The orchard rows finished, she sees how he pushes the small farmhouse to the end of them, so a neat avenue of fruit trees leads to the carved wooden doorway. Does he imagine a warm hearth behind it, a warm welcome for himself and his brother under those roof tiles?
Where does the Jew child think he will find that?
Yasia douses the lamp, a signal to him to lie down. Be still and silent.
5
Mykola knows well the weight of a revolver. The ones he sees slung from the belts of the SS patrols look around the same weight as the Russian handgun that hung at his own waist. It is only weeks since he felt that; half a lifetime, but only weeks at the same time. He last held the heft of it in his palm when he flung it into the wide Sluch waters, and when he sees the German guns now, he remembers: that heft first, and then the sick mix of fear and relief at being rid of it, crouching deep in the reeds at dusk, waiting for nightfall.
Such a risk he took, deserting. Cutting and running into open country, instead of returning to his unit. It could have earned him a bullet in the back of the neck from either side, if the wrong side had caught him at the wrong time. The Red Army, those black and red Nazis: neither had any care for the wrong and the right of things—or not as he’d been taught them—and Mykola dreaded each as much as he loathed them, all the time he was running. But what other chance did he have of getting home?
The handgun landed deep in the reed and silt at the river’s edge, and it gave him a strange lurching feeling to hear it; to be without its weight after so long.
He knew by then what battle was, what battle does; Mykola knew slaughter. He’d seen it in farmsteads and orchards, been in the thick of it on village streets: wherever the fighting ripped through. And he’d seen how it took a grip of men, even those who feared it.
Mykola had stuck with the nervous, the reluctant like himself among the newly recruited, until he’d learned that another man’s fear was nothing to trust in. Give the fearful a knife or a rifle, they will use it; in the midst of the fray, give them a flame, they will lay waste.
Soldiers tore at each other; no one wants to die at the hands of another. And Mykola had felt it enough times: his own dark and bastard will to do his worst—and first—before any other man could take him.
But he’d been a soldier then.
And without his uniform, it wasn’t soldiers fighting soldiers that frightened him.
Battle was fear and fury, but it was not confined to armies. It tore through fields and barns and houses, and slaughter didn’t only take the fighting men. It took all in its wake: the village women, the old and the lame, and the children; all those with no flame or rifle, no reason for soldiers to heed them.
And now he was one of them.
Without his uniform—without his gun most of all—he’d left himself wide open.
Mykola saw others in the days that followed: other deserters, who’d discarded their rifles when they’d thrown off their belts and tunics. Some had left their boots, even, if they were Red Army issue: they’d wanted no trace of that army about themselves, now it was on the losing side.
Mykola had long ripped the badges from his shoulders: they’d been the first to go, landing with his cap in the roadside ditches as he’d started on his way home. He’d stripped away the other remnants over the journey, bartering and begging old clothes to cover him. He’d needed cover then, and food to fill him, so Mykola had taken to stealing; where was the right any longer, where was the wrong in staying alive?
The pistol was the last thing he discarded. For weeks he’d kept his hand on it inside his jerkin while he was sleeping and while he was walking. It had fetched him bread when he needed it, let him rest all those nights he was on his own and out in the open. And all without him firing it. Just the weight of it in his palm had been enough, or the sight of him holding it. The people who saw it held at his side, they knew enough of guns and soldiers, and they gave him food, gave him a bed for the night without argument.
But when the country got familiar, and the people spoke like he did, he threw the thing away. Myko told himself it was best that way. He’d taken it far enough: best it was done with.
He stayed crouched in the reed bed after he’d flung it, even as the dark came; his stomach lurching, palms empty and useless—his hands felt so weak now. But he was on home ground, nearly. Just two days, three more days of walking; already he was nearing the marshland. He had the wet and welcome smell of it in his nostrils, sunk in the river mud, up to his ankles, and Mykola crouched at the water’s edge as the reeling fear subsided, feeling the seep of it through his boot seams, at his heels first, then between his toes, and he was grateful.
He was grateful to be alive still to feel it. And that he’d kept his boots on too, through all of this.
He’d wrapped them in rags to hide them, but Mykola had kept his feet inside them. The boots were Russian, but they were good ones, and they’d eased the long weeks of walking. And once they got him home again he knew he’d need a good pair of boots to farm in.
—
The ground is soft underfoot where he stands now: where the trees have been torn out, the sod turned over.
Mykola stands shivering on the dog-leg of cleared land, between the back wall of the factory and the scrub where the men were labouring until a few days ago. The sky here is heavy with rain, the earth under him slippery with dead and wet leaf remains, and Myko’s boots sink and slide as he stands waiting for more instructions; he waits where he was told, in the cold, by the first of the trucks with the other auxiliaries.
The Germans called them all out, just before dawn, and they are not long out of their bunks and blankets: Stepan and Jaroslav, who were with the Russians, just like him; Taras, who wasn’t, and joined the Germans early; he has the bunk above Myko’s in the barrack room. But it’s not just them out here, it’s all the others from the barrack block. Some stand like Myko, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched about their shorn necks, against the raw morning. Others crouch with their backs up against the wheel arches, sheltering from the first spits of rain there, passing the stub-ends of their eked-out German cigarettes between them.
A hip flask has gone hand-to-hand too, along the line and back again; Mykola can still feel the warm burn of his last mouthful, in his throat now and spreading deeper, into his chest, and under everything is the low rumble of the truck exhausts, truck engines.
There are more German trucks out here than Mykola remembers: long parked lines of them behind him, all left idling. So many vehicles, they must have been driven onto the cleared ground in the early hours; Mykola thinks he might even have heard them while he was sleeping. He was still asleep less than an hour ago.
He rubs his face, hard, with the sleeve of his tunic, and then squints across the churned sod at the factory wall before him.
A score of soldiers—more—have gathered by the low doorway where he’s been told the Jews are to be brought out. Myko peers at their handguns and their peaked caps, but not for too long: they are SS bastards, and he cannot feel easy around them. After today, Myko hopes they will go again.
All the Jews will be gone in a few hours.
That’s what the Germans told them, when they gave out the orders. How much longer until it starts? They have been saying this was coming for days now, and Myko feels caught here, waiting, between the factory wall and the idling vehicles.
He stands at the first row: three grey trucks either side of him, ranked across the mud. All have their tailgates open, their ramps down, ready to receive their cargo, and the narrow gaps between them form a series of passages for the Jews to be passed down. Rat runs, Taras told him, as they pulled on their boots and tunics in the barrack room.
All the barrack talk this morning was of the round-up: who saw what, and how many Jews were taken. All the pitiful zhyds; the sorry sight they made; especially those that came to line up at the factory, so dutiful, like the SS told them. Those Germans. Only those bastards could do this. Round up all the Jew
s in the district, in their tens and hundreds, and decide they can be rid of them.
“So? Better a bastard than pitiful.”
That was Taras.
“Better to be a bastard, any day.”
Most agreed with him: Better them than us. Mykola thinks it is best to get this over with, and so he shifts, waiting on the hip flask’s return; the burn is in his belly now, empty of breakfast, and his chest is tight again—all this waiting is making it worse.
Over his shoulder, he watches the policemen passing up and down the nearest of the passageways, talking to the drivers, making last checks. Myko has been watching them make ready, off and on, ever since he took up his position here, and he has been trying to guess at how many vehicles. But the rat runs are too narrow: all he sees is that there are more trucks behind this first row.
Taras has been back there: he says there’s a muddy space at the centre, and that the SS have left it clear of vehicles for the Jews to be gathered and counted—they want to be sure they really have got all of them. But more trucks are lined up beyond that; at least another row of them. Myko thinks there must be trucks parked as far as the scrubland, where the labourers stopped clearing. But from where he has been posted this morning, all he sees is the grey of rain on the way, and glimpses of cab roof and tarpaulin as the last few trucks are driven into position back there. If the barrack talkers have it right, there are upwards of four hundred Jews to drive between the vehicles. Jews and their suitcases and children.
“You’ll soon see how the Germans do this.”
Taras is on his feet now beside him.
“The Germans have been doing this in all the districts.”
His face is still creased with sleep, but he is wound just as tight as the rest of them, Mykola can see that.
The stubs are all smoked, so Taras climbs onto the ramp beside the policeman, to gain a better vantage. He stands with his feet at Mykola’s elbow, craning his neck, looking behind himself, first at the rain clouds and the rows and rows of vehicles, then turning to look over the factory wall before them.
“Can you see them yet?” Myko asks.
Taras shrugs, spitting into the mud. Their trucks are parked twenty metres, more, from the factory, so he won’t be able to see into the yard; if there are any waiting there. He’s tired of waiting too, Myko thinks. Maybe even the Jews will be.
“Drink, boys,” the policeman tells them. “Drink, then be ready for them.”
He gestures for his bottle to be taken, to be passed onwards. Older than they are, his face gives nothing away, but even he is watching the factory doorway. On the ramp of the next truck stands another, a sergeant this time, but with the same guarded look about him. Swallowing his mouthful, Myko steps over to reach the bottle up to this next man, and he thinks it might be the same one who woke them from their bunks, even before the dawn came.
“Get up now. Up now. The Sturmbannführer wants this done swiftly.” The sergeant had rapped his truncheon on the bed-frames as he passed through the barrack room. “We will make this swift, for all concerned.”
That’s what the Sturmbannführer told them too, when he spoke to all of them: SS and Wehrmacht, police and auxiliaries, all were mustered on the cleared ground this morning. Mykola was pressed at the back with the others from his bunk room, the last to fall in, but he could still make out the Sturmbannführer through the massed heads in front of him. Mykola had seen the man before, driven through the town, driven through the district, conducting inspections, but he’d never heard him, so he found himself listening.
He did not shout, the officer spoke, so there had to be hush to hear him. And when that quiet fell, it held them all—Mykola felt it. He could even see it in the soldiers, that great throng of them, all keyed-up and leaning in to hear the man’s intention; and it was the same with the policemen. The officer spoke in German, and mainly to his own men, but Mykola found himself leaning in to heed the man. Despite the chill out there, and his too rude and recent waking, Myko listened although he couldn’t understand even half the words spoken.
He got his orders from the translators afterwards.
The SS at the door will bring the Jews out to them, a few at a time—a dozen at a time, they said—and he and the other auxiliaries are to wait at the ramps to receive them. Take the luggage and keep them moving. These first vehicles are for their cases and bundles, and police auxiliaries have been posted at each of the trucks in this first row to do the same thing; all of them from Myko’s barrack room.
“You will work fast,” the translators told them. “This is best. You understand?” Myko nodded; all the others also.
Now Myko holds out the bottle to the sergeant on the truck beside his, but the man doesn’t take it; he holds up his own one in answer. Have all of them been issued with a flask this morning?
The sergeant speaks, like he’s raising a toast: “The sooner this is started, the sooner it will be over.”
And then Taras kicks at his elbow, and Myko looks to the factory.
“See them?”
The first to come are few and grey-haired; a small and old group, slow and stooped on the wide mud with their bundles. The police and auxiliaries watch from the trucks in silence as these first Jews look about themselves.
Trapped inside for so long, the old people squint in the daylight, weak as it is, winter’s grey-pale light. They peer at the muddy ground, and the rain clouds, and the ranks of vehicles; and there is a second or two of quiet and uncertainty. But Mykola thinks even the Jews want this to be swift now, because once they see the ramps are down and ready for them, they lift their cases, shouldering their bundles: they start making for the vehicles.
No sooner are they moving than the SS run at them.
They peel off from the wall, running hard to set the small group moving faster. This dark and sudden sweep of them has Mykola blinking, pulling the bottle from his lips and wincing as he swallows his mouthful.
“Marsch! Marsch ihr Juden!”
The drink burns, and the SS are shouting.
“Schnell hier!”
“See what I told you?” Taras’s voice is above him. “See how they make the rats run now.”
Myko can barely hear for the noise of the engines, but he can see how the SS have their mouths pulled wide, faces pushed close to the old men to hound them. And how the men put their heads down, clutching their bags and cases, running as best they can across the ruts in the churned earth.
“We’re first.”
The policeman swears as the group is pressed towards them. Pocketing his bottle, shoving Taras down the ramp, he says: “Be ready. Be ready for them.”
The group are close enough now for Myko to see their faces, crumpled and blinking; their old hands clasped to their cases. One stumbles and falls; another is bent forward, leaning on the shoulders of the man beside him. Bare-headed, a bruised man, his frock coat torn, this bent one limps hurriedly, half carried by his helper. The group struggle on across the mud like this, until the SS bring them to a halt at the truck mouth where Myko is standing; and then all the Jews search the truck backs, anxious—quickly, quickly—as though all they want is somewhere to climb inside.
“Mach schon!” The SS give the order.
“Lass sie liegen!” They are told to drop their bags and leave them.
Perhaps it is the German, or the harrying, or perhaps no one told the zhyds this beforehand, but these first few clasp their bundles ever closer, and they look open-mouthed, uncomprehending, from the soldiers who order them to the waiting policemen. They are to drop their belongings here?
“Leave them and move on.” The policeman calls down to them in Ukrainian. “These first trucks are for your bags. Your bags and cases only.”
These were the orders. Still the men are slow to make sense of this, and they look to the auxiliaries: to Mykola on the mud beside them.
“So it is the next trucks that will take us?” one asks, halting. Dark-eyed, dark-bearded, bent under the weight of the
bruised man, he speaks like a townsman. He is not as old as the rest, but his gaze is just as anxious behind his glasses.
“No one told us,” this town Jew says.
Under one arm he clutches a briefcase, with the other he gestures to the bruises, the half-closed eyes of the old man he is holding; and then, glancing between the first trucks to the next row, he asks: “Must we go far still?”
But Mykola can’t answer. He was told: no delays, no talking. Taras is throwing bundles, and already the SS are calling.
“Nimm die Koffer ab!” They tell Mykola to get a move on. “Du, Junge. Mach schon!”
“You go now,” he mutters to the asking Jew, pointing him between the truck sides as he bends to throw more cases; he was told to throw the luggage swiftly, to keep things moving. But still the asking man stares at him.
“Move on!”
Mykola shouts now, to be heard above the engines, and he makes a grab for the asking man’s briefcase: he has more bags from this first lot of Jews to deal with, and already the next lot is being sent out.
“Just go, you hear me? Get moving!”
His throat burns with the noise he makes, not just with the drink now, and Myko glances to the new group already emerging from the factory doorway—can the man not see them?
“This is how it’s done, see?”
But the man has no chance to respond. He is shoved, hard and abrupt, away from Mykola by the sergeant; the policeman jumps down from the ramp and slams into him with his shoulder, twice, three times, forcing him to move along.
The asking man has to drop his case, reeling, to keep himself upright under this onslaught; to hold his injured friend also, grabbing him by the jacket sleeve.
A Boy in Winter Page 13