11
THREE WEEKS
Three weeks was a long time.
Sasha felt a blend of relief – he was still alive, hadn’t been punished – and deep sadness: he wasn’t going home, was instead stuck in Moscow until he eventually boarded a ship for Stalingrad. Home was well and truly behind him.
He thought the time would pass slowly.
But it didn’t.
~*~
Or, rather, it did, but he didn’t spend that time staring glumly out of windows, contemplating his fate, missing home. He was too busy for that.
The next morning, Ivan packed a heavy knapsack after breakfast and slung it over his shoulder. “Get your coat, pup.”
Sasha rose to comply, glancing down at his plate – Pyotr was already gathering it with the others – curious and excited, going along already though he had no idea what was happening. “Where are we going?”
“To teach you how to fight,” Kolya said.
“I can fight,” he said, frowning, shrugging into his coat.
Nikita made an amused sound into his tea.
Pyotr had packed them lunch and thermoses of tea. Feliks took the bag from him and together, the four of them trooped down the concrete stairwell and out into the silver, smoke-scented morning.
Yesterday, this trip had been an assault on all his senses, the new smells and sights and sounds overwhelming him, too many to catalogue all at once. But today the details were easier to pick out.
The bold silhouettes of St. Basil’s spires and onion domes. The tender-white, exhaustion-bruised flesh around the female factory workers’ eyes where their goggles had shielded them from the soot that marred the rest of their faces in big, careless smudges. The glimmer of sunlight on their metal lunchboxes, the faded floral patterns of their shirts, just visible between the halves of haphazardly buttoned coats. Too tired to care, too tired to feel the cold. There were ravens, so many ravens, wheeling and diving, picking through tidbits in the dirty snow, cackling at one another, croaking and cocking their heads to regard the humans that passed, totally unafraid.
Three played tug-of-war over a frozen rat corpse in the middle of the sidewalk, and Feliks sent them scattering with a kick, black feathers and skinny tracks left behind.
Sasha had never seen this many birds in the woods. The presence of so many here, in the heart of the city, was disconcerting.
He walked in the middle of their four-person group, Ivan huge and hulking beside him, his shadow swallowing Sasha’s whole. His presence was a comfort, if Sasha was honest. No one would take a look at Ivan and decide to rob the man walking beside him.
Feliks brought up the rear and Kolya led the way, leading them down into an alley that stank of unwashed human bodies, where a queue more than fifty long waited in front of a window, where they were trading ration cards for questionable gray loaves of bread. Those waiting – a blend of older and young women, and dirty-faced children – glanced at their passing group with outward fear, shrinking down into their scarves and coat collars, averting their eyes.
In Tomsk, the Cheka were feared in a way that a bear with a taste for manflesh was feared: they were an unseemly annoyance that could present a real danger, but mostly just hampered daily life. They invaded homes, and they stole, and had no respect for decency. But no one back home shrank like these people, quivering and hiding gasps in their gloves.
Sasha wanted to ask Ivan what this was about…but he didn’t have to.
After they passed the queue, and passed through an open iron gate, Sasha glanced up over Kolya’s shoulder and saw three men dressed up like Chekists walking toward them, long black coats swirling around their knees.
Beside him, Ivan’s spine straightened the final fraction, his breath catching in a quiet huff, like a startled animal.
“What?” Sasha asked, but then the strangers were upon them.
“Dyomin,” the leader greeted Kolya, drawing to a halt. He had a pale, pouchy face, his eyes small and set a hairsbreadth too close together. Seeing them in front of one another, there was an immediate contrast between this officer and Kolya – all of Nikita’s men. Kolya and the others were lean, and muscled, and hard, even young Pyotr, his cheeks windburned and sharp. Underfed, hungry, watchful and wary, they spoke to Sasha of woodland predators, strong, tough, wild things, who killed when they needed to, intelligence flashing in their carefully-hooded eyes.
But this man was doughy and soft, a city-dweller through and through, one who was confident and comfortable in his position. And that was when Sasha knew that his new flatmates were indeed secret Whites: they were nervous, on-edge always, even when asleep, even when joking and eating. But this man had no such nervousness, self-assured, his smile reptilian and satisfied. He looked like someone who hoped to catch his colleague in a trap, and suddenly, inexplicably, Sasha was nervous for Kolya.
“Commander Beria,” Kolya said, tone cool and flat.
“Your trip went well?” the man, Beria, said.
Kolya nodded. “Yes. Very well.”
Sasha saw, and felt the man’s eyes flick up to him, touching his face with a moment of cold, calculating precision, before his gaze returned to Kolya. “You brought someone back with you.”
“Those were our orders.”
“Introduce me.”
“That I can’t do.”
The man’s eyes flashed. “What?”
“Our orders come directly from the Vozhd on this assignment, Commander. You can take it up with him. If you’ll excuse us…” And he resumed walking down the alley, leaving Beria, now furious, behind.
“Come on,” Ivan muttered, free hand closing on Sasha’s arm, and he all but pushed him past the three other Chekists.
“Good morning, Commander,” Feliks said behind them as they passed.
When they were well away, Sasha whispered, “What was all that?”
Ivan shook his head and wouldn’t answer, expression grim.
The buildings on either side of them were made of dark stone, the walls studded with cinched-tight steel roll-top windows and black-painted doors. Sasha expected them to go through the double doors at the end of the alley with the official-looking sign posted over the top, but instead Kolya ducked to the left and let them through a narrow red door that fed directly into a concrete staircase that seemed to go up, and up, and up. When Feliks shut the door behind them, the light was cut off, the latch sliding back into place with a decisive click.
“Where are we?” Sasha asked, not really expecting an answer.
But Ivan said, “Our private offices. We’re very important people around here, don’t you know.”
“As important as Commander Beria?”
There was just enough light to see Ivan’s slanted, smirking look. “Careful, pup.”
“Right.”
The light grew brighter, and then the stairs leveled off at the top to reveal a wide open space – the sight of which hit Sasha like a physical presence, halting him on the top step, hand reaching reflexively for the bit of iron railing there. Before him stretched a loft, the top floor of a warehouse with soaring ceilings, exposed steel beams and girders, rivets, and vents. Ten tall, arched windows marched down the far wall, pouring in pale winter sunlight across rough board floors. Open, and bright, and full of echoes, like a cathedral.
The furniture seemed too-small: a cluster of tidy desks and telephones, a low table cluttered with mugs. A blue china teapot sat perched atop a stove in one corner. In another, there were dumbbells, barbells, and a sand-filled punching bag suspended from the ceiling.
He found it indescribably lovely.
But then he thought of the people waiting for bread downstairs, and his wonder dimmed.
Ivan walked over to the makeshift gym and dropped his bag on the floor; it landed with a heavy thump, a muted jangle of metal.
“Your offices?” Sasha asked.
Kolya had walked to the desks to set their lunch down, and shrugged out of his coat and hat. “We’ve been working on the major general’s special project for over a year.” His inflection told Sasha what he thought of that. “We got this in the bargain.” He waved a hand to indicate the loft.
“What do you do here?”
“Sleep, sometimes. Eat. Train.” He twitched a bare scrap of a grin. “And now, train you.”
~*~
Sasha did not, in fact, know how to fight. Sure, he’d tussled with the other boys on his street when he was younger, had rolled on the floor when he was three and four, and his favorite game was the one where his father pretended to be a bear and snarled and fake-batted at him until Sasha was laughing so hard tears streamed from his eyes. But he’d never had occasion to throw a real punch, and as he stood opposite Feliks, his sleeves folded back and his knuckles wrapped in dirty, once-white linen bandages, his inexperience settled across his shoulders like a physical weight.
“Um,” he said, and Ivan chuckled.
“I thought you knew how to fight?”
“Well. About that.”
The chuckle turned into a hearty laugh. “Don’t worry. I knew you were lying.”
“I wasn’t lying,” Sasha huffed, and Kolya lifted his brows. “Alright, alright, I was lying.”
“Why?” Kolya asked.
“Because–”
Feliks ducked in and punched him right in the arm.
“Ow!”
The three Chekists laughed, and Sasha clapped a hand over his mouth. Shit. It hadn’t hurt terribly, but it had hurt nonetheless, and he hadn’t been at all prepared for the attack.
He felt his cheeks heat with shame. He waited for the insults.
But none came. As their laughter died, he saw that they were smiling – but not unkindly. Not like he was a joke.
“Rule one,” Kolya said, “is to always pay attention. Never let your guard down. Not around anyone.”
“Not even around you?” Sasha shot back.
“Especially not us,” Ivan said, stepping up beside him. “Alright, here, let me show you. Hold your hands like this…”
~*~
Nikita tried to pass it off like he forgot to eat sometimes. That he got distracted and skipped meals by accident. But the truth was he didn’t like to eat. He rose every morning, and went to bed every night with a low-grade nausea stirring in the pit of his belly. Eating did help with his constant light-headedness, but it wasn’t a surefire fix.
He knew the moment they left the apartment that it had been a mistake to skip breakfast, but there was no helping that now. He drew his shoulders back, swallowed down the lump in his throat, and pressed on with deliberate strides. Most days if he ignored the sensations, they went away on their own for a little while.
Monsieur Philippe proved a beneficial distraction.
“I’ve been assured that everything we’ll need for the procedure is already waiting for us at the lab in Stalingrad,” he said as they walked. “But of course you can bring anything else you think is necessary.”
“Of course,” Nikita echoed. Not knowing what this “procedure” was all about was becoming an itch beneath his skin, one that was slowly driving him up the wall. Every time Sasha looked at him for permission or approval, every time he twitched a little smile because of something Ivan said, the rash spread a little farther, a little deeper. It was a true worry now, edging toward regret. He’d always told himself that when the chance to strike a blow against the Soviets arose, he would take it, no questions asked. But after Dmitri...
“Nik,” Pyotr breathed beside him, leaning in close, breath ghosting warm across his ear. “It’s him.”
He didn’t have to ask for clarification.
Walking toward them, flanked by two of his favorite lackeys, was Commander Beria.
Nikita’s stomach grabbed, and a throbbing headache started up behind his eyes. He really should have had breakfast.
Beria spotted him with a chilly smile and changed course, coming right toward them.
Nikita angled his shoulder in front of Pyotr, drew up to a halt with his arm cocked in a way that slanted his elbow across the boy’s front, a makeshift shield. Pyotr was eighteen, but he looked younger. He looked –
“Captain,” Beria greeted.
“Commander.”
Pyotr pressed up close behind him, close enough for Nikita to feel his full-body shiver and know it had nothing to do with the cold.
“I saw Dyomin and Bashanov before,” Beria said. “With your new recruit.”
“Oh, you must mean Sasha,” Philippe said, injecting himself into the conversation with a guileless, beaming smile. The moment he started speaking, Nikita felt a sudden flowering of calm inside himself, a soft lavender ointment smoothing across all his tattered nerves. Pyotr stopped shivering, a long, deep sigh leaving his lungs, rushing against the back of Nikita’s neck. It’s okay, he thought. We’re fine. And he had no idea why he would think such things in front of the Commander, around whom nothing was ever fine.
Beria blinked, surprised. “Who are you?”
“Monsieur Philippe. Very pleased to meet you.” He boldly took one of Beria’s hands between both of his, the same way he’d done to Nikita, and his men, and Sasha upon meeting all of them. “And you must be Commander Beria. I’ve heard such wonderful things about you from the Vozhd.”
Nikita found his tongue again, the sense of calm pumping through him, flooding his veins. “We’re helping Monsieur Philippe with a new kind of weapon. Top secret. Stalin’s orders.”
Beria looked between him and the magician, gaze troubled. His usual coy, threatening attitude had abandoned him, and he seemed only confused. Worried, even.
“Well,” he said, finally. “Alright.”
“Good afternoon,” Philippe told him, and started off down the sidewalk again.
Nikita nodded to his commander and moved to follow –
But Beria’s hand curled around his elbow, pulled him up short.
He still seemed confused, and frightened now, too, struggling with whatever spell of emotion or doubt had overtaken him. “What are you up to, Nikita?” he hissed. “Why wasn’t I informed of this?”
It took every ounce of self-control not to rip his arm out of the man’s baby-raping hold. A fresh wave of confidence filled him, heating him from the inside. “You’ll have to take that up with Stalin,” he said, simply, and this time Beria let him go.
When they were well away, he risked a glance over his shoulder and saw that Beria was staring after them, frowning.
Pyotr whimpered, part-distress and part-relief.
“It’s alright,” Nikita told him, gripping him briefly by the back of the neck and squeezing. “Nothing’s going to happen.”
Ahead of them, Philippe walked with cheerful, bouncy strides, fur hat bobbing along.
“Monsieur,” Nikita said. The sense of calm was fading now, replaced by his usual drained, queasy disquiet. The old man had worked some magic on them, then. In this instance, Nikita couldn’t say he minded. “Do you know who that was?”
“Oh, yes. Don’t worry, though. I had a peek at his future, and I can promise you it doesn’t end well for him.”
A cold comfort, given the man’s reputation. “What about our futures?”
“Are you sure you want to know about those?”
He glanced over at Pyotr, walking with his head down, eyes trained on the dirty snow. “No,” he decided. “I guess not.”
~*~
“Good! Again!” Ivan called.
Sasha stepped back out of Feliks’s reach, weaved, dodged, and snapped a punch that almost connected. Almost. Feliks blocked him, but for a moment his eyes went wide, startled, like he was surprised Sasha had gotten so close.
“You have to be faster,” Ivan said. “Not so timid. Get in there! Really hit him.” He smacked his palm with his own fist for emphasis.
“Mind your footwork,” Kolya said.
Sasha glanced down –
And Feliks popped him in the jaw.
It was light, just a tap really, but his teeth snapped together and the pain lit up the inside of his skull, shooting through his bones, rattling down his neck. He bit his tongue and tasted blood.
He grunted in surprise and staggered back, reaching up to cradle his face. His skin felt hot and tight immediately, already swelling.
“I see it’s going well,” Nikita said dryly, and Sasha wondered when he’d arrived and how long he’d been watching.
“Hey, it’s his first day,” Ivan said in his defense, and Sasha felt a burst of warmth for the man. “I remember you on your first day.”
“I was thirteen,” Nikita said. “And you knocked my tooth loose.” He touched his canine with the tip of his tongue, like he was testing it.
“Yeah, but it didn’t fall out.”
Nikita snorted and then looked at Sasha. “They’re probably teaching you all wrong.”
“No. Um…no, they’re great.”
Another snort. He shrugged out of his coat and laid it across the desk, on top of the others there. He unbuttoned his cuffs and started to roll his sleeves up. “You’re standing all wrong. Come here and I’ll show you.”
Embarrassed now, he walked forward to meet Nikita halfway across the floor of the makeshift gym.
Bare-knuckled, out of place in his pressed shirt and belted pants, the captain lifted his hands in a careless way, expression bored.
Sasha resumed his stance, just like Ivan had showed him, leading with his left, fists up tight so he could deflect a blow to his face – not that it had helped him do so yet. He took a deep breath and tried to let it out in a steady stream, not wanting to betray his nerves. He had no doubt he looked like a startled deer, all whites-of-his-eyes and flash of teeth when he grimaced. He waited – for an instruction, a correction, for Nikita to make the first move.
And he kept waiting.
The man’s pale eyes – gray on the train and in the apartment – revealed striations of pale blue in the fall of early sunlight. A wolf’s eyes, Sasha thought, uncanny and intimidating.
Finally, slowly, Nikita threw a punch. A halfhearted jab, really, with no force or energy behind it. Sasha blocked it easily and danced back out of reach.
“Good, good. But hold your ground better. You can’t be retreating the whole time. You’ll never land a good blow that way.”
Sasha nodded.
And then waited some more.
After a moment, Nikita said, “Do you remember the man you passed outside earlier?”
“Commander Beria?”
“Yes. Him. Do you remember him?”
Sasha thought recalling his name was essentially remembering him, but he said, “Yes.”
“Last week, he left his office downstairs, walked over to the bread queue, and picked out a little girl who was waiting with her mother. Two of his men, one on either side, took hold of her arms and pulled her out of the queue.”
Sasha swallowed the sudden tightness in his throat. He didn’t want to hear the rest. He knew where this was going, it was impossible not to, but he thought hearing it in words would somehow make it more horrible to contemplate.
Nikita said, “The mother protested, at first. Her other children had died of typhus, she said, and the girl was all she had left in the world. Her husband was killed outside of Moscow, fighting in the Red Army. ‘My husband died a patriot,’ she said. She was stupid enough to say that. To say anything at all. Commander Beria hit her with a closed fist.” His own tightened, knuckles cracking.
Sasha could hear his own rough breathing, the way it sawed in and out of his mouth, heard the thump of his pulse deep inside his head, but the others were all quiet. Listening.
“She fell and she didn’t get back up. Commander Beria had his men bring the girl to the apartment he keeps here in the city. They carried her into the bedroom and left her there with him, waited outside in the hall for several hours until he was done.”
His face was blank as he spoke, his voice emotionless. “Maybe she screamed,” he said, “maybe she cried. Maybe she begged. Maybe she called for her mother. Who knows. I wasn’t there.
“Commander Beria likes to play rough,” he said, cold, cold. “I’m sure he didn’t mean to snap the girl’s neck, but in the throes of passion, accidents do happen.”
Sasha flushed hot all over. His breakfast curdled in his stomach. He was angry, he realized. Furious.
“She was seven years-old,” Nikita said. “He stole her, forced himself on her, and snapped her neck.”
He threw a fast jab toward Sasha’s face.
Sasha blocked it. And hit back hard.
“Good,” Nikita said as he parried him. “Again, good.”
Sasha faltered.
“I take orders from a man who rapes children. What do you think of that?” Nikita asked.
And then they slid into the dance.
Jab, block, jab, block, punch. Pain blossomed in his ribs, his arm, his shoulder, and blasted white-hot across his face. But he kept going, digging in closer, faster, angrier, tasting blood from his split lip. He felt his lungs working, his muscles bunching, felt the flex of each tendon in his arms and hands. Nikita was older and stronger, but Sasha was faster, and he pressed that advantage, ducking away from blows and striking back lightning-fast with his own. Nikita stopped telling him that he was “good,” the fight devolving into grunts and quick hisses when something hurt. And it was a fight. Sasha’s anger was for Commander Beria, yes, but also for his family, for himself, for having been snatched away from home and brought here to be used as a weapon. Beria was the match to the fuse, but the fury had already been there, brewing steadily since the night Andrei warned him that out of town Chekists had invaded his home.
He dodged a blow that sent Nikita leaning too close, and popped the man right in the mouth with a hard right hook.
Nikita made a surprised sound and staggered sideways, off-balance and struggling not to fall.
A big hand closed on the nape of Sasha’s neck and squeezed, and just like that all fight bled out of him. Rushing out like wine from an uncorked barrel.
“Easy there,” Ivan said, chuckling, giving him a little shake.
Kolya had stepped forward to lend an arm to Nikita. The captain waved him away, but accepted the bit of towel Kolya offered for his bloodied lip. He pressed it to the split and took a visibly shaky breath, other hand pressed to the side of his head.
He hadn’t had breakfast with the rest of them, Sasha remembered, and was flooded with guilt. He hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone, least of all Nikita, who’d promised he wouldn’t be a soldier, who was just as worried and confused by Monsieur Philippe’s plans as Sasha. The secret White working to bring down the Soviets from the inside.
“Oh no,” Sasha murmured.
Ivan chuckled. “He’s alright. Didn’t know your own strength, did you?”
No, he hadn’t, not in relation to inflicting harm on other men. He knew he was capable with a rifle, and a knife, and that he was a nearly unparalleled tracker, that he could set up camp with deft, practiced movements, and that he could pitch a reindeer skin tent that would never leak.
But he hadn’t known that he could hit someone that hard with his fist. The bright crimson flash of blood on Nikita’s mouth as he pulled the towel back was a bucket of icy water down Sasha’s back.
“Oh no,” he repeated.
Nikita heard him this time, gaze flicking over. One corner of his bloodied mouth lifted in a smile. “That was good, Sasha. Well done.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What for? You learned something today. You learned that you fight better when you’re angry.”
Sasha reached to push his sweaty hair off his forehead, and saw blood on his wrapped knuckles. He shivered, cold despite the sweat pooling at the small of his back. “Is it true what you said about the commander?”
Nikita’s expression turned grim and he nodded. “Yes.”
Sasha took a deep breath and nodded. Curled his hands into fists and tested the soreness of his knuckles. “I’m ready to learn more.”
Ivan laughed again, low and delighted.
Nikita sent him another flicker of a smile. “You heard the man, Feliks. Show him some more.”
~*~
Every day, Nikita would take one of the others and go off to “work,” reporting to the major general, or Commander Beria, or any number of higher-ups, always returning back for supper gray-faced but determined. They were preparing for the trip, they said, getting everything ready.
Sasha learned that prior to being sent to Tomsk to retrieve him, Nikita and his men had been running reconnaissance missions to the villages outside of Moscow, searching for what the major general had described as “artifacts valuable to the war effort.”
“Black magic shit,” Nikita muttered under his breath.
In a voice that managed to be softly scolding and informative, Monsieur Philippe corrected, “Russia has always been a wellspring of the mystical. Stalin is a practical man, but no doubt he’s heard the old stories. He’s manufacturing his guns, and bullets, and tanks, yes, but it never hurts to turn over every stone. You never know when you might find something useful.”
“Like me?” Sasha asked.
“Yes, dear boy. Like you.”
Whoever wasn’t in Nikita’s company would take Sasha with them on errands to buy food, and clothes, showing him the sights of the city – as soot-blackened and war-ready as it was.
He and Pyotr stood for long moments on the bank of the Volga one afternoon, the sun directly overhead, glinting off the icy surface of the water. It had a certain wet shine to it.
“Soon,” Pyotr said, “it’ll break up enough for a ship to get through.”
And then they would leave for Stalingrad.
~*~
Monsieur Philippe decided that Sasha should learn a bit about magic.
Sasha was still trying to wrap his head around the idea of magic. He found he’d never dismissed it, no. When you lived on the very edge of the wilderness, it was impossible not to take the folk tales seriously. He knew well the magic of the forest, its rhythms and its wisdom.
But it was another thing to watch a man light fire from thin air and talk about power in the way that Philippe did.
“Magic is not a gun,” he told Sasha late one afternoon as they sipped tea mixed with a few precious dollops of strawberry jam in Nikita’s loft office. Ivan was working over the punching bag and Feliks lifted weights, their regular breaths an unobtrusive white noise. “It isn’t a matter of having the necessary pieces, arranging them the right way, and pulling the trigger. It requires a spiritual contribution as well. You have to feel it – it has to fill you up, and you have to trust it.”
Sasha stared at him over the rim of his mug.
“You don’t understand?”
“Where does it come from? Before it ‘fills you up,’ where is it?”
Philippe gestured to the room around them. “Everywhere. It exists constantly. It takes great concentration and practice to be able to feel it, and then even more to harness it.”
“Will I be able to start fire like you?”
“No, no.” He shook his head. “Your magic will be of a very different sort.”
But later that night, lying on his bed and staring at the water-marked ceiling, Sasha closed his eyes and breathed out carefully, tried to empty his mind of all distracting thoughts. He smelled damp socks on the radiator, the tang of grease and onions from their dinner of fried-up pickled mackerel. His stomach clenched unhappily on the food as he thought of it, and he pushed the thought of sickness away too. He had to be receptive, had to concentrate, had to be calm and let the magic fill him.
But all he felt was the musty air against his skin, the strain of waiting and wondering.
If magic existed in this tiny room, it wasn’t the kind that Sasha could reach out and touch.
~*~
Sasha was helping Pyotr wash the supper dishes one night when he felt a soft touch at his elbow and turned to find Nikita standing beside him at the sink, a hardbound book and a few sheets of loose-leaf paper in one hand, a pencil in the other. “Come on, Sasha, I want to show you something.”
Sasha wiped his hands dry and followed the captain out to the table behind the sofa, where Ivan and Feliks had made themselves scarce. He heard the murmur of voices in the bedroom, and realized they’d given them a moment of privacy, something hard to come by around here.
“What is it?” Sasha asked as he sat down. He’d long since given up on being timid or deferential with all of them. They’d welcomed him in as one of their own, and he didn’t question that anymore.
Nikita moved his chair around so they sat beside each other on the same side of the table, and laid out the paper he’d brought. The top sheet was a list of some sort – the names of cities, railway stations, villages. Nikita opened the book next and flipped it to a two-page spread that was a map of the Soviet Union.
“This is where we are now,” Nikita said, voice quiet. He touched the tip of the pencil to a far-west dot labeled Moscow. “And this is where you came from.” Tomsk. “Have you seen a map like this before?”
Sasha nodded, because he had, but it was always easy to forget what it looked like. Standing with your own two feet on the ground was so different from looking down at the entire country spready out as a sequence of lines and dots.
“This is where we’re going.” Stalingrad. “I’ve written out here the way you would go home.”
Sasha read the directions again, taking his time now, absorbing their meaning. He realized, as he read Nikita’s careful, step-by-step instructions, that at this moment, had the opportunity to get away and get back home to Tomsk presented itself, he wouldn’t have a clue how to start.
“It’s been a few months since I was in Stalingrad,” Nikita said, a note of apology in his voice. “And with the war on, some of the roads and metro stations might be closed. But I think you could travel overland well, yes? So here.” He produced a small silver disc from his pocket that he set on the table between them. A compass. “If you get lost, follow the river. The Volga will take you back to Moscow. And then you have to go east. The Trakt will take you all the way to Omsk, and once you cross the Ob, you’ll find Tomsk. Follow the compass, always east, Sasha, remember that.”
Sasha could only nod, staring down at the map, at the compass, at the painstaking bits of advice worked into Nikita’s directions, all of it written in a delicate, tiny font that belied everything his Chekist image projected. Sasha’s eyes started to burn, and then the page blurred. He blinked the tears away, not wanting Nikita to see.
But this. This. This was the moment, looking back later, when Sasha knew that he trusted him. A monster might take a boy from his home and drag him into a war. But only a kind man would give him the means to escape and run back home – only a friend.
Nikita put an arm around his shoulders, warm and grounding, and Sasha leaned into him. He missed his father terribly in that moment, fighting tears and the overwhelming weight of simple kindness.
“I promised I would look out for you,” Nikita said. “And I will. But if something goes wrong, and I can’t anymore, I want you to run. Run and go home. Okay?”
Sasha nodded, throat too tight to speak.
~*~
Pyotr was the one who did most of the shopping, his sweet face and kind smile generally enough to win over those staffing and waiting in the queues. The Cheka could buy most of their essentials at the Workers’ Cooperative Stores alongside the factory workers, but indulgences, like fresh fish and meat, had to be bought alongside everyone else.
One morning, human breath coalescing into a dense cloud above their heads, a small, wormy potato thunked into the side of Pyotr’s head. When Sasha turned to find the culprit, he saw an old woman in a babushka, all but three or four teeth missing. She looked away quickly, knowing that to strike an officer was a crime punishable by Siberian exile – or death, if she was lucky.
Pyotr shook his head grimly, and pretended it hadn’t happened.
~*~
Nikita finally did what Kolya had been warning of, and passed out one morning. They were walking as a group to the offices, not a hundred yards from the apartment building. Feliks asked Nikita a question, and the captain opened his mouth to reply – and then his eyes went skyward, the tension left his body, and he fainted face-first into a snow bank.
“Oh!” Sasha gasped, startled and alarmed.
The others looked on with exasperation and weariness.
“How many times have I told him?” Kolya said, bending to take hold of the back of Nikita’s jacket. “Huh? Eat breakfast. You should eat something. Have you eaten? It’s all I ever say. Stubborn damn fool.”
Kolya managed to drag him up with his hands beneath his armpits so that his face was at least clear of the snow, but it took Ivan to actually get him up in the air. The big man plucked his captain up like he was a doll and slung him carefully over one shoulder.
Sasha didn’t realize he was standing there like an idiot, breathing through his open mouth, worry skittering down all his nerve endings, until Feliks clapped him on the shoulder and said, “He’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”
“But he–”
“He didn’t eat breakfast. It catches up to him sometimes,” Feliks said, making a face that expressed what can you do?
And then Sasha understood why the others got so angry with him, why they badgered him about eating, because he felt the same way, suddenly, his worry hardening into the kind of impotent anger that clenched his teeth and curled his hands into fists.
“People are starving,” Sasha hissed. “To death. I stepped over a dead woman on the way to the market yesterday. And he chooses not to eat.”
Feliks’s brows jumped, a smile catching one corner of his mouth. “You gonna give him hell about it?”
“I ought to.”
“That’s the spirit.”
~*~
Nikita woke to the warm rim of a tea mug pressed to his lips. He could smell the strawberry jam in it - the ratio was at least three-quarters jam to one-quarter tea.
“What?” he asked, just in general.
“You passed out, you stupid fuck, that’s what,” Kolya said.
“Oh.”
“That’s all you say. ‘Oh.’ How about, ‘You’re right, Kolya, I am a stupid fuck.’”
Nikita looked up at his second in command, perched on the edge of the bed, one hand steady on the mug of tea at Nikita’s lips, the other gesticulating angrily. “You’re right,” Nikita said. “I am.”
But that didn’t seem to help. “You’re damn right I’m right. Look at you, carried to bed like a child. Having to have tea forced down your throat – take a sip of that, fuck, come on.”
Nikita took two swallows, teeth aching from the sweetness. It wasn’t until he’d taken a third and then a fourth that Kolya pulled the cup back and gave him space to breathe.
“Do you know how bad you frightened the little ones?”
Nikita winced; he hadn’t thought of that. “Are they–”
“Sasha went white as a sheet. And Pyotr, well, he’s seen it before, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t get him upset. He’s making you breakfast, and when he brings it in here, you’re going to eat it.” His thunderous scowl suggested that attempts to avoid eating would result in Kolya shoving it down his gullet by the fistful. Possibly while Ivan sat on him.
“Alright, alright.”
“What are you thinking?” Kolya ranted. It was the most emotional Nikita had ever seen him. “What we’re doing is important. It’s what we’ve been working toward our entire lives. And we’re following you – you’re our leader, Nik, and you’re letting yourself fall apart.” His shoulders slumped and he swiped his too-long hair back off his face with one hand, a dramatic gesture that revealed a glimpse of the pale, vulnerable lines of his throat. “We can’t do this without you,” he said, quiet now. He looked at the wall. “I know that losing Dima…broke something…inside you. But we’re still here, and we still need you.” His eyes cut over then, glinting in the sunlight, uncertain in a way he never liked to show.
Nikita sighed and let his head fall back on the pillow. Clouds scudded across the sun, patterns of stripes in the sunlight that played across the ceiling. He thought a proper leader would condemn his subordinate for such boldness – suggesting he was broken in some way. But even if he was their leader, Nikita was also their friend, and that was the side of Kolya he was seeing now: the angry friend. The steadfast comrade who, though understanding of his grief, was hurt that Nikita was eschewing all of them in favor of nursing his own guilt.
And damn. The boys had lost Dima too. Pyotr was his brother, for God’s sakes. They were all hurting.
“You’re right,” he said, voice coming out thick and clotted. The tea mug pressed into his hand and he curled his fingers around it. “I’ve been an idiot. I’m sorry.”
“Drink.”
He lifted his head and did.
Kolya sat forward with his elbows on his knees, picking at loose skin around his thumbnail with the opposite hand, face obscured by his hair. It was the reason he wore it too long, Nikita knew, to shield his eyes in the moments he dared to allow emotion to bubble to the surface.
“He wouldn’t regret it, you know,” Kolya said, and Nikita felt the tea like a lead ball in his gut. “Some days, I thought Dima was more committed to the cause than you.” He snorted, like that was impossible. “He believed in it, Nik, and he was willing to do anything. You know that.” He turned to give Nikita a look, eyes dark and open, gaze raw through the thin veil of his hair. “He knew – just like we all know – that we could die any moment. We understand the risk. He wouldn’t want you to make yourself sick over what happened. I know he wouldn’t.”
He grabbed Nikita’s knee and squeezed. “Don’t let it be in vain, okay? Because that old man’s crazy, but so are we, and I have the feeling something important is about to happen.”
Nikita hitched himself up against the wall into a proper sit, tea cradled in both hands. He sighed. “Yeah. I hear you.” He frowned. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a shit captain.”
Kolya said, “Don’t be sorry. Just do better.”