Dan Smith - The Child Thief

‘How can you be sure this man has shelter?’ Leonid asked.

‘Because if he didn’t, he’d freeze to death just like any of us. We have to go back first,’ I said. ‘We have to collect a few things. Then we’ll follow. At first light.’

‘That’s too late,’ Dimitri said. ‘She might be—’

‘She’s not,’ I said. ‘She’s not.’ But I couldn’t be sure Dariya wasn’t already dead. I could only hope.

‘I can’t wait till first light. I’m going now,’ Dimitri said, pulling away from me and rushing out into the snow. Almost immediately he stumbled and fell.

I hurried out to grab hold of him. ‘You’re destroying the tracks. We’ll never find her if you do that. We have to wait until first light,’ I said. ‘We have to wait . I understand your pain and your impatience, but we have to wait. We can’t follow at night, unprepared.’ I felt Dimitri’s fear and his anger. I felt it seeping from every pore, washing him with its stink. I could smell it all around him. Dimitri was afraid for his daughter as any father would be afraid for his child. As I would be afraid for mine. And he had come fresh from the scene of two murdered children and a wrongly hanged man. He would be thinking what we were all thinking.

‘We’ll find her,’ I said. ‘I promised Lara, and now I’m promising you. We’ll find her and we’ll bring her back.’

Dimitri continued to struggle, but he began to weaken and I felt the fight drain from him. He knew I was right. There was no point in following her in the dark. The moon was dying behind the clouds and the night would be black. We’d see nothing of the tracks, and the cold would break us. It would slip its fingers beneath our coats and it would wrap itself around our hearts. I could feel it now, already nipping at me.

‘We’ll fetch a lamp,’ Dimitri said. ‘Begin searching tonight.’

‘A lamp’s no good,’ I told him. ‘A few candles in the forest at night? You’ll see nothing but your feet. At best you’ll destroy any tracks, and at worst you’ll lose yourself and be dead from the cold before morning. I’ve seen it before.’

I pulled my brother-in-law to his feet and turned him in the direction of home. Pushing and pulling him back down to the village.

‘First light,’ I said. ‘I promise,’ I was already thinking about what we would need to take with us.

The other men walked in silence, all of them feeling Dimitri’s pain.

‘You’re a believer,’ I said to Dimitri.

‘Hm?’

‘You believe in God.’

‘Of course.’

‘Then pray.’

‘I already am. Every second.’

I nodded, watching what I could see of Dimitri’s face in the falling darkness, then I lifted my eyes to the stars and a made a quiet prayer of my own. I thought about those tracks in the land, leading away from Lara and Dariya’s secret place, and I prayed that God would do just one thing for me. I prayed the tracks would stay fresh. I prayed it wouldn’t snow tonight.

Natalia was at the window, lit by the weak flame of a candle, when I returned. She and the children had been watching for me, seeing the dark shapes up on the slope before the sun dropped and took them from their sight. But now she was at the door, helping me with my coat, waiting for me to remove my boots.

‘Did you find her, Papa?’ Lara came forward without hope in her eyes.

I put my hands on my daughter’s cheeks and squatted so our eyes were level.

I wanted to tell her that Dariya was safe at home, that I had climbed the gentle hill with my head high and I had shown the other men what to do. I wanted to prove to my daughter that I was the brave and perfect father she believed she had.

But I shook my head. ‘No, my angel.’

Lara swallowed and nodded because she knew that would be the answer. She’d been at the window with her mother, and she’d seen that Dariya was not with me when I returned to the village. ‘Did the Baba Yaga take her?’

I smiled, but it was a forced, tight-lipped expression caused by sadness rather than amusement. ‘No, my angel. There is no Baba Yaga. That’s just a story.’ A story with which we teased the children, a way of keeping them from wandering too far into the forest. It was a dangerous place if they became lost, but it was sometimes hard to make children understand that. Frightening them with tales of the old hag worked better. There were even grown men who shuddered in the forest when they remembered the tales they’d heard as children – tales which they now recounted to their own sons and daughters.

Alone in the forest, with nothing but the trees, a person raised on folk stories of the old witch can find it hard not to imagine the bone fences, each post topped by a human skull except for the one left free for the head of the next weary traveller. There were savage dogs and a terrible house that moved on chicken legs, creaking and groaning, screaming as it turned to face the traveller. And the twisted old hag herself, spewing from that house, cackling, flying in her blackened pestle. The stories varied from telling to telling – the keyhole filled with teeth, the witch who ages a year each time she answers a question – but the one thing many of the stories had in common was that the Baba Yaga’s favourite food was lost, vulnerable children. And thinking about it like that, I wondered if Lara wasn’t half right. Perhaps the Baba Yaga had taken Dariya.

‘Then where is she?’ Lara asked. ‘Is she lost?’ Her eyes widened as she considered something even more terrible than the broken teeth and the crooked back of the old witch. Lara had heard Natalia and me talking. She had assimilated words and emotions she knew nothing about, but they had become her fears. ‘Did the Chekists come for her?’ she asked.

I glanced up at Natalia standing close, the word hanging between us as an invisible entity. It was an old word for an organisation that no longer existed under that name. Lenin’s Cheka was once responsible for grain requisition, the interrogation of political enemies, running the Gulag system and putting down rebellious peasants, workers and deserting Red Army soldiers. Its name was so ingrained in the consciousness of the people that even though it had a new title, OGPU, many people still referred to the political police as Chekists. And just that one word was sufficient to capture the essence of everything the organisation stood for.

For Lara, the word held special power. She was afraid of the Baba Yaga, but the adults were afraid of the Chekists.

‘No, Lara. Not them either,’ I said. ‘Dariya is lost, that’s all. But I’m going to find her. Her papa and I are going to look for her and we’re going to find her.’

‘You promise?’

‘Didn’t I already promise?’

Lara nodded and I hugged her tight, grateful she was here and not out there in the dark and the cold. I felt a great sadness for Dimitri, and I felt fear and sympathy for Dariya, but I couldn’t help also feeling relief for my own daughter, and for the other people standing around me in that room.

I held Lara for a while, the hard floor painful on my knees, and I wiped the palm of my hand across my eyes before I released her. ‘Time for you to sleep now.’

‘But, Papa, I—’

‘Now,’ I said, looking up at Natalia again. ‘And no stories tonight. Straight to sleep.’

Natalia nodded and took Lara’s hand, leading her into the bedroom.

I watched them go and stayed on my knees. My legs didn’t work like they did when I was a young man. There was a stiffness in the joints, aches in the places where they had been broken or injured. I’d survived two wars, fought for three different armies, and I counted my blessings I’d come away alive, but I hadn’t been free from injury.