Traitor Read online

Somebody opened the dormer window. There were Russian voices very close. Boots tramped over the attic floor. Mrs. Kijek’s voice came indistinctly up the stairs. Then the window swung shut again. The riflemen kicked the cellar doors shut and moved to the far side of the house.

  Tolya waited, shivering. Finally, he heard the car doors slam and the engine catch. The car swung a wide loop around the yard and rumbled away, back toward Zarudce.

  Mrs. Kijek opened the window.

  “You can come back in,” she said.

  He sat on the edge of the bed while she brought out the drip pole and swabbed the inside of his arm with ethanol. She worked in silence, not looking up.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, because he was ashamed and afraid of that silence.

  She held his elbow in her hand and pressed a new catheter into the vein in the crook of his arm. “There are guns under my floorboards,” she said. “There are explosives buried in my vegetable garden, and there are timing pencils in my kitchen drawers.” She took out the needle and fitted the intravenous tube to the catheter. She looked up now, smiling slightly. “You’re the least of my concerns.”

  * * *

  Mrs. Kijek was a widow. Her husband, Lena’s father, had been a professor of civil law at the university in Lwów, one of the twenty-five professors the SS death squads had shot in July 1941. Tolya knew that because she brought him clothes that had been her husband’s—store-bought, machine-made clothes, finer than anything Tolya had ever owned and only a little too big—and when he tried to protest she told him that it wasn’t as though Adrian would mind, and she must have mistaken the blankness in his face for a question because then she told him why.

  He didn’t want to take those clothes. All he had left of his own was his threadbare uniform trousers, bloodstained and clammy even after washing, but he didn’t want to lie in her attic wearing her dead husband’s clothes when it had been Ukrainian nationalists supplying Polish names and addresses for the Nazis’ kill lists. He didn’t tell her that, of course, but he told her he didn’t want to take them. And she said that was too bad, but they were his whether he liked it or not because otherwise they were only going to go for bandages.

  So now he had smart gray wool trousers and a suit jacket, and a crisp, collared shirt, and buttery-smooth leather shoes.

  He could guess some of the rest. She didn’t tell him, and he didn’t ask, but she must have had medical schooling, which meant she’d come from money, not just married into it, which probably meant this was her house—her ancestral house, not the house of her widowhood.

  It was a sprawling old house, all timber-framed white clay—shuttered and sheeted and moth-eaten now, but still grand. There was an old clock down the stairs that chimed the quarter hours like a church bell. There was a bathroom with marble counters and a tub as big as a swimming pool. There was a magnificent old dining room with a paving-stone floor and a vaulted, trussed ceiling and diamond-paned windows and half-paneled brick walls, and there was a study with a wide brick hearth and fireplace running the whole length of one wall. There was a crowned Polish eagle carved into the mantelpiece, its proud wings spread as wide as Tolya was tall.

  There was the piano in the drawing room, and sometimes in the long, twilit evenings he could hear Mrs. Kijek playing. She played beautifully. He didn’t know any of the pieces except one, Liebesträum no. 3. He knew that was the Hungarian, Liszt, because it had been Aunt Olena’s favorite piece and she’d had Rubinstein’s recording for the phonograph, until her husband, Ivan, smashed the record over the tabletop—“fascist foolery,” he said. When Aunt Olena said nothing, Ivan broke the phonograph too.

  One more reason why Tolya had never called him uncle.

  All that week it was just Tolya and Mrs. Kijek and the tabby cat Maja in the house. In the gray half-light before dawn each morning, Mrs. Kijek would stir up the coals in the stove and put the kettle on, and then she would go out to the yard to feed the chickens and get the eggs, coming back in just as the kettle whistled. Then she would come up the stairs with coddled eggs and porridge and rye toast and butter and black-currant jam and tea—real black tea with sugar and cream—and she would sit with Maja on her lap, listening to the news out of Warsaw on the wireless while Tolya ate. There was fighting in Warsaw. The Soviet advance had stalled on the east bank of the Vistula, but the Polish Resistance was fighting.

  Twice a day Mrs. Kijek would change the dressings on Tolya’s back and shoulder and at the crook of his arm, around the catheter, and once a day she would change the intravenous solution. It didn’t occur to Tolya until he’d been almost the whole week in that room, with nothing much to do but think, to wonder where she got the medicine. The butter and sugar and tea and wine could be explained away. He knew there was a black market in Lwów, and he knew Mrs. Kijek had money, and he didn’t doubt she had black market contacts. But antibiotics didn’t go to civilians, even on the black market—not when the NKVD could be bribed with them—and he’d only ever seen those American morphine syrettes once before.

  He didn’t ask. He didn’t say anything about the syrettes. He was afraid of how much he might give up if he said anything—how much they would try to make him give up, about Anna and Iryna and the Red Cross station in Toporiv and anything else about the UPA that they weren’t asking because they didn’t think he knew. He was afraid of them knowing that he did.

  * * *

  Lena and Janek came back that Sunday night. It must have been their routine—maybe not always Lena and Janek, but some two or three of them coming down on Sundays for a hot meal—because he could hear Mrs. Kijek already laying the table when they got there. While Janek was out splitting wood for the stove, Lena came up the attic stairs with a bundle of rifles. She unstrapped one to show him. It was a German Karabiner modified for sniping, with a Zeiss scope, a blued steel barrel, and a smooth, blond oak stock. She gave it to him and let him test the sights.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” she said. “Have you ever used one?”

  He leaned on his elbows over the cat, who was curled up asleep on the pillow. He shouldered the rifle and sighted the darkening wood through the window.

  “Yeah,” he said, “once.” Comrade Lieutenant Spirin had carried a German rifle, a prize from the Battle of Moscow. He’d let Tolya try it at Voronezh. One of the NKVD men had taken it after Spirin’s execution.

  Lena knelt to pull up a floorboard. She dropped the rifles into the space between the joists. She brought out a cartridge box from her pocket and held it up so he could see.

  “In case you ever need it,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything. Her trust shamed him, the way Mrs. Kijek’s silence had shamed him. He was suddenly very conscious of wearing Lena’s dead father’s shirt and trousers and jacket and shoes. He handed her the German rifle, and she put it down with the others between the joists. She laid the floorboard back down. Then she sat back on her heels and looked at him.

  “Are you all right? Do you need anything?”

  “No,” he said. “I mean yes, I’m all right.”

  “You must be bored to death up here. I’d be bored to death.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Do you like to read?”

  “No,” he said. He could read passably in Ukrainian and Russian. He didn’t want to tell her that he couldn’t read at all in Polish.

  “What do you like to do?” she asked. Then she corrected herself a little. “What did you like to do before the war?”

  He thought about it. He didn’t think about Kuz’myn. Kuz’myn was only hunger and death. He thought about Kyiv in those last two years before the war, when it was just him and Aunt Olena. He thought about Aunt Olena’s apartment, the new apartment in Pechersk, with the tall French windows opening onto the balcony, and the cobbled street below lined with flowering horse-chestnut trees, and the boats on the Dnieper, and Bohdan Khmelnytsky, hero of the Cossacks, astride his proud horse under the golden spires of Holy Sophia—which of course was no longer Holy Sop
hia but only a museum.

  “I played football,” he said.

  “In Tarnopol?”

  “No,” he said into Maja’s fur.

  “Where? You sound Galician.”

  He thought about lying. It would have been easy to lie. But her trust shamed him.

  “In Kyiv,” he said.

  She tilted her head, studying him. “You’re Ukrainian.”

  It was a realization, not a question. He didn’t say anything.

  “I assumed you were a Polish conscript. They took thousands of us after the invasion. It was that or be shot.”

  He didn’t say anything. What was there to say? He wasn’t Polish, and he wasn’t Ukrainian. He was a traitor to his father’s people on account of his mother, and a traitor to his mother’s people on account of his father, and a traitor to both on account of the Reds, and a traitor to the Reds on account of Zampolit Petrov.

  Lena got up, treading on the floorboard to make sure it was flush. “Will you go back?”

  “What?”

  “To Kijów. After the war.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and he realized in that moment that he’d stopped thinking about after.

  “You’ve got family there?”

  “Not anymore.”

  She looked up, glancing over his face. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? I’m Ukrainian.”

  She didn’t say anything, and he looked away. He hadn’t meant to say it. He hadn’t really meant it at all, except there was the bitter, shamed part of him that knew how and why Adrian Kijek had died.

  He lay looking at the wall, blinking furiously, while her footsteps went away down the stairs. Then he clamped the tube, peeled off the dressing, and took the catheter out. He took Adrian Kijek’s jacket and shoes, and he took the German rifle and the box of cartridges. He moved Maja off the bed so he could straighten the sheet. Then he opened the window and went out onto the roof, shutting the window behind him so Maja wouldn’t come out.

  34

  They would hunt him.

  He knew that. They would hunt him by necessity because he knew too much—because he knew names, real names, and faces, and because he knew about the guns under the attic floorboards. And they would hunt him for vengeance because of Adrian Kijek.

  That was all right. He was sorry, though, about the clothes. He didn’t want to take them. He was sorry too about Mrs. Kijek’s medicine and the German rifle, and most of all about Lena’s trust. The medicine and the rifle it might be possible to repay—someday, somehow, after, if he lived. But he couldn’t really repay her father’s clothes, and he would never be able to repay her trust. He couldn’t give Lena her father back, and he couldn’t go back and change the reason her father had died.

  Outside, it was blue twilight, and the nightingales were singing. The hollow thump of Janek’s hatchet echoed up from the side yard. There was a quarter moon hanging over the wood, a breath of wind coming off the hill. The yard was dark and cool below him. He slipped down the mossed shingles and handed himself carefully into the yard from the low, guttered ledge—left foot first, reaching with his toes, keeping his weight off his right foot.

  “I’d have made you a pack if you’d asked,” Lena said.

  She was sitting on the kitchen step in the half-light, smoking a cigarette, watching him.

  He straightened slowly, shifting his weight onto his heels. He steadied himself with one hand on the wall. The rifle was slung across his back, and the cartridges were in his pocket. Her submachine gun was beside her against the wall. Her pistol, Zampolit Petrov’s pistol, was holstered at her belt, under her jacket. He could see it when she touched the cigarette to her lips.

  “Is this because of that?” She jerked her chin toward the attic window.

  She could have the pistol out and trained before he got the sling over his head, never mind loading. He didn’t move.

  “I know what happened to your father,” he said.

  She was silent for a moment, pulling on her cigarette. “You think I blame you?”

  “I think you’ve got the right.”

  “That doesn’t work, you know—doesn’t solve anything. Punishing the many for the sins of the few. That’s how you get this.” She waved her cigarette in a vague circle. “That’s how you end up strapped to a post in a root cellar.”

  He didn’t say anything. The thump of Janek’s hatchet was still echoing over the yard, rolling away into the trees up the hill.

  “You know, it was a Ukrainian who got Mama out of the city.” Lena flicked away the ash from her cigarette with quick fingers. “I wasn’t there. I’d been with cousins in England since the war began. They took Papa at the house—the SS—but Mama was on duty in the ward that night. He got her out before they could track her down. He was a nationalist—one of the Nachtigallen, Ukrainian volunteers fighting with the Wehrmacht. The idea was the Germans were going to help them set up an independent Ukrainian state.” She let out a low, smoky breath. “We’d been in school together, he and I, before the war. He was a couple years older—brilliant, but his Polish wasn’t very good, so they kept holding him back. They’d shut the Ukrainian schools back in the twenties. Made all the Ukrainian kids start coming to Polish schools. Well, technically our schools were supposed to be bilingual, Polish and Ukrainian. That was the way the law was written. But everybody knew that didn’t happen.”

  She took a fierce drag on her cigarette.

  “He tried, at first, really tried, but—no Polish friends, and he wasn’t getting it at home. He never really stood much chance. We bullied him badly, and he stopped trying. He dropped out. Six years later he was a nationalist gunman.” She shrugged. “Maybe they got too radical for him. Maybe collaboration with the Nazis was the last straw. I don’t know. I don’t know how much he knew of the plan beforehand. I don’t know if he saw the list. I guess he must have: He knew they’d be watching for those names at the checkpoints out of the city. He got Mama out through the sewers.” She hesitated, trailing smoke softly from her lips. “I like to think they shot him for it. Of all the things they could have done to him—I like to think they shot him. Quick and easy. But they always put the body on display after they shot somebody—as a lesson for the rest of us, you know—and I never saw his, which I guess means I’m fooling myself.”

  She held her cigarette in two fingers and took another drag, more calmly this time.

  “I wonder,” she said. “How much of that was his fault, and how much of it was ours? Who are you supposed to blame? Who are you supposed to punish? He was the one trying to atone.” She tapped the ash from her cigarette absently. “I don’t blame him. I don’t blame you. If I had to blame anybody, I suppose I’d blame myself. My sins are the only ones I’m sure about.”

  He didn’t say anything, and she looked up.

  “I’m being an idiot,” she said. “It makes sense in my head. Here—have a cigarette.”

  She slipped another cigarette from her pocket and held it out.

  He took it. He sat down beside her on the step, and she leaned over to light the cigarette for him.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked. “Talking about Kijów?”

  He cupped the cigarette in his hands and took a drag. It was a real cigarette, not makhorka rolled loosely in scrap paper. He hadn’t had a real cigarette since Tarnopol, when they’d found Ecksteins on the German dead.

  He leaned his head back against the door jamb, his throat and chest comfortably warm.

  “No,” he said. Then, because it felt like a lie, he said cautiously, “I’m not from Kijów—not from birth.”

  “Where from birth?”

  “Kuz’myn.” He didn’t know how to say it in Polish. “Outside Proskuriv—Płoskirów.”

  “So I was right about Galicia. Just wrong about which side of the border.”

  “Yeah.” He hesitated. “My mother was Polish. There are many Poles in that part of Galicia. There were.”

  She looked at her nails. They were chipped and b
itten, the skin torn. Her face was blank. Tolya waited, expecting questions—the technical questions, how and why and when.

  Instead, she said, “Kuz’myn is the one that hurts, isn’t it?”

  He looked away. He had the images but not the words. He remembered, in blurred snapshots, the fields stripped and black and dust scoured, and bodies swollen with hunger, and the air yellow and sour with smoke and rot and the stink of death, always the stink of death, and the whole village made, at gunpoint, to stand in a circle and watch while the NKVD knouted young Avgust Vovk against the cross in the churchyard (twenty-five strokes, enough to kill, except Papa had broken on the twelfth), and Mama curled over her knees against the base of the garden wall, on the little plot of collective land they’d been allowed to call their own.

  “Yeah,” he said. His hands were shaking. He took another drag on the cigarette. He glanced at her. “Like Lwów for you—but you came back.”

  She was tapping the ash from her cigarette, not looking at him.

  “Like an idiot,” she said, “to fight a war that was lost five years ago.”

  She rubbed the cigarette between her fingertips and looked up, smiling a slight, sad smile—Mrs. Kijek’s smile, in perfect duplicate.

  “We’ve lost Lwów. We’ll lose Warsaw. I don’t know who will win, but we’ve lost.”

  He didn’t say anything. On the radio that morning, they said the Germans had executed forty thousand Polish civilians in the center of Warsaw—forty thousand in just one week, in reprisal for the Resistance uprising. He didn’t know what you were supposed to say to that. It’s all right, Solovey would say because there was nothing else to say, it’s all right—but you knew he didn’t mean it.

  Lena let out a soft breath between her teeth.

  “One more week. Finish this round of antibiotics. Then I’ll get you out of here, all right? I’ll take you into the mountains. You can make the coast before the weather turns. Find a ship for Turkey or something.”

  “I thought you said you needed a sniper.”