came back last week in numbers and threw the bell from the tower, rode their horses into the church, and when the priest tried to stop them, they ordered him to strip naked and walk out into the snow. They watched him until he began to cry. A grown man, a priest, reduced to tears and begging. So they whipped him across the back with their pistols and left him to bleed while they burned the icons and turned the church into a prison’

I was surprised at the tone of Kostya’s voice – as if he was recounting something that had happened many years ago, and to someone else. There was no anger or indignation or sense of injustice. There was only a weary acceptance, as if he had all but given up.

‘And they began their liquidation of kulaks,’ he said. ‘If anyone even knows what a kulak is.’

‘Everyone is a kulak,’ Evgeni said. ‘If you have a small plot of land, you’re a kulak. If you own an animal, you’re a kulak. If you’ve ever owned an animal, you’re a kulak. And they’re terrified of the kulak like they’re afraid of the Jew.’

‘But they didn’t deport any of you?’

‘You mean we might be spies?’ Yuri asked.

‘No, I…’

‘Of course that’s what you mean,’ said Kostya, ‘and why wouldn’t you? It’s just like it was after the revolution. No one can trust anyone. It’s how they want it.’

‘And why are they still here?’

‘They made this their headquarters,’ he said. ‘From here they find the other villages and farms and they force them into the kolkhoz and they take away their belongings and their food and their kulaks. And then they’ll send workers from the cities to farm the land because there’ll be none of us left. We’ll either be deported or we’ll be dead. If not by their hand, then because we have nothing to eat. My wife, she used to be fat. Fat and beautiful, but now I can see her bones through her skin, and she goes into the forest to look for mushrooms or whatever she can. If we could catch the birds from the sky, we would eat them.’

No one spoke. The sound of breathing filled the room and I felt the despair and resignation in these men.

‘We are beginning to starve,’ Evgeni said. ‘All of us. Much more of this, and there’ll be no one left. It’ll be like it was ten years ago when there was nothing to eat and the Volga refugees brought cholera and typhus.’

‘They say people even ate their own children,’ Yuri said, and it made me think of the bodies I’d found on the sled just a few days ago. ‘You ever hear stories like that, Luka? You ever hear of people eating their own children?’

‘Not their own, no.’

‘But something like it?’

I didn’t answer.

‘A soldier like you, you must have seen things,’ he persisted.

‘As must you.’

‘They’ll let us all die in the streets,’ Evgeni said.

I put my hands to my face and rubbed hard. I wondered if it was possible to die from despair. ‘And you men?’ I asked. ‘Why were you arrested?’

Kostya laughed, but it was a sad sound, made low in his chest. ‘Does there need to be a reason?’

No one answered.

‘I made a joke,’ he said. ‘I made a stupid joke that our great leader must be getting fat with all the bread he has while we’re getting thinner. A soldier heard me and now I’m an agitator. An enemy of the state. My brother, Evgeni, he’s here because I am, and I will for ever be sorry that I have made it so. If I’m an enemy of the state, then so must he be.’

‘They beat me for being a conspirator or an enemy of the state or something,’ Evgeni said. ‘A counter-revolutionary. They beat me and put me in the bell tower to make me admit it. So I admit it.’

‘The bell tower?’

‘They left me up there. Naked, in the cold, until my heart felt like it was going to freeze right in my chest. So I admitted to whatever they asked me.’

The men had exhausted themselves and they fell silent for a long time, all of them thinking about what had been said. The room was blank but for the soporific sound of steady breathing, the occasional cough.

Sitting against the wall with my head tipped back, the hardness of the stone was cruel on the places where my bones were closest to the skin. I had no coat to make myself comfortable, to use as a pillow or a mattress, and sitting in the darkness it was impossible to know what time of day it was, but eventually I slept, waking only to the sound of the church door banging and the advance of heavy boots across the floor. There was a scraping of wood on stone, a voice speaking with authority, rapid sentences, and then the footsteps approached the door that was keeping us sealed inside that small room. They stopped. A key in the lock, turning, metal on metal.

The door opened wide, allowing a small amount of light to enter. It was weak and orange, of little real consequence, but to us, deprived of light, it was a connection to whatever was on the other side of the door.

The fragile glow slipped across the floor and reached for the face of the man who owned the voice I knew as Kostya. I saw him for the first time, drawn and thin, and I realised I hadn’t asked him how long he had been in this room. His beard was wild and scruffy, clinging to sunken cheeks, with patches of grey and places where it grew in tufts as if it had either been torn out or had fallen out. He reminded me of a starving feral dog with its stomach arched and boned, its hair missing in clumps. His skin was fissured into deep wrinkles across his forehead and around his sunken eyes. He was wearing a shirt and a waistcoat, the standard dress of a peasant, with dirty trousers and worn boots on his feet.

He looked over with watery eyes, but when hands took my shoulders and dragged me to my feet, Kostya looked away.

I was dragged backwards from the room before I even had a chance to stand, then hauled to my feet by opre soldier while another kicked the door closed and locked it once regain. The sound of the door slamming back into place reverberated from the church walls, filling my ears.

It was colder out there than it had been inside the room, and there was a harsh feeling of being taken out, like a traumatic birth. Inside it had been dark and disorientating, the stench of fear and urine in the air, but it had been warm, and now I was back in the cold, my bare feet on the freezing stone floor. In there it had been terrible – the waiting and the not knowing – but it had been safer than I knew it was out here.