Traitor

by Amanda McCrina

  He waited. He held the blanket drawn tight in his fists, watching the pistol at Solovey’s belt. The Ukrainian nation is against mixed marriage and regards it as a crime …

  But Solovey only pulled on his cigarette and said, “NKVD?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old were you?”

  “You mean when they died?”

  “Mm.”

  “Seven when they took my father.” The pistol didn’t seem to be forthcoming. Solovey was leaning his elbows on his knees, holding his cigarette in two fingers and rolling it absently between his fingertips, not looking up. Tolya shut his eyes again. “Ten when—when it was my mother.”

  “That was in 1937?”

  “Yes.”

  “And after that—what? One of the state orphanages?”

  “My aunt took me to Kyiv—my father’s sister. Her husband wrote for the state paper there. Proletars’ka Pravda.”

  “Party members?”

  Tolya hesitated. “He was. I think you have to be—to write for the paper.”

  Solovey was silent for a moment, pulling on his cigarette and breathing out the smoke. Then he said, “Did he make it difficult?”

  “You mean…”

  “For you.”

  It wasn’t the question he’d expected. He swallowed, remembering Ivan’s voice through the shut closet door. Don’t you understand? He’ll get us shot, the half-breed.

  “Sometimes,” Tolya said.

  “Abuse?”—quietly.

  Tolya opened his eyes. He craned his neck to look up into Solovey’s face.

  “You don’t have to answer,” Solovey said. In the glow of the cigarette, the lines of his face were hard and sharp shadowed. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  “How did you—”

  “You called him your aunt’s husband, not your uncle. It was a guess. You don’t have to tell me.”

  “She wanted to leave,” Tolya said. “We were going to leave—my aunt and I, together. But she was afraid—because I didn’t have the permission to be off the collective—you’ve got to have a special permission to be off, and I—she had just—”

  “She was afraid he’d turn you in if you tried to leave.”

  “Yes.”

  Solovey rolled his cigarette between his fingertips. “How long?”

  “In Kyiv?”

  “Under his roof.”

  “A year. They took him in one of the party purges—the NKVD.” It had occurred to Tolya only much later that it must have been Aunt Olena who’d denounced him.

  “And your aunt…”

  “No, she died at Voronezh, in the retreat. We went to Voronezh when the Germans came.”

  “Is that where you were conscripted?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sniper,” Solovey said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m told our source spoke very highly of you.”

  “He didn’t know about my mother,” Tolya said. There was something bitter on the base of his tongue.

  “No,” Solovey said, “I imagine not.” He was silent, breathing smoke out softly through his nostrils. Then he said, “Were you lying?”

  “What?”

  “About this friend in the Front.”

  Tolya was angry suddenly. “Maybe I’m lying about all of it.”

  Solovey’s face was blank. “Because I’m going to look like an idiot trying to make another rescue, if you were.”

  Tolya blinked at him.

  “I owe you that much,” Solovey said.

  “It’s no good.”

  “What’s no good?”

  “Rescue.”

  “We won’t be able to pull off the same trick again. That’s all right. I know other tricks.”

  “I mean she can’t make a clean break.”

  “Family?”

  “She’s got a sister in Kyiv.”

  Solovey flicked ash from his cigarette. He took a thoughtful drag. “What’s her name?”

  Tolya didn’t say anything.

  Solovey let out a low, smoky breath—not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh.

  “All right,” he said. “Three possibilities. There are more, but let’s keep it to three for simplicity’s sake.” He counted on his fingers, starting with his thumb. “One—I’m NKVD, and it doesn’t make a difference whether you tell me her name or not. If they’re going to take her, they’ve taken her already. Two”—holding his forefinger and middle finger together, the cigarette between them—“I’m not NKVD, and I figure out her name on my own. She’ll probably be dead by then, but at least you know you didn’t betray her. Three—”

  Tolya shut his eyes.

  “Koval. Nataliya Koval. She’s a junior sergeant with the Hundredth. Second Battalion.”

  “Sniper?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll see,” Solovey said.

  “I think she’s dead already.” He made himself open his eyes. He looked up into Solovey’s face. “I think she’d have done it herself—before they took her.”

  Solovey slipped his cigarette back into his mouth. He was silent for a moment, playing with the cigarette between his teeth. Then he took it out again and stubbed it out in the dirt.

  “We’ll see,” he said. “You should eat. I’ve been politely pretending not to hear your stomach growling.”

  5

  Night came down thick and black. Solovey was gone, and Tolya was alone under the tarpaulin. For a little while, he tried to keep himself awake, but his stomach was comfortably full of sausage, and his body heavy and numb with morphine, and it was no good. He slept. He woke up once, in darkness, to low voices and the crackle of underbrush in the wood. He lay tensely still under the blanket, listening, but now there was only silence and the far-off hooting of an owl. He slept again, and this time when he woke up there was pale, early sunlight slanting through the trees, and the fresh, damp, clean smell of dirt and tree bark and pine needles.

  Somebody leaned over him, blocking the light. He jerked by reflex, thrashing his legs.

  “Mind,” Solovey said. He was sitting across from Tolya under the tarpaulin, smoking a cigarette. “He’s awake.”

  The Red Cross girl, Iryna, the one who’d brought the morphine, sat back on her heels. She smiled down at Tolya. She was a thin, dark-eyed girl with a long plait of black hair under a kerchief.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m just changing the dressing.”

  “How is it?” Solovey asked.

  “Do you want the technical prognosis?”

  “No, please, dear God. I’ve had a long night.”

  “Bleeding a little, but it’s clean.”

  “Permanent damage?”

  “There shouldn’t be. The bullet penetrated below the medial cord.”

  “You’re getting technical,” Solovey said.

  “There shouldn’t be any nerve damage,” Iryna said. She was leaning into the sunlight again, holding Tolya’s shoulder in cool fingers and wrapping it tightly with a strip of gauze. She glanced down into Tolya’s face. “You’re awfully quiet. Is that because it doesn’t hurt, or because you want me to think it doesn’t hurt?”

  “It’s all right,” Tolya said.

  “So, yes—it hurts. How badly?”

  “It’s not bad.”

  “He remembers you stuck needles in him,” Solovey said. “That’s the issue. That was his first introduction to you. Now he wakes up with your hands all over him.”

  “Mind yourself,” Iryna said.

  Tolya leaned his head back on the blanket, holding the pain behind shut teeth. He looked out into the wood. There was a camouflage net over a pile of ammunition boxes just outside the tarpaulin, and another over the DP-27 and the 120mm mortar, which were mounted a little way up the slope, toward the ridge. There was a stretch of open, grassy ground between. He lay watching the squad share a cold breakfast of black bread and pork drippings. There were five of them. He recognized Andriy and Taras and the other Red Cross girl, Anna. He didn’t s
ee the big, bearish one, Yakiv, but the whole squad wouldn’t be here in the camp all at once. There would be couriers and scouts. There would be sentries posted at intervals all around the wood.

  Iryna tied off the gauze and cut it with a pair of scissors. She rolled up the extra gauze around her fingers and put it in her bag.

  “You know what I’m going to say,” she said to Solovey.

  “Do I?”

  “Yes, because it’s the same thing Anna will say. It would be better if he came back with us to Toporiv.”

  Solovey pulled on his cigarette expressionlessly. “I need him here.”

  “He’ll have a better chance at a full recovery in Toporiv.”

  “You mean there’s a risk he won’t make a full recovery.”

  “There’s always a risk with this kind of wound. You know that.”

  Solovey was silent, pulling on his cigarette.

  Iryna shouldered her bag and got up. “Even if he does make a full recovery, it’ll be a month. He’s not going to be doing you much good here.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Solovey said.

  He came over when Iryna had gone, crouching slowly on his heels by Tolya’s blanket. He laid a piece of bread spread with drippings beside Tolya on the blanket.

  “Were you lying to her?”

  “What?”

  “About the pain.”

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

  “There’s a Red Cross station in Toporiv. That’s what she was talking about.” Solovey took his cigarette out of his mouth and spun it in his fingertips absently. “She wasn’t lying. That’s your best option, medically speaking.”

  Tolya watched him spin the cigarette. His stomach was tight.

  “And my other options?”

  “Well,” Solovey said, “that’s what you and I need to talk about.”

  He put the cigarette back in his mouth.

  “I went down to talk to the commander last night,” he said, “about your friend—about why I didn’t know about your friend.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Not much, as it turns out. I didn’t actually end up getting to talk to him. It’s hard to work these things out spontaneously, you understand.” Solovey shrugged. “I did some poking around on my own, just so it wouldn’t be a wasted trip. It’s eight hours on foot—there and back. Eight hours total, I mean. Four hours each way.”

  “And?”

  Solovey took out his cigarette. He spun it between his fingers and dropped it on the dirt, grinding it out under the toe of his boot. He looked down into Tolya’s face finally.

  “You were right,” he said.

  It took him a second, blinking back up into Solovey’s face, to understand.

  “Dead?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Tolya looked away. He looked out into the wood, blinking and swallowing—blinking very quickly so Solovey wouldn’t see the tears, then not caring, and letting the tears come, and watching the tree branches blur together, and hearing Solovey say quietly, somewhere very far above him, “She was more than a friend, wasn’t she?”—and not having the words to explain, because all he could think about was yesterday morning in the switch tower and the way her eyes turned green, the color of moths’ wings, in sunlight.

  “You said she’s got a sister in Kyiv,” Solovey said.

  He squeezed his eyes shut. “Nadiya.”

  “I put a message through to our people in Kyiv. We’ll get her out.”

  He couldn’t speak. His throat was closed. You’re lying, he wanted to say—but he could hear her voice, and he could hear the hardness in it, and he could see the straightness in her shoulders, and he knew it wasn’t a lie. Your fault, he wanted to say, your fault, all of it—but it wasn’t, not really. Solovey hadn’t shot Zampolit Petrov.

  Solovey stood suddenly. He prodded Tolya’s ribs with the toe of his boot.

  “Get up, Tolya. Eat that bread. Then get your boots. I want to have a look at something.”

  * * *

  He followed Solovey up the slope, away from the little camp. Solovey was carrying a musette bag slung across his body and a pair of binoculars on a strap around his neck. He had his pistol at his hip and a rifle—a scoped Mosin with a bent bolt, very like Tolya’s own rifle—propped on his shoulder, the legs of the bipod dangling down his back. He paused every now and then to let Tolya catch up. They crested the ridge. The earth dropped away sharply ahead of them, down into a narrow, shaded ravine, sloping up again across the ravine and rolling on down to the river valley, the way they’d come yesterday. There was the road through the poplars, faint and far below. There was the dark scar of the railroad tracks, and the gray ruin of the city, and there was Gródecka Street, plowing west to the San River, choked with soldiers and trucks and the big dashka guns on trolleys.

  The Front was moving out of Lwów, pushing west in pursuit of the Germans and new territory to claim for the motherland.

  Solovey put down the musette bag and propped up the rifle on its bipod.

  “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

  He went down the slope into the ravine. Tolya watched him through the trees—losing him for a little while in the thick trees at the bottom of the ravine, finding him again on the far slope. Solovey went just about halfway up the slope and took off his cap and hung it on a tree branch.

  He came down and crossed the ravine and climbed back up to Tolya.

  “What do you think?” he said. “Five hundred meters?”

  “Maybe,” Tolya said.

  Solovey crouched by the rifle, taking the butt on his lap. He took a cartridge box out of his pocket and popped the bolt on the rifle, stripping a clip smoothly into the magazine. He shoved the bolt home with his palm. Then he laid the butt of the rifle carefully on the ground. He sat back, wiping his hands on his trousers. He looked up at Tolya.

  “Hit the cap,” he said.

  Tolya didn’t move. He knew this kind of game. He would be playing for his life, but the trick of it was there was nothing he could do to win.

  Solovey patted the stock of the rifle. “Try it.”

  He would die for failing, and he would die for refusing, and very likely he would die when it was done no matter how it went. It was a game he couldn’t win unless Solovey decided to let him win.

  “I’ll allow you a margin of error,” Solovey said, “in light of circumstances which are entirely my fault.”

  Tolya knelt numbly. He went down onto his stomach on the ground, shouldering the butt and leaning his cheek on the smooth wood, balancing the stock gingerly with his fingers. He closed his left eye and sighted through the scope, sliding his forefinger over the trigger. He lifted his head a little. Closer to six hundred meters—negative elevation twelve meters. There was a strong crosswind cutting through the ravine from nine o’clock, north to south.

  He leaned his cheek back on the stock. He squeezed his eye shut and sighted again, willing his hands not to shake. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Solovey looking through the binoculars. He drew a breath, squeezed the trigger, and let out the breath. He lifted his head and slid the bolt back. The empty shell casing spun out. He threw the bolt shut and looked up, tight-throated, at Solovey.

  Solovey lowered his binoculars.

  “Go get it,” he said.

  Tolya hesitated, just for a second. There were four rounds still loaded, and they both knew it. He laid the rifle down, wiped his hands, and got up. He walked down the slope, away from Solovey. There were beech trees all down the slope. He handed himself from one mottled gray trunk to the next, down to the floor of the ravine. He felt the rifle on his back all the way down. He thought he remembered the ravine from yesterday, but there was a wide, shallow stream on the floor of the ravine that he didn’t remember, so it must have been right about here that he’d passed out. There were deep, green shadows between the hills and sharp flashes of sunlight when the wind lifted the beech boughs. The air was clear and cool. Thrushes
sang back and forth across the hillsides above him. He crossed the stream and went up the slope. He found Solovey’s cap on the ground. There was a neat, round hole, the width of his fingertip, through the top of the cap.

  He took the cap back across the ravine and went up to Solovey on the ridge.

  Solovey was sitting by the rifle, smoking. When Tolya came up, he stubbed out his cigarette against the barrel of the rifle and flicked the butt away.

  “You owe me a new hat,” he said. He held out his hand and took the cap from Tolya and held it on his lap, putting a finger through the bullet hole. “Why didn’t you run?”

  “Why didn’t you shoot?”

  “I wanted you to know I wouldn’t. It could have important implications for what comes next. I’m giving you two options, and I want you to make an educated choice.”

  He moved the cap off his knee and leaned over to open the musette bag.

  “I’m not counting Toporiv, by the way,” he said, rummaging in the bag. “It might be your best option from a medical standpoint, but you’ve got a lot more to worry about than that shoulder. Toporiv is our ground—UPA ground. They won’t have any reason to think you’ve got Polish in your blood unless you give them reason to think you’ve got Polish in your blood, but it won’t take too many innocuous questions before somebody figures out you came in with the Front, which is just as bad. Anna and Iryna won’t betray you, but they won’t be able to protect you either—and at that point neither will I. The commander could, but he wouldn’t.”

  “I thought you said he ordered the extraction.”

  “The commander,” Solovey said, still rummaging, “is what you might call a utilitarian. Do you know what that means?”

  “No.”

  “Means his interest in your well-being is directly proportional to his estimation of your usefulness. And his estimation of your usefulness is inversely proportional to the number of people who know you fought with a Soviet rifle division. In other words—”

  “I live only as long as I’m useful.”

  “And you’re useful only as long as you’re safely anonymous. They find you out in Toporiv, he throws you to the wolves. Otherwise the wolves turn on him.” Solovey held up a little plastic vial between thumb and forefinger. “So. American morphine syrettes, thirty milligrams apiece. The Red Cross gets them through to us sometimes. Like gold, these—you could bribe your way across a border with them. Also some iodine, courtesy of Iryna; another sausage, courtesy of Anna; and these. Very important.” He held up a thin red-leather wallet. “New identification papers, and a Young Communist League membership card. We had to tear up your military registration for the photograph. I’m sorry. You’re now a party-appointed schoolteacher on your way to Stryy. Do you know where Stryy is?”