“THEY KILLED THEM! THEY killed them all!”
Isabelle looked out the window to see the tiny Cici atop the massive Boyko, galloping up the sloping hill. High above her, a sedge of gray cranes, long-necked and mighty-winged, flew in a broken formation.
Jumping off the horse before the mount stopped moving, Cici ran into Isabelle’s house. Not just ran but sprinted as if she had something great and important to announce that couldn’t wait another second. Isabelle wanted to say, tie up Roman’s horse, but before she could speak, Cici flung open the door, cried the words above, and bent over gasping.
Isabelle was almost twenty-nine years old, fair-haired, fair-eyed, fair-skinned. She was lean and strong in the way women are who live on a farm and work all day. There was only one mirror in her house, and she often went weeks without glancing in it. She brushed her teeth, washed her face, smoothed and braided her hair, got dressed, put on her boots, and began her day without once considering what she looked like. She knew. Only on Sundays did she put on a few airs and a pretty dress. Sometimes she left her hair down, in the summer put flowers in it. But often she didn’t catch a glimpse of herself, even on Sundays.
And today was not a summer Sunday. It was a Tuesday in the dead of February.
Isabelle set down her wooden spoon; she had been frying potatoes and eggs. It was seven in the morning. Mirik had come in after loading the milk canisters into the dray. In the winter they made their deliveries right after sunrise. The light was still low, the sky a hulking gray.
Until Cici burst in, the cottage had been quiet. Isabelle’s boisterous boys were down in the barn with Isabelle’s mother. Talk about the blind leading the blind. Oksana was a good teacher, engaging and level-headed, but a terrible dairy farmer. However, Isabelle’s children weren’t allowed in the stables with Roman anymore, not after he allowed the boys to ride two untamed foals without a saddle! Now only the inefficient but safe grandmother was allowed to supervise them.
Isabelle’s husband came to stand next to her as they stared at Cici panting. Mirik Kovalenko was seven years older, a serious man with a stern nose, kind brown eyes and a composed manner. He wasn’t much taller than Isabelle or much bigger than her in build. His light brown hair was thinning, and he needed glasses, but wouldn’t admit it.
Cici was still gasping, but not because she was out of breath.
“Killed who?” asked Isabelle.
“Who is they?” asked Mirik. “And who is them? Cici, speak sense.”
“Stan and Vitaly!” Cici said. Stan and Vitaly Babich were Cici’s cousins.
“Someone killed Stan and Vitaly?!”
“No!” cried Cici. “Stan and Vitya ambushed a squadron of Soviets coming down the road and shot them. I don’t know if they were council members or OGPU. Stan is convinced they were chekists.” OGPU were the Soviet internal security forces. Colloquially they were referred to by their post-Revolution name, chekists, from when the secret police was called CHEKA. “But either way, they killed them all. Maybe four dozen men.”
Isabelle and Mirik half-relaxed. Cici was known Ispas over for her fantastical and far-fetched embellishment of facts. And Stan and Vitaly were not exactly famous for their intrepid military ingenuity. They were potato farmers who liked to drink and get into stupid trouble.
“Our Stan and Vitya shot four dozen soldiers?” Mirik said in his slowest, most skeptical voice.
“That’s right, Mirik.” Cici was adamant.
“And they were walking, these fifty officers?” Mirik said. “Not riding in military vans with loaded automatics?”
“They were walking, yes.”
“In the middle of the night.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes!” said Cici. “I am witness.”
“You were up in the middle of the night in the middle of the woods and saw Stan and Vitya shoot a company of Soviets?” It was Isabelle’s turn to sound incredulous.
“No! By the time I heard about it and got to the woods, it was over.”
“Ah,” said Mirik.
“I saw the last of them being thrown into a mass grave,” said Cici.
Isabelle and Mirik exchanged a glance, less relaxed but still skeptical.
“What do you mean, by the time you heard about it?” Isabelle said. “How could you possibly hear about it? Weren’t you next door with Roman, sleeping together like husband and wife? I just left Roman at the stables. He mentioned nothing about this.”
Cici waved dismissively at Isabelle, as if to say don’t bother me with nonsense. “Roman slept at home, if you must know everything, and I was at Tamara’s.”
“Why?”
“Why, why. Who cares. We had a fight.”
“About this?”
“Isa, did you not hear what I just told you?”
“Oh, I heard.” Isabelle really hoped Cici was exaggerating because otherwise, their simple life was about to get a lot less simple. When she first saw Cici racing up the hill, the girl had looked so much as if she was bringing good news! Isabelle thought maybe she was pregnant. Now Isabelle knew the truth—not only not pregnant but burying Communists in ditches, apparently.
“Cici, this story of yours is getting more and more marvelous,” said Mirik. He was always calm. “Please—tell us more,” he said. “We have all the time in the world. It’s not like we have work to do or milk to deliver.”
Isabelle elbowed her husband. She was not always calm, but she remained calm now because she didn’t want to believe Cici.
“It’s fine, Isa,” Mirik said. “It didn’t happen, so there’s nothing to worry about. Is my food ready?”
“You don’t believe me?” Cici said. “Go see for yourselves. On the other side of Ispas, on the road to Kammenets, just past the gray rock.” Kammenets was the closest city to their hamlet.
“Now, why would all those Soviets be coming to Ispas all of a sudden?” Mirik said.
“You know why,” Cici said, her voice laden with meaning. The rumbling through the countryside was getting hard to ignore. The Soviet food procurement units had been sent out into the Ukrainian villages since December. The cities didn’t have enough to eat. It had been a fallow summer and an empty winter.
“Look, let’s all pipe down,” said Isabelle. “We don’t know who they were—”
“Or even if they were,” said Mirik.
“We don’t know what they were—soldiers or requisitionists or just propagandists,” Isabelle said. “We don’t know if it was forty men or three.”
“It was zero,” said Mirik.
“It was four dozen!” said Cici. “You don’t think I know the difference between three soldiers and fifty? I saw the bodies with my own eyes!”
“Cici is right about one thing, Mirik,” said Isabelle. “Whoever it was, and however many, if they were walking down the road in darkness, before dawn, that’s not a good sign. No one creeping into a village in the middle of the night can be up to anything good.” But Isabelle knew and didn’t want to say—if Cici was telling the truth and Stan and Vitya actually killed Soviet men, that was even worse.
“The Ukrainian loves a good story,” said Mirik. “Isabelle, is my breakfast burning? Because there’s work to do. The milk will go off before Cici is finished speaking.”
“Please say you’re making it up, Cici,” said Isabelle, peering outside her kitchen window for a glimpse of she didn’t know what.
“I’m not! I know sometimes I like to tell a tall tale or two, but trust me, Isa, this is not one of those times. Look at me. You know I’m telling the truth.” Raven-haired, raven-eyed Cici was a minute, slightly rounded girl, but she carried herself high and mighty, as if on a plinth. Cici had always been a raging ball of fire. Part Romanian, her heart all Gypsy, she was impulse and flame. “Still don’t believe me? Ask my husband. He knows.”
“Oh, now he’s your husband,” Isabelle said. “A minute ago, you weren’t even sleeping in the same bed.”
“Don’t humor her, Isa,” said Mirik at the stove, spooning his own potatoes from the cast iron pan onto a pewter plate.
Cici shook her fists. “Both of you—get your heads out of the ground!”
“Oh, I would,” Isabelle said, “if only the Soviets weren’t supposedly in that ground, rotting in a shallow grave.”
“Who said anything about shallow?” said Cici. “Our boys dug practically to Australia! They dug that hole like it was the most important hole of their lives!”
“And the ground looks freshly dug, like a grave?” asked Isabelle.
“They’re not idiots. They covered it with twigs and leaves.”
“No, of course,” said Mirik. “Not idiots.” He wolfed down his potatoes.
“Mirik, you heard what that kramar from Shatava told us who ran through here last week,” Cici said. “The Soviets arrived uninvited and unannounced, upended his store, and took nearly all his provisions. He had to abandon the village and flee! That’s why Stan and Vitya reacted as they did.”
“If that’s the case, what’s their considered plan?” said Mirik. “To lie in wait every night waiting for more Soviets? That’s the problem with Ispas. Too far out in the glyxi doki to have any sense. We have a village full of cavalier clowns with a few rifles and even fewer bullets. We can’t fight the OGPU or the Red Army, Cici. We couldn’t beat them ten years ago when we were better organized and better armed and we’re not going to beat them now. We’ll give them some milk—we’ve done it before—and they’ll be on their way.”
Cici got quite worked up. “Mirik, they’re not coming for just your milk this time,” she said. “They’re coming for your cow. They’re coming for Roman’s horse.”
“Yeah, good luck with that,” muttered Isabelle.
Mirik, who didn’t get worked up about much, turned red in the face. He waved his dirty spoon at the two women. “So, what are you going to do, follow Stan and Vitaly’s lead?”
“They want to come here? Let them,” said Isabelle. “This is Lazar land. We have my three brothers, we have Yana, who’s worth ten men, even though she’s expecting a baby. We have me, we even have you, Mirik.”
“Thanks a lot, wife.”
“And me,” said Cici.
Yana was a warrior, Cici a wannabe warrior. “A Lazar by marriage lies in the same bed as her husband,” Isabelle said, adding, “but fine. And you, too.” She turned back to Mirik. “We have rifles, we have shotguns. We have horses. That’s a cavalry, husband. And Roman even kept some grenade sticks from the war as souvenirs.” The war was the Civil War of 1918–1921 between Bolshevik Russia and Ukraine.
“Yes, and you know what else we have?” said Mirik, wiping his mouth. “Because you seem to have forgotten. Two small sons and our feeble mothers. We can’t be waging another war with the Soviets.”
“Who are you calling feeble?” said Isabelle’s mother Oksana, who had just walked inside.
“And who are you calling small?” said nine-year-old Slava, Isabelle’s firstborn son, black curly-haired and round-faced. Slava was the word for glory in Ukrainian. As in Slava Bohu, Glory to God.
“Yeah, Papa, who?” said Maxim, Isabelle’s second son, who was a blade of long grass like his mother. They called him Max. He was eight.
“Decade-old grenades and two enormous boys,” Mirik said, his hands on his children’s diminutive heads. “Yes, Mama, we’re unbeatable.”