The night was drenchingly hot in the village of Shepilovka and, when he awoke, Benya found himself a prisoner in one of the village stables that had been converted into makeshift cells. The bars to his cell were nailed crooked and he thought of escape, but he was afraid to move, too broken. His terrified mind jerked from thought to thought: his shoulder was hurting, his shirt sopping wet with blood, and it had been hours since he had eaten or drunk a thing.
He could see through the bars that the flags in the village were at half-mast and the bodies swayed on the makeshift gallows in the courtyard. He couldn’t tell who they were. Death just wiped their personality as a rag wipes letters off a blackboard. Perhaps they were the lucky ones, thought Benya.
But Mandryka was dead. They had got him! He had heard the music, a discordant village band, out-of-tune trumpets and balalaikas, playing a death march. This had been followed by volley after volley of gunfire as Mandryka’s men let off their guns in salute for their fallen chieftain, and the beginnings of a drunken wake, accompanied by the breathy notes of an accordion. Benya listened to the songs – he knew some of them: ‘Black Crow’, ‘Volga-Volga’. As speeches were made, and more volleys fired, he sensed a spasm of a grotesque and truly terrifying spirit abroad, made up of military ritual and peasant drunkenness and the lairy cruelty of this black-hearted time. He waited for what would happen next. He was bleeding from his shoulder; the pain made him sweat, the shivers came in gusts, and he guessed he would die. If it happens, at least be calm, he told himself, don’t beg, don’t shriek, don’t wet yourself, but then he knew he would do all those things, and anything, anything, to survive, and the hysteria made him shudder. We killed Mandryka, he told himself, at least we achieved something – and he remembered Melishko saying, ‘Maybe we’ll do something to make our families proud – even if they never know it.’
But Melishko also had said, ‘You can’t get me,’ and they had got him.
The party is over, and the shouting suddenly gets nearer. Mandryka’s men are pouring into the courtyard and taking out the prisoners. They are now so close, Benya can hear their breath, the chink of keys, locks grinding, and the breathless panting of excited, drunk men. Benya waits his turn. Then the door is opening and they seize him under the arms and toss him out into the courtyard, Russians, Cossacks and Ukrainians, all babbling at once, hard men, peasants and farm-boys, villagers and flotsam. They are kicking him and beating him with whips. There’s just a roil of bodies and Benya can’t focus. The band has started up again, somewhere else in the village, and some of the men are dancing, weaving in and out, singing to themselves, and a shirtless old Cossack is playing an accordion. One group are trying to hang a man from the gallows but the rope keeps breaking and the man swings back and forth like a macabre pendulum. Some of Mandryka’s men – yes, he can see his former comrade Ogloblin amongst them – have a man on the ground and others – there are Bap and Delibash – are less focused, and are staggering from one scene to another, coming in for a kick. The orders are being barked out in a hoarse feminine voice that he recognizes and then he sees her: it is Tonya, in a German grey tunic with a Schmeisser on her shoulder, the long flat face with its smudged gaze, her almost invisible eyebrows and reddish eyelashes, and her fat legs are clad in fancy stockings and riding boots. Everyone is sweating alcohol, he can smell it, and garlic and peppers.
Tonya wipes her forehead on her cuff. ‘Cut the nettles!’ she says to the men. ‘Make them feel it.’ They enjoy following her orders, these hard, angry men. They are joking about her: ‘Smertina’ – the Death Woman – ‘cooks spicy dishes, the bitch!’ they say, but they obey.
‘Yes, nurse, if you say so, nurse!’ cackles one, swinging his whip.
‘We can’t deny you, Mama,’ gasps the shirtless Cossack, who drops the accordion, which gives out a few breathy notes, and bends over a man who’s lying on the sand.
‘Are the horses well shod?’ she says.
‘I’m seeing to that, Mama!’ It is the voice of Tufty Grishchuk, the farrier who’s shod Silver Socks so many times. Drunk and husky, he wears his leather apron over a grey tunic.
Tonya sees Benya suddenly, and she darts at him, her quirt striking him across the face. The sting brings tears, but he stares right into her eyes, her sleepy eyes, always so bored. But now they shake him to his bones. Now her eyes are greedy with that freak lust he himself recognizes. Tonya has been recast and then unleashed.
She smiles as she never did all the months he knew her, a smile stained in the brightest pink lipstick, and before he knows it, she’s struck him again with the butt of her gun, so hard that he falls through the grip of his handlers and finds himself on the ground. From this boot-level vantage, he sees across the yard to where a crowd has gathered.
He can’t fathom it at first. They’re holding one of the Shtrafniki, young fair-haired Geft, who’s lightly wounded, and Grishchuk, the farrier in his leather apron, is laying out his tools, asking his assistant, Delibash, for them one by one: ‘Clinchers!’ ‘Hoof knife!’ ‘Nippers!’ ‘Shoe!’ ‘Nails!’ and finally with relish: ‘Hammer!’
The group leans over to see more, jostling each other but, at the same time, straining to hold someone still.
‘He’s not saying a word!’
‘Now we’ll hear him!’ Benya has a sudden view of Grishchuk as he hammers in the nails. ‘Giddy up, horsey!’ he shouts. Inhuman shrieks of pain and intoxicated guffaws. And there is Geft on all fours, the horseshoes nailed to his hands and feet.
Benya is shaking his head over and over: such things can scarcely be absorbed.
He crawls away, the whip falling on his back, and finds Captain Zhurko right there, in his underwear, and he is bleeding from the face. Benya sees he has no eyelids. This is fine work for the nurse with the balletic fingers, and he knows instantly that it is Tonya’s special gift to the captain who had never noticed her. Benya and Zhurko look at each other but can Zhurko see him without his spectacles? ‘It’s me, Golden,’ says Benya.
‘Golden, my wife, my son…’ he starts. He wants Benya to tell his son something but his voice trails away.
‘Yes, of course I will,’ says Benya, thinking: Neither of us will get out of this. Then Zhurko is pulled out of his reach. The men are seizing the others, dragging them all up and standing them against the wall.
‘I’ll cut the nettles,’ Tonya says, and Benya sees the sub-machine gun on her shoulder.
‘Let’s see how Mama cuts the nettles,’ cries Delibash.
‘Line ’em up,’ she says. They pick up Benya. ‘Not him. But him and him. Line them up!’
‘Can nurses shoot? I’ll wager not…’ says one of the men, daring her.
This ‘cutting of nettles’ is the mantra of the night, it seems. Tonya lets rip with the gun. It’s deafening. Burst after burst.
And then he sees they have Nyushka, Jaba’s Bunny, the other nurse. Tonya’s distracted by this girl whom she knew so well. ‘Take the slut, she wants it, she’s yours!’ she calls to the men. Nyushka, whom Benya himself admired, the sweet-hearted one who slept with Jaba, who believed so strongly in the Great Stalin and that the Party was always right – how Tonya must have hated her in their shared room. He hears the ripping of cloth, Nyushka’s shrieks, the grunts of men, and Nyushka lets it happen, and afterwards she lies as they leave her, exhausted, her limbs awry.
‘Look, it’s the writer!’ Benya is kicked again, hard. The boot catches his shoulder where he’s already wounded and the pain is so overwhelming, he blacks out. Back in his stable, he hears the volleys of machine-gun fire. The presentiment of death is clear – and he welcomes it. Now let me die, he prays. He has done all he can. Mandryka is dead but Kapto…