The Child Thief

4

The low light was a blessing; it cast a gentler hue on what we were seeing. The sled was packed with the man’s few belongings. A bale of clothes, rolled and tied with rope. A couple of waterproof coverings. A leather satchel and a Mosin-Nagant rifle like the one Viktor had been carrying on the steppe. There was also a wooden case for a Mauser pistol.

And there were the two bodies. A boy and a girl.

It wasn’t so easy to make it out in the incomplete darkness, but I had seen the boy’s face when we were on the hillside, I had seen the precise laceration on the naked girl’s leg, and I saw those things now, just as clearly in my mind.

Looking at the two bodies lying in shadow, I closed my eyes and thanked God I couldn’t see better in the dark.

‘We have to cover her,’ I said. ‘Give her some dignity. And nobody else needs to see this. You understand that, don’t you? People have enough to scare them. They hide in their homes and pray for deliverance, and something like this…’

‘I understand, ‘Viktor said. ‘But how do we keep it from them?’

‘We’ll bury them tomorrow. In the right place.’

‘The graveyard? People will see.’

‘We’ll go early.’

‘They’ll see where we’ve been digging.’

‘By then it won’t matter. We’ll tell them something they’ll believe.’

Viktor reached out to take the clothes, but I tightened my grip. Viktor tugged once. ‘Let me.’

‘No.’ I pulled them back and opened them out, laying them beside the girl.

I gritted my teeth and leaned down to slip the trousers over her feet. My hands were dumb inside thick gloves, and I fumbled and failed. I shifted, straightened the trousers once more, and tried again, but her feet were at right angles to her ankles and they refused to slide into the legs of the material. I cursed and breathed out hard, preparing myself for another attempt, this time jamming the child’s feet in the trousers so hard I had to tug to remove them for another try.

‘Damn it.’ I put the trousers aside, knowing I’d have to break the joints.

‘I’ll do it,’ Viktor said, but his voice was weak, almost a whisper.

‘No.’ I took off my gloves and stuffed them into my pockets. I put my left hand on the girl’s frozen shin and looked up at the ceiling of the barn.

My hands were still warm from having been inside the gloves, but I felt the heat draining away when I touched the girl. Her skin was smooth and cold as stone.

I put my right hand on her foot and squeezed my eyes tight before I leaned all my weight down and felt the ankle crack. And as it did, a lump rose to my throat and I fought hard to retain my composure in front of my son. Our world was not a world for weakness. It was a world for strength and survival. Those were the most important lessons I could teach my son. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to look at the girl as I felt for her other foot and prepared to do the same the thing again.

With the second crack, I turned away and bent over, putting my hands on my knees and breathing hard. I fought the urge to vomit, swallowing hard, drawing on all my reserves of strength. ‘Damn.’ I punched my own leg. ‘Damn, damn, damn.’

I had been in terrible places and I had seen terrible things. As a soldier I had been responsible for many deaths, and in my life as a farmer I slaughtered animals and I butchered them. I had broken bones many times over, but nothing had ever sickened me like this. The sound was close to that of snapping away a lamb’s leg, and I knew I would never be able to do that again without thinking of this moment.

‘Let me finish,’ Viktor said, putting his hand on my back.

I straightened and looked my son in the eye. ‘No, I—’

‘You don’t have to do it all yourself.’

I wanted to tell him how much that meant. ‘Dry that. It’ll freeze.’

‘Hm?’

I pointed at my son’s face and Viktor rubbed his eye with the heel of his palm, taking away the tear. ‘I’ll do the rest,’ he said.

I let him take the trousers, and I watched him slip them over the girl’s loose feet and pull them over the wound on her thigh. I tried not to think of my own daughter.

When he was finished, we stood side by side and looked down at the two small bodies on the sled.

‘You think we should have left them up there?’ Viktor asked.

‘On the hill?’

‘Not just on the hill, but out of sight, somewhere—’

‘For the wolves? Or for the crows to take their eyes?’

‘No, I just meant—’

‘This is someone’s daughter. Someone’s son.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘Then what did you mean?’ It wasn’t Viktor’s fault, but I could feel anger building anyway. I’d gone out this morning to find something to eat to keep my family alive as long as possible in this hateful, murderous weather, but I’d come down with the bodies of two children and a man who was no use to anyone.

‘I just meant it would have been easier. No, not easier. Better. Maybe it would have been better. We wouldn’t have had to do this. People don’t need another thing to worry about. This will scare them. It scares me.’

I swallowed my anger, forcing it away, battling it back inside me to feed and grow. ‘That’s why we have to keep it to ourselves.’

‘We shouldn’t have him in the house.’

‘We don’t know he’s done anything wrong.’

‘Does it matter? Is it worth the risk?’

‘Of course it matters,’ I said, trying to feel my own humanity; trying to find my own compassion. ‘We’re still human. Whatever we do, whatever we see, whatever’s happening to this country, we have to remember that. We’re still human. We always have to remember that. Because once we forget that, it will all be over.’

Coming back to the house, we stopped at the front door. ‘Viktor…’ I pursed my lips, wanting the right words to come.

My son looked at me. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You’re welcome.’

I nodded and reached out to rub his shoulder. ‘You’re a good boy.’

We went in and removed our coats and boots, stamping the snow off by the door.

The stranger was lying in front of the fire with a blanket over him, but if anyone had walked in, they would’ve thought him nothing more than a pile of rags. Petro was sitting in the far corner, settled into one of the old chairs, a rifle propped against the wall beside him. The room was lit only by the fire that burned in the grate, and three half-burned candles wedged into a chipped clay holder on the table.

‘Has he said anything?’ I asked.

‘Nothing.’ Petro blinked hard as if he’d been falling asleep. ‘Not even moved.’

‘But he’s alive?’ I went to the man, my knees popping when I crouched, and put my fingers to his neck. ‘Yes. He’s alive.’

‘You think he’s an activist?’ Petro asked.

‘No.’ I glanced at Viktor, letting our knowledge of the man’s cargo remain a secret between us.

‘From a kolkhoz, then?’ Petro pushed himself out of the chair and came closer. ‘You think he’s from a collective, running from the OGPU? Maybe they’ll follow him here.’

‘It’s possible,’ I said, opening the flap in the wooden case I’d taken from the sled. ‘But unlikely.’ I tipped it so the pistol slipped out. ‘I don’t know. There’s something about him.’ I turned the pistol over in my hands, looking at the number nine burned into the handle and painted red.

‘Some kind of mark?’ asked Petro. ‘Does the number mean something?’

‘To remind you what ammunition to use,’ I told him. ‘It means this weapon belonged to a German.’

‘He’s German?’

‘Or he took it from someone who is. Was.’ I slipped the pistol back and put the case on the shelf. I left the boys talking and went to where Natalia was standing over the stove. Lara was sitting at the table, playing with a piece of wool. I tousled the top of her hair and sat down beside her, watching her smile as she twisted the wool.

‘Hungry?’ Natalia asked, without turning around.

‘Starving.’

She banged a metal spoon against the rim of an iron cooking pot and laid it on the worktop beside her. ‘Lara, put that away now.’

Lara groaned and rolled her eyes at me, but did as she was asked, winding the wool into a ball as she pushed back her chair and called to Viktor and Petro.

‘Is everything all right?’ Natalia asked as soon as Lara had turned her back. ‘You want to tell me about it?’

‘Not now.’

She glanced at Lara, then lowered her voice further. ‘That man’s been shot, Luka, who the hell is he?’

‘Shot?’

‘Right through here.’ She put a finger to her abdomen, just below her last rib. ‘Straight through. Someone’s dressed it -maybe he even did it himself, I don’t know, but he’s lucky to have lived this long. I don’t think he’ll last much longer.’ She put her hand on mine. ‘I’m scared. We can’t keep him here.’

‘What else can we do with him? We can’t leave him to die.’

‘He’ll probably die anyway; he must’ve lost so much blood. There’s some infection too, I think. And he looks like he hasn’t eaten for days.’

‘Then we have to help him.’

‘We can’t, Luka. What if he’s being followed? What if someone finds him here—’

‘You’d want someone to do the same for me. For one of our sons.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘He stays here for now.’

‘You know what they do to people who help enemies of the state. They’ll call us counter-revolutionaries.’

‘Who says he’s an enemy of the state? And if they come here, they’ll call us kulaks and take everything anyway. But at least we’ll still have our humanity.’

Natalia made a sound of disapproval and turned away, reaching up to take bowls from the cupboard. She stared at me as she put them on the table, placing them harder than she needed to. ‘I’ve left his things for you to look at,’ she said.

‘Where?’

‘In the basket by his clothes.’

I started to stand, but she stopped me, saying, ‘Later. Food’s ready.’

Natalia ladled rabbit stew into the bowls, putting only a little into each. It was bulked out with some of the few potatoes and beets we had left, and we ate it with dented spoons and we drank water from dented cups.

‘When will he wake up?’ Lara asked. She was excited to see someone new. Vyriv was small and isolated. Newcomers were a rarity and it was better that way but, in Lara, the advent of a stranger stirred curiosity and adventure.

‘Soon, I hope.’ I looked across the table at my daughter and couldn’t help but see the image of the mutilated girl in my mind. I tried to ignore it, but it fought against my better thoughts, tainting them and forcing them aside so I saw the cold white face, half hidden by matted hair. I saw her blue lips, her tiny limbs, and the whiteness of the bone in her leg.

I put down my spoon and pushed the bowl away with the back of my hand.

Natalia turned to watch me. ‘Not hungry?’

‘I lost my appetite.’

After we’d eaten, my sons turned in and Natalia chased Lara to bed. When they were gone, I blew out the candles and took the pistol from the shelf. I collected the basket containing the man’s belongings and went to sit by the fire, stretching my legs so my feet were close to the man’s head and I could feel the warmth of the fire.

The man lay still, as if he were already dead, and I had to watch him for a long time before I detected the slightest indication he was breathing.

There was little to speak of in the basket. A small piece of sausage wrapped in cloth. A knife, a handful of cartridges of different calibres, and a heavy revolver. I opened the revolver and pulled out a single spent cartridge, turning it over in my fingers before replacing it with a fresh one. I set the revolver back in the basket and put it down, turning my attention to the pistol that had been on the sled.

Once again I took the German pistol from its wooden case, but this time I set the case on the floor and checked the weapon. It was in good condition, and when I drew back the slide I could see it was loaded. I ran a fingertip around the red number nine and remembered how I had looked into the barrel of a similar weapon, in the days after we were betrayed by the Red Army.

In those days everything was tainted with one colour or another. Black, red, white, green. Every army gave itself a colour, as if they were teams preparing to meet for some purpose other than to murder each other. With the anarchist Black Army under Nestor Makhno, I had fought hard against General Wrangel’s White Army, eventually joining forces with the Red Army that I’d deserted just a few months before. In 1920, with our tenuous bond holding, the cavalry and infantry of the two armies pursued Wrangel south through Ukraine to the Crimea, but after our combined victory that winter, the Red Army renounced its agreement and broke the weak alliance between black and red. The communists were ruthless in their treatment, more so of those of us who’d once been among their number, and the palette was washed clean. The only colour that remained was red, and few of my brothers in arms escaped the executions.

Just days after Wrangel fled, Bolshevik communications were intercepted: orders for all members of Makhno’s organisation to be arrested. All staff and subordinate commanders were apprehended and executed. Makhno escaped, taking his soldiers, fleeing north into Ukraine and then disbanding, heading west for the places Lenin had signed over to the Polish.

I was with a small group of men who, like me, had no intention of leaving Ukraine. Natalia and I first met in my home town of Moscow, but she was from Ukraine, and when the war with Germany began, she returned to the village of Vyriv to raise our sons. So that’s where I intended to go – I had a wife and children I hardly knew and I wanted to make a new life with my family.

I and a few stragglers shed any sign of allegiance and headed north, hoping to find provisions in villages along the way, but at one settlement a small unit of Red Army soldiers had already been to requisition grain and food. The villagers had protested so the communists retaliated by burning them out of their homes. As we approached, we saw the smoke from the fires and chose to skirt around the area, but the reds had already left and we ran straight into them.

The communists were fuelled with the destruction and death they’d left behind, and they confronted us without fear. Their commander drew his pistol and nudged his horse forward so he could point it down at me, the barrel close to my face. I was younger and faster in those days. Battle-hardened and fearless. I reached out and took the pistol in my fist before the mounted soldier could fire. I pushed it aside, dragged the soldier from his horse and took the weapon from him. I shot the commander twice, pressing the pistol against his chest, and red and black emptied their weapons at each other until there was silence once more.

Two of my friends were killed in the fight, but when the rest of us left on horseback, taking the communists’ weapons, all five red soldiers lay dead.

Now I rested the pistol in my lap and stared at the flames. The room was filled with flickering orange light, the only sound was the crackling and snapping of the wood. The ticking of a clock.

‘What are you doing?’ Natalia asked, making me blink and rub my eyes.

‘Sitting,’ I said, looking up to see her standing in the doorway. ‘Remembering.’

She came in and eased into the chair opposite.

‘How long were you standing there?’ I asked.

‘Long enough. You going to tell me about it?’

I watched the fire reflected in her eyes. ‘He wasn’t alone. There were two children with him. A boy and a girl. Both dead.’

Natalia put her hands up, cupping them over her mouth and nose, her thumbs sliding under her chin. ‘How?’ Her voice sounded hollow, held in like that.

I tried to find the words but nothing felt right. There was no good way to say what I thought.

Natalia pulled her chair closer and turned it to face me, sitting so our knees were touching. ‘Whatever it is, you can tell me.’

I nodded, thinking it was a hard thing to tell a mother, but I relied on her to help me carry my dark thoughts. She needed to know. ‘The girl had wounds like her flesh had been taken off,’ he said. ‘Like she’d been butchered.’

Natalia knew the stories as well as I did. She hadn’t seen it first hand, but she’d heard that in the famine ten years ago there were those who were so hungry, so deranged, they’d taken to eating their dead.

‘Not now,’ she said. ‘Not any more. People aren’t that desperate.’

I ran a hand across my beard. ‘Do you think a man could find a taste for it?’

Natalia sat back. ‘That’s too horrible to even think about.’

I had seen it before. After we’d fought the small detachment of red soldiers, we’d entered the skeletal village to look for food and survivors. The povolzhye famine was not yet in full swing, but grain requisitions, disruptions to agriculture and drought had squeezed everything from the Volga-Ural region, and disease and starvation was spreading. First the war with the central powers, then the civil war had taken the heart and life from the country and it was beginning to die. People were so hungry that seed grain was eaten before it could be sown. Farm animals had all been butchered, as had dogs, cats, anything that would provide meat. People foraged for whatever sustenance they could find because their cellars and their bellies were empty. They ate rotten potatoes, grass, nettles, bark from the trees. They filled themselves with water, distending their stomachs, swelling their legs, making their eyes bulge and their skin sag. And finally they dropped in the streets with no one strong enough to bury them or take them away. Then came rumours that people had begun to eat their own dead.

I had found evidence in that unnamed village. A place with no more than a few homes scattered around smallholdings which had been ransacked and burned, the charred wood blackened and bleak.

We had checked each home that was still intact, knocking on the doors and going inside to search for food, but we didn’t need to open cupboards because they were already left open to display their emptiness. We looked beneath tables and searched cellars, stepping over the wasted bodies of women and children left to rot. We covered our faces and noses, searching only because we were desperate and because desperate men will do almost anything they have to do to survive. And then I discovered the one thing I would not do.

In one house I found an emaciated man standing by a large pot that boiled on the wood-burning stove. He was like a dead man animated, a corpse dressed in rags. And, at his feet, a naked body with slices of flesh cut from the backs of its legs.

‘Luka.’

‘Hmm?’ Once more Natalia jarred me from my memories. ‘What?’

She drew her arms around herself and stared at the wall. I didn’t know if she was looking to where our children lay asleep or simply trying not to look at the stranger smothered in blankets by the fire. ‘You really think someone might do that when they didn’t have to?’

‘Are there people who like it, you mean? I don’t know. Maybe it’s possible.’

‘We can’t have him in our house. We have to get him out.’

‘Right now he’s harmless.’

‘So why are you watching him? And why do you have that?’

I smiled without humour and lifted the pistol. ‘To be safe.’

‘You should have left him,’ she said. ‘Out there.’

‘That’s what Viktor said.’

‘So maybe he was right.’

‘He would have died.’

Natalia shrugged.

‘Would you want that?’ I asked. ‘Would you want to go to bed each night, knowing your husband and son had left a man to die?’

‘You were a soldier,’ she said. ‘I manage to sleep knowing you’ve done the kind of things soldiers do.’

‘This is different. What kind of a person would I be if I didn’t do something to help? What kind of a human being would I be?’

She remained silent.

‘There are things on his sled,’ I told her. ‘Things he has with him that make me think he’s a veteran.’

‘Of what? Which war?’

I looked down at the pistol. ‘I’ve seen weapons like this before. Some of the German soldiers carried them. The Bolshevik commissars used something similar during the civil war, but this one came from a German. The number on the handle tells me that. This man might have fought the Germans, Natalia, and that means he was in the Imperial Army like me. It’s like he’s my brother.’

‘Unless he’s Red Army.’

‘We have to give him the benefit of the doubt. We have to let him speak for himself and then we can decide what he has and hasn’t done.’

Natalia folded her hands in her lap, pushing them between her knees. ‘And if he’s running from something?’ she asked. ‘Someone shot him, so they might be following him. What if he brings the communists?’

‘They’ll come eventually; we both know that.’

‘Later rather than sooner is the way I’d like it. What do you think they’ll do when they come here? They’ll take everything we have. Force us onto a collective if we’re lucky or send my children away to Siberia if I’m not. Take my husband out in the night and I’ll never see him again.’

I stared into the fire. ‘We should think about leaving,’ I said. ‘Soon. There are ways into Poland.’

‘We’ve talked about this. The borders are closed and we don’t have papers.’

‘We’ll find somewhere if we go across country – stay away from the roads.’

‘We can’t take Lara across country in this weather. No, all we can do is stay here, and when they come do whatever they ask of us. If we do that, we can stay together.’

‘I’m not so sure they’d allow it.’

We sat for a long time without speaking, both of us lost in our thoughts. We watched the fire weaken in the hearth, and I threw on another piece of wood when Natalia went to bed. And while she drew the blankets against the cold, I stayed in my chair, watching the stranger.

I barely closed my eyes all night. My whole being was alert to the sounds of the house, my ears strained for a rattling at the locked door. I considered Natalia’s concern that someone might have followed the stranger – that he might have been running from something – and I knew that when the activists first came, they always came at night. To take the men away.