Traitor

by Amanda McCrina

  It was Vitalik, once, sitting against the wall, smoking his cigarette and reading through a dossier by the light of the single electric bulb, saying, without looking up, “Why wouldn’t you kill him?”

  Tolya blinked stupidly in Vitalik’s face. He was holding his bread in his hand, tearing it with careful fingers and putting it piece by little piece into his swollen mouth, packing it against his cheek and letting his saliva soften it until he could suck it down because he couldn’t chew it. Vitalik’s fists had turned his gums to bloody mush.

  “That soldier,” Vitalik said. He shuffled the papers and looked up. “Do you remember, Tolya?”

  And Tolya remembered the NKVD soldier, with his life pouring out through the gash in his throat, kicking circles in the dirt at Vitalik’s feet.

  “Yes,” he said. His voice had long ago stopped being his own. It came out in a whisper, low and clotted and rasping.

  “Why wouldn’t you kill him? It was stupid—blowing cover for him. He was dead anyway. You knew that.”

  There was, of course, no use protesting or denying or contradicting. There was no use pointing out that he had no cover to blow because he wasn’t NKVD. He’d learned at Vitalik’s fists and Vitalik’s feet and under Vitalik’s knout and under Vitalik’s knife that it was easier to let Vitalik believe what he wanted to believe.

  “Was he a friend?” Vitalik asked.

  “Yes,” Tolya said, because it was easier that way.

  “What was his name?”

  “Yura,” Tolya said.

  Vitalik smiled around his cigarette. He flicked the ash from the tip.

  “Don’t lie to me, Tolya,” he said.

  * * *

  There was darkness, mostly.

  His parents were there, sometimes, in the uneven stretches between the questionings, or Aunt Olena, or Father Stepan, who’d outlasted the famine only to disappear in the night during the purges, or Father Dmytro, who’d been shot in the churchyard and who would still say—Tolya knew he would still say—there was nothing for it but to love, only to love, as God only loved.

  Sometimes it was Koval, cool and blond, putting cool, gentle fingertips on his swollen face, pressing cool, gentle lips to his swollen lips, and his eyelids, and his jaw, and his throat—and he was back in Kyiv, and it was December 1943, two weeks before Christmas and six hours before they were to cross the Dnieper on the new offensive, and the snow was falling new and clean and white on the ruined shell of the city, and they were watching it from the bell tower of Holy Sophia, warm and close under his greatcoat, finally unguarded enough to talk about after—because it had seemed then, for the first time in so many years, that there really would be an after.

  Sometimes it was Comrade Lieutenant Spirin, sitting patiently beside him, just sitting, being there, not saying anything and not needing to say anything, the way he’d sat on the bank in Voronezh, letting Tolya eat every last one of his lend-lease tinned pork rations.

  Sometimes, when the pain had been very bad, it was Solovey, putting his hands on Tolya’s shoulders and leaning in close to say, It’s all right, Tolya, it’s all right—and it was.

  Then he knew it wasn’t just Solovey, but his patron, his name saint, the first Anatoliy, Anatoliy of Laodicea, Anatoliy the Peacemaker, Anatoliy the Mathematician, come to comfort and to strengthen in the hour of death.

  * * *

  There was gunfire.

  He heard it distantly at first, then much closer. That was the dashka—thud, thud, thud. Voices shouted and doors slammed and boots pounded across the floor. The wooden post shuddered at his back. Mortar fire? A grenade? There was the heavy thump of a falling body somewhere above and another spattering of gunfire.

  Then there was silence.

  After a little while, there were slow, careful footsteps across the floorboards. The door creaked and scraped open. Voices floated down the stairs, unfamiliar voices—Polish voices.

  Somebody was calling for a light.

  Tolya waited.

  They came down the stairs. One of them tripped and caught himself and laughed—and then abruptly stopped laughing, and Tolya knew they’d seen him.

  Footsteps approached cautiously across the packed earth. Uncertain fingers slid over Tolya’s throat.

  “Alive?” somebody asked quietly from the staircase.

  “I think so.” The fingers went away from Tolya’s throat. “Do you have your knife?”

  Then there were hands on Tolya’s ankles and fingers fumbling at the ropes. A knife blade eased between the loops.

  “Ours?” the voice on the staircase asked.

  “No.”

  “NKVD?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll go get Janek.”

  “No, come here. Help me take him up.”

  They cut the ropes from his waist and wrists and laid him carefully on the floor. He lay holding himself very still, his cheek pressed on the cool, packed earth, while they debated how best to get him up the stairs. In the end, they carried him up like a sandbag between them, cradling his shoulders and knees. They put him facedown on the floorboards at the top of the stairs.

  “Holy hell, it’s bad,” one of them said.

  Tolya felt somebody bend over him.

  “Can you hear me? I’m going to take off the blindfold. Shut your eyes. The light might hurt.”

  Tolya squeezed his eyes shut. Fingers slipped under the blindfold, loosened it, and tugged it off.

  “You stay here with him,” one of the voices said. “I’m going to get Janek.”

  Booted footsteps went away across the floorboards. Hands lifted Tolya’s head gently. Water trickled over his face. The spout of a canteen pushed between his cracked lips.

  “Here—try to drink,” the voice at Tolya’s ear said.

  Water ran over Tolya’s teeth, cool and soft on his swollen gums, washing over his tongue and down his aching throat.

  “Can you hear me?” the voice said. “Czy rozumiesz po polsku—can you understand Polish?”

  Tolya swallowed. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. He turned his head away from the canteen.

  “Tak,” he said hoarsely, in the voice that wasn’t his own.

  “How long have you been down there?”

  And then he was crying, shivering as with cold. “I don’t know.”

  “What are you? NKVD?”

  “No.”

  “Are you Polish? Russian? German?”

  “I don’t know,” Tolya said. “I don’t know.”

  IV

  ALEKSEY

  Sunday, June 29–Thursday, July 3

  1941

  24

  It was dark when I woke up. I was a little surprised Mykola had let me sleep so long. I sat up to tell him so and flopped right back down, wheezing. I wasn’t quite so blessedly numb now.

  Neither was I under the old castle wall.

  I was in a bed. Those were feather pillows I’d flopped down against—pillows, as in more than one pillow. The mattress was feathers too. The sheets were cool and slippery. My left thigh had been bandaged—really bandaged, I mean, not wrapped with the ripped-up, bloody bits of my shirt—and there was a heavy plaster casing around my right calf. I was wearing a nightshirt that certainly wasn’t mine.

  I lay blinking up at a high, molded ceiling, waiting for everything to start making sense. I wasn’t tied to a chair in a wine cellar, and I wasn’t dead. Either of those would have been understandable. Satin sheets and featherbeds were beyond my capacity at the moment.

  I started experimenting. I couldn’t move my legs without considerable pain, but I could reach the bed table with one hand if I stretched. I fumbled blindly over the tabletop. I knocked over a glass that hit the floor with an odd, meaty thump. Somebody swore. I found a lamp and tugged the pull chain. Electric light flooded the room. Mykola was sitting up on the floor, wiping water from his face with the back of his hand.

  “I guess that wasn’t the floor,” I said.

  “No, just m
y head.”

  “Glad it wasn’t anything important.”

  “Of course I’m all right,” he said. “Thanks for asking.”

  He’d been cleaned up too. There was still a line of ripe, purple, knuckle-sized bruises across his cheekbone, but the blood was off. He was wearing a pair of striped pajamas big enough for three of him. The ends of the sleeves hung past his fingertips. He had to hold the pants bunched at the waist to keep them from slipping down when he stood. The hems trailed behind him like streamers.

  He took the glass and vanished through a doorway to the right. I heard a tap running. He came back with the refilled glass and put it back on the bed table.

  “Historically, that’s been a bad idea,” I said.

  “You can take another codeine tablet if you need to. It’s been more than three hours.” He showed me the pill case—silver, engraved with a curling monogram in Latin letters I couldn’t untangle just then. “And there’s some dinner left in the refrigerator. We couldn’t keep you awake long enough to feed you.”

  “Who’s we? Where are we, anyway?”

  He didn’t look at me. He picked up his duvet from the floor, wrapped himself in it, head to toe, and sat down in the armchair, looking something like a sausage rolled up in a puff pastry.

  “The Kijeks’,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The nurse—Mrs. Kijek. The one with the card.”

  “No, I know. I meant what?”

  “I didn’t know what else to—”

  “Damn it, Mykola. Did you try thinking?”

  His face paled. “Must have been too busy saving your life. Sorry.”

  I sank back against the pillows, defeated, digging the heels of my hands into my eyes.

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” Mykola said again, miserably.

  “I know,” I said. “I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you.” I dropped my hands. “How’d you get me here, anyway? You didn’t carry me, did you?”

  “You don’t think I could?”

  “It’s not about whether I think you could. It’s about the fact that I wasn’t wearing any pants.”

  That got me a ghost of a smile. “We brought you in Mr. Kijek’s car.”

  “Nobody saw me.”

  “No.”

  Maybe this wasn’t so bad. Unless somebody saw us and talked, or unless the Kijeks found out about the price on my head and took an opportunity to curry favor with the new regime, the Nachtigallen would never think to look—

  Wait.

  Oh, merciful God.

  “We’ve got to go,” I said.

  “What?”

  “We’ve got to go now.”

  “Aleks, nobody saw you. Nobody knows we’re here.”

  “Andriy was there when she gave me the card,” I said. “He heard me tell you the address.”

  25

  “That leg is broken,” Mrs. Kijek told me bluntly. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  She’d heard us talking and seen the light under the door and come in with a plate of warmed-over pork roast and potatoes. It must not have been quite as late as it seemed. She and her husband were both still in dinner dress. Mr. Kijek leaned against the doorframe with a cigarette and a snifter of cognac or Scotch—something amber-colored and expensive anyway. Something about him seemed oddly familiar—maybe his face, maybe the way he leaned on the jamb, exuding a vague, aristocratic carelessness. Maybe I’d seen him at the Hotel George? I couldn’t put a finger on it. He seemed content to let Mrs. Kijek do the talking. I realized when she directed a remark to him in Polish over her shoulder that he must not understand Ukrainian.

  I pushed potatoes around the plate, wondering how much I should explain. I could tell them about the price on my head and hope they’d be principled enough just to turn us out, not to hand us over. My hopes weren’t very high. Anybody who’d done this well through two years of Soviet occupation had either paid protection money or collaborated. They’d hand us over to the Nachtigallen to save their own necks.

  “We’ve got enemies,” I said. “You’re in danger as long as we stay.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled back the duvet to check the bandage above my knee. “They’re not going to find you here.”

  “They’ve got the address.”

  She paused.

  “I trusted the wrong person,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  She lifted the edge of the bandage with a fingertip. Then she smoothed it down, satisfied, and draped the duvet back across my legs. Her face was expressionless.

  “German or Polish?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Your enemies. German or Polish?”

  “It’s not political,” I said.

  I said it a little too quickly, and I’d hesitated a little too long. The lie sounded thin. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mykola shift in the armchair. Mr. Kijek was swirling his cognac in the doorway, head tilted, studying me. He was scowling. He didn’t need to dance the dance to know I’d just put a foot wrong.

  Mrs. Kijek looked at me very hard for a second—just long enough to make it clear she knew I was lying.

  “We can move you tomorrow,” she said. “The car’s on loan to a friend tonight. You’re safer here than out on the streets for now.” She patted my arm. “Eat, Aleksey. You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

  I was pretty sure anything I put in my stomach was just going to come right back up again, but I managed three bites of potato and a mouthful of pork, which was a good enough start to convince them I’d finish the rest on my own. I put the plate down as soon as they’d shut the door.

  “There’ll be Germans all over the place tomorrow,” Mykola said bleakly.

  “We’re not going to be here tomorrow,” I said. “We’re getting out tonight.”

  “You heard what she said.”

  And I’d seen what she hadn’t said. That look had told me all I needed to know.

  “She was lying.”

  “What?”

  “You really think the car’s on loan to a friend? Who borrows a car at this time of night? She’s buying time so they can get a message off to the Polish Resistance. They think that’s who we’re running from. They think we’re UPA. They’re going to give us up.”

  Mykola was silent.

  “This is their front—all of this.” I waved at the room in general. “Live like rich suck-ups and fund their Resistance right under the Reds’ noses.”

  He didn’t look convinced. “Why would they think we’re UPA? They don’t know who we are.”

  “They know what we are. The Resistance will figure out who.”

  He pulled his duvet tight and looked at the wall. “Maybe you’re wrong,” he said.

  “When have I ever been wrong?”

  He cast a disdainful glance at my legs. “I can think of at least once.”

  “When have I ever been wrong about Poles?”

  “You trusted Andriy just because he’s Ukrainian. What does that say about distrusting people just because they’re Poles?”

  “It says one of us pays attention to history.”

  “It wasn’t Poles who shot you,” he said. “You’re just a fascist bigot. You’re like Papa.”

  “We’re leaving tonight,” I said.

  He scoffed. “You can’t even walk.”

  “I can walk.”

  “You can’t walk. You think you can because you’re doped up on codeine.”

  I swung my legs off the bed to prove him wrong, deposited my weight on my left foot, and sank promptly to the floor as my knee buckled.

  He looked down at me indifferently.

  “Twice,” he said.

  I pulled myself awkwardly back into the bed. That had hurt like hell, but I wasn’t going to let him see it. I wasn’t going to concede total defeat either.

  “Well, you’re going, even if I’m not,” I said.

  “Make me,” he said.

  “Listen to me, Mykola.”

  “What are
you going to do—throw a pillow at me?”

  “Think about what happens if I’m right,” I said.

  I knew he must have been thinking about it because he didn’t fling that one back at me. He shrugged.

  “I’d stay anyway,” he said. “But you’re wrong.”

  * * *

  I spent a long time lying awake in the dark, listening for booted footsteps and watching the door, waiting for it to burst open and gunmen to rush in, the way they’d come for Papa. But when the door did finally open it was just Mrs. Kijek with a breakfast tray and her nurse’s bag and my coat, laundered and neatly pressed, and a shirt and trousers and pair of shoes that must have been Mr. Kijek’s. There was sunlight poking in through the tiny holes in the window blinds. The clock on the bed table said half past ten.

  Mykola was gone.

  I sat bolt upright.

  “Where is he?”

  It came out in a snarl, but she didn’t seem to notice. She put the tray on the bed table.

  “He found the bookshelves in the study,” she said.

  My mouth moved faster than my brain. “He can’t read Polish.”

  She must have heard that without really listening. She was holding my wrist in her fingers, feeling the pulse.

  “I think he was looking at the atlases,” she said. “I think he’s also made friends with the cat.” She laid a cool wrist on my forehead. Then she pulled back the duvet and looked at my legs. There were two dull red stains on the wrapping above my knee. She peeled the wrapping back, making a disappointed tck against the back of her teeth. “I thought we’d gotten that bleeding stopped.”