Dan Smith - Red Winter

‘He was armed,’ I said.

‘I don’t remember it that way. I remember a poor old man begging you to spare his son, and you shot him like you were swatting a fly. And what was it you said after that? Oh yes. “Hang his son.” You were magnificent. Magnificent .’

‘No. I was doing my job. The old man was armed, and his son was a deserter.’

‘Yes, you were doing your job, and it was an inspiration to see. You said that we had to pull out the weeds to make the crop grow strong – that’s what you told us – and I knew exactly what you meant. You were so right, and it felt good when I threw the rope over the tree. And when we hauled that boy up and watched him struggle at the end of the rope, his feet kicking, didn’t you feel it too?’

‘He was not a boy; he was a soldier,’ I said.

‘A deserter, like you. A weed that needed to be pulled out. He struggled for a good few minutes, you know. It wasn’t quick.’

‘He was a deserter who murdered two men. Two good soldiers with families.’

‘What difference does that make?’

‘It makes all the difference.’ I stared at him, this vile and misguided creature, wondering if it really could have been me who created the man who led these soldiers to Belev. But he had made me look at myself again, reminded me who I had been, who I was now and how my beliefs had changed. The anger slipped away, smothered by other feelings of guilt and denial and realisation. I was questioning myself, my former actions, knowing I had found excuses for them then, just as I was trying to do now. I didn’t know if I was a product of my time or if my time was a product of men like me, men like Krukov and these soldiers in front of me. Men who can use twisted and misinterpreted beliefs to vindicate their most base actions. ‘It makes—’

‘No. A deserter is a deserter. That’s why I was so let down by you. When we realised you weren’t dead, that it was all a trick…’ He sneered at me. ‘You were such a disappointment. I thought you were so righteous , so solid . Such a patriot. The things you said, the things I’d heard about you. I was honoured to join you, honoured .’ He spat the word, then stopped. He looked down and sighed. ‘But in the end, you were nothing more than a coward and a traitor who lied about what he believed in.’

I couldn’t accept what I was hearing. Had he admired me so much that he had taken my words and applied them to justify so much violence? Had I really given him the excuse to do the things he had done? Had he murdered and burned according to a doctrine he had learned from me? There had to be more to it than that. There had to be.

As I reeled at the horror that he could rationalise his actions using words and beliefs he had learned from me, some other words echoed in my mind: the words the young soldier from the train had heard from Stanislav. That Nikolai Levitsky had created Koschei. That Nikolai Levitsky had let him loose.

And then I knew the truth.

I raised my pistol and pointed it at Ryzhkov. ‘It’s you,’ I said. ‘ You’re Koschei.’

The room was silent. The accusation of Koschei’s identity was like casting a spell inside the izba , As if time had stopped to allow us to process this new revelation. No one spoke; no one moved; hardly a breath was taken.

Marianna. The boys. I was close now. So close. I had to keep my nerve. I couldn’t fail now. Not now.

‘You?’ Tanya broke the silence. ‘ You’re Koschei?’

Ryzhkov inflated before me as he sucked a long breath into his nostrils. He held it for a moment, then let it out as the grin returned to his lips. He kept his eyes on me, only me, and there was a disturbing glint in them, which he had hidden well when we met. He had played the part of the honourable soldier; the man who had followed the orders of a maniac because he was too afraid to disobey, but he had been unable to maintain the charade for long. He was too full of conceit, and now the spark was there that made him more alive than any of us. My eyes felt dull and tired and weary of the things they had seen, but his were glittering with expectation and excitement. He was glad to be himself again, the perfect tool of the Cheka. A man who enjoyed his work.

He straightened, throwing back his shoulders and lifting his arm. He raised it slowly, finger and thumb formed in the way a child would pretend he was holding a pistol. When the finger was level with me, he was a mirror image, standing with his make-believe weapon outstretched, as I stood with my real one.

His sudden composure was chilling. One moment he was raising his voice and ranting like a lunatic, and the next he was almost serene.

‘No. You’re Koschei,’ he said, dropping his thumb to fire an imaginary bullet into my head. ‘And him. He’s Koschei too.’ He aimed at one of the men at the table and did the same. ‘And him .’ He pointed at another, firing a third, silent, invisible bullet.

‘Where is my wife? Where are my sons?’ My words came out as a whisper, but they were easily audible in the quiet room.

Ryzhkov spread his hands wide. ‘We’re all Koschei. Don’t you see that? Every one of us tasked with spreading the terror that keeps the enemy in the shadow is Koschei. We’re a whispered promise of death.’

‘Where are they?’ I asked.

‘I’m a monster , and you are too. Don’t you understand that? That’s what they want us to be, the men who give the orders. They want people to tell stories about us for years to come. They gave you a medal for it.’

‘Tell me where you took them.’

Ryzhkov rolled his eyes in exasperation as if his mask of calmness were about to crack and fall from his face to reveal the true evil beneath.

‘Think about it, Nikolai. Mothers and fathers tell their children the skazkas to teach them not to go into the woods, not to steal, not to curse, to… to do as they are told.’ He waved a hand. ‘To obey. And that’s what we do for the people – we give them a symbol of what can happen if they don’t obey. They’ll be afraid for a long time – for years to come. They’ll talk about us in whispers, Nikolai. We make them afraid. You make them afraid.’

‘Where are they?’ I thumbed back the hammer of my pistol, aware of the men at the table. They were unarmed, but they were still dangerous. Four loyal, well-trained, experienced and obedient men. I could not afford to dismiss them as subdued.

Ryzhkov shook his head in disappointment. ‘You can’t shoot me, Nikolai, you know that. Kill me and you’ll never know where my prisoners went. Or…’ the grin returned, ‘…or maybe you can just shoot me. I mean, how do you even know they’re still alive? Maybe they’re dead already. I’ve killed so many people I’ve lost count and probably wouldn’t even remember which village it was. Isn’t that a wonderful irony? That I found your family without even knowing it?’

It was clear that Ryzhkov was a madman. Whatever he had done, whoever he had been and whatever he had believed, it had driven him to this. Turned him into this .

‘One of your men will tell us,’ Tanya said.

‘Perhaps they don’t even know.’ He turned to Tanya with an expression of mock sympathy. ‘Sorry. It looks like we’ve reached a stalemate. There’s nowhere to go from here. So what do we do? What do you want to do?’

Tanya didn’t reply. Instead she approached Ryzhkov, coming close enough to press the barrel of her pistol against his heart. ‘I want my husband and my children back.’

Behind me, Oksana and the old woman said, ‘No,’ in unison, and the men at the table made a move to rise, but Ryzhkov held out a hand to them, signalling them to stay where they were.