THE SPLIT IN THE family was bitter, blackening every word and darkening every soul.
No one could put forth a persuasive enough case for what was best. They were all like vile Zhuk, relying on the power of useless words to affect a change in their circumstances, and failing. No one knew what combination of words they could use to persuade the others.
Fear was a ruler.
Anger was a ruler too.
So was pride.
And so was despair.
And each one dictated a different response to the matter of Efros and Zhuk and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Fear said, do nothing, keep quiet, work, they’ll leave you alone. Give them what they want, feed them; give them the land, the milk, the horses. Do anything to stay alive. Anything to save the children.
But Anger said never. Never! To all those things.
And Pride echoed Anger’s words. Never, to any of those things. They already took from us almost everything. They cannot have what’s left.
While Despair said, do whatever you must, anything, everything, to live.
The crisis made the family behave in starkly different ways. Even Petka understood that when you arrested the mother of a Cossack you were not mending fences. And after his own mother was taken, Petka—who was most definitely not a Cossack—wanted no part of the war to come.
To save his hide, Petka made a separate peace with Roman. He swore to him on the blood of the covenant that he would never say a word about anything to anyone in exchange for one of Roman’s older horses. Petka decided to take Roman’s wise advice and go visit family in Proskuriv. Roman agreed, though he later told Isabelle he didn’t know how Petka would answer even the most basic questions at the roadblocks out of Ispas without disclosing almost immediately that he was a tenant farmer on the Lazar ranch and was, inexplicably—in the middle of the farm’s busiest season—leaving with his entire family and all his belongings. “Our time is drawing short,” Roman said to Isabelle, “and not just because of Petka.”
Petka loaded the milk cart with essentials, which included his wife, children, and his ailing father, harnessed the nag, and took off before sunrise. The day before they left, Mirik asked Petka to take Slava and Maxim.
Petka refused. “I can’t be responsible for Lazar children, brother,” he said. “They can’t be controlled. You tell them one thing, they nod their heads and do what they want.”
“They’re your blood,” Mirik said.
“Maybe, but look at them,” said Petka. In the dusty clearing, Slava and Maxim were fencing with two of Martyn Lazar’s old swords. “Open your eyes. They’re not remotely Kovalenkos.”
Isabelle came up behind the brothers and stared at her sons through their backs. “Are you giving away my children without speaking to me, Mirik?”
“Why not?” he said. “You’re planning to declare war on the Soviet Union without speaking to me.”
“Slava, Maxim, come here, boys,” Isabelle called to her sons.
They ran up, swords up.
“Darlings,” she said, her hands on their shoulders. “First of all, don’t run with your swords up; it’s not safe. Second, your Uncle Petka is going to visit relatives in Proskuriv. Would you like to go with him for a little visit? Just a few weeks. Mama and Papa will join you soon.”
In unison the boys refused. They did everything together.
Isabelle took a deep breath. “What about if your father comes with you?”
“Isabelle!” said Mirik. “Don’t—don’t do that. Don’t speak for me.”
They took a few steps back to speak privately. “You believe there’s danger here,” she said. “I’m offering this to you. You want to go? Go.”
“Only if you come with me,” Mirik replied, just as quietly.
“You know I can’t,” said Isabelle.
“Is Uncle Roman going to come?” Slava said, whooshing his sword. “Is Mama going to come? Because if they’re not going, we’re not going.”
“If they’re not going, we’re not going,” echoed Maxim.
“Case in point, dear brother,” Petka said to Mirik. “And probably for the best. There’s no room in the milk cart for you and your sons.”
The day after Petka fled, Oksana and Bogda disappeared by train to parts unknown. Isabelle went to bring her mother her daily meal, and Oksana was gone. In their cell were two new women stretching out their hands to Isabelle’s plate of potatoes. Neither Efros nor Zhuk, nor anyone else would say a word about where they’d been taken. In exchange for half a bottle of vodka, a guard at the jail told Isabelle about a Kammenets train that took the mothers in the night.
A day after Oksana vanished, Yana, who was by then nearly at term, showed everyone what it was like to be ruled by all four passions—fear, anger, pride, and despair. While Ispas slept, she walked three kilometers to the village, climbed to the second floor of Efros’s requisitioned house, crept through his window, suffocated him with his own dirty socks lying on the floor, and then dragged him and hanged him by the neck off a thick branch of the beech tree she had just climbed. The socks were still stuffed in his mouth.
Yana took his revolvers and walked three kilometers back home. Day was almost breaking, but she didn’t go to bed. Instead, she proceeded down into the valley, past the fallow fields, to the far end of their property by the brook, and induced labor by breaking her waters with a thin piece of metal wire, inserted just so. Alone in the woods, Yana gave birth and smothered her infant in the earth. She buried him and then shot herself with Efros’s revolver, falling over the little grave. Isabelle and Cici heard the thundering gunshot echo through the cold morning. Screaming, the newborn cranes flapped up into the sky and flew away without a formation.
Yana spoke of her plan to no one; she asked no one for help. She must have believed it was the only way to help her fearless Ostap fight the way he was meant to, the way Yana would have, had she not felt herself to be a burden to him.
Ostap wept for a day and then hardened into granite.
The grim and mute family was still burying Yana when Zhuk and the OGPU men arrived, armed and furious, set to arrest and execute the pregnant blonde woman four witnesses saw stringing up Efros near the public square.
After what happened to Efros, Zhuk and the chekists didn’t leave Isabelle’s farm. During the day, the OGPU guards shadowed the Lazars on their daily tasks or pointed rifles at Isabelle’s children for sport, and at night they smoked and drank and played cards and ate the meager rations Isabelle prepared for them.
Zhuk forbade the family to meet or speak privately. His guards upended their pantries in search of food and rifled through the homes looking for weapons. Roman allowed Zhuk’s men to do what they wished and said nothing, stopping his sister and brothers from raising their voices in complaint. “The time has not yet come,” said Roman.
The only way Isabelle and Mirik spoke to each other was out in the fields or in bed at night and only in the softest tones because the sentry sat either right below their open window or at the table in their living room. But even before the incursion, Isabelle had nothing to say to her husband lately, even in bed. The cleft between the Lazars and Kovalenkos had grown unbridgeable.
After her mother had vanished and Yana died, Isabelle had even less to say to Mirik.
A few nights after Zhuk came, it was Mirik who reached out to Isabelle.
“Isa,” he whispered, lying behind her. His arm went around her. He nuzzled into her hair.
“Shh.”
“Isa, I’m sorry.”
“Still shh, but for what?”
“For thinking we could do it my way. I really believed they’d leave us alone.”
“Not very likely now, after Yana. Or even then.”
“You and your brothers terrify me,” Mirik said. “Can I just say this before I say anything else?”
“Say it quick,” Isabelle said. “He’s going to hear you in a minute.”
And right on cue, Gregor the sentry yelled outside their open window. “Hey, you two, enough! Fuck or sleep but shut the hell up!”
Grinding her teeth, Isabelle breathed to calm down, to settle in, to sleep for a few hours before another hard hungry day would begin. They waited for Gregor to step away to piss in the grass before they spoke again.
“They tore all goodwill out of my chest when they took my mother,” Mirik whispered.
“I had no goodwill left before they took mine,” whispered Isabelle.
“I didn’t think I would feel this heavy with my anger.”
“We are mocked by them,” Isabelle whispered back. “They drip poison upon our earth. But we have not been beaten yet, Mirik, and we have not been dishonored.”
“Not yet,” Mirik said. “But it’s coming. I can tell by Zhuk’s demeanor. Something bad is coming.”
Isabelle’s unblinking eyes were focused on a splintered crack in the plank wall. “Oh, I agree,” she said. “Something bad is coming.”
“I’m so scared for our sons,” Mirik whispered.
“No matter what we do,” she said, “our sons have been disinherited from this land. The question is, can we promise them a place of their own? A place free from grief and pain.”
“I don’t know if such a place exists,” Mirik said, sounding as down as he had ever sounded. “But let’s try to find it. I’m with you. The time has come for us to act against those who act against us.”
Turning, Isabelle embraced him. “It’s long past time,” she whispered.
“How would it even work?” Mirik asked.
“That part you leave to me.”
“Don’t they have to leave first before we can ride away?”
“One way or another,” said Isabelle, “those men will leave my land.”
“Why do I fear it’s going to be another?” said Mirik.
It didn’t look as if Zhuk was leaving voluntarily. “The murderess may be beyond our punishment,” Zhuk told Isabelle, “but her family is not.” He was waiting for reinforcements from Kammenets, he said. “Whether by chance or design, your labor force seems to have gotten quite depleted, comrades,” he told the Lazars. “You barely have a handful of Lazars left on your farm. That’s another reason we don’t believe you can work these fields and animals yourselves. There are too few of you.”
“Are you here to help us?” Roman said, looking over the dozen indolent men lounging around his clearing.
“We are here to keep you singularly focused on the pledge you made to me and my dear fallen colleague Yefim Efros,” Zhuk said, “that you would deliver to us two hundred bushels or six metric tonnes of grain by September and produce two cows and five horses by June. You seem to be too distracted with murder and sudden trips to visit distant relatives to remember your quota requirements.”
Poor Petka, Isabelle thought, pitying Mirik’s brother and his innocent family.
“The cows will calve, Comrade Zhuk,” Roman said. “The horses will foal. And six tonnes of grain will be delivered to you on time and in full.”
It helped that neither Zhuk nor his Soviet guards had any idea what wheat stalks were supposed to look like in late May. The shoots should have been dense and over a meter tall, but instead they were sparse and barely out of the ground. Drought and torrential rains had done them in. It had rained only once in twenty-three days—the day Yana died.
And it hadn’t stopped raining since.
Roman’s pledge to Zhuk of a bountiful harvest may have been singed by drought and drowned by mud, but it was out of this sludge of earth and rain, with the armed Bolsheviks ten meters away on dry ground, that the plan took final shape in reedy piecemeal. The time to strategize was in the mire of the blighted fields.
They named it Operation Enay—Operation Aeneas—in tribute to their mother, Oksana Malita, a classical scholar at the University of Krakow, one of the few women who had studied there and taught there. Prince Aeneas was a mythical warrior, one of Troy’s sole survivors who, after the destruction of his city, fashioned a boat out of wood and, with his father and son, set off into the great unknown through warm and treacherous waters to find a new homeland and build a new civilization.
After the rains, there were fish in the stream. Cici and Isabelle went fishing together. Next to them sat an OGPU soldier and a runt trainee from the Youth Brigade, one armed Communist for each unarmed farm woman, always watching, always listening.
“Your brother asks when,” Cici said to Isabelle in Romanian, their fishing lines in the brook. “He’s at breaking point.”
“Tell him the time is near,” Isabelle said. “Enay is a go.”
“What are you saying?” screeched the nearby chekist, almost dropping his weapon.
“We caught a trout,” Cici said, showing him.
In Romanian, Isabelle said, “Tell Roman to practice his hoot-hoots like a bufnitsa.”
“I said Russian,” screamed the guard.
“I said we need more worms,” said Cici. “We don’t have enough.”
“In Russian!”
“How do you say worm in Russian? Maybe you know?” Cici asked.
“Chervey,” replied the chekist.
“We dig for treisprezece black worms when the moon is full,” said Isabelle to Cici, mostly in Russian so the Soviet guard could understand.