Child Thief (30 page)

‘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.

23

The soldiers didn't speak while they took me to the table in the centre of the church. They pushed me down into a chair and stepped away, one on each side, just a few feet away, and there they remained silent. Waiting.

On the table the candles flickered, flames twisting in the air, their light glinting on the surface of a heavy glass tumbler of water that stood by a dented metal jug. I sat straight in the chair, staring at the wooden crucifix lying on the table close to the half-burned candles. Its main upright was as long and thick as my forearm, and I could see where it had once stood in a base. It was not ornate, but a simple representation of the cross. I stared at it and prepared for what was to come. I tried to relax, calm my mind. I tried to close myself off and pretend I wasn't here. I was at home, at the table in the kitchen. The
pich
was alight and warm. The table was laid with fresh bread and
salo
and mushrooms that Natalia had picked from the woods in the summer. There was a full bottle of
horilka
. And my family was there. Natalia beside me, my sons and my daughter around the table.