‘Take me to whoever is in charge and I will tell you.’
‘I am in charge!’
‘No,’ said Pekkala. ‘You’re just the person he sent.’
The man hit Pekkala in the face.
Pekkala staggered back and then righted himself. He touched his fingers to his lips. The skin was split. He tasted blood.
‘I should kill you where you stand,’ growled the man.
‘Then you would have to explain why you don’t have the bolt for this gun, or the ammunition you will need to use it.’
‘You have ammunition?’
Pekkala nodded. ‘Enough to have killed you if I’d wanted to.’
‘I’ll do as you ask,’ said the man, ‘but you may well regret what you wish for.’
The shadows closed in around Pekkala, but they were hesitant, as if his nakedness defied the rusted edges of their handmade weaponry.
‘Now!’ screamed the man.
Fumbling, they put a sack over Pekkala’s head and dragged him away through the trees.
For several hours, they steered him through the darkness.
Branches clawed against his shoulders and the soles of his feet were cut by roots and stones. When at last the partisans lifted the sack from Pekkala’s head, they did so gingerly, as if unhooding a falcon.
Pekkala found himself in the middle of a small encampment deep in the forest. His gaze fixed upon two old women, their ankle-length dresses plastered with ashes and mud, huddled around a fire and roasting a dog on a spit. Beside the fire lay a small heap of dented pans and pots, like the emptied shells of river clams. The metal spike squeaked as the dog twisted slowly above the embers, teeth bared in a blackened snarl as if to rage at its misfortune.
Clothing, more filthy and ruined than the rags he had burned in the fire, was dumped at his feet. Shivering at the clammy touch of the cloth, Pekkala struggled into a rough linen shirt with wooden buttons and a pair of wool trousers patched across the seat. The garments reeked of old machorka, its smell like damp leaves in the rain.
‘Give him some food,’ ordered a voice.
Oblivious to the heat, one of the women took hold of the dog’s right rear leg. With a twisting cracking sound, she wrenched it off. Then she walked over to Pekkala, holding out the leg by its charred paw, steam rising from the splayed meat and the shiny white ball of the hip bone at the end.
Pekkala ripped away a mouthful of the scalding flesh. He had forgotten how hungry he was.
The woman stared at him while he ate, eyes glinting in her puckered face. Then she turned around and walked back to the fire.
A man appeared from the darkness. For a long time, he studied Pekkala, keeping to the edge of the light, his face masked in the shadows. ‘I don’t know who you are,’ he said, ‘but the Germans sent hundreds of men to kill you.’
‘That sounds about right,’ said Pekkala.
‘How in the name of God did you manage to survive?’
‘I’d say it was luck,’ he replied.
‘And I’d say it was more than that,’ replied the man, as he stepped from the shadows at last. His face was surprisingly gentle. He had a rounded chin, a thin and patchy beard and thoughtful brown eyes, which he struggled to focus on his prisoner. He is an intellectual, guessed Pekkala. A man who has learned to survive by something other than brute force. Who would have kept himself clean-shaven if only he could have found a razor. A man who has lost his glasses.
As if reading Pekkala’s mind, the man produced a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, one of the temples replaced with a piece of string, looped them over his ears and continued his observation of the stranger. ‘I am Barabanschikov,’ he said.
‘And my name is Pekkala.’
Barabanschikov’s eyes widened. ‘Then it is no wonder they couldn’t find you. You are supposed to be dead!’
Then the darkness just beyond the firelight began to fill with whispers, swirling through the smoky air like the first gust of an approaching storm.
‘You make them nervous,’ observed Barabanschikov.
‘That was never my intention,’ replied Pekkala. ‘If you let me go, I will leave you my rifle, along with the location of the place where I buried the bolt and ammunition. You won’t ever see me again.’
‘That would be a pity.’ The man held up his hand in a gesture of conciliation, his palm glowing in the firelight. ‘I was hoping you might stay here for a while. Any man who can outrun an army might have skills that we’d find useful in the forest.’
A few snowflakes made their way down through the trees.
‘Winter is coming,’ warned Barabanschikov. ‘For a man to take his chances, out there alone in the snow, is the difference between brave and suicidal.’
Pekkala glanced about him at the ragged assembly of men and women. They had the look of death upon them, as if they knew how little time they had left. Although they did not speak, their eyes pleaded with him to stay. ‘I will remain with you until the ice has melted in the spring,’ he said, ‘but then I must be moving on.’
‘Until the ice has melted,’ agreed Barabanschikov.
He stepped forward and the two men shook hands.
‘I might need that rifle, after all,’ remarked Pekkala.
Barabanschikov reached into his coat, withdrew a sawn-off shotgun and handed it to Pekkala. ‘Take this instead. It strikes me that you are a man who does his killing at close range. A rifle is more suitable to those — ’ he jerked his chin towards the men who had brought Pekkala into the camp — ‘who find safety in numbers and distance.’
Humiliated, the men lowered their heads and scowled at the ground.
That was in the early days, when Barabanschikov’s Atrad was not a fighting force, but just a group of terrified and haphazardly armed people who had fled into the forest and were simply trying to stay alive. It was only later that they managed to acquire enough weapons to defend themselves.
Before the war began, the Red Army had not prepared for any kind of partisan activity. Those who had proposed training soldiers in guerrilla tactics on Russian soil, in the event of an invasion, were condemned as being defeatist. Teaching Russian soldiers to fight behind enemy lines assumed that Russia could be successfully attacked, and Red Army generals had assured Stalin that this was impossible. Any officers expressing doubts were shot, with the result that, when German troops poured across the border in the summer of 1941, the Soviet High Command had no idea how to combat the enemy in territory which had been overrun.
That was left to men like Barabanschikov and the hundreds, later thousands, of Red Army stragglers, known as okruzhentsy, who fled into the dense forests of Ukraine. Filling the ranks of these partisan bands were escaped Red Army prisoners of war, and other soldiers who were lucky enough to have avoided the vast encirclements which trapped and then annihilated entire Soviet army groups. Many were civilians, with no military training at all. Barabanschikov himself had been a school teacher in Rovno, before his school was converted into the headquarters of the German Secret Field Police. Together, this assortment of men, women and children began to organise themselves into bands united either by race or politics or simply the need to seek vengeance.
Few of them lasted for long.
In August of 1941, an SS Cavalry Brigade infiltrated the Pripet marshes and killed more than 13,000 partisans at the cost of only two men dead.
In the winter of that year, which was one of the harshest in living memory, most of those who had escaped the massacre either froze or starved to death, because the Red Army had scorched the earth as they retreated, burning homes and crops, killing livestock and poisoning wells. Their aim had been to leave nothing but a wasteland for the enemy, but it also left nothing for those who were just trying to survive. Nor was the landscape the only thing the Red Army devastated in the path of their flight. Mass executions took place in almost every city that would fall into enemy hands. On the orders of Lavrenti Beria, head of NKVD, over 100,000 Soviet civilians were shot as the Red Army decamped from Lvov.