‘Anything?’ My voice was almost lost to the wind when I called out. I looked back to see Viktor standing with a corner of the tarpaulin in his fingers, lifted so he could look beneath.
Viktor spoke without turning in my direction, his shrouded face angled down towards what was concealed beneath the waterproof covering. His voice was muffled. ‘I think you should see this.’
I released my grip on the stranger and went over, stopping as soon as I saw the children lying on the sled. Immediately I looked away, lifting my eyes to the barren trees. But I didn’t see the black branches. Instead I saw the image of the children fixed in my mind, as if they had been burned into my thoughts. It had been a long time since I had seen anything like it, and it probed at my darkest memories like the tip of a hot needle.
I took a deep breath and hardened myself, prepared myself to look once more. And when I was ready, I turned back to them.
The boy’s hair was as black as the winter night that moved through the trees, and his head was turned so that, were he alive, he would have been looking to the right side of the sled. But this boy saw nothing because his eyes were dry and dead and stared at only whatever comes after death.
Accompanying him on the sled was a girl. Her hair was long, frozen hard against her face and neck so her features were less visible. She was lying on her back, staring wide-eyed through the stiff strands of tangled hair. Her small, undernourished body was naked and pale, and I estimated she was no more than ten or eleven years old, just a few years older than my own daughter. There was a long and wide laceration from the top of her thigh to just above the knee. From one side to the other. The whole of the front of her thigh had been removed so the white of the bone was visible.
I had seen many wounds, but few like this. Wars did not fashion violence in this way. I was accustomed to the ragged shredding of explosions and the punctured flesh left by bullets, but these cuts were clean. Precise. And whenever I had seen injuries like these, they had been made with much darker intent than that of soldiers fighting soldiers.
‘Papa?’ Viktor’s voice cut into my thoughts. ‘What happened to them?’
I glanced at my son and shook my head.
‘So what do we do?’
I went back to the man lying in the snow and crouched beside him, staring down into his face, wondering who he was and why he had come here. ‘This man is dying,’ I said. ‘He needs our help. We should get him back.’
‘You mean take him back to the village? Is that safe? He might—’
‘If we leave him here he’ll die. Do you want that?’
‘And what about them?’ Viktor inclined his head towards the children. ‘What do we do with them?’
‘We take them with us.’
Together, we pulled the man aboard the sled, mindful of the terrible cargo hidden beneath the tarpaulin. I hitched the reins around my waist and leaned my weight forward as we began the trek home. Soon my legs were burning with fatigue. I wasn’t getting younger, and my muscles were weakened by age and circumstance. I had lived just less than half a century and my bones and muscles were feeling the strain of the wear I’d forced on them.
Once we peaked the summit of the low hill, we could see Vyriv nestling in the shallow valley below, and as we began to descend, we saw smoke trailing and could already feel the warmth and the light the homes held within.
We moved into the village of only twenty or so buildings, many of which were now unoccupied. Some people had left because they couldn’t cope with the hardship, thinking life would be better in the cities, and some had moved on to Karkhiv or Kiev, others hoping to enter Russia. And there were those who had gone west, looking for Poland, going back to the place where I had fought not fifteen years ago when General Brusilov led the Russian army into disaster in Galicia. But now the country was being closed off. There was no way out.
Last year the government introduced collectivisation, and defined the kulak. The use of labour, ownership, the sale of surplus goods – these were all signs of a kulak. Any man who could afford to feed himself and his family was to give his property over to the state, and when people resisted in numbers, Stalin declared war on us and his great machine swept across the country, liquidating, collectivising and appropriating. Homes and possessions and people all now belonged to the state, leaving only three fates for the kulak – death, deportation or the labour camp.
It was as if we were simply waiting for execution or the march to the trains. We lived in constant fear of the soldiers’ arrival; of being forced into wagons and taken north to Siberia, south to Kazakhstan, packed so tight our feet wouldn’t touch the wooden floor. And already there were signs of hunger like there had been before the famine of 1921.
For those of us who still lived in Vyriv, there was nothing left but a slim hope of survival; a small chance to avoid starvation if we kept our heads bowed and remained there, unnoticed in the valley for as long as possible.
‘What do you think?’ asked Viktor as we walked. ‘Where’s he from? I mean, there’s nobody close. Uroz is the closest and that’s more than a day’s walk in this weather. And what do you think happened to them?’ He looked over at the shape of the tarpaulin. A range of hills in miniature, hiding something unspeakable beneath. ‘You think some kind of animal did that?’
‘Some kind.’ I kept my head down, staring at the ground beneath my feet.
‘Wolves?’
‘No.’
Viktor sighed, his broad shoulders rising high as he drew air into his lungs. ‘You think a person did it, don’t you? I’m old enough to know the truth.’
I lifted my head and stared at my son, and Viktor stared back as my equal. Viktor was wilful and determined, like me. He had inherited my obstinacy and, as he grew older, he was learning to apply it. ‘Yes, I think the wounds are man-made.’
‘It looks… well, it looks like an animal.’
‘That was no animal. The cuts are too clean.’
‘No. I mean it looks like when you butcher an animal. When you take off the meat.’
‘I’ve seen something like this before.’ I swallowed hard. ‘There are people,’ I said. ‘Desperate people who’ll do anything to survive. Hungry people. There were times – during the wars and the famine – when people would eat whatever they could. And there are bad people too, Viktor; people who’ve forgotten what it is to be human.’
Viktor shook his head and ran a hand across his mouth. ‘You think that man did that so he could…?’
‘I don’t know. Him, someone else, I don’t know.’
‘But they’re children. Is it safe to take him with us? What do you—’
‘I don’t know,’ I cut him short. ‘Wait until he can tell us himself.’
3
The heart of the village was a circular area now covered with snow that had drifted into the shallow valley on a bitter wind. And in the centre an oak stood old and hard and dark, unclothed for the winter. I had no idea what this village elder had witnessed through the years of war and revolution, but I knew this small collection of houses, close to nowhere, had seen little of the bloodshed. The fighting on the eastern front had been far enough from here, and the revolution had happened in another world. The civil war had ridden past Vyriv, not noticing the tiny village crouched in the dip of the land. I had passed it myself without realising; marching down to the Crimea, the Black Army advancing to defeat another that called itself White. Even the famine of ten years ago had barely managed to rake its fingers across this small village. It was as if God turned the heads of men who passed it, so they looked away to the horizon. But the clouds were darkening now, and our great leader had dispatched his eyes and his ears to scour the land, and perhaps even God wouldn’t be able to blind those eyes.