Somebody leaned over him, blocking the light. He jerked by reflex, thrashing his legs.
“Mind,” Solovey said. He was sitting across from Tolya under the tarpaulin, smoking a cigarette. “He’s awake.”
The Red Cross girl, Iryna, the one who’d brought the morphine, sat back on her heels. She smiled down at Tolya. She was a thin, dark-eyed girl with a long plait of black hair under a kerchief.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m just changing the dressing.”
“How is it?” Solovey asked.
“Do you want the technical prognosis?”
“No, please, dear God. I’ve had a long night.”
“Bleeding a little, but it’s clean.”
“Permanent damage?”
“There shouldn’t be. The bullet penetrated below the medial cord.”
“You’re getting technical,” Solovey said.
“There shouldn’t be any nerve damage,” Iryna said. She was leaning into the sunlight again, holding Tolya’s shoulder in cool fingers and wrapping it tightly with a strip of gauze. She glanced down into Tolya’s face. “You’re awfully quiet. Is that because it doesn’t hurt, or because you want me to think it doesn’t hurt?”
“It’s all right,” Tolya said.
“So, yes—it hurts. How badly?”
“It’s not bad.”
“He remembers you stuck needles in him,” Solovey said. “That’s the issue. That was his first introduction to you. Now he wakes up with your hands all over him.”
“Mind yourself,” Iryna said.
Tolya leaned his head back on the blanket, holding the pain behind shut teeth. He looked out into the wood. There was a camouflage net over a pile of ammunition boxes just outside the tarpaulin, and another over the DP-27 and the 120mm mortar, which were mounted a little way up the slope, toward the ridge. There was a stretch of open, grassy ground between. He lay watching the squad share a cold breakfast of black bread and pork drippings. There were five of them. He recognized Andriy and Taras and the other Red Cross girl, Anna. He didn’t see the big, bearish one, Yakiv, but the whole squad wouldn’t be here in the camp all at once. There would be couriers and scouts. There would be sentries posted at intervals all around the wood.
Iryna tied off the gauze and cut it with a pair of scissors. She rolled up the extra gauze around her fingers and put it in her bag.
“You know what I’m going to say,” she said to Solovey.
“Do I?”
“Yes, because it’s the same thing Anna will say. It would be better if he came back with us to Toporiv.”
Solovey pulled on his cigarette expressionlessly. “I need him here.”
“He’ll have a better chance at a full recovery in Toporiv.”
“You mean there’s a risk he won’t make a full recovery.”
“There’s always a risk with this kind of wound. You know that.”
Solovey was silent, pulling on his cigarette.
Iryna shouldered her bag and got up. “Even if he does make a full recovery, it’ll be a month. He’s not going to be doing you much good here.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Solovey said.
He came over when Iryna had gone, crouching slowly on his heels by Tolya’s blanket. He laid a piece of bread spread with drippings beside Tolya on the blanket.
“Were you lying to her?”
“What?”
“About the pain.”
“It’s all right,” Tolya said automatically.
“There’s a Red Cross station in Toporiv. That’s what she was talking about.” Solovey took his cigarette out of his mouth and spun it in his fingertips absently. “She wasn’t lying. That’s your best option, medically speaking.”
Tolya watched him spin the cigarette. His stomach was tight.
“And my other options?”
“Well,” Solovey said, “that’s what you and I need to talk about.”
He put the cigarette back in his mouth.
“I went down to talk to the commander last night,” he said, “about your friend—about why I didn’t know about your friend.”
“What did he say?”
“Not much, as it turns out. I didn’t actually end up getting to talk to him. It’s hard to work these things out spontaneously, you understand.” Solovey shrugged. “I did some poking around on my own, just so it wouldn’t be a wasted trip. It’s eight hours on foot—there and back. Eight hours total, I mean. Four hours each way.”
“And?”
Solovey took out his cigarette. He spun it between his fingers and dropped it on the dirt, grinding it out under the toe of his boot. He looked down into Tolya’s face finally.
“You were right,” he said.
It took him a second, blinking back up into Solovey’s face, to understand.
“Dead?”
“I’m sorry.”
Tolya looked away. He looked out into the wood, blinking and swallowing—blinking very quickly so Solovey wouldn’t see the tears, then not caring, and letting the tears come, and watching the tree branches blur together, and hearing Solovey say quietly, somewhere very far above him, “She was more than a friend, wasn’t she?”—and not having the words to explain, because all he could think about was yesterday morning in the switch tower and the way her eyes turned green, the color of moths’ wings, in sunlight.
“You said she’s got a sister in Kyiv,” Solovey said.
He squeezed his eyes shut. “Nadiya.”
“I put a message through to our people in Kyiv. We’ll get her out.”
He couldn’t speak. His throat was closed. You’re lying, he wanted to say—but he could hear her voice, and he could hear the hardness in it, and he could see the straightness in her shoulders, and he knew it wasn’t a lie. Your fault, he wanted to say, your fault, all of it—but it wasn’t, not really. Solovey hadn’t shot Zampolit Petrov.
Solovey stood suddenly. He prodded Tolya’s ribs with the toe of his boot.
“Get up, Tolya. Eat that bread. Then get your boots. I want to have a look at something.”
* * *
He followed Solovey up the slope, away from the little camp. Solovey was carrying a musette bag slung across his body and a pair of binoculars on a strap around his neck. He had his pistol at his hip and a rifle—a scoped Mosin with a bent bolt, very like Tolya’s own rifle—propped on his shoulder, the legs of the bipod dangling down his back. He paused every now and then to let Tolya catch up. They crested the ridge. The earth dropped away sharply ahead of them, down into a narrow, shaded ravine, sloping up again across the ravine and rolling on down to the river valley, the way they’d come yesterday. There was the road through the poplars, faint and far below. There was the dark scar of the railroad tracks, and the gray ruin of the city, and there was Gródecka Street, plowing west to the San River, choked with soldiers and trucks and the big dashka guns on trolleys.
The Front was moving out of Lwów, pushing west in pursuit of the Germans and new territory to claim for the motherland.
Solovey put down the musette bag and propped up the rifle on its bipod.