A Boy in Winter Read online

  The fighting is far to the east, the front troops are all well beyond Kiev, and Pohl had expected civil servants here by this time, Reich officials for all his dealings with the district offices. But, even now, the territory is under military rule.

  No mere invaders, the SS have extended their duties in the district. It is not safe, Himmler claims, until the rule of law has been established, until the partisans have been flushed out of the marshland. So his men have taken charge of administration as well as patrolling—of construction too, for the meantime; putting together work gangs from the villages to build the new police quarters at the town’s edge, and all the new offices for the civilian administration, yet to be posted here from Germany.

  SS hands touch everything here. Even the roadworks.

  It is they who find and provide the Ukrainian labour teams Pohl uses. They who deliver workers to the sandpits and the gravel pits and the quarries; men to break the stones and haul the rubble; and more men for the road encampments, to take instruction from the overseers.

  It is not something Pohl feels easy with. Or that he has told his Dorle. He hunches further behind the windscreen, blinking out into the fog-shrouded nothingness.

  It is less a road he has stopped on than a track, cutting northward through rough country, and now the emptiness out here begins to unnerve him. The way ahead is pocked with holes and puddles, the ground on either side sodden. And if he drives much further, Pohl knows he will be in the marshes: no German welcome there, even a civilian.

  He imagines the feeling—on his next leave, say—of sitting Dorle down in front of him. He thinks of the ugliness in what he must tell, in what she must hear him say out loud.

  Our soldiers came for the Jews in the early hours.

  Pohl wrenches the steering wheel, turning back sharply for the roadworks.

  —

  Yasia hears the siren first, a sudden burst of wailing noise, and then the crackle of a loudhailer: a German voice speaking in Ukrainian.

  “... under the law of occupation.”

  It sends the old horse shying beside her, and Yasia has to grasp the reins to halt him while the crows rise cawing from the treetops into the low clouds above them. Taking the animal’s head, she stops him at the birches, under their winter-bare branches that mark the start of the town streets, the end of the fields and orchards—and there she listens a moment.

  “... under curfew, until further notice. Movement is permitted in daylight hours only.”

  The mist has the cobbles slick beneath her muddied boot-soles, and its cold beads are on the shawl wrapped about her head and shoulders, heavy with the damp of three hours’ walking, from farm to market town, most of it still in darkness. Only the horse’s breath is warm on Yasia’s fingers as she puts a palm to his nose to soothe him, and the loudhailer keeps up its wailing. It is fading in and out now, dampened by the stone walls and the tight-packed houses, but always the same voice returning; Yasia lifts her head as it comes again.

  “Gatherings of more than three people are not permitted on the town streets.”

  Her father’s old horse shifts, her mother’s sacks of apples shifting with him, strapped across his bony flanks, and Yasia puts a staying hand to his neck, taking a tighter grip of the reins again.

  She had to pull him the last mile or so on the walk here, where the mud was deepest, fog at its thickest; so taken up with clicking and cajoling, she’d stopped watching for the town spires in the mist, for any lamps lit in the windows, as she always does with her mother on market days.

  It took Yasia aback when she saw no one at the fork, where the cart track merges with the first of the cobbled streets, and the going gets a little easier: traders usually gather there at the stone arch, the old town gateway, as they come in from the villages, and she was expecting to walk on to the market street among them. But then Yasia saw the jeeps passing, the Germans like shadows inside them. They cut across the street she’d meant to walk down, fleet and dark; they were there and then gone again—just like that blaring noise they make.

  Yasia hasn’t caught enough yet to know their reasons, but the soldiers are circling the place, she is sure of that much: they are making their presence felt here. And even now that they have passed her, and all is falling quiet, she isn’t yet certain that it’s safe enough to go further.

  The horse drops his head to nose at her, the crows returning to their roosts among the branches, but Yasia sees the street ahead of her is shuttered and empty. The fog hangs between the houses, and a hush does too: movement is permitted, or so these soldiers say, but none of the townsfolk are taking them at their word.

  She is on the boundary road that skirts the edge of the town. Looking along it, finding it deserted, Yasia turns the horse now, cautious, leaving the cover of the branches, thinking to make for Osip’s workshop instead of the market street. His yard is on the outskirts—and Osip is family too. So Yasia thinks she’ll be safest there, beyond the town hall, out by the railway sidings, until she knows why the Germans are turning their circles.

  —

  Yasia saw her first Germans in August.

  Before that, they had Stalin.

  “Ten years, my daughter.”

  Her papa held both his palms up, all his fingers spread wide, so they could see how many they’d endured, when the final order came from the Collective.

  “Those stooges.”

  Her papa hated anyone who worked for the Soviets.

  He was eating the breakfast she’d made him, sitting at the farm table with all her brothers, all of them younger, who she’d chased from their beds, and washed and fed, as she did every morning. Her mother was busy with the baby, still new and fretful; the oldest boys were sullen and sleepy and already in their field clothes; the many younger ones at Yasia’s skirts, small limbs pressed to her and waiting.

  “Ten years,” her papa told his children. “But this is the worst one.”

  All the collectives in the district had been told to bring in the harvest, though it was barely July. They were to work day and night, if need be. Or destroy the crop: pour paraffin on the fields and burn them. Leave nothing for the Germans.

  “What have the Germans done to us, I ask you? It’s the Communists I’d set fire to,” her papa declared. “I’d walk away and leave them burning.”

  Yasia’s many brothers looked at their father blankly. She did too: her papa had always toed the line, more or less silently, until then.

  Years ago, perhaps half her lifetime, Yasia remembered her father’s evening mutterings about the village elders. Her brothers were already sleeping, all those who’d been born by then, but Yasia had sought out her mother’s solid form to curl against, because those were hungry times. Her mama rocked the cradle at the stove-side with her toes, and her papa muttered and stoked the flames while he called the Farm Chairman spineless. Weak-willed, weak-minded. All the names he could think of. He blows with the wind, that man; he bends wherever he sees advantage. Her mama nodded, emphatic, Yasia felt her. Especially when her papa spoke of their land being stolen from under them: harvests meant for our children’s mouths, stolen to feed Russian brats. Her father spoke his mind back then, in mutters at least, at the stove-side in the evenings. But Yasia knew that, in daylight, he did as he was bidden. He doesn’t bend with the wind, your father, but he bends under the yoke, child; that’s what her mother said about him, while her papa found less and less to say. Over the years he became a silent man.

  So it surprised all his children to hear him announce his disobedience.

  “I will not destroy the crop I have planted.”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  And to see him spit Stalin’s name in the dirt as he was leaving the yard.

  “What is our papa saying, Yasia?”

  “Where is our papa going, big sister?”

  “You all be quiet now.”

  Yasia hushed them, watching him stride out to the pasture. But as soon as he was out of earshot, she sent her own curse to Mo
scow, to fly alongside her father’s.

  She had her own reasons.

  Yasia would have been a wife a year already, were it not for Joseph Stalin. She should have been married, been a mother. Instead, she had turned seventeen without the young husband, and without the fat baby she was so sure she’d be cradling this summer, as plump and soft as her mama’s many baby boys. Yasia had not seen her Mykola since he was drafted; her sweetheart had been lost to the Red Army, and though she tried just then, following her father’s example, she found no curse loud enough or harsh enough to compensate.

  The Farm Chairman was at the yard gate the following morning.

  The new day already hot and damp, promising a deluge, he stood dabbing at his face with his shirt tails, panting the latest. In the next village—Mykola’s village—they were up in arms. They were disobeying orders. More: they were taking back their fields, even taking back their tools so no one else could use them.

  “They are breaking up the Collective. Overnight. They decided. Who on earth gave them the authority?”

  The Farm Chairman threw up his palms and told them he’d been cycling from homestead to homestead since daybreak, to consult the remaining farmers:

  “And you, Fedir?” he entreated.

  Yasia’s father pulled on his boots in answer, and set off for the village while the Farm Chairman followed him down the puddled lane, imploring: “But please, please, my friend, take back only what is yours.”

  Her papa was home by midday, flushed, triumphant, with his horse and his ploughshares, which had not stood in their barn since Yasia was a child.

  “Do you remember, my daughter?”

  “I do, Papa.”

  So rare to see her father satisfied, her father smiling; the sight of that had her brothers staring, as much as the belongings returned to them.

  Her mother was certain it was the Lord’s work: “He has mercy on us after all.”

  But Yasia couldn’t share in her rejoicing. Because why had the Lord, in all his mercy, not returned her Mykola?

  She knew herself selfish, but she couldn’t help it. Yasia thought daily of the old crone in a headscarf she might become without him. Or worse: the old man she might have to marry, if all the young men should perish now at the hands of the Germans; so many had perished already for the Soviets.

  The old men in the district divided the grain the next morning, all the crops still in the ground, and the hayricks between them. In just a short day’s back and forth, IV Stalin Collective Farm was no longer, the record books consigned by her papa to the kitchen stove.

  He stirred the embers, gratified, but he muttered to Yasia and her mother: “No celebrating; not yet.”

  He would let no one tempt that devil fate.

  They were lucky in the end. Their farmstead was not near the main route east, the main line of retreat. It was Mykola’s village that caught the worst of it: Red Army foot troops passed through there. Turning tail in the face of the Germans, they turned on the farms, going through the barns, breaking up the ploughs, the hayforks and the harrows.

  Out in the fields, they went from stack to stack with torches, setting the hayricks blazing, and the last of the beet crop that Mykola’s grandfather hadn’t brought in.

  His cows were driven out too, from the milking pen into the burning pasture; beaten across their hindquarters, and set running through the flames.

  Yasia stood in the yard with her mother that afternoon, all her brothers around them, watching the smoke plumes rising, grey-purple on the near horizon. She could still see the glow of the fires come the evening; they were burning as Yasia climbed into bed beside the younger ones, so she knew the flames must have caught the buildings. And then she was woken by Grandfather’s cows at first light, blundering through the yard. Stinking of bonfire, too exhausted, too frightened to return home; udders swollen and sore, they bellowed to be milked in the cool morning air.

  Yasia learned, then, how it was to feel fury. Before, she had been frightened. For Mykola mainly, called away to do Stalin’s bidding; for her papa too, and what any foot troops left might do to him: he had penned the cows and then set off across the fields to help the villagers.

  But the troops had already done with the place and departed, and her papa returned smoke-blackened with Mykola’s sister by the hand; he found Myko’s mother and grandfather in the hours that followed. And in the weeks that came after, they sat up long into the nights, telling of all they had seen, and worse, all that they had heard since.

  The rail lines to the town had all been dynamited, and the signal boxes too. The same in Kiev, Myko’s sister whispered— but of Kiev there was so much more to tell. Whole districts were being looted, and what they couldn’t carry, the Russians were burning, or just ruining: sacks of sugar, sacks of leather, even packs of medicines they threw into the Dnieper. In Zhytomyr, the Komsomol burned down the bread factory. Such criminality. To burn bread and the grain that made it, the grain of so many hands’ harvest. And still no word, still no word from Mykola.

  “We must brace ourselves,” his grandfather told them: the German invasion had yet to reach them.

  When she heard the Luftwaffe planes drone, Yasia was crossing the pasture, her father’s lunch pail in one hand, and the youngest of her brothers clutched to the other. Too far from the barn, from the farmhouse, they had nowhere to run, nowhere to shelter. So she scooped up Oleksiy and laid him beside her in the grass, their faces pressed to the damp earth, her father’s milk spilled across her skirts.

  But they dropped no bombs that day, the Germans; only showers of paper. Leaflets that littered the verges, sticking limp in the crop after the afternoon downpour.

  The German planes had scattered Ukrainian words, and Yasia read these out loud for her father, after the planes were gone, and the worst of the rain too: she and Oleksiy found him on the pasture’s far side, catching at the papers blowing across the grass, and he thrust the wet tatters at Yasia to decipher.

  We have no quarrel with those who lead a peaceful life, with those who wish Ukraine to prosper.

  She had been taught just enough at the Collective school to make out that much.

  “Read more. What does that say? And that part?” Her papa pointed, impatient, even eager now. “Read on, my daughter. What else do the Germans say?”

  The words she found there made Yasia’s chest tight.

  We have no quarrel with men who were drafted, with any who lay down Soviet arms of their own free will now.

  Each damp leaflet a free pass for Red Army deserters. If Mykola found one, he had only to present himself.

  All over the district, mothers and sisters found reason to hope there. Children were sent running out with fistfuls of the gathered German papers to find fathers and uncles and cousins, while the menfolk emerged, blinking, from their hiding places in the grain bins and distillery cellars.

  And then, finally, after so long praying and waiting; dusk was just falling, lamps being lit in the farmhouse kitchen, when they caught sight of a caller, dust-covered, by the well in the yard.

  Oleksiy pointed out of the window and asked: “Who is that man?”

  “Oh!”

  “Oh, who do you think, child?”

  So much thinner than before; he was properly gaunt from his long walk, from all his months of poor Red Army rations. Her poor Mykola.

  His shoulder blades like sharp wings under his shirt, Yasia saw them as his mother flung open the door to him, and his raw-boned leanness had her tongue-tied, newly shy of him somehow, as his sister ran to pull him inside. Yasia had to steal away, though it shamed her; she had to retreat a while to swallow her shock, to still her heart, stealing glances at him through the knot holes in the wooden farmhouse walls, while Myko sat hunched and dripping in the tin bath his mother poured.

  Washed clean again in the water she’d warmed, he sat at the table; Yasia put food in front of him, plate after plate, and this helped her, even if he ate so little, only drinking the beer she poured
him; she found she could stand at Mykola’s elbow while his grandfather sat talking, talking.

  Mykola’s mother and his sister sat with him too, recounting their woes, describing the charred barn and ruined beet crop, and the cows that gave no milk now: the sorry mess that was all they had left them.

  Mykola said little. “Yes, I saw it.” He told them he’d walked through the village on his way here.

  He must have walked and walked through other towns and villages just like it; too many ruined places; Yasia could see that from the hollows of his cheeks and temples, the sore drooping of his reddened eyelids. Still Myko’s family talked on, relentless. Until he put his head down and slept, sudden and face-down on the table, between his plate and beer glass.

  But after everyone was sleeping, Mykola woke again; he came and stole her from her bed, and he lay with her in the orchard grass.

  She had lain with him there before. Yasia had first known Myko before he was a soldier, when he was a boy and blond as wheat, come to help her father with the harvest. Her father couldn’t know, so they had to be careful—they were not even nearly old enough to marry then—so they’d hidden themselves among the old trees, in the long grass; far from the pasture and the farmhouse. And then they’d lain there, unbuttoned, their breath held, both of them; pressed together and hushed, lest they be discovered and this would have to stop, this press of him against her. Brown and gold after a day in the fields, chaff from the threshing caught in the down on his upper lip, it was his boy’s blunt fingers Yasia remembered most, reaching inside her dress, his eyes intent. He’d pressed his palms to her belly first, eager, uncertain, so Yasia had pulled them to her breasts; she’d pulled them where she wanted them, and she’d lifted her skirts for him.

  This time it was different. Myko was no longer so clumsy, so inexpert; neither did he lie wrapped around her afterwards. And Yasia lay awake then, blinking at the back of his sleeping head beside hers. This Mykola, she thought, was not her Mykola of old.