Deremnytsia, Reichskommissariat Ukraine
february 25, 1944
the moment the door to the back bedroom closed, Marko lit the candle on the nightstand and it shivered in a draft, the flame casting a shadow across his wife’s beautifully obstinate chin, her wide and delicate mouth, her cheeks, now gaunt and hollow. He sank his fingers into Savka’s glorious long hair. Then they were together, devouring each other, hands seeking familiar yet new ground, mouth pressed hard against mouth as they struggled with buttons and ties, laughing as his mother-in-law began loudly singing a folk song in the other room.
Marko kicked off his boots. One hit the floor with a thud, and he glanced up as the singing paused a beat, holding his breath, then smiling as Mama started in on a more rousing tune. Taking the silk slip out of his wife’s hands, he floated it over her head, flinching when she caught at his arm.
“AB negative?” she said, squinting at his tattoo in the light of the candle. “What’s this?”
“Every SS man has a tattoo of his blood type,” he said, his fingers brushing her nipples through the slip draped over her body. She was much slimmer than he remembered. “How else will doctors know what kind of blood to give me if I’m wounded in battle?”
Falling back on the bed, she gazed up at him with a seductive smile. “You will not be wounded, Marko Ivanets.”
Lifting her foot, he inhaled the skin of Savka’s ankle, her agonizingly lovely calf. He wanted to start at his wife’s feet and move his way up, kissing and adoring every inch of her, but he yearned to be inside her. Hovering over her on the bed, he growled. “You think I’m protected by your prayers?”
“My Ukrainian prayers are stronger than your German helmet,” she said, pressing her lips to his cheek.
He kissed her neck, the straw-filled mattress whispering beneath them. “I forgot how beautiful you are,” he said as Savka pulled his suspenders down over his shoulders, giggling when he fumbled with his breeches. “You laugh at a Waffen-Sturmbannführer?” he teased her.
“You forgot I was beautiful?” Savka grasped his shoulders, drawing him into her, inviting him home. The war disappeared as he lowered himself between her thighs, the awful memories retreating when he slipped a hand to the small of her back, quieting her hips as he dug deeper, his blood ebbing and flowing like a great red tide that rose, engulfing him, until he collapsed upon her in blessed relief.
Later, as they lay facing each other, their skin damp with sweat, their fingers intertwined, Savka cleared her throat and said, “Isn’t it time Mykola Lebed ordered you to take over the division? The underground needs a Ukrainian army to help them fight partisans.”
He suppressed a spark of irritation. “Of course it isn’t time, Savka. Do you think me, and the other Ukrainian officers, would get away with killing Freitag and his men and stealing a ten-thousand-strong division with weapons and artillery—a division the Germans poured great effort into training? Lebed must wait on his order until the krauts are in chaos, running back to Berlin. Besides, Freitag has recently begun to trust me. The old Prussian invites me to battle meetings in his tent, asking what I think of the next day’s orders from Berlin.”
He fell silent, his face burning at the memory of Freitag’s recent insult toward him, when he hadn’t realized Marko had arrived early for an officer’s briefing. He had been standing outside the Brigadeführer’s tent, his hand on the flap, when he heard Freitag sneer, “Man from the forest,” to his German officers within. That’s what his commanding officer really thought of the Ukrainians—simple peasants and nothing more.
“How nice for Hitler to have ten thousand filthy Slavs to do his dirty work,” Savka said, her normally gentle voice grown harsh with exasperation.
Marko’s temper flared. “Do you think I wish to fight with the Germans? Lebed ordered me to join the division. There’s a purpose to all of this.”
Savka raised herself on one elbow and stared at him. “Lebed sits on his high throne, issuing orders. He’s not the one risking his life fighting ruthless Soviet partisans.” He could not see her expression clearly in the light of the candle, but Marko chided himself for doubting her. This obstinate refusal to take him at his word was simply a wife’s worry for her husband.
And it was true. Mykola Lebed was not on the ground, made to suffer the Germans day after day. Lebed had taken over command of the OUN when Stepan Bandera was arrested and sent to a German concentration camp in 1941 for daring to use the Nazi invasion to declare an independent Ukrainian state. Lebed had allied himself with the Germans, helping to form the Fourteenth Waffen-SS Division—only tall, Aryan-looking Slavs allowed—and he’d secretly inserted a few officers like Marko Ivanets, one of the underground’s top commanders.
He shifted in the bed, every nerve and muscle of his body now primed and on high alert. When the entire division was on the march—motorcycles roaring, trucks carrying light field howitzers spinning their tires in the mud—each tree and hillock posed a potential threat. Partisans harassed their camps at night. Sentries would disappear and be found later, their throats cut. Each soldier slept with a hand on his gun.
“Your hand is shaking,” Savka said, placing it on her bare breast.
She smiled, like she had the moment their eyes first met in a cafe in Lviv. How he’d been struck by her, a petite, dimpled beauty, with those eyes. But her smile did not soothe him. Perhaps he no longer deserved the comfort of a woman. To avoid her scrutiny, he burrowed under the blanket, his hand snaking up her thigh. “God willing, let us make another child.”
Despite their frequent attempts at conception since Taras’s birth, Savka had miscarried repeatedly, and Marko had long ago resigned himself to the reality that she’d never have another baby. “Six children!” they’d cried to each other, hands clasped after their wedding ceremony, giddy with delight at the thought of a large family.
Savka’s hand was on his arm. “Hitler will soon send you to the front, where too many of you will be killed and Lebed’s plan to take the division will be lost. Desert and go back to the bunker in the mountains,” she urged him.
Marko blinked in astonishment. “It’s Kuzak’s now.” Until last year, he’d relished commanding a military district for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, but now the thought of living in a hole in the ground made him shudder. “Do you not appreciate that your husband is a very important man?” he said, forcing jocularity.
With an impish grin, his wife pinned him to the bed, delighting him, surprising him. The slip was bunched around her waist and her gorgeous long hair spread like a curtain around them, shutting out the war and each silver spark of loss they would yet endure. She closed her eyes and ground her hips against his, and he drew her down, holding her close to his chest, stunned at her show of passion, as she finished in a sweat and bit her lip with a relieved laugh. Then she rolled away and curled up in his arms, a blissful smile on her face.
They lay together in contented silence for a few moments, Marko drifting strands of her hair between his fingers, considering how to tell her what she needed to know. “My unit has not been ordered to the front,” he said finally. “We’re going after Medvedev and his band of Soviet partisans.”
The moment shattered between them and Savka lay still, like a rabbit in the grass, hunted by an owl that circled overhead. “I saw your unit camped in the forest.”
Marko was surprised that his normally timid wife had wandered into a danger zone. “What were you doing?” he laughed. “Spying on us?”
Savka raised her head to peer through the near dark at him. “A banderivka found me at the river earlier. She took me to treat a wounded insurgent.”
Marko frowned. “A banderivka? There are no women in the bunkers—”
“There are now. This one was fierce,” she said, sounding exasperated and weary. “Her name was Natalka.”
He remembered seeing Natalka once, a pretty brunette courier who now had somehow found herself a place in Kuzak’s bunker. Marko threw back the blanket and sat on the edge of the bed. “Fucking Kuzak,” he said. “Always reckless and unpredictable.” The small room was suddenly unbearable to him. His heart raced and he exhaled slowly to calm himself. Taking out a paper from one of his tunic pockets, he found a pencil stub and began to compose a shtafeta upon his knee, a message in the code of the underground.
Savka knelt behind him on the bed, her arm around his shoulder, hand on his chest. “What are you writing?”
Her hand seemed to sear his flesh, and his first instinct was to push it away, but he forced himself to fold her fingers into his, talking himself down. A sweat broke out on his forehead. Why was he on edge? He was back with his wife; he’d wanted this moment. His pencil flew across the paper, and he glared down at it, focusing his anger on the bunker commander. “I’m writing orders for Kuzak to leave killing partisans to us.”
“Natalka and Bohdan were obviously starving,” Savka was babbling in his ear. “Natalka even took the roots I’d foraged. She said she had a trapline—”
“No traplines!” Marko shook his head and kept writing, his mouth a grim, obstinate line. “Kuzak’s insurgents should only leave the bunker in winter to check if a courier left information in the dead drop. It’s too dangerous to come down the mountain, even when they cover their tracks in the snow.” He finished writing and, after rolling the paper into a tight scroll, handed it to her.
But his wife held the shtafeta as if it had just come out of the fire. “There’s more than just a warning to Kuzak,” she said. “What else does it say?”
“Coded details of the German offensive on the Red Army at the front,” he admitted. “Leave this note in the dead drop on the east face of the mountain—Taras knows it—and wait in the forest for one of Kuzak’s men to come. He will lead you to the bunker.”
“Why would we go to the bunker? And why bring Taras?” Her voice seemed small, choked. “What if we run into Soviet partisans? It’s winter…”
He lifted a hand to smooth the wildness from her hair, the whites of her eyes stark against her shadowed face. Marko thought of leaving her his Luger, but Freitag would ask where his sidearm had gone and would fly into a rage if Marko made an excuse of losing it somewhere in the forest. What kind of Waffen-Sturmbannführer misplaced his pistol? “We’ve driven the partisans off the mountain,” he insisted. Reaching for his breeches, he drew them on, then the tall boots.
Savka dropped the shtafeta and scrambled to the edge of the bed. “You’re leaving? Already?”
Marko stared through the window, where snow was quietly falling in the darkness. He could hear her disappointment, but his wife’s reluctance to deliver the shtafeta made him wish he were out in the snowstorm rather than in here. Marko had thought long and hard of their reunion. He’d envisioned lying in her arms all night. In a real bed. But now he was anxious to get back to his men. “Freitag expects me at an officer’s meeting.” He riffled through the pockets of his SS field tunic and withdrew an envelope. “After we kill Medvedev, we’ll finally be ordered to the front.”
Savka fell back on the bed, clutching the sheet to her breasts. “The front? What if you’re trapped and can’t get away?” She turned her head. “Damn Hitler and this war he started, sacrificing Ukrainian men to a fight the Germans will lose.”
Exasperated, Marko leaned forward, elbows on his knees, looking down at the envelope in his hands. “Soon Ukraine will have a great army, Savka. Think of what we can do against the Soviets. But you and I will never come back to Deremnytsia.” He handed her the envelope. His wife opened it and pulled out the forged exit visas and false identification papers he’d arranged for her and Taras. She stared blankly, as if struggling to comprehend, then glanced up at him. He said, “The Red Army will be here within the month,” shrugging into his field tunic. “NKVD close behind. They’re deporting families they suspect allied with the underground, sending them to Siberia. You and Taras will deliver the shtafeta to Kuzak and tell him Roman demands that he take you in.”
“Taras is too young to live in a bunker,” Savka stammered.
“And you’re too afraid,” he scoffed, jabbing his finger toward the window. “You know what’s happening out there? This Gerhard…the Red Army soldiers will rape and murder Lilia for sleeping with him, and you, for being married to a Waffen-SS officer.”
“We will leave before they arrive—”
“The Russians will catch up and take Taras as cannon fodder. Going to Kuzak is your only hope.”
Marko buttoned his tunic and stared at her through the near dark, saw her struggle with the ugly truth and then come to the same conclusion: this was the only solution to save their son. “For how long?” she asked finally.
“When the snows melt, Kuzak’s men will take you and Taras to the Polish border. Other insurgents will meet you and put you on a train that will take you to Munich. I’ll find you there after the war.”
“What of Mama and Lilia…and Sofiy?”
He stood up. “I’m working on documents for them.”
“Don’t send me and Taras up there,” she begged, reaching for him. “Hours of climbing through snow and cold, only to be met by…”
“Natalka?” he reminded her. “Watch her, listen to her. You will learn to be a fierce banderivka.”
She reached for his hand, but he was already buckling his holster and dagger. “Promise me you’ll get papers for Mama and Lilia, the children,” she pleaded, “that you’ll get them out.”
“I promise, kokhana.” He left her then, closing the door behind him without looking back.