Traitor Page 23

He lifted his head from the rifle and looked at her over his shoulder. She was holding his ankle under her hands, looking at the wound.

  “This might hurt,” she said.

  He looked away, swallowing. He leaned his cheek back on the stock of the rifle.

  “When?”

  It was a question that could be taken several different ways, but she knew what he meant.

  “I joined up eighteen months ago.” She picked out the splinter quickly and calmly, wrapping the gash with the strip of trouser cloth. “Just before we met.”

  “Kharkiv.”

  “They recruited me there. They were afraid the UPA might try to infiltrate the Front when we moved into Ukraine. We had assignments—marks. Potential anti-Soviet elements.” Her fingers paused just for a second, resting lightly on his ankle. “You were mine.”

  He watched Lena and Mrs. Kijek move along in the shadow of the barn. His throat was tight, so tight. “Why?”

  “It was random. They gave me a name.”

  “I mean I hadn’t done anything.”

  “You were CSIR—chlen sem’i izmennika rodiny, the son of traitors. They’d found a file on your parents when Spirin recommended you for the Red Star.” She tied off the wrapping and laced his shoe back on. “You did make a good candidate: an orphan, a loner, ‘resistant to re-education.’ By Tarnopol, we knew the UPA had an informant in the Front, and we thought—after Petrov had Spirin shot, and you went off on him like that—”

  “You thought it was me.”

  “We suspected. Petrov was sure. He wanted to deal with you then. It took Colonel Sokolov saying no. He’d lost Spirin. He didn’t want to lose you. Moot point, as it turns out. If you were the informant, you’d have known better than to shoot Petrov in the street. But you gave us another option.”

  Shadows shifted in the attic. Any second now, the window would be flung open, or the kitchen door would swing in, and an NKVD gunman would lean out to see what had become of the vanished defenders.

  Koval crouched at his elbow. “You were—not bait, exactly, because we didn’t know they’d come for you. More like a homing signal. We let them take you. At first, the plan was just to follow from a distance, mark the position of the camp, attack that night. Then we found your rat Yakiv’s message in the stolen car. He had the watch the next night, and in exchange for amnesty he would make sure there was no alarm. He gave us the coordinates for the camp and for that munitions dump up in the hills.”

  There was the attic window opening, and the nose of a submachine gun sticking cautiously out. Tolya squeezed his eye shut and shot the gunman through the windowpane.

  “Not us,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Not us. You’re not one of them.”

  She was silent for a moment. She started to say something. Then she stopped.

  “Listen,” she said finally, “I’ve got to go—unless you want to explain this to them.” She jerked her chin at Lena and Mrs. Kijek, who were crossing the last stretch of open ground between the barn and the wood. “You’ll have about an hour. That’s how long it will take me to bring up reinforcements from Lwów.” She paused on one knee. “I will bring them up, Tolya.”

  “Then why let me go?”

  “Self-preservation. I’m afraid of what you’ll tell them under interrogation.”

  “You could just put a bullet in my head.”

  “They want you alive. They’d want to know why I put a bullet in your head.”

  “They wouldn’t have to know it was you. Maybe it was him. Maybe you killed him for it.”

  “With an eight-millimeter Mauser, the same as killed both gun crews. Questions and more questions.”

  “What are you afraid I’ll tell them under interrogation?”

  She shrugged. “I told you to run to Stryy.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’ll tell them I told you to, and they’ll assume I meant it—and then they’ll assume I meant this.”

  She leaned in on her knee. She took his chin in her fingers, turning his face up to hers, cupping his cheek in her hand. She bent her head and slid her lips over his—softly, slowly, as though she were being very careful not to break him.

  “Mistaken assumptions,” she murmured against the corner of his mouth. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  Underbrush crackled distantly down the slope—Lena and Mrs. Kijek, coming up through the trees from the yard.

  Tolya shut his eyes. She was holding him close, stroking the back of his neck gently with her fingertips, and he was trembling against her, throat aching, breathless, and there were too many things he wanted to say, too many things he needed to say and needed to know and needed her to know—too many things to fit into words, a year and a half of things that wouldn’t fit into words—all stuck in a sore, tight knot at the base of his tongue.

  The only thing that came out was her name.

  “Nataliya,” he said—and she put her hand over his mouth because there wasn’t any time.

  “I’m not Nataliya.” Her fingers traced his lips, his cheekbones, his throat, the line of his jaw. “I’m not Koval, I’m not Tasha, and I’m not from Kyiv. I don’t have a sister there either.” She ducked her head to kiss him quickly on the cheek. “An hour, Tolya. Then you’d better hope you never see me again.”

  VI

  ALEKSEY

  Friday, July 4

  1941

  37

  If you follow the tunnels out of Łyczakowski District, going east and south, after a couple of kilometers or so you spill out into Pasieka Creek, with nothing but beech and elm woodland and maybe some cows around you. There are low hills farther on—nothing much for hunting or fishing because you’re too close to the dairy farms, but from the hilltops you’ve got a pretty good view of that whole eastern slice of the city, from the Wulka Hills in the south to our own Zamarstynów in the north, and of the main east road to Tarnopol.

  We stopped there, just over the ridge—or I collapsed and everybody else stopped. That was enough, Mrs. Kijek said. She gave me one of the sulfa tablets from Andriy’s packet and two aspirin from her handbag and sent Mykola with the rifle back up the slope to watch the creek and the road, and we settled in to spend the night.

  It was still dark when I woke up. Two thirty, maybe three—the moon had set. It was a cool, clear, starlit night. Mykola was asleep between two fat, mossy roots, curled up in a tight ball with his head burrowed between his arms. Mrs. Kijek slept sitting up against an elm trunk, her coat around her shoulders. Andriy was on watch. He was hunched against a tree with his elbows on his knees, the rifle propped up on his shoulder, his chin on his hands. I rolled carefully onto my stomach and crawled over to him.

  “Anything?” I asked. The city lay blacked out and silent below us. Light flashed noiselessly on the horizon, north and east—thunderstorm or artillery bombardment, I couldn’t tell.

  Andriy shook his head without lifting his chin from his hands. “Just routine patrols.”

  We sat in silence for a while, listening to the nightingales. I could feel the wariness in him. It occurred to me that he probably thought I’d come up to make sure he didn’t slip off into the dark.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  He turned his chin and looked at me inquiringly.

  “I should have told you about Strilka. You found out when you were getting the vitamins, didn’t you? That I’d killed him—that was why they’d put a price on my head.”

  He looked away.

  “Oh,” he said. “Yes.”

  “It wasn’t fair. I should have told you. I’m sorry.”

  He dug his chin into his hands and studied his boots.

  “I don’t blame you for leaving,” I said. “I was being stupid earlier. I know it wasn’t about the money.”

  “Makes it worse,” he said.

  “What?”

  He rocked on his feet a little. “No questions. Just—whatever he wanted, I did it. Anything for him. Wo
rse than doing it for money.”

  “He saved your life. You felt you owed him. It’s understandable.”

  “Understandable,” he agreed hollowly. “Everything’s understandable.”

  I recognized his tone. He didn’t want my justifications. Nothing I said was going to make any difference when he was at war with himself.

  “I wanted to apologize.” Andriy dug at the dirt with the toe of his boot. “Didn’t know how. Hung around that apartment block for two days, trying to figure out how. Didn’t think you’d want to hear it anyway.” He shrugged tightly. “Vitalik said you would—said you’d listen. Said I had to try. I didn’t know he’d been watching.”

  “Did you know he was going to do that—double-cross the Nachtigallen?”

  Andriy shook his head.

  “I don’t think anybody ever really knows with Vitalik,” he said.

  “Who is he?”

  “Strilka thought he was NKVD. Vitalik said the NKVD didn’t need agents in the UPA as long as we had officers like Strilka. They didn’t like each other.”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “I always thought—” he started. Then he darted a glance at me, as though making sure of me. “I don’t know. I always thought—I mean, it’s probably stupid, but I don’t think he’s Ukrainian.”

  “What—Polish?”

  Andriy hesitated.

  “I think he’s Russian. I think he’s a White.”

  “An émigré?” Thousands of anti-Communist Russians, Whites, the last remnants of the old czarist regime, had filtered into Poland in the years after the Russian Revolution.

  “His people anyway. I know he comes from money. I mean—he tries to hide it, to fit in, but I can tell, and I think Strilka could too.” Andriy shrugged again. “I don’t think he cares about us—about Ukraine, I mean. I think he cares about fighting the Reds.”

  “Is that why he wouldn’t come with us?”

  Andriy toed the dirt and looked away.

  “No,” he said. “That was because he killed your father.”

  * * *

  They’d sent him into Brygidki prison two years ago, right after the Red invasion, with orders to assassinate Papa and make it look like a suicide. They’d been afraid Papa still knew too much about the Ukrainian underground, even after five years—too many names, too many damning details. They’d been afraid of what the Reds might be able to jog from his memory. So they’d sent Vitalik to kill him.

  Strilka had known. Andriy wasn’t sure about that—the order had come straight from Shukhevych—but I was. Strilka wouldn’t have told me, of course. He wanted me safely in the fold. He wouldn’t tell me the UPA had killed my father. But he could put his pistol in my hand and tell me to kill Vitalik. It was too theatrically perfect for me to believe he hadn’t known.

  I sent Andriy down to sleep. I got the impression he hadn’t done much of that in the past few days, and I wasn’t going to get back to sleep anyway. My legs were hurting pretty badly, and I didn’t want to have to wake Mrs. Kijek up to ask for more aspirin. At first I distracted myself by picking out the constellations, the way we used to pick them out over the lake in Brzuchowice before the world went to hell. Then I ran out of constellations and started musing over whether I’d have killed Vitalik after all, if I’d known he’d killed Papa.

  Then I gave up and cried—for Papa and Mama and Grandfather and Father Yosyp and Mr. Kijek and all the rest of my dead—because would haves didn’t do any good.

  I cried very quietly and was careful not to sniff, but Mykola came up anyway. He slid in silently beside me in the dark, and he sat there without a word until Mrs. Kijek came up to say we’d better move off the ridge before dawn.

  VII

  TOLYA

  Sunday, August 13

  1944

  38

  Now he was watching the gray, heather-choked fields speed past under clouded moonlight.

  The green radium dials of the clock on the dashboard said 11:22. It wasn’t quite an hour since he’d been in the wood with Koval. Tolya was stretched out on the back seat with his right foot propped up on the far door. Lena was in the passenger’s seat, her submachine gun on her lap, the German rifle slung over her shoulder. She looked back over the seat.

  “It’s not much farther,” she said. “Four kilometers. We’re almost there.”

  She hadn’t spoken once of Janek—neither she nor her mother—but in the moonlight in the wood above the Zarudce road, when they’d gone to take the car, he’d seen the tears on her face.

  “We’ll have to leave the car,” Mrs. Kijek said. “There’s a roadblock below Żółkiew.”

  “Leave it in the Wiśniewskis’ barn. We’ll go by the river.”

  Now the car was turning off the paved road and going down a soft mud lane between two low rail fences. They were going slowly and without headlights. Mud and rain spattered lightly on the windshield.

  “Let it rain, let it rain,” Lena said, bending to look out the window. She squinted through the streaks on the glass.

  “Rain won’t cover these tracks,” Mrs. Kijek said.

  “It’ll slow them down coming through Kulików.”

  The lane went down to a little farm that was tucked away from the road in a fold between the low hills. There was a small mud yard and a house and a stock barn, and through the rain-beaded window Tolya could see where there’d been outbuildings and a grain barn, but now they were just bald, burned patches on the wet, gray grass.

  Lena got out to open the barn doors. They put the car in the empty barn, and Tolya stood leaning on the peeling outer wall, blinking the rain out of his eyes, while they shut the doors. The barn was half burned, gaping open to the sky. The bare posts and beams stuck up and curved over like broken ribs. The house, too, was burned and skeletal—four charred walls leaning in on the collapsed ruin of the roof.

  Lena came over to pull his arm across her shoulders.

  “UPA?” Tolya asked.

  “Last year. This farm and the Nowaks’, across the river.”

  They went down to the water. The moon was gone behind clouds. The rain fell softly and steadily. A low mist was rising off the water. There was a rowboat stowed under a brush screen in the trees along the bank. They put the boat out into the water, and Mrs. Kijek sat handling the rudder while Lena rowed.

  They went along quietly in the mist and darkness. He was sitting in the bottom of the boat, his legs stretched out on the floor under the seat, and he was listening to the nightingales in the trees on the banks and the soft patter of the rain on the water and the plashing of the oars, and he was slipping away and coming back, slipping away and coming back, his head and shoulder tucked into the curving side of the boat, the rain on his face.

  You knew, he was saying to Solovey in the darkness, you knew. You knew she was still alive. You knew she was NKVD.

  I knew, Solovey said.

  You found out that first night—when you went down to talk to your commander. That’s why you couldn’t get her out.

  It’s one reason.

  You said she was dead.

  I suggested.

  You lied.

  I told you what I was ordered to tell you.

  When has that ever been good enough for you—orders for the sake of orders? Was it orders when you took Mrs. Kijek out through the sewers that night?

  A pause.

  If I didn’t know you had the emotional range of a boiled potato, Solovey said, I’d think you were angry.

  Shut up and answer me.

  I can’t do both.

  Answer me. Was it orders to let me live?

  Tolya—

  Or were you going to put a bullet in my brain after all? Plug me in the forehead—is that it?

  Tolya—

  Because that’s what you told your commander you were going to do. You told him you were going to kill me as soon as you had me kill Comrade Colonel Volkov. That’s the only reason he let you get me out.

  I’ve lost track
of which question I’m supposed to be answering.

  Orders for the sake of orders. You were supposed to kill me when Volkov was dead.

  Extract all useful intelligence and execute you as a collaborator, to be exact.

  My point is that you didn’t.

  Volkov isn’t dead.

  You weren’t going to anyway, or you’d have done it the night they attacked the camp.

  Then, like a true philosopher, you’ve answered your own question. What do you need from me?

  I want to know why you lied. Don’t try to tell me it was just because of your orders.

  It was safer that way.

  Safer for who? You?

  For her.

  Tolya’s turn to pause now.

  Nataliya, he said.

  Yes.

  Nataliya is your informant in the Front.

  That’s not really her name, you understand.

  She’s been working for you this whole time.

  For the UPA, yes.

  But then—

  Yes.

  She knew about Yakiv. She knew about the attack.

  She had her orders too.

  She could have warned you.

  She did what was necessary to maintain her cover.

  She could have warned you.

  We all make sacrifices.

  She could have found a way to warn you.

  She probably assumed you’d be halfway over the Carpathians by then, if it makes you feel any better. She’d never have expected you to stay with me.

  It doesn’t.

  Give it some time, Solovey said.

  * * *

  Now the boat shifted and shuddered beneath him. It was still raining softly, and the boat was knocking gently against a low dock, and somebody was saying, “Careful, careful,” and hands, many hands, were prying him up from the floor of the boat.

  “I can walk,” he said to the world in general.

  “Hush.” That was Mrs. Kijek.

  “I can walk.”

  They ignored him. They put him on a stretcher and took him up the bank. There was a farmhouse up from the water. There was warm, yellow lamplight winking through the trees. Lena was walking beside him, her hand on his arm, and he knew, though she hadn’t said anything, that they were leaving him here.