Traitor

by Amanda McCrina

  He muttered something into his knees, but he lifted his head. He let me pry his arms apart and uncurl his clenched fingers and put the glass in his hand. He sat holding the cool glass against his temple, kneading his forehead with his fingertips and looking across the room at nothing, while I mopped his sick off the floor with one of the blankets.

  “So?” I said. “I’m waiting.”

  “Thought you were dead,” he said, not looking at me. “He said you were dead.”

  “Who? Father Yosyp?”

  He made a noise in his throat. He was swallowing a long mouthful of water—tossing back the whole glass in one gulp.

  “He was misinformed, obviously.”

  “He said you’d gone to the Brygidki.”

  Bitterness in his voice now. It was an accusation. I kicked the blankets over to the dustbin. Our saints watched expectantly—Saint Aleksey, who deceived his own family out of love for God, Saint Mykola, who smacked people in the face for the sake of truth.

  “Do you think I’m an idiot?” I said.

  He didn’t take the bait.

  “Where were you?”

  “I didn’t get off till two. They’d stopped the trams. I had to walk all the way back from downtown.”

  “It’s past six.”

  “I got lost.”

  “You’re lying,” he said. “You always lie.”

  “I was seeing a girl.”

  “You went to the Brygidki.”

  “The point is you don’t know, do you, because you were too busy spewing your guts all over the floor.”

  He was silent. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him swallow twice, blinking, and I realized he was trying very hard not to cry.

  I relented.

  “Hey, I’m not dead, all right?” I crouched beside him and started emptying my pockets of sausages and dumplings. “Here—look at all this.”

  He watched hollowly, unmoving, while I unwrapped the sausages one by one, then the dumplings, only slightly squashed.

  “Is Papa dead?”

  I spread the newspapers on the floor between us. I didn’t look up. I didn’t want to look into his face just then, and I didn’t want him to look into mine. I wiped my fingers on the papers.

  “Eat.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Eat, Mykola.”

  “He’s dead or you’d look me in the face.”

  “He was dead two years ago,” I said. It wasn’t really a lie. Maybe they hadn’t put the bullet in his head until last night, but he was dead two years ago.

  “I wish he’d been,” Mykola said.

  “Eat,” I said.

  But he was crying now—silently but without trying to stop it, leaning his elbows on his knees and resting his face in his hands, shaking with trapped sobs.

  “Mykola, you’re fun when you’re drunk.” I clambered carefully over the newspapers to sit down beside him against the wall. I slipped my arm around his shoulders. “It’s all right,” I said. “We’ll be all right. Take a look at this.” I took out the wad of crisp marks Strilka had given me—my first month’s pay, in advance. I pushed the wad between Mykola’s fingers. “We’re getting out of here.”

  He lifted his head to look at the money in his hand. He unfolded the bills and smoothed them carefully against his knees, turning them over one by one, as though to make sure they were real.

  “It’s German,” he said with a sniff.

  “Very good. You didn’t drink yourself blind.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “That’s where things get tricky.”

  “You stole it?”

  “Trickier.” I took the money from his hand and put it back in my pocket.

  “You joined,” he said.

  I lifted my arm from his shoulders. “Wrap that stuff back up if you’re not going to eat it. Put it in your pack.”

  “You joined one of the volunteer battalions.”

  “They think I did.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means we need to get the hell out of here. I wasn’t kidding about that.” I got up, nudging his ankles. “Wrap that stuff up. Thirty marks doesn’t mean we can start throwing away food.”

  11

  The Ukrainian Church of Our Lady’s Dormition on Ruska Street was the only church in Lwów to survive the Reds’ invasion. All the Catholic churches, Roman and Greek, had been closed up and carted off piece by piece to the Historical Museum. The idea was that the Orthodox faithful could be shepherded into Moscow’s fold, given enough time. It wasn’t a bad idea in theory, but it wasn’t going to work—not here anyway, not in Lwów, where our church had been our one freedom under Polish rule. We couldn’t speak Ukrainian in our schools or our offices, but we could speak it in our liturgies. We couldn’t publicly keep our holy days, but we could keep them quietly to ourselves in the shelter of our church walls.

  The Reds couldn’t win. Either they had to treat our priests like the Catholics—ship them to the camps or shoot them, in which case they could damn well forget about herding us back to Moscow like meek, compliant sheep—or they had to tolerate them, which meant tolerating the memory of freedom.

  The Brygidki was still burning—black smoke roiling up over the rooftops westward, past the opera house. Too close. My two hours was nearly up, and Strilka would know I’d cheated him. He wouldn’t care about the thirty marks as much as he’d care that I’d taken him for a fool, even after his little lesson on consequences. Would he care enough to hunt me? Part of me didn’t think he’d waste the time. Part of me was pretty sure he wouldn’t consider it a waste.

  If he did hunt me, this would be the first place he’d look.

  He was right. I’d been careless.

  There was no answer to my knock at the door of Father Yosyp’s flat, adjoining the belfry. It was a little past seven now. The church doors were still locked. The deacon, Father Kliment, wouldn’t be along for another hour. I kicked gravel down the empty sidewalk.

  “He didn’t say anything about going anywhere?” I asked Mykola. “Last night—when you talked to him.”

  Mykola had sat down on the church steps, leaning his head against the wall, eyes squeezed shut against the bright morning sunlight. “Probably went to get your body. Thinks you’re dead in the Brygidki.”

  I wasn’t careless. I was an idiot.

  Because he would. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He never took no for an answer—not from the Poles, not from the Reds.

  Not from Strilka.

  I kicked Mykola’s ankles. “Up.”

  “We can just wait for him.”

  “You need to burn off that alcohol. Come on.”

  * * *

  There was some kind of riot going on at the Brygidki gate.

  I couldn’t see anything but people—hundreds of people, pressed elbow to elbow along the sidewalk below the gate wall—but somewhere up ahead, in the lingering smoke and the tangle of bodies, there were shouts and screams and the intermittent cracks of pistol shots. NKVD, I thought. They were trying to retake the prison, and the Nachtigallen were fighting back. But the crowd was pushing and shoving toward the gate, not away—eager, not afraid. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a firefight. I’d seen enough of those two years ago, when the city fell. Crowds didn’t run toward a firefight.

  A couple of nurses in the uniforms of the State Medical Institute broke away from the crowd just ahead, hauling a bloody-faced, stumbling girl between them. The girl’s netted hat was askew, her dress torn. They hurried her past us, moving her along so quickly that her feet never really touched the sidewalk.

  At the edge of the crowd, a thin, graying woman in ratty furs picked up a cobblestone and flung it after them.

  “Hey!” I caught her wrist. “What the hell?”

  She wasn’t paying any attention to me. She was shouting after them: “Bolshevik whore! You did this!”

  I shoved her away. “Shut up.”

  “You did this!”

  I shoved her a
gain, sharply. She staggered back, caught a heel on the curb, and sat straight down, her mouth open—oh.

  Somebody’s fist connected soundly with my jaw.

  The sidewalk and the crowd and the Brygidki wall slid away and back again, like a yo-yo. I reeled, head spinning. Something small and dark shot past me—Mykola, dropping his pack and lunging, head down. He caught the punch thrower neatly around the middle and carried him down to the sidewalk.

  It was like a schoolyard fight—and nowhere close to my first or Mykola’s first—except I had no idea who we were fighting or what we were fighting about. In the schoolyard, it was always because some Polish snot had been stupid enough to call me chachoł or savage or salo-eater, or to try to get me to spit on the blue-and-yellow bicolor or admit that Shukhevych and Kobryn were traitors who deserved the gallows. They didn’t know Yevhen Kobryn was my father, of course, but sometimes I fantasized about telling them—preferably after we’d taken Lwów back, and they were the ones having to bow and scrape. Anyway, there’d never been any question about who or what or why. But these were Ukrainians—at least, the fur lady had been screaming in Ukrainian, and that tall fellow in workman’s clothes who was trying to kick Mykola off the punch thrower swore in Ukrainian when I socked him.

  Marko broke it up. He popped up from somewhere with a pistol in his hand and cleared the sidewalk by squeezing off a few shots into the air. He holstered the gun and yanked Mykola off the punch thrower. He nudged the prone man with his boot.

  “Get out of here.”

  He stood holding Mykola by the arms while the crowd shuffled resentfully along. Then he spun him around to face me, keeping his hands on Mykola’s shoulders.

  “Yours?”

  There wasn’t any denying it, really. Mykola would always be smaller, but we had the same long, straight nose and square jaw, Mama’s, and the same dark hair and gray eyes, Papa’s. Mykola’s eyes were on me now. He didn’t say anything—he was much too sharp to say anything, even hung over—but he was watching me, reading my face, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do.

  The problem was I didn’t know.

  My mouth was full of blood. No teeth out—I must have bit the inside of my cheek. I spit blood onto the sidewalk and picked up Mykola’s pack.

  “Mykola,” I said, “Marko. Marko, Mykola.”

  Marko didn’t let go of Mykola’s shoulders. I noted, with satisfaction, the tooth marks on his fingers.

  “The commander said two hours. You’re late.”

  “Going to be later the longer we stand here jawing. Where is he?”

  Marko was silent for a long moment, looking at me. Finally, he jerked his chin over his shoulder, toward the shop. He shoved Mykola at me sharply.

  “Watch that tongue, Kobryn,” he said.

  I very nearly promised him I would watch my teeth too, but thought better of it. He had a pistol. I did not.

  Mykola was silent as we walked. I could see him putting things together. His lip was split, bleeding a little. There was a set of knuckles imprinted in perfect duplicate across his left cheekbone, red turning purple.

  “She was a Jew,” he said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “That girl. She was a Jew.” He was nursing his lip carefully with the tip of his tongue. He must have been expecting a question because he said after a moment, “She works at Altenberg’s. I see her there sometimes.”

  He meant the bookseller’s in the shop front below the Hotel George.

  I glanced back down the sidewalk. Marko was standing in the street, watching us go, his hand resting on the butt of his holstered pistol. There was still a crowd pressed close at the Brygidki gate, shouting indistinctly, though the shooting had stopped.

  Bolshevik whore! You did this!

  My stomach tightened. It was an old idea—that this was all just some Jewish conspiracy, that the Reds were nothing more than Jewish thugs—and it was a stupid one. Jews died with NKVD bullets in their heads just like the rest of us. But it was the kind of idea somebody like Strilka wouldn’t mind using if he thought he could get something out of it, and it was the kind of idea angry, hurting people latched on to, when they couldn’t touch the real culprits but still wanted to feel they could do something.

  Andriy was standing guard at the alley door—sitting guard, at least. He was huddled against the jamb, leaning on his rifle, shivering the way he’d shivered in the cellar when I’d had the knife at his throat. He jumped up as though he’d been kicked when he saw us through the smoke.

  “Glory to Ukraine,” I said.

  He was supposed to respond with “Glory to her heroes.” It was stupidly obvious, both password and countersign, because that had been the nationalists’ standard greeting for years, and everybody in Lwów knew it. But he didn’t say it. He didn’t say anything. He was scrubbing hastily at his face with the back of his free hand. He’d been crying.

  Opportunity presented itself.

  I took the rifle away from him. I didn’t trust him holding it toward me when he was shaking like a leaf. He didn’t protest—didn’t resist at all. I gave the rifle to Mykola and sat Andriy back down on the step, crouching in front of him with my hands on his trembling shoulders. Holy hell, he was thin. His collarbones poked up sharply under his loose coat. His teeth were chattering, though it was hot enough in the breathless, smoky stuffiness of the alley that I was sweating.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s all right. I need your help.”

  He looked warily into my face, but he didn’t speak. I took that as a good sign. He was willing to listen.

  “I’m looking for somebody. A priest—Father Yosyp, from the Dormition Church.” He wouldn’t wear his cassock out in the open, but still. “Commander Strilka went to talk to him last night. You know who I’m talking about?”

  Andriy darted a glance down the alley, then to Mykola, then back to me.

  “It’s all right,” I said again.

  He swallowed. He nodded once—a quick, shamed dip of his head. Yes.

  “Have you seen him?”

  “Here?”

  “We think he might have come looking for me.”

  He didn’t say anything. He shut his eyes. I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to remember or just trying to shut me out.

  I prompted him. “Some time last night or this morning.”

  “No,” he said finally, in a choked kind of voice. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Nobody’s tried to get in to talk to Strilka?”

  A shake of the head, this time—no. “He just got back.”

  “Strilka? Back from where?”

  He didn’t answer. I thought I’d finally got him to stop shivering, but he started again now, violently.

  “Andriy,” I said.

  He flinched as though I’d hit him.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Look at me.”

  He opened his eyes and looked. His lips quivered.

  “I’ll get you out of here,” I said.

  It wasn’t an outright lie—I’d do it if I could, and I’d try my best even if I couldn’t—but it was overly optimistic. I felt guilty for saying it and even more guilty that it actually seemed to calm him.

  I was as good at this as Strilka.

  Andriy sucked a long, steadying breath.

  “They’ve got another prisoner—down there,” he said. “They brought him in from the Brygidki.” He looked into my face quickly, almost desperately, as though to make sure I understood.

  I did. I held on to his shoulders tightly. “Polish?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did he look like?”

  Another shake of the head. “They had a hood on him.”

  They hadn’t hooded the Pole. They wouldn’t hood a prisoner for the thirty-meter stretch between here and the Brygidki gate unless they didn’t want that mob seeing who they’d got.

  The local parish priest, for instance.

  I squeezed Andriy’s shoulders and looked a
t Mykola.

  “I’m going to go take a look. You’ve got the rifle. If I’m not back in twenty minutes—”

  “Run for the hills?”

  “I was going to say come rescue me.”

  “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  “I love you too,” I said.

  12

  It wasn’t Father Yosyp.

  His hood was off by the time I got down there. They’d made me wait at the top of the cellar stairs while they’d sent down to ask whether Strilka wanted me just then. The prisoner was my age or Andriy’s—not much older anyway—prison pale and shaven-headed. He was tied to a chair in the middle of the floor, ankles lashed to the chair legs, arms wrenched behind the chair back and tied at the wrists. Blood dribbled from his nose, running in two red lines around the corners of his bruised, battered mouth, then in a single wide streak down his chin. He’d tilted his head back against the chair, trying to stanch the flow. He saw me come in.

  “Got a new pet?” the prisoner asked Strilka, in Ukrainian.

  Strilka was leaning against a wine barrel, dabbing absently at his split knuckles with a handkerchief. It was just the two of them—and me, gulping like a dying fish there in the shadows at the foot of the stairs.

  “Aleksey,” Strilka said, not looking up from his knuckles, “come here.”

  I went. I slunk around the edge of the lamplight, trying not to look at the prisoner. But I could feel his eyes on me, unblinking and contemptuous.

  Strilka folded his handkerchief unhurriedly and put it in a pocket. He took me by the elbow and pulled me over, putting his hands on my shoulders, holding me easily in front of him, the way Marko had held Mykola.

  “One more chance, Vitalik,” he said to the prisoner. “Make it good.”

  “If I’d talked,” Vitalik said, in a measured voice, dead calm, “why wouldn’t I have told them about this?”

  “What about this?”

  “I could have had them waiting for you here last night.”

  “How would you have known?”

  “Put it together. Two and two. Bringing in the gun. Asking Andriy to case the sightlines from the window—making sure you could get a shot at the gate.”