Lost Kin

by Anderson, Steve

  “No one’s hurting you, forcing you?”

  “No. It’s all very casual, no hurry at all.”

  “It isn’t a trick, you think?”

  “I can tell you it is not, friend. Come on up … when you’re ready.”

  They could take their time. Sandwiches, water, and coffee were set out in Sabine’s tent. The children, women, elderly stood in the clearing nibbling the sandwiches. Talking. Keeping close together. Eyeing Sabine and the odd green soldiers who stood around so casually and took no notice of them. With time, the people climbed into the trucks, and their friends and family helped them up. The women helped up young Alex. Max waved at him. Alex waved back.

  And Harry and Max were already off again, to help the last group over.

  Near midnight. The last group was the Cossack men.

  On the way back to the settlement, Harry and Max had another close encounter with a Soviet Army patrol. This patrol moved with purpose as if it had a clear destination, coming up on Harry and Max so fast they had to lie flat under the remains of a fallen log.

  They found the settlement deserted. “I know where they are,” Max said.

  Farther south, they discovered the Cossack men hunkered down in a hut along a stream, thirty of them crammed in there like too many chickens in a coop. They had left behind the few rifles and pistols they had. They had all agreed on that. Their meager worn guns wouldn’t help them against so many Red troopers and would only start a war if not endanger the rest making it over the border. Harry and Max carried no weapons, not even a new pocketknife. What could a Colt or a Mauser do now that it could not before? Harry wasn’t up against one man anymore but the relentless machine of a system.

  “The rest have made it,” Max told them, and it raised the men’s spirits enough to get them moving. They navigated through the mud and underbrush and fog and snow like the smallest rodents in the forest, taking an hour to move ten feet if they had to, speaking little, using hand gestures. Soviet soldiers were everywhere. They could hear engines and occasional shouts. The settlement was probably the Russians’ command post by now, Harry couldn’t help realizing.

  They came up to the valley from the north. After climbing on his stomach to the peak of a small hill, and then shinning up a thick birch tree, one of the Cossacks returned muddied, scratched-up, and panting to report that Soviet soldiers had taken up positions at the tree line on the eastern edge of the valley. He saw the soldiers below him there, their silhouettes mixing in the moonlight and snow of the valley—the Red troopers stood right on the border, keeping watch.

  Could Colonel Partland know this on the other side? Could his binoculars pick up any of it? Had he sent out scouts? Harry and Max would just have to trust him.

  “I only hope the Cossacks over there don’t know, or they’d suspect a deal,” Max whispered to Harry. “They might panic.”

  “They’ll have to trust us,” Harry said.

  Harry and Max and the Cossacks decided to wait until later when the Soviet soldiers were at their groggiest. They then would make a break for it, taking out a soldier on watch if they had to, because some of the hardier Cossacks still had their daggers. They didn’t want to reposition farther south because they could not know what the Soviets had there. They only knew they were safe here in their pocket. But not for long. They squatted like rugby players in a scrum, some whispering prayers, others rocking back and forth, humming, then hunched over, stomping their feet and interlocking arms to stay closer.

  Five a.m.—Friday, November 9. They could see purple on the horizon, fading to a uniform gray. The sun would be up in an hour. They huddled around again, this time like before a big game. They were thanking each other, grabbing at each other’s shoulders, passing along messages and love in case any of them didn’t make it. Harry could make out tears in the dim light.

  Max had moved over to Harry. He put his arm around him and gave him a squeeze. “Let’s go.”

  They moved along in a chain, from tree to tree, rock to rock, hole to hole, downed trunk to trunk. It took longer than Harry wanted. The sun was coming up, the grayness rising fast into the sky as the sun rose up behind the clouds. Harry was in the middle of the group, crouching behind a snowdrift that had blown in from the valley. They had to be right on the border here. It was all he could do not to make a break for it. The dire need was straining all their tired and frantic minds.

  Shouts, from inside the woods. It was Russian. Soviet Army regular soldiers rushed to the tree line north of them. The Ivans were everywhere. Others were coming through the trees, shouting and charging from every direction.

  The Cossacks ran now, breaking off into little groups, some only two together, in every direction. Harry found Max. They grabbed at each other, panting, and sprinted on.

  “Look, look!” Max gasped.

  At the opposite tree line at the other end of the white valley, Colonel Partland’s GIs were advancing out into the white open. Some Cossacks were running that way.

  Harry and Max moved along, ducking behind trees. They traded urgent glances. Should they do the same? Would the Ivans shoot?

  Behind them a group of four Russians had three Cossacks surrounded, aiming their rifles. The Cossacks charged before the soldiers could get a shot off and tackled them wielding daggers, but more soldiers bounded over and absorbed the three Cossacks. Screams rang out. Shrieks. From other parts of the forest too.

  “Look, more are out there,” Max said.

  “We go. It’s time.”

  Harry grabbed Max. They sprinted out into the white valley, their legs heavy, the snow pulling them down. They ran in a zigzag pattern, grasping at each other for support.

  Soviet soldiers advanced into the valley with their barrels lowered yet in a line, as if moving to surround the thirty or so Cossacks huddling out in the middle of the valley with arms up. The Cossacks were backing away towards the GIs who were advancing out to them just the same with their barrels lowered. A line of Soviet soldiers pushed forward behind Harry and Max. Harry and Max ran, joining the Cossacks who held their arms out to them, urging them on as if they were swimming to a lifeboat.

  The Cossacks kept backing up, in a half circle as if hiding something. One was panting, growling, muttering fierce words to himself, and none could console him. He broke off from them and charged the line of Soviet soldiers raising a dagger and the Ivans let him on through until the Cossack reached the trees where more Ivans surrounded him, rifles up. The Cossack swung his blade at them. A rifle butt struck his jaw and he dropped, and the Ivans dragged him into the dark forest.

  Harry huffed at the sight, sickly, incredulously. Two potent adversaries were like something out of the old Battle of Waterloo now, each side in tight aligned formations. A line of American GIs stood about forty yards away, out in the valley. On the other side of Harry, Max and the Cossacks stood a line of the Soviet soldiers.

  The Cossacks kept to the middle of the valley, close together on a muddied patch of snow, the steam billowing out of them.

  “Stay there!” came a shout from the American tree line, repeated in Russian and German.

  “Do not move!” came a command in Russian from the Soviet side, repeated in German.

  Thirty-Five

  THE SUN CAME UP AND OUT, breaking through clouds and illuminating the snow all around them with a blinding whiteness. Neither the Soviet Army Ivans nor American GIs advanced, heeding the commands from either end. The opposing troops each stood in their lines, each man roughly three yards apart, stealing looks back for further commands from the tree line. Out among the Cossacks, a few cigarettes came out. They shared them, the sun bringing warmth to their pale, white faces. It didn’t warm their numbing cold feet. They slapped their hands together.

  An hour had passed. Harry imagined frantic wireless communications on each side, reinforcements called in. Harry could make out Colonel Partland at the Americans’ tree line. Partland appeared to give him a thumbs-up. Harry only nodded. At this point, he didn’t wan
t to try anything that made the Soviets think he was more than a common Cossack. His exhausted mind had been racing through the possibilities, around and around, an endless oval track of comeuppances. As Partland had warned him, an American captured among this group could be used for all manner of propaganda, as proof of aggressive US intentions. A show trial. And in concert with his brother, the former SS man? It was tailor-made for propaganda. He would, at the very least, make a useful prisoner for swapping someday. He wondered if they knew of him already. It depended on how far Hartmut Dietz had gotten with his disclosures, and how much they would believe him. Harry looked to the Americans’ trees again and realized he was looking for any sign of Aubrey Slaipe there. He saw none but somehow felt his presence, like a man standing on a train platform sensing that a train was coming.

  “Do be careful what you wish,” Max muttered to Harry. He was scanning their trees too.

  A Soviet officer arrived at the Soviet tree line using binoculars. Soon a man in a civilian overcoat flanked him wearing a large black sable hat that bore a red star badge. A commissar.

  Another hour passed. The rich aroma of the cigarettes gave way to the terrified, metallic breath of the Cossacks around them.

  “It’s like being on that damn island again,” Max said.

  “That or in a train car.”

  The Soviet officer and commissar advanced out into the snow and kept coming, right past their line of men. From the US side, Harry saw Colonel Partland doing the same, flanked by a young captain. The opposing lines of GIs and Ivans each followed, but Partland and his counterpart from the Soviet side each waved at their men to stay put.

  The group of Cossacks convened in groups of threes and fours, arguing what they would do under what conditions.

  “The woman and children, the old ones made it over. We’ve done our work,” said one.

  “But that’s no reason to lie down and take it up the ass,” growled another.

  “If it saves the whole?”

  “We don’t know just who’s saved, not yet.”

  They grabbed at each other’s collars, shouted at one another, hugged, shared whispers.

  The Soviet commissar in the overcoat was grinning at them, and Harry half expected to see the man bounce on over and give them a touristy pitch on the positives of returning to the Soviet Union, their great Mother Russia that would welcome them as heroes. Yet as the commissar came closer, Harry could see the man’s grin was one of ridicule. A rich man grinning at circus clowns. They were only pawns. Their opinions, wants, and wishes did not matter.

  Colonel Partland and his captain met the Soviet officer and his commissar in the middle of the valley. Harry and Max stood as close as they could without leaving the Cossacks, straining to hear.

  The four officers exchanged terse greetings. Hands were shook. The commissar spoke some English and Colonel Partland’s captain translated the Russian parts. It went back in forth in Russian and English with some German thrown in. The Soviet talked of an exchange—half would go one way, half the other.

  “Nothing doing,” Colonel Partland said. “These men, they’re now in the US zone.”

  “Can you prove it? They fled the Soviet zone, did they not?”

  It went on like this. The Cossacks, their faces deathly pale, kept arguing among themselves as they eyed the deliberations. The thirty men had split up into two rough groups—ten in one group, about twenty in the other. This confirmed they were separating according to who had family that had made it over—these men went on to safety while the others would return as sacrifice. This wasn’t a new arrangement. The men had often discussed the possibility, Max told Harry.

  “Look, Harry, look,” Max said.

  One Cossack from the twenty trudged over to the officers deliberating. At the same time, the group of twenty started walking back to the line of Soviet Army soldiers, their knees arching high as they hiked through the snow.

  “Wait, come back!” Harry and Max shouted, but the ten or so Cossacks who’d stayed surrounded them and hands slapped over their mouths. “All right, all right,” Harry growled, pushing the hands away as Max did the same.

  The Cossack representing the twenty deliberated with the Soviet officer, his arms flailing, frantic now as he eyed his men marching back to the Soviet line. As the Soviet officer listened, the commissar lit a cigarette and stuck it in the Cossack’s mouth. Colonel Partland and his captain were standing back, their faces taut.

  “They are doing it to save us—and to save you who have done so much for us,” one of the ten Cossack men said in Harry’s ear.

  The twenty Cossacks neared the line of Soviet soldiers. The Ivans raised their barrels. The Soviet officer shouted and they lowered the barrels, but it didn’t stop the Cossacks from raising their arms high about their heads. The Ivans turned with them, escorting them back to the tree line and into the forest that was the border of the Soviet zone.

  Harry and Max and their ten stood there a long while, their feet planted in the muddied snow. Then things became calmer. The Soviet soldiers retreated from the tree line altogether. It looked like a normal forest anywhere. The meeting broke up. The Soviet officer and his commissar were strolling back to their side with their hands clasped casually behind their backs, moving through the deep snow as if it were a thin grass.

  “Harry? Come on, let’s go.” Colonel Partland was standing behind them.

  “No,” Max said. “We can’t just let them.”

  “We have to. It’s all we have. It’s over.”

  The last truck drove away, to catch up with those already heading for the Standkaserne DP camp in Munich. Colonel Partland and his captain had sped off to escort the trucks through any constabulary checkpoints. The Cossacks were on their way and Sabine’s assistants were with them—feeding them, treating them, consoling the ones whose men did not make it over. The GIs had packed up the post and, as ordered, left the captain’s jeep for Harry, Max and Sabine complete with trip papers. Colonel Partland had stood a bottle of Scotch on the hood, but no one felt like toasting. Sabine opened Harry’s chrome thermos and the three drank coffee from the red cap. They had a little fire going. They smoked. Soon the Scotch made it into the coffee.

  “Alex was quite the brave young man,” Sabine said at some point to no one in particular.

  Max kept standing at tree trunks along the clearing, surveying the Soviet line across the valley with binoculars. It was afternoon now. Low dark clouds had moved in and the snow had a grayish-blue tint, what would be a permanent dusk until the sun went down.

  The Soviets’ woods were dim, Max told them, but they were still there, inside. “They have a fire or two burning, moving around in there for certain. But they’re farther back now.”

  They heard singing from the Soviet side. Max said it was a Cossack song. “Keeping their heads high,” he said.

  The singing stopped. Minutes passed, the three of them in silence. A half hour. Max sat on the hood of the jeep, a wool helmet beanie on his head pushed back. Like this he looked like a corn-fed American soldier—like he might have looked two years before as a half-baked spy on the loose in the Ardennes. Sabine sat with Harry on a crate. The only smells left in the world were tobacco, coffee, Scotch, the charcoal smell of their fire. The fire smoldered now as embers, and no one bothered to stoke it. They wouldn’t need to stay here all night. All of them knew it.

  Max heaved himself from the hood and stood at the tree line. He lifted the binoculars. He trudged on back, and he found his spot on the hood. “Soon,” he said.

  The Cossacks’ singing started up again, faint but clear enough. All three could hear it from across the high valley. Then they heard pops, and screams, what sounded like the trees themselves splintering apart and wailing. The screams ceased. Yet the clacks of gunfire persisted, spaced a few random seconds apart, and on, and on, like the creaks of a slow, slow, heavy old wheel.

  Thirty-Six

  “THEY ARE COPING WELL ENOUGH,” Sabine said.

  �
�Laying low, I hope,” Harry said.

  It had been three days since they rescued the Cossacks from the Šumava. Harry sat at the desk in his den. Sabine sat across from him in a smart blue pea coat, brown scarf, and modest black hat, her cheeks flushed from being outside. She’d just come back from the Standkaserne.

  She nodded. “Those passports are a mix of nationalities, so all the more reason to sit tight. They play down their Cossack nature to outsiders, of course, but only until we can get them moved out. Then they’re refugees again. They may become whoever they are.”

  “And young Alex?”

  “Also well. We have many children who lost their parents, from everywhere. He is among them now. He plays with them. And he stays close to me.”

  “Is he talking to Max?”

  “He slept by his side last night.”

  “Good. That’s good. Have either of you told him yet?”

  “No. That time will come. He must be ready.”

  “Supposing those Sovs come sniffing around—your friends at the Soviet Repatriation Mission?”

  “The Nansen passports should protect them. Any case, I do not think the Soviets will bother. They got their spoils.”

  That weekend, Colonel Partland had met with trusted contacts from the US Consulate. The United States government could not help directly, but officials there would do what they could. It may take a while, Sabine warned. A vast number of Displaced Persons still needed homes, including those millions of Jews who would never return to Germany. Most countries’ existing refugee quotas were completely inadequate and many didn’t have new policies yet. The United States, the land of the immigrants, was well behind other countries in taking in the vast numbers.