There was little to speak of in the basket. A small piece of sausage wrapped in cloth. A knife, a handful of cartridges of different calibres, and a heavy revolver. I opened the revolver and pulled out a single spent cartridge, turning it over in my fingers before replacing it with a fresh one. I set the revolver back in the basket and put it down, turning my attention to the pistol that had been on the sled.
Once again I took the German pistol from its wooden case, but this time I set the case on the floor and checked the weapon. It was in good condition, and when I drew back the slide I could see it was loaded. I ran a fingertip around the red number nine and remembered how I had looked into the barrel of a similar weapon, in the days after we were betrayed by the Red Army.
In those days everything was tainted with one colour or another. Black, red, white, green. Every army gave itself a colour, as if they were teams preparing to meet for some purpose other than to murder each other. With the anarchist Black Army under Nestor Makhno, I had fought hard against General Wrangel’s White Army, eventually joining forces with the Red Army that I’d deserted just a few months before. In 1920, with our tenuous bond holding, the cavalry and infantry of the two armies pursued Wrangel south through Ukraine to the Crimea, but after our combined victory that winter, the Red Army renounced its agreement and broke the weak alliance between black and red. The communists were ruthless in their treatment, more so of those of us who’d once been among their number, and the palette was washed clean. The only colour that remained was red, and few of my brothers in arms escaped the executions.
Just days after Wrangel fled, Bolshevik communications were intercepted: orders for all members of Makhno’s organisation to be arrested. All staff and subordinate commanders were apprehended and executed. Makhno escaped, taking his soldiers, fleeing north into Ukraine and then disbanding, heading west for the places Lenin had signed over to the Polish.
I was with a small group of men who, like me, had no intention of leaving Ukraine. Natalia and I first met in my home town of Moscow, but she was from Ukraine, and when the war with Germany began, she returned to the village of Vyriv to raise our sons. So that’s where I intended to go – I had a wife and children I hardly knew and I wanted to make a new life with my family.
I and a few stragglers shed any sign of allegiance and headed north, hoping to find provisions in villages along the way, but at one settlement a small unit of Red Army soldiers had already been to requisition grain and food. The villagers had protested so the communists retaliated by burning them out of their homes. As we approached, we saw the smoke from the fires and chose to skirt around the area, but the reds had already left and we ran straight into them.
The communists were fuelled with the destruction and death they’d left behind, and they confronted us without fear. Their commander drew his pistol and nudged his horse forward so he could point it down at me, the barrel close to my face. I was younger and faster in those days. Battle-hardened and fearless. I reached out and took the pistol in my fist before the mounted soldier could fire. I pushed it aside, dragged the soldier from his horse and took the weapon from him. I shot the commander twice, pressing the pistol against his chest, and red and black emptied their weapons at each other until there was silence once more.
Two of my friends were killed in the fight, but when the rest of us left on horseback, taking the communists’ weapons, all five red soldiers lay dead.
Now I rested the pistol in my lap and stared at the flames. The room was filled with flickering orange light, the only sound was the crackling and snapping of the wood. The ticking of a clock.
‘What are you doing?’ Natalia asked, making me blink and rub my eyes.
‘Sitting,’ I said, looking up to see her standing in the doorway. ‘Remembering.’
She came in and eased into the chair opposite.
‘How long were you standing there?’ I asked.
‘Long enough. You going to tell me about it?’
I watched the fire reflected in her eyes. ‘He wasn’t alone. There were two children with him. A boy and a girl. Both dead.’
Natalia put her hands up, cupping them over her mouth and nose, her thumbs sliding under her chin. ‘How?’ Her voice sounded hollow, held in like that.
I tried to find the words but nothing felt right. There was no good way to say what I thought.
Natalia pulled her chair closer and turned it to face me, sitting so our knees were touching. ‘Whatever it is, you can tell me.’
I nodded, thinking it was a hard thing to tell a mother, but I relied on her to help me carry my dark thoughts. She needed to know. ‘The girl had wounds like her flesh had been taken off,’ he said. ‘Like she’d been butchered.’
Natalia knew the stories as well as I did. She hadn’t seen it first hand, but she’d heard that in the famine ten years ago there were those who were so hungry, so deranged, they’d taken to eating their dead.
‘Not now,’ she said. ‘Not any more. People aren’t that desperate.’
I ran a hand across my beard. ‘Do you think a man could find a taste for it?’
Natalia sat back. ‘That’s too horrible to even think about.’
I had seen it before. After we’d fought the small detachment of red soldiers, we’d entered the skeletal village to look for food and survivors. The povolzhye famine was not yet in full swing, but grain requisitions, disruptions to agriculture and drought had squeezed everything from the Volga-Ural region, and disease and starvation was spreading. First the war with the central powers, then the civil war had taken the heart and life from the country and it was beginning to die. People were so hungry that seed grain was eaten before it could be sown. Farm animals had all been butchered, as had dogs, cats, anything that would provide meat. People foraged for whatever sustenance they could find because their cellars and their bellies were empty. They ate rotten potatoes, grass, nettles, bark from the trees. They filled themselves with water, distending their stomachs, swelling their legs, making their eyes bulge and their skin sag. And finally they dropped in the streets with no one strong enough to bury them or take them away. Then came rumours that people had begun to eat their own dead.
I had found evidence in that unnamed village. A place with no more than a few homes scattered around smallholdings which had been ransacked and burned, the charred wood blackened and bleak.
We had checked each home that was still intact, knocking on the doors and going inside to search for food, but we didn’t need to open cupboards because they were already left open to display their emptiness. We looked beneath tables and searched cellars, stepping over the wasted bodies of women and children left to rot. We covered our faces and noses, searching only because we were desperate and because desperate men will do almost anything they have to do to survive. And then I discovered the one thing I would not do.
In one house I found an emaciated man standing by a large pot that boiled on the wood-burning stove. He was like a dead man animated, a corpse dressed in rags. And, at his feet, a naked body with slices of flesh cut from the backs of its legs.
‘Luka.’
‘Hmm?’ Once more Natalia jarred me from my memories. ‘What?’
She drew her arms around herself and stared at the wall. I didn’t know if she was looking to where our children lay asleep or simply trying not to look at the stranger smothered in blankets by the fire. ‘You really think someone might do that when they didn’t have to?’
‘Are there people who like it, you mean? I don’t know. Maybe it’s possible.’