Traitor Read online

  The bullets cut his legs from under him. He staggered and went down. He landed heavily on his knees, doubling over as though winded, leaning on his hands. Then he dove across the rocks. He slid on his stomach and snatched up the pistol. He pushed the muzzle under his chin.

  Crack.

  His head dropped, his body jerking.

  And Tolya ran.

  He flung himself up the bank, clawing at the black earth. He got a knee up on the rim and lunged for the cover of the trees. Bullets raced after him. Splintered wood stung his bare heels and the backs of his legs. Kicked-up leaves and dirt and detritus showered around him. He darted this way and that between the tree trunks, shoving through the underbrush, skidding and sliding over dry leaves. Branches tore at his face and hands, briars tugging at his trouser legs. He fell once, jamming his toes against a root and pitching headlong to the ground. The pistol flew from his hands. He staggered to his feet and went on, leaving the pistol, not caring. There were tears blurring his eyes, pricking on his face. His throat was closed. He couldn’t see, and he couldn’t breathe, and he couldn’t think, and over the roar of blood in his ears he couldn’t hear anything but Solovey’s voice.

  Run, Tolya.

  So he ran.

  21

  He ran until he couldn’t run any more.

  The moon had set by then. The wood was cool and dark and silent. He curled up on the pine needles, looping his arms around his knees, and he cried, without making any noise—eyes squeezed shut, shoulders shaking, face pressed to the dew-damp earth.

  Then he was too tired to cry, and he lay numbly still, hugging his knees, listening to the nightingales.

  His head cleared very slowly.

  The trick was to focus on the immediate things, laying them out like playing cards in his head, and to go through them one by one.

  So, first—his own pain.

  He’d broken a toe. He couldn’t see it in the dark, but he could definitely feel it. His left arm ached from shoulder to fingertips, and the ache sharpened to pain when he moved. The gash on the inside of his foot was bleeding again, and there was a new one, fairly deep, just above the ankle on the outside of his right calf, where a bullet must have grazed him. His hands bled and stung. He’d scraped the skin off his palms when he fell in the streambed. But he could walk; that was the important thing. He could run if he had to.

  Second—what to do now.

  He couldn’t go to Hruszów. He didn’t know what Solovey had expected to find there—more UPA?—but in any case the NKVD had probably guessed why Solovey had chosen this line westward through the wood. They would be going to Hruszów themselves—or they were there already, waiting, the way they’d been waiting at the cabin.

  He couldn’t go to the church on Ruska Street either. It didn’t even matter that they would shoot him as a spy or a collaborator or a Pole. The point was that whoever had given up the cabin had probably given up the church too.

  He could make Stryy in three or four days, if he risked open country—Stryy, the way Koval had wanted.

  He needed a weapon. He could live off the land well enough, but there was a good chance that at some point between here and Stryy, it would come to shooting, not running, and he had no weapon now but Solovey’s knife, tucked in his waistband. There was no question of finding his pistol again—not in the dark anyway—but there was another good chance that the NKVD hadn’t taken the time to strip Solovey’s body.

  There was a very good chance that the NKVD weren’t expecting him to backtrack.

  Slowly, carefully, he uncurled himself and got up, brushing the embedded sand from his raw palms, keeping his weight off his toes.

  The machine gun picked up again.

  He ducked low, sprawling on his stomach, but it was farther away than he’d thought—somewhere off westward. Five kilometers? Ten? The night air and the hills played games with sound. He waited, listening. There were other guns, answering guns, too distant to be distinct, but he recognized the pop of handguns and the quick, insistent rat-tat-tat of submachine guns.

  They weren’t friends, whoever they were—UPA, Poles, Germans. Your chances aren’t very good, Tolya. But they were drawing the NKVD off.

  He got up again and struck out eastward, the way he’d come.

  * * *

  He found the stream again a little before dawn. He was downstream from where he and Solovey had crossed. The water was slower and deeper here, the banks low and flat and wide. He walked along the western bank, upstream, until the bank was towering steeply over the water, the long slope of the ridge running away westward above him, the cut splitting off eastward below. From the top of the bank, he had a good, long view of the streambed in both directions.

  The body was gone.

  He slid down the bank in a shower of crumbly dirt. He crossed the rocks. It had been just here. There was Solovey’s blood on the dry, bone-white tops of the rocks. But the body was gone, and the pistol was gone.

  Panic numbed his lips. He’d seen the shot. He’d seen the body jerk and go still. He was dead—he was dead—he had to be dead—please, God, I wouldn’t have left him alive—

  No. The body was there.

  They’d taken him up on the eastern bank. They’d hung him by the wrists from the low branch of an alder tree on the edge of the bank. He was turning slowly back and forth in the breath of wind, bare feet dangling just off the ground. His uniform was in pieces around the base of the tree.

  Tolya crossed the stream and went up the bank. There was a tightness between his shoulder blades, a cold lump of lead at the base of his throat. He took Solovey’s knife in his hand and leaned into the tree trunk, standing on his good toes on an exposed root, stretching to his fingertips. He cut the rope from Solovey’s wrists and eased the body down against the bole of the tree.

  It had been cool enough in the night that the body wasn’t swollen. With his head bowed in the half-light, you couldn’t see the hole gaping under his chin, and with his eyes closed you could almost imagine that he was just sitting there very still against the tree, resting. Tolya tucked the knife back into his waistband. He picked up Solovey’s jacket and put it over Solovey’s body. He couldn’t remember much of the akathist, but he knew the words of the funeral psalm.

  “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High,” he said, aloud into the silence, “who abides in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust—’”

  Then his throat closed, and he couldn’t finish it.

  He shut his eyes and said the Memory Eternal in his head. Then he took Solovey’s boots and went a little way down the bank. He cuffed his trousers and washed his feet and lay looking up at the streaks of cloud in the dawn sky while his feet dried, the boots beside him.

  * * *

  He fell asleep, like an idiot.

  He woke up to voices and booted footsteps coming toward him down the bank.

  He grabbed Solovey’s boots and slid up the bank into the trees, swearing in his head—Polish and Ukrainian—at his own stupidity. Midmorning sunlight was slanting across the streambed. He’d slept for hours.

  The boots and voices came closer. They were speaking Ukrainian, not Russian. He could see them through the trees—two riflemen, wearing the green-gray jackets and trousers and side caps of the UPA.

  He crouched low against the base of an old, gnarled oak, leaning his cheek on the mossy bark, listening. He heard them find Solovey’s body. He lifted his head a little and watched them lay him out gently on the black-earth bank. One of them knelt to look at the bullet wounds. The other was holding his rifle in the crook of his arm, looking at the ground. He found Tolya’s footprints and came down the bank, following the prints. It wasn’t going to take him much longer to find the fresh footprints going up into the trees, so Tolya slipped his feet into Solovey’s boots and got up, holding up his hands, palms out.

  “Don’t shoot,” he said. “Please, don’t shoot. Ya ukrayinets’—I’m Ukra
inian.”

  The rifle swung up. The rifleman sighted, finger ready on the trigger.

  “Come down here—slowly. Keep your hands up.”

  Tolya stepped out from behind the tree. The other man came down the bank. He was about Solovey’s age, tall and hard-faced, with fallow-brown hair shaven close to the sides of his head. There was oily black axle grease smeared in three-fingered streaks across his cheekbones. He was an officer. He wore a sidearm at his belt and the same bloodred stripes on his sleeves that Solovey had worn.

  He slung his rifle over his shoulder and hooked his thumb on the sling. He looked Tolya over, pausing when he came to Solovey’s boots.

  He looked into Tolya’s face.

  “Explain,” he said very coldly.

  “I was with him,” Tolya said, “with Solovey.” His mouth was dry, his heart pounding. He had to be very careful now. “My name is Tolya Korolenko.”

  “What happened?”

  “They found our camp two nights ago—the NKVD. We were running. We were going to Hruszów.” His throat had knotted tight again. He swallowed, blinking. “They caught up to us last night.”

  The officer came close. He put his hands in Tolya’s pockets and brought out Solovey’s spare clips.

  “Where’s the gun?”

  “I lost it in the wood.”

  The officer shoved the clips into his own pocket. He took Solovey’s knife from Tolya’s waistband and turned it over in his hands, considering, holding the blade between thumb and forefinger and tapping the haft against his palm.

  “What—did you come back to strip him?”

  “No,” Tolya said, through shut teeth. It wasn’t really a lie. Solovey had told him to take the boots.

  “Sterv’yatnyk,” the officer said. “Vulture.” He kicked Tolya’s ankles.

  Tolya didn’t say anything. He knew how it was going to go, and there was nothing for it. The officer stuck the knife in his belt and returned to his search, more vigorously now. He knelt to pat down Tolya’s trouser legs. He straightened again, running his hands roughly over Tolya’s arms, feeling under Tolya’s shirt. He brought out the rosary and held it in his clenched fist, looking at it.

  He held it up in front of Tolya’s face, dangling the crucifix.

  “What is this?”

  “That’s a rosary,” Tolya said, because there was nothing for it, and suddenly he didn’t care.

  Still, he knew better than to duck the fist. He couldn’t win this fight, and he knew how it was going to go if he showed resistance. He felt every one of the officer’s knuckles connect with the corner of his mouth. He spun and dropped, sprawling facedown on the bank—gratifyingly, he hoped, because he didn’t want a rifle butt in his stomach, and he very much didn’t want one between his legs.

  The officer put a heavy boot between Tolya’s shoulder blades. He unslung his rifle and pressed the cold steel muzzle to the back of Tolya’s neck.

  “I knew you were Polish shit,” he said. He used the derogatory word—lyakh shit. To the other man he said, “Go get that rope.”

  Then he said, “No—wait.”

  He kicked Tolya’s ribs. “Up,” he said. He clipped the side of Tolya’s face sharply with the nose of his rifle. “On your feet.”

  They went up the bank. Tolya stumbled ahead, blinking hot blood out of his eyes. The officer came behind, prodding him along with the mouth of the rifle, pushing him down to his knees beside Solovey’s body.

  “Dig,” the officer said. He put his foot between Tolya’s shoulder blades and shoved Tolya to his hands in the dirt. “Use your hands. That’s what lyakhy are good for, isn’t it?”

  Tolya spit blood at the officer’s feet.

  That got him the rifle butt in the stomach. For a long moment afterward, he was curled over his knees, hugging his ribs and wheezing, while the wood spun around him and the breath trickled slowly back into his lungs. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see more UPA soldiers crossing the streambed, coming down the bank, crowding around to watch silently and solemnly, somewhat bored, as though this were one of Zampolit Petrov’s political lectures.

  He recognized one of the faces.

  He lifted his head, blinking—dazedly, stupidly.

  “Yakiv,” he said.

  Yakiv—alive and unhurt, leaning against the alder tree, smoking a cigarette, pretending not to hear him.

  “Yakiv,” Tolya said.

  The officer’s rifle was in his face. He caught the barrel in his hand and shoved it away. “Yakiv, look at—”

  Then he was facedown in the dirt again, the officer’s boot on his back, the mouth of the rifle kissing the base of his skull. He didn’t care. He was too angry to care. He wrenched and twisted under the boot, fighting to raise his head.

  “Look at me, Yakiv. You can tell them—you’ve got to tell them. Please, Yakiv. Tell them who I am.”

  Yakiv shifted against the tree. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and flicked the ash from the tip.

  “They know who you are, zradnyk,” he said. “Better start digging.”

  22

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Yakiv said.

  He was sitting against the alder tree with a papasha submachine gun across his knees, smoking and watching while Tolya dug in the crumbling black earth beneath the trees on the bank. The rest of the squad were making camp up in the wood. It was noon, and the sun was pouring through the trees. Tolya was sweating as he dug.

  “Do you hear me?” Yakiv said. “I can get you out of here.”

  Tolya ignored him. He dug—head bent, teeth clenched. He’d dug with his hands first, scratching at the dirt until his fingers were torn and bloody. Then they’d gotten impatient or bored with the game, and somebody had brought him a trench spade.

  “Squad Leader Vitalik thinks you’re Polish Resistance—thinks you’re an infiltrator, a spy.” Yakiv was leaning back comfortably against the tree trunk, feet spread. “Why shouldn’t he? You show up, and a day later the NKVD blow us to hell.”

  They would shoot him when he was done. Tolya knew that. Dig and then die. They would tell him to stand at the edge of the hole, or to lie on his face at the bottom, and they would give him the genickschuss, the single shot to the back of the neck.

  “Do you know what Vitalik does to spies?” Yakiv said.

  Tolya’s shoulder was hurting badly, the lips of the wound pulling and cracking, but there was nothing for it. They would shoot him when he was done, and they would shoot him if he dawdled.

  “Solovey was just going to shoot you,” Yakiv said. “Bullet to the brain, nice and quick.” He demonstrated with the papasha carelessly, lifting the muzzle to Tolya’s face and mouthing the sound of the shot, rat-tat-tat, miming the recoil. “You know that, don’t you? He was going to shoot you when he was done with you.”

  He was dead either way.

  “He wanted a sniper,” Yakiv said. “That was why. He wanted to take out Volkov. He was going to shoot you as soon as he was done with you. That’s what he told the commander. That was the condition for getting you out.”

  Don’t listen, Tolya.

  “Don’t believe me?” Yakiv said. “He told us later. It was all planned out. Of course he didn’t know you were a Pole. Might have changed the plan a little. He hated Poles. He hated Poles more than he hated Volkov. He hated Volkov in theory. He hated Poles in practice.” Yakiv smiled. “He never took Polish prisoners. He’d line them up afterward—walk down the line and plug them in the forehead. Bang, bang, bang.”

  Don’t listen, Tolya. Dig.

  “I think that’s the difference, you know?” Yakiv said. “He was a gentleman, Solovey. Bullet to the brain—bang—done, and he’d look you in the eye while he did it. Vitalik, now. Vitalik is an animal.”

  Dig, Tolya.

  “I’ve seen him take all day on a Polish prisoner,” Yakiv said.

  Dig, Tolya.

  “He doesn’t use this,” Yakiv said, lifting the papasha. “He uses this.” He stretched out his leg
and showed Tolya the knife in his boot.

  Dig.

  Yakiv slid the knife back into his boot.

  “Whenever you want to talk, Tolya,” he said, “I’ll talk. Remember that.”

  Dig and die.

  “Whenever you want to talk,” Yakiv said, “while you’ve still got your tongue.” He smiled and puffed his cigarette.

  * * *

  They didn’t shoot him when he was done.

  They pulled him out of the hole and tied his hands with the rope he’d cut from Solovey’s wrists, and they made him lie on his stomach on the bank while they put Solovey in the hole and covered him with the black earth.

  The problem, as he understood, was not just that he was Polish and not just that he was a collaborator.

  The problem, as he understood, was that Vitalik thought he’d killed and stripped Solovey.

  So—“We’re going to talk,” Vitalik said, “you and I, the two of us.”

  The rest of the squad had gone back up to the camp. They were alone on the bank, he and Vitalik, and Vitalik had pulled him up by an elbow and sat down cross-legged, facing him—closely enough that Tolya could smell the bittersweet, burnt-grass smell of makhorka on his jacket. Vitalik took a packet of the red-brown tobacco and a rolling paper from his breast pocket. He rolled a cigarette on his thigh, careful not to let any of the tobacco spill. His hands were like Solovey’s hands—smooth, middle-class hands with long, slender fingers—except Solovey’s hands had been whole. Vitalik’s hands, both of them, were missing the tips of the little fingers, below the knuckle.

  Vitalik folded the packet of tobacco and put it in his breast pocket. He stuck the cigarette between his teeth. He caught Tolya’s eye and followed Tolya’s gaze to his hands.

  “A memento of the Brygidki,” he said, “courtesy of your friends. Do you know the Brygidki?”

  “The prison.”

  “Not always. They built it as a convent. That’s where the name comes from: It was a convent of the Bridgettines. The Hapsburgs made it a prison.” Out came a lighter—unhurriedly, methodically. It was a performance, all of it, done with the precision of long practice. “The Reds made it a slaughterhouse. It’s a natural progression.”