Tin Sky (34 page)

She has added a possibly significant square to the Tibyetsky puzzle thus far: namely that the open quarrelling between Khan and Platonov was about theft, or that stick-in-the-mud Platonov’s idea of theft. It begs the question as to whether Khan’s luxurious living in Kharkov (Larisa called him a sybarite!) was wholly derived from the Party’s gratitude to a hero, or had other sources as well (his audacious business deals with foreigners, for example). The expression she used, “a thief’s thief”, points to an appropriation of goods from someone who owned them illegally or unjustly in the first place. Makhno? The landed gentry themselves? I mean to go back to Pomorki as soon as possible and wheedle out of her all she remembers about those days. She’s right as far as I am concerned: I did visit her with an ulterior motive.

Note: not far from her house, on the grounds of the Biological Institute, totally abandoned, there are shafts leading to underground gas pipes. As I saw when I briefly stopped there on my way back – curiosity being my second name – I noticed that except for one, their iron lids are bolted shut. Rightly so, because otherwise they’d make a perfect hideout for undesirables. If the lidless one is a typical example, they’re 7 or 8 metres deep!

Another note: upon my return to the schoolhouse, Kostya was as moody as one like Kostya can be moody, surely on account of my burning Tarasov’s place. Well, what do these Russians want? Can’t they appreciate that one is sparing them worse trouble? Peasants through and through; Larisa was right.

8

WEDNESDAY 19 MAY, KALEKINA FARM, NEAR KRASNY YAR

At the edge of the woods, the red-stemmed dogwood they called
deren
in Ukraine was in full bloom. Pollen from other plants, shaken by the wind, fell across the sunbeams where the trees grew sparsely, although in other spots the shade was deep and blue-green. Along the dirt lane white poplars shed their down. It was like a snowstorm in places, bits of white fluff becoming caught in the unripe ears of wheat until the fields were covered with a layer that made their bristling, tender green look cottony. Bora and Nagel arrived on horseback. They stopped by the desolate farm marked on their maps as Kalekina; long collectivized under the name “Friendship of Peoples”, it was nothing now but a set of ramshackle buildings where hollyhock grew rank to the height of a man, and the fences had been burnt as firewood. The wheat meagrely sown before the last battle for Kharkov might not ripen before the next battle took place.

Nagel looked at the shabbiness of the farm. “They have the woods less than half a kilometre away,” he observed, “and they’ve pulled up pickets and gates. They
are
afraid of going into the Yar.”

“Can’t blame them, Nagel. They are afraid of that, and of us, and of everything else at this time. You’ve seen the women by the old man’s grave; they bowed deeply to us as they would have done when the tsar or landowner went by.”

The women at the grave were the ones who’d sent the Germans to the Kalekina farm. According to them, the beheaded corpse belonged to old man Kalekin, who had two adolescent grandsons and had ventured into Krasny Yar “only because of the boys, because the boys were the first to go missing during the spring thaw”. Missing where? In the Yar, of course. After his death, two sisters whose husbands had died at the front moved into the Kalekina farmhouse. The siblings were thought to know other details that Bora and Nagel were seeking before entering the woods.

Bora was never formal or predictable on these occasions, and that’s why he wanted Nagel with him, who knew him best and went along with him whatever the errand. He approached the main house from the side, where a small four-paned window, blue with the reflection of the sky from afar, turned darker and more transparent as he drew near. Bora discreetly rapped on the glass with his knuckles, in part because he didn’t want to alarm those inside (although Nagel kept a sub-machine gun at the ready), and in part because the fragile bubble-specked pane, beyond which shadows were perceivable in the glare from another small window opposite, divided the everyday world from a realm inside. Reflections and transitory images: if Bora moved his head slightly he could see the sergeant standing watch behind him; if he only tilted it, the interior of the house came into view with the liquid semi-darkness of a water tank. Enchantresses, witches, fairy women were as likely to live inside the Kalekina farm as peasant girls whose men had gone to die. It wasn’t Larisa Malinovskaya Bora was reminded of – she was mundane even in her solitude – but Remedios in Spain, whom he’d physically loved like no other (
Martin-Heinz Bora… died and went to heaven
, he’d written in his diary after meeting her for the first time), and whose essence he wondered about to this day. She was to him what she wasn’t to other men; other men saw her and tasted her in wholly different ways. What she’d given him she’d given no one else. Circe, Calypso, Melusina: she’d
been the sorceress who is far from everyone and to whom men must go begging, or come stumbling to from foreign lands.

He rapped three times on the pane, a magic number, and the shadows within gave something like a shiver, less than a motion. A woman’s face floated within two steps of the window, looking out. Plain as it was to both of them that he could have smashed the window instead or barged in unbidden, she made a small gesture of her left hand that invited him to come around the corner and reach the doorstep.

They looked to be in their late thirties, homely and clean, so fair that the blonde hairline showing from under the white kerchiefs on their heads seemed white. One was tall and stocky, smelling of cheap drink, the other minute; both had eyes of that peculiar blue-grey, dark to the extent of simulating blackness. When Bora told them what he was here to do – find out details about those who hadn’t died, necessarily, but had gone missing in the Yar – they both looked suddenly grief-stricken, as if wilting under his question. He realized the boys lost were their own before they told him, and was briefly angry at the others, those by the grave, who hadn’t informed him of this. But the sisters did not weep.
They’re like springs that have given all the water there was to give
, he thought,
and I stand here digging for wetness
. He chose not to step indoors, speaking to them in full view by the threshold. Once he made it clear that he and his man hadn’t come looking for labourers or recruits (in case the boys had been found and were presently in hiding), they told him the story.

For perhaps half an hour the three of them spoke, in a storm of fluff raining from the poplars. The seed-bearing tufts, blinding in the warm sun, wafted and became caught on every surface, vertical or flat. They reminded Bora of the cinders hovering, impalpable, around the steel of Khan’s T-34: lightness over difficulty and peril, as now. Mankind complicates everything, and nature literally makes light of it, with twirling ashes and hairy seeds. Nagel kept watch and Bora tactfully questioned the
women, nodding at their words, until the stocky one withdrew and he conversed with the small sister alone.

Kalekin had been their father-in-law. Their sons, aged thirteen and fourteen respectively, had never come back from a trip to the Udy River, on the other side of Krasny Yar. The old man had taken it even harder than the mothers; once his own sons had fallen at the front, the grandsons had become a reason for living: he doted on them, spoilt them all he could under the circumstances. They’d gone fishing in the Udy, and never come back. The Russian army was quartered at Papskaya Ternovka then, so Kalekin had trekked to enquire of their commander if by chance the boys had been recruited or hurt by a mine. The officer, who was a good fellow and also a local, told the old man the boys hadn’t been seen. Yes, they might have strayed into the woods; however, the comrades didn’t have time now to go looking for them – he could readily understand this, couldn’t he? Kalekin said he could, but it wasn’t true. He became ill with the loss, obsessed with searching for his grandsons despite the battles that were being fought everywhere around him, until he’d left the farm early on 1 May for the woods, and had died there.

“But there’s no proof your boys went into the Yar,” Bora objected, “much less that they were killed.” He showed the wooden button he still carried in his pocket. “Was this your father-in-law’s?”

How could he have known? The small sister was staggered; she covered her mouth, glancing back as if to make sure her sibling was out of earshot. “It comes from my nephew’s coat, the coat that used to belong to his father. Where did you find it,
poshany
Major?”

Bora felt an inner chill, and wouldn’t say. He modified the statement he’d been about to make to “There’s no proof he was killed” because it seemed obvious that at least one of the boys had ended up in the woods, and also possible that his grandfather had been killed just after he’d found the clue.
“Don’t frighten your sister for now. Stay away from the Yar, both of you, and tell me what else you know about it.”

The rest was whispered to him away from the house, where the farm woman stood to avoid being overheard by her sister, and where, of his own accord, Bora righted a spindly gate, fallen in from the last gaping, rickety fence.

He learnt that in Makhno’s days the older sister, twelve at the time, had been taken from her parents’ farm at Sharkov, brought to Krasny Yar and raped, which was why she also had another child, a daughter twenty-two years of age, now an army nurse. “Father went looking for her, and Makhno’s men shot him. My sister won’t talk of those days,
poshany
Major, not even to us. She’s so scared of the dark even now, you have to keep the candle burning at night.” (
Or else she gets drunk to be able to fall asleep
, Bora told himself.) “She won’t go near the woods, be sure of that, not even for her son. When the priest from Losukovka came a few days ago and walked with his procession around the Yar, she wouldn’t look out of the window.”

“In the years after that war, did you live here?”

She shook her head. “We moved. Our husbands worked at the warehouse in Smijeff. We came back to our father-in-law’s when we were widowed, but were in Sharkov when he died.”

Afterwards, summarizing things to the sergeant, Bora wondered out loud, “About the kidnapping: what can the dark have to do with it? The Yar is anything but a dark forest, even at its thickest. Was the girl raped overnight? Night is dark everywhere.”

“They might have thrown a cloth over her head, or kept her hooded the time she was with Makhno’s men. How did she escape, Herr Major?”

“The younger sister was quite small at the time, and doesn’t remember. She is aware the Bolsheviks replaced the Black Army, but can’t tell for sure whether it was they who freed the girl or if she had picked her way out of the woods. On the other hand, both women were familiar with a boy who went missing
at that time. He was found hanging from a tree at the edge of the woods, stripped naked.”

Nagel glanced at the house, at the woods, and back at the house. “It’s all very strange, Herr Major. Looks as if discouraging folks from going into the Yar is the main idea. But there are towns and collective farms that could have organized expeditions through the years, not to speak of the government or the Red Army. They could have resolved the matter had they wanted to. Or were the woods declared off limits for whatever reason?”

“That’s what I think. But if they were, it wasn’t done officially. Which is why I wanted you here today: I have no clearance to do so, but I’m going to take another look before we go in with the regiment.”

With the privilege of a senior non-com, Nagel shook his head. “Well, sir, I’m not about to wait out here. We’ve been through worse things than a patch of Russian woods, the Major and I. And if the women can keep an eye on our mounts, I’m ready when the Major is.”

Considering the irregularity of the errand, it was a mark of Nagel’s regard for him. And Bora, usually so spare with effusions, went as far as allowing himself a friendly tap on the sergeant’s shoulder. “Let’s go, then.”

Entering Krasny Yar from the once well-kept “Friendship of the Peoples” confines, he understood at once how the accumulation of leaves over the seasons concealed the irregularity of the terrain throughout the woods. Days after the rain the low-lying areas were still wet if not soggy, while others, rock-strewn, stayed scrubby and dry. Overgrown fruit trees, long returned to the wild, had survived their extinct farmsteads (the place had been settled in the late 1700s, and kept as pasture then), while elsewhere one stumbled upon rotten planks and stumps that had once sustained sheds or lean-tos, beyond living memory. No trace of man-made paths remained. Still, the dismantled structures pointed to a possible reason for the locals to come foraging here during the Great War, and later in the years of
the Famine: scrap wood to burn or reuse, small apples, berries, mushrooms. The Russian peasant’s ability to live off the barest essentials made even the Yar a promising – if scary – place to come beggaring through. After all, not all those who’d strayed into Krasny Yar had died, despite Father Victor’s dreams and tales of wild creatures and ghosts.

Ahead, the thin, trilling chatter of small birds drew festoons of sound from tree to tree, as green as their striped livery; deeper in, woodpeckers’ calls sounded like people whistling insistently for their dogs. The Germans proceeded in view of each other, cutting through the Yar at a ninety-degree angle from Bora’s first visit, when he’d met Father Victor. Although their compasses functioned for the time being, both snapped branches or blazed young trees with pocket knives to mark their trail. Seeking to pick up signs of human presence, they followed a north-north-west direction, towards the blasted tree where those of the 241st had recovered Kalekin’s remains. Muddy spots were checked for footprints; heaped leaves for signs of discomposure.