Dan Smith - Red Winter

‘And no one came to the house?’ I asked. ‘After the fighting?’ I couldn’t help look around at the full cupboards, the tidy clothes and the clean boots. There were even enough spoons and bowls for each of us at the table.

The old woman shared a glance with her husband, then shrugged. ‘They passed on. Hardly even knew we were here.’

‘You went to look, though,’ said Tanya. ‘You went to see where they had been fighting.’

The old woman nodded. ‘It was terrible.’

‘That didn’t stop you from taking what you could.’ It was Lyudmila who spoke this time, and I wondered if she had seen what it was that had filled their cupboards and put fresh clothes on their starving bodies. She understood what was making the old woman and her husband so edgy. They had stolen from the dead.

The old woman looked down at the tabletop. They were ashamed of it. ‘Times are hard.’

‘I understand,’ I told her. ‘Nothing can be wasted.’

She nodded.

‘We’re not bad people,’ Sergei said. ‘We’re just…’

‘You don’t need to explain yourselves,’ I said.

Sergei lifted his eyes to look at me across the table before he reached for his pipe and took a healthy pinch of tobacco from a worn but full pouch.

‘All of this didn’t come from a battlefield,’ Lyudmila said, as he packed the tobacco tight and clamped the pipe between his teeth. ‘Not all this food.’ She cast her eyes around the room.

Sergei shook his head.

‘Papa brought us things too,’ the boy said, making his mother squeeze him and give him a stern look. Everybody watched him but the old woman. She kept her eyes on the three of us, sitting on the opposite side of the table.

‘What’s that you said?’ Lyudmila sat back and put one hand on her thigh.

‘Nikolai misses his papa.’ The old woman smiled, displaying blackened teeth, before leaning in and whispering to us. ‘He imagines he sees him sometimes. It’s very hard for the children, you know.’ The stink of her breath soured the air.

‘Of course.’

For a moment there was no sound in the room but the fire crackling in the pich .

‘But tell us about you.’ The old woman sat back and raised her voice. ‘Where are you from?’

I looked at Tanya and Lyudmila, none of us saying anything.

‘I understand,’ the old woman said. ‘You’re deserters – of course you don’t want to talk about it.’

‘No, we…’ Tanya stopped.

‘It’s all right.’ The old woman pulled her shawl tighter. ‘We won’t tell anyone, will we, Sergei?’

‘No. No, of course not.’

‘So what brings you this way?’ she asked. ‘You said you’re looking for someone.’

There was an awkward silence as we considered what to tell them, what kind of threat they could be to us, or what information they might have.

‘We’re looking for a man calling himself Koschei,’ I said eventually, glancing at Tanya. ‘Have you heard of him?’

‘Koschei?’ Sergei took his pipe from his mouth and studied the glowing tobacco in the bowl as if the answer might be hidden in the embers. With his other hand, he reached up and stroked his beard, smoothing it round his upper lip and running his fingers down its length. ‘Like the story?’

‘Yes, but this man is real. Have you heard of him?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said the old woman.

‘He’s a Chekist. His real name is Krukov.’

‘I don’t know the name.’

‘And you haven’t seen anyone pass by?’ I asked. ‘Soldiers taking prisoners? Or maybe—’

‘We don’t see anybody here.’ The old woman spoke a little too suddenly.

‘What about your neighbours? Might they have—’

‘No one passes by. No one sees anything. It’s safer that way.’ An edge had crept into her tone and the atmosphere in the room had become more tense. When I looked across at Sergei, he was still staring at the tabletop. Oksana busied herself with her children, stroking their hair and bringing Natasha to sit on her knee, as if she was finding something to do so she didn’t have to make eye contact.

‘Is there something wrong?’ I asked.

‘There is always something wrong,’ the old woman said.

‘We do what we have to.’ Sergei looked up with sad eyes. ‘What else can we do?’

I was about to ask him what he meant by that, but Oksana pushed back her chair and stood up. ‘It’s late,’ she said, making it clear it was time for the conversation to end. ‘The children need to sleep, and you must be exhausted.’ She gave Anna a sympathetic look.

‘I’m fine,’ Anna said without expression. ‘I’m tougher than I look.’

Oksana smiled, but there was sadness in her eyes. ‘I’m sure you are.’

‘Well, you can sleep in the izba next door,’ the old woman said. ‘The roof’s not so good, so it’ll get cold, but there are some old blankets, and if you light the fire, you’ll be warm enough.’

Before we left, I thanked the old woman for her hospitality and shook Sergei’s hand.

‘Oksana,’ I said, ‘may I ask where your husband is?’

‘Our son is fighting the war,’ the old woman answered for her, filling her chest with pride and standing as straight as she could. ‘He’s a good boy.’

I didn’t ask which uniform he wore.

The night was bitter and black. The cold had rooted itself deep in the earth, and the frost had thickened. The first few flakes of snow were in the air, small and light and almost nothing, but they lay where they fell.

No breeze stirred in the forest, and the air was silent.

I was the first to step out of the warmth, Anna at my side as always. Tuzik must have jumped to his feet as soon as he heard the door open, because he was trotting over before I had even crossed the threshold. He was almost invisible in the darkness and came without sound, a creature of the night, nuzzling into my hand to take the morsel of food I had promised. As he snapped it down, I felt a wetness in my palm, and when I turned to look at it in the weak light from the lamp Sergei was holding, I saw the blood of a fresh kill.

‘Looks like he’s already eaten,’ I said to Sergei. ‘You have one less rabbit to eat your crops.’

Sergei took us to the front door of the empty izba next door and stood aside so that Tanya and Lyudmila could go in first. Sergei didn’t object when I let Tuzik enter, but when I stepped up to go in, he put his hand on my chest and stopped me.

‘Are you sure you want to stay?’ he asked. ‘The woods make for good shelter if you know how to build a fire.’

‘Have we taken advantage of your kindness?’ I asked.

‘No, it’s not that…’

‘You have no reason to be afraid of us,’ I told him.

‘I know. It’s just… you seem like good people.’ He looked down at Anna and put out his hand to put it on her head, but he stopped himself, closing his fingers and letting his arm fall to his side.

‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘What’s the matter?’

Sergei paused with his mouth open as if the words had caught in his throat, then he shook his head. ‘Sleep well,’ he said, handing me the lamp. ‘And God protect you.’

When he was gone, I bolted the door and turned to Tanya and Lyudmila, who were standing by the table in the cold room. It was dark and dusty, as if no one had been here for a long time, but there was a pile of old blankets on the table just as the old woman had said.

‘What do you think?’ Tanya said. ‘Did anyone else feel uncomfortable in there?’

‘They’re hiding something,’ Lyudmila said.

‘ Everyone ’s hiding something,’ I told her. ‘These people are ashamed of stealing from the dead.’ I put the lamp on the table and looked around the room, seeing my breath form in clouds. There wasn’t much in there to speak of. The table was bare, apart from the blankets, and the shelves were all empty. True to the old woman’s word, there was a man-sized hole in the far corner of the roof, just to the right of the pich , which explained the temperature in the house, and from time to time a snowflake found its way through and dropped to the floor. It would have been easy enough for a young man to fix if he had the right tools and supplies, but for a man Sergei’s age, it would be too much.