He must have passed out, because he woke up to find Solovey and Andriy carrying him, Solovey’s arms under his arms and Andriy’s arms around his knees. Solovey was walking slowly backward, talking over his shoulder to somebody Tolya couldn’t see: “Going to have to hurry if you want the light.”
“Put him down—here.” That was a girl’s voice. Somebody put a hand on Tolya’s shoulder. He jerked reflexively, hissing.
Solovey’s hands tightened under his arms. “Morphine,” Solovey said.
“You want to use—”
“Yes.”
“Iryna,” the girl said.
Tolya jerked again, deliberately this time. He twisted against Andriy’s arms, scrabbling for Solovey’s hands. He knew what that meant too—morphine. They would give him a little before the questioning, just enough to keep him calm and pliable and to dull the pain so he wouldn’t pass out again. That was what the NKVD did. He jerked wildly, kicking.
“Put him down,” the girl said. “For the love of heaven, put him down before he hurts himself.”
They put him on the ground, spreading his arms. He tried to lunge back up. They pushed him down and held him. Solovey leaned over him.
“Easy, tiger,” he said. “We’re going to take the bullet out.” He had a knee in Tolya’s stomach and a hand on either side of Tolya’s head, pinning him. “You picked the wrong time to wake up,” he said.
“How did it happen?” the girl asked, unwrapping the makeshift bandage from Tolya’s shoulder. She had calm, steady hands—warm, red hands, callused from work. There was a Red Cross badge on the sleeve of her coat.
“Stray shot,” Solovey said. “The getaway. It was close.” He grinned a quick, pained grin down into Tolya’s face.
“No one else?” The girl peeled away the bandage and wiped the blood with clean gauze.
“We were lucky,” Solovey said.
“He was lucky the bullet missed the bone.”
“Extremely,” Solovey agreed.
Another Red Cross girl swooped in beside Solovey, slipping a bag from her shoulder.
“Fifteen milligrams, Iryna,” the first girl said.
“Thirty,” Solovey said.
The two girls looked at each other over Tolya.
“Thirty milligrams,” Solovey said. “Take it out of mine.”
“Fine,” the first girl said, “all right. Thirty.” She was pinning her hair up. “Give me those forceps,” she said to Solovey. “Make yourself useful for a change.”
* * *
Afterward, Tolya was under a canvas tarpaulin in the blue half-light, curled up on a blanket on the ground with another blanket over him, blinking up through tangled tree branches to a twilit sky. His head was very thick and very light at the same time. When he moved, it felt as though somebody else were directing his limbs distantly on a puppet string. He lay still, listening to the nightingales. It’s all right, he thought vaguely, it’s all right. If they were going to torture him now, they wouldn’t have troubled with blankets.
Solovey ducked in under the tarpaulin.
He wasn’t wearing the NKVD uniform. He was wearing a green-gray jacket and trousers and a green-gray side cap with the tryzub, the Ukrainian trident, in bloodred and black on the badge. He had his pistol at his belt, and the bloodred stripes on his sleeves must mark him as an officer. He was carrying a sausage in waxed paper.
“No hot food,” he said. “No fires. I’m sorry.”
He sat down cross-legged beside Tolya. He showed Tolya the sausage.
“A present from Anna, to make up for digging around in your shoulder with sharp metal things. Eating something ought to make you feel a little better. Always works for me, anyway.”
He laid the sausage down and spread open the waxed paper. He had his scout’s knife in his hand.
“All right,” he said, “here’s the thing.” He held the sausage in his left hand and cut with his right, bracing the spine of the blade on his forefinger and cutting the sausage in thick slices. “Early this morning, our source in the Front contacted command and asked if we could get you out. You’d shot your political officer, and it was only a matter of hours before the NKVD followed it back to you.” He picked a strip of sausage skin off the heel of the blade with his thumbnail. “Now, I made it very clear to command—and command, in turn, made it very clear to our source—that I wouldn’t even try getting you out unless I knew you could make a clean break of it. That means no living family, no close friends. And I got the unequivocal assurance that you could.”
“They lied,” Tolya said, through shut teeth. He lay very still under the blanket, watching the knife in Solovey’s hand.
“I’ve thought about it,” Solovey said. “Motivation is tricky. Our source is a double agent, maybe, and you’re a Red spy. That’s as far as that line of thinking takes me.”
“I’m not a spy.”
“It raises an interesting question. Did you spit in my face because you thought I was NKVD or because you knew I was UPA?”
“I’m not a spy.”
“The other possibility, of course, is that you lied, in which case motivation becomes a little easier. Our well-meaning but unwitting source delivered you right into the hands of the UPA, and you needed an excuse to get away.”
He finished cutting the sausage and wiped his knife carefully on the paper, then on the grass. He glanced up.
“Was that it?”
Tolya didn’t say anything. He watched the knife disappear into the lining of Solovey’s boot. He was clenching his muscles to keep his empty stomach from muttering, trying not to look at the sausage. He focused on the pistol at Solovey’s hip. The pistol was very nearly within his reach, and it would be if Solovey leaned forward just a little.
“Don’t even think about it,” Solovey said.
Tolya looked away, swallowing. His shoulder hurt, and his empty stomach ached, and Koval would be dead by now because she wouldn’t have let them take her, and his throat was tight, and he was very afraid in that moment that he was going to cry with Solovey watching.
Solovey said, “How old are you, Tolya?”
Official UPA policy was to kill every Polish male over the age of sixteen. He supposed it was the conscientious ones who asked first.
“You’ve got my papers,” he said.
“Not at the moment,” Solovey said.
“You saw them.”
“I was too damn nervous to read them.”
He knew it was a lie, but he was too tired to keep fighting, and too much a coward. He shut his eyes and swallowed.
“Eighteen in October,” he said.
“Conscript?”
He nodded against the blanket. He couldn’t speak.
“I guess you’d have to be,” Solovey said. “They wouldn’t take you at the recruiting stations—not for a frontline rifle company, anyway.” Tolya heard the click of a lighter. “You’re not from Kyiv, are you?” Solovey said. “Not with those fine Galician vowels.”
“Kuz’myn,” Tolya said.
“Where’s that?”
“Outside Proskuriv.”