Red Winter (6 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. Then I put him over my shoulder and stumbled and staggered along the road with him on my back. His joints were stiff, and his muscles were hard, and he seemed to weigh even more today. I fell to my knees in the frozen mud and dropped my brother more than once, and when I came to the church steps, I rested for a moment before going inside.

The church was hardly a church at all. It had no bell or tower, no cross mounted on its roof. It was little more than a house like all the others, except the door was carved with a crude cross and it was built, if anything, from lighter materials than the other homes – as if the original builders had trusted to God that it would stay warm and not be destroyed by the weather. Even though I had searched it last night, I felt compelled to go in, perhaps to show my brother to whatever remnants of God might be left, before I broke the ground for him and covered him in frozen soil. Or perhaps it was a pilgrimage; a penance for letting him die, just as it had been a kind of penance to carry him here from our home. A way to absolve myself of the guilt I felt for his death.

I struggled with Alek, feeling the pinch in my back as I summoned whatever strength I had to lift him. I crouched and hefted him onto my shoulder, using the fence to help me to my feet, then I stood and took Alek into the church, the door creaking on cold hinges.

Empty chairs faced an altar covered with a threadbare cloth upon which stood two large red candles, one at either end. There was a holder for smaller candles, a pair of icons and a wooden crucifix with three cross-beams. There were other icons on the walls too, faded and cracked, exactly as I remembered them.

I put Alek in front of the altar and took a seat, breathing hard as I fought to regain my breath. Despite the cold, I was sweating under my clothes and I felt the moisture chill on my skin, making me shiver.

‘Not what we were expecting, is it?’ I said aloud. ‘We come all this way, get through so much and . . .’ I leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. ‘I thought Marianna would be waiting. Misha and Pavel. I should have known.’ I sniffed hard and looked at my brother again. ‘You knew, didn’t you? That’s why you gave up.’

I wished I had never gone to war. I wished I had stayed at home and cherished every moment with my family. Misha was nine years old when I first left, Pavel just seven, and my time with them since then had been limited to that which I was able to spend away from soldiering. The babies I had once cradled with just one hand were now grown almost as tall as their mama, and I had wasted so much of that time.

‘Maybe this is my punishment – to live for
this
.’ I looked up at the cross. ‘Is that it? Are you punishing me?’

Behind me, the door creaked.

I reached for my weapon and turned to see a figure standing silhouetted against the morning. Bulked by a winter coat and hat, rifle in hand, he cut an impressive figure. His breath clouded about his face, and he stood unmoving, watching.

I stayed as I was, one hand on my revolver.

‘What have you done?’

Everything about her demeanour had made me think she was a man. Only when she spoke did I realise that her imposing profile had deceived me. She had the almost lazy bearing of someone who had nothing to lose; someone for whom violence was a part of life. A certainty. And when she took a step into the church, the muzzle of her rifle pointed at the floor, she looked comfortable and without fear. I’d seen young men hold a rifle with trepidation, even after training, but this woman held it like she meant to use it.

‘What have you got there?’ She inclined her head to one side. ‘Behind the seat? You’re armed?’

‘I am.’

She nodded as if she had expected as much. ‘And you killed him?’ She glanced at Alek, lying in front of the altar.

‘Not really.’

The woman studied me, perhaps looking for lies, but it was hard to see her expression. She had the advantage of the light behind her, so her face was in shadow, like a closed book.

She came further into the church, taking another two or three steps along the aisle between the seats, until she was no more than an arm’s length from me. At this range, her rifle would be of little use to her. We were so close that the length of the barrel would prohibit her from raising it enough to shoot at me.

Despite the cold, my fingers sweated on the pistol grip, and my skin felt clammy, but I was ready to use it if I had to.

‘You’re alone?’ she asked.

I didn’t answer.

‘You
are
alone,’ she said. ‘We’ve been watching the village since first light.’

‘We?’

The woman nodded and raised her hand to point behind me.

For a moment I didn’t move. I wondered if it was a trick to make me look away. I used to do something similar with Misha and Pavel at dinnertime, a ruse to steal food from their plates. When someone spoke from behind me, though, I knew it was no trick.

‘We’ve been right through the village from the other end.’ The voice betrayed some tension in the speaker. A touch of barely restrained hostility. ‘As soon as we saw you leave the house with him. Where’s everyone else?’

I turned to see another woman standing behind me and guessed she must have come in through the back while I was watching the other. I cursed myself for having been so easily duped.

‘You’ve been following me?’ I wondered if Alek and I had been right when we’d thought there had been eyes watching us in the forest.

‘Not following, watching.’

‘Where are you from? Not here.’

‘No. Not here.’

This woman was slight in build, wearing trousers and a long winter coat. At this angle, I could see her more clearly than the other woman: the light was on her face. She wore a dark lambswool hat, like a Kuban Cossack might wear, pulled low on her forehead with just a hint of blonde hair hanging below its rim, the fringe cut short and straight. Cold blue eyes gave away none of her thoughts, and her angular, handsome features were set in a permanent frown. Brow furrowed, lips pursed tight, jaw clenched, she had the appearance of someone whose expression was a product of the experiences she had lived through.

She wore a rifle slung over her shoulder and held a commissar’s pistol in her hand, but there wasn’t any surprise in seeing armed women any more than seeing armed men. Some of the strongest soldiers I’d known had been women.

I looked for any evidence of affiliation but saw nothing to suggest which army or ideology held her allegiance, other than the pistol in her hand.

‘Where did you steal that?’ I asked. ‘Or has it always been yours?’ If it belonged to her, and she had shed her uniform, then perhaps she had been in the Red Army, like me.

‘Mine?’ She shook her head. ‘No. I don’t remember where it came from.’ But I didn’t believe her. If it wasn’t hers, then she had taken it from a body – either one she had found or one she had killed – and that was something she’d remember.

I looked down at my revolver, sensing the woman’s tension as I turned it. ‘No reason for anyone to get hurt,’ I said, returning the weapon to my pocket. I had no intention of giving it up to them, but I wanted them to see I was not a threat. They had me at a disadvantage, so it was in my interest to give them the impression of submission without appearing weak.

‘I agree,’ she said, sitting on the altar step in front of me, resting her forearms on her knees so that the pistol dangled between them.

The woman behind me moved away, finding a distance more suited to the long weapon she was carrying. She’d done her job distracting me and now her duty was to protect the woman in front of me.

‘So you’re in charge?’ I said to the woman in the lambswool hat.

‘In charge of what?’

I shrugged. ‘The rifle behind me. Any others you might have outside. How many
do
you have outside?’

‘Who
are
you?’ she asked.

‘No one.’

She smiled, but it didn’t change her face much. It didn’t touch her eyes; it was just a movement of her mouth, those full lips turning up at the corners, a hint of teeth too white for a common peasant. ‘Just like me. No one.’ She inclined her head toward Alek. ‘And him? When my comrade asked if you killed him, you said, “Not really.” What did you mean by that?’

‘I meant no.’ I looked down at Alek and wished I could have done more for him. It had been my decision to run like that, even though he was hurt. It was the best time, the only way to make it work, but if we had gone back, things might have been different. Alek might still have been alive. ‘He’s my brother,’ I said.

‘In arms?’

‘In blood.’ I looked at the woman. ‘My name is Kolya. This is Alek.’

‘Kolya.’

I nodded.

‘Then you can call me Tanya. And this is Lyudmila.’ No patronymic. No surname.

With the pistol in her left hand, she reached into her pocket and took out a small leather pouch. She contemplated it, realising she needed both hands, so rested the pistol beside her and opened the pouch. She removed a cigarette paper, which she put on her thigh to keep steady while she took a pinch of dry tobacco between finger and thumb. To my eyes, her fingers and hands seemed too delicate to be those of a farmer’s wife or a soldier, but they looked firm enough when they were wrapped round the handle of her pistol.

There was something precious about the softness in the bend of her wrist when she sprinkled the tobacco along the paper, and when she had rolled the cigarette and licked it to stick it down, she tore the corner from an empty booklet of papers and made a small tube with the scrap. She inserted this makeshift filter into the end of the cigarette in an odd and affected quirk I’d never seen before. There was something about her I couldn’t quite put my finger on. She was somehow different from the usual peasants and soldiers I dealt with.

She put the cigarette in the corner of her mouth and was in the process of replacing the pouch in her pocket when she stopped. She looked up and then leaned across, offering it to me.

‘Thank you,’ I said, taking it.

Alek and I had been travelling alone for close to three weeks. The journey had been long and difficult. Some days, we hadn’t moved at all, only daring to travel at night through the forest, when it was almost impossible to navigate. Other days, Alek had been too weak to go far. We had come a long way from our unit after what happened, living on the sparse supplies we had, bolstered by whatever we could hunt and forage. We kept to the forest as much as possible, avoiding the roads and the search parties that used them. The tobacco had run out after the first week.

I rolled one for myself, and when I handed the pouch back, she struck a match on the step and leaned across to offer me the flame. I glanced at the weapon by her side, thinking I could take it. I could kill her in a blink, but there was a rifle trained on my back. I was quick, but maybe not quick enough, and I wasn’t inclined to fight right now. I was here to bury my brother.

I accepted the light, and the first drag on the cigarette was like a blessing. I realised how low I had fallen for it to be such a singular pleasure. Other than the warmth from the oven last night, it was the closest thing I’d had to comfort for longer than I cared to remember.

I tipped my head back, blew the smoke at the ceiling and stayed that way for a while. I closed my eyes and ignored the women as if they had never been there. Then I remembered Alek lying at my feet. He would have enjoyed this moment, and an image came to me of the times we would go to the lake at dawn to fish because it was the best time, and we would sit in silence, smoking and listening to the water washing the shore. What happened to Mama didn’t stop us; we couldn’t allow it to. The lake had ugly memories, but it had beautiful ones too. Memories of Alek. Memories of being there in the summer with Marianna.

The lake gave life just as it took it away.

‘Where’s everybody else?’ Lyudmila asked. ‘There’s no one here.’

‘You tell me.’ The memories faded into the grey light.

‘What have you done with them?’ Her insistence suggested she didn’t know what had happened here, and I had seen so many lies and betrayals that it would take a good act to fool me. My training and experience had shaped me into not just a soldier capable of great cruelty but also into a reasonable reader of intentions.

‘Nothing. This is my home. I don’t know where—’

‘Are you a soldier?’ Tanya asked.

I opened my eyes and looked at her.

‘Which colour are you?’ The pistol was in her hand again. The barrel was pointing to the floor, but all she had to do was move it a hair’s breadth and she could put holes right through me. It was not a threat, but she was ready for whatever might come.

‘Which colour are
you
?’ I asked.

Tanya showed me the non-smile again and shook her head. ‘It doesn’t work that way.’

‘I’m on my side,’ I said. ‘Yours. No one’s.’

‘But you’re a soldier. All men are soldiers, aren’t they? For one side or another.’

‘Red or White makes no difference to me,’ I said. ‘Nor Black, or Blue, Green.’ There were too many colours to keep track of. The Black Army of anarchists in Ukraine, spontaneous Green armies rising out of the peasantry to protect their lands and livestock, and the Blues spawned from the uprising in Tambov.

‘I don’t care about those things,’ I said. ‘I just want to bury my brother.’

‘He’s really your brother? Your real brother?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, smoke encircling her face. ‘Where are you from?’

‘I already told you.
This
is my home. But what about you?’ I asked. ‘Where are
you
from? How do I know you didn’t have something to do with what’s happened here?’

‘What
has
happened here?’ Tanya looked at the woman behind her and there was a flash of something difficult to read in her expression. Recognition? Fear? Perhaps both.

‘You know something?’ I asked.

‘About what?’