Savaged Lands by Lana Kortchik

Author:Lana Kortchik [Kortchik, Lana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2016-01-07T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6 – Freedom’s Elusive Glare

Natasha was counting the steps down four flights of stairs, an empty bucket hooked on her arm, a scarf wrapped around her head. It was early and the winter sun peeked timidly through the cloud, illuminating the city half hidden by snow. It wasn’t fresh snow any more. It wasn’t white or pure or soft like feathers. On the contrary, it was all grey ice and brown slush, muddy, dull, deflated.

Natasha had just stepped outside when she heard mortar shots. They were at least a few blocks away but the unexpected noise made her stop in her tracks, drop the bucket and, not pausing to catch it as it rolled down the hill, run back upstairs. Mother, Nikolai and Lisa were already at the kitchen window. Natasha was just in time to see a tiny dot of a plane as it vanished into the distance, its machine guns popping and cracking long after the plane had disappeared.

It was at this plane that the mortars were firing.

‘That was our plane. A Soviet plane!’ exclaimed Nikolai, his voice raising a few octaves too high and then falling to almost a whisper.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Natasha. She had a sudden desire to hug her brother and twirl him in a dance around the kitchen.

‘Positive. I saw a red star on the fuselage.’

‘You imagined it, silly,’ said Lisa. ‘A Soviet plane! What nonsense.’

Nikolai glared at his sister. ‘You think you know everything, smarty-pants? Then explain why the Germans were firing at their own plane.’

Lisa had no answer to that. Four pairs of excited eyes stared out of the window at the quiet street. For a minute, no one spoke.

Natasha said, ‘We haven’t seen a Soviet plane since—’

‘Since September,’ interrupted Mother. ‘And the paper said yesterday that the Soviet air force was destroyed.’

‘You still read the papers, Mama? It’s all lies, every last word,’ said Natasha.

‘The Red Army must be closer than we think,’ said Mother.

The plane was the first sign of life from the territories unoccupied by Hitler they had seen in a long time. There was no electricity in their apartment any more. No electricity meant no radio, which in turn meant that the Smirnovs had no way of knowing what was happening in the outside world. Yuri had stopped bringing his radio downstairs and it remained on the roof, under a pile of bricks, concealed by half a meter of snow. Mother finally noticed Natasha’s boots and her smile evaporated. ‘Shoes in the house? Take them off immediately and sit down. Breakfast is almost ready.’

‘What’s for breakfast?’ Nikolai wanted to know.

Mother pointed at two large beetroots and a potato. The vegetables were withered, as if they had spent not just three winter months but a number of years hidden away in someone’s cellar. Mother proudly brought them from the market earlier that morning and had sliced them on a cutting board into wafer-thin, almost transparent portions. She looked around. The shelves were empty. ‘I don’t understand. Where did all our pots go? We had at least half a dozen.

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