You must, Father Dmytro would say. You must forgive as our Lord forgives.
And Tolya would say nothing for a little while, trying to find the words, and then in the end he would say only, It’s hard.
And Father Dmytro would say, Hate is harder.
No.
Always.
And Tolya would be angry by then, and he would say, Hate is the easiest thing in the world.
Hate is like hogweed, Father Dmytro would say, easily seeded, easily spread—but have you ever tried to root out hogweed? And you’ve got to root it out, because it chokes everything else.
I don’t care, Tolya would say. I hate the men who killed Papa, and I hate the men who killed Mama, and I hate the men who killed you.
But he knew he’d lost.
* * *
The girl was coming over to him across the yard.
He remembered her. The sunburn had gone to tan, but he remembered the freckles on her nose and cheeks, and the short, tight chestnut braids behind her ears, and the bulky soldier’s jacket belted over her skirt, and the monstrous soldier’s boots swallowing her feet.
She knelt by the board, shifting her submachine gun on her shoulder. She took Tolya’s hand in her slim, brown hands, uncurled his fingers, and spooled his rosary onto his open palm.
He looked at the beads. He peeled his tongue off his teeth.
“How?”
“He was still alive when we got to him—the officer.” The girl jerked her chin at Vitalik. “‘The boy is yours,’ he said, ‘and this is his’—as calmly as that, though he must have wanted pretty badly to make sure we knew. Usually they kill themselves before they risk capture.” She closed Tolya’s fingers over the crucifix. “Are you Yakiv? He kept saying ‘Yakiv.’”
* * *
He’d been so sure, so very sure, that it was Vitalik’s game.
To be fair, so had Vitalik.
Then again, it wasn’t Yakiv’s game either, not really.
His body was outside the gate. Tolya saw it when they lifted the board. He was curled on his side, facing the pine wood. Vitalik had shot him in the back as he’d tried to run.
Really, anybody in the yard could have shot him, but in Tolya’s mind it had been Vitalik.
He said the prayer the same as he’d said it for Vitalik, and he tried to mean it. In some ways, it was easier. He understood Yakiv—one traitor to another. He understood Yakiv’s hatred and contempt. You didn’t hate so much and so strongly unless you were hating part of yourself deep down—unless you saw part of yourself in the thing you hated. That was what Father Dmytro would say.
In some ways, it was harder. He wasn’t sure how to forgive Yakiv because he wasn’t sure how to forgive himself.
They went into the wood above the little farmhouse. Two of them carried the board by the corners. He bumped and slid and gripped the edges of the board tightly, trying not to slip off.
Jerzy walked beside the board, his hand on Tolya’s arm. “Careful,” he said.
“How about you carry him?” one of the stretcher bearers said, grunting.
“No strenuous activity. Ask Janek.”
“How about you be quiet, all of you?” the girl said from somewhere up ahead.
The wood tilted and spun. Tolya shut his aching eyes. He was back in darkness, waiting for the creak and scrape of the door, and the clomp, clomp, clomp of boots, and Vitalik’s fists, and Yakiv’s voice, taunting.
She’s still alive—your girlfriend.
But of course he would say that. He would have said anything. He needed the name of the source, and he thought Tolya knew it.
Solovey had said she was dead. Solovey wouldn’t have lied.
At least, he wouldn’t have had any reason to lie.
Unless—
He was going to shoot you when he was done with you, Yakiv said. You know that, don’t you? He didn’t take Polish prisoners.
You’ve got to trust me, Solovey said.
It was all planned out, Yakiv said.
You’ve got to trust me, Solovey said, unholstering his pistol and pressing the muzzle to Tolya’s forehead.
Bullet to the brain, Yakiv said, done.
“No,” Tolya said, “no, no—”
He tried to tear away. He wrenched and twisted and fought, thrashing his legs, flinging out his arms. Hands held him down against the board.
And Solovey pulled the trigger.
Tolya jerked, gasping. The hands held him down tightly.
“You’re safe,” a voice said into his ear. “You’re safe—with friends, all right?”
He recognized Jerzy’s voice—Jerzy’s voice, Jerzy’s hand on his head. He was in the pine wood. There were shafts of warm, dusty sunlight coming down through the trees. He lay still. His throat was closed, his heart pattering frantically on the board—thump, thump, thump.
“Can you give him another dose?” the girl asked, distantly above.
“I’m out of codeine tablets.” That was Janek, the medic. “He can’t take another one for three hours anyway. I gave him sixty milligrams the first time.”
“All right,” the girl said, “change of plans. Jerzy, get this stuff back to camp. Kostek, Ryś, and Janek with me.”
“She’s not going to like it,” Jerzy warned.
“She won’t care about him,” the girl said. “She just doesn’t like you.”
32
They tipped crushed aspirin onto his tongue before they set out again, all the aspirin Janek had, to keep him quiet. There were only the five of them now, and they went more quickly than before. He lay watching the pine trunks slip by in blurry streaks, trying hard not to make any noise when they jolted him, biting his tongue and digging his fingernails into his palms and blinking away the darkness—fighting it and fighting it, until he was too tired to fight it anymore.
He shut his eyes. He didn’t mean to sleep, but when he opened his eyes again, there were white clay walls around him, and a sloping, raftered roof above him, and a yellow plank floor below. He was on his stomach on a soft, fat mattress, a cool pillow under his cheek. There was embroidery in scarlet thread on the edge of the sheet and on the pillowcase, and the smell of fresh rye bread drifting from somewhere, and just for a second—just for a second—he thought he’d woken up in his bed at home in Kuz’myn, and today was Obzhynky, the last day of the harvest, and he was smelling the harvest loaf they would put out with salt under the uncut grain at the corner of the field while Papa prayed the blessing on next year’s crop.
Then he thought he must be dead.
Then he tried to move, and he knew he wasn’t dead because it hurt.
“Lie still,” somebody said.
A tall, straight-shouldered, striking blond woman, perhaps Aunt Olena’s age, was sitting beside him on a stool, uncapping a syrette. There was a drip bag hanging from a pole by the bed and a thin intravenous tube taped to Tolya’s forearm.
“Antibiotics,” the blond woman said, holding the syrette up and pressing the tube carefully between her thumb and middle finger. “Preventative. We’re not going to take chances with your back. You’ll have the scars—nothing much to be done about that. But scars are to be preferred to septicemia.”
She leaned over him, cool and businesslike and smelling faintly of lavender. There were tiny, creamy pearls at her ears and throat. She held his upper arm in strong fingers and slid the needle into the muscle. Her well-tended fingertips brushed the bullet hole in his shoulder lightly.
“This is coming along nicely. No damage to the bone or the brachial plexus. You’ve had treatment, haven’t you? I mean proper treatment, not salt and vodka.”
“Yes,” he said, thickly, dazedly, in the voice that wasn’t his own.
She withdrew the needle.
“You’ve got some broken ribs, judging by the pattern of the bruising. Three broken toes on the right foot; superficial to moderate lacerations on face, arms, hands, and feet; second-degree burns on arms and neck; malnourishment; dehydration—the list g
oes on, but I won’t. How do you feel?”
He couldn’t answer. His throat was closed, his heart clenched like a fist.
“You’ll be feeling pretty good in a minute,” she said. “That was thirty milligrams of morphine.” She patted his arm briskly. “Try to sleep.”
* * *
He didn’t sleep this time, though his head was bleary with the drug. He lay awake, sweating in the heat. Afternoon sunlight slanted in through the dormered window above the bed, and though the window hung open there wasn’t much of a breeze. He lay very still, his cheek on the pillow, listening to the chatter of the swallows up in the eaves and the murmur of voices coming up from below, through the opening in the plank floor. He could hear the woman’s voice, and the girl’s, and Janek’s, and other voices that must be Kostek’s and Ryś’s. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he could hear enough to know they were arguing.
They must have settled it, or agreed to put it off, because their voices went quiet. He heard the clatter of pans and the scrape of chairs and the whistle of a teakettle. Then he heard boots coming up the stairs—clomp, clomp, clomp—and just for a second they were Vitalik’s boots.
He was off the bed before he remembered the tube in his arm.
He sprawled facedown on the floor, the tube tangling around his ankles. The drip pole crashed down across the backs of his legs.
Janek came up through the opening in the floor. He had tea and bread and jam on a tray. He took in Tolya and the toppled drip pole in one long, blank glance.
“It’s just tea,” he said. He put the tray on the stool. “Let me see that catheter.”
Tolya pushed up slowly on his hands. He sat back on his heels. His heart was pounding.
“I’m not NKVD,” he said.
“Let me see the catheter,” Janek said.
He took a step toward Tolya, and Tolya backed away, kicking across the floor until he came up against the bedframe.
“Calm down,” Janek said.
“You think I’m NKVD.” It was very clear in his head, but he couldn’t seem to get the words to say what he meant. Janek didn’t seem to understand anyway. “That’s why you’re k-keeping me alive.”
Janek crouched to tug the tube away from his ankles. “We can talk about that later.”
“Now.”
“Look, I don’t know if you’re NKVD. I know you’ll be dead without antibiotics, so unless you are NKVD, that’s probably what you should be worrying—”
“Janek,” the girl said.
She’d come up silently. She was leaning against the wall at the top of the stairs, her arms folded. She wasn’t carrying her submachine gun, but her pistol—Zampolit Petrov’s pistol—peeked out from under her jacket.
“I’ll take care of it,” she said.
Janek picked up the drip pole and set it back up by the bed. He didn’t protest, but Tolya heard what he said to her under his breath as he brushed past her: “Careful.”
She ignored that. She waited until he’d disappeared through the opening. Then she came over and sat down beside Tolya on the floor. She took his arm across her lap and turned it up, holding it gingerly by the wrist and elbow. She pressed the tape back down with her thumb. Her fingers searched over the scabbing, purple welts on the inside of his wrist, following the marks of Vitalik’s knife along his forearm.
She let out a low, sharp breath between her teeth.
“They did a job on you, didn’t they?”
“I’m not NKVD.”
“I know, Comrade. They know better than to leave witnesses when they murder somebody.” She lifted her head to look him in the face. “Did you think I forgot?”
He didn’t answer. He wasn’t going to say what he really thought—that she’d pretended to forget, so she wouldn’t have to explain to the others why she’d left him alive that day in the alley in Lwów.
“I didn’t forget,” she said. “We didn’t introduce ourselves properly last time. I’m Lena.”
He shut his eyes, swallowing. His teeth were chattering, though he wasn’t cold.
“Your war n-name?”
“Really Lena. It’d be a boring war name.” She turned his arm back over and held it across her lap. “Yours?”
“My war name?”
“If you want. Right now you’re ‘kid’—or ‘poor kid,’ if it’s Jerzy. He’s the softy.”
He leaned his head back against the mattress. “Anatol,” he said. That was how his mother had said it, in Polish.
“All right. Anatol. So, what—you deserted and ran right into the UPA?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t want to talk about Solovey.
“I’d say they got the better of it, except you’re the one still alive.” Her hand was firm and steady on his trembling arm. “You met Mrs. Kijek?”
“Your m-mother.”
She looked at him sharply. “Did she tell you?”
“A guess.”
“A lucky guess. We don’t look anything alike. Sometimes I’m jealous. She got mistaken for Lidia Wysocka once, on the tram.”
The name didn’t mean anything to him, and she must have seen it.
“The actress,” she said. “Lidia Wysocka. Did you see Gehenna?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, because that sounded better than no.
“Nobody will ever mistake me for Lidia Wysocka, is what I’m saying.”
“No nonsense,” Tolya said.
“What?”
“Both of you. Exactly alike. No nonsense.”
“Yes—well. Everybody is, I suppose, these days. Anyway, keep it to yourself. Janek’s the only one in the squad who knows, and that’s just because we knew each other before the war.” She folded his arm carefully over his stomach. “You’ve got two weeks on this round of antibiotics. It’s easiest if you’re here. Mama doesn’t mind, really. It just means we’ve got to be careful. They’ve been coming up to the house every couple days—the NKVD. There’s a guard post in Zarudce, and they come up to get eggs. So, just in case…”
She showed him how to clamp the intravenous tube, take out the catheter, and fit the drip pole into the space under the floorboards. Then she showed him how the dormered window swung open onto the roof, and how if he followed the roof down, he could drop into the backyard, toward the western wood. That was in case the NKVD came into the house. Usually they just came to the kitchen door, asking for eggs, but they always came looking for wounded and stragglers after there’d been a firefight in the woods.
“But nothing ever happens,” she said. “We had Jerzy here for almost a week after we got him out, and nothing happened.”
“Got him out?”
“That prison camp at the train station. We raided it. Managed to pack most of them straight off into the woods, but they’d, um—given Jerzy some special attention. He’s got a couple of broken ribs, and he won’t let anybody forget it.”
“Oh.”
“Your tea’s gone cold,” she said. “I’ll bring you another cup.”
He watched her go. His throat was tight.
“What happens after two weeks?”
“Depends on how you’re coming along. Maybe another round of antibiotics. Maybe not. We’ll see.”
“If not?”
“We could use a sniper,” she said.
* * *
He lay awake in the dark, listening to them at dinner.
He could hear the chink of silverware on porcelain plates, and the thump of a wine bottle on the board, and the mellow ripple of piano keys, and their voices, and their laughter—and he pressed his face into the mattress and put the pillow over his head to shut out the sounds because just then he knew exactly what he’d lost in the Soviet prison at Proskuriv and against the garden wall in Kuz’myn. On the muddy road out of Voronezh two years ago, when the Luftwaffe planes had strafed the refugee columns, and before a firing squad in a rubbled alley in Tarnopol. With one pistol shot in Lwów and with another in a streambed in the hills, where the bank ran down.
> Lena came up later, bringing dinner on a tray. Tolya pulled the pillow off his head and pretended to be asleep. He could see her through mostly shut eyes—standing there in silhouette against the soft, yellow lamplight from below, the tray in her hands, then turning and going back down the stairs.
“What’s wrong?” Mrs. Kijek’s voice, at the bottom of the stairs.
“Nothing. He’s out like a log.”
“Finally,” Mrs. Kijek said.
33
The NKVD came the next morning.
Lena and Janek and the other two were already gone. Tolya had heard them leave in the cool, gray half-light before dawn. He hadn’t been able to get back to sleep, so he was already sitting up in bed, fumbling with the tube, when Mrs. Kijek came up the stairs with a pair of trousers and a shirt and told him there was an NKVD staff car coming up the road from Zarudce.
She helped him take out the catheter and put the drip pole down between the joists under the floorboards, and she straightened the bedclothes and plumped the pillows while he dressed. Then she went back downstairs, and Tolya opened the window and sat on the sill to listen.
He heard the car pull into the yard, and he heard the engine cut off and three doors slam in succession. It didn’t take three people to ask for eggs at the kitchen door. He swung his legs over the sill, pushing the window shut behind him.
The sun wasn’t over the rooftop yet, and the mossed shingles were slick with dew. There was a breeze along the pitch and the smell of woodsmoke. There were voices and footsteps coming around the corner of the house, just below.
He sank quickly into the shadowed nook between the kitchen chimney and the dormer. He curled up against the side of the dormer, arms looped tightly around his knees, while two NKVD riflemen made a loose circuit of the yard. They opened the barn and the henhouse and the toolshed, flashing an electric torch. They fumbled for a second with the padlock on the cellar doors. Then one of them unslung his rifle and shot the lock away. They threw open the doors and flashed the torch down the steps.
Traitor Page 20
