Red Winter

by Smith, Dan

  RED WINTER

  Dan Smith

  For Helen and Laura

  Acknowledgements

  Bringing a novel to the shelves is no small matter, and no writer can work in total isolation. So thanks go to my agent Carolyn for all her advice and hard work, and to Jon, Eli, Laura, and all the other talented people at Orion who have had a hand in giving life to Kolya’s story.

  Thanks also to my wife and children who put up with my vacant looks when my mind is elsewhere and are always ready to offer a first opinion and a reassuring word when it’s needed.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  November 1920 Central Russia

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Once upon a time there was a smith.

  ‘Well now,’ says he. ‘I’ve never set my eyes on any harm. They say there’s evil in the world. I’ll go and seek me out evil.’

  So he went and had a goodish drink, and then started in search of evil. On the way he met a tailor.

  Well, they walked and walked till they reached a dark, dense forest. In it, they found a small path, and along it they went – along the narrow path. They walked and walked, and at last they saw a large cottage standing before them. It was night; there was nowhere else to go.

  In they went. There was nobody there. All looked bare and squalid. Presently in came a tall woman, lank, crooked, with only one eye.

  ‘Ah!’ says she. ‘I’ve visitors. Good day to you.’

  ‘Good day, grandmother. We’ve come to pass the night under your roof.’

  ‘Very good. I shall have something to sup on.’

  Thereupon they were greatly terrified. As for her, she went and fetched a great heap of firewood, flung it into the stove and set it alight. Then she went up to the two men, took one of them – the tailor – cut his throat, trussed him and put him in the oven.

  From One-Eyed Likho, a traditional skazka, translated by W. R. S. Ralston

  November 1920 Central Russia

  1

  The village cowered with doors closed and windows shuttered. The street was empty. The cold air was quiet.

  Kashtan sidestepped beneath me, shaking her head and blowing hard through flared nostrils. I leaned forward and rubbed her neck. ‘You feel it too, girl?’

  There should have been voices. A dog barking. Women coming in from the field. There should have been children, but I heard only the wind in the forest behind and the murmur of the river before me.

  I stayed in the trees and watched the village, but nothing moved.

  ‘You think they’re hiding from us?’ I spoke to my brother. ‘Or do you think . . . ?’ I stared at the back of his head and let my words trail away. ‘I promised to get you home, Alek. Look.’ I raised my eyes once more and studied the log-built izbas across the river. ‘Home.’ But there was no light in any of the windows.

  Kashtan moved again, something making her uneasy.

  ‘Come on.’ I nudged her forward into the water. ‘Let’s have a look.’

  I knew I should have waited until dark, but I’d been travelling a long time. For days we had kept to the trees to avoid the colourful armies that had battled over our country in civil war since the revolution, and now the people from my dreams needed to be made real. I had to reassure myself that my family wasn’t an illusion; that I hadn’t imagined them just to give everything a purpose.

  Somewhere a crow called into the darkening afternoon and I snatched my head up in the direction of the sound. For a moment I saw nothing; then a black shape rose from the bare fingers of the tallest tree behind the houses. It wheeled and dived, skimming the wooden roofs before it passed over me and disappeared from view. I took one hand from the reins and rested it on my thigh, close to the revolver in my pocket. The mare faltered, reluctant to enter the cold river, but I encouraged her into the shallows, where she struggled to find her footing on the stones below. I pressed her on until my boots were soaked through, but as the water swelled round my knees, leaching my warmth and carrying it away towards the lake, Kashtan tossed her head and stopped in the deepest part as if she had come to an unseen barrier. She wanted to turn, to be away from here. She had scented something that troubled her.

  ‘What is it?’ I said, looking at Alek, but he gave no answer. ‘Come on, girl.’ I spurred Kashtan into motion. ‘Don’t give up on me now.’

  We came out onto the bank close to the windmill and passed beneath the sails, leaving a dark, wet trail in our wake. Kashtan’s hooves were hollow on the hardened dirt of the track, and her breathing was heavy, the two sounds falling into rhythm as we walked between the izbas and onto the road cutting through the village.

  Once there, we stopped and waited, the cold air biting at my legs.

  ‘Hello?’

  My voice was dead and out of place.

  ‘Hello? It’s us. Nikolai and . . .’

  I waited a while longer, watching, but nothing stirred, so I swung my leg over and dismounted. The sound was abrasive in the silence, and as soon as I was down, I stopped still, listening. I scanned the houses, wondering if anyone was watching me from the hush behind the closed doors. I glanced back at the forest, the trees black against the bruised sky, and thought perhaps I had been too eager to leave its protection. I had spent many days in there and now I felt exposed. But although it had hidden me well, the forest was a forbidding place that made it easy to believe in demons.

  ‘Hello?’ I called again, but still there was no answer. Doors and windows remained closed. ‘It’s Nikolai and Alek Levitsky.’ My voice was flat and without echo. ‘You can come out. We won’t harm you.’

  With a deepening sense of unease, I drew my revolver and led Kashtan to my home, moving slowly. I hitched the reins round the fence and put a hand to her muzzle. ‘Stay here,’ I whispered, before forcing myself to look up at Alek. ‘I’ll come back for you in a minute,’ I told him. ‘We’re home now.’

  The front door was closed but unbolted. It yielded to my first push, opening in to the gloom inside.

  ‘Marianna?’

  The click of my boot heels was obtrusive on the wooden floor. I took a deep breath, expecting the smell of home, but instead there was something else. Not explicit, but a faint smell of decay that lingered in my nostrils.

  ‘Marianna?’

  I had imagined the pich would be alight – the clay oven was the heart of our home, the
place to cook, and the source of heat in winter. There would be bread baking in its furnace. Marianna would be smiling at Pavel, who would be playing with the little wooden figures my father had carved for me when I was a boy. Our eldest son, Misha, would be carrying logs in from outside. I had hoped for the warmth of a fire on an early winter evening, the faint lilt of a garmoshka being played in one of the other izbas.

  But I found none of those things. No warmth. No life. Nothing.

  The house was empty.

  2

  I stood for a long time in the half-darkness of my home. I called their names – Marianna’s and the boys’ – but no one came. The pich remained cold, and the house remained empty.

  River water ran from me, dripping onto the floor, leaving a stain round my feet. The drips were the only sound and it felt for a moment as if this was another of my dreams. Perhaps I hadn’t reached home at all but was still beneath some grotesque tree in the forest, sheltering from the weather under its twisted branches, hiding from those who would see me dead. Or perhaps this was only a nightmare of what I thought I might find when I returned home.

  But I knew it was real. The cold told me that. The fear told me that.

  The weak sun of approaching winter had dropped by the time I forced myself to move, so that only a grey, grainy light slipped through the windows as I went to the pich and put a hand to it, feeling the coldness of the iron door, which lay open, and the hardened clay that surrounded it. In the depth of winter, we often slept above the oven, all four of us sharing the benefit of its heat, but now white ash slumped in a heap inside where it had burned itself out. Beside it, cooking implements leaned against the wall, ready to be used. Sprigs of dried plants hung from a narrow beam over my head, and one or two leaves had been pulled free and lain on the wooden surround. A neat pile of fresh logs and kindling was stacked in the corner.

  On the table, four plates lay in no particular arrangement, as if they were about to be set out. The underlying smell in the room pointed to the presence of rotting food, but I saw nothing to indicate where the odour was coming from – nothing in the oven or on any of the plates – and the only food left in the cupboard was a handful of potatoes, some pickled cabbage and a few strips of dried pork.

  In the centre of the table, a half-burned candle was glued with its own wax to a chipped bowl and I remembered how it was when the candle was aflame and voices filled the room. It was always warm and light, even in the deepest days of winter, when the pich was burning and my family was together.

  As a soldier, I rarely had the opportunity to come home; my visits were sporadic and often came less than once a year. The last time I was inside this room was more than six months ago. It was early spring, and my unit was close, meeting with a larger force for resupply, so I took a week to visit home. Alek came too, and we sat at this table that first night and saw how Marianna and the boys coped with what little they had. Whites and Reds had been through the village more than once, taking what provisions they could find, leaving them with almost nothing, but I was thankful my wife and children had been left unharmed. Misha and Pavel were proud to show off the rabbits they had snared in the forest and the fish they had taken from the lake, just as Alek and I had snared and fished when we were younger.

  Now I stared at the table and imagined them round it, as they had been that night, and I felt an overwhelming sense of what had been. The togetherness that had filled me was more than any sense of brotherhood I felt with my comrades-in-arms, and it confirmed my growing doubts about the war and all that it stood for. Being with my own children, my own wife, had brought visions of those who now lay wasted in the fields and forests and burned towns and villages of our country. And when our meal was done and the night had grown dark and the children slept, Marianna and I had come together in a way that made me want her more than ever. Lying with her, feeling her beside me, I had found myself longing for a means to leave the horror behind and return to the family she had held together so well. I had known then that coming home was my only chance for redemption; my only chance to fill the emptiness.

  My eyes drifted to the bent nails beside the door. I had put them there a thousand years ago, hammering the iron into the thick wooden wall because Marianna wanted somewhere to hang our winter coats, but now those coats were gone and the nails were naked.

  I wondered what it meant. Had they taken their coats because they hadn’t expected to return? Already the early winter winds had risen and the snow was not far away. Only a fool would leave without her coat when the land was preparing to sleep. With that in mind, I took the absence of coats as a good sign. Wherever they had gone, my wife and children had the foresight to prepare for cold weather.

  Running the fingers of my left hand along the edge of the table, I moved to the door that stood open to the bedroom.

  ‘Marianna?’

  Shivering from the damp cold in my legs, I pushed the door open a little further and crept in. There was a heavy atmosphere; a sense that I should remain unnoticed. This was my house, yet I felt like a stranger – a thief stealing in during the night.

  The beds were made and pushed against opposite walls, just as they had always been. The one below the window was the bed Marianna and I had slept in for years, the other for my sons, Misha and Pavel.

  A translucent and frayed curtain hung from a crooked rail, allowing the last light of the day to filter through, and there was a rug hanging on the back wall, red and black, but faded with age. A chest of drawers painted white, and a small, round table with a piece of old lace thrown across to protect its surface. A single chair with a towel over its back. Above the table, a small icon hung on a nail. Everything was in exactly the same place as it had been when I left. Nothing had moved. It was as if, at any moment now, Marianna and the children would come into the house and life would return to normal. But something had happened here; I could feel it.

  I went to the table where some of Marianna’s belongings lay and ran my fingers through the teeth of her hairbrush, one or two hairs still caught there as if to prove her existence. They were long and golden, the colour of ripe winter wheat. It was a trait she had hoped for our children to inherit – fair hair and eyes as blue as the summer sky – but my own darkness had won over. Misha had her fine features, her narrow face, her mannerisms and her strength, but his hair was the colour of burned sugar, and he had dark and serious eyes. Pavel’s colouring was lighter, with hazel eyes. His hair had the same hue as the acorns Alek and I used to collect from the forest floor when we were boys, and it always seemed to smell fresh and clean no matter what. I used to love putting my nose to the top of his head in the pretence of kissing him, just to breathe that smell. Pavel’s temperament was closer to mine – he was more reserved than his brother – and I always understood him better than Marianna did.

  I pulled the hairs from the brush, holding them between finger and thumb, hoping for a sense of closeness to my wife, but feeling no change to the empty silence. I picked up Marianna’s chotki, the knotted prayer rope she tied herself from lambswool, and turned it in my hand just as I saw a flurry of motion from the corner of my eye.

  A dark shape moving. The swish of material and a solid thump on the wooden floor.

  I dropped the prayer rope and whipped round, raising the revolver and sinking to one knee to make myself low. My heart pounded and it was almost impossible to breathe. In a fraction of a second I had to choose whether or not to fire. It might be an enemy. It might be my wife. Or perhaps this was one of my dreams and it was something darker come to claim me for the terrible things I had done.

  No more sign of movement from the shape behind the door. I relaxed my fingers and breathed deeply, keeping the revolver levelled at the object as I approached, seeing almost at once that it was not a person or anything more sinister. It was only a coat I had dislodged from its hook on the back of the door. Just a black woollen coat.

  I bent to take it in my fingers, and when I lifted it to the dim light from the wind
ow, my heart stopped. This wasn’t just any coat. It was my wife’s.

  It was Marianna’s winter coat. She must have hung it here, in the bedroom, but why had she not taken it with her?

  I sat on the bed and leaned forward, holding the revolver so tight my fingers began to ache.

  ‘Where are you?’ The frustration was almost unbearable. ‘Why aren’t you here?’

  I had come so far and risked so much, and all I had found was this.

  When Alek and I had run, our unit had been moving north-east to Tambov, called to aid in the destruction of the peasant rebellion that had begun in August, rising out of the unrest caused by the harsh grain requisition laws and their heavy-handed implementation by the Red Army. Already the peasant militia was calling itself Blue and numbered more than fifty thousand fighters. It had even attracted defectors from the Red Army, so some units were ordered back from fighting the Whites in Ukraine to bring it under control and intensify the Red Terror that would subdue the masses. It was on that journey north-east, heading towards Tambov, that Alek and I had finally seen an opportunity to break away; to escape the endless progression of violence and horror that had become our second nature.

  We knew that two men on horseback would be a target for the units hunting deserters, but we ran anyway, taking almost three weeks to travel the hundred or so kilometres home. We avoided the open roads and the steppes as much as we could, keeping to the forests even though it made for difficult travel and nights that were long and cold and lonely. We took hard feed for the horses wherever we could find it, stealing from farms, afraid to be seen. Any soldier would shoot us for the honour, and any peasant would betray us for a handful of grain or a little mercy, but we had stayed out of sight and it had slowed us down. Alek was stronger than I could have imagined. As his wound worsened, I had wanted to take to the road, but he wouldn’t let me, and now I couldn’t help wondering if I should have done it anyway. We would have arrived sooner and perhaps Marianna would still be here. Perhaps . . . perhaps many things would be different.