Red Winter

by Smith, Dan

  ‘They’re hunting you. I don’t like that. It puts Lyudmila and me at greater risk.’

  ‘It doesn’t really change anything,’ I said. ‘You and me . . . we’re following the same trail. We can’t avoid each other, so we might as well be together.’

  ‘It’s a mistake to think we’ll help if they catch up to you,’ she warned, but she looked back at Anna and I saw the doubt in her eyes.

  ‘I intend to stay well ahead of them,’ I told her. ‘Lose them, if we haven’t already.’

  ‘But they’re persistent.’ She turned her face towards me. ‘So I’m wondering who are you, Kolya? Who are you really?’

  ‘I’m a deserter.’ I shrugged. ‘They hunt deserters.’

  ‘So you are Red.’

  ‘I’m not anything anymore. I’m just a man who wants to find his family.’

  ‘But you’re something more than that. I know it. They don’t send seven to catch one. Not unless the one is special. Dangerous, even.’

  ‘I’m nobody,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t ask? Is that it? I don’t ask about you, you won’t ask about me?’

  ‘It’s better that way. We leave the past behind us; it’s easier for us to be friends.’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll ever be friends, Kolya, and we can only the leave the past behind if it isn’t chasing us.’ She scanned the steppe as if searching for a glimpse of seven distant riders, and when she looked back at me, I could see she wanted to know more. There were questions in her eyes, on her lips, but things remained unsaid. I didn’t tell her what or where I had deserted from, and I didn’t disclose my connection to Krukov. Those were things she didn’t need to know; things that would almost certainly affect our relationship for the worse and leave one or other of us dead, right there and then in that grove.

  While I kept my secrets from Tanya, I knew nothing about her. She gave no information willingly, but there were some things she could not hide and I was beginning to suspect that she was not just a simple peasant. The way she ate when we stopped to rest, the way she rolled her cigarette, the sharpness of her thoughts, the questions she asked, the way she spoke, and the words she used. Everything about her behaviour told me that Tanya was educated. She wasn’t just a farmer’s wife.

  ‘It seems you’ve learned more about Koschei than I have,’ she said eventually. ‘There’s nothing more I can tell you about him. We’ve been following his signs, looking for the red star and going north, that’s all. But what do you think is drawing him north? Everyone else is going south.’

  ‘I’ve been wondering the same thing. Maybe the uprising has spread north of here. Maybe something else. They said they had prisoners and that there are holding camps in this area; he could be bringing prisoners here and then he’ll go back.’

  ‘What stopped him from killing them?’ There was something odd in the way she stressed that last word.

  ‘It legitimises what he’s doing,’ I suggested, but it was just an idea. ‘The Red Army always needs new conscripts, and the labour camps need filling. There’s a lot of work to be done, so he takes the young ones. But the old men and women . . .’

  He likes to drown the women.

  I took a deep breath and tried not to see the images that flooded my thoughts. ‘. . . It could be that’s why he split his unit. Prisoners would slow them down, so maybe part of the unit went ahead—’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘To find more prisoners? Spread more terror?’ I shook my head and speculated about the reasons Koschei might have to split his unit. I thought about telling Tanya that perhaps they hadn’t just split into two. That maybe there was a third fraction of Koschei’s unit. With the intelligence gleaned at the train, I had convinced myself that Koschei and Krukov were the same man, and it would make sense if a part of that unit were now following me. Koschei and his men might not just be in front of us, but behind us too.

  ‘And I think we should stop calling him “Koschei”,’ I said. ‘It makes him . . . less than human. Or more than human. But he isn’t. He’s just a man. We should call him by his name. Krukov.’

  Tanya looked at me and nodded once. ‘And this commander on the train, he was sure about that? About Krukov?’

  ‘He was sure.’ When I told Tanya about my conversation with Commander Orlov, I had bent the truth a little in my favour, leaving out the part about him recognising me, so she might not have been as sure as I was, but I was convinced Krukov was Koschei not because Commander Orlov gave the name to a doctor, but because he gave it to Nikolai Levitsky. He had known who I was from the moment he saw me and had made it clear what he thought of me. When he used Krukov’s name in connection with Koschei, he was telling me the truth, and my knowledge of Krukov only concreted my certainty of that.

  Tanya flicked her cigarette into the frosty grass and looked up at the sky. Grey clouds were moving across it now, the pale winter blue almost entirely gone.

  ‘What did he do to you?’ I asked. ‘What did Krukov do?’

  Tanya turned her back on the steppe and switched her attention to Anna, who was sitting close to Tuzik, one hand buried in the thick fur at his neck. There was a change in Tanya’s expression when she looked at Anna. Something of the melancholy I had seen earlier washed across her face like an incoming wave. The sudden softening of her appearance showed me something I’d never witnessed in her before, and for the first time, it occurred to me that her eyes were almost exactly the same colour as Marianna’s. Before now, they had always seemed cold and hard, but the softening transformed her.

  I felt a stab of anguish, a desperation to be with my wife again, and I stared into Tanya’s eyes as if it would give me just a taste of what it would be like to have Marianna here.

  But then the lightness of Tanya’s countenance was gone again, leaving not a trace. It was a sudden and brief transformation, as if she had swept one personality aside and replaced it with another. Now her face hardened.

  ‘You have children?’ I asked.

  There was a furrowing of her eyebrows, a clenching of the jaw.

  ‘That’s why I want him,’ I said. ‘You know that. I understand what you’re feeling.’

  ‘You understand nothing,’ she said. ‘What can you understand?’

  ‘More than you think.’

  ‘You’re a professional soldier; you’ve got it written all over your face. It’s in the way you walk and talk. Everything. I’ve seen so many damn soldiers, I know what one looks like.’

  ‘So what would you see if you were to look in a mirror?’ I asked.

  Tanya glanced up at me and sighed before turning her eyes to the ground.

  ‘Whatever I’ve done,’ I said, ‘whatever I am, I’m still a father. A husband.’

  ‘When did you last see them?’ she asked. ‘Your sons? You have two, right? When did you last tell them you love them? When did you last hold your wife?’

  There was anger growing in her voice and I knew that when she looked at me, she couldn’t see me as anything but a soldier. It was men like me who had shattered her life, whatever colour they had chosen.

  ‘It’s a long time, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Because you’ve been out there, armed, killing other fathers and sons; mothers and wives too, I’d bet.’

  Her stare cut through me just as her words did. She was right about me. There was nothing I could say to change that; nothing I could say to make her think differently.

  ‘He didn’t take them prisoner, did he?’ I asked. ‘Your—’

  ‘No. He slaughtered them. Everyone. My son, just fifteen. My daughter, not much older than . . .’ She looked back at Anna and squeezed her eyes shut, determined that her emotion would be anger rather than grief.

  ‘And you? Were you there? How did you—’

  ‘My husband and my father with red stars burned on their skin. Do you know what that does to you? Seeing that?’

  ‘I can imagine it—’

  ‘No, you can’t imagine,’ she said. ‘You can’t imagine it at all
, because it hasn’t happened to you. You have some hope that your family is alive. Hope. That’s what keeps you going. For me, there is only hate. That’s what it does to you – it fills you with hate. That’s what keeps me going.’

  I wondered what was different about Tanya’s family that had made Krukov murder everyone while he took the young people from Belev with him. Her son had been fighting age.

  Perhaps it was something to do with who she was. I had come to suspect that she wasn’t a common peasant – she had developed a hard look to her, but she didn’t have the posture or mannerisms or speech traits I expected from a worker. I wondered if she had a background in wealth and education that had riled Koschei into such frenzy. Or maybe there had been some change in the way he operated. Or perhaps he had just had a bad day. It wasn’t uncommon for Chekist leaders to lose their minds – perpetrating such horrors, fuelling themselves with drugs and alcohol, it was little surprise.

  ‘You were wealthy?’ The words came out before I thought about them.

  Tanya didn’t reply, but she turned and stared at me with an expression that at least confirmed it.

  ‘And educated,’ I said. ‘So you’re not a soldier?’

  Tanya glanced back at Lyudmila, then turned to look out at the steppe once more. ‘No.’

  ‘What about her?’ I asked. ‘Lyudmila? What—’

  ‘If you want to know about Lyudmila, you’ll have to ask her yourself.’

  But I had a feeling she would tell me even less than Tanya had.

  ‘I’m sorry about your family.’ It was a pointless thing to say. Words couldn’t bring them back, and they couldn’t convey my sympathy for her. Tanya was wrong about something, though. I could imagine how she felt, and I understood that there was an important and worrying difference between us.

  I was looking for my wife and sons; Tanya was looking only for revenge.

  ‘When we find him,’ I said, ‘I want to know what happened to my family.’

  ‘You’re telling me not to kill him.’

  ‘Not right away.’ It was more important now than ever that we stayed together. I couldn’t afford for her to find Koschei before me.

  ‘I’ll make him tell you what you want to know.’ She looked me up and down. ‘Though I suspect you’d be good at that yourself.’

  I ignored her comment. ‘After that, you can do whatever you want.’

  ‘What I want is all of them, not just Kosch— Krukov. Not just Krukov. I want all of them. Every single one of his men.’

  ‘When was it?’ I asked. ‘How long have you been looking for him?’

  ‘Thirty-seven days,’ she said. ‘And out here, that’s a long time. It changes you. But we’re getting close, I can feel it.’

  ‘When it’s done? What will you do then?’

  ‘I haven’t seen that far yet.’ Tanya adjusted her rifle, moving the strap on her shoulder, then took the tobacco pouch from her pocket. ‘But when the time comes,’ she said, ‘I just hope you’re as good at killing as I think you are.’

  28

  It was early evening and we’d seen nobody for hours when we reached a farm.

  Already the sun had begun to set, a hazy orange disc behind the grey clouds, and with its setting so the cold had bitten harder and harder.

  ‘It look like snow?’ Tanya directed her question at Lyudmila, who stared up at the sky and shook her head.

  Lyudmila didn’t talk much, but she watched me all the time. She guarded Tanya with jealousy, and I saw the way she grew tense whenever I came close to her. She hated everything about me and I wondered what it was that burned so deeply in her; what tragedy or otherwise had brought her together with Tanya.

  Her reaction to Anna was different, though. Lyudmila barely spoke to her; seemed to avoid being close to her, as if she didn’t like children or didn’t know how to deal with them. Or perhaps she thought it might soften her. I had seen her steal glances at Anna, though, and I knew her coldness didn’t run all the way down to her core.

  ‘It’ll snow soon enough,’ I said. ‘Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, but it’s coming.’

  We had come through a forested area, thick and dark, and spied the farm from the trees. Taking up position to watch it for some time, we thought it would be good to spend the night here. It was a simple place with two wooden houses standing side by side. The nearest was larger than the one beside it, and while they were both basic constructions with pitched, thatched roofs, the farthest was in bad repair. It looked older and had suffered the onslaught of the weather for many years so that the windows were cracked, the walls were patched with moss, and there were places where the thatch had come away from the roof.

  It was almost as I pictured One-Eyed Likho’s house to be when Marianna told her skazkas to the boys. If I hadn’t known better, I might have believed the witch was real and waiting in the house to catch us off guard so she could cut my throat and put me in her oven.

  In front of the second house, in the far corner of a yard surrounded by a ramshackle fence, stood an outbuilding, which also had a thatched roof. The yard was empty but for a water trough at one end and a cart, which lay idle in the centre.

  Behind the farm was nothing but the forest we used for cover. It was mottled with shadow there now, and the trunks leaned in towards the buildings, the crooked and barren branches extending as if reaching out to smother it and take the farm for its own.

  Beyond the yard, though, the fields stretched a long way. On the far side of them, there was a hedgerow and evenly spaced trees, beyond which another farm stood. Only the roofs of the far buildings were visible.

  There had been no movement for at least half an hour. No sign at all that the near farm was inhabited. No smoke from the chimney and no light from the windows. The evening closed in on us and the air grew colder and we shivered in our heavy winter coats.

  When the darkness smothered us, and the time of forest demons was on us, I felt a chill run through me.

  I put my arm around Anna’s shoulder and held her close.

  Tuzik stood in front of us, Kashtan behind, the four of us inseparable now.

  ‘We should go down there,’ I said into the eerie quiet. ‘Either that or go back into the forest and find somewhere good to build a fire. It’s getting late and I don’t want to freeze to death out here.’ My breath was white and thick around me.

  ‘Maybe we should keep going,’ Tanya said.

  ‘I want to go on as much as you do –’ I didn’t take my eyes off the farm ‘– but there’s too much cloud to travel at night. And the horses need rest. We all do.’

  I felt her turn to me, so I met her gaze. Jagged teeth of hair jutted from the fringe of her hat. Her eyes had a distant look.

  ‘We’ll find him,’ I said. ‘Together. But we need to rest.’ Stopping at Lev’s place had given my pursuers time to catch up, and I was reluctant to make the same mistake, but we were exhausted and needed to rest. My hunters would need to do the same thing.

  She looked away, clenching her jaw and pursing her lips tight.

  ‘It pains me to say this, Tanya, but he’s right. I say we go down there.’ Lyudmila hadn’t spoken for a while and it was a surprise to hear her agree with me. ‘There’s no one there.’

  ‘And if there is?’ Tanya asked. ‘What do we do then?’

  ‘If there were soldiers down there, we’d have seen them,’ I said. ‘There’d be horses, equipment . . . and with three of us, armed, we should be able to deal with any overprotective farmers.’

  ‘And what about the other farm?’ Tanya asked, looking out at the rooftops beyond the hedgerow. ‘There might be people there.’

  ‘We’ve seen nothing so far. And if we can’t see them, they won’t see us.’

  So we led the horses out of the trees and headed towards the back of the farm, keeping out of view as much as possible.

  When we reached the rear of the two houses, Tuzik padded ahead, nose to the ground, and we followed him round to the front.

&
nbsp; ‘There’s no one here,’ I said, as we came closer and let the horses through the gate.

  As we entered the yard, though, the door to the first building opened, making me snap my head round, my hand reaching for my pocket. I half expected One-Eyed Likho to appear from the house like a crazed old hag, but instead it was an old man who stepped out into the cold.

  He was as surprised to see us as we were to see him and we all stopped dead in our tracks.

  Tuzik lowered his head and splayed his front legs in one sudden movement, his whole body tense. The fur on his neck rose, his ears went back, and he bared his teeth in warning. The growl that escaped him was feral.

  ‘He’s unarmed,’ Tanya whispered. ‘Don’t do anything.’

  ‘What do you think I’m going to do?’ I asked, moving in front of Anna. ‘Attack an old man?’

  Tanya gave me a look to suggest that was exactly what she expected me to do. ‘You or your dog,’ she said under her breath. ‘Keep the damn thing under control.’ Then she turned and raised a hand. ‘Good evening,’ she said.

  The old man nodded once with uncertainty and glanced into the house behind him with a worried expression before casting his eyes over us once more.

  ‘Let me talk to him,’ Tanya said, handing me the reins of her horse. ‘And hold on to that dog.’

  I called Tuzik, surprised when he obeyed and came to my side. Anna held on to him as Tanya strode over to the old man and took off her hat, holding it in the fist of her right hand. As she did so, the old man stood a little straighter and took a deep breath.

  ‘What do you want?’ He closed the door behind him and took a pace forward to stop Tanya from climbing onto the first step.

  ‘We thought there was no one here.’ She hesitated with one foot raised.

  ‘And now you can see there is.’ His voice was deep and rattled with phlegm as if he needed to cough.

  ‘We’re passing by on our way north. Looking for shelter for the night.’ She withdrew her foot.

  ‘And you want to get it here?’ He looked down at her, then squinted and peered through the semi-darkness at me and Lyudmila standing with the horses.