Tolya ducked into the trees—and tripped, stupidly, sprawling over a root, falling on his face on the cool, damp earth.
He fought against Solovey’s hands—or he tried anyway, twisting and kicking and swearing. Solovey put a knee into his back and jerked his arms around.
“I’m sorry,” Solovey said, sliding the ammunition bag off Tolya’s shoulder. He held Tolya’s wrists in one hand. He had a scout’s knife in his other hand. He cut the strap of the bag. “I didn’t want to shoot you,” he said, tying Tolya’s wrists with the strap. “You’ve got to understand I can’t let you go. They’ll torture you if they take you, trying to find us.”
His hands lifted Tolya slowly, carefully. He opened the buttons of Tolya’s jacket and pulled the jacket down Tolya’s arms. He held Tolya’s tunic in his hands and ripped it and peeled it away.
His fingers found the rosary around Tolya’s neck.
Orthodox didn’t pray the rosary. Neither did the Ukrainian Catholics here in Lwów.
A rosary meant Tolya was a Roman Catholic, a Pole—and he knew what the UPA did to Poles.
For a moment, Solovey was frozen, holding the rosary in his fingers and looking at the crucifix on his palm. Very distantly, over the blood in his ears and the wind in the trees, Tolya could hear Andriy and Taras and Yakiv coming up from the roadside.
Solovey yanked the clasp open, tore the rosary from Tolya’s neck, and shoved it quickly into a pocket. He tore Tolya’s tunic into strips.
“It’s all right, Tolya,” he said. “It’s all right.”
4
They would torture him first, to see what he knew about numbers and positions and battle orders.
Then they would kill him.
The Ukrainian nation is against mixed marriage and regards it as a crime, the UPA leaflets said. He’d seen them in Tarnopol, in Zborów, in Złoczów—all the way across Galicia. The family is the most important organic unit, the highest cell of the national collective, and thus we have to keep it purely Ukrainian.
There were other leaflets listing other crimes: Death to the traitors who join the Red Army! Death to the traitors who join the collective farms! They hadn’t stuck with him the same way. Those other crimes were just things you did. Who cared what he’d done? They would kill him just for what he was—or maybe for what he wasn’t. He wasn’t purely Ukrainian. With a Polish mother and a Ukrainian father, he was an impurity in the blood of the Ukrainian race.
They would kill him to cleanse the blood.
“You’re going to have to walk,” Solovey said. He was bandaging Tolya’s shoulder with strips of tunic. “There’s a reason I didn’t aim for your legs. Well, multiple reasons, but that was one of them. However, try to run…”
He showed Tolya his pistol, holding it very close to Tolya’s face, opening the magazine and letting Tolya see the six remaining rounds.
“I can use every one of them without killing you,” he said, “but it would be miserable for both of us, so I’m going to ask you, please, not to run. All right? Be good about it, and I might even untie your hands.”
Tolya swore at him in Polish.
Solovey slid a hand over Tolya’s mouth. “In Ukrainian, you suicidal idiot.”
“Vyrodok”—through Solovey’s fingers—“suchyy syn—”
“I’d conserve the energy,” Solovey said. “It’s a long walk, and I’m not going to carry you.”
* * *
Tolya tried to run.
He knew he wouldn’t make it away. There was no question of making it away. But he didn’t want to live to go through a UPA interrogation, and he thought, in a sudden rush of panic, that he could make it enough of a possibility that Solovey would shoot to kill.
There wasn’t much more thought to it than that. He waited until they were halfway up the bare-grass slope, very nearly the same place as last time, and he ran.
He’d never tried running with his hands tied behind his back. This time he didn’t even make it to the trees. He stumbled ten meters or so, fighting for his balance the whole way, before the soldier called Yakiv—intimidatingly big and surprisingly quick—caught him by an elbow, jerked him around, and shoved him to the ground, planting a heavy, booted foot in Tolya’s stomach. Tolya looked up into the gaping metal mouth of Yakiv’s rifle.
“Do you know, zradnyk,” Yakiv said, “you can still walk with a shattered kneecap, given enough motivation.”
“Not very quickly,” Solovey said lazily, coming down through the grass, “and not for very long, no matter the motivation. Leave him his kneecaps, Yakiv.”
“Up, zradnyk.” Yakiv took his foot off Tolya’s stomach and jabbed Tolya’s ribs with the muzzle of the rifle.
If he’d been braver, he would have said he wasn’t the zradnyk, the traitor, not technically, because he only shot Germans and Soviet political officers—but he didn’t say it. He got up. He rolled over onto his stomach and pushed himself up awkwardly on his knees. Yakiv prodded him with the rifle again, just for good measure, and they walked.
He didn’t know how far they walked. He tried to estimate time and distance by the angle of the sun, the way Comrade Lieutenant Spirin had taught him, but Yakiv hurried him roughly along with the muzzle of the rifle whenever he looked up into the trees. Solovey and Andriy were ahead, carrying the machine gun and the ammunition bag between them. Yakiv followed Tolya, and Taras brought up the rear. They were going north and west into the low foothills above the city. He knew that much because when they crested one long, wooded slope he risked a glance back over his shoulder and saw the wood spreading away behind them, the road through the poplars as thin as a thread below them, the city like a smear of ash on the far green floor of the river valley. Then Yakiv nudged him with the rifle, and he stumbled down the slope after Solovey and Andriy.
They rested once. Andriy passed around a canteen of warm, stale water. At first, he was going to refuse because his hands were still tied, which meant Solovey had to hold the canteen for him. But his shoulder was hurting badly, and when he opened his mouth to snarl an oath, he lost his nerve and ended up letting Solovey tip the water onto his tongue—and Solovey must have taken that as his surrender, because afterward he bent over Tolya with his knife and cut the strap from Tolya’s wrists.
They walked again. His shoulder was hurting very badly now. The bandage was swollen and soaking. He bit the insides of his cheeks and blinked away blackness from the corners of his eyes, letting Yakiv nose him this way and that with the rifle because that was easier than lifting his head to look.
He tried to think about Comrade Lieutenant Spirin making it all the way back from the German lines at Tarnopol with two broken ribs and a bullet hole in his back, but all he could think about was how Comrade Lieutenant Spirin got a firing squad instead of a Red Star because Zampolit Petrov said he’d been turned in captivity.
Then he tried to think about Koval, calmly picking out shrapnel from her calf after a mortar round collapsed the walls of the slit trench, but all he could think about was that morning in the switch tower, and collective guilt, and how she would put a pistol in her mouth before she’d let them take her.