A Boy in Winter by Rachel Seiffert

Author:Rachel Seiffert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

5

Mykola knows well the weight of a revolver. The ones he sees slung from the belts of the SS patrols look around the same weight as the Russian handgun that hung at his own waist. It is only weeks since he felt that; half a lifetime, but only weeks at the same time. He last held the heft of it in his palm when he flung it into the wide Sluch waters, and when he sees the German guns now, he remembers: that heft first, and then the sick mix of fear and relief at being rid of it, crouching deep in the reeds at dusk, waiting for nightfall.

Such a risk he took, deserting. Cutting and running into open country, instead of returning to his unit. It could have earned him a bullet in the back of the neck from either side, if the wrong side had caught him at the wrong time. The Red Army, those black and red Nazis: neither had any care for the wrong and the right of things—or not as he’d been taught them—and Mykola dreaded each as much as he loathed them, all the time he was running. But what other chance did he have of getting home?

The handgun landed deep in the reed and silt at the river’s edge, and it gave him a strange lurching feeling to hear it; to be without its weight after so long.

He knew by then what battle was, what battle does; Mykola knew slaughter. He’d seen it in farmsteads and orchards, been in the thick of it on village streets: wherever the fighting ripped through. And he’d seen how it took a grip of men, even those who feared it.

Mykola had stuck with the nervous, the reluctant like himself among the newly recruited, until he’d learned that another man’s fear was nothing to trust in. Give the fearful a knife or a rifle, they will use it; in the midst of the fray, give them a flame, they will lay waste.

Soldiers tore at each other; no one wants to die at the hands of another. And Mykola had felt it enough times: his own dark and bastard will to do his worst—and first—before any other man could take him.

But he’d been a soldier then.

And without his uniform, it wasn’t soldiers fighting soldiers that frightened him.

Battle was fear and fury, but it was not confined to armies. It tore through fields and barns and houses, and slaughter didn’t only take the fighting men. It took all in its wake: the village women, the old and the lame, and the children; all those with no flame or rifle, no reason for soldiers to heed them.

And now he was one of them.

Without his uniform—without his gun most of all—he’d left himself wide open.

Mykola saw others in the days that followed: other deserters, who’d discarded their rifles when they’d thrown off their belts and tunics. Some had left their boots, even, if they were Red Army issue: they’d wanted no trace of that army about themselves, now it was on the losing side.

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