A Boy in Winter Read online

  “They will wait until dark, and even after,” he mutters. “Until we give them what they came for.”

  The fighters want meat and meal to last them, boots to get them through the winter, and Uncle tells Yasia he gave at first.

  “Much too much,” he says. “Better never to have given. Perhaps, perhaps.”

  He calls the fighters bandits, and says there are so many different packs of them.

  “This village is theirs. They’ve laid claim to us. They say they will protect us from raiders, as well as from the Germans. So they will always come for payment,” Uncle whispers, bitter. “And what can we do?”

  The drifts around the fighters are deep, blue-cold in the last of the day’s light, and the men have a wild look about them. Their boots wrapped in rags, bodies draped in felt and fur and sacking, in stolen German greatcoats and torn Red Army tunics; they make Yasia uneasy. She sees how the older boy watches them, intent, blinking in the shafts of cold light between the shingles; the same look on his face as when he turns his eyes to the horizon.

  Uncle sees him watching too. He tells Yasia: “Boys have gone to those outlaws, from other marsh villages,” lifting his chin at the oldest brother, as if he thinks this one might get the same idea. Then he squints out at the fighters himself.

  “This pack would bring the war back through here, if they could. But just to bring the Russians back. You understand?” Uncle pokes the older boy, to be sure that he hears this. But the boy gives no sign—his eyes only on the fighters.

  “You see those guns they wave? Do you?” Uncle persists, and the boy shrugs; he gives one of his half nods, and Uncle sucks his teeth, impatient.

  “Those are Russian rifles,” Uncle tells him. “They were found in the thickets where the Red soldiers threw them when they ran away from the Germans. Are you listening to me?”

  The boy turns to him, reluctant.

  “Haven’t you had enough?” Uncle asks. “There’ll be more war, more Germans, everywhere beyond the marshes, as soon as the snows are gone.”

  Uncle falls silent. But not like he’s finished talking, just taking his time, regarding the boy, his small brother beside him.

  And then:

  “One more thing,” he says. “They wouldn’t have you. None of the bandits would. Don’t think for a moment they’d take someone of your kind.”

  The boy’s face tightens; Yasia’s chest also.

  Uncle knows. He must have known all along that the brothers are Jew boys, and Yasia could curse herself for hoping otherwise. But she can’t think now, only that the boys are not safe here; and then the old man points out at the fighters.

  “They all want the Germans gone, just like you do. But don’t be thinking that makes you welcome.”

  He waits then, as if for an answer, a response of some sort: Yasia thinks her Uncle wants something more than the usual half nod from this boy now. But the boy does nothing save to blink at him, eyes bright and hard with tears that he won’t allow himself. He blinks them away and then he turns to look outside again.

  Uncle sucks his teeth. He would shout, Yasia can see that, but for the fighters, who would come and chase them from their hiding place; they would chase all the food from the larder. And what would they do to these brothers?

  Yasia pulls the small one into her lap, because if Uncle knows about the boys, then so must the elders; so must every one of the villagers. What will they say once the snows have gone?

  She peers again through the gaps in the shingles.

  A woman is hurrying through the drifts towards the fighters. At first Yasia is frightened: that the woman will turn and point, just like the timber man’s wife, back in Osip’s yard; that she will tell the bandits about the Jew boys in the cow byre.

  But the woman’s arms are too full for that. Yasia sees the loaves in the crook of her elbow, and the neck of a bottle, too, that the men make a grab for, lifting it to the evening light. Probably that’s what the men want most, she tells herself: something warming. It eases her fears a little to think so, and it makes the fighters seem less like strangers. Her father always took a bottle with him if he had to work out in the snows; Myko’s grandfather too.

  But then she thinks of Mykola.

  Yasia holds the small one closer.

  —

  They crawl to their beds after the fighters are gone again, and she lies a long while in the dark there, thinking too much for sleep to come.

  When the snows are gone. Yasia doesn’t like to think of it. Of her uncle being right, and the Germans taking everywhere beyond the marshes. Or of all that may have to be given up, if they are to live to see them gone again.

  Is it better to strike out alone for the horizon? Or better to run and hide as they do, than to fire a Russian rifle, than to wear a German greatcoat? Yasia thinks of Myko in his armband. Better to run. Better he had deserted; better that than do another’s bidding, surely.

  But those thoughts are still so raw, and thoughts of who or what to fight for too confusing. Yasia turns to the quiet forms beside her.

  “Better to hide,” she whispers to the small one who lies warm at her side, although he sleeps too soundly to heed her.

  “Better to lie low,” she continues, because she knows the almost-grown one is lying sleepless just beyond him, and she wants him to hear her.

  “Best to sit it out.”

  Though who can say how long they’ll be allowed to sit it out here?

  Epilogue

  Ukraine, early 1942

  Arnold is already driving at sun-up, along the frost-grey country tracks, as the first light rises on a clear and new year’s morning.

  Snow is still banked either side of the cart road, and the surface is rutted, but it has frozen overnight so it is passable, and his driver steers the jeep at pace, skirting the potholes, passing fields and farmsteads, all frost-rimed and empty.

  It is still too early for farmhands to be working. The Sturmbannführer knows that soon they will be out, to break the ice in the drinking troughs, fork the hay for the animals, but for now it is just the first lamps he sees burning in the farm kitchens. He glimpses their yellow flicker, here and there across the field and pasture beyond the breath-fogged windscreen, and even once beyond the branches, in the darkness of a small woodland he passes into.

  His driver has to slow there: the track is softer, and the trees grow dense beside it, and the man has to wind down his window and check that the tyres are not sinking too far into the mire. Arnold shifts, uncomfortable at the smell of mud and leaf mould rising. He is uncertain, too, of the gloom around him—and of the lamplight among the trees there. The marshes are still full of bandits. Despite his frequent warnings, his superiors have not yet sent reinforcements, and Arnold feels himself watched from beyond the windscreen.

  But then the wheels find their grip again and the jeep lurches forward, and the track turns eastward too. So when they emerge from the forest, finally, Arnold finds they are driving into the sunrise.

  The damp on the windscreen catches the sunlight, and the driver has to slow the jeep again, shielding his eyes with his forearm, but Arnold sits up straighter, peering intrigued through the smears as he rubs the glass clear again. Because even through their blur, he can see the new road in front of him.

  Still distant, but it is unmistakable: a high and straight line under the horizon.

  It cuts across the fields and ditches and over the streams that still lie frozen; over all the hedge-and-post peasant markers of the land boundaries—clean across the territory before him.

  The sight of it gives him pause first, and then it has him hurrying his driver: “There, man. Faster. You can see where we are now.”

  It is the final stretch to be completed. Arnold has had to come out almost daily these past weeks to all the different stretches, the different encampments, to inspect the surfacing: that it has really been finished to standard, as all the foremen have reported.

  These duties have fallen to Arnold since Pohl�
�s arrest. He has been supervising schedules, the delivery of materials, the quality and speed of work, as well as seeing to all the usual commitments of his Sturmbannführer’s life here. At times, it has weighed on him like a burden. Left him wondering if he was capable; in the eyes of his superiors and of his peers (Arnold has heard the whispers), even in his own estimation.

  But today Arnold rose early. He sent for the driver even before first light, deliberately, to ensure he’d be alone out here. Without anyone looking over his shoulder, or passing comment, without the banality of small talk too—he is amazed at the number of his colleagues who can talk only of small things, even as they undertake this largest of all enterprises. Arnold has sought out solitude, some driving and thinking time—and now he has come upon the road sooner than expected.

  What he sees is a long embankment, like a rampart; like the earthworks of ancient times, but new and clean somehow. A proud and stately causeway, new-laid across the terrain here.

  Lifted by this unexpected sight, Arnold unbuckles the jeep roof, folding it back, the better to contemplate it; and then, once the driver has parked, he leaves the vehicle, telling his man to wait by the drainage ditch, climbing the low slope alone.

  Stepping onto the tarmac, coming to a standstill, Arnold feels it underfoot now, not just weighing on his shoulders: this road he has had to take on, and that has threatened to take over everything these past months.

  But it makes an impressive sight this morning. The sheer length of it completed, for one thing—but it is more than that. Wide and dark and even, the surface is just touched with frost, and with light from the rising day, and it stretches ever onwards, both before and behind him. The slopes that buttress it fall away steeply to either side, into the rough country where a cold mist still lingers—but the road is lifted, it seems. Above the damp and mist, and above the plain, still dotted with snow-mounds and hollows; above everything, or so it seems to Arnold. Even the far stands of birches and the woodland he passed through seem low by comparison.

  The road hovers as though suspended, cutting a swathe across these wet lands; visible for miles around, it must be. And it stretches ever onwards, as though unending, meeting the rise of the land—perhaps even the curve of the earth—and then cresting it, into the rose-and-blue distance.

  It pleases him to see it like this. And Arnold knows it is not just the sunrise colouring everything this morning: it is the road itself that brings such satisfaction. The slow and even rise of it, the solidity of it underfoot; the fine grade of tarmac, resistant to water ingress; the gentle curve of the camber. Arnold looks at the road, clear and sound and durable, running wide and smooth away from him in either direction, and he thinks that he did well to listen to Pohl—about engineering matters, in any case.

  It even feels like his road just then; his own achievement; this stretch of it, at least. Arnold thinks he fought for it, after all: even while Pohl was still here and doing his job, he had to argue with his superiors—over the sheer number of labourers required, of course, but above all over the cost of these materials. Arnold could not have used lesser ones—not once Pohl had explained things: how fine a road they could build here. And now Arnold gazes at the result a good few minutes, gratified by the sight.

  What would Pohl say?

  It is impossible not to ask himself. This road was the engineer’s before it was his, Arnold concedes. It was made to last; made to his specifications. The man insisted he build this road well enough to last a human lifespan, and even beyond that. Is this Reich not meant to outlast all of us small mortals?

  Arnold has not followed Pohl’s case since he left the district.

  He made his report on the man’s conduct—he had to—but he’d wanted no part in it beyond that. He can imagine what ensued, though, and Arnold imagines it again as he stands there. The knock on the door in the small hours; the bare and brutal little room for Pohl to end his days in. Soon there will be the coldly official letter for his wife to open: died whilst trying to escape; died at his own hand, or some other such bleak Gestapo fiction.

  The man should have listened to him. If Pohl had listened, Arnold tells himself, frowning as he remembers.

  His breath comes in clouds, and he is a little stiff this morning, his legs and shoulders. He’s been like this all these past weeks since the round-up, since the Jews were dealt with: bent out of shape by all he’s seen through. By the demands of this damned posting.

  But here he is still.

  And here too is this strange lightness; this good road and this gratitude for it—so unexpected.

  Arnold blinks at the wide-open country around him, and then he reminds himself that it does not help to think of Pohl, or of all the darkness he has encountered here. Only that he has this lightness this morning, and how much this is worth.

  He decides to leave the car and walk, in order to savour it this morning. Who is there to stop him? He can follow this stretch of road on foot, take his time and enjoy it—he can even walk to the next encampment. Arnold is due at the far-eastern one at midday, but the one to the west is just two kilometres, three kilometres away: a good stretch for walking, and a thorough distance to be checking for surface quality. So if anyone should ask what he was doing, he will tell them: Admiring the good road I had built here. It occurs to him that if he walks westward, he will in some way—even if in just a small way—be walking homeward. So, as this is the thought Arnold prefers, he turns now, thankful to feel the winter sun at his shoulders.

  He buttons his tunic against the cold, pulling his greatcoat around himself. But Arnold doesn’t start walking, not quite yet, because his eyes are caught by something on the horizon. Is there movement there?

  He cocks his head, unsure what he is hearing, if he is hearing something at all, and at first there is only quiet, the frost-held stillness. But then it comes again, just as he sets off walking: a distant thrum in the cold air, like a pulsing. And although Arnold keeps on striding, the thrum keeps on getting louder; it soon becomes a drone, loud enough to slow him.

  Arnold halts on the road then, under the cold and clear sunrise, and he waits and watches the far line where the sky meets the flatlands. Because the noise is accompanied by a darkness, a mass advancing; he can see it now. It is still distant—still indistinct—but gaining ground and volume; and along with the drone, shapes are forming there, and growing.

  Trucks: Arnold can make them out. Field-grey vehicles: it is a military convoy. Wehrmacht and darker: Arnold sees an army unit with Waffen SS behind it.

  Troops are coming through the district.

  But these are earlier than he had expected.

  Midday, he was told: Arnold is to be at the eastern encampment to see the convoys passing, along with all his brother officers. So perhaps this is merely an advance guard—but the troops he sees are impressive nonetheless.

  The battalion on the horizon is gaining form and substance as it draws closer, and Arnold is glad to have caught this: he is seeing this convoy ahead of all the other SS in the district.

  Most of it is artillery, judging by the vehicles; judging by the noise they are making. Trucks are first and behind them come vans, then tanks. And behind them? There must be armaments; Arnold imagines machine guns and field guns and mortars, all mounted in rows on the backs of lorries.

  He has long waited for this: to see the Reich make use of this road for its armies. For taking Odessa and Kharkov, Crimea, Sebastopol; clawing out more of that oil and grain land; claiming more workers for the Reich factories—perhaps even for clearing the marshes here of bandits, finally, as he’s so often requested.

  Arnold is aware, too, that there is another road being laid to the north of here—on the far side of the marshes; parallel, almost, to the road he stands on—and the mass of troops is so clear now, drawing ever nearer, so he wonders as he watches, if that other road has been completed. If there is another convoy tearing along there, even now, roaring on to claim Moscow and the continent beyond it.

&
nbsp; For a moment, Arnold feels the grandeur of the Reich’s expansion; its enormity, set against his own human smallness.

  But then he falters.

  Because they will not stop, these soldiers: no reason for them to slow or stop on this road, built wide enough and well enough to hold them, so Arnold backs away now.

  Turning for the car again, he steps off the tarmac onto the rubble sloping, a little too hastily. Arnold misses his footing, just briefly, but just long enough to throw him, and to have him glancing over his shoulder at the road and the advancing forces.

  And then he finds himself thinking, as he stumbles, of the man who gave so much to build it for them.

  —

  The first warm dawns bring a trickling along the shingles. A dripping from the icicles. Yasia watches the bright drops falling from the lintel in the mornings, face pressed to the belly of the cow she is milking.

  Not long after, walking back from the byre, she sees the dark of earth and grass again in her melting footprints.

  The snow still sits packed in drifts at the house-sides; Yasia finds it heaped against the tallest trunks at the edge of the woodland when she is out with the youngest and gathering kindling. But it drops, abruptly, from the branches. It slides from the roofs too, sudden and wet, from the houses in the cleft of land below the forest. The rush of the tumbling snow makes the young one start and gasp, and seek out the safety of Yasia’s skirts. They stand among the trunks, hand in hand, watching as it slips first from one village house and then the next.

  Soon the snow clears wherever the sun reaches. The ground gives again underfoot, wherever it is trodden.

  All is sink and softness, drip and gurgle. And this fills Yasia with misgivings.

  People pass again through the village. She sees other marsh dwellers, on their way to other villages: more each day, it seems. Some stop to sell, some stop to buy, calling for milk and curds at Uncle’s byre.

  They stop and talk at all the village houses, passing on all the winter’s births and deaths, the season’s arguments and truces. Word spreads fast from mouth to mouth across the marshes of all the winter’s departures and arrivals.