Armageddon - Leon Uris

Igor tolerated her as one tolerates a small sister. He had known Natasha from earliest memory. She lived three cottages down the road. Well, perhaps it was more than a toleration; she was a faithful friend. They even shared a secret hiding place near a bend in the river. Oftentimes they would meet there and discuss their most intimate thoughts.

“Please don’t be so sad, Igor,” she said.

“I don’t like to go into the house any more.”

“It is no better in my house.”

“Yes, I know. Alexander says the fighting is over. We all have to accept the new order. Only Poppa ...”

“Igor, come down to the river tomorrow and meet me?”

“I don’t know. We will be sacking grain most of the day. Besides, I have to study. You know how Alexander insists I learn how to read and write.”

“Please.”

“Very well. But only for a few minutes when the others are taking their midday rest.”

She ran off, climbed the rail fence, then ran down the road toward her cottage after a last look and a wave.

“Igor! Come in!” Momma’s voice called.

The crude room was held by an awesome silence. Igor’s father, Gregory Karlovy, a leathery, bearded giant sat at the rough-hewn table with his great hands folded, glowering at the floor. Opposite him, twenty-year-old Alexander sat with his face muscles twitching with tension. Igor slipped alongside his father as quietly as he could.

A great pot of chicken broth and dumplings was put on the center of the table. As Alexander reached for a chunk of bread his father raised his head and glared at him. Alexander retreated by dropping the bread, folding his hands, and mumbling a short prayer and crossing himself.

It was another of those silent meals, frequent of late, the only noise an occasional slurp. With each spoonful Igor saw the wrath building up in his father. Finally the old man brought a hamlike fist down on the table making the entire room rumble. “My own flesh and blood leaving the house and the land of his fathers!”

Alexander nearly choked trying to swallow past the lump in his throat. His father roared again. He dropped his spoon. “I’m telling you for the fiftieth time. I am going to Rostov at the invitation of the District Planning Committee. It is the greatest opportunity in my life. We will be reorganizing clear down to the Georgian border. Can’t you understand how important this is to me?”

“Nothing is more important than your own farm.”

“You’re wrong, Poppa. The revolution is more important.”

“It seems to me,” the father answered with a trembling voice, “that we have lived through enough years of bloodshed and sorrow. First the war took half our sons, then the revolution, and then the counterrevolution. Is there to be no peace? What kind of a revolution is it that turns a son against his own father and his own land.”

“The old ways are gone.”

“Gone, hell! Generations of Karlovys have been born, lived, and died on this land! Don’t you tell me they’re gone!”

“Poppa, for God’s name. The counterrevolution has failed. We’ve been bled dry for centuries. The people want a new life.”

“I will thank you not to repeat Red slogans under this roof.”

“This is not a slogan, Poppa. Glinka has stood here for three hundred years without a school or a hospital. Don’t you want to see Igor read and write. Don’t you want to see women like your own wife give birth without losing three or four children.”

The old man shook his head sadly. “Freedom is life, my son. We have heard all of the talk of reform before. Here ... this land ... this is freedom. You are a Kuban Cossack and that is freedom. If there is anything we have learned it is to smell out those who would take freedom from us.”

The young man pushed away from the table. “What the hell’s the use of talking.”

An impasse had been reached. A final impasse. The flame of revolution was destined to burn in the young man’s heart, alone. The father was lost to the son just as the old ways were gone. Alexander turned, shoved open the curtain across his alcove, and grabbed his carpetbag. His mother and his brother began weeping.

He went to her and kissed her and he tousled his brother’s hair. “Study Igor, study. The future will belong to those who study.”

The father and the son stood face to face. “Shall we shake hands, Father? Will you wish me a good journey?”

Gregory Karlovy arose, but his hands remained at his sides. He turned his back. “May God protect you,” he whispered after the door slammed shut.

Igor whistled their secret code, three times like a marsh swallow, then skittered down the bank through the tall grass to the clearing where Natasha waited for him. They were on the slightest of knolls on a point in the bend of the river; nearby stood a huge and ancient willow tree whose limbs draped to the water’s edge.

It was midday. The air hung still, the land aflame with oranges and reds and golds. A raftsman swirled past them, poking his long pole into the opposite bank to push him back midstream. Voices of song drifted to their hearing from over the fields.

Natasha’s great brown eyes were filled with fear and she was trembling. “I’m so glad you’re here, Igor ...”

“It wasn’t easy to come,” he said, mindful only of his own problems. “Alexander left home for good last night. He has gone to Rostov to join the Reds. I lay awake all night trying to think of what life will be like without Alexander. I could hear Momma crying and Poppa moaning in his sleep.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Never mind. Well, what is so important?”

Natasha drew a deep breath and tried to speak, not knowing if she could; and then he saw her anxiety.

“The Reds,” she quivered at last ‘They have talked to my brother, Sergei.”

“Where? When?”

“When we were at market three days ago in Armavir. Poppa went to the Jew’s quarters to trade with them and left Sergei to watch our stall. When I came he was gone. He didn’t tell me until this morning where he had been. The Reds had taken him away.”

“What did they want?”

“What they always want. They wanted to know where the village was hiding the grain.”

“He didn’t tell, of course.”

“Not at first. Then they told him we were all saboteurs and provocateurs ... whatever that means ... and that the people in the city were starving.”

“Damn them! You know what the Reds give us for our grain! A piece of paper no one can read.”

“They ... they promised to make Sergei a hero of the Soviet Union if he told.”

“A hero for telling on his own parents?”

“Sergei told.”

Igor bolted to his feet “You should have told me immediately.”

“I ... I only found out about it ... and I was afraid ...”

“I’ve got to warn the village!”

Igor raced across the fields yelling at the top of his voice. He ran all the way back to the village center, a muddy street, gasped dizzily, grabbed the rope of the alarm bell, and pulled for all his worth, bringing villagers on the run from fields in all directions.

Igor blurted out the story, and Sergei, his own age of twelve, was brought into the square and questioned until he broke down and confessed. His father dragged him off to their barn and thrashed him to within an inch of his life as Natasha screamed. The Cossacks frantically scrambled to remove their hidden grain to another place. In the middle of all this the Reds swooped in and caught them. Natasha’s home was burned to the ground and her father hung by the neck in the square.

When he was cut down and buried and the grieving was done and the shock settled, Natasha and her mother went off to live with relatives in the next village.