He was still holding the letter in his grasp as he drove his cart up the track to the farm, eight hours since it had been pressed into his hand by the messenger, a young Catholic boy who wouldn’t look him in the eye. Tacit knew the seriousness of the letter by the mark on the envelope. He’d torn it open and read it immediately in the hope that it wasn’t what he knew it to be.
She came out to meet him on the track, as she always did when he visited, whether heading out or back from an assignment, cleaning her hands on her apron after preparing meals for the farm hands in the kitchen. But this time she knew that something was wrong. He hadn’t waved from the track and he was driving the cart hard.
Mila stepped aside as he thundered the cart to a halt and tumbled from the cab into her arms, tears in his eyes.
He howled like child as she held him, right there on the track, like a child who had lost his favourite toy, knowing it would never return to him. Eventually, she spotted the paper clutched tight in his fingers.
“I am the last one left,” he wept, as Mila read the letter. “Georgi. Georgi has been killed.”
Mila felt she knew the young man Georgi like her own. Tacit had littered the stories he told her with mention of him, tales of daring and kindness and a love only brothers could appreciate. As she read the note from the church, her own eyes filled with tears.
“Poldek …” she muttered, but she could find no other words.
“I’ve had enough,” he replied and he reached out to her. She resisted, at first afraid, but his hold was firm and she allowed her herself to be drawn towards him. He leant forward and kissed her for the very first time and she swooned in his arms, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him passionately back – the two lost completely in each other. “I’m leaving the Church,” he murmured finally, pulling away from her just a little. “They’ve lost me. I want no more of them. They are dead to me.”
Mila wept and kissed him again, and Tacit bound her up into his arms, carrying her back to the homestead.