Dan Smith - The Child Thief

‘What are you up to, Luka?’ he said. ‘I came over to do some repairs on the church and I spot you three skulking round the back. What are you doing?’

‘Dimitri,’ I replied and raised a hand to my head in mock salute.

‘What are you up to?’ He grinned as he spoke, but there was no humour in him. He thought we were doing something he should know about and he was making it his business to find out.

Fate had related Dimitri Petrovich Spektor and me. We were family by marriage because our wives were sisters. My daughter Lara played with Dimitri’s daughter, Dariya, because they were cousins and of a similar age, but Dimitri and I had never managed any bond of friendship. Dimitri made no attempt to conceal his dislike of me and his opinion that I sullied the family blood. I had lived in Vyriv for over six years, my wife and children were Ukrainian, and I had fought for the Ukrainian anarchists, yet Dimitri found it hard to see beyond the fact that I was Russian and had once been a soldier of the Red Army. To him, all Russians were thieves and drunkards, and his brash rudeness was always amplified when he addressed me. He used harsh tones and often spoke quickly, running his words together, making it more difficult for me to understand him. I spoke good Ukrainian, but it was not my first language.

Now I sighed and looked at Viktor before waving a hand at the sled. There was no point in trying to hide it from him. The man was like a ferret and would find out whether we wanted him to or not.

‘What you got under there?’ Dimitri asked, putting his hands on his hips and tilting his head. He wore an old cap, the kind his father used to wear but, like everything else, it was worn in patches, the material fraying.

‘Maybe you’d better just take a look,’ I said, thinking it was easier than trying to explain.

Dimitri nodded and stepped forward, reaching out to take hold of the tarpaulin. ‘I’m not going to get a surprise, am I?’

‘Probably,’ I replied as Dimitri pulled back the cover to reveal the two bodies.

Dimitri dropped the corner of the tarpaulin and stepped away. ‘Shit. Why didn’t you just tell me? What kind of a trick is that?’

‘No trick,’ I said. ‘It’s what it is.’

Dimitri puffed his ruddy cheeks and breathed out hard. ‘Who are they? I’ve never seen them before. And what the hell happened to her feet?’

I shrugged.

‘They were with that man you brought in yesterday?’

‘Yes.’

Dimitri stood silent, shifting his eyes to the open grave. I knew what he was thinking. His brain would be churning under his cap and his thinning scalp, coming to all the wrong conclusions. I knew what Dimitri’s words were going to be before they even tripped off his thick lips and puffed into the cold air around his red-veined cheeks.

‘Did he kill them?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to them.’

‘Nothing natural, that’s for sure.’ He stared at me. ‘And you brought him here. Where is he now?’

‘Safe.’

‘Safe where?’

Dariya obviously hadn’t told him what she’d seen the day before and it surprised me that she’d kept it to herself. It showed restraint I wouldn’t have expected from her. ‘In my house,’ I said.

‘In your house ?’

‘Yes. He’s very sick. Unconscious.’

‘And if he wakes up? What’s he going to do? Murder all our children? Put his hands on my little Dariya? She is forbidden from coming to your house again. What kind of idiot are you?’

Viktor stepped forward but I put out a hand to stop him. ‘Nobody said anything about murder. We don’t know what happened to these children. All we can do is bury them and wait for the man to speak for himself.’

‘He must’ve done something to her. Look at her feet for God’s sake.’

‘Perhaps she fell,’ I said.

‘Fell?’ Dimitri’s face was gaining heat, the veins becoming more prominent as his mood heightened and his words tripped over one another. ‘What about the boy, then? Did he fall too?’ His whole body shook with emotion. ‘And you took him into your house.’ He looked down at the grave again, his eyes lighting up. ‘I’ll have to tell the others.’

‘No, Dimitri. Let me tell them. As soon as we’re done here, I’ll tell the others. They don’t need to see this. Let me give these children some dignity.’

‘Wait right here,’ he said, turning around and hurrying away. ‘Don’t do anything. The others need to see this now .’

‘That went well,’ said Petro when we were alone again.

‘Of all the people…’ I pinched the bridge of my nose. ‘It had to be him.’

Viktor put his hands in the small of his spine, leaning back. ‘What now?’

‘Bury them?’ Petro asked.

‘No, we should wait,’ I said, whipping the tarpaulin back over the children. ‘What else can we do?’

Viktor and I were sitting on a broken piece of the wall, Petro standing, when Dimitri returned with some of the other men. We saw them coming around the side of the church and making their way through the grave markers.

We had put our coats back on now we were still, but the day was growing to be a good one. The sun had risen in Dimitri’s absence and burned away the low-hanging cloud, to give us a light blue sky that was as clear as any I had seen. The brightness was reflected from the snow and the gravestones glistened with encrusted ice which had begun to thaw at its outer edges. I could even hear a gentle drip from the branches of the trees.

I squinted as I watched the men approach.

‘There,’ Dimitri pointed when he reached us. ‘Under there.’

We greeted each other with short nods and grim faces.

‘What’s going on, Luka?’ Ivan Sergeyevich stepped forward, holding out a hand for me to shake.

Ivan Sergeyevich Antoniv was well into his sixties, but he was strong and healthy. I knew him as a man who believed in fairness. We had spoken many times about the revolution and what we had expected of it, and I knew our views were similar. Both of us were disillusioned by what we had thought would be a better way for us all. He was a sensible man, and I knew he would see this the right way, so I shook his hand with some relief.

‘Why didn’t we know about this last night?’ Ivan said, and I remembered he’d been one of the men in the square when we had returned from the hillside. ‘Viktor told us you’d found a man. There was nothing about bodies. Nothing about children.’ He put a pipe to his mouth, clamping it between yellowed teeth and sucking hard.

Behind him, Dimitri shuffled, glancing at the other two men he’d brought with him. Josif Abramovich Fomenko and Leonid Andreyevich Tatlin. All of them men who had grown together and survived together. I was an outsider here, but they were men I respected. Men who worked hard and took care of their families. And they didn’t look at me the way Dimitri did. They didn’t see my history the way Dimitri saw it.

‘I thought it would scare people,’ I said, looking at Dimitri.

‘They’re already scared.’ Ivan let the smoke fall from his mouth rather than blowing it away. It shrouded him, hanging in the air. ‘Someone said OGPU—’

‘Who said that?’ I asked. ‘Why would they say that?’

‘I doesn’t matter,’ Ivan told me. ‘You know how rumours start. What matters is now people think he’s either running from them or that he’s one of them. And whichever way they look at it, they think activists are coming to murder their husbands or take their wives and children from them.’

‘I didn’t want people to think the wrong thing.’

‘They already do.’

‘Maybe we should have a look,’ Josif said. ‘Would you mind?’