Red Winter (45 page)

‘Thank you,’ I said.

So Anna lifted the wood from the pile and I took it to the cart, and when there was enough, I covered the bodies with dry straw from the barn.

With that done, Anna and I returned to Kashtan, who nickered and came to me, putting her nose against my chest. I looked into her soft brown eyes and rubbed her neck.

‘Stay with her,’ I said to Anna. ‘There’s one last thing for me to do.’

‘What is it? Can’t I come with you?’ she asked.

‘I need you to keep Kashtan company. Don’t worry. You’re safe.’

‘I don’t feel safe.’

‘I know.’ I turned to Anna and opened my arms to her and she stepped against me. I embraced her and held her tight, putting up a hand to stroke her hair. ‘But I have to bring Tanya and Lyudmila out.’

‘I don’t want to be alone.’ Her face was pressed against my coat and her voice was muffled.

‘You won’t be. I’ll be close. And Kashtan is here. Tuzik too.’

Inside, the old woman was sitting at the table, and Sergei had put water on to boil. He made tea while I took Tanya and Lyudmila into the yard, but I didn’t put them in the cart with the Chekists. They deserved better than that. They deserved the land, so I laid them on my tarpaulin, one at a time, and wrapped it round them before I returned to the barn to collect some tools.

‘I’m going to take them to the edge of the forest,’ I told Anna. ‘To bury them. It may take a little while.’ I glanced over at the
izba
. There was a glow at the window and it would be warm inside.

Anna saw me looking and began to shake her head. ‘Don’t leave me.’ There was desperation in her voice. ‘Please don’t make me go—’

‘I want you to come with me,’ I said, removing one glove and putting my hand to the side of her face. ‘I won’t let you out of my sight.’ It was the only choice I had. I couldn’t leave her out here in the barn, and though it would be warm in the house, I couldn’t send her inside to be alone with the old woman, the mother of the man she had helped kill.

Anna’s relief was clear. Her shoulders slumped and she closed her eyes, releasing her breath.

‘Come on,’ I said, putting my glove back on. ‘You can bring the tools.’

I gave her an axe and a shovel from the back of the barn and we went to the wrapped tarpaulin at the far end of the yard. I took the end in both hands and walked backwards, dragging it through the gate, to the edge of the trees.

Anna walked beside me while Tuzik followed, and when I broke the ground with the axe and dug a shallow grave, they watched in silence, Tuzik sitting motionless, Anna standing beside him with one hand on his head.

As I dug, I remembered how I done the same thing for my brother not long ago. I had broken the ground as the sleet came down, and the two women had watched from shelter. It occurred to me that I knew so very little about them.

When the grave was deep enough, I checked their pockets, removing all papers and belongings and putting them in my satchel. Then I rolled them into the hole to lie side by side under the trees. They looked small and insignificant like that, as if they didn’t matter. I wondered who would miss them or if they’d even know they were gone.

The cold, black, rich soil was like heavy rain on their clothes as I shovelled it onto them, and when all I could see were their dead, white faces, I paused. I closed my eyes and touched the
chotki
round my wrist. I said a small prayer and wished them luck wherever they were going, then I threw the last of the soil over them and they were gone.

When we returned to the house, Oksana and her children were at the rear of the
izba
. Sergei and the old woman were at the table.

I stopped in the doorway, Anna beside me. Tuzik pushed past, coming into the warmth, and grunted as he lay down. He kept his head up and opened his mouth. The sound of his breathing filled the room.

I scanned the
izba
, my eyes meeting Oksana’s, but Sergei and the old woman kept their heads bowed.

‘We’ll take some of your food,’ I said, going to the cupboard, ‘but not everything.’

I gathered some pickles, bread, sausage,
kovbyk
and a hessian bag filled with sunflower seeds. I stuffed what I could into my pockets and handed down supplies for Anna to carry.

‘What will you do now?’ Oksana’s voice was quiet and husky, but it took us all by surprise.

I stopped with my hand still in the cupboard and turned to look at her. Tuzik was on his feet immediately. Anna inched closer to me.

‘Just leave?’ Oksana asked.

‘Yes.’

‘And do what?’

‘Look for my wife and sons.’ It wasn’t Oksana’s fault. She had not been responsible for her husband’s madness, had even tried to warn us, but I couldn’t hide the animosity in my voice. She was connected to him and he was no longer here to accept my anger.

‘What about Anna?’ She looked at the girl, who now moved so she was partly behind me. ‘What will happen to her?’

‘She’ll come with me.’ I took my arm from the cupboard and put it down to shield Anna.

Oksana took two hesitant steps towards us and stopped. She ran her hands down her apron. ‘With you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Winter is almost here. How long do you think it will—’

‘As long as it takes.’

She clasped her hands together, a troubled look on her face. ‘It’s no place for a young girl, out there in the cold with a man like you.’

‘A man like me?’

‘At least let her stay here for now. Come back when you’ve—’

‘She’s coming with me,’ I said.

‘But we can feed her, keep her warm. It’ll be so cold soon; the snow has already started. You have to let her stay.’

‘Do I?’

‘She’s just a child.’

‘She’s stronger than you think, and she knows her own mind.’ I looked at Anna. ‘What do
you
want to do?’ I asked her.

‘You were his wife,’ Anna said, looking at Oksana. ‘And she was his mama.’ She pointed at the old woman without taking her eyes off Oksana. ‘I’m not staying here. Not with you. I don’t want anything from you. I want to be with Kolya.’

Oksana lowered her head and tightened her mouth and nodded once. She didn’t speak again. She went back to her own children as we finished gathering what we needed.

Anna and I took a fair amount of what we found, leaving Oksana and her family enough to survive. Then we left the
izba
, with Tuzik following on our heels.

We went to the barn, and I lit a lamp and eased down to sit on a pile of straw and lean against the wall. My whole body ached and it was good to take the weight off my feet. I wanted to put my head back and close my eyes, but didn’t dare, in case I fell asleep.

Anna sat beside me, stretching out her legs, and Tuzik came to lie along the side of them. Kashtan and the other two horses watched us as they chewed the hay Anna had put out for them earlier.

‘How are you feeling?’ I asked her.

‘I’m all right.

‘You sure? What you did—’

‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Doesn’t it hurt?’

‘Don’t worry about me.’ I put a hand to my nose, feeling the dried blood and realising what a mess I was. ‘It probably looks worse than it is.’ When I ran my tongue round my mouth, I felt the jagged edge of a broken tooth. ‘But maybe we should talk about what hap—’

‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ she said. ‘Not now.’ There was almost no expression in her voice. ‘I was thinking there might be clues at the other farm,’ she said. ‘Where the soldiers were. There might be something there to tell you where they took your wife.’

I was taken aback. I had expected something else. A different reaction. This must be her way of putting it behind her, pretending it hadn’t happened. Sooner or later, though, she would have to talk about it. She couldn’t keep a thing like this inside her.

‘Is it not a good idea?’ She stared ahead and put out a hand to scratch Tuzik behind the ear.

‘Yes. It is.’ Then I thought about what we might find at the other farm. There wouldn’t be more soldiers – I was certain that if there had been, they would have heard the shooting last night – but there might be something else. More bodies. The five-pointed brand Ryzhkov had used to mark his victims. The sword he had used to take their heads. This was not something I wanted Anna to see. She didn’t need any more of this; she needed a home; she needed someone to look after her.

‘We can take their equipment,’ Anna suggested. ‘It might help us.’

‘I don’t . . .’ I searched for the right words. ‘Do you . . . ?’

Anna continued to scratch Tuzik’s ear.

‘You don’t like Oksana,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘What about her children? Nikolai and Natasha?’

Anna shrugged.

I sighed. ‘What I’m trying to say is, maybe she was right. Don’t you think you might be better off without me?’

‘Without you?’ She turned to look at me, worry in her eyes. ‘Why? What do you mean?’

‘It’s dangerous what I’m doing, where I might have to go. It’s no life for you.’

‘Don’t you
want
me to come with you?’

‘It’s not that . . .’

‘You promised.’

‘I know, but don’t you think you’d be safer here? With Oksana?’

‘And the witch?’ Anna glanced at the barn door as if she expected the old woman to come flying in like Baba Yaga.

‘I don’t think they’d hurt you. I think they’re—’

‘No. I want to go with you.’ She shook her head with short, tight movements. ‘I’m safer with you.’

‘I hoped you would say that.’

‘You can’t go without me. Wherever it is. I want to help you. Promise you won’t go without me.
Promise
.’

There was a desperation in her voice that I couldn’t ignore. ‘I promise,’ I said.

Anna’s relief was evident and I leaned over to kiss the top of her head. ‘We’ll find them together.’

‘When will we leave? We should go soon, shouldn’t we?’

‘Yes. Soon.’ I took off my satchel and put it on the ground between my outstretched legs. I opened it and removed the things I had taken from Tanya and Lyudmila’s pockets.

‘What’s that?’ Anna asked.

‘They never told me who they were,’ I said, staring at the papers, wondering if I wanted to look, if I wanted to know who they were. I didn’t know if it would change what I thought of them. ‘It doesn’t make any difference,’ I said under my breath.

‘What?’ Anna asked.

‘Nothing.’

Tanya’s belongings consisted of a tin containing only three cigarette papers and a pinch of tobacco. There was also a stripper clip of ammunition for her pistol, a folding knife, a small piece of cloth wrapped into a tiny bundle and tied with a piece of string, and her papers. The papers had been folded into a small rectangle and pushed to the bottom of her inside coat pocket and had been difficult to find. It seemed that she, unlike me, had been unable to part with them.

I placed the bundle of cloth on the ground and picked at the string to loosen it. I opened it out in front of me.

The glow from the lamp glinted on the matching pair of gold rings.

‘Wedding rings,’ I said, looking at Anna. ‘Expensive too. Real gold.’

I pinched one of the rings between my finger and thumb, holding it up to the light and turning it before placing it in Anna’s palm for her to see.

‘Did she have children too?’ she asked. ‘Did that man . . . Is that why she wanted to kill him?’

‘Yes.’ I took the ring when she handed it back to me, then tied it back into the piece of cloth.

Next, I unfolded Tanya’s papers and opened them out in front of me to look at what was left of her.

‘Tatyana Maximovna Tikhonova.’ I smiled to myself and tapped the paper. ‘You see what it says here? She was gentry.’

Anna leaned over to see.

‘Can you believe it? She was gentry. I knew she was educated, from a good family, but . . .’ I put my head back and thought about when Tanya told me what had happened to her family. I had imagined she had lived in a good village, but the details in her papers said otherwise. Tanya was from a wealthy family; she wouldn’t have lived in a village. She would have lived in a big country dacha, or a many-roomed house in one of the towns, depending on the season. She would have worn fine dresses and attended parties and talked about the latest poets and writers. That explained why Koschei had taken no prisoners. As an overzealous revolutionary, he would have hated her privilege more than anything.

I realised how the revolution must have changed Tanya. It had not been kind to her and her family. She would have suffered even before Koschei descended upon her family, perhaps for years, and then he had come, and I would never know how she had survived
that
horror.

Tanya had never been a soldier. She was just a woman looking for revenge because she had nothing else left. Koschei had taken everything from her.

He had even taken away who she was.

I put the papers aside and turned my attention to the belongings from Lyudmila’s pockets. Like Tanya, there was little there: a tobacco pouch, a smooth stone, a few coins, some pistol cartridges, her papers.

And a small fold of cloth tied with a piece of string.

I held the bundle in my open hand, reflecting that I knew even less about Lyudmila than I did about Tanya. She had never told me her motive for chasing Koschei, and I had always assumed it was from some allegiance to Tanya, but the fold of cloth suggested otherwise.

‘Are you going to look?’ Anna said.

I pinched it with my finger and thumb, feeling what was inside.

‘Is it rings?’ Anna asked. ‘Like the other one?’

I picked away the knot and opened the bundle to reveal two gold rings. They were fine and expensive, just like Tanya’s were.

‘She was married too,’ Anna said. ‘Did
she
have children?’

‘I don’t know.’ I retied the rings and placed the bundle beside Lyudmila’s other belongings.

I studied the small collection of bits and pieces, sad to think how little it was to account for a person’s life, and yet it had given me a greater insight into Lyudmila’s truth than the woman herself had ever given me.