Red Winter (15 page)

Lev lifted his cup. ‘To the prince,’ he said.

‘To the prince.’ I smiled and drank, feeling the effects of the vodka. It was the best I had felt in a long time.

‘You shouldn’t worry,’ I said to Anna, ‘because when the spoon and the fork and the snuffbox turned black, so the falcon and the eagle and the raven came to help. One of them dragged the barrel from the sea, while another went to fetch the water of life, and another to find the water of death. They broke open the barrel, put the pieces of the prince together and sprinkled them with the water of death to make everything stick together. Then they used the water of life to bring back Ivan. Straight away Prince Ivan set off in search of Marya Morevna again, but this time, instead of taking her, he told her to find out where Koschei got his horse from.’

Anna stifled another yawn.

‘Tired?’ I asked.

‘Maybe you can hear the rest another time.’ Lev started to stand.

‘Please,’ she begged.

‘Maybe the short version,’ Lev suggested.

‘All right. The short version.’ I took the last drag of the cigarette and put it out in my empty bowl. ‘In the short version, Ivan discovers that Koschei’s horse is from Baba Yaga’s herd.’

‘Baba Yaga.’ Anna pretended to shiver. ‘I know her. She’s the witch with the house that has legs like a chicken. She eats children.’

‘Hmm. But only juicy ones, eh?’ I licked my lips at her. ‘Now, on the way to her hut, across the fiery river, Ivan grows very hungry, but every time he finds an animal to eat, the animal begs him not to eat it, and when he eventually finds Baba Yaga and asks her for a horse, she says she will give him one only if he can perform an almost impossible task – which he manages to do because the animals help him in return for his mercy.’

‘Like Koschei gave
him
mercy?’

‘I suppose,’ I agreed. ‘But Baba Yaga tries to betray Ivan anyway, so he tricks her and gets away with a horse, and this time when he steals Marya Morevna away, Koschei finds it hard to catch him.’

‘So he gets away?’

‘Not quite. You see, Prince Ivan and Marya Morevna stop to rest, and that’s when Koschei catches up with them and he takes out his sword to chop them into pieces.’ I pretended to draw a sword from my belt and brandish it.

‘So
that’s
when the prince kills him?’

‘Well, the prince’s horse kicks Koschei in the head and then Ivan finishes him off with a club before building a pyre and burning his terrible body. And
that’s
the end of him.’

‘So why do they call him “the Deathless”?’ she asked. ‘He isn’t deathless, is he?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He isn’t.’

‘And why are you looking for him? Is there a
real
Koschei?’

‘In a way,’ I said.

‘A man?’ She waited for a reply, watching me intently.

‘I think so.’

Anna nodded as if she had just come to a long-awaited conclusion to something that had puzzled her for a long time. ‘Papa always said there were no monsters, but there are, aren’t there?’

I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but I couldn’t. There really were monsters, but they didn’t hide in lakes and graveyards and under beds. Instead they hid in uniforms.

‘Come on.’ Lev eased Anna from his lap. ‘Time to sleep.’

With tired reluctance, Anna headed to the sleeping berth above the
pich
and Lev helped her up. He kissed her and I saw the love they shared and I remembered kissing my sons goodnight; how I used to make them giggle by rubbing my whiskers on their cheeks.

I stood and went to them, giving Lev one of the blankets I had brought from home. ‘To keep her warm,’ I said.

‘Thank you.’

‘You didn’t say why you’re looking for Koschei,’ Anna said before she climbed up to bed.

‘Because he took my sons,’ I told her. ‘And my wife.’

‘Like he took Marya Morevna?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re Prince Ivan?’

‘I’m no prince.’

‘But your horse is fast?’

‘Kashtan? She’s as fast as the wind.’

‘And when you find him, are you going to kill him?’

‘That’s not something for you to be—’

‘
Are
you?’ she asked again, and I saw that she needed to hear the answer.

‘When I’ve found my wife and sons . . .’ I said, ‘. . . yes. Yes, I am.’

When Lev came back to the table, he poured us another drink.

‘To your daughter,’ I said, raising my cup. ‘You’re a lucky man.’

‘And to your sons.’ He raised his own and drank with me.

I drained the vodka and put my hands on the table to look at them, seeing bloodstains that were no longer there. I was reminded of the wicked things I had made these hands do, in days when I had been blinded by what I thought was the righteousness of my actions. Now there were other things to fill my thoughts, things that crammed into my mind, pushing everything else aside. Never had I felt such fear. Not in fighting a hundred battles or witnessing countless deaths had I felt anything close to the dread and apprehension in not knowing what had happened to my wife and sons, not knowing where they really were. Perhaps they were even dead already.

He likes to drown the women.

Except I could not allow that idea to poison my thoughts. They were dark enough already without that to cloud them further.

‘What’s your story, Kolya?’ He spoke quietly so as not to disturb his daughter. ‘You seem like a good man to me.’

I looked up at him and forced a smile. ‘No one is ever quite what they seem.’

‘Well . . . a good man is a good man.’

I liked his sentiment but wasn’t sure if I agreed. ‘There’s good and bad in all of us.’ I ran a hand across my face as if to wash away the day’s events. It felt as if I had been awake for weeks. ‘It’s finding the right balance that’s hard.’

‘You look tired,’ he said. ‘How long have you been travelling?’

‘Longer than I want to think about. How about you?’

‘The same. We’ve been here a few days, though. It’s a good place to stay.’

‘But you haven’t seen anyone?’

‘No one.’

The dog grunted beside me and scratched himself.

‘How about two women on horseback?’ I asked. ‘Have you seen them?’

He shook his head. ‘No one at all. The road is further east; we can’t see much of anything from here.’

‘Which means no one can see this farm from the road.’

‘It works well for us,’ he said.

Perhaps Tanya and Lyudmila had passed along that road, and Koschei before them, but for now they were out of sight, out of reach, and might as well have been across the sea in some country where the revolution was just words in a newspaper.

‘So how did you find it?’ I asked.

Lev pulled an empty chair towards him and put his feet on it. ‘We were lucky, I suppose. We kept away from the roads, spotted this in the distance and came closer to see what was here. We were hungry and cold, so it was worth taking the risk.’ It was his turn to look down at his hands now, making me wonder what he had made them do.

‘And it was empty?’ My words caused him to glance up at me, but he didn’t hold my gaze. His eyes shifted to look at the
pich
where Anna was sleeping, then back to his hands again.

His mouth tightened and he swallowed. ‘Yes. Empty.’ He took the bottle and poured again, splashing a few drops on the table. ‘Who knows what happened to whoever lived here, but they hadn’t been here for a while – months, I’d say. Maybe a husband fighting, a wife who couldn’t look after a farm alone.’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

‘Who knows?’ I agreed, lifting the cup to my lips. ‘To our children,’ I said, knocking it back and feeling it burn my throat.

‘Our children.’ Lev drank it and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand without putting the cup on the table. He stared into the bottom of it.

‘And the horse?’ I asked.

‘The horse is mine.’ This time he looked me right in the eye and I knew it was the truth.

‘But you’re not a blacksmith.’

He placed the cup on the table and picked dirt from under his fingernail. ‘No, not a blacksmith, but we always had horses. My father always had them.’

‘So you’re . . . ?’

‘I’m a teacher,’ he said. ‘At least, I
was
a teacher. Mathematics. You think I always looked like this? Like a beggar?’ He swept a hand towards his chest in a false flourish, but when he noticed them shaking, he clasped them together to make them stop. ‘I was always so smart, so tidy. I wore a good suit and—’ He stopped himself as if he were suddenly aware of our differences. A teacher telling a revolutionary how well dressed he used to be. ‘I don’t know what I am anymore.’ He hung his head. ‘The things I’ve had to do to take care of Anna.’

‘I don’t care what you had to do to get here,’ I said.

‘Not even if I killed a man?’

‘Is that what you’ve done?’ I watched him closely, wondering what might have driven Lev to kill, but it didn’t take much to work it out. I had seen how he loved his daughter.

‘I’m a
teacher
, for God’s sake.’ He tightened both hands into fists. ‘A teacher. And look at me now. Stealing and begging. Dirty and cold and hungry. I used to be smart and respectable and . . . I never hurt anyone, had never even hit a man until . . .’ He shook his head.

I waited for him to go on, thought about pressing him to tell me more, but it was better to leave him. It didn’t matter what he had done, and if he wanted to talk about it, he would do it when he was ready.

‘I was always a soldier,’ I said. ‘Well, it feels that way. I thought that was respectable too, but not anymore. Not really. I joined to fight the Great War, and when that was finished, I wanted a better country for Marianna and the boys, so I continued to fight. For them, at first, and then for me, because it was, I don’t know, it was what I did. Sometimes it’s hard to leave the path you’re on.’

Lev wiped his eyes with his fingers, leaving damps streaks in the dirt on his face. Streaks that glistened in the lamplight. ‘And now? Are you still a soldier?’

‘Now I’m a father. A husband.’ I thought for a moment. ‘And a soldier still.’

‘But you left the army?’

‘Deserted.’ The word still felt wrong on my tongue and left a bitter taste in my mouth. ‘I’ve always believed that was a bad thing. Cowardly.’ There were many deserters who had been executed because I once held that belief so strongly, but I didn’t tell him that. ‘Now, though, all that matters is finding my family.’ I told Lev about what I had found in Belev, what Galina said she had done and what she had called the man she stabbed. I had thought it was the ramblings of an insane old woman, but then Tanya and Lyudmila had come and they had known the name ‘Koschei’ too.

And I told him about the star branded into men’s skin, just as he had seen himself.

‘So you think this man Koschei has taken them?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t find them, so I have to believe that, otherwise . . .’ I smiled a melancholy smile and turned the cup in my hand. ‘Otherwise I’ll need a lot more of this.’ I showed him my empty cup.

‘Your sons,’ he said, refilling us. ‘Are they fighting age?’

‘Depends on your idea of fighting age. Pavel is just twelve . . .’

‘The same age as Anna.’

‘. . . and Misha is fourteen, but I’ve known armies take boys as young as ten.’

Lev closed his eyes and shook his head at the sadness of it. ‘And if they don’t take them to fight, they want to send them away to labour camps, right?’

I put my head back and closed my eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to . . . I was thinking aloud. It was stupid of me.’

‘It’s all right.’ I waved away the comment with the back of my hand. ‘I’ve thought of that already.’

‘So who do you think he is?’ he asked.

‘Well, he might seem like a ghost, but I’m sure he’s no fairy tale.’ I concentrated on the darkness behind my eyelids as I spoke to him. ‘He uses the name to frighten people maybe, but I’ve seen what he leaves in his wake, so he’s real enough. A man.’

‘But who?’

‘The exact man, I have no idea, but the
type
of man?’ I looked at him. ‘You already know.’

Lev sat back and ran a hand over his head. ‘Chekists?’ he whispered.

I said nothing.

He cleared his throat and stared into the top corner of the room behind me. He couldn’t hide what he was thinking. ‘The worst of humanity.’ He said the words with a quietness that made me shiver. Even here, just the two of us, he was afraid to speak ill of them aloud, such was their reputation.

With Lenin’s sanction, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission – the Cheka – was put together by Dzerzhinsky to combat those who would undermine the revolution. It was a political army to safeguard the toiling masses, the ordinary man, but after Kaplan tried to kill Lenin more than two years ago, Stalin recommended using the harsh tactics he had employed to crush counter-revolutionary resistance in Tsaritsyn. And so the Red Terror was born.

Landholders and the wealthy classes who refused to fall into line were the first targets, but the definition of wealth had become hazy and the Cheka units, made up of Communist leaders and former convicts and soldiers, were left as both police and executioner. Peasants were targeted as often as anyone else, and some units primed themselves on drugs and alcohol before raids, while others used artillery to bombard towns into dust. Dzerzhinsky himself said the units stood for organised terror, to keep the people under control, and with the peasant uprising in Tambov that started in August, the Chekists had been sent out with units to create that terror. They hunted deserters, burned villages, tortured peasants for refusing to give up their crops and gassed rebels who took refuge in the forests. They took young men for recruitment and deported thousands to labour camps across the country. Cheka agents were even secreted in Red Army units to report on their comrades. They were darker and more frightening than any fairy-tale monster.

They were worse than devils.

Lev poured us another drink without speaking. It was as if he was giving us both a moment to deal with the thought of such atrocity, giving
me
a moment to compose myself after voicing my concern for my family.