One might have noticed, had one viewed it as a movie, the youth’s quiet, and understood it to be fear, and such a reaction would have been understandable. The mixture of bravado and accusation that the two figures were displaying as they were surrounded by guns in the foreground was rife with contempt and pregnant with threat. The youth simply stood there in silence.
There was a deeper reason for his silence, however. He was not simply cowering before the men who had terrorized him all of his life, and he was not merely carefully choosing his words. Instead, he was looking at four guards from the prison, guards he had known from his recent stay in one of its cells. They were blindfolded and lined up along the wall of the gymnasium. The Spetnaz soldiers were pointing their guns at them and waiting for an order to shoot.
Watching from that distance, one would have seen the taller of the figures approach the youth called Vasily and push him to the ground and the shorter man bend slowly down to whisper to him. A Russian soldier walked over at their bidding and took the youth into custody and tied his hands behind his back. He jerked the boy called Vasily to his feet and marched him, tripping and slipping, across a small patch of hard-packed snow toward the wall where the captured guards were lined up, standing blindfolded, shivering with cold and fear.
From the distance, one would have seen the two leaders approach the guards, and the youth near the soldier would have been placed beside the condemned men. One would have seen the taller of the figures, Vladimir, take out a pistol from a holster.
Vladimir moved slowly, methodically, walking down the line of shivering guards, placing a gun to the head of each. One by one, each condemned man, in turn, cried out for his life only to be cut off in mid-sentence by the harsh report of the gun in the crisp night air as it rang out across the town of Warwick, echoing in the valley and circling through the tops of the trees and then reaching up into the mountains before growing fainter as it faded into the nighttime sky.
From a distance, one would have seen the bodies slump to the ground, one by one, until there was only one left standing, and the two figures approached the shivering boy who was left standing in the midst of the bodies. They accosted him together.
The youth stood in silence, and the taller of the figures placed a gun to his temple and the youth felt his knees buckle and the world turned upside down like a snow globe.
That is when the world seemed strange and disjointed, that sublime and terrifying moment when it cracked open just a little beneath the feet of the shivering youth and then suddenly snapped back into place, and the familiar crept back into the sum of the parts.
Vladimir slapped Vasily on the shoulder. “You poor, dumb, boy. Why are you afraid? We know you didn’t do it on purpose. You’re too stupid to be complicit.”
CHAPTER 12
“You should know that if you keep scattering the dirt willy-nilly like that, it’ll only take us longer when we have to put it back in.”
Vasily was standing waist deep in one of a series of seven holes. In each of the holes stood a pair of youths, and to the side of each hole was a growing heap of earth. This digging of holes was no easy task just before the onset of winter in the State of New York, but the ground was still workable, if only barely so, and if they’d been forced to dig these graves later into the winter, they most likely would have failed at the task.
Vasily’s hole was shallower than the others and his heap less high, although it still came up to the level of his eyes and was made taller, in relation to his small frame, as all the heaps were, by the fact that the fresh dug earth was piled upon the several feet of snow that blanketed the open field.
Vasily pushed the point of his shovel into the earth and stepped onto the foot rest with all his weight, giving a little hop and landing on the shovel until he felt the blade sink into the as-yet unfrozen soil. The handle in his hands felt solid as he leaned back and used his leverage to carefully lift the soil out of the hole and up and over his head. He emptied the dirt onto the heap, more gently this time, making sure it didn’t slide back into the hole on top of him.
The young man talking to him—his work partner in digging this hole—was named Kolya. He was older than Vasily and had a reputation for being a quirky intellectual. Vasily had never spent much time around him, but standing now in the hole with him he glanced at the intellectual’s pudgy round face and angular glasses and noticed his soft fleshy hands, red from the cold in the thinning moonlight, and he wondered silently to himself what Kolya’s interest was in being here at this moment. He had, like the rest of the youths who were now digging, volunteered for this duty.
Vladimir had asked for volunteers to follow him behind the prison in the immediate aftermath of the execution of the guards. There is a way that revolutionaries request volunteers, especially after a particularly brutal display of violence, which insures an adequate level of participation from those who otherwise might just be caught up in the riptide of events. Some volunteer out of a desire to curry favor with violent and powerful men, some do so out of fear or panic, and still others pitch-in out of curiosity, or merely from a lack of any other plan for the moment.
Kolya, standing with a large group of boys around the gymnasium and feeling voluntold to work, quickly stepped out of the crowd to follow the brutish Vladimir to the open field. Vasily, too, had gone along, not really as a volunteer, but mainly because he felt internally compelled to do so in order to remain, as much as possible, under the radar. Now he found himself with Kolya and the others digging holes in the ground in the crisp night air.
Had they been digging for treasure, there might have been a celebratory feel to it all, everyone joking and cutting up as they checked their maps to make sure that the spot where they were digging was likely to lead them to the gold, but there was no celebration in the air, and there were no maps either, and the frigid night was filled with diligent grunting without a hint of laughter. They were simply youths—most in their late teens, but a few in their early twenties—in the middle of a field laboring away with cold solemnity. The dead didn’t mind or protest, and so this somehow seemed the only appropriate response since, from the moment they had been handed shovels, they’d realized their purpose. They were there to dig graves for those who had departed from this night’s horrible events.
Kolya had spoken to him in English. Vasily was careful not to look at him or to give any indication that he understood. Best to just let them think I’m an idiot, he thought. He was still shaking a bit from the fear he’d experienced at the hands of Vladimir and Mikail, and that fear now jumped into his chest once more as he looked up with his next shovel full and saw the barrel of a gun at the end of Vladimir’s arm.
“He can’t understand English, you fool,” Vladimir barked at Kolya. “And get back to work. Morning will come before you know it and we have other work to do! Where did you learn to speak like that anyway? Where did you learn this phrase ‘willy-nilly’?” When Vladimir spoke the word it sounded like “will-he, nill-he.”
“I read… That’s how I know that phrase. Maybe I saw it in Shakespeare,” Kolya said.
Vladimir looked at Kolya through narrowed eyes.
“What?!” Kolya feigned surprise. “You think no one in our little hamlet reads Shakespeare?” He smiled at the corners of his mouth, waiting for some flash of recognition from Vladimir, but if the brute saw anything clever in what Kolya had said, he didn’t show it.
Vladimir switched to Russian. “I don’t know and I don’t care. Perhaps you should spend some time reading Marx. And before that, perhaps you should spend some time digging this grave or maybe I’ll decide to have you dig your own.”