Michael Bunker - WICK

Vasily’s hole was shallower than the others and his heap less high, although it still came up to the level of his eyes and was made taller, in relation to his small frame, as all the heaps were, by the fact that the fresh dug earth was piled upon the several feet of snow that blanketed the open field.

Vasily pushed the point of his shovel into the earth and stepped onto the foot rest with all his weight, giving a little hop and landing on the shovel until he felt the blade sink into the as-yet unfrozen soil. The handle in his hands felt solid as he leaned back and used his leverage to carefully lift the soil out of the hole and up and over his head. He emptied the dirt onto the heap, more gently this time, making sure it didn’t slide back into the hole on top of him.

The young man talking to him—his work partner in digging this hole—was named Kolya. He was older than Vasily and had a reputation for being a quirky intellectual. Vasily had never spent much time around him, but standing now in the hole with him he glanced at the intellectual’s pudgy round face and angular glasses and noticed his soft fleshy hands, red from the cold in the thinning moonlight, and he wondered silently to himself what Kolya’s interest was in being here at this moment. He had, like the rest of the youths who were now digging, volunteered for this duty.

Vladimir had asked for volunteers to follow him behind the prison in the immediate aftermath of the execution of the guards. There is a way that revolutionaries request volunteers, especially after a particularly brutal display of violence, which insures an adequate level of participation from those who otherwise might just be caught up in the riptide of events. Some volunteer out of a desire to curry favor with violent and powerful men, some do so out of fear or panic, and still others pitch-in out of curiosity, or merely from a lack of any other plan for the moment.

Kolya, standing with a large group of boys around the gymnasium and feeling voluntold to work, quickly stepped out of the crowd to follow the brutish Vladimir to the open field. Vasily, too, had gone along, not really as a volunteer, but mainly because he felt internally compelled to do so in order to remain, as much as possible, under the radar. Now he found himself with Kolya and the others digging holes in the ground in the crisp night air.

Had they been digging for treasure, there might have been a celebratory feel to it all, everyone joking and cutting up as they checked their maps to make sure that the spot where they were digging was likely to lead them to the gold, but there was no celebration in the air, and there were no maps either, and the frigid night was filled with diligent grunting without a hint of laughter. They were simply youths—most in their late teens, but a few in their early twenties—in the middle of a field laboring away with cold solemnity. The dead didn’t mind or protest, and so this somehow seemed the only appropriate response since, from the moment they had been handed shovels, they’d realized their purpose. They were there to dig graves for those who had departed from this night’s horrible events.

Kolya had spoken to him in English. Vasily was careful not to look at him or to give any indication that he understood. Best to just let them think I’m an idiot, he thought. He was still shaking a bit from the fear he’d experienced at the hands of Vladimir and Mikail, and that fear now jumped into his chest once more as he looked up with his next shovel full and saw the barrel of a gun at the end of Vladimir’s arm.

“He can’t understand English, you fool,” Vladimir barked at Kolya. “And get back to work. Morning will come before you know it and we have other work to do! Where did you learn to speak like that anyway? Where did you learn this phrase ‘willy-nilly’?” When Vladimir spoke the word it sounded like “will-he, nill-he.”

“I read… That’s how I know that phrase. Maybe I saw it in Shakespeare,” Kolya said.

Vladimir looked at Kolya through narrowed eyes.

“What?!” Kolya feigned surprise. “You think no one in our little hamlet reads Shakespeare?” He smiled at the corners of his mouth, waiting for some flash of recognition from Vladimir, but if the brute saw anything clever in what Kolya had said, he didn’t show it.

Vladimir switched to Russian. “I don’t know and I don’t care. Perhaps you should spend some time reading Marx. And before that, perhaps you should spend some time digging this grave or maybe I’ll decide to have you dig your own.”

“How very bourgeois of you,” Kolya answered in Russian. “Or is it me being bourgeois? Standing here and talking to you while I am possibly digging my own grave… and you there, shaking your spear at me!”

Vasily glanced up at him, to see whether Kolya was being insolent or clever. The young intellectual seemed to be doing neither and both. More so, it seemed that he was merely in love with the sound of the words. He waited again for a response from Vladimir, but only got a threatening snap of the gun against the brute’s side in response. Then the gun and the brute walked away and made their way down the line of graves, stepping gingerly around the series of body bags laid out near the holes.

Kolya bent his nose down to look at Vasily over his glasses and winked. He gave a faint little whistle and then took his shovel in hand and slowly began to press himself into service. As he did, Vasily looked up at the black bag in front of him and noticed the hastily scribbled name on the surface of the bag, shimmering in white against the black of the bag in the light of the moon and the snow.

Volkhov.

He felt a grip of grief and looked over quickly at his mate to see if the older youth had noticed, only to give a short dumb smile before he went back to his digging. He heard a grunt from the hole next to him and the plop of earth land at the top of that heap, followed by the shushing of the tiny aggregate as it separated and began to roll slowly down the small hill, willy-nilly.

There is a feeling of finality, mixed liberally with the morose recognition of the vibrancy and vitality of still being alive, when one is digging a grave for another human. Eyes peer into other eyes and declare firmly to one another that “we are still alive,” and answer back to one another without words the old question, “Why is there existence, rather than the lack of it?”

I dig and therefore I am.

Digging graves is an effective antidote to the most foolish of philosophies. Denying existence is for men who’ve never dug a grave for a friend.

They finished the digging part as the night settled into the a.m., and wearily climbed out of the graves and stood around waiting for whatever was to come next. They assumed the un-digging part would come next—the burying of the dead—but that part would have to wait.

What came next was the figure of Mikail, walking quickly across the snow, calling out to Vladimir who met him halfway along his path. The group could faintly hear what seemed to be an argument emanating from the two men as they approached. Vasily stood near the back of the group, farthest away from the two men, and watched as Mikail waved his hands at Vladimir’s head-shaking. Not from any words he could hear, but from the image of the two arguing, Vasily got the word picture of violent reason butting heads with reasonless violence.

As they drew closer, the argument ceased, and Vladimir commanded the youths to follow him. “We have to go to the church to address a disturbance,” he said, as if that statement fully briefed the group to his satisfaction.

Vasily began walking in the direction of St. Olaf’s, only to feel a hand grab his arm, his sleeve riding up on his shoulder, and when he turned, he found Mikail standing behind him.