Dan Smith - Red Winter

We knew that two men on horseback would be a target for the units hunting deserters, but we ran anyway, taking almost three weeks to travel the hundred or so kilometres home. We avoided the open roads and the steppes as much as we could, keeping to the forests even though it made for difficult travel and nights that were long and cold and lonely. We took hard feed for the horses wherever we could find it, stealing from farms, afraid to be seen. Any soldier would shoot us for the honour, and any peasant would betray us for a handful of grain or a little mercy, but we had stayed out of sight and it had slowed us down. Alek was stronger than I could have imagined. As his wound worsened, I had wanted to take to the road, but he wouldn’t let me, and now I couldn’t help wondering if I should have done it anyway. We would have arrived sooner and perhaps Marianna would still be here. Perhaps… perhaps many things would be different.

I gritted my teeth and bowed my head. I needed my family. Only they could cast away the shadow that grew darker across my soul every day. They had to be here somewhere. I had to find them.

I closed my eyes and took deep breaths, forcing the emotions away. I placed the revolver on the bed and ran my hands across my head and face, rubbing life and sense into them.

‘Pull yourself together,’ I said aloud, finding comfort in my own voice.

With fresh purpose, I strengthened my resolve and went to the chest of drawers to rummage for fresh clothes, which I laid on the bed beside the revolver. Shucking off my boots, I dragged the wet trousers from my legs and used the towel from the back of the chair to dry. I had to take care of myself before anything else. Damp and cold and driven to madness, I was useless.

Redressed, I fastened my coat and pulled on my cold, wet boots, collecting the revolver before heading back to the front door and pulling it open to the night. The sky was clear of cloud now and any last traces of warmth were stolen away. The countless stars looked on, and the half-moon washed everything in silver.

Kashtan nickered and snorted as soon as she saw me, and I scanned each way along the street, listening, before I stepped out and went to her. She nuzzled my chest and I put a hand to the blaze on her face.

‘A moment longer,’ I whispered, putting my nose close to hers and feeling the heat of her sweet breath. ‘I’ll get you out of sight. Somewhere warm. Find you something to eat if I can.’

I patted her neck and moved round her, casting my eyes to the black shape of the forest on the other side of the river. Among the trees, the night was dark, and after a while it played tricks on even the strongest mind. I would be glad to sleep under a proper roof tonight and thanked my luck for that small mercy.

‘You did well,’ I told her. ‘You’ve been brave.’

She had been in battle, she knew the smell of blood, but it had still frightened her to have Alek on her back. Without Kashtan I never would have made it home. She was a good friend.

I loosened the binding that had kept my brother from falling and pulled him towards me, dragging him over my shoulder as I took his weight. I carried him into the house and leaned him against the wall by the pich , collapsing beside him, breathing heavily from the effort. We sat side by side as if we’d settled for a cigarette and a talk about old times.

‘You’re home,’ I told him. ‘More or less.’

Alek didn’t live with me; he lived in the house next door with his wife, Irina, but she had died childless the year before the revolution, and this was where he spent much of his time when he was here in Belev, so it was more of a home than anywhere else. And this was the house he had grown up in, the house Papa had built himself and that Mama ran with a firm hand and a warm smile, the house we had played and argued and fought in as boys; the house he had left to be with Irina, the beauty of the village. Everyone said she’d marry Semyon Petrovich, but she’d never been interested in anyone other than Alek. He once said to me that Irina loved the way he played the garmoshka , that’s why she had married him, but I told him it couldn’t be true. His playing was tuneless, and his garmoshka was so worn and shabby it wheezed like an old man smoking his last pipe.

I stared at his sturdy boots, then looked down at my own – cold and damp and uncomfortable. ‘You don’t need them now,’ I whispered, and sat up to tug them from his feet.

Leaving my own in a heap by the pich , I felt a wave of sadness as I pulled on Alek’s socks and boots, but they were a better fit than my own and were of no use to a dead man. He would want me to have them.

‘Wait here for me,’ I said, unable to look at his face.

Back outside, I unhitched Kashtan and led her to the outbuilding at the back of the izba . In the past, we had used it for storing grain and livestock, but now I was beginning to wonder if there might be something else in there, and as I came close to the door, I imagined I would open it to find the bodies of my children hanging from the rafters, with nooses tight about their necks. I’d seen such things already on my journey home, and the darkness of those images had been a constant passenger in my thoughts, but I had not expected that I would find such things here. I had only seen hope and warmth when I thought of home, and now I tightened my jaw and tried to push away the ghosts of my more recent memories. But those bleaker images crept into my thoughts like shadowy apparitions, smothering the light I longed for.

I passed my old two-wheeled cart and swallowed hard as I prepared for the worst – if it was even possible to prepare for the terrible things I could imagine. I took a deep breath and braced myself, but when I put a foot to the door and pushed it open, raising the revolver, I found the outbuilding to be as empty as the house.

I stood for a while and allowed my breath to escape me in a long sigh, forcing my fingers to relax as I lowered my arm. A wave of relief washed over me with a suddenness that brought with it the surprise that I could have felt so much more afraid and helpless than I had realised. But that relief was tempered with something else; this time, at least, my fears were unfounded, but the absence of my family here was both a blessing and a curse. They were still missing and I damned the experiences that now sent me visions of the worst.

Any livestock that had once been kept in the outbuilding was long gone, but the scent of animals remained. The fenced-off section to the left of the door was bereft of any food stocks and I assumed the requisitions had been as harsh here as anywhere else. Perhaps Marianna and the children had moved on to find a place where they could feed themselves better. Or perhaps they had forgotten me and run from the war, looking for something safer.

But there was the coat. Marianna would never leave without her coat.

The floor was covered with straw, and there was a small pile of hay at the far end beside a shallow trough containing a few inches of rainwater that fed in from a pipe coming through the roof. When I led Kashtan in, she followed without trouble, going straight to the hay.

I removed the few pieces of kit I had collected on my journey and slipped the saddle from her back, dumping it on the ground by the door. There were surface scratches across her flanks, ragged scrapes from our ride through the forest. She’d been reluctant to go where the trees grew so thick – the closeness of them had spooked her, and the scent of wild animals had troubled her – but she’d gone on. She’d been brave and I owed her for that.

I took a rag from one of my saddlebags and soaked it in the trough before cleaning the dried blood from her skin, drying her and leaving her to the warmth of the outbuilding. I closed the door behind me and stood in the silence of the night, looking across at the field where the moonlight washed over the regular wave of the unplanted furrows.