Dan Smith - The Child Thief

‘What does it matter?’ said Kostya. ‘We’re all revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries now. There is nothing else. No more individuals. We’re all part of the collective.’

‘Or perhaps you liked the fighting?’ Yuri ignored him. ‘The action? I can understand it. There’s fear and horror in fighting, but when you’ve fought for so long it becomes part of you.’

‘I manage without it. I put those things away.’

‘Is that what you do with your guilt?’

‘There’s no guilt,’ I said.

‘But it’s how you live with the things you saw,’ Yuri said. ‘How you forget the men you killed and the things you did. You put them away.’

‘How do you forget?’

‘Who says I do?’

I looked across at the dark shape that was Yuri Grigorovich.

‘So you lock them away in your mind,’ he went on. ‘You leave them behind a door in the dark. And what happens when that door opens, just a crack?’

‘It never does,’ I said.

Yuri grunted, making a dismissive sound, and the room fell into silence.

There was no way to measure time in the obscurity of our prison. The only light was that which trickled around and beneath the door. The only sounds were of breathing, of bodies shuffling, throats being cleared. We were left to our thoughts, only drawn back to the present by sporadic snatches of conversation.

‘So they arrested you for owning a rifle,’ Kostya said into the gloom.

‘Maybe for that.’ I was glad for the change in subject. Yuri’s direction had been unsettling. ‘Or maybe for fighting in the Imperial Army? For being a tsarist? I don’t know. What reasons do they need? They arrested Dimitri for trying to help a child. And the rest of you? What are you locked in here for?’

‘Maybe because there was no one else to arrest, Evgeni said. ‘Because the soldiers were bored.’

‘So why are they here?’ I asked. ‘The soldiers. Moscow doesn’t send soldiers to every village. Activists, maybe, but soldiers? And this many?’

‘We refused to join the kolkhoz ,’ Kostya said. ‘It’s not our tradition; we’re single farmers. We work hard for what little we have, and they tell us to give it away and to move out to one of their farms. They said it would be good for us all, that they would give us tractors and we would grow so much we could feed the revolution. But we said no, and one of their activists came two weeks ago – one of their young men from the city who knows nothing of our lives or the country.’

I waited for him to go on.

‘He came with two soldiers, and they wanted to take our land and our animals. So we slaughtered them.’

‘The activist?’

‘No,’ Kostya half-laughed. ‘That came later. No, we killed the animals so they couldn’t take them for their kolkhoz , so they took our belongings instead, burning what they didn’t want, and then they began to take the men. There were those in the village who called themselves good communists, people who spied on the rest of us, and they pointed their fingers, and there would be a knock on the door in the middle of the night, and people disappeared and didn’t come back. Some of the men, the ones who were left, they protested.’

‘Protested how?’ I asked.

‘By bringing a death sentence on the whole village,’ Yuri said.

‘They went to the house where the activist and the soldiers were staying, and they burned it to the ground,’ Kostya said. ‘But it was a small victory. They came back last week in numbers and threw the bell from the tower, rode their horses into the church, and when the priest tried to stop them, they ordered him to strip naked and walk out into the snow. They watched him until he began to cry. A grown man, a priest , reduced to tears and begging. So they whipped him across the back with their pistols and left him to bleed while they burned the icons and turned the church into a prison’

I was surprised at the tone of Kostya’s voice – as if he was recounting something that had happened many years ago, and to someone else. There was no anger or indignation or sense of injustice. There was only a weary acceptance, as if he had all but given up.

‘And they began their liquidation of kulaks,’ he said. ‘If anyone even knows what a kulak is.’

‘Everyone is a kulak,’ Evgeni said. ‘If you have a small plot of land, you’re a kulak. If you own an animal, you’re a kulak. If you’ve ever owned an animal, you’re a kulak. And they’re terrified of the kulak like they’re afraid of the Jew.’

‘But they didn’t deport any of you ?’

‘You mean we might be spies?’ Yuri asked.

‘No, I…’

‘Of course that’s what you mean,’ said Kostya, ‘and why wouldn’t you? It’s just like it was after the revolution. No one can trust anyone. It’s how they want it.’

‘And why are they still here?’

‘They made this their headquarters,’ he said. ‘From here they find the other villages and farms and they force them into the kolkhoz and they take away their belongings and their food and their kulaks. And then they’ll send workers from the cities to farm the land because there’ll be none of us left. We’ll either be deported or we’ll be dead. If not by their hand, then because we have nothing to eat. My wife, she used to be fat. Fat and beautiful, but now I can see her bones through her skin, and she goes into the forest to look for mushrooms or whatever she can. If we could catch the birds from the sky, we would eat them.’

No one spoke. The sound of breathing filled the room and I felt the despair and resignation in these men.

‘We are beginning to starve,’ Evgeni said. ‘All of us. Much more of this, and there’ll be no one left. It’ll be like it was ten years ago when there was nothing to eat and the Volga refugees brought cholera and typhus.’

‘They say people even ate their own children,’ Yuri said, and it made me think of the bodies I’d found on the sled just a few days ago. ‘You ever hear stories like that, Luka? You ever hear of people eating their own children?’

‘Not their own, no.’

‘But something like it?’

I didn’t answer.

‘A soldier like you, you must have seen things,’ he persisted.

‘As must you .’

‘They’ll let us all die in the streets,’ Evgeni said.

I put my hands to my face and rubbed hard. I wondered if it was possible to die from despair. ‘And you men?’ I asked. ‘Why were you arrested?’

Kostya laughed, but it was a sad sound, made low in his chest. ‘Does there need to be a reason?’

No one answered.

‘I made a joke,’ he said. ‘I made a stupid joke that our great leader must be getting fat with all the bread he has while we’re getting thinner. A soldier heard me and now I’m an agitator. An enemy of the state. My brother, Evgeni, he’s here because I am, and I will for ever be sorry that I have made it so. If I’m an enemy of the state, then so must he be.’

‘They beat me for being a conspirator or an enemy of the state or something,’ Evgeni said. ‘A counter-revolutionary. They beat me and put me in the bell tower to make me admit it. So I admit it.’

‘The bell tower?’

‘They left me up there. Naked, in the cold, until my heart felt like it was going to freeze right in my chest. So I admitted to whatever they asked me.’

The men had exhausted themselves and they fell silent for a long time, all of them thinking about what had been said. The room was blank but for the soporific sound of steady breathing, the occasional cough.

Sitting against the wall with my head tipped back, the hardness of the stone was cruel on the places where my bones were closest to the skin. I had no coat to make myself comfortable, to use as a pillow or a mattress, and sitting in the darkness it was impossible to know what time of day it was, but eventually I slept, waking only to the sound of the church door banging and the advance of heavy boots across the floor. There was a scraping of wood on stone, a voice speaking with authority, rapid sentences, and then the footsteps approached the door that was keeping us sealed inside that small room. They stopped. A key in the lock, turning, metal on metal.