The Winter Thief

61

Gabriel arrived in the port of Trabzon and, as Simon had predicted, was unable to find porters who would take the supplies he wished to purchase into the mountains. What few roads there were, incredulous locals told him, were snowed in, and where he wanted to go there were no roads at all, only tracks. It cost him two precious gold liras to find a guide willing to take him and a hostler willing to sell him a horse and two mules. The guide was a bear of a man whose face was nearly hidden behind a bristling black beard, mustache, and thick eyebrows. His clothes were greasy and he stank. He grunted at Gabriel’s instructions and took the coins, turning up a few hours later with the animals and supplies.

Gabriel decided to leave his trunk and extra supplies locked in a stone shed he purchased behind the guesthouse where he was lodging, and he paid the owner to keep an eye on it. The gold was hidden in the trunk beneath a false bottom. Despite Gabriel’s fear that it would be discovered by some nosy townsman, he thought the gold safer there than strapped onto a mule with this disreputable guide and unknown dangers on the road. He would return for it as soon as he could.

They set off before dawn. Gabriel was excited about finally going to live at the commune, although he regretted that he didn’t have more weapons and supplies to present to his comrades. In the spring, when the roads were open, he would purchase what they needed with the gold. By then Yorg Pasha would have found Vera and she would have arrived in Trabzon. They would pass through these mountains together.

The morning mist cleared, revealing layer upon layer of ascending ranges. The horses picked their way through the snow as the guide sounded the path before them with a six-foot wand to check for hidden fissures. They lost one of the mules when it stepped off the path and broke through a crust of ice hiding a deep streambed. At night, Gabriel and his guide put up in village houses that often consisted of only two rooms, one for the family and the other for their animals. Despite his being plagued by fleas, Gabriel’s spirits remained high. Except for occasional instructions in a thick local dialect that Gabriel found hard to follow, the guide didn’t speak to him at all. The journey from the coast took them fifteen days. Of the trip, Gabriel remembered the silence, broken only by the sound of distant avalanches and the glare of snow against a changing sky.

On his approach to the commune, Gabriel found a ghastly sight. The fields around the monastery were littered with dismembered corpses. When they arrived at the gate, the guide took the rest of his payment without dismounting, turned his horse, and disappeared back into the untracked expanse of the mountains. The gate was open. There was no sound, and Gabriel had the panicked thought that all his comrades were dead. He walked through the courtyard and pushed open the door to the building. It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. He was in a cavernous hall, a smoking fire at one end casting neither light nor heat. The windows were plugged with blocks of what appeared to be straw mixed with mud. Far above, he could make out a tiled roof. The commune’s two dozen inhabitants, hollow-eyed and emaciated, sat or lay listlessly on straw pallets, barely taking note of Gabriel’s arrival.

One man hurried toward him. Gabriel recognized Victor Byman, the medical student from New York. His distinctive head was round as a melon and seemed set directly onto his shoulders. When he got closer, Gabriel saw that his face was gray and sagged with exhaustion.

Victor broke into a grin when he recognized Gabriel. “The angel Gabriel come to save us,” he quipped as the men embraced. When Gabriel stepped back, he saw tears in the man’s eyes.

“What’s happened?” Gabriel asked. “Why are there so many unburied bodies?”

Of fifty comrades who had made their way from far corners of the world to New Concord over the past eight months, Victor explained, only twenty-six had survived. “The ground was too frozen to dig, so we stacked the bodies outside the walls, first in a shed, then, when there were too many, buried under the snow. But the wolves dug down and dragged the bodies out and spread the remains across the fields, and we don’t have the strength to stop them.”

Victor led him to a stool by the fire and introduced the young Irishwoman sitting beside him as Alicia. Her face was mottled with freckles and her matted hair was the color of dry straw, but her blue eyes were clear as chips of ice. Alicia’s hands were red and chapped, her dress tattered, but of good wool and embroidered at the sleeves. Gabriel wondered what had brought a girl of a good house all the way from Ireland to eastern Anatolia.

Victor brought them water and apologized that they couldn’t offer more to a tired traveler. Gabriel told him about the supplies he had brought, although greatly reduced by the loss of one mule and its load.

Alicia got up hastily. “We thank you, sir,” she told Gabriel, looking around the dark hall. “We are sorely in need. They’ve had little to eat these past days.” She strode away, and Gabriel saw her speak to two men. They followed her into the courtyard, where his animals were tied up. After a few moments she returned.

Cradling his cup of water, Victor told Gabriel what had happened to the commune. The year had gone well enough. They put on a roof and harvested one crop; the hunting and fishing were good. New comrades arrived, bringing tools and supplies. Then their comrade Klaus Wedel died. Gabriel remembered him as a Swiss wool merchant, an avid skier who had come late to the movement.

“I thought it was pneumonia.” Victor paused to take a sip of water. “That was in late autumn, when the ground was still soft enough to dig a grave.”

The crackling of the fire was punctuated by coughs from the pallets. These makeshift nests of quilts, blankets, and straw were laid close together along an inner wall.

“My ma and pa and every blessed one of my siblings died of the pneumonia last winter.” Alicia broke into the silence, her voice strangely dispassionate. “It took a mere two weeks to erase all their lifetimes.”

“I’m sorry, Alicia.” Victor leaned forward and pressed her hand with his own. “After Klaus, there were more,” he went on. “We quarantined them, but this place is too small. It looked like pneumonia, but I’m not sure. Some had intestinal bleeding, so it could have been cholera, or even influenza. But it was faster than anything I’ve ever seen. You cough a bit, like something’s stuck in your throat, you get a nosebleed, and next morning you’re dead.” Victor’s hands, Gabriel noticed in the firelight, were clean and manicured, in contrast with his Shetland sweater and trousers, their colors camouflaged by dark stains. Gabriel wondered if the stains were blood.

Victor was examining his hands now, as if he were thinking the same thing. “There haven’t been any cases in two weeks, so I hope it’s over, but we need food. The weaker they are, the more susceptible they become. One more outbreak and we might as well give up.”

“We have some ammunition left,” Alicia said. “Ten cartridges.”

“Alicia is the best marksman we have,” Victor announced. “The source of all the game in our pot. Never wastes a bullet.”

Gabriel saw his admiring look at Alicia, and her face lowered, a barely repressed smile on her lips. He thought of Vera. What would she think of him for abandoning her? He allowed himself to wonder for the first time whether she was still alive. He closed his eyes and willed the pain in his gut to subside.

“Something hurt?” Victor asked him with a concerned look. “Life, comrade.” Gabriel forced a smile.

The next morning, Gabriel and Alicia donned snowshoes that a Norwegian comrade, now buried beneath the snow, had brought with him.

“But you can’t shoot.” Victor pointed to Gabriel’s bandaged right hand. “You’d be more helpful giving a morale talk to the comrades. Their heads are as starved as their bellies.”

“Alicia can’t go by herself,” Gabriel insisted.

“I do all the time.” Rifle slung across her shoulder, she was already swinging her feet, attached to the webbed snowshoes, across the field like a duck, heading for the forest.

“Alicia,” Gabriel called out. “Stop. What if you’re hurt? And how will you get the carcass back?”

“I’ll go.” Victor held out his hands for the snowshoes. “You’re right, she might bag a deer instead of a hare.”

Over several hours, Gabriel heard occasional shots ricochet through the mountains. He was stacking wood when he heard a shot that didn’t sound like the others. It had a quicker report, like a snarl instead of the boom of the shotguns. He stared at the woods, then took up a rifle and stomped awkwardly though the knee-deep snow toward the line of pines, following the broad track of snowshoes.

He met Alicia and Victor stumbling through the woods.

“He’s been shot,” Alicia gasped.

As soon as they were back in the monastery, Victor shrugged off his coat and pulled back a blood-soaked sleeve. “Just grazed,” he announced, his relief audible, but his face gray with pain.

Alicia cleaned the wound with an iodine solution.

“What happened?” Gabriel asked.

“I shot a deer,” she said, her hands busy with bandages. “We were walking over to it when a man stepped from behind a tree with a pistol and shot Victor. He looked familiar. I think he works for one of the local landowners.” She stroked Victor’s forehead.

“Did he say anything?”

“I didn’t understand him.”

Victor sat up, wincing. “He said, ‘Get out. You bring bad luck.’”

“In what language?” Gabriel asked.

“Armenian.”

“I didn’t know you spoke Armenian.”

“My grandfather on my mother’s side was Armenian. He moved to California, looking for paradise. He didn’t find it and returned to New York, but I thought I should keep looking.” He reached up with his good arm and pressed Alicia’s hand against his lips.

“Wonderful,” Gabriel declared. “Now the locals are after us too. Did you have any trouble with them before?” He wondered whether news of the bank robbery had reached this valley.

“A few months after we arrived,” Alicia explained, “we were running short of money, so we stopped buying food from the Karakaya farmers. We had our gardens and a promising crop, and we hunted. The farmers left us alone. But recently we heard that the governor had paid a visit to the three biggest landowners, and after that it seemed like they turned on us. We had five goats, but one morning they were gone. When we hunted, sometimes there’d be the sound of a drum that would scare the game away. But nothing like this. They never shot at us before.”

“Maybe we should think about leaving,” Victor ventured. “There aren’t all that many of us left.”

“That would mean our comrades died for nothing,” Gabriel answered crossly.

“The living are our responsibility too.”

“Well, I’m staying,” Gabriel insisted. There was nothing left for him in Europe, and he could never return to Russia or to Istanbul. There was only this valley. He saw Victor meet Alicia’s eyes before he turned to stir life into the fire.