It came as a surprise when Berta pushed open the door and found the place in shambles. There were dirty dishes all over the tables, broken plates on the floor, chairs overturned, and the contents of a soup bowl splattered on the wall. At first Berta didn’t see the little woman slumped in a chair in the back, her clothes stiff with dirt, blending into the chaos. The old woman’s eyes were dull and staring out of the hollows in her skull, her stringy hair framing a vacant face. She sat motionless, her gaze fixed on the crusty bits of dried soup on the wall, her flat chest barely rising and falling.
“What happened here?” whispered Berta.
The old woman didn’t move. She didn’t seem to know that Berta was there.
A younger woman came in through the kitchen door and stopped when she saw Berta crouching beside the proprietress. “We’re closed,” the woman said, looking Berta over with large suspicious eyes half hidden under a fringe of brown hair.
Berta asked, “Is she all right?”
“Of course she’s not all right. Look at her. She’s half dead.”
“What happened?”
The woman shrugged and turned away. She walked over to a table and started to gather up the plates.
“It’s all right. I’m a friend.”
The woman hesitated, then said, “There were eight of them. Soldiers, but they weren’t in uniform.”
“Hryhoriiv’s men?”
“No. They were Reds.”
Berta was surprised. Of all the factions fighting in the countryside, the Red Army of the Bolsheviks seemed the least likely to kill Jews. The White Army, composed of a loose affiliation of anti-Bolsheviks including the Cossacks; the Volunteer Army of General Denikin; the anarchist Black Army; the Ukrainian army called the Directory; and a long list of bandits headed by atamans or chieftains all waged brutal pogroms against the Jews, slaughtering them by the thousands and destroying their shtetlekh. But the Reds nearly always showed restraint.
“Reds? You sure?”
A bitter laugh. “Of course, I’m sure. I was here, wasn’t I?”
“What did they want?”
“They wanted to be fed, what else? And naturally there was no question of payment.”
“Did she feed them?”
“What else is she going to do? But her sons were out in the back putting away some wood and they came running in. She begged them to go away, but they wouldn’t listen to her. Stupid boys. What could they do against those men? They didn’t even have guns. The soldiers took what they wanted and shot them in the head.” She held a finger up to her forehead. “And the whole time this poor woman was standing there watching.”
The woman sighed, shook her head, and took the stack of plates into the kitchen. Berta picked up the saucers and cups and followed her in. “After they shot her sons they told her they’d be back for lunch the next day. That was yesterday, only God help me it seems like a lifetime ago.” They put the dishes in the dry sink and went back for more. “She buried her sons this morning. And then they came back just as they said they would and she fed them soup. One of them didn’t like it.” She nodded to the splatter on the wall while clearing the second table. “They took everything, all the food and the bread, everything from the kitchen, and left. After that she sat down in that chair and hasn’t moved since.”
Berta helped the woman clear the tables. When they had washed and put away the dishes they got the old woman up and walked her back to the bedroom. It was a neat little room off the kitchen with a clean coverlet over a straw mattress, a coat and a good dress hanging on a hook on the wall, and a pair of shoes in the corner. They undressed her and pulled a nightdress over her head and shoulders. Her arms remained limp at her sides, her face blank, her eyes flat and black like dirty coins. Her will was gone. She had retreated into her own world where the dishes were always clean, the floors smelled of carbolic soap, and her sons were out in the yard stacking firewood for her oven.
The woman found some bread that the soldiers had missed and gave it to Berta. “Be careful on the road,” she said at the door, as she watched Berta shoulder her bundles. “Three men disappeared yesterday. So stay off the main road and look out for yourself.”
Berta nodded. But on the way out of town she wondered how she was going to get to where she wanted to go if she didn’t take the main road. So she stayed on it, passing the outlying houses and taverns, the deserted yards and the brittle sticks still standing in the frozen kitchen gardens, until she came to a cart track that led off through the snowy fields.
The going was slow because she was carrying her bundles and wearing a pair of men’s boots stuffed with newspaper to make them fit. The sun was past its zenith, a raw globe behind the clouds and not much brighter than the moon. The wind was picking up and she clutched the bundles to her chest to block it. She had one last delivery to make and wanted to hurry so she could get back for the early train. The farmstead wasn’t far, but it would be hard to find because of the mist that clung to the hollows and spiraled up through the trees. She had never come this way before. She kept thinking that out here it would be easy to freeze to death. Be only steps away from the house and never know it.
Ihor Kochubey’s son was getting married and this meant that gold chains had to be bought since it was the custom among the kulaks to cover their brides in gold. Because Ihor Kochubey had already married off two sons the previous year, this bride would have to be satisfied with a necklace and perhaps a bracelet or two. For this reason she would not be the youngest or the prettiest of the eligible girls, but then Ihor Kochubey’s son was not exactly a catch either. He was slow-witted and often seen talking to himself.
Berta had borrowed several chains from a jeweler and had sewn them into the hem of her skirt. As she walked through the deep snow across the fields she could feel the soft thud of their weight hitting against her leg. It wasn’t easy walking. She had to curl her toes to keep her feet from sliding around in the boots while shifting her bundles from arm to arm, trying to find a comfortable way of carrying them.
Finally she came to a drive that she thought might lead down to the house. It was smoother than the surrounding fields and lacked the undulating corn row pattern beneath the snow. There was a frozen stream beside it that looked familiar, though she couldn’t be sure, since she had always seen it in the summer, when it came crashing down from the hillside or in the fall, when the water was nearly gone and barely covered the gravelly bottom. Now it was covered with a thick layer of ice imbedded with bits of leaves and twigs. She crouched down and peered through the milky ice and saw the water flowing beneath it like long, blue fingers. Wedged between two rocks was a clump of human hair trailing in the gentle current. The shock of it knocked her back off her heels. When she came back to take a closer look she told herself that it had to be some strange river reed. Fear was playing tricks with her mind.
On her way down the drive she thought about a warm fire in the stove, sipping a mug of hot tea, and sharing a loaf of bread and salt. They would want the news before they got down to business. They wouldn’t want the usual gossip. The goings-on of their neighbors held little interest for them now that the war was over and the Germans had left.
A year ago, in March of 1918, the Congress of Soviets ratified the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which gave Lenin peace with Germany, something he had to have if he wanted to stay in power. In return he signed away half of Russia’s western domain. Under the treaty the Germans were given the Baltic provinces and the nominally sovereign provinces of Poland, Georgia, and the Ukraine, which, in fact, were not sovereign states at all, but German-controlled protectorates. Under German rule the fledgling Ukrainian state enjoyed a period of peace and a certain measure of autonomy. This continued until the end of the war, when the Germans were driven out, taking any semblance of law and order with them. Now, no one wanted to hear about gossip anymore. All they wanted to talk about were the troubles on the farmsteads, in the cities, about the fighting between the Reds and Whites, about the warlords and the Directory troops who took what they wanted from farms like theirs and moved on. Of less interest were the widespread pogroms that were raging in the shtetlekh and in the cities like Kiev and Poltava and the frequent attacks on Jewish travelers on the trains and roads.