Dan Smith - Red Winter

The lake gave life just as it took it away.

‘Where’s everybody else?’ Lyudmila asked. ‘There’s no one here.’

‘You tell me.’ The memories faded into the grey light.

‘What have you done with them?’ Her insistence suggested she didn’t know what had happened here, and I had seen so many lies and betrayals that it would take a good act to fool me. My training and experience had shaped me into not just a soldier capable of great cruelty but also into a reasonable reader of intentions.

‘Nothing. This is my home. I don’t know where—’

‘Are you a soldier?’ Tanya asked.

I opened my eyes and looked at her.

‘Which colour are you?’ The pistol was in her hand again. The barrel was pointing to the floor, but all she had to do was move it a hair’s breadth and she could put holes right through me. It was not a threat, but she was ready for whatever might come.

‘Which colour are you ?’ I asked.

Tanya showed me the non-smile again and shook her head. ‘It doesn’t work that way.’

‘I’m on my side,’ I said. ‘Yours. No one’s.’

‘But you’re a soldier. All men are soldiers, aren’t they? For one side or another.’

‘Red or White makes no difference to me,’ I said. ‘Nor Black, or Blue, Green.’ There were too many colours to keep track of. The Black Army of anarchists in Ukraine, spontaneous Green armies rising out of the peasantry to protect their lands and livestock, and the Blues spawned from the uprising in Tambov.

‘I don’t care about those things,’ I said. ‘I just want to bury my brother.’

‘He’s really your brother? Your real brother?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, smoke encircling her face. ‘Where are you from?’

‘I already told you. This is my home. But what about you?’ I asked. ‘Where are you from? How do I know you didn’t have something to do with what’s happened here?’

‘What has happened here?’ Tanya looked at the woman behind her and there was a flash of something difficult to read in her expression. Recognition? Fear? Perhaps both.

‘You know something?’ I asked.

‘About what?’

‘About where everyone has gone,’ I said. ‘About the dead man lying back there in the forest.’

‘Dead man?’ She stood and I could see from her reaction that she didn’t know about Galina’s husband. ‘Show me.’

I dragged on the thin cigarette and glanced at the pistol in her hand. ‘You don’t need that.’

‘Tell me where the man is and—’

‘Put that away,’ I said, ‘and let me bury my brother.’

‘No, you need to—’

‘Let me bury my brother,’ I insisted. ‘Then I’ll take you.’ I was eager to press on too, but the thought of what I might find was unsettling me, and I had to honour my brother; I couldn’t leave him here like this.

Tanya considered the pistol for a moment before she looked up, nodded once and holstered it. When she did that, I knew our dynamic had shifted. I had something she wanted and she had just complied with my demand, soft as it was. She was less of a threat to me than I had first thought.

I turned to see that the woman behind me had followed Tanya’s lead and lowered her rifle to point at the floor.

‘The ground will be hard,’ Lyudmila said, ‘for a burial.’

‘I have an axe. It won’t take long.’ I stood up, making Tanya lean back and reach towards the pistol once more.

I raised both hands in front of me. ‘Please. Trust me.’

‘Trust is a hard thing to come by these days,’ she said.

In some ways, it was good to have the company. Galina had been too touched by madness to offer any companionship, and Alek had been incoherent for much of our journey. His wound had festered and I had done what I could, but it hadn’t been enough. I couldn’t help but blame myself for that. Perhaps if we had stayed with the unit, our medic, Nevsky, could have saved him. There might have been something he could do.

‘I’m not a threat to you,’ I said. I needed to get back to the lake and look for my wife and sons. I had to find some clue of what had happened to them.

‘Where are you going to go?’ she asked. ‘After you bury him. Back to your unit?’

I ignored her and went to my brother.

‘No. I think you’re avoiding that. You’re a deserter.’

It was the first time that word had been thrown at me – a word laced with betrayal and disgrace – and it cut me more deeply than I expected. I knew what I was, and deserter wasn’t the worst of it, but I was reminded of the men I had hunted for the same crime, men whose only real offence was to want something better.

I clamped the cigarette between my teeth and the smoke stung my eyes as I crouched beside my brother to put my hands under his arms, turning him over and pulling him across my shoulder. I struggled with him, wishing I were stronger, wishing he were alive, wishing so many things, but none of it helped me and I felt myself weakening. My brother was dead, and my family was lost, and I was alone.

‘You came home and there’s no one here, is that it? I want you to tell me what happened.’

‘Later.’ I grunted as my strength failed me and I laid Alek on the floor and sat beside his body, trying to forget the women were there. I bit hard on the cigarette and fought back the shame and the guilt and the fear that threatened to overwhelm me. I had no time for it. I couldn’t afford it. I had a job to do and I needed to do it quickly. I would finish my duty to my brother and then I would do my duty to my family.

I steeled myself once more and prepared to lift my brother again.

‘Let me help you.’ Tanya came round me and crouched by Alek’s bare feet.

‘I can do it.’

‘I know. But it’s easier with two.’

She pushed back her hat and looked at me through the hair that fell across her brow, and in that fraction of time, I had a glimpse of the woman she might have been before the war. The look in her eye softened to one more sympathetic, as if she had read my emotions. The frown faded, her jaw softened, and I saw what might be the real Tanya rather than the mask she wore. She wasn’t beautiful, but there was something attractive in her features – the way her lips bowed, the upturn of her nose, the sharpness of her cheekbones.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

We carried Alek through the church, to the plot where the people of Belev had always buried their dead. A small area surrounded by a failing fence and a thicket of trees that shaded the cemetery in the summer. Picking through the simple wooden grave markers, we shuffled to a place close to the back and put Alek down.

In the field on the other side of the fence, two horses grazed at the wintry grass and it surprised me I hadn’t heard them approach. The women must have kept to the softest ground and I had been inattentive, but their tactics would have left prints in the frost that could be found and followed by anyone who might be tracking me. I’d seen no concrete evidence yet, but the constant sense of being trailed refused to leave me, and two riders on horseback could easily be mistaken for Alek and me.

I stretched my back and took a last drag on the cigarette before pinching away the glowing end and putting it in my pocket. It would be greedy to smoke it all at once, so I would keep the rest for another time.

‘This is where my parents are buried.’ I pointed at the two markers in front of us. They were simple, like all the others; just wooden orthodox crosses painted white, faded and cracked by the weather. If the markers were to be removed, there would be almost no sign at all that anyone was buried here.