Traitor Read online

  Solovey didn’t say anything.

  “Anyway, I can’t let you shoot yourself,” Tolya said.

  “Worried for my soul?” Solovey said.

  “If they’re anywhere close, they’ll hear the shot.”

  Solovey was silent, holding on to the tree.

  “All right,” he said finally, “all right—but you take these, to save time later.” He dug the spare clips out of his pocket. “Look at me, Tolya. You leave me if you have to, do you understand? Because I swear I’d leave you.”

  “Shut up,” Tolya said.

  * * *

  The kukuruznik came back just after noon.

  They heard the engine muttering over the water before they saw the plane. They dropped flat on their stomachs under the trees, waiting for the flyover. Ahead of them, the pine wood marched away down a long, low slope. There was a reed marsh at the foot of the slope and a swath of bare grassland sweeping back up to the eaves of the wood on the far side of the marsh. The kukuruznik passed over south by east, on a line for the city. Tolya picked himself up on his hands and knees, sitting back on his heels.

  Solovey’s fingers snaked around his wrist, jerking him back down.

  “What is—” Tolya started, but Solovey crooked an arm around his neck, slipping a hand over his mouth. He motioned with his pistol. Through the reeds across the marsh, Tolya could see two NKVD riflemen going up the grassy slope, away from the water. They’d been filling their canteens.

  There were more riflemen at the edge of the wood.

  Tolya’s throat closed. He watched the squad split and spread out across the shore. Their voices carried over the water—a murmur, a snatch of laughter, a sharp command in Russian: “Quiet!” They came closer, working through the reeds on the mud bank, looking for footprints in the wet black earth at the water’s edge. He could see the red-enameled order star above the right breast pocket of the nearest man’s jacket.

  Then they were past, moving slowly away down the shore. The crunch of boots on underbrush faded away. There was no sound but the rustle of the marsh grass and the whine of the mosquitoes and the thump, thump, thump of his heart against the pine needles.

  Solovey let go of Tolya’s mouth. He lifted his arm from Tolya’s neck. He lay still for a moment, his eyes shut, his forehead pressed to the earth, as though he were praying. Then he raised his head and smiled. His face was pale.

  “Well,” he said very softly. “That’s that.”

  “You think they found the cabin?”

  “I think we’ve got to assume they did.” Solovey rolled away from him and sat up. “Anna didn’t know this place,” he said. “Neither did Iryna. The others did.” He was silent, holding a hand absently on his splinted calf. “Do you know what’s funny about it?” he said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “They went right past us in the night, and neither you nor I saw or heard them, and they didn’t see or hear us. What do you think? What’s the most obvious explanation?”

  “They didn’t go past us in the night.”

  “They were already here, waiting for us. We were betrayed.” Solovey got up, kicking the ground with his good foot. Then he put his hand on a tree trunk and stood for a moment, head tipped back, eyes shut.

  “How are your feet, Tolya?” he asked. His voice was calm.

  “They’re all right.”

  “Your shoulder?”

  “All right.”

  “Liar,” Solovey said. “But I guess the best of us are.”

  He opened his eyes. He pushed himself away from the tree.

  “Come on,” he said. “It’s two days due west to Hruszów.”

  20

  They rested in the heat of the day. That was Tolya’s decision. Solovey didn’t want to stop.

  “Five minutes,” he said.

  He was still sleeping an hour later, bowed over his knees against a tree trunk, and Tolya didn’t wake him.

  The shadows crawled slowly across the pine-needle floor of the wood. Tolya sat with the midafternoon sun warm and hard on his back, his pistol braced on his updrawn knees. He threaded his rosary carefully out through the neck of his shirt and slipped the cool glass beads between his fingers.

  Rejoice, O Virgin Theotokos, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee …

  He spoke their names into the silence of the wood—Andriy and Yakiv and Valentyn. Those probably weren’t even their real names, just their war names, but God would know he spoke in sincerity—or Christ and the saints could intercede with sincerity, at least, where Tolya couldn’t manage. He wasn’t sorry about Yakiv.

  He didn’t know about the rest—Taras and Ruslan, Anna and Iryna on their way to Toporiv. Anyway, he wasn’t sure what to pray for Ruslan, who was Muslim. In the end, Tolya made a prayer to Saint Mykola for guidance and protection and a prayer to Saint Yuriy, the helper of soldiers, pressing the crucifix to his lips in amen.

  Solovey was awake, watching him.

  Tolya pushed the beads back into his shirt quickly, sliding the crucifix off his palm.

  Solovey straightened against the trunk, bracing himself on his hands and shifting his legs very carefully.

  “Was it your mother’s?” he said.

  “What?” Tolya said stupidly.

  “That rosary.” Solovey’s voice was neutral. “Was it your mother’s?”

  Tolya swallowed. “Yes.”

  “Is that how they knew—the NKVD?”

  “No, by her name—her maiden name, I mean.”

  “Marriage records?”

  Tolya took the time to put his words together. Koval had asked him once. That was the only time he’d ever talked to anybody about Kuz’myn. Aunt Olena had never asked. At first, he’d thought that was just because she was afraid of Ivan, but she’d never asked even after Ivan was gone—and Comrade Lieutenant Spirin had never asked either, and Comrade Lieutenant Spirin wasn’t afraid of anything.

  Then he’d realized it was because they knew how much it hurt.

  “They wanted names,” he said, “the NKVD. Somebody had been putting out leaflets, telling people not to deliver their grain quotas, telling people that it was better to slaughter their stock than to let the Reds take it. They wanted names. So they made us come down to the churchyard—all of us, the whole village—and they made us watch. Took people at random and whipped them to pulp. Said they’d do it until they got a confession. My father confessed. Couldn’t stomach it.” He shrugged. His shoulders were tight. “They didn’t know who he was when they took him. Just a face in a crowd. I mean—probably didn’t take them long to find out, but the point is they didn’t know to take us with him—my mother and me. They’d have sent us to one of the camps if they’d known—for being kin of a traitor.”

  That, too, had taken him a long time to understand. All you knew at seven was that the men with the blue caps were taking Papa away, and you couldn’t go with him. Mama and Mrs. Tkachuk had held you back when you tried.

  “My mother started using her maiden name after that. We were registered on the collective under her maiden name.” He shrugged again, suddenly conscious of how much he’d let spill. “So. That was how.”

  Solovey was studying him. “Nobody betrayed you—not in the village, not on the collective?”

  “No.” And then, angry by reflex: “It doesn’t make a difference when you’re starving—Pole, Ukrainian. They were our people. We understood that in Kuz’myn.”

  “Somebody could have turned you in for an extra grain ration,” Solovey said.

  He had a knack for pricking the vulnerable spots. Tolya didn’t say anything.

  Solovey checked his wristwatch. “Wake me up next time, all right? The NKVD might if you don’t, and I’d rather it was you.”

  “I betrayed them,” Tolya said.

  “What?”

  “My mother. My father.”

  Solovey paused, halfway to his feet, leaning one-handed on the tree, looking at him.

  “The Reds killed them,” Tolya sai
d. He swallowed against the knot in his throat. His heart was beating loudly in the silence—thump, thump, thump against his ribs. He wasn’t going to make excuses. What was he going to say—I was hungry in Voronezh? “I collaborated,” he said. “I fought for their murderers. I’m the one who betrayed them.”

  Solovey straightened very slowly, keeping his weight off his right leg. His face was blank.

  “Is that what you think?” he said. “Or is that what you think I want to hear?”

  Thump, thump, thump went Tolya’s heart against his ribs.

  “I don’t know,” he said, because he didn’t.

  “It’s an easy word to throw around,” Solovey said, “collaborator.”

  “I put on the uniform,” Tolya said.

  “The uniform isn’t what matters,” Solovey said.

  But he was looking away into the wood now, and Tolya knew he didn’t really mean it.

  * * *

  They walked in the cuts between the hills, where the pine wood was deep and silent—Tolya ahead now and Solovey behind, handing himself carefully along by the pine trunks as though they were crutches, keeping his weight off the leg. He was sweating with the effort, though the air was cool.

  “Tell me when to stop,” Tolya said.

  Solovey looked up blankly. “What?”

  “Tell me when you need to stop. We’ll stop.”

  He expected a hasty objection—the hissed breath and the half smile and Don’t be an idiot, Tolya. He hadn’t said as much, but Tolya knew he was embarrassed about sleeping so long earlier.

  But Solovey didn’t object. “All right,” he said.

  A little while later he said, “Mykola.”

  He’d dropped his pistol. He was holding himself up between two trees, his arms spread. Sweat ran on his face in dirty streaks. His skin was the color of ashes.

  “Just for a second,” he said. He grinned apologetically.

  “Sit down,” Tolya said.

  “I’m all right. Just need to—”

  “Sit down.”

  “You go,” Solovey said. He was holding on to the trees very tightly. “I’ll catch up.”

  “That’s not going to work.”

  “I’ll catch up, Mykola.”

  “I’m not Mykola.” He picked up Solovey’s pistol and tucked it in the waistband of his trousers. “Give me your knife,” he said—and then, because Solovey had gone too far away to hear, he knelt and unlaced Solovey’s boot and took the knife himself. “I’ll be back, all right? I’m going to get you some water.”

  He left Solovey sitting there on the pine-needle floor. He pushed through bracken and birch brush, slipping over the moss beds, ducking the low branches. As he’d guessed, there was water farther down the cut—a thin, pebbly spring stream not yet run dry. He cut a strip of birch bark, curled it in a cone, and took water in the cone back up the cut.

  Solovey was sitting with his back against a pine trunk, his legs stretched out. His face had cleared, though his skin was still pale.

  “Tolya.”

  “Here—drink.”

  “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you like that.”

  “It’s all right. Drink.”

  Solovey took the cone. He cupped it in his hands, covering the seam to keep it from dripping.

  “You should go,” he said.

  “I don’t go unless you go. We already decided.”

  Solovey tipped the cone, drank a little, and dashed the remainder on his face. He smiled wearily.

  “You decided—but you’ve got both guns, and the knife, so I’m not really in a position to argue.”

  “Who’s Mykola?”

  Solovey flung the bark away. “So you’re asking the questions now too, is that it?”

  “You know enough about me. I don’t know anything about you—except that you had a grandfather and you like fishing and Polish beer.”

  “What else is there to know?”

  “I don’t even know your full name.”

  “Neither do the NKVD, and I’d like to keep it that way. Give me the gun.” Solovey was holding out his hand. “Give me the gun, Tolya.”

  “Give me your name,” Tolya said.

  It was stupid and pointless, but they were both going to be dead soon, and he was tired of secrets, and he was tired of lies.

  Solovey dropped his hand to his lap. He leaned his head back against the trunk. His face was blank.

  “You’ve got to trust me,” he said.

  “All I’ve done is trust you. Why can’t you trust me?”

  “You’re holding both guns, and the knife. It wouldn’t exactly be trust, at this point.”

  Tolya didn’t say anything.

  “Give me the gun,” Solovey said very quietly.

  Tolya hesitated. Solovey’s hand was outstretched again, waiting. Tolya took Solovey’s pistol from his waistband and handed it over, grip first. Solovey took it and opened the magazine to count the rounds. Then he shoved the magazine back in. He looked up.

  “Aleksey Yevhenovych Kobryn, from L’viv. I was studying mathematics at the polytechnic before all this. First year. I worked nights as a porter at the Hotel George to pay for my books, and the most daring thing I’d ever done was hop the tram between the city center and Zamarstynów. I’d used the last of my fare money to see Czarni play for the ice-hockey championship at the Citadel.” He smiled again, wryly. “I wanted to play. Not for Czarni—they were Poles only. You understand. There was an all-Ukrainian team—Ukraina. But Czarni was the best.”

  Tolya digested this piece by piece—Solovey the mathematics student, Solovey the night porter, Solovey who spent his tram fares on ice-hockey matches. “And Mykola?”

  Solovey holstered his pistol. He bent to lace his boot.

  “My brother,” he said. “About your age. He was.”

  Tolya’s throat tightened with sudden shame. “He’s dead?”

  “Three years, three days.”

  July 27, 1941. It hadn’t been the Reds who’d killed him. They’d abandoned Lwów a month earlier in the face of the German advance.

  “The Germans? Why?”

  Solovey’s hands moved very slowly and carefully, threading the laces over the tongue of his boot.

  “The Nazis made kill lists when they came,” he said. “Jews they just killed indiscriminately, but for the rest of us there were lists. Political dissidents, academics, clergy, prominent citizens—the intelligentsia, the core of a potential resistance movement. You understand. The Reds had done the same thing two years before.” He pulled the laces tight, breathing softly through his nose. “They had the names of some of the Polish faculty at the polytechnic, at the university, at the Medical Institute. The SS murdered them—twenty-five professors, with their families. Afterward, people started asking questions—why those names? Why only Poles? And then they started saying it was Ukrainian students, collaborators, supplying names and addresses for the lists. And then there were reprisals.” He knotted the laces, looped them around, and knotted them again, not looking up. “They had my name,” he said, “the Polish Resistance. They came looking for me. They found Mykola instead.”

  He finished with the laces. He brushed his nose with the backs of his fingers. He sat up, cupping his knees in his hands. His knuckles were white.

  “We were going to get out,” he said. “We were going to make for Turkey. We’d been planning it for weeks—us and Andriy. But we’d had a run-in with some Nazis, and I was laid up in a friend’s place with a bum leg, and she and Andriy and I all had bounties on our heads and our photographs plastered on the Nazis’ wanted posters all over the city. Mykola was the only one who could risk going out for supplies.”

  He rubbed his knees absently, flexing his fingers.

  “Andriy went out looking for him when he wasn’t back by dark that night. Found him in our old flat. I don’t know if he’d gone there on his own or if they’d just dumped him knowing we’d look for him there. Don’t know how they’d have gotten the address. But th
ey left a note for me on his body—stuck on a bayonet in his spine. Made sure I knew everything they’d done to him. Made sure I knew how long it took.”

  Tolya didn’t say anything. Solovey took his pistol back out, snapping the slide. Tolya looked away. He swallowed the knot in his throat and waited. There was the murmur of the stream coming up faintly through the trees, and the whisper of the wind, and the beat of his heart, and there was the pistol in Solovey’s hand.

  But Solovey only pulled himself up against the tree, sucking his breath through his teeth.

  “I could use that beer,” he said.

  Tolya shut his eyes. He couldn’t look in Solovey’s face.

  “Solovey,” he said.

  “It’s all right,” Solovey said. “It’s all right.”

  * * *

  The cut gaped open onto a sunken streambed running north-south at the foot of a low ridge. They crossed the stream and went north for a while, walking in the streambed until the bank ran down. The sun had dipped behind the ridge. Moonlight shimmered across the water. Solovey was coming slowly behind, his head bowed, his shoulders hunched, one hand stretched to the bank. He caught the toe of his boot on a lip of rock and fell forward on his hands. His pistol clattered away over the rocks. He pushed himself up quickly. He was smiling, but his face was white.

  “I’m all right,” he said, brushing away Tolya’s hand. “Just a bad step. Go get the gun.”

  Tolya picked his way back across the streambed. Machine-gun fire flashed out of the darkness on the east ridge. Bullets spat up sand on the far bank, splashing toward him across the water. He reeled and staggered back, feet slipping on the slick rocks, arms flailing. He fell, sprawling. He scrambled frantically backward, kicking over the rocks, scrabbling blindly with his hands.

  Solovey was there, hauling him up and shoving him away.

  Tolya caught Solovey’s arms. “No,” he said, “no, I’m not going to—”

  “Yes, you are.” Solovey tore his arms free. He put his hands on Tolya’s chest and shoved, hard. “Run, Tolya.”

  Solovey stumbled around to face the hillside. “Khay zhyve vil’na Ukrayina! Khay—”