Dan Smith - The Child Thief

I went to the tracks leading away and took off a glove, putting my finger into one of the prints. ‘He was carrying her when he walked away,’ I said.

‘Alive?’ Petro asked.

‘There’s no way of knowing.’

‘So what are you going to do now?’ Aleksandra asked.

I took one of the two last cigarettes from the packet and put it between my lips. I lit it with a match and sucked the smoke deep. ‘Keep going,’ I said, looking at the boys. ‘I’m going to find this man and I’m going to kill him.’ And I knew I wanted it more than ever now. Never had I wanted to take a life as much as I wanted it now. Until this moment I had been intent on finding Dariya, and the fate of the child thief was always secondary, but now I wanted him dead. I wanted to see his life fade. I wanted him to look into my eyes as his own glazed over and became dry.

‘Maybe it’s time to go back,’ Petro said. ‘Maybe it’s time to go back to Mama and Lara. I want to find Dariya, but I’m worried about Mama. And if Dariya’s already…’ He took a deep breath. ‘Maybe we should go back to them.’

‘They’re fine,’ I told him. ‘They’re strong.’

‘The Bolsheviks might be there already. In our village. Taking our—’

‘They won’t do anything to your mother or Lara. It’s the men they want. It’s our belongings and it’s the men.’

Petro looked at Aleksandra, who stared at him for a moment and then turned away. Her mouth was tight, her lips pressed together, her hair falling about her face. She knew different. We all did.

‘I don’t know,’ Petro said. ‘I just can’t help feeling we should go back. I want to keep looking but…’

A part of me wanted to listen to him. I wanted to go back and be with my family, to protect them from the oncoming storm, but the truth was that there was little I could do to protect them from the Bolsheviks. When the party officials and the OGPU and the Red Army were upon Vyriv, there would be nothing anyone could do other than cooperate with them. They could have our chickens and they could have our field and they could have our grain and what few potatoes were left in the cellar. Natalia and Lara were no threat to them, but they might think I was. A veteran of the Imperial Army. A former Red Army soldier who defected because he grew to despise an army that treated its soldiers with disdain, executed young soldiers who were afraid to fight, dragged men from their homes to fill their ranks. If they came to Vyriv and they found out who I was, they would take me out in the night and they would shoot me. They would murder my family as counter-revolutionaries.

‘Maybe we should go back,’ Petro said again. ‘There’s no point if she’s already gone.’

‘No. We should follow him.’ Viktor spoke now, and I could see myself in my son’s eyes. He felt what I felt. He felt the rage and violent necessity for retribution. For Viktor this was a direction for his feelings, something to obliterate what he’d done back on the road. It was his nature to deal with it this way. ‘Papa’s right. Mama and Lara will be fine.’

‘And if someone denounces them?’ Petro said. ‘What then?’

Standing out there in the wilderness and the cold, my heart faltered and it was my turn to look at Aleksandra. I knew Petro was right. There was nothing to stop one of the other villagers from denouncing them in order to make themselves look more loyal. Aleksandra had already made that clear. In their delusion, they would try to deflect the horror onto others rather than accept it upon themselves. The truth was that we would all suffer, and in the years to come millions would lie dead in the streets with their bones pushing through paper-thin flesh and their eyes bulging in their skulls. But human instinct is to survive, and if someone in our village saw a way of making their own situation less severe, there was a strong chance they would use my history to save themselves.

I looked back at the way we had come. Then I looked forward at the single track leading away. Ahead, the child thief was increasing his lead. Behind, there might be soldiers already following our trail, searching for Aleksandra. And, further back, our village hid in the dip of the valley, trembling at the approaching terror. I could see no right decision. There were too many possibilities and too few certainties.

Viktor and Petro waited, but I didn’t know what to say. For the first time since we had left, I didn’t know what was the best thing to do. I had made a promise to Lara that I would return with her cousin, but the blood and the scalp suggested I had failed in that already.

It was Aleksandra who gave me the answer. ‘You said she could survive this.’

I tried not to look at the scalp. ‘I said it’s possible, but…’ I blew my breath out, puffing my cheeks and shaking my head.

‘Then maybe you should give her a chance,’ Aleksandra said. ‘You have friends in your village?’

‘Of course.’

‘And your wife is with your daughter.’

I could see what she was saying. She was weighing the options, trying to find who needed me most right now.

‘But this girl… she has no one. She is just a girl, alone. With a killer.’

I took the last drag of the cigarette and dropped it into the snow.

‘Maybe we should separate,’ said Petro. ‘I’ll go back to—’

‘No. That’s the thing we should not do,’ I said. ‘Not now. You’d never get back alone.’

I could see Petro was about to protest. I’d seen the expression enough times to know what was in his head. ‘I trust you, Petro. It’s not that. I know you’re strong and I know you’re capable. You’ve proved that. You can hunt, build a shelter, keep warm, but it’s a mistake to go alone. We should stay together.’ I gestured at the forest behind us. ‘There might be soldiers out there searching for Aleksandra. Or maybe this man we’re hunting wants us to split up, so he can pick us off alone.’ I looked my son in the eye. ‘If we separate, we can’t take care of each other.’ I felt as if we were being led, drawn into the child thief’s trap, but I saw no alternative other than to press on. And it troubled me that, while we discussed our options, the child thief had left his trail, knowing before we knew ourselves that we would follow. There was no choice.

‘I’m afraid for Mama,’ Petro said.

‘So am I. But I’m afraid for Dariya too. If she’s still alive, then she’s alone and afraid and hurt. We have to keep after her until we know for sure.’

‘For how long?’ There was relief in his expression. He had voiced his concern, but the decision was out of his hands. I had chosen to go on and I had told him to follow. He wanted to find Dariya, appease his guilt for what had happened to her, and he had spoken aloud his worries about his mother. I had made the difficult choice for them, and the decision had been prompted by Aleksandra, the only one of us who had any objectivity.

‘We’ll keep going until nightfall,’ I said. ‘After that, we’ll rethink if necessary.’

So we walked in silence again. Petro to my left, the faint remainder of the child thief’s lonely tracks to my right. And behind, Viktor and Aleksandra kept up, all of us forging through the snow until we came to the edge of the forest, opening onto another clear area. But this was not like the fields we had come across before. Here the ground was rocky and undulating. And unlike the flat fields of fertile black soil where Dimitri had been shot, this area was on a steeper incline.

‘Stay close to the trees,’ I said, crouching at the trunk of a large maple and taking out my binoculars. The snow had begun to ease off now, just a few light flakes falling from a translucent sky.

‘You see anything?’ Viktor asked.