Traitor

by Amanda McCrina

  “You don’t know anything about Tarnopol,” Tolya said.

  “—but definitely with deliberate intent,” Solovey finished, “whatever the reason. Anyway, if they don’t shoot you for treason, they’ll shoot you for desertion. You’re absent without leave and consorting with the enemy. Maybe you didn’t have a choice, but neither did Lieutenant Spirin, did he? Didn’t stop the NKVD from putting a bullet in his head—but I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Shut up.”

  “The point is you don’t want to go back. Trust me.”

  “There are people close to me,” Tolya said.

  Solovey’s chin snapped up.

  “Our source said you were alone—no family.”

  “Not family.” Tolya hesitated. He’d never had to explain Koval. She was just Koval—though sometimes, in the safety of his head, she was Nataliya. “A friend.”

  Solovey scowled. “In the Front?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ukrainian?”

  “Yes.”

  Solovey was silent, leaning on the gun.

  “You’ve got to let me go back,” Tolya said.

  Solovey looked up. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve got to let me go back.”

  “I can’t,” Solovey said, “not now. I’m sorry. The problem—”

  Tolya ran. He stumbled down the bare hillside, fighting through the long grass. There was a little copse of poplars at the foot of the hill, curving away from the road. If he could make it to the trees, he could make it away. Solovey was shouting after him. Tolya didn’t stop, and he didn’t look back. He was almost to the trees. He heard the crack of a pistol shot, and he ducked by instinct. The bullet tore through the trees ahead of him—a warning shot. There was a pause, then another crack. The bullet slammed into him, low in his left shoulder, pitching him forward onto his hands.

  For a moment, he lay numbly still, breathless with the shock, holding the grass in fistfuls. Then there was pain, spreading out and searching him through with white-hot fingers, and the blood roaring in his ears, and the frantic thump, thump, thump of his heart on the grass.

  Solovey’s footsteps were coming toward him down the hill.

  Tolya staggered up and stumbled on, gasping, holding his shoulder.

  “Stop, Tolya,” Solovey said. He’d broken into a run, his pistol in his hand.

  Tolya ducked into the trees—and tripped, stupidly, sprawling over a root, falling on his face on the cool, damp earth.

  He fought against Solovey’s hands—or he tried anyway, twisting and kicking and swearing. Solovey put a knee into his back and jerked his arms around.

  “I’m sorry,” Solovey said, sliding the ammunition bag off Tolya’s shoulder. He held Tolya’s wrists in one hand. He had a scout’s knife in his other hand. He cut the strap of the bag. “I didn’t want to shoot you,” he said, tying Tolya’s wrists with the strap. “You’ve got to understand I can’t let you go. They’ll torture you if they take you, trying to find us.”

  His hands lifted Tolya slowly, carefully. He opened the buttons of Tolya’s jacket and pulled the jacket down Tolya’s arms. He held Tolya’s tunic in his hands and ripped it and peeled it away.

  His fingers found the rosary around Tolya’s neck.

  Orthodox didn’t pray the rosary. Neither did the Ukrainian Catholics here in Lwów.

  A rosary meant Tolya was a Roman Catholic, a Pole—and he knew what the UPA did to Poles.

  For a moment, Solovey was frozen, holding the rosary in his fingers and looking at the crucifix on his palm. Very distantly, over the blood in his ears and the wind in the trees, Tolya could hear Andriy and Taras and Yakiv coming up from the roadside.

  Solovey yanked the clasp open, tore the rosary from Tolya’s neck, and shoved it quickly into a pocket. He tore Tolya’s tunic into strips.

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

  4

  They would torture him first, to see what he knew about numbers and positions and battle orders.

  Then they would kill him.

  The Ukrainian nation is against mixed marriage and regards it as a crime, the UPA leaflets said. He’d seen them in Tarnopol, in Zborów, in Złoczów—all the way across Galicia. The family is the most important organic unit, the highest cell of the national collective, and thus we have to keep it purely Ukrainian.

  There were other leaflets listing other crimes: Death to the traitors who join the Red Army! Death to the traitors who join the collective farms! They hadn’t stuck with him the same way. Those other crimes were just things you did. Who cared what he’d done? They would kill him just for what he was—or maybe for what he wasn’t. He wasn’t purely Ukrainian. With a Polish mother and a Ukrainian father, he was an impurity in the blood of the Ukrainian race.

  They would kill him to cleanse the blood.

  “You’re going to have to walk,” Solovey said. He was bandaging Tolya’s shoulder with strips of tunic. “There’s a reason I didn’t aim for your legs. Well, multiple reasons, but that was one of them. However, try to run…”

  He showed Tolya his pistol, holding it very close to Tolya’s face, opening the magazine and letting Tolya see the six remaining rounds.

  “I can use every one of them without killing you,” he said, “but it would be miserable for both of us, so I’m going to ask you, please, not to run. All right? Be good about it, and I might even untie your hands.”

  Tolya swore at him in Polish.

  Solovey slid a hand over Tolya’s mouth. “In Ukrainian, you suicidal idiot.”

  “Vyrodok”—through Solovey’s fingers—“suchyy syn—”

  “I’d conserve the energy,” Solovey said. “It’s a long walk, and I’m not going to carry you.”

  * * *

  Tolya tried to run.

  He knew he wouldn’t make it away. There was no question of making it away. But he didn’t want to live to go through a UPA interrogation, and he thought, in a sudden rush of panic, that he could make it enough of a possibility that Solovey would shoot to kill.

  There wasn’t much more thought to it than that. He waited until they were halfway up the bare-grass slope, very nearly the same place as last time, and he ran.

  He’d never tried running with his hands tied behind his back. This time he didn’t even make it to the trees. He stumbled ten meters or so, fighting for his balance the whole way, before the soldier called Yakiv—intimidatingly big and surprisingly quick—caught him by an elbow, jerked him around, and shoved him to the ground, planting a heavy, booted foot in Tolya’s stomach. Tolya looked up into the gaping metal mouth of Yakiv’s rifle.

  “Do you know, zradnyk,” Yakiv said, “you can still walk with a shattered kneecap, given enough motivation.”

  “Not very quickly,” Solovey said lazily, coming down through the grass, “and not for very long, no matter the motivation. Leave him his kneecaps, Yakiv.”

  “Up, zradnyk.” Yakiv took his foot off Tolya’s stomach and jabbed Tolya’s ribs with the muzzle of the rifle.

  If he’d been braver, he would have said he wasn’t the zradnyk, the traitor, not technically, because he only shot Germans and Soviet political officers—but he didn’t say it. He got up. He rolled over onto his stomach and pushed himself up awkwardly on his knees. Yakiv prodded him with the rifle again, just for good measure, and they walked.

  He didn’t know how far they walked. He tried to estimate time and distance by the angle of the sun, the way Comrade Lieutenant Spirin had taught him, but Yakiv hurried him roughly along with the muzzle of the rifle whenever he looked up into the trees. Solovey and Andriy were ahead, carrying the machine gun and the ammunition bag between them. Yakiv followed Tolya, and Taras brought up the rear. They were going north and west into the low foothills above the city. He knew that much because when they crested one long, wooded slope he risked a glance back over his shoulder and saw the wood spreading away behind them, the road through the poplars as thin as a thread belo
w them, the city like a smear of ash on the far green floor of the river valley. Then Yakiv nudged him with the rifle, and he stumbled down the slope after Solovey and Andriy.

  They rested once. Andriy passed around a canteen of warm, stale water. At first, he was going to refuse because his hands were still tied, which meant Solovey had to hold the canteen for him. But his shoulder was hurting badly, and when he opened his mouth to snarl an oath, he lost his nerve and ended up letting Solovey tip the water onto his tongue—and Solovey must have taken that as his surrender, because afterward he bent over Tolya with his knife and cut the strap from Tolya’s wrists.

  They walked again. His shoulder was hurting very badly now. The bandage was swollen and soaking. He bit the insides of his cheeks and blinked away blackness from the corners of his eyes, letting Yakiv nose him this way and that with the rifle because that was easier than lifting his head to look.

  He tried to think about Comrade Lieutenant Spirin making it all the way back from the German lines at Tarnopol with two broken ribs and a bullet hole in his back, but all he could think about was how Comrade Lieutenant Spirin got a firing squad instead of a Red Star because Zampolit Petrov said he’d been turned in captivity.

  Then he tried to think about Koval, calmly picking out shrapnel from her calf after a mortar round collapsed the walls of the slit trench, but all he could think about was that morning in the switch tower, and collective guilt, and how she would put a pistol in her mouth before she’d let them take her.

  He must have passed out, because he woke up to find Solovey and Andriy carrying him, Solovey’s arms under his arms and Andriy’s arms around his knees. Solovey was walking slowly backward, talking over his shoulder to somebody Tolya couldn’t see: “Going to have to hurry if you want the light.”

  “Put him down—here.” That was a girl’s voice. Somebody put a hand on Tolya’s shoulder. He jerked reflexively, hissing.

  Solovey’s hands tightened under his arms. “Morphine,” Solovey said.

  “You want to use—”

  “Yes.”

  “Iryna,” the girl said.

  Tolya jerked again, deliberately this time. He twisted against Andriy’s arms, scrabbling for Solovey’s hands. He knew what that meant too—morphine. They would give him a little before the questioning, just enough to keep him calm and pliable and to dull the pain so he wouldn’t pass out again. That was what the NKVD did. He jerked wildly, kicking.

  “Put him down,” the girl said. “For the love of heaven, put him down before he hurts himself.”

  They put him on the ground, spreading his arms. He tried to lunge back up. They pushed him down and held him. Solovey leaned over him.

  “Easy, tiger,” he said. “We’re going to take the bullet out.” He had a knee in Tolya’s stomach and a hand on either side of Tolya’s head, pinning him. “You picked the wrong time to wake up,” he said.

  “How did it happen?” the girl asked, unwrapping the makeshift bandage from Tolya’s shoulder. She had calm, steady hands—warm, red hands, callused from work. There was a Red Cross badge on the sleeve of her coat.

  “Stray shot,” Solovey said. “The getaway. It was close.” He grinned a quick, pained grin down into Tolya’s face.

  “No one else?” The girl peeled away the bandage and wiped the blood with clean gauze.

  “We were lucky,” Solovey said.

  “He was lucky the bullet missed the bone.”

  “Extremely,” Solovey agreed.

  Another Red Cross girl swooped in beside Solovey, slipping a bag from her shoulder.

  “Fifteen milligrams, Iryna,” the first girl said.

  “Thirty,” Solovey said.

  The two girls looked at each other over Tolya.

  “Thirty milligrams,” Solovey said. “Take it out of mine.”

  “Fine,” the first girl said, “all right. Thirty.” She was pinning her hair up. “Give me those forceps,” she said to Solovey. “Make yourself useful for a change.”

  * * *

  Afterward, Tolya was under a canvas tarpaulin in the blue half-light, curled up on a blanket on the ground with another blanket over him, blinking up through tangled tree branches to a twilit sky. His head was very thick and very light at the same time. When he moved, it felt as though somebody else were directing his limbs distantly on a puppet string. He lay still, listening to the nightingales. It’s all right, he thought vaguely, it’s all right. If they were going to torture him now, they wouldn’t have troubled with blankets.

  Solovey ducked in under the tarpaulin.

  He wasn’t wearing the NKVD uniform. He was wearing a green-gray jacket and trousers and a green-gray side cap with the tryzub, the Ukrainian trident, in bloodred and black on the badge. He had his pistol at his belt, and the bloodred stripes on his sleeves must mark him as an officer. He was carrying a sausage in waxed paper.

  “No hot food,” he said. “No fires. I’m sorry.”

  He sat down cross-legged beside Tolya. He showed Tolya the sausage.

  “A present from Anna, to make up for digging around in your shoulder with sharp metal things. Eating something ought to make you feel a little better. Always works for me, anyway.”

  He laid the sausage down and spread open the waxed paper. He had his scout’s knife in his hand.

  “All right,” he said, “here’s the thing.” He held the sausage in his left hand and cut with his right, bracing the spine of the blade on his forefinger and cutting the sausage in thick slices. “Early this morning, our source in the Front contacted command and asked if we could get you out. You’d shot your political officer, and it was only a matter of hours before the NKVD followed it back to you.” He picked a strip of sausage skin off the heel of the blade with his thumbnail. “Now, I made it very clear to command—and command, in turn, made it very clear to our source—that I wouldn’t even try getting you out unless I knew you could make a clean break of it. That means no living family, no close friends. And I got the unequivocal assurance that you could.”

  “They lied,” Tolya said, through shut teeth. He lay very still under the blanket, watching the knife in Solovey’s hand.

  “I’ve thought about it,” Solovey said. “Motivation is tricky. Our source is a double agent, maybe, and you’re a Red spy. That’s as far as that line of thinking takes me.”

  “I’m not a spy.”

  “It raises an interesting question. Did you spit in my face because you thought I was NKVD or because you knew I was UPA?”

  “I’m not a spy.”

  “The other possibility, of course, is that you lied, in which case motivation becomes a little easier. Our well-meaning but unwitting source delivered you right into the hands of the UPA, and you needed an excuse to get away.”

  He finished cutting the sausage and wiped his knife carefully on the paper, then on the grass. He glanced up.

  “Was that it?”

  Tolya didn’t say anything. He watched the knife disappear into the lining of Solovey’s boot. He was clenching his muscles to keep his empty stomach from muttering, trying not to look at the sausage. He focused on the pistol at Solovey’s hip. The pistol was very nearly within his reach, and it would be if Solovey leaned forward just a little.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Solovey said.

  Tolya looked away, swallowing. His shoulder hurt, and his empty stomach ached, and Koval would be dead by now because she wouldn’t have let them take her, and his throat was tight, and he was very afraid in that moment that he was going to cry with Solovey watching.

  Solovey said, “How old are you, Tolya?”

  Official UPA policy was to kill every Polish male over the age of sixteen. He supposed it was the conscientious ones who asked first.

  “You’ve got my papers,” he said.

  “Not at the moment,” Solovey said.

  “You saw them.”

  “I was too damn nervous to read them.”

  He knew it was a lie, but he was too tired to keep
fighting, and too much a coward. He shut his eyes and swallowed.

  “Eighteen in October,” he said.

  “Conscript?”

  He nodded against the blanket. He couldn’t speak.

  “I guess you’d have to be,” Solovey said. “They wouldn’t take you at the recruiting stations—not for a frontline rifle company, anyway.” Tolya heard the click of a lighter. “You’re not from Kyiv, are you?” Solovey said. “Not with those fine Galician vowels.”

  “Kuz’myn,” Tolya said.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Outside Proskuriv.”

  “Andriy would know,” Solovey said. “He’s from Proskuriv.”

  His fingers tugged at Tolya’s elbow. Tolya opened his eyes. Solovey held out a cigarette. Tolya looked at it, wanted it so badly that his mouth watered, fought with himself, knew that Solovey could see him fighting with himself, and turned his head quickly away because he wasn’t going to give Solovey the satisfaction.

  Solovey returned the cigarette indifferently to his breast pocket. “How did your parents die?”

  He had to get his mind off that cigarette. “My father in the prison at Proskuriv,” he said.

  “Political.”

  “They said so.”

  “Would you not?”

  “I mean—he was one of the ones—when the Reds were trying to make us give up our land and go to the kolhosp—the collective farm…” He risked a glance to see whether Solovey understood.

  “Yes,” Solovey said.

  “He was one of the ones who resisted. But that’s not what they killed him for. Lots of people resisted.”

  “What did they kill him for?”

  “He confessed to something he didn’t do. So they asked him questions he couldn’t answer. He died under torture.”

  Solovey flicked the ash from the tip of his cigarette and blew a soft, smoky breath. “What about your mother?”

  Tolya swallowed quickly. “Against our garden wall, because she was Polish.”