Traitor

by Amanda McCrina

  Tolya wiped the lenses of the scope. He mounted the scope and lifted the rifle, shouldering the butt and resting his cheek on the cool, smooth walnut stock.

  “Listen,” Koval said, “I’m only asking because the NKVD will be asking too, and they won’t be nearly as polite about it.”

  The NKVD—the Narodnyĭ Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs—were the Soviet secret police. If—when?—he ended up in the basement of Brygidki prison, the NKVD would be the ones taking him apart.

  “They won’t just shoot you,” Koval said. “First they’ll make you cough up all the other anti-Soviet elements in the company.”

  Tolya shut his left eye and sighted an imaginary target in the poplar trees at the foot of the hill—distance six hundred meters, half wind from two o’clock. He squeezed the trigger and lifted his head, homing the shot in his mind.

  “You’re short,” Koval said dryly.

  Tolya lowered the rifle to his lap. He clipped the sling on the stock and butt.

  “My grandmother is buried in Łyczakowski Cemetery—my mother’s mother. I went to find the grave.”

  Koval was silent.

  Tolya took a clip from his pocket, stripped it into the magazine, and shoved the bolt in.

  “I’m sorry,” Koval said. “I didn’t know.”

  “That’s a first,” he said.

  He hadn’t meant it to sound so sour. She ignored it anyway.

  “Are they from L’viv—your mother’s people?” She used the Ukrainian name, L’viv, not the Polish Lwów.

  “No, they moved to L’viv after the Poles took Galicia. They didn’t want to stay on the Ukrainian side of the border.”

  That was in 1919, after Ukraine went to war with Poland for control of oil-rich eastern Galicia. His mother’s family, Poles, had held land in the village of Kuz’myn for more than a century, but Kuz’myn was in Ukrainian territory, and Tolya supposed they’d feared reprisals.

  “But your mother stayed,” Koval said.

  “My mother stayed.”

  He had wondered, more and more as he’d gotten older, if she’d ever regretted it. She’d been eighteen years old and in love, and even if she’d known her father would disown her for loving a Ukrainian, she couldn’t have known the Reds would take Ukraine, seal the borders, and shoot her against a wall for being Polish.

  “Are any of her family still here?” Koval asked. “Living, I mean.”

  “No,” Tolya said. That was a lie. More accurately, he didn’t know. He knew his mother’s father was dead, because he’d found that grave, too, in Łyczakowski Cemetery, and he knew it must have happened in the German invasion because the date on the headstone was July 1, 1941. He’d tried to be sorry, but he wasn’t very. He couldn’t think of his mother’s father as his grandfather. The man had certainly never thought of him, the half-breed, as a grandson. His mother’s mother had written when she could, in quiet defiance of her husband. His mother’s father hadn’t broken silence once, even when Aunt Olena had written from Kyiv to tell him his daughter was dead.

  He wasn’t sure about his mother’s brothers and sisters, but they’d never written either, and if they’d ever cared about a mongrel nephew from the wrong side of the border, they wouldn’t care now—not when he came wearing the Reds’ uniform.

  “Listen,” Koval said, “I’m sorry, I really am, but the cemetery is on the east side, isn’t it?”

  “So?”

  “Vasya said you came in on the tracks last night.”

  Tolya didn’t say anything.

  “Listen to me, Tolya. If I can figure out that you weren’t at the cemetery—or not only at the cemetery—then the NKVD can too. All they’ve got to do is ask for names.”

  “What names?”

  “Anybody who had a history with Petrov, cross-checked against anybody who was absent at the time he was shot. You’d fit on both counts—and Vasya will talk. Everybody talks.”

  Tolya didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t care that you shot him,” Koval said. “Somebody should have shot him at Tarnopol. I care about what happens to you.”

  He looked at her. The breath of wind through the open windows was pulling blond hair from the neat bun under her cap and whipping it around her ears. The sunlight had turned her eyes softly green, the color of moths’ wings.

  “It’s seventy kilometers to Stryy,” she said quietly. “You could be in the mountains in two days.”

  “No.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I’m not running.”

  “They’ll find out. They’ll find out, if they don’t know already. Everybody talks, sooner or later.”

  “It’s an admission of guilt if I run.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if they couldn’t find you.”

  “They’d come for you. Collective guilt. They’d know you helped me.”

  “I’d put a pistol in my mouth.” Her voice was hard. “I’m not going to be their bait.”

  “They’d go for your sister,” he said.

  She was silent. The breeze tugged at her hair. Tolya swung his feet off the switchboard. He leaned over and caught one of the blond strands in his fingers, tucking it behind her ear.

  “They can’t prove anything,” he said.

  She shut her eyes. “Don’t be stupid, Tolya.”

  “I’m not being stupid.”

  “They’ll have your name. They’ll have whatever proof they want once they’ve got you in an interrogation cell.”

  “The only way they prove anything is if I try to run.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  He didn’t answer. He traced her cheekbone with his fingertips—very lightly because his fingers were cracked and callused. Peasant fingers, Koval would say, teasing. She was city born, from Kyiv.

  She caught his wrist. “That was not supposed to be a rhetorical question.”

  He looked away.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Look at me,” she said.

  He looked back. He couldn’t meet her eyes. He looked at the strands of blond hair slipping loose again from behind her ear.

  She said, “You don’t have to worry about me, all right?”

  “All right.”

  “So promise me you’ll go.”

  “I’ll go.”

  She held his wrist tightly. “Don’t lie to me. Promise me you’ll go tonight—as soon as it’s dark enough to get past the checkpoints.”

  “I’ll go tonight,” he lied.

  “You promise,” she corrected.

  “I promise I’ll go tonight.”

  “Better.” She slid off the switchboard, settled lightly on his lap, and leaned into him, lifting his chin with cool fingers so she could lay a row of kisses very slowly and carefully across the base of his throat.

  She must have felt his heart lurch, because when she sat back, the corners of her mouth were turned up in a slight, sly grin. She brought his trembling hand to her lips and kissed his callused fingertips, one by one.

  “Is that goodbye?” His voice was hoarse. He hadn’t quite caught his breath yet.

  “It’s good luck,” she said. “I’ll see you again.”

  He didn’t say anything. He had the feeling she knew he was lying. She always knew.

  3

  In the end it didn’t matter, the lie, because the NKVD came for him at noon mess.

  There were three of them, wearing the khaki tunics and the bloused navy trousers and the blue peaked caps with the blood-red bands. Each carried a sleek sidearm very much like the one he’d taken off Zampolit Petrov and given to the Polish Resistance girl. They took him from the mess line, and two of them held him tightly by the arms while the third plucked Tolya’s identification papers from his breast pocket and compared them carefully to another set of papers that Tolya couldn’t see to read. Then he folded both sets of papers into his own pocket and jerked his chin over his shoulder.

  They took Tolya out to the station s
quare, the two holding him by the arms, the third walking behind with the mouth of his pistol pressed in the small of Tolya’s back. There was a smooth, low black car idling by the curb. The driver had a DP-27 machine gun loose on his lap. They pushed Tolya’s head down and shoved him into the back seat. One of them sat on either side of him. The third holstered his pistol and went around to sit with the driver, pulling the machine gun across his knees.

  The car pulled away from the curb, circled around the square, and went down toward Gródecka. The verdigris spires of Saint Elizabeth’s rose up straight ahead. The car turned left onto Pierackiego Street, following the railroad tracks. They weren’t taking him to the prison. The car sped along the street, away from the city center—very nearly the same way he’d run, last night.

  The one with the machine gun, the one who’d held his pistol on Tolya’s back, turned around, cradling the gun in the crook of his arm.

  “Don’t be afraid, Tolya,” he said, in Ukrainian.

  Tolya spit at him.

  They all laughed—except the driver, who hadn’t seen it and who glanced up in the mirror distractedly.

  “We’re all friends here,” the one with the machine gun said. “We’re not NKVD.”

  He took off the blue peaked cap and smoothed his dark hair with his fingers. He was young—five years or so older than Tolya. He had a smooth, tanned face and cold gray eyes that were much older than his face. There was a tiny sliver of a scar, like the mark of a fingernail, on his right cheekbone, below the eye.

  “This is Andriy,” he said, putting his hand on the driver’s shoulder. “That’s Taras”—flicking his fingers—“and that’s Yakiv. I’m sorry about the uniforms, but I think we pulled it off pretty well.”

  He slid the gun off his arm and stuck out his hand to Tolya, over the seat.

  “Aleksey,” he said, “but you can call me Solovey. This is my squad—well, some of it. We’re with the L’viv group of the UPA.”

  Tolya didn’t move. It was a trick. He was sure it was a trick. They would speak in Ukrainian, saying L’viv instead of Lwów, and they would tell him they were UPA—Ukrainska Povstanska Armiia, the Insurgent Army, radical Ukrainian nationalists and anti-Communists—and they would try to trick him into talking.

  After a moment, Solovey withdrew his hand.

  “It’s all right, Tolya,” he said. “It’s all right.”

  Tolya looked out the window. They were crossing the north fork of the railroad tracks. There was a roadblock with a boom gate at the end of the bridge. Solovey put his cap back on. He slipped a paper from inside his jacket, unfolded it, and leaned across Andriy to show it to the sentry. This time, Tolya saw the heading at the top of the paper and the stamp on the corner.

  “Comrade Colonel Volkov’s orders,” Solovey said to the sentry, in Russian.

  Tolya’s throat closed. He watched the paper circulate hands outside the car window. Fyodor Volkov was the Front’s senior NKVD officer. Tolya had seen him only once, in Kyiv last November, and then only very quickly from a distance: He’d been with General Vatutin, commander of the Front, on an inspection of the ruined city. Five months later General Vatutin was dead, assassinated by UPA partisans, and Volkov had sworn the UPA would pay.

  They must think he was UPA. They must think that was why he’d killed Zampolit Petrov. That was the only reason they would take him on Volkov’s personal orders. That was the only reason they would be trying to convince him that they, too, were UPA.

  The stamped paper came back in through the window. The sentry raised the gate.

  “I almost saluted,” Solovey said, and laughed. He was speaking Ukrainian again.

  “Quiet,” Andriy said, glancing up in the mirror.

  He didn’t know why they were taking him out of the city to work on him. He knew how the NKVD did their business. If they really needed to get somebody talking, they would do it in public, making everybody else watch. They called that the “conference method,” and that was how they’d gotten his father. His father hadn’t been strong enough—weak enough? hardened enough?—to stand by and watch in silence.

  The last of the city was speeding past in a gray, rubbled blur. Now there were bright green poplar trees streaming along the roadside. Tolya’s stomach jumped and twisted. He looked away.

  Solovey looked back at him over the seat.

  “Have you ever been in a car before, Tolya?”

  No. He remembered the first time he’d ever seen a car—in Kyiv, at the train station, after Aunt Olena had come to get him and take him away from Kuz’myn. That was three or four days after his mother had been shot. There’d been some high-ranking Communist Party official getting out of the car, and there’d been NKVD with him, and Tolya had held on tightly to Aunt Olena’s hand because they’d looked so very like the men who’d shot his mother against the garden wall. Of course, they couldn’t have been the same because it was three hundred kilometers from Kuz’myn to Kyiv and there were different jurisdictions, but that wasn’t how a ten-year-old mind worked. You didn’t understand distances and jurisdictions. All you really knew was that your mother was dead, and it wasn’t the famine that had done it, but the men with the blue caps.

  “Our source says you come from Kyiv,” Solovey said, as though he’d heard Tolya’s thoughts. But that was another trick—to drop names and dates, to pretend you knew things. Tolya didn’t say anything. Solovey didn’t seem to care. “Turn off here,” he said to Andriy. The car eased off the road, the tires spitting up gravel. Andriy put on the hand brake and cut the engine.

  Solovey held the machine gun with his left hand and opened his door. He got out, cradling the gun on his arm. They all got out. The road went on ahead between the poplars. It was hot there on the shoulder of the road. The sun was beating down hard and bright in a clear blue sky, the heat curling off the pavement in slick, greasy waves—and Tolya knew suddenly that he was going to die, here and now on the side of the road in the heat and the sunlight.

  Solovey kicked the car door shut and said, “Tolya, come here.”

  He wasn’t going to die with a bullet in his back, and he wasn’t going to be dragged to it. He went over on his own, holding his head up. His heart was lodged in a cold, tight lump at the base of his throat.

  Solovey shouldered the machine gun. He held out the ammunition bag.

  “You carry this. We’re on foot from here.”

  Tolya took the bag numbly. He put the strap over his head, looking back over his shoulder. The others weren’t paying any attention to him or Solovey. Yakiv was taking a tool kit out of the trunk of the car. Andriy and Taras were lifting the hood, leaning over the engine.

  “They’ll catch up,” Solovey said. “They’re wiring the car—a little surprise for our NKVD friends, if they come looking. Know what a tilt fuse is?”

  “No,” Tolya said.

  “I don’t really either,” Solovey said. “That’s why I’m not the one wiring it.”

  * * *

  They walked away from the road. Solovey walked ahead, bent a little under the weight of the machine gun. The ground sloped up and up to the foothills, and they walked in knee-high grass and tall, purple heather. For the first little while, they walked in silence, and Tolya could hear the murmur of the wind in the grass, and the snatches of birdsong in the poplars, and the beat of his heart in his throat.

  “All right,” Solovey said, “switch—to the trees.” He slid the gun off his shoulder and held it out to Tolya. “Give me the bag.”

  Tolya didn’t move. His heart was beating very loudly. “Shoot me if you’re going to shoot me. This is stupid.”

  Solovey planted the butt of the gun on the ground between his feet. He crouched in the grass, leaning on the gun as though it were a walking stick. He looked up into Tolya’s face. “I’m not NKVD, Tolya. I’m not going to shoot you. This is a rescue—or an extraction, if you want to be technical.”

  “On Comrade Colonel Volkov’s orders?”

  “Not that he knows. That
was a forgery.”

  “That’s what you want me to think.”

  “Well—yes.”

  “I didn’t ask to be extracted.”

  “No. Our source in the Front put in a request through channels, and my commander obliged. Sent his best man.” Solovey grinned winningly.

  “Who’s your source in the Front?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine—probably better, actually. I just follow orders and dodge bullets.”

  “All right,” Tolya said. “You followed your orders. Now let me go.”

  “Go where? There aren’t many options for a Red deserter—not in L’viv anyway.”

  “I’ll take my own chances.”

  “With the Poles? They’ll shoot you just for being Ukrainian, never mind what uniform you’re wearing. Repayment in kind.” Solovey smiled again, without humor.

  Tolya’s stomach clenched. He knew what the UPA did to Poles. He’d heard it from the small, roving bands of Polish Resistance that had fought together with the Front for a while back in the spring, before Stalin had ordered them disarmed. Then he’d seen it himself, all the way across Galicia from Tarnopol to Lwów—all that stretch of chewed-up, exhausted, godforsaken black-earth country: farmhouses burned, Polish civilians tortured and raped and shot, their mutilated bodies marked traitor or collaborator or NKVD rat and hung up for examples. The UPA claimed Galicia and neighboring Volhynia as rightfully Ukrainian. Poles were a blight on the land, a cancer to be excised.

  “The Germans might not shoot you,” Solovey said. “They might just take you for slave labor. Ostarbeit, they call it. Tidy and efficient—very German. But I doubt you’d make it that far. They’re in full retreat across the San. Your chances aren’t very good, Tolya.”

  “You don’t understand. I’ve got to go back.”

  Solovey’s smile disappeared. “You murdered a political officer. They’ll hang you on a meat hook.”

  “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “Sergei Ilyich Petrov,” Solovey recited, “thirty-six years old, from Ulyanovsk, just like dear Comrade Lenin. He’s been a party member since 1926 and political officer for the Hundredth Rifles since November of last year. You shot him once in the back and once in the head, possibly over differences left unsettled since Tarnopol—”