“So?”
“Last night—in an alley off Gródecka Street. They’re saying it was one of us.”
Tolya lifted his scope and trained it on the hillside, following the artillery fire across the shoulder of the hill.
Koval reached over and knocked the scope away from his face. “Did you hear me? They think it was one of us. They saw a uniform.”
“It could have been Polish Resistance. We’ve caught them in our uniforms.” And it would have been, if he’d just let things alone, but how was he supposed to know?
“Where were you, anyway? Yura said you were gone all afternoon.”
Tolya wiped the lenses of the scope. He mounted the scope and lifted the rifle, shouldering the butt and resting his cheek on the cool, smooth walnut stock.
“Listen,” Koval said, “I’m only asking because the NKVD will be asking too, and they won’t be nearly as polite about it.”
The NKVD—the Narodnyĭ Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs—were the Soviet secret police. If—when?—he ended up in the basement of Brygidki prison, the NKVD would be the ones taking him apart.
“They won’t just shoot you,” Koval said. “First they’ll make you cough up all the other anti-Soviet elements in the company.”
Tolya shut his left eye and sighted an imaginary target in the poplar trees at the foot of the hill—distance six hundred meters, half wind from two o’clock. He squeezed the trigger and lifted his head, homing the shot in his mind.
“You’re short,” Koval said dryly.
Tolya lowered the rifle to his lap. He clipped the sling on the stock and butt.
“My grandmother is buried in Łyczakowski Cemetery—my mother’s mother. I went to find the grave.”
Koval was silent.
Tolya took a clip from his pocket, stripped it into the magazine, and shoved the bolt in.
“I’m sorry,” Koval said. “I didn’t know.”
“That’s a first,” he said.
He hadn’t meant it to sound so sour. She ignored it anyway.
“Are they from L’viv—your mother’s people?” She used the Ukrainian name, L’viv, not the Polish Lwów.
“No, they moved to L’viv after the Poles took Galicia. They didn’t want to stay on the Ukrainian side of the border.”
That was in 1919, after Ukraine went to war with Poland for control of oil-rich eastern Galicia. His mother’s family, Poles, had held land in the village of Kuz’myn for more than a century, but Kuz’myn was in Ukrainian territory, and Tolya supposed they’d feared reprisals.
“But your mother stayed,” Koval said.
“My mother stayed.”
He had wondered, more and more as he’d gotten older, if she’d ever regretted it. She’d been eighteen years old and in love, and even if she’d known her father would disown her for loving a Ukrainian, she couldn’t have known the Reds would take Ukraine, seal the borders, and shoot her against a wall for being Polish.
“Are any of her family still here?” Koval asked. “Living, I mean.”
“No,” Tolya said. That was a lie. More accurately, he didn’t know. He knew his mother’s father was dead, because he’d found that grave, too, in Łyczakowski Cemetery, and he knew it must have happened in the German invasion because the date on the headstone was July 1, 1941. He’d tried to be sorry, but he wasn’t very. He couldn’t think of his mother’s father as his grandfather. The man had certainly never thought of him, the half-breed, as a grandson. His mother’s mother had written when she could, in quiet defiance of her husband. His mother’s father hadn’t broken silence once, even when Aunt Olena had written from Kyiv to tell him his daughter was dead.
He wasn’t sure about his mother’s brothers and sisters, but they’d never written either, and if they’d ever cared about a mongrel nephew from the wrong side of the border, they wouldn’t care now—not when he came wearing the Reds’ uniform.
“Listen,” Koval said, “I’m sorry, I really am, but the cemetery is on the east side, isn’t it?”
“So?”
“Vasya said you came in on the tracks last night.”
Tolya didn’t say anything.
“Listen to me, Tolya. If I can figure out that you weren’t at the cemetery—or not only at the cemetery—then the NKVD can too. All they’ve got to do is ask for names.”
“What names?”
“Anybody who had a history with Petrov, cross-checked against anybody who was absent at the time he was shot. You’d fit on both counts—and Vasya will talk. Everybody talks.”
Tolya didn’t say anything.
“I don’t care that you shot him,” Koval said. “Somebody should have shot him at Tarnopol. I care about what happens to you.”
He looked at her. The breath of wind through the open windows was pulling blond hair from the neat bun under her cap and whipping it around her ears. The sunlight had turned her eyes softly green, the color of moths’ wings.
“It’s seventy kilometers to Stryy,” she said quietly. “You could be in the mountains in two days.”
“No.”
“I’m serious.”
“I’m not running.”
“They’ll find out. They’ll find out, if they don’t know already. Everybody talks, sooner or later.”
“It’s an admission of guilt if I run.”
“It wouldn’t matter if they couldn’t find you.”
“They’d come for you. Collective guilt. They’d know you helped me.”
“I’d put a pistol in my mouth.” Her voice was hard. “I’m not going to be their bait.”
“They’d go for your sister,” he said.
She was silent. The breeze tugged at her hair. Tolya swung his feet off the switchboard. He leaned over and caught one of the blond strands in his fingers, tucking it behind her ear.
“They can’t prove anything,” he said.
She shut her eyes. “Don’t be stupid, Tolya.”
“I’m not being stupid.”
“They’ll have your name. They’ll have whatever proof they want once they’ve got you in an interrogation cell.”
“The only way they prove anything is if I try to run.”
“Do you trust me?”
He didn’t answer. He traced her cheekbone with his fingertips—very lightly because his fingers were cracked and callused. Peasant fingers, Koval would say, teasing. She was city born, from Kyiv.
She caught his wrist. “That was not supposed to be a rhetorical question.”
He looked away.
“Yes,” he said.
“Look at me,” she said.
He looked back. He couldn’t meet her eyes. He looked at the strands of blond hair slipping loose again from behind her ear.
She said, “You don’t have to worry about me, all right?”
“All right.”
“So promise me you’ll go.”
“I’ll go.”
She held his wrist tightly. “Don’t lie to me. Promise me you’ll go tonight—as soon as it’s dark enough to get past the checkpoints.”