Traitor

by Amanda McCrina

  Level-headed Andriy would understand, if any of them would. He was from Proskuriv, Solovey had said. He would understand hunger. He would understand you were still learning to think in hard, unbending terms like resistance and collaboration, not in soft, shifting ones like survival. But it was Andriy’s shift on the watch, or something. He’d left right after the meeting.

  The Red Cross girls were leaving too, and Solovey was kissing Anna under the tarpaulin. Tolya didn’t see them behind the ammunition boxes until he’d nearly walked into them. He spun around quickly on his heel before either of them noticed. He fled to the other side of the piled boxes and sat pretending to clean the pistol Solovey had given him—fumbling at it one-handed because Iryna had put his arm in a sling after she found out Solovey had made him shoot. (“Idiots, both of you,” she said. “He made the shot,” Solovey said, half defensive and half smug.)

  Afterward, Solovey walked the two girls to the edge of the camp. He was holding Anna’s hand, fingers threaded through hers. They kissed again at the trees. Then Solovey stood leaning on the mortar, watching the girls go up into the darkening wood.

  That was Tolya’s chance, but somebody caught his good arm when he started for the gun—Yakiv, pulling him back and spinning him around and holding him tightly by the elbow with thick, strong fingers.

  “Where do you think you’re going, zradnyk?”

  It was just the two of them there in the long, blue shadows of the ammunition boxes. Tolya tried to pull his arm away. Yakiv’s fingers were tight as a vise.

  “I want you where I can keep an eye on you,” Yakiv said.

  “I n-need to talk to Solovey.” It stumbled out in a whisper. His throat was closed.

  “Listen, zradnyk—this is the only thing you should be worrying about.” Yakiv made a pistol with two fingers and pressed his fingertips to Tolya’s forehead. He pursed his lips and let out a soft breath, bang, pushing hard with his fingers and then jerking his hand tautly back, as with recoil. “Understand? There’s only one reason you’re here and not spattered against a wall in L’viv.”

  Only as long as you’re useful, Tolya Korolenko.

  And then?

  He realized, in that moment, that Solovey had never really answered the question.

  18

  He didn’t speak to Solovey for the rest of the afternoon. He pretended to sleep through the meal, and he pretended to sleep while Solovey sat across from him under the tarpaulin afterward, making notes in his field book in the last of the sunlight.

  Then he must really have been asleep because he woke up to machine-gun fire.

  Tracer rounds flashed in the darkness, pouring down in long, white streams through the trees. He was back at Tarnopol, facedown against the earth, waiting with his hands over his ears for the shrieks of the Stuka bombers.

  But it was wrong, all wrong. There hadn’t been any trees at Tarnopol—not by the time it came to a close fight. Maybe never again. There’d been a month of shelling and dive-bombing, raiding and retreating, blow for blow, before the final push. It was gravel and gray mud and a German garrison dead nearly to the last man, Tarnopol.

  He raised his head.

  He was under the tarpaulin on the hillside, and the wood was alive with tracers and muzzle flashes and shouts and pounding footsteps and the hammering of the machine gun.

  Somebody slid in heavily beside him from somewhere in the darkness—Solovey, with a pistol in his hand.

  “Keep your head down,” he said. He was on his stomach, his cheek against the dirt. He pushed a clip into the magazine of his pistol. “We’re blown,” he said. His hands moved carefully, steadily. “Do you have your pistol?”

  “Yes.”

  “Loaded?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re trying to cordon us off. I think they’ve only got the one machine gun—on the ridge.” Solovey refitted the magazine against his palm. “You’re going to run when I say—west, as fast as you can. Keep low. I’ll be behind you. If I drop, you keep running. Believe me—I’ll do the same if it’s you, and I won’t lose any sleep over it. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  Solovey snapped the slide of his pistol. “Do you remember what we said about contingency plans?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait until he reloads,” Solovey said. He grinned against the dirt. “Should have gone to Stryy.” Then, after a pause: “Go.”

  Tolya stumbled out into the darkness. Bodies dotted the open ground—black lumps in the afterglow of muzzle flashes. A dark shape loomed up in front of him. The long shadow of a rifle bent toward him. There was no time to duck, no time to think—just the pistol in his hand, and the trigger under his finger, and the quick, sharp jerk of his wrist. Then he was running, weaving through the trees down the slope—running and running, head down, heart in his throat, the machine gun hammering after him, the tracers arcing past in white streaks, Solovey’s footsteps pounding behind.

  He didn’t know how long he ran, or how far. The wood was close and black. His legs gave out on the far, mossy bank of a thin stream. He caught himself awkwardly on one hand, keeping his weight off his left arm. He untied Iryna’s sling with numb, fumbling fingers and wadded it into his trouser pocket. Then he eased himself down and lay still, feeling the cool, wet moss on his cheek. There was no sound but his own gasped breaths, and Solovey’s footsteps coming up behind him, and the soft calls of the nightingales in the trees above.

  Solovey crouched beside him. “Are you hurt?” His voice was very quiet.

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “We’ll listen just for a bit,” Solovey said.

  They sat on the bank, listening. The trees shivered and groaned in the wind off the hillsides. There was a sudden fluttering of wings somewhere out in the darkness. Beside him, Solovey bent down, pressing his ear to the earth, lying so still for so long that Tolya wondered whether he’d fallen asleep. But then he sat back up slowly, holstering his pistol. He let out a long, low breath.

  “Andriy’s dead,” he said. He leaned his elbows on his knees, resting his face in his hands. After a moment, he kneaded his temples with his fingertips and lifted his head. “Presumably Yakiv and Valentyn. They had the watch on the ridge, and there was no alarm. I think Taras might have made it away.” He took out his pistol again and opened the magazine, counting the rounds. “Didn’t they teach you to sleep with your boots on in the army? You’re going to have a hell of a time running.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “I’ll leave you behind if I have to. I’m not joking.”

  “Were they NKVD?”

  Solovey was reloading the magazine, cupping the loose cartridges in his palm. “Yes,” he said. “Bad news for us.”

  “Did they track us? Yesterday?”

  “No,” Solovey said. “If I had to guess, I’d say they took Anna and Iryna.” He refitted the magazine, slamming the pistol butt against the heel of his hand. “Come on,” he said. “They’ll be tracking us now.”

  * * *

  This time Solovey led. They alternated running and walking, weaving a jagged line through the trees. They didn’t speak, and they didn’t stop. At first they paused, every now and then, just for a little while, to catch their breaths and to listen—Solovey going down on the ground as he’d done back at the stream, leaning on his shoulder and pressing his ear to the earth. Then he seemed to have satisfied himself about whatever he’d heard, and wherever he’d heard it, because they didn’t pause again.

  They were deep in the hills now. The wind had died, and it was dark and late and very still. The madness back in the camp on the hillside seemed long ago and far away and uncertain, like the edges of a dream. It was a heavy, humid night, the stars overcast and the air thick, and there was sweat crawling down Tolya’s face and neck, trickling between his shoulder blades, soaking his shirt and the waistband of his trousers.

  He’d stopped trying to keep track of direction. There was only Solovey, ahead in the darkness
, and the endless black earth under his bare feet. He moved mechanically, one leg after the other—up and down, up and down, like pistons. His feet were scratched and bloody. He’d found the sharp edge of a stone in the dark and opened a long, thin gash along the instep of his right foot. There was a stitch in his side, a jabbing pain in his shoulder, an ache at the back of his throat. There was salt on his lips and the metallic taste of blood on his tongue. His fingers had seized up stiffly and uselessly on the pistol grip. But they didn’t stop.

  The air cooled and cleared toward morning. The wind picked up again, pushing against them gently. They were near water. He could hear the soft, shivering, mournful whistles of lake divers coming up on the wind through the trees.

  In the gray half-light before dawn, Solovey finally stopped. He put a hand on a tree trunk and crouched on his heels.

  “Tolya,” he said, in a low voice, “come here.”

  They were on the shoulder of a low, pine-clad hill. The water shimmered through the trees down the slope, silvery in the half-light. Tolya crouched beside Solovey. He opened his curled fingers one at a time and wiped his palm on his trousers.

  “How are your feet?” Solovey asked.

  “They’re all right.”

  “They look like hell.”

  “They’re not bad,” Tolya said. There was a cold fist of fear in the pit of his stomach. Only as long as you’re useful, Tolya Korolenko. He was useless now, and he was too slow, and he knew too much.

  This was where Solovey put a bullet in his head.

  But Solovey turned a little and sat against the trunk, easing himself carefully down with his hands, sucking a soft breath through his teeth.

  “I need you to do something for me,” he said. He braced himself against the tree and stretched out his legs stiffly. “Take off my boot—my right boot. My knife’s in the lining.”

  Tolya hesitated, just for a second. Then he laid his pistol on the grass and unlaced Solovey’s boot. The trouser leg beneath was dark and wet with blood. He looked up into Solovey’s face. Solovey grinned.

  “It’s all right,” he said. His face was slick with sweat. “Machine-gun slug.”

  “Where?”

  “Below the knee, just on the—yes. There.” Another grin, fainter this time. “You found it.”

  Tolya felt the bone under his fingers. “Is it broken?”

  “I think so,” Solovey said calmly. “Do you think you can make a splint?”

  “All right.”

  “You’ll need a stick—a good, stout one. Take the knife.”

  The pines were no good for sticks, but he found beech trees toward the water. He cut a beech bough about the width of his thumb and took it back up the slope to Solovey. He rolled up Solovey’s blood-soaked trouser leg and unwound the footcloth, wiping the blood with his fingers. The bullet had gone straight to the bone through the back of Solovey’s calf. There were old white scars peppering the fleshy part of the calf. This wasn’t the first bullet he’d taken—or, Tolya suspected, the first time that bone had broken.

  “Wrap it up,” Solovey said. His voice was low and tight, his teeth clenched. “Use the cloth.”

  Tolya wrapped the wound with Solovey’s footcloth. He measured the stick to Solovey’s shin and cut it down and tied it against the bone with long strips cut from Iryna’s sling. Then he wiped Solovey’s knife on his thigh and put the knife back in the boot.

  “Lace it up tight, Tolya,” Solovey said. He had his shoulders braced stiffly against the tree. He was holding his pistol in white-knuckled hands. “Is that what I should call you—Tolya? Or do you want me to be formal and say Anatoliy? I should have asked before.”

  “Tolya.”

  “I’m sorry for presuming.”

  “It’s all right,” Tolya said.

  * * *

  He went down to the lake shore to wash. Solovey was up on the ridge, “having a look,” he said. Tolya washed Solovey’s blood from his hands. He cupped water in his palms and drank and doused his face and neck, rinsing off the sweat. Then he rolled up his trousers and stuck his blistered, battered feet into the pebbly shallows, holding his tongue in his teeth and hissing softly at the sting.

  The first pink glow of dawn was coming over the pine wood. There was a wispy, pale mist rising off the lake. There were little concentric rings here and there on the surface of the water where the fish were feeding. He watched, sitting very still, holding his breath and listening to his heart beat, while a young elk came down from the edge of the wood to drink.

  An engine broke the silence. An olive-drab biplane rattled up over the ridge—one of the ones they called kukuruzniki, corn cutters, flying low-level reconnaissance out of Lwów.

  Tolya dove up the bank, sliding on his stomach under the cover of the trees. The elk started at his movement, head flying up, knobby legs stiffening. It broke into a lumbering run up out of the water. Tolya lay on his stomach on a thick carpet of pine needles and watched the plane come over. It cleared the ridge and went away westward over the lake—too high and too fast to be hunting here. Bigger prey was retreating west across the San.

  Tolya pushed up on his hands. The elk was gone. Solovey was coming down from the ridge through the trees. In daylight now Tolya could see his limp and also the way he was trying to hide it. His trouser leg was crusted to the knee with dried blood, the color of rust.

  “I don’t think that was for us,” he said.

  “No.”

  Solovey holstered his pistol and went down to the water. He knelt at the edge, splashed his face, and tipped water down his collar. He bent stiffly to drink. Then he sat back on his heels, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

  “Do you fish, Tolya?”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever fished?”

  “Oh—no.” Tolya hesitated. “We used to fish the Sluch River—people in Kuz’myn, I mean, before the famine. Then the Reds said we couldn’t fish.”

  “We fished this lake before the war,” Solovey said, “my grandfather and I—my mother’s father. There are marvelous pike in this lake.” He was sitting with his hands cupped on his knees, looking out over the water. “First thing I’m going to do when the war is over,” he said. “Come up here, drink Polish beer, fish all day. That’s when I’m going to know the war is over.”

  He was somewhere very far away, and Tolya didn’t say anything. There was the wind in the trees, and the lap of the little waves at the shoreline, and the low, sad whistles of the divers carrying across the water. Just for a second, he thought about trying to say what he’d wanted to say yesterday—to apologize, at least, if he couldn’t explain. But the words wouldn’t come, and he didn’t think Solovey would really hear him right then anyway.

  Solovey came back slowly. He looked up at Tolya and smiled.

  “Soon,” he said. “Not yet.”

  19

  They went around the lake. The sun came up, and it was hazy and humid in a way that meant it would be hot later. They weren’t running now. Solovey was walking ahead, trying not to show his limp. They were going north by west. They’d been going roughly north by west all night. Tolya could see the smoke above Lwów when he looked back over his shoulder.

  He didn’t dare ask Solovey where they were going—hadn’t cared last night, didn’t dare now. They weren’t going to the Red Cross station in Toporiv—his first guess—or they would have turned east by now. He didn’t have any other guesses. He didn’t know what Solovey had heard last night in the darkness with his ear to the ground, and he didn’t know what Solovey had seen that morning from the ridge.

  What he did know was that they weren’t going to Toporiv.

  They hadn’t spoken since the lake shore at dawn. It was full daylight now. The lake was away below them. The sun was hot through the trees. He could feel the silence like an arm across his throat.

  “Solovey,” he said.

  Solovey looked back. “All right?”

  “I’m sorry,” Tolya said. He fumbled, stammering
a little. “I-if it was Anna,” he said. He couldn’t finish it.

  “She knew what she was doing,” Solovey said. “She knew the risks. We all did.”

  “I know,” Tolya said, “but I’m sorry.”

  Solovey had stopped now. He was leaning on one hand against a tree, his weight off his right leg. He wiped sweat from his face with the back of his gun hand and swore once, softly but soundly.

  He looked up at Tolya. “Take the boots.”

  “What?”

  “I’m slowing you down, and you know it, so don’t act like an idiot. Take the boots. I’ve got three full clips for my pistol. That’s twenty-four rounds. You can have twenty-three of them. I’ll need the pistol.”

  “No.”

  “You keep going along the shoulder of this hill,” Solovey said, ignoring him. “Follow the lake around. There’s a cabin—six kilometers or so. Right up from the water. My grandfather’s. We’ve been using it as an ammunition dump—also a rendezvous point in case things went to hell, which they’ve done.” He smiled. “Haven’t been up in a while, but it ought to be stocked pretty well. Everything you need. Let this cool down a bit, then get the hell out. Can you remember an address?”

  “Listen—”

  “Ruska Street, number five. The Dormition Church. You can see the bell tower from the boulevard. Ask for Father Kliment. Tell him I sent you.”

  “No.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Not without you.”

  Solovey let out a soft breath between his teeth. “I said don’t be an idiot.”

  “I’m not being an idiot. I can’t go without you. They don’t know me. They won’t believe me. If I show up saying I’m the only one who made it away, they’ll shoot me as a spy—even if they don’t find out I’ve got Polish in my blood.”