Tolya looked away, swallowing quickly. His throat was very tight.
“In the mountains,” he said.
“Due south. On foot, it will take you three days—two, if you push yourself. I wouldn’t. I’d take it easy, with that shoulder. And, because party-appointed schoolteachers don’t carry sniper rifles…”
Solovey unbuckled his gun belt and handed the pistol in its holster to Tolya.
“Easier to keep hidden. There are rounds in the bag. Not many, so you’ll have to be judicious.”
He sat back on his heels. “That’s your first option. It’s not as simple as it sounds. Do you believe in God, Tolya?”
The question hung on the air between them. Tolya’s tongue was tied by reflex, weighed down with years of careful silence.
“You’re either a believer or an idiot,” Solovey said. “Those are the only people carrying prayer beads in Stalin’s army.”
The anger was by reflex too. “Why do you care?”
“You’ve thought about your contingency plans?”
“What?”
“Your contingency plans—for instance, if the NKVD take you. It’s a very good chance they will, if we’re being realistic. There’s seventy kilometers between you and the mountains. Open farmland, most of it.”
Solovey covered Tolya’s hand with his hand and lifted the pistol, pressing the mouth of the pistol gently to Tolya’s temple.
“What do you think?” he said. “Would God forgive you this?”
The pistol was holstered and safety locked, but even so Tolya’s stomach jumped. He didn’t move.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Think about it. Do you trust him enough to pull the trigger? Do you trust him enough not to pull the trigger? You’re wagering body and soul on a decision you make in a second—the hardest and loneliest decision of your life. Could you do it?”
Thump, thump, thump went Tolya’s heart against his ribs.
“Could you?” he said.
Solovey smiled. His fingers were cold.
“I’ve got more faith in God’s mercy than in the NKVD’s,” he said.
He let go of Tolya’s hand.
“Second option,” he said. “Fyodor Volkov. What do you know about him?”
“He commands the NKVD rifle division with the Front.” Tolya hesitated. “He says he’s going to make you pay for killing General Vatutin.”
“He’s the highest-ranking NKVD officer in all of western Ukraine, and he’s going to hang us publicly in our own village squares, to be exact—yes. He’s more worried about us than about the Germans, so he and his rifles are staying behind in L’viv while the rest of the Front pushes across the Vistula.” Solovey patted the stock of the rifle again. He looked up into Tolya’s face. “So—second option. You stay with me, and I get you within five hundred meters or so of Volkov.”
“And then?”
“You put a hole in his head.”
“I mean after that.”
“I can promise you the NKVD won’t give a damn about one runaway Galician conscript after that—even if you did murder a political officer.”
“What about the UPA? Will I still be useful?”
Solovey was silent for a moment. He looked away into the wood. The muscles in his cheek tightened, fluttering.
“This is between you and me,” he said, “not the UPA.” He looked back, smiling just a little. “Yours won’t be the first secret I’ve kept. I can promise you that too.”
Tolya didn’t say anything.
“Think about it,” Solovey said. He stuck a hand in his pocket. He brought out Tolya’s rosary and spilled it into Tolya’s hand. “I’ll be down the hill.”
* * *
Tolya sat on the ridge, running the rosary between his fingers.
He didn’t know how to pray the beads as his mother had prayed, in Latin, but he knew the first three beads after the crucifix were the prayer to the Theotokos, and he didn’t think the Theotokos really minded that he did it in Ukrainian instead.
Rejoice, O Virgin Theotokos, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, for thou hast borne the Savior of our souls.
He made the prayers in turn: to the Theotokos; to his patron and the patrons of his family, holding the icons in his head one by one; and last of all to Christ, holding the crucifix tightly in his hand, for Thou art the Resurrection and the Life and the Repose of Thy departed handmaiden …
Then he faltered, because he couldn’t bring himself to say her name.
It was very quiet in the wood. The wind had died. The midmorning sun was pouring through the trees there on the hilltop. With his eyes closed, he could hear the murmur of voices up from the camp and—distantly—the low hum of engines. The Front was still crawling along the floor of the river valley, westward, away from Lwów—away from him.
It was a strange, empty feeling—being left.
He had imagined running. He’d lain awake in the darkness between Yura and Petya, thinking about what it would be like to run. Of course, the only way you could do it, really, was to do it the cowards’ way, slipping away quietly in the night or in the ragged confusion of battle. But he’d still liked to think they would know, somehow—that he was Tolya Anatoliyovych Korolenko, his father a murdered Ukrainian peasant farmer and his mother a murdered Catholic Pole, and he wasn’t going to fight the murderer Stalin’s war any longer—as clearly as if he’d stood up and shouted it.
Anyway, it had only been imagination. Koval couldn’t run, and he wouldn’t run without her.
He’d killed her just the same.
He’d killed her by killing Zampolit Petrov, and he’d killed her sister, Nadiya, too.
We’ll get her out, Solovey said, the same way he said I’m sorry, Tolya and It’s all right, Tolya and all the other things he didn’t really mean—not lies, exactly, but the kinds of things you said only because you didn’t know what else to say, the kinds of things you believed only because it would hurt too much if you didn’t.
The truth was they were dead, and he’d killed them.
He could follow the trail of ifs. If he hadn’t shot Zampolit Petrov, if Zampolit Petrov hadn’t killed Comrade Lieutenant Spirin, if Comrade Lieutenant Spirin hadn’t seen him drop that German Oberleutnant from seven hundred meters across the river in Voronezh two years ago—if and if and if, all the way back to Kuz’myn.
But he couldn’t change the truth, and he couldn’t outrun it—not if he kept running for the rest of his life.
All he could do was choose not to try.
* * *
He put the holstered pistol down on the grass by Solovey’s knee, slipping the musette bag from his shoulder.
Solovey looked at the pistol. Then he looked up into Tolya’s face.
Tolya expected a question. He had an answer ready. But Solovey only leaned over the field book spread open on his lap, picked up the pistol, and held it out again.
“Keep it,” he said. “You need something you can use one-handed, for a while.”
II
ALEKSEY
Friday, June 27–Saturday, June 28
1941
6
Down in the street, a gaggle of schoolboys was throwing rocks at the shuttered, barred windows of Lwów’s Brygidki prison.
“Hey, moskali!” A cobblestone bounced off one of the bricked-up doors—clatter-rattle-clatter. “Better run, moskali! The Germans are coming for you!”
They clomped down the empty sidewalk in the shadow of the long, white wall, alternating rocks and taunts.
“Hey, moskali! Better run while you can!”
Ukrainians, these—moskali was their slur for the hated Russian interlopers. Poles said ruski.
They were braver than I was.
No, stupider. Very important distinction. Never mistake stupidity for bravery. Both can kill you, but only one can kill you for a purpose.
I’d been there all afternoon, watching, wai
ting for darkness. It was nearly eight o’clock now. The sun was touching the tops of the northwestern hills. The streetlamps were coming on below me. In the silence—when the boys had vanished around the corner onto Kazimierzowska Street—you could hear the long German eighty-eights thundering from across the San River, ninety kilometers west.
They’re coming for you, moskali.
The Germans would be here by Monday. We all knew it. The Reds knew it. They’d abandoned the city’s westernmost districts three days ago, when the bombs started dropping. But they were still holding on to the radio towers and the NKVD offices on Pełczyńska Street and the prisons at Zamarstynów and the Citadel, and they were still holding on to the Brygidki.
They wouldn’t move all their prisoners. That was simple mathematics. For two years, they’d been stuffing every dissident, every subversive into the cells of Lwów’s prisons—Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish, indiscriminately. There were four thousand prisoners in the Brygidki alone, by my count, maybe more.
Not all of them were political prisoners, of course—and not all the political prisoners were the Reds’.
Anyway, they wouldn’t try to move all of them. They wouldn’t waste the manpower. Realistically, they had no choice but to leave most of their prisoners behind.
Most. Not all.
They would take the high-profile prisoners, the really important ones—the ones they could break for intelligence or barter for concessions.
They would take my father if they knew who he was: Yevhen Kobryn, hero of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, jailed as a terrorist by the Poles for his part in the assassination of an interior minister seven years ago.
I wasn’t sure they knew, but I wasn’t taking chances.
I didn’t have much of a plan. I had a couple of stick grenades—last resorts—and a battered rifle, all lifted from a vodka-drunk sentry down at the station. If I’d had the nerve, I’d have cut his throat with his own bayonet when I took his weapons. The best he could hope for from his own people was a bullet in the back of the head.
His own people. For all I knew, he’d been Ukrainian—a conscript from the steppe, maybe. He’d had high Cossack cheekbones in a gaunt peasant’s face. That didn’t matter. He’d put on the Reds’ uniform. He was the enemy. Anything else was unnecessary complication.
It was beside the point, in the end. I hadn’t had the nerve.
What I did have, in addition to the weapons, was an NKVD officer’s jacket, a pair of bloused uniform trousers, and a fine pair of golden-leather cavalry boots. The officers came down to the Hotel George sometimes to have their uniforms laundered and pressed, and I’d filched this one right off the line and smuggled it home in a potato sack. Repayment in kind—these weren’t NKVD-issue boots. Some Polish officer had been shipped off bootless to the camps when the Reds took the city two years ago.
I had neither the NKVD’s red-banded peaked cap nor the sidearm—officers didn’t carry rifles—but it was enough to fool at first glance. I hoped.
Most importantly, I had a pretty good map of the interior of the Brygidki. Father Yosyp had made it for me this morning on the back of a Psalter page. Before the Reds came, Father Yosyp had gone once a week into the Brygidki to hear the confessions of the faithful among the prisoners and to administer the Eucharist, and his memory was good—better than mine. I’d been into the Brygidki too, twice. The first time, I was twelve, and we’d just put Mama into the ground. The second time was two years ago, just before the city fell. I was seventeen, and that was the last time I’d seen my father.
I wasn’t sure he was still alive, but I wasn’t taking chances.
Father Yosyp hadn’t asked why I wanted the map. He knew—and I think he knew I was going to do what I meant to do anyway, map or no.
He would look after my brother, Mykola, if I failed. I knew that of him.
The sun was slipping behind the hills. The Brygidki stretched long and silent and ghostly pale below me. It stretched a full block along Kazimierzowska Street—a squat, square complex of blocky sandstone buildings around a broad central courtyard. At one point in its long history, it had been a convent of the Bridgettine order of nuns. It had been a prison and a killing place since the time of the Hapsburgs, but the name had stuck—Brygidki—clean and innocent as the whitewashed walls.
A whitened sepulchre, this place, full of Ukrainian blood and Ukrainian bones.
Below me, down in the shop, the door from the alley creaked open and swung shut again. Footsteps echoed over the shop floor—two pairs of heavy, booted footsteps, clomping toward me up the stairs.
I dove behind the long bar counter, slipping the rifle from my shoulder. I curled up against the cabinet with the rifle across my knees, holding my breath and listening. They came up to the landing. They paused in the doorway. I could smell cigarettes on them—the bitter, burnt-grass smell of rough makhorka tobacco. Their shadows ran over the ceiling in the light from the streetlamps.
I could see the silhouettes of rifles.
“I thought you said you could see into the yard,” one of them said.
“The back yard. You can see the garages.”
One of the shadows dipped. The first man ducked through the doorway. He stopped short just inside, hissing a low, sharp breath.
My momentary relief—they’d been speaking Ukrainian, not Russian—shifted back into fear. He’d seen my fresh footprints on the dusty floor.
“You,” he said. “You, behind the bar. Show me your hands.”
I didn’t move.
“I know you’re there.” He unslung his rifle, unlocking the bolt. “Come on, hands up. Come out of there.”
I said, with my heart in my throat, “What happens if I don’t?”
“Stop wasting time. Show me your hands.”
“I’m genuinely curious. What are you going to do with the gun?”
A pause.
“I’ve got a gun too,” I said. “It does me just about as much good as it does you.” The Reds might be willing to ignore a few rocks chucked by bored schoolboys, but they weren’t going to ignore a firefight on their doorstep.
Another pause while he came to the same conclusion. “All right,” he said grudgingly. “All right. Get up, and we’ll talk it over. You’re Ukrainian?”
“Tak,” I affirmed, and remembered only as I stood that I was wearing an NKVD officer’s jacket.
The first man, the one whose rifle swung back up toward me as though by instinct, was obviously the senior of the two. He had maybe ten years on me. He had coppery red-blond hair cut close under his cap and a scattering of bristly red-blond stubble on his chin. His blue eyes were hard and unblinking. Besides the rifle in his hands, he had a pistol holstered neatly under his arm.
The other, hanging back silently in the doorway, was my age, or close, with a sharp, serious, pale face. He met my eyes, blinked, and looked away. He was holding his rifle very tightly.
“Hold your hands up,” the blond man said to me, “above the bar, where I can see them. Come around here.”
“Or what?” It was stupid to keep pushing him, but I was very afraid just then. I had no identification on me. I hadn’t been that stupid. I had an NKVD uniform—most of it—and a Red’s weapons. This could go very badly.
“All right,” the blond man said. “We’ll play it like this.”
He lowered his rifle and slung it back over his shoulder. He brushed open his jacket and slipped a long knife from somewhere inside. He showed it to me, holding the blade between his thumb and two fingers.
“That’s not a throwing knife,” I said.
“Come around here,” the blond man said.
I went. My feet started moving on their own, and I went, holding my hands up. The blond man watched me come around the bar.
“Stand there,” he said, pointing with the knife. Then to the young one: “Search him.”
The young one slung his rifle and approached me cautiously. He crouched at my feet and patted down my legs, straightening slow
ly as he worked his way up. He took the grenades from my pockets very carefully and laid them on the bar. He took out the spare clips for the rifle. He unfolded Father Yosyp’s map with stumbling fingers.
“What does it say?” the blond man asked. He hadn’t turned his eyes from my face.
“It’s a map,” the young one said softly.
“Of what, half-wit?”
“Of the Brygidki.”
“Give it to me,” the blond man said. “Let me see. What about papers? Any identification?”
The young one felt along my arms and slipped his hands shyly into my jacket pockets. He shook his head, not looking in my face. “No, nothing.”
“All right.” The blond man folded up my map and put it in his pocket. “Tie his hands. Use that twine.”
At this point, I didn’t have much to lose by being frank.
“Look,” I said, “I’m not NKVD.”
“So?” the blond man said. “Then you don’t have anything to worry about, eh?”
They tied my hands with a scrap of fuzzy packing twine snaking through the dusty debris on the floor. They pushed me down against the bar, and the young one stood over me watchfully while the blond one went around to pick up my rifle from behind the bar. More footsteps on the stairs, and another man came in from the landing. He was short and burly and bearded, with the rolling gait of a sea captain—ship’s commander Golikov fresh off the battleship Potemkin. He was cupping a pipe in one hand. He had a sidearm holstered at his belt, under his coat.
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