The first rays of sunlight glimmered faintly on the tracks. A moment later, the world around them ignited into a million coppery fragments as tiny stones out in the fields beyond, puddles of dirty water and even the powdery condensation of their breath caught the fireball’s reflection.
‘What’s that?’ asked Kirov, pointing up ahead.
Pekkala squinted at some strange, segmented creature, leaning up against one of the telegraph poles which ran beside the tracks. As he looked, it seemed to move, bowing out slightly in the centre and then settling back into its original shape. ‘Whatever it is,’ he whispered, ‘I think it is alive.’
Just then they heard a voice, calling out faintly across the empty fields.
At first, the two men could not even tell its source.
Then it came again, and they realised it was coming from the creature by the telegraph pole.
It was calling for help.
Without a moment’s consultation, the two men set off running, unsure what they would find but drawn by the exhausted terror in that voice.
Not until they were standing practically in front of it did they fully understand what they were seeing.
A man had been hanged by a rope from one of the crooked spikes used by linemen for climbing to the wires above. But his life had been saved by a boy, who had placed himself beneath the man’s feet so that the victim’s neck did not bear the full weight of the noose.
It looked as they had been there all night, or even longer.
The man’s hands had been tied behind his back. He wore heavy wool trousers and thick-soled boots, but only a flannel shirt above the waist. If he’d ever had a coat, it had been taken from him. Even though he was not dead, the noose had tightened on his throat and he was half-choked, breathing in short gasps like a fish pulled up on to a river bank.
The boy was tall and skinny, with a thick crop of ginger-red hair cow-licked vertically at the front. What strength he had was almost gone, and fatigue had made his pale skin almost translucent. His white-knuckled hands gripped the man’s trouser legs in an attempt to hold him steady.
While Kirov climbed the pole to cut him down, Pekkala took the boy’s place, settling the man’s boots upon his own shoulders and feeling the sharp heel irons dig into the flesh above his collarbone.
Carefully, they lowered the man to the ground, cut the rope from around his neck and propped him up against the dirty rails to let him breathe.
The boy sat down on the ground and stared at the men, too tired even to thank them except with the expression in his eyes.
‘Who did this?’ asked Pekkala. He had learned to speak German while at school in Finland, but his grammar was clumsy and the words crackled strangely in his mouth, as if he were chewing on bones.
‘Feldgendarmerie,’ replied the boy. Field Police.
Even back in Moscow, Pekkala had heard of these roving bands of soldiers, who rounded up anyone whom they suspected of desertion, or failure to place themselves in harm’s way. The execution of these stragglers was summary and swift. Their bodies, sometimes bearing placards on which their supposed crimes were listed, dangled from piano-wire nooses all across the shrinking territory of the Reich.
‘My son,’ said the hanged man, when he was finally able to talk. He gestured at the boy.
Pekkala wondered what charges had been laid against the man, who was not wearing military uniform, and by what stroke of fortune his son had been around to save him from the improvised gallows of the Feldgendarmerie. ‘Where are they now?’ he asked. ‘These Field Police?’
The man shook his head. He did not know. He brushed his hand towards the north to show in which direction they had gone.
‘And to Berlin?’ asked Pekkala.
With one trembling hand, the wrist rubbed raw by the wire with which it had been bound, the man reached out and pointed down the tracks. ‘But do not go,’ he told them. ‘In Berlin there is nothing but death and, when the Russians arrive, even death will not be enough to describe it.’
‘We must go there,’ replied Pekkala. He wished he could explain what must have seemed an act of total madness. Instead, he only muttered, ‘I’m afraid we have no choice.’
Neither the man nor his son asked any questions, but both seemed anxious to repay them for their kindness. Motioning for the two men to follow, they pointed across the field towards a grove of sycamore trees, on which the reddening buds glowed like a haze in the morning sunlight. Almost hidden in amongst the branches was a small brick chimney rising from a roof of grey slates patched with luminous green moss.
‘That is where we live,’ explained the boy.
‘We are grateful,’ said Pekkala, ‘but we must be moving on.’
‘If you want to reach your destination,’ warned the father, ‘then you should wait until the danger has passed. The Field Police barracks is on the outskirts of the city and they usually head back well before sunset. By mid-afternoon, it should be safe to travel. Then you can enter Berlin after dark.’
Pekkala hesitated, knowing he should take the man’s advice but so anxious to press on towards Berlin that his instincts faltered as they balanced the need against the risk.
‘We have food,’ said the boy. Knowing that only one of the men could understand what he was saying, he motioned with his hand to his mouth.
Kirov had been trying without success to follow the conversation between Pekkala and the half-hanged man. But he understood the gesture perfectly. He touched Pekkala on the arm and raised his eyebrows in a question, knowing that he could not speak without giving away the fact that he was Russian.
Feeling the touch against his arm, Pekkala glanced at the major. The reminder that he was responsible, not only for what might happen to himself but to them both, returned him abruptly to his senses. Pekkala gestured towards the house in the distance. ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly.
Without another word, the four of them set off across the field.
At the edge of the woods, the ground sloped away sharply, revealing a small farmstead tucked away in a hollow.
A dog was sprawled dead outside the farmhouse door. It had been shot several times and its blood had leaked out into the mud on which it lay.
Ringing the small farmyard were racks of small cages, the doors of which were open.
‘Fasane,’ said the father, gesturing at the cages. Pheasants.
The father fluttered his fingers, to show they had all flown away. ‘I let them go,’ he explained. His voice was still hoarse and the chafing of the noose had rubbed a bloody groove beneath his chin.
‘But why?’ asked Pekkala.
The father shrugged, as if he wasn’t even sure himself. ‘So that they would have a chance,’ he said. And then he went on to describe how the band of military police had spotted the birds as they took to the air and had come to investigate. The first thing they did was shoot the farmer’s dog after it growled at them. Then, finding that the farmer had released the birds, which might otherwise have fed the hungry soldiers, they accused him of treason and immediately condemned him to death. At gunpoint they had marched him out across the field until they came to the telegraph poles. When they brought out the rope, he asked them why they had not hanged him from a tree by his own house. They told him it was so that people passing on the tracks could see his body, and think twice before they, too, betrayed their country. They tied a noose and hauled him up to hang him slowly, rather than breaking his neck with a drop.
Unknown to the military police, the boy had followed them.
As soon as the soldiers had departed, the boy rushed in and set his shoulders underneath the father’s feet. And they stood there through the night, waiting for someone to help.
The boy fetched a shovel from the back of the house in order to bury the dog. Kirov went with him, to share in the burden of digging, while the father brought Pekkala into the barn. There, he opened up a horse stall, in which something had been hidden underneath an old grey tarpaulin. The man pulled back the oil-stained canvas, revealing two bicycles.