The Story of Us

by Lana Kortchik

  At five on Saturday morning, Natasha packed what little bread they had, and the four of them set out for the prisoner camp, leaving Grandfather and Mikhail at home.

  As they made their way towards the river, covering their faces with scarfs to protect them from the blizzard, Natasha noticed a group of German soldiers, who were pulling their cannon with oxen. She paused, transfixed. She had never seen an ox on the streets of Kiev before.

  ‘What, German trucks don’t start in this weather?’ muttered Lisa.

  ‘Serves them right,’ exclaimed Natasha. ‘If our army doesn’t finish them off, maybe the cold will.’

  ‘Not much chance of that,’ said Nikolai, pointing at the fur hats and sheepskin coats the Germans were wearing. ‘They’re warmer than we are.’

  Mother remained quiet but shook her fist in the direction of the soldiers. Fortunately, they were too busy with the cannon to notice.

  Brovary was on the opposite bank of the Dnieper. Although snow hadn’t settled yet, the river was frozen in places. It was unprecedented for the ice to form on the Dnieper before February. But the mighty river, so beautiful and full of life as it flowed steadily towards the Black Sea, had stopped dead, just like Kiev had stopped dead the day Hitler’s troops marched through its petrified streets.

  Natasha pulled Nikolai by the sleeve of his oversized jacket. ‘Remember, we built a swing on that tree over there?’

  ‘I remember. We used it to catapult ourselves into the river. It was such fun.’

  ‘It was. You loved it so much, you wouldn’t let anyone else have a go.’

  ‘I was a child then.’

  ‘It was only a year ago.’

  ‘Exactly.’ He was no longer smiling. ‘Remember, Lisa got so scared, she refused to let go of the rope? She never did jump in the river. Alexei had to help her down.’

  Natasha nodded and glanced at her sister. At the mention of Alexei, Lisa paled and looked at the spot where what seemed like a lifetime ago five carefree teenagers were enjoying what was to be their last carefree summer. Something in Lisa’s eyes looked broken.

  Natasha thought with longing of summers past, of scorching afternoons filled with laughter and childish abandon. She glanced at the dead cattle scattered along the riverbank, at the sombre faces of everyone around her. So far removed was this reality from her childhood memories, so alien was this landscape she knew so well, Natasha wondered whether it was real or a terrible dream from which they would soon wake up.

  Half a dozen boats made their slow way through patches of river untouched by the ice. It seemed to Natasha that the whole female population of Kiev was gathered on the bank, waiting to cross. The Smirnovs joined the queue. Mother put her arm around Natasha, and together they stared at the dull river. Natasha didn’t cry. It was too cold to cry. She whispered, ‘Oh Mama. I feel awful. Why did I have to say such terrible things to Papa? I don’t want the last words we ever exchanged to be bitter.’

  Mother shuddered. ‘Don’t say that. Your father will be back. One way or another.’

  ‘You think so?

  ‘I know so.’ And a bit quieter, ‘I have to believe it.’ On the icy riverbank Mother held Natasha. ‘You know, when you were two and sick with pneumonia, your father stayed in hospital with you for a week. He read to you and fed you and didn’t sleep for many nights. And when one of the nurses told him to go home, you know what he said?’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That they would have to drug him to force him to leave you.’ Through her tears Mother smiled. ‘No matter what you said to each other, no matter how upset you were at one another, he knows that you love him very much. And he loves you.’

  It took the family three hours to get a boat. And when they did, so many people piled in, the boat almost sank. They made it across safely, but the cabin flooded, and Natasha’s boots filled with water.

  In Brovary, hundreds of women and children were searching for those they loved, just like Natasha and her family were searching for the one they loved. A few hundred men crouched behind barbed wire, huddled close to stay warm. The prisoners were a sorry sight. Barefoot, their feet red and swollen, they raised their eyes to women and begged for food. They drank from puddles on the ground and threw themselves at the food offered by women and children as if it was the last thing standing between them and death. They ate the potatoes raw before the German rifles came down on their backs. The Nazis grabbed the women, hit them and pushed them out of the way. And still it wasn’t enough to deter them from coming close to the men. The noise was deafening. Transfixed, Natasha watched the commotion, watched as one of Dante’s nine circles of hell came to life right in front of her.

  ‘The trick is to wait for the sentry to look away and then pass the food to the prisoners,’ whispered Nikolai.

  ‘Why are you whispering?’ demanded Lisa.

  ‘Can you see Papa?’ asked Mother.

  They looked and looked. Natasha stood on her tiptoes, eyes watering in the wind, but she was too small to see behind the prisoners. Hunched and destitute, they were still taller than her. The Smirnovs walked up and down the camp, expecting any minute to catch a glimpse of the familiar face, of a disdainful mouth, a headful of brown hair. There was no sign of him. Soon more boats arrived and more women came, pushing them away. The curfew was now five o’clock. They couldn’t stay in Brovary any longer. Dejected, they meandered back. Natasha closed her eyes to not see the dead cattle on the bank, to not see her mother’s tears. She wondered how her father was going to survive the prisoner camp, because no one could live with what they had just witnessed for long.

  *

  The Smirnovs were not going to give up so easily. Their father needed them, wherever he was, and they were going to find him, if only to see his face one more time and to tell him to hold on. As they were getting ready to leave for Brovary the next morning, the doorbell rang. Natasha opened the door to one of their neighbours, a shrivelled old lady who lived on the third floor. ‘I heard you were going to the prisoner camp,’ she croaked. ‘My son is there. Would you be kind enough to take a note for him? And here are some eggs. If you could take them for him, too, I would be very grateful. I would go myself but…’ She pointed at her left leg that was a few inches shorter than her right.

  Lisa pushed Natasha out of the way and glared at the old woman. ‘Leave my sister alone,’ she said. ‘It’s too dangerous. The guards beat you for passing notes to prisoners.’ She slammed the door in the woman’s face.

  ‘Lisa, don’t be cruel. I’d be willing to help her.’

  Lisa shrugged as if to say, suit yourself.

  Natasha ran after the woman, who had barely made it down one flight of stairs. ‘Wait! I’ll take the note. And the eggs.’

  ‘Thank you, my dear,’ said the old woman. ‘Thank you for your trouble.’

  ‘It’s no trouble at all.’

  ‘God bless you for your kind heart.’ She made a sign of cross on Natasha. ‘My name is Claudia. If you ever need anything, anything at all…’

  ‘How are we going to find your son?’

  ‘His name’s on the envelope. Just give the letter to the first prisoners you see and ask them to pass it on.’

  Natasha spent the next twenty minutes writing her own letter to her father, ripping up one draft after another. Nothing she said seemed adequate. In the end, she wrote, ‘Dear Papa, I’m sorry for what I said. I didn’t mean it. Please come back soon. Love you and miss you, Natasha.’

  The word soon spread, and by the time the Smirnovs were ready to leave, Mother had collected a large bag of food from the neighbours, and Natasha had two dozen notes for prisoners. It seemed every family in the building had a son, a husband or a father in the camp.

  Even before they crossed the river, they knew something was wrong. Instead of going to the camp, people were walking away from it, carrying their provisions, their meatless soup, their frost-bitten potatoes, their butter-less porridge. The camp had moved, everybody said. Natasha and h
er family refused to believe it. They crossed the river just like they had done the day before. Unlike the previous day, however, the boat was almost empty. On the other side of the river, the Smirnovs walked in silence next to half a dozen women.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked an old man, who was returning to the city. ‘There are no prisoners left in Brovary. No one there at all.’

  ‘Where did they take them?’ Mother wanted to know.

  But the man only shrugged.

  ‘I’m not giving up,’ said an old woman wearing a string of onions around her neck. ‘My grandson is there. He’s got pneumonia after sleeping out in the open for too long. If I don’t bring him food, he’ll die.’ She looked as if she was near death’s door herself. She could barely walk, and yet she kept going. The Smirnovs walked next to her.

  Where only a day ago there was hell on earth, was now nothing but silence. Nothing but barren land. Only barbed wire and half a dozen dead bodies remained. Natasha couldn’t look at the bodies but she couldn’t look at her mother’s face either. She looked away, back at the river, gloomy and grey, and her tears stung her cheeks in the cold. She folded and unfolded the envelope meant for her father.

  Lisa hugged her close. ‘Don’t worry,’ she whispered. ‘Whatever you said in your letter, deep in his heart he already knows it.’

  Silently they made their way back.

  When they reached Podol, Mother joined a queue at one of the stores, hoping for some bread. Natasha suspected she wanted to be alone, so she could cry for her husband unobserved.

  The brother and sisters continued home. On Spasskaya Street, they saw a large crowd gathered around a group of prisoners. They approached the prisoners, and Natasha looked into every gaunt face, hoping and praying that her father was among them.

  He wasn’t.

  A woman in the crowd next to Natasha said, ‘They’re Red Army soldiers. Germans left them here to convince us our army’s been defeated.’

  ‘They’ll need more than a handful of starved men to convince us of that,’ mumbled Natasha.

  The prisoner closest to them was unconscious. He was flat on the ground and his head, only a few centimetres from Natasha’s foot, rested in a puddle of water. No one had dared to help him up. A Nazi officer stepped over the soldier, pushing him with his boot. Natasha waited for the German to disappear before she whispered, ‘Let’s drag him to safety.’

  Lisa glared at her. ‘Drag him where? Are you out of your mind?’

  ‘If we don’t and the Germans return, he won’t be able to walk and they’ll shoot him. He’ll die.’

  ‘And what about our safety?’ demanded Lisa.

  Nikolai interrupted, ‘Natasha is right. We can’t leave him here.’

  ‘You think I’m going to risk my life for a complete stranger?’ Lisa sneered.

  ‘A complete stranger who almost lost his life fighting to protect you from the Germans.’ Nikolai glared at Lisa the same way Lisa had been glaring at Natasha a few seconds earlier. Lisa turned away.

  Natasha said, ‘Just imagine if it was Stanislav or Papa. Imagine if they were in trouble and no one volunteered to help them.’

  Lisa mumbled, ‘Do what you want. I’m going home.’

  Nikolai and Natasha watched Lisa until she disappeared behind a building. ‘What’s the matter with Lisa?’ asked Nikolai. ‘She’s never been like this before.’

  ‘Alexei is the matter with Lisa,’ said Natasha.

  The two of them pulled the soldier towards a nearby yard, concealing his unconscious body behind a wooden shed. Nikolai said, ‘We should wait till it’s dark to get him home.’

  ‘And get detained for breaking the curfew? Why don’t we just carry him through the back streets?’

  ‘And if we are stopped?’

  ‘We can say he’s our brother who’s been wounded. He’s not wearing a uniform. No one will know he’s a soldier in the Red Army. But we’ll need help. We can’t carry him ourselves. He’s too heavy.’

  ‘I’ll find someone,’ said Nikolai, turning on his heel and disappearing in the direction of home.

  At first, Natasha watched the road, praying that Nikolai would come back before a Nazi patrol did. Then she examined the soldier. He was tall and broad-shouldered. Through his tattered clothes she could see the wiry muscles of his arms. It was impossible to say what colour hair he had. His face and body were covered in dirt. His forehead was bleeding as if he had been struck with a blunt weapon, possibly a rifle.

  While Natasha was studying him, the soldier groaned and opened his eyes. They were the eyes of an old man on a young man’s face. The colour of his eyes, green like the grass, looked especially striking on his grimy face. Natasha wondered what he’d been through to be able look at her with that expression. She took his hand and said, ‘Don’t worry, you’re safe. I’m just waiting for my brother, and then we’ll carry you home.’

  ‘Who are you?’ His voice was that of an old man too, hoarse and dull and without hope.

  ‘My name is Natasha. We’ll look after you. I wish I had some food or water but I don’t. Can you wait till we get home? You can stay with us till you feel better.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he croaked and closed his eyes again.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Natasha wanted to keep the soldier talking. She didn’t want him to fall asleep, leaving her alone in the deserted yard.

  ‘Yuri. Yuri Korovin.’

  ‘Are you a soldier in the Red Army?’

  He nodded. ‘I was.’

  Yuri was about to say something else when Nikolai returned with a neighbour, and together they carried the soldier to Ilinskaya Street. Mother, who had returned from the store empty-handed, moved her belongings into the room Natasha and Lisa shared with Nikolai, giving up her couch to the rescued prisoner.

  Nikolai helped the soldier to the bathroom, where he washed and changed into some of Father’s clothes. After he had a piece of bread, Yuri stretched out on the couch and pointed to a book on the table. ‘War and Peace. My favourite.’

  ‘Mine too,’ said Natasha.

  ‘I like your name. Natasha Rostova is my favourite character.’

  ‘Mine too,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Please, can you do me a favour?’

  ‘Of course. Anything.’

  ‘Read to me till I fall asleep. Unless you have something else to do.’

  ‘It will be my pleasure.’

  As she read late into the night, Natasha thought, What a miracle to have a Red Army soldier asleep under our roof. It was a good sign, she was sure of it. Every time she stopped reading, thinking Yuri had fallen asleep, he opened his eyes and said, ‘Please, don’t stop. I love this part. Read some more.’ And she did.

  *

  Was it Natasha’s imagination or had time slowed down, finally coming to a halt around four in the afternoon? From the moment she stepped through the cafeteria doors, she watched the clock that counted down the seconds next to the portrait of Hitler on the wall. She counted down with it, and this was how she knew that the thin metal hand took twice as long as normal to make a full circle around the dial. Today her hands shook so badly – in impatience, in anticipation – she dropped two plates and a tea cup. Fortunately, only one of the plates broke. As she thought of Mark’s hands on her breasts, she blushed and her stomach churned with nerves.

  As soon as he walked in, he told her to put her coat on and follow him. ‘Where are we going?’ she demanded as they made their way through the dark streets. It was so cold, she could see her breath as she spoke.

  ‘It’s a surprise.’

  He tightened his fingers around hers, and instantly she felt warmer. ‘You have a surprise for me? What is it?’

  ‘If I tell you, it will no longer be a surprise.’

  ‘How far is it?’

  ‘Not too far.’

  ‘How long do we have to walk?’

  ‘Ten minutes at most.’

  ‘Tell me what it is!’

  ‘I’m not telling you
,’ he said, smiling from ear to ear. ‘You are going to have to wait.’

  ‘But I want to know now.’

  ‘You can’t wait ten minutes?’

  Increasing her pace, she tried to keep up with Mark. She felt a warm trickle of excitement spreading inside her, as if they were just a regular couple in love with not a care in the world. But then a Nazi patrol barged its way past, and a chill ran through her. ‘Mark, do you know where the Brovary prisoner camp has moved to?’ she asked.

  ‘The Germans are taking the prisoners outside of Kiev. Where, I don’t know.’

  ‘They are taking them away? Why?’

  ‘I guess they don’t want anyone to witness the abysmal conditions of the camps.’

  ‘It’s too late. That camp was…’ She paused, unable to find words gruesome enough to describe what she had seen.

  ‘I know. Apparently the cries of starving, freezing prisoners were keeping Kievans awake at night. And every morning there were hundreds of corpses on the ground.’

  ‘But why move the prisoners? Since when do they care about what we think?’ She thought of the thousands of innocents that had been marched to the ravines of Babi Yar. Marched in broad daylight, in front of everyone.

  ‘They don’t. They’re killing all the disabled and mentally ill people at Kirillov Hospital as we speak. But these are prisoners of war. It’s different.’

  She trembled. ‘They are killing the disabled people?’

  ‘Using deadly gas in specially designed vans.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ She squeezed her eyes shut in horror and almost tripped on the ice.

  He held her up. ‘I have more bad news. Donbas and Yalta are in Hitler’s hands.’

  Yalta was a resort town on the northern coast of the Black Sea. Natasha, who had never seen the sea before, had always dreamt of visiting it.

  ‘That means all of Ukraine is now occupied.’

  She couldn’t believe it, didn’t want to believe it. ‘All of Ukraine? Are you sure?’

  ‘Afraid so. But Leningrad and Moscow are still holding.’