Dan Smith - Red Winter

So it had come to this.

After countless hours on horseback, innumerable desperate nights in the forest and more red stars than I wanted to remember, it had come to this .

I had achieved nothing more than ground. I had moved from one place to another, collected a ragged group of people with either vengeance or grief in their hearts, but I was still as far away from what I wanted as I had ever been. When Alek and I had left our unit, all we wanted was to find some normality, to enjoy the peace of our families and escape the fire and blood of war, but perhaps that was my destiny. Fire and blood. To be a soldier first and a father second.

I went to the window and lifted the corner of the curtain to look out.

Tuzik was nowhere to be seen. Not even a hint of his lithe shape skulking in the yard. He had disappeared in the commotion, probably slipping through the fence and heading for the trees to find safety. He was a strange mix of wild and tame, but he was a hunter and he would survive. I wished him luck, wherever he went.

Tanya and Lyudmila’s horses weren’t easy to make out, but there was a dark form at the far right corner of the yard that moved in a manner I recognised. They had become calmer now and I suspected they were standing together, keeping close to one another for comfort and warmth, facing out into the field as if trying to ignore the men who occupied the yard with them.

It was those men who now demanded my attention.

Almost invisible in the night, there were two soldiers behind the cart, no doubt with rifles resting across the back of it; another two crouched behind the far fence. One more stood at the corner of the outbuilding, and his weapon would be pointed in our direction, but the expected attack did not come.

Not a shot. Not a word.

An eerie silence fell over the scene.

Inside, it was the same.

Sergei had returned home before the soldiers set out for the farm. He and his wife had now retreated with Oksana and her children to the back of the izba , close to the pich . Anna lay on the floor behind the overturned table, just as I had instructed her to do. Tanya crouched beside me at the window, rifle ready; Lyudmila watched from the other.

But all was still and quiet, as if the world had stopped moving around us. I had expected shooting, shouting, fire and blood, but there was nothing.

Only waiting.

It confirmed to me that these were not the men who had been following me. Men who had trailed me that hard and for that long would not have hesitated to kill everyone here. Instead the men in the yard had put out their lamps, just as we had, and they were little more than shadows in the falling snow. The soft flakes floated among them, settling on everything they touched. The gathering whiteness cast a beauty in the night. It softened and brightened everything, making the events being played out around the farm incongruous. These things should not happen amid such beauty.

Snow does that. It covers everything, from the autumn mud and the flame-coloured leaves to the sounds of the forest and the bodies left in the wake of armies and oppressors. Marianna always told me that God sent us the snow to make our country beautiful; to hide whatever ugliness we created for ourselves. Right now, it would be falling on the dead men of Belev. Erasing them. It was as if we had an unwritten law that we should find beauty and poetry in the white landscape, but the truth was that the winters were harsh and the beauty belied its cruelty. Winter was a difficult time for everyone and we all celebrated its passing, no matter what ugliness might be revealed when spring came and melted the snow as surely as a warm heart had melted Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden.

‘Snegurochka’ was just another of the skazkas Marianna told our children – she was the daughter of Spring and Frost who could never love until her mother granted her the ability, but the gift was fatal, and when Snegurochka fell in love, her heart warmed and she melted into nothing, just as the spring sun took away the whiteness. For all Marianna’s talk of the snow hiding the ugliness, we had always drowned a straw figure in the river to signify the death of the Snow Maiden and to herald the spring.

Now that image brought new connotations for me.

He likes to drown the women .

I saw the white face of a woman squashed into a barrel. I saw Galina breaking through the paper-thin ice, sinking beneath its water. I saw the faces of men I knew as they threw the women of Belev into the lake. They were laughing, putting their boots on their heads to keep them under, firing their rifles into the water, the surface erupting in a mosaic of splashes and ripples as the women begged and struggled and died. And I saw the men, stripped of skin, nailed, cut, beaten, shot. Branded with that terrible red star. Men who would still be there when the snows melted.

The winter didn’t change anything; it didn’t make it go away; it preserved it.

I closed my eyes and tried to see something else. I put my hand over them and rubbed, but the images remained.

‘You all right?’ Tanya looked away from the window and watched me.

‘Fine. I’m fine.’

She studied me, perhaps wondering if I could be relied upon, if the waiting would unnerve me. The whites of her eyes were clear in the semi-darkness. ‘You think it’s him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How many do you count?’

‘Five.’

‘That’s not many,’ Lyudmila said. ‘I would have expected more.’

‘But if we’re right, if Krukov split his unit… maybe this is part of it.’

We were all thinking the same thing. Five lamps, five men. We could have made a stand at the barn.

‘I want him alive,’ I said.

‘If it’s him.’

‘Yes. If it’s him.’

‘What’s stopping them from just shooting this place apart?’ Lyudmila asked. ‘From just killing us all?’

I glanced back at Oksana and the shadows sitting with her at the far end of the room. The iron door of the pich beside them was closed, but the glow of the fire within was visible in the cracks round it. The children were hidden above the oven now, just as they had been when we arrived.

‘Women and children wouldn’t stop them,’ Tanya said, as if trying to read my thoughts. ‘We know that. It must be something else. Maybe it’s not even him.’ But she shook her head and answered her own suggestion. ‘No, that wouldn’t matter. Chekists are Chekists, whatever their name is.’

‘So why don’t they just do something?’ There was tension in Lyudmila’s voice. ‘Why don’t they try something? I don’t like this.’

‘Stay calm,’ Tanya told her.

‘I am calm, but why—’

‘ Something ’s stopping them,’ I said.

‘But what? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘This is worse than fighting,’ Lyudmila said, getting to her knees and looking out of the window again. ‘We should—’

‘Do nothing,’ I said to her. ‘We should do nothing.’

‘But we have to do something. Why don’t we shoot at them? Anything is better than waiting. Who knows what they’re doing out there while we sit in here like idiots.’ The edge in her voice heightened; her words came faster. ‘Maybe they’re planning something. Getting ready to—’

‘No shooting,’ I said. ‘Not yet. I need them alive.’ I couldn’t risk that we might kill the only people who could lead me to my family. And there were children in here. If we provoked the men outside, maybe they would change their minds. If they decided to be less passive, there were many ways they could force us into the open. Fire, gas, grenade.

‘Why should I take orders from you?’ Lyudmila raised her rifle and smashed the barrel into the corner of the window. The glass withstood the blow, but the sound was abrupt and unexpected.