Dan Smith - The Child Thief

‘She is not your daughter, is she?’

‘She is.’ I turned to Dariya once again. ‘Please. Tell him. Tell him who I am.’ I looked at the OGPU man again. ‘I swear it. She is my—’

‘Then explain this.’

Lermentov reached into my satchel once more and removed the waxed paper parcel I had taken from the shepherd’s hut. He put it on the table, pushing the satchel away.

And I knew. Before Lermentov unwrapped it, I knew what it would contain. Even in death the child thief had won his game. From his grave he had found a way of killing me.

The OGPU officer took the edges of the paper in his fingers and pulled them apart, opening them out and smoothing them against the surface of the table. Then he turned the open package around and pushed it a little closer so I could see the piece of meat it contained.

When I had first taken it from the cabin, I had expected salo . Salted pork fat that I had intended to share with my sons to stave off the hunger. But this was not pork fat. This flesh was from a different animal altogether.

My world stopped. Nothing was real any more.

Dariya was not my daughter, but I had said it so many times, tried hard to believe my own story, that now I felt as if I truly were her father. After all, she had no other father to protect her, for her own lay dead beneath the snow. Somehow she had managed to do what I – and who knew how many men before me – had failed to do. She had killed the child thief. She had pierced his throat with steel and taken his life, and now she had stumbled from one nightmare into another and her child’s mind was unable to cope with it. She had receded into her own head and I found myself envying her. Right now I wanted to do the same thing, but my mind was stronger and I was conditioned to withstand atrocity. I was hardened to the things around me, just like all those who had grown to maturity in those godless times. From the Great War to the revolution and the civil war and the following hardships, we were all conditioned to a life of struggle. But this child before me, not even nine years old, she knew none of those things. She had lived apart from those things, but now they had entered her life, and they had turned her inwards and broken her.

I wanted to reach out to her. I wanted to hold her. This poor girl with no one to help her. No one to protect her.

I stood and took a step towards her, wanting to pull her close and let her bury her face in the folds of my shirt. I wanted her to know that she wasn’t alone, to whisper in her ear and tell her I would keep her safe. And for a moment she was Lara, standing there on the cold stones, looking at me, asking me to bring back her friend.

‘I promised,’ I said. ‘I promised.’

‘You child-hating bastard.’ Lermentov spat his words into the cold church and the blow from the crucifix was like none that had come before it. The old wood cracked into the side of my head hard enough to knock me off my feet. I fell against the chair, forcing it away from me, my face smashing against the seat before I was on the floor.

From my prone position I looked up at the policeman standing over me, the crucifix in his hands. The bearded man from the village was looking at me now, his lips pursed, a slight shake in his head. Beside him Dariya continued to stare ahead.

Then I closed my eyes.

When I woke, I was in darkness. For a second I thought I was blind and there was a brief moment of panic before I saw the faint light sliding beneath the door. There were voices too, quiet but insistent, and someone’s hands were on me, but they weren’t there to inflict pain.

‘He’s waking up, I think.’ It sounded like Kostya, the man who was imprisoned for making a joke about our great leader.

‘I’ m fine,’ I said, pushing the hand away, sitting up and moving back to lean against the wall. ‘Leave me.’

‘You’ve been asleep for a while.’

‘How long?’

‘It’s hard to say.’

‘Hours? A day?’

‘Much of the day. At least I think it’s day. They brought food a while ago, and I think that usually comes in the morning.’

I touched the side of my face, feeling the split in the skin, the hardened crust of blood. There was a graze across my forehead that was rough and dry, and my head was pounding like I’d drunk a whole bottle of horilka myself.

‘Here.’ I felt a hand on my own and I tried to pull away, but the grip tightened.

‘Please,’ Kostya said. ‘Take this.’

I remained tense for a second, untrusting, then relaxed and allowed Kostya to take my hand, open my fingers and touch something to them. Something metallic.

‘Drink it,’ he said.

I took hold of the cup and lifted it to my nose to sniff it.

‘Water,’ Kostya said. ‘It’s a little stale, but it’s water.’

‘Where…’ I began to ask, but my mouth was dry and my tongue was swollen. My lips were thick and fat from where the policeman had hit me.

‘They give us water once a day,’ said Dimitri Markovich. ‘We all save a mouthful to make it last. There’s a little bread too. Take it.’

‘This is all of it,’ Kostya said.

‘I can’t—’

‘Drink,’ he said, and I felt his hands touching me again, finding the cup and pushing it towards my mouth. ‘You need it.’

I put the metal cup to my lips and tipped it, the warm liquid moistening my mouth. I kept it there, savouring the feeling, then took it away, not wanting to drink it all at once. There wasn’t much more than a drop left.

I fumbled the crust of bread that Kostya pressed into my hand, feeling its hard edges, the softer interior, and I remembered I hadn’t eaten for a long time. I’d taken the child thief’s parcel, thinking it would be my next meal, but the thought of it now filled me with revulsion. That small piece of meat wrapped in paper.

‘Eat,’ Kostya said, touching my hand. ‘Eat.’

I pushed aside the image that dirtied my thoughts. I pictured not the flesh nor the wound, but the girl. Dariya was safe and she was alive; that’s what was important. And if I was to have any chance of helping her I needed to be strong. I needed to eat.

I bit off a small piece of bread with my front teeth and tried not to feel the guilt of taking the last of the food and water.

I wanted to see the faces of the men who had given me everything they had. Men who knew nothing about me and yet offered everything. And it struck me that in these hard times there were small moments of kindness which lifted us above the filth and the death. With these tiny acts, we were still human, still able to have faith in one another. There was still something good left in the world.

‘Thank you,’ I said to the darkness. I drank again and somewhere outside I heard a garmoshka begin to play. The music went on for a few bars, a melancholy tune, and then someone began to sing. A deep voice, the words sung in Russian.

‘Always this song,’ said Dimitri. ‘He always plays this song.’

‘To stop us from sleeping,’ said Kostya.

‘His awful Russian songs.’

‘Russians. They’re all drunkards and thieves,’ said Yuri.

I let the water slip down my throat and I leaned my head back on the wall and listened to the song. A Russian folk song, about a man imprisoned for telling the truth. He escapes his prison one dark night and comes to Lake Baikal, where he takes a fisherman’s boat and sings a sad song as he crosses the lake to his mother. When he reaches the furthest shore he embraces his mother and asks for his father and his brother. But his father is long dead and buried beneath the damp earth, and his brother is in chains in Siberia.

When it was finished there was silence for just a few moments, probably for someone to take a drink of vodka, and then the music began again, this time a faster tune, someone clapping along.