Dan Smith - Red Winter

‘If only that were true. No, if I ride behind them, they’ll think I don’t trust them and so they won’t trust me. It’s… complicated.’

‘Well, I don’t like it.’

‘Then we need to remain alert and keep watching. And stay close to me. Don’t ever leave my sight. Here.’ I took Tanya’s folding knife from my satchel and held it out to her. ‘Put this somewhere handy. Just in case.’

I didn’t anticipate that she would ever need it, but it would make her feel safer, and soon, there might come a time when I would have to leave her alone with some of these men.

Anna took it without hesitation, turning it over in her hands and slipping it into her pocket.

‘You know what I was, don’t you?’ I said.

‘You mean a soldier?’

‘But you know what kind of soldier.’

‘Yes.’

‘But I’m not a bad person. I don’t want you to think I’m a bad person. I’ve done—’

‘I know what you are,’ Anna said. ‘You’re not a bad man. Papa liked you.’

‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘I liked him too. Very much. And thank you.’

‘For what?’

‘For what you did in the izba .’

‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ she said.

‘All right. I understand.’

The men had few supplies, so when we rejoined them, Anna and I shared what we had. They took the opportunity to speak with me, shaking my hand, patting me on the back and saying how good it was to have me as their commander once again.

‘But you’ve been hunting me all this time,’ I said.

‘You were in no danger,’ Bukharin said. ‘Not from us.’ He was one of the men I had known the longest – a subordinate, but with as much experience as I had. Bukharin fought in the war before the revolution, joined the people’s army rather than be conscripted. He was more a soldier than anyone I knew, but had always shown more loyalty to his unit than to Moscow. He had been a good man to have with me at Grivino.

‘You could have just let me go. Gone back to Ryzhkov to tell him I was dead.’

‘He wanted you alive,’ said Manarov. ‘Or proof that you were dead.’

‘What kind of proof?’

The men looked around at each other.

‘Your head.’

Then I understood how truly afraid my men had been of Koschei. Now there was an air of relief about them, as if a burden had been lifted from their shoulders, and I imagined them pursuing me, all the time wondering what they would do if they caught me.

‘Did you let me get ahead?’ I asked. ‘You let me escape you?’

‘Not really,’ Manarov said with a shrug. ‘Sometimes you were clumsy, but mostly you were almost impossible to follow. In the forest, you were like a ghost.’

I smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You’re too kind.’

The men tried to talk to Anna, showing a kindness I had hardly known in them, reminding me that they were also brothers and father and sons. As a unit, we had taken our job seriously and had gathered conscripts and punished deserters just as we were supposed to, but we had not been animals. I had become caught up in my duty, as these men had, but I had woken to the horror of what was being done across our country and I wondered if these men’s eyes had been opened too. Perhaps they had seen enough to instil in them a little compassion. Or perhaps they were just loyal men taking care of their commander’s ward.

Even so, Anna did not speak to any of them. Not a single word.

They put down a tarpaulin for her to sit on, but she refused to leave my side, sitting only when I did. When they made a fire to boil tea, she drank only when I did. One of the men, Nevsky, even brought a medical bag, offering to check her over, but she refused, staring at him and narrowing her eyes in distrust.

Krukov sat beside me, the breeze ruffling his fox-fur hat, and watched her without expression. ‘She’s the child from the farm?’ he asked.

‘That’s right.’

‘We thought she was a boy. What happened to the man who was there?’

I shook my head.

Krukov adjusted his hat. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I didn’t leave because I’m a coward,’ I said. ‘I’m not a coward.’

‘I know that.’

‘I shouldn’t have gone, though. If I hadn’t, none of this would have happened.’

‘Or perhaps it would have happened in a different way,’ Krukov said. He removed his gloves and tore a chunk of bread in two, offering one of the pieces to me.

I took it and stared at the river. It was beautiful, the sun reflecting from its surface, the water still chasing through the wide channel. A few more weeks and the worsening weather would freeze it right down to the bed. The cold would halt all nature but man.

‘Why did Ryzhkov send you after me?’ I asked, still watching the water. ‘Why not come himself?’

‘He did.’ Krukov took a bite of the bread and reached for a piece of salo . ‘At first, anyway.’

‘You told him I was still alive?’

‘It was my duty.’

I took my eyes off the river and looked at Krukov sitting beside me. His sunken cheeks were corpse-like, tight around angular cheekbones. His eyes were almost too large for their sockets, bulging, and his lips were thin. If any one had told me this man was Koschei, I would have believed it. He had the look, the cold disposition, the literal interpretation of orders. For a moment I felt uneasy in his presence, wondering if I had been fooled. It wouldn’t be the first time I discovered that someone wasn’t who they said they were. Perhaps Ryzhkov had lied. Perhaps he had been protecting Krukov’s true identity. Perhaps it was he who was afraid of Koschei.

My mind spun as it tried to follow the endless strands woven into the blanket of deceit that smothered us. I felt as if I would never be certain of anything again. Everything was a lie. Everything was shrouded in dishonesty. Everyone was hiding something.

‘Are you all right?’ Krukov asked.

‘Of course.’ It was a ridiculous notion. If Krukov was Koschei, he would have killed me by now, and the deception would be too elaborate. I couldn’t let go of it, though. Everyone was someone else. It almost hurt to think about it. All I wanted was to be alone with my family, to put the world behind me and find a place where a man is just a man. A friend is a friend.

‘I had to tell him,’ Krukov said. ‘Without you, he was my superior.’

‘I understand.’ Disobeying orders was a capital offence. Ryzhkov had been commander of his unit before it was attached to mine, so when I was no longer there, leadership fell to him. The Red Army had done away with rank and title, but it could not do away with leaders. Without leaders, an army was just a rabble.

Krukov studied the bread in his hand as if he were thinking hard about something, and when he looked back up at me, his expression had softened.

‘All my life I followed orders,’ he said. ‘I was never in command…’

‘You’re a good soldier.’

‘Let me finish.’ Krukov reached into his pocket and took out a flask, which he opened and raised to me. ‘Alek,’ he said. Then he put it to his lips and drank. He grimaced and offered it to me. ‘Vodka.’

‘Alek,’ I toasted, and drank. It stung the cuts and swellings in my mouth, burned as it went down, but it spread a good warmth in my chest. I passed it back and bit into the black bread as Krukov returned the flask to his pocket.

‘I always followed orders,’ he said, ‘always trusted my senior officer, so when I realised it wasn’t you in that ditch in Ulyanov, it was like you’d betrayed me. I was angry, so I reported it to my new commander, Ryzhkov, and we came after you right away. Ryzhkov was… His behaviour was strange. He was like a man whose wife has cheated on him. I had never seen anything like it. I think he admired you.’