Dan Smith - Red Winter

‘I don’t care what you had to do to get here,’ I said.

‘Not even if I killed a man?’

‘Is that what you’ve done?’ I watched him closely, wondering what might have driven Lev to kill, but it didn’t take much to work it out. I had seen how he loved his daughter.

‘I’m a teacher , for God’s sake.’ He tightened both hands into fists. ‘A teacher. And look at me now. Stealing and begging. Dirty and cold and hungry. I used to be smart and respectable and… I never hurt anyone, had never even hit a man until…’ He shook his head.

I waited for him to go on, thought about pressing him to tell me more, but it was better to leave him. It didn’t matter what he had done, and if he wanted to talk about it, he would do it when he was ready.

‘I was always a soldier,’ I said. ‘Well, it feels that way. I thought that was respectable too, but not anymore. Not really. I joined to fight the Great War, and when that was finished, I wanted a better country for Marianna and the boys, so I continued to fight. For them, at first, and then for me, because it was, I don’t know, it was what I did. Sometimes it’s hard to leave the path you’re on.’

Lev wiped his eyes with his fingers, leaving damps streaks in the dirt on his face. Streaks that glistened in the lamplight. ‘And now? Are you still a soldier?’

‘Now I’m a father. A husband.’ I thought for a moment. ‘And a soldier still.’

‘But you left the army?’

‘Deserted.’ The word still felt wrong on my tongue and left a bitter taste in my mouth. ‘I’ve always believed that was a bad thing. Cowardly.’ There were many deserters who had been executed because I once held that belief so strongly, but I didn’t tell him that. ‘Now, though, all that matters is finding my family.’ I told Lev about what I had found in Belev, what Galina said she had done and what she had called the man she stabbed. I had thought it was the ramblings of an insane old woman, but then Tanya and Lyudmila had come and they had known the name ‘Koschei’ too.

And I told him about the star branded into men’s skin, just as he had seen himself.

‘So you think this man Koschei has taken them?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t find them, so I have to believe that, otherwise…’ I smiled a melancholy smile and turned the cup in my hand. ‘Otherwise I’ll need a lot more of this.’ I showed him my empty cup.

‘Your sons,’ he said, refilling us. ‘Are they fighting age?’

‘Depends on your idea of fighting age. Pavel is just twelve…’

‘The same age as Anna.’

‘…and Misha is fourteen, but I’ve known armies take boys as young as ten.’

Lev closed his eyes and shook his head at the sadness of it. ‘And if they don’t take them to fight, they want to send them away to labour camps, right?’

I put my head back and closed my eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to… I was thinking aloud. It was stupid of me.’

‘It’s all right.’ I waved away the comment with the back of my hand. ‘I’ve thought of that already.’

‘So who do you think he is?’ he asked.

‘Well, he might seem like a ghost, but I’m sure he’s no fairy tale.’ I concentrated on the darkness behind my eyelids as I spoke to him. ‘He uses the name to frighten people maybe, but I’ve seen what he leaves in his wake, so he’s real enough. A man.’

‘But who?’

‘The exact man, I have no idea, but the type of man?’ I looked at him. ‘You already know.’

Lev sat back and ran a hand over his head. ‘Chekists?’ he whispered.

I said nothing.

He cleared his throat and stared into the top corner of the room behind me. He couldn’t hide what he was thinking. ‘The worst of humanity.’ He said the words with a quietness that made me shiver. Even here, just the two of us, he was afraid to speak ill of them aloud, such was their reputation.

With Lenin’s sanction, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission – the Cheka – was put together by Dzerzhinsky to combat those who would undermine the revolution. It was a political army to safeguard the toiling masses, the ordinary man, but after Kaplan tried to kill Lenin more than two years ago, Stalin recommended using the harsh tactics he had employed to crush counter-revolutionary resistance in Tsaritsyn. And so the Red Terror was born.

Landholders and the wealthy classes who refused to fall into line were the first targets, but the definition of wealth had become hazy and the Cheka units, made up of Communist leaders and former convicts and soldiers, were left as both police and executioner. Peasants were targeted as often as anyone else, and some units primed themselves on drugs and alcohol before raids, while others used artillery to bombard towns into dust. Dzerzhinsky himself said the units stood for organised terror, to keep the people under control, and with the peasant uprising in Tambov that started in August, the Chekists had been sent out with units to create that terror. They hunted deserters, burned villages, tortured peasants for refusing to give up their crops and gassed rebels who took refuge in the forests. They took young men for recruitment and deported thousands to labour camps across the country. Cheka agents were even secreted in Red Army units to report on their comrades. They were darker and more frightening than any fairy-tale monster.

They were worse than devils.

Lev poured us another drink without speaking. It was as if he was giving us both a moment to deal with the thought of such atrocity, giving me a moment to compose myself after voicing my concern for my family.

When our cups were full, he sat back and cleared his throat. ‘So you deserted before you knew what happened in your village? What made you leave?’ He didn’t ask what unit I had come from.

‘This isn’t a war anymore; it’s just people killing people and I didn’t want to be a part of it. I had to go home.’ He didn’t need to know the rest of it, the real r eason.

‘So you ran? Just like that? Don’t the Bolsheviks hunt deserters?’

‘It was early morning,’ I said. ‘We entered a village to… Anyway, we were ambushed by fighters.’

‘You don’t need to tell me.’

‘My brother was wounded.’ I put a hand to my stomach without even thinking about it, remembering the place where Alek had been hit. ‘I tried to make it look as if we were killed in the fighting – swapped our uniforms with men who were already dead, left our papers in their pockets and… it was mayhem. Screaming, shooting, grenades exploding in the houses. People dying. It was all so… so out of control. I couldn’t do it anymore. I had to get away. Undressing the dead peasants was easy, but getting them into our uniforms was hard. We left them in a ditch just outside the village we were fighting in, more or less where they died, but we had to make them unrecognisable. No one could know.’ Of all the things I’d had to do, that was the hardest. Bringing the rock down on them again and again. Over and over. Rubbing them from the world. I pushed the image away and reached for the bottle.

‘What made you do it?’

‘So many things.’ I thought for a moment, trying to put it into words. Alek and I hadn’t ever voiced it so bluntly to one another. For us, it was a succession of utterances, of exchanged glances, of silent understandings. We didn’t dare discuss it, because the illegality and wrongness of it were so ingrained in us. We had punished men simply for thinking such things and knew what would happen to us if we expressed the thoughts aloud.

‘All the killing,’ I said. ‘All the suffering. All the terrible things I’d done.’ I glanced at Lev but couldn’t look him in the eye. I had terrorised people like him. ‘I didn’t know myself anymore. I was…’ I shook my head and let the thought trail away. ‘My brother and I went home six months ago. It was… so good to be there, with Marianna and my sons. Things were hard for them, just like anyone, and Marianna was so strong , the way she took care of Misha and Pavel, but I should have been there for them. That was my place. Being with them reminded me of that.’