Child Thief

by Dan Smith

‘I slept a little.’

  ‘So now what?’

  ‘So now we see to one or two things. Viktor and me. Outside.’

  ‘You want me to help?’ Petro asked, putting his sister down and coming to sit in his usual place, opposite me.

  ‘You can help your mother.’

  Petro mumbled something under his breath.

  ‘What did you say?’

  He looked at me. ‘I said “woman’s work”. You always give me the woman’s work.’

  ‘Woman’s work? Looking after the animals isn’t woman’s work. Taking care of your family is not woman’s work.’

  ‘But you always take Viktor,’ he said. ‘You give Viktor the rifle when we hunt—’

  ‘He’s a better shot than you. We can’t afford to waste ammunition.’

  ‘And now you take Viktor with you when you could take me. Or both of us.’

  I sat back and ran a hand across my beard. ‘Trust me, son, you don’t want to do this. That’s why I’m taking Viktor.’

  ‘I’m stronger than you think,’ Petro said, looking at his brother.

  ‘Maybe you should let him come.’ Viktor shrugged. ‘He’s as strong as I am.’

  I watched my sons sitting side by side at my table and wondered how they had grown to be men without me noticing. I allowed myself a moment of pride, looking at my family. My strong wife, my two sons and my beautiful daughter. I was a lucky man to have come so far and still have so much. Behind me there was death and hardship, before me there was blood and horror, but here, now, I had everything a man could want.

  I nodded. ‘All right, Petro. We could use your help.’

  There was still no sign of the sun when we went out into the cold. A greyish half-light had graced the air, but it was subdued by a mist that hung like a veil. We trudged around the house, disturbing a pair of magpies that flew up into the naked branches of an apple tree. The birds watched us from their perch, chattering their staccato cackle and dropping back to the ground as we passed.

  ‘How d’you want to do this?’ Viktor asked as we came round the old barn.

  I unlocked the door and we went in, disturbing the animals, a chicken running for cover.

  ‘What’s under there?’ Petro asked, nodding his head at the shape under the tarpaulin.

  ‘Children,’ I said.

  ‘Children?’

  I looked at Viktor. ‘We’ll take everything else off the sled.’ I crouched to untie the ropes that held the tarpaulin in place. ‘Then we’ll take them to the cemetery and bury them.’

  Viktor and Petro helped unload the man’s belongings, piling them in one corner of the barn. It wasn’t much to account for a man’s life. A few odds and ends, items one might collect on a long search to survive. I imagined what it must have been like to pull that sled, with its ugly cargo, across the snow for so long that it had wasted a man to almost nothing. I asked myself what could drive a man to that kind of task, and I remembered what Natalia had said about the man’s injury. A single shot that had pierced and exited his body. An expertly dressed wound. I’d seen evidence this man might have been a soldier, maybe even fighting the Germans before we pulled away from the war, so perhaps he had learned to dress a wound. But I wondered who he’d been running from and who might be following him. It didn’t occur to me that the stranger might not have been running from anything. Someone might have been running from him.

  I watched Petro’s eyes trying to look away from the small bodies, and was dismayed he’d been adamant about coming with us. He was strong, but he was more sensitive than his brother. Viktor had a harder heart, a stronger constitution. What Viktor saw, he took at face value, but his brother always looked deeper. Petro had his mother’s understanding of the world, and a thing like this would haunt him. I could see the sadness and the revulsion in both their faces, but I knew it was Petro who would see this when he closed his eyes at night.

  When everything was unloaded, we covered the children once more and Viktor and Petro took up the reins and dragged the sled outside.

  I grabbed a couple of shovels and a pickaxe from the barn and jogged to catch up with them.

  ‘Put them on the sled,’ Viktor said, but I rested them against my shoulder like weapons and walked alongside my sons as we left the gates and headed out to the cemetery that lay behind the church.

  I scanned the doors and windows as we passed among the houses, but I didn’t notice anybody watching us. It wasn’t that I wanted to keep secrets, but I didn’t want the other villagers to worry. They didn’t need to share this. Burying a child is hard, and they’d had their fair share of hardship.

  The people of Vyriv had endured the shortages of the famine ten years ago. They had kept their heads low and survived on what little they could produce themselves, afraid they would be noticed in their small valley. They had been spared the cholera and the extreme starvation, but it had been no easy time for them and many had died. Natalia’s parents had been among those who were too weak to survive the hardship. Her father collapsed in the field, at the handles of his plough. His heart failed and he fell into the freshly turned soil, dying on the land he had sown for most of his life. Natalia’s mother saw him fall, but she was old and her painful joints made her slow. He was dead by the time she reached him, and his death weakened her will to go on.

  Seeing the destruction caused by the famine, Lenin abolished grain requisitioning, allowed free trade and the country began to recover. Vyriv, like other villages in Ukraine, enjoyed a brief period of prosperity, and the culture was allowed to flourish for a short while. The Ukrainian language was freely spoken once more. But Lenin’s successor was more ruthless and his demands were higher. Stalin was threatened by the prospect of an independent Ukraine. He wanted the country’s food, its blood and its sweat, so he sent his soldiers to take it.

  The arrival of the stranger in the village would put the people on edge. They would be full of fear, sense the advent of something terrible, and I wanted to keep this from them because I was afraid of what they might do. Especially if they saw what he had brought with him. I wanted to bury the children, put them to rest without them ever coming to the villagers’ notice.

  The church in front of the cemetery was small, nothing grand. A simple building of wood and stone, the walls painted white. There were no gold spires, no bright colours, not even a bell tower. Nor was there a priest to tend it; he had left more than a year ago when he heard about the fate of other priests. The state had tolerated the Church for a while, but now there was only the advance of Stalin’s vision. Like the kulak, priests and poets were a threat to the common way of living so they were sought out and they were deported. Some were executed for their beliefs or for the words they put on paper and the thoughts they had in their heads. Churches were broken and torn down. Bells were cast down from their towers.

  Our priest saw it coming and he ran. No one knew where he’d gone; all we knew was that one day he was simply not here. He told no one of his flight.

  Since then we had kept the church clean and in as good order as we were able, but there are things that can change a man’s faith, mould a man’s faith, and there are other things that can’t. For me, a building and an effigy were not enough to make up for all that had happened and was happening to this world, and that was even truer as I walked alongside a sled that carried the bodies of two small children. But I understood the value of ceremony for some people, and I knew the importance of life and of ritual.

  We passed among the broken headstones, and found a spot at the far end of the cemetery, by a crumbling wall, where we could dig.

  ‘One hole,’ I said, using a shovel to move the snow. ‘They can go in together.’

  Viktor took the other shovel, helping to clear the snow, and when we had outlined a big enough plot, we took turns swinging the pick to break the ground, which was hard with cold. And when that was done, Petro shovelled out the dirt until the hole was deep enough.

  As we worked, the mist dissolved around u
s and the sun struggled to the edge of the sky, occasionally breaking through the cloud to catch on the icicles that stretched down from the overhang of the wall. The graveyard was filled with a bleak beauty that was not lost on me.

  It was hard working like that, and after a while we stopped to take off our coats, Viktor nudging me to attract my attention.

  ‘What?’ I asked, glancing up.

  Viktor inclined his head in the direction we’d come from, and I looked across to see someone approaching.

  ‘Dimitri,’ I said under my breath. ‘Shit.’ I jabbed my shovel into the loosened soil and leaned a forearm on the end of its handle to watch him approach.

  ‘What are you up to, Luka?’ he said. ‘I came over to do some repairs on the church and I spot you three skulking round the back. What are you doing?’

  ‘Dimitri,’ I replied and raised a hand to my head in mock salute.

  ‘What are you up to?’ He grinned as he spoke, but there was no humour in him. He thought we were doing something he should know about and he was making it his business to find out.

  Fate had related Dimitri Petrovich Spektor and me. We were family by marriage because our wives were sisters. My daughter Lara played with Dimitri’s daughter, Dariya, because they were cousins and of a similar age, but Dimitri and I had never managed any bond of friendship. Dimitri made no attempt to conceal his dislike of me and his opinion that I sullied the family blood. I had lived in Vyriv for over six years, my wife and children were Ukrainian, and I had fought for the Ukrainian anarchists, yet Dimitri found it hard to see beyond the fact that I was Russian and had once been a soldier of the Red Army. To him, all Russians were thieves and drunkards, and his brash rudeness was always amplified when he addressed me. He used harsh tones and often spoke quickly, running his words together, making it more difficult for me to understand him. I spoke good Ukrainian, but it was not my first language.

  Now I sighed and looked at Viktor before waving a hand at the sled. There was no point in trying to hide it from him. The man was like a ferret and would find out whether we wanted him to or not.

  ‘What you got under there?’ Dimitri asked, putting his hands on his hips and tilting his head. He wore an old cap, the kind his father used to wear but, like everything else, it was worn in patches, the material fraying.

  ‘Maybe you’d better just take a look,’ I said, thinking it was easier than trying to explain.

  Dimitri nodded and stepped forward, reaching out to take hold of the tarpaulin. ‘I’m not going to get a surprise, am I?’

  ‘Probably,’ I replied as Dimitri pulled back the cover to reveal the two bodies.

  Dimitri dropped the corner of the tarpaulin and stepped away. ‘Shit. Why didn’t you just tell me? What kind of a trick is that?’

  ‘No trick,’ I said. ‘It’s what it is.’

  Dimitri puffed his ruddy cheeks and breathed out hard. ‘Who are they? I’ve never seen them before. And what the hell happened to her feet?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘They were with that man you brought in yesterday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Dimitri stood silent, shifting his eyes to the open grave. I knew what he was thinking. His brain would be churning under his cap and his thinning scalp, coming to all the wrong conclusions. I knew what Dimitri’s words were going to be before they even tripped off his thick lips and puffed into the cold air around his red-veined cheeks.

  ‘Did he kill them?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to them.’

  ‘Nothing natural, that’s for sure.’ He stared at me. ‘And you brought him here. Where is he now?’

  ‘Safe.’

  ‘Safe where?’

  Dariya obviously hadn’t told him what she’d seen the day before and it surprised me that she’d kept it to herself. It showed restraint I wouldn’t have expected from her. ‘In my house,’ I said.

  ‘In your house?’

  ‘Yes. He’s very sick. Unconscious.’

  ‘And if he wakes up? What’s he going to do? Murder all our children? Put his hands on my little Dariya? She is forbidden from coming to your house again. What kind of idiot are you?’

  Viktor stepped forward but I put out a hand to stop him. ‘Nobody said anything about murder. We don’t know what happened to these children. All we can do is bury them and wait for the man to speak for himself.’

  ‘He must’ve done something to her. Look at her feet for God’s sake.’

  ‘Perhaps she fell,’ I said.

  ‘Fell?’ Dimitri’s face was gaining heat, the veins becoming more prominent as his mood heightened and his words tripped over one another. ‘What about the boy, then? Did he fall too?’ His whole body shook with emotion. ‘And you took him into your house.’ He looked down at the grave again, his eyes lighting up. ‘I’ll have to tell the others.’

  ‘No, Dimitri. Let me tell them. As soon as we’re done here, I’ll tell the others. They don’t need to see this. Let me give these children some dignity.’

  ‘Wait right here,’ he said, turning around and hurrying away. ‘Don’t do anything. The others need to see this now.’

  ‘That went well,’ said Petro when we were alone again.

  ‘Of all the people …’ I pinched the bridge of my nose. ‘It had to be him.’

  Viktor put his hands in the small of his spine, leaning back. ‘What now?’

  ‘Bury them?’ Petro asked.

  ‘No, we should wait,’ I said, whipping the tarpaulin back over the children. ‘What else can we do?’

  Viktor and I were sitting on a broken piece of the wall, Petro standing, when Dimitri returned with some of the other men. We saw them coming around the side of the church and making their way through the grave markers.

  We had put our coats back on now we were still, but the day was growing to be a good one. The sun had risen in Dimitri’s absence and burned away the low-hanging cloud, to give us a light blue sky that was as clear as any I had seen. The brightness was reflected from the snow and the gravestones glistened with encrusted ice which had begun to thaw at its outer edges. I could even hear a gentle drip from the branches of the trees.

  I squinted as I watched the men approach.

  ‘There,’ Dimitri pointed when he reached us. ‘Under there.’

  We greeted each other with short nods and grim faces.

  ‘What’s going on, Luka?’ Ivan Sergeyevich stepped forward, holding out a hand for me to shake.

  Ivan Sergeyevich Antoniv was well into his sixties, but he was strong and healthy. I knew him as a man who believed in fairness. We had spoken many times about the revolution and what we had expected of it, and I knew our views were similar. Both of us were disillusioned by what we had thought would be a better way for us all. He was a sensible man, and I knew he would see this the right way, so I shook his hand with some relief.

  ‘Why didn’t we know about this last night?’ Ivan said, and I remembered he’d been one of the men in the square when we had returned from the hillside. ‘Viktor told us you’d found a man. There was nothing about bodies. Nothing about children.’ He put a pipe to his mouth, clamping it between yellowed teeth and sucking hard.

  Behind him, Dimitri shuffled, glancing at the other two men he’d brought with him. Josif Abramovich Fomenko and Leonid Andreyevich Tatlin. All of them men who had grown together and survived together. I was an outsider here, but they were men I respected. Men who worked hard and took care of their families. And they didn’t look at me the way Dimitri did. They didn’t see my history the way Dimitri saw it.

  ‘I thought it would scare people,’ I said, looking at Dimitri.

  ‘They’re already scared.’ Ivan let the smoke fall from his mouth rather than blowing it away. It shrouded him, hanging in the air. ‘Someone said OGPU—’

  ‘Who said that?’ I asked. ‘Why would they say that?’

  ‘I doesn’t matter,’ Ivan told me. ‘You know how rumours start. What matters is now people think h
e’s either running from them or that he’s one of them. And whichever way they look at it, they think activists are coming to murder their husbands or take their wives and children from them.’

  ‘I didn’t want people to think the wrong thing.’

  ‘They already do.’

  ‘Maybe we should have a look,’ Josif said. ‘Would you mind?’

  Josif Abramovich had been the first man to come to our door when I arrived in Vyriv after the war. He had welcomed me before any other, bringing bread and Ukrainian vodka – horilka. Natalia had laid the rushnyk on the table and we’d drunk the whole bottle together. Josif drank himself into a good mood and told me he had been disheartened when Natalia’s parents died, but was glad for her and our children now our family was together again.

  It’s not a good thing to see,’ I told him. ‘Are you sure you want to look?’

  ‘I’ve seen bad things before.’

  ‘Maybe not like this.’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  ‘All right.’ I nodded to Viktor and my son pulled back the tarpaulin to expose the bodies once more.

  Josif studied them for a few moments, his breath audible as he crunched around the sled, his boots crushing the snow. He beckoned the other two men, who came over and looked. They seemed immune to the death right before them. As if they saw not the bodies of children, but an object to confirm or otherwise the theory of an irate man.

  Ivan and Leonid shook their heads almost in unison.

  ‘You see?’ Dimitri said. ‘The man’s a killer.’

  ‘Or perhaps it was the cold?’ Josif suggested.

  Ivan looked closer. ‘These marks here.’ He pointed close to the girl’s face. ‘You see these around her nose and mouth? Maybe she was suffocated.’

  ‘What does it matter how he did it?’ Dimitri said. ‘The man’s a killer.’

  ‘We don’t know that,’ I said. ‘Not for sure.’

  ‘We should do something about it,’ Dimitri went on.

  ‘Like what?’ I asked. ‘Think about what you’re saying, Dimitri.’

  ‘I am thinking.’ He looked round at each of us. ‘I’m the only one thinking. That man is too much of a risk to our own children.’