Child Thief (4 page)

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.

5

It was still dark, but I guessed it was between four and five because I was roused from an ill doze by the lilt of a lonely blackbird's song. It continued to sing, oblivious to my troubles, and I looked at the man still lying in front of the fire. The flames were long since dead and the room was cold, but the man was well covered.

I stood and rubbed my eyes. I arched my back, feeling the stiffness working out of my muscles.

The man had hardly moved. He was in more or less the same position he'd been in last night, his thin frame tucked beneath a pile of blankets and sheets. I could hear him breathing – a slow, heavy sound. Laboured and shallow breaths, each one accompanied by the rasping wheeze of a dying man. I waited, listening to the awkward drawing in of air, the weak exhalation, then I went through to the bedroom.

‘What's the matter?' Natalia whispered.

‘Nothing. Go back to sleep.'

‘I haven't slept all night.'

‘I'm going to take Viktor up to the cemetery,' I said. ‘Bury those children. You can take care of the animals?'

‘I can manage.'

‘Take Petro and Lara with you.' They would make Natalia's job easier and it would mean they were out of the house. I wanted to show our guest some care and hospitality, but I didn't want to put my family at risk by leaving them alone with him.

Natalia pushed back the bedclothes and swung her legs out.
Beside her, Lara stirred. In the other bed, Viktor and Petro, men now, not boys, too big to have to sleep together. Perhaps, when times were better, they could have their own places.

I shook Viktor awake. ‘Come on. I need your help.'

‘Is he still alive?' Natalia asked.

‘Still alive.' I nodded. ‘Still asleep. He must be exhausted. I wonder how far he's come. What he's been through.'

‘Or what he's
done
.'

‘We'll wake him when I come back. Give him something hot to eat, find out who he is. Then we'll know what he's done.'

‘Will we?'

I looked at my wife.

‘If he's done something to those children, do you really think he's going to tell us?' she asked.

‘We'll know if he's lying.'

‘How? How will we know?'

‘He'll be tired,' I said. ‘Confused. Exhausted. He won't be able to think straight.'

‘Then maybe we should talk to him
before
we feed him.'

‘Could you do that? Just let him starve?'

Natalia came close. ‘Yes. Maybe.' She shook her head. ‘No. Oh, I don't know. I just want him gone. Out of this house. He's brought trouble with him; I can feel it in the air like I can feel it when winter's coming.'

‘It'll be all right.
We'll
be all right.'

‘Can you really say that?'

‘Yes.'

‘Really?'

I sighed and turned away from her, telling Viktor to meet me outside. I went to the front door, Natalia coming from the bedroom as I put on my coat.

‘You should eat something before you go,' she said as I pulled on my boots. ‘I'll make porridge.'

I shoved my foot hard into my boot and straightened up, putting a hand on my belly. ‘I can't eat before this,' I said.

‘You'll need your strength.'

‘I'll regain it afterwards.'

‘Please,' she said, unfastening my coat. ‘It won't take a minute.'

I slumped my shoulders and thought about it before nodding.

‘And Viktor will need something,' she went on. ‘Think of your son if not of yourself.'

‘OK,' I sighed. ‘But not too much.'

I sat while she prepared something for us, Viktor and Petro coming out of the other room. Petro was carrying Lara, dressed but still sleepy.