Dan Smith - The Child Thief

‘Maybe you should let him come.’ Viktor shrugged. ‘He’s as strong as I am.’

I watched my sons sitting side by side at my table and wondered how they had grown to be men without me noticing. I allowed myself a moment of pride, looking at my family. My strong wife, my two sons and my beautiful daughter. I was a lucky man to have come so far and still have so much. Behind me there was death and hardship, before me there was blood and horror, but here, now, I had everything a man could want.

I nodded. ‘All right, Petro. We could use your help.’

There was still no sign of the sun when we went out into the cold. A greyish half-light had graced the air, but it was subdued by a mist that hung like a veil. We trudged around the house, disturbing a pair of magpies that flew up into the naked branches of an apple tree. The birds watched us from their perch, chattering their staccato cackle and dropping back to the ground as we passed.

‘How d’you want to do this?’ Viktor asked as we came round the old barn.

I unlocked the door and we went in, disturbing the animals, a chicken running for cover.

‘What’s under there?’ Petro asked, nodding his head at the shape under the tarpaulin.

‘Children,’ I said.

‘Children?’

I looked at Viktor. ‘We’ll take everything else off the sled.’ I crouched to untie the ropes that held the tarpaulin in place. ‘Then we’ll take them to the cemetery and bury them.’

Viktor and Petro helped unload the man’s belongings, piling them in one corner of the barn. It wasn’t much to account for a man’s life. A few odds and ends, items one might collect on a long search to survive. I imagined what it must have been like to pull that sled, with its ugly cargo, across the snow for so long that it had wasted a man to almost nothing. I asked myself what could drive a man to that kind of task, and I remembered what Natalia had said about the man’s injury. A single shot that had pierced and exited his body. An expertly dressed wound. I’d seen evidence this man might have been a soldier, maybe even fighting the Germans before we pulled away from the war, so perhaps he had learned to dress a wound. But I wondered who he’d been running from and who might be following him. It didn’t occur to me that the stranger might not have been running from anything. Someone might have been running from him .

I watched Petro’s eyes trying to look away from the small bodies, and was dismayed he’d been adamant about coming with us. He was strong, but he was more sensitive than his brother. Viktor had a harder heart, a stronger constitution. What Viktor saw, he took at face value, but his brother always looked deeper. Petro had his mother’s understanding of the world, and a thing like this would haunt him. I could see the sadness and the revulsion in both their faces, but I knew it was Petro who would see this when he closed his eyes at night.

When everything was unloaded, we covered the children once more and Viktor and Petro took up the reins and dragged the sled outside.

I grabbed a couple of shovels and a pickaxe from the barn and jogged to catch up with them.

‘Put them on the sled,’ Viktor said, but I rested them against my shoulder like weapons and walked alongside my sons as we left the gates and headed out to the cemetery that lay behind the church.

I scanned the doors and windows as we passed among the houses, but I didn’t notice anybody watching us. It wasn’t that I wanted to keep secrets, but I didn’t want the other villagers to worry. They didn’t need to share this. Burying a child is hard, and they’d had their fair share of hardship.

The people of Vyriv had endured the shortages of the famine ten years ago. They had kept their heads low and survived on what little they could produce themselves, afraid they would be noticed in their small valley. They had been spared the cholera and the extreme starvation, but it had been no easy time for them and many had died. Natalia’s parents had been among those who were too weak to survive the hardship. Her father collapsed in the field, at the handles of his plough. His heart failed and he fell into the freshly turned soil, dying on the land he had sown for most of his life. Natalia’s mother saw him fall, but she was old and her painful joints made her slow. He was dead by the time she reached him, and his death weakened her will to go on.

Seeing the destruction caused by the famine, Lenin abolished grain requisitioning, allowed free trade and the country began to recover. Vyriv, like other villages in Ukraine, enjoyed a brief period of prosperity, and the culture was allowed to flourish for a short while. The Ukrainian language was freely spoken once more. But Lenin’s successor was more ruthless and his demands were higher. Stalin was threatened by the prospect of an independent Ukraine. He wanted the country’s food, its blood and its sweat, so he sent his soldiers to take it.

The arrival of the stranger in the village would put the people on edge. They would be full of fear, sense the advent of something terrible, and I wanted to keep this from them because I was afraid of what they might do. Especially if they saw what he had brought with him. I wanted to bury the children, put them to rest without them ever coming to the villagers’ notice.

The church in front of the cemetery was small, nothing grand. A simple building of wood and stone, the walls painted white. There were no gold spires, no bright colours, not even a bell tower. Nor was there a priest to tend it; he had left more than a year ago when he heard about the fate of other priests. The state had tolerated the Church for a while, but now there was only the advance of Stalin’s vision. Like the kulak, priests and poets were a threat to the common way of living so they were sought out and they were deported. Some were executed for their beliefs or for the words they put on paper and the thoughts they had in their heads. Churches were broken and torn down. Bells were cast down from their towers.

Our priest saw it coming and he ran. No one knew where he’d gone; all we knew was that one day he was simply not here. He told no one of his flight.

Since then we had kept the church clean and in as good order as we were able, but there are things that can change a man’s faith, mould a man’s faith, and there are other things that can’t. For me, a building and an effigy were not enough to make up for all that had happened and was happening to this world, and that was even truer as I walked alongside a sled that carried the bodies of two small children. But I understood the value of ceremony for some people, and I knew the importance of life and of ritual.

We passed among the broken headstones, and found a spot at the far end of the cemetery, by a crumbling wall, where we could dig.

‘One hole,’ I said, using a shovel to move the snow. ‘They can go in together.’

Viktor took the other shovel, helping to clear the snow, and when we had outlined a big enough plot, we took turns swinging the pick to break the ground, which was hard with cold. And when that was done, Petro shovelled out the dirt until the hole was deep enough.

As we worked, the mist dissolved around us and the sun struggled to the edge of the sky, occasionally breaking through the cloud to catch on the icicles that stretched down from the overhang of the wall. The graveyard was filled with a bleak beauty that was not lost on me.

It was hard working like that, and after a while we stopped to take off our coats, Viktor nudging me to attract my attention.

‘What?’ I asked, glancing up.

Viktor inclined his head in the direction we’d come from, and I looked across to see someone approaching.

‘Dimitri,’ I said under my breath. ‘Shit.’ I jabbed my shovel into the loosened soil and leaned a forearm on the end of its handle to watch him approach.