Two men got out and clumped toward the dining hall. It was early in the morning. People were still spooning up kasha, drinking glasses of tea, and smoking their first cigarettes. Like Ihor, the rest of the kolkhozniks eyed one another in apprehension when the badly tuned engine stopped so close by.
As soon as Ihor saw the men, he knew they had to belong to the MGB. The Chekists didn’t just mean trouble. They meant disaster for whomever their gaze fell upon. These fellows wore gray suits that fit their lumpy bodies none too well. One had a red tie, the other a black. Fedoras sat at a challenging angle on their bullet heads.
They eyed the kolkhozniks in the dining hall the way Ihor would have eyed a chicken he was about to take to the chopping block. “We’re here to bring two men into the service of the glorious, ever-victorious Red Army of the Soviet Union,” the one with the red tie announced. He spoke Russian, of course. To expect a Chekist, even a Chekist born in Kiev, to use Ukrainian would have been to expect the sun to rise in the west. He figured the nervous people in front of him would be able to understand…and he was right. Nodding to his partner, he said, “Read the names, Vanya.”
“I’ll do it,” the one with the black tie-Vanya-said. He fumbled in an inside pocket that held the paper with those names. The fumbling showed he had a shoulder holster, though the bulge under his left arm, and under his boss’, had already warned of that. He unfolded the paper. “First name is Gavrysh, Bogdan Stepanovich.” In his mouth, too, Ukrainian h’s turned to Russian g’s.
Bohdan stared in horror. He always made noises that marked him as a patriotic man. He’d fought against the Nazis, and must have thought the government would keep leaving him alone this time around.
“Come on,” said the MGB man with the red tie-the one who wasn’t Vanya. “Do you serve the Soviet Union or don’t you?”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Bohdan choked out. Any other answer would have sent him to the gulags instead of the Red Army, or maybe into the Red Army after a beating that should have earned him a medical exemption.
His wife put her head down and covered her face with her hands. Elizaveta was shocked, and well she might be. Ihor guessed it wouldn’t be more than a couple of weeks before she decided she was at least as well off without him. Ihor didn’t know Bohdan was as big a gasbag in private as in public, but it sure seemed likely to him.
Miserably, the kolkhoznik got up and walked over to the two MGB men. The one with the red tie nodded to Vanya. “The other whore, and then we’ll be on our way.” He sounded as if getting out of here was his fondest wish. He also sounded like a zek, dropping mat’ into his talk without noticing he was doing it.
“The other one. Right.” Vanya peered down at the paper again. “Shevchenko, Igor Semyonovich.”
Anya shrieked, then clapped both hands to her mouth. Ihor felt as if someone had slapped him in the face with a meter-long salmon. “You can’t do that!” he said automatically.
Tovarishch Red Tie glowered at him. With the Chekist’s ugly, badly shaved mug, it was a good glower. “No, huh?” he growled. His voice wasn’t deep enough for a truly scary growl, but he did his best with what he had. “You want to find out what we can do and what we can’t, prick?”
“But…But…But…” Ihor unstuck himself. He got to his feet, stepped away from the table-and from his wife-and pulled up his trouser leg to show his scars. “One of your people was here not too long ago. He looked at the leg, and he said the wound was too bad for the Army to take me back.”
“Well, I’m here now, and I’m telling you something fucking else,” the MGB man said. “Get over here with What’s-his-face if you know what’s good for you. You want to get cute, we’ll teach you more about cute than you ever wanted to find out.”
They would, too. And they’d enjoy themselves while they were doing it. Nobody here would lift a finger to save him. If the collective farm rebelled, the Chekists would take a couple of T-34s out of storage-maybe not even the new ones, but the originals with the two-man turret and the smaller gun-and level the place to the ground. They’d shoot the men right away. They’d have their fun with the women, then shoot them, too. All the kolkhozniks knew as much. Ihor could see the sick certainty in their eyes. He was sure they could also see it in his.
He limped over to the Chekists. “Cut the playacting, cuntface,” the one with the red tie said. “Won’t do you no good.”
“It isn’t playacting. It’s how I walk. But…” Ihor drew himself to stiff attention. It wasn’t as if he’d forgotten how. “I serve the Soviet Union!” As well as I can, he added, but only to himself.
“Let’s go,” Red Tie said. Go they did. Ihor looked back over his shoulder once, but only once. Seeing Anya wailing like that made him feel worse, not better.
He and Bohdan got into the Gaz’s back seat. Vanya slammed the door closed behind them. That was when Ihor discovered the rear doors had no latches on the inside. He also discovered that a grill of steel mesh separated the passengers in the back seat from the ones up front.
Vanya drove. Tovarishch Red Tie-Ihor still didn’t know his name-sat on the passenger side and took it easy. “We drop off these dingleberries, then head out to the next worthless fucking dump,” he said.
“That’s about the size of it,” Vanya agreed. “Shitty goddamn job, but somebody’s gotta do it.”
“Hey, we serve the Soviet Union, too,” the other Chekist said. “How are we gonna whip the imperialists without soldiers, huh? Gotta find ’em somewhere. These cunts ain’t much, but they’re better’n nothin’.”
They drove down to Vasilkov, south of Kiev. It had been a small, sleepy town. Now it was bustling: it had taken over many of the functions Kiev had performed till it was visited by hell on earth. The place put Ihor in mind of a four-year-old in a two-year-old’s clothes-it was too big for its britches.
The Gaz stopped in front of a Red Army recruiting station. “We’ll take you inside,” Red Tie told Ihor and Bohdan. “Don’t want anything getting fucked up, the way it could if we just leave you on the sidewalk.” Don’t want you bugging out-Ihor had no trouble reading between the lines.
A sergeant with a patch where his left eye should have been and scars all over that side of his face waved to the MGB men as if they were old friends. They probably were. “Well, what kind of ravens’ meat have you got for me this time?” he called.
“Ravens’ meat? These are veterans! Good, solid men.” Red Tie sounded insulted.
“They’re veterans, are they?” The sergeant’s glower put the Chekist’s to shame, but he had unfair advantages in frightfulness. “You pussies fought the Hitlerites?”
“Yes, Comrade Sergeant,” Ihor and Bohdan said together.
“Then we don’t even have to waste time with the oath. You swore it the last time, and it still holds.” The cyclops sergeant jabbed a thumb at a doorway behind him. “Go through there. They’ll do your paperwork and kit you out. This time tomorrow, you’ll be on a train heading west. Something to look forward to, hey?”
Ihor looked forward only to going home to Anya. All he wanted to do was stay alive. Now if only the state cared a kopek for what he wanted!
When Aaron Finch came to the door, Ruth opened it with the oddest expression on her face. After he kissed her, he asked, “Okay, what’s Leon gone and done?” That was the likeliest thing he could think of to make her wear such a bemused look.
“Leon didn’t do anything,” Ruth said. As if to contradict her, Aaron got attacked by a toddling tornado in a cowboy outfit. Leon hadn’t seen him all day. When you’d just turned two, that was a decent chunk of your lifespan.
Once the tickling and rough-housing and other greetings were out of the way, Aaron asked, “Nu? What is going on then?” He was positive something had to be.