Light at Lavelle, page 33
Weeks ago, near the seedling sugar beets, Mirik asked her how they would ride at night. He suggested taking Zhuk’s trucks instead. She put her hand on his face. A tenderness still remained. “Dearest Mirik,” she said to him, “besides the obvious—that none of us can drive—the trucks can’t be driven at night without lights, on rough terrain, through the woods. And the main road to the river is filled with checkpoints.”
He didn’t look convinced.
“But also,” Isabelle said, “trucks can’t cross the Dniester.”
“And horses can?”
“Of course.”
“They can see at night?”
“Very well.”
“You better hope the Dniester is shallow at the crossing,” said Mirik. “Because what’s your horse going to do when it can’t touch bottom?”
“It’s going to swim.”
“Horses can swim?”
Incredulously, Isabelle stared. “Mirik, how is it that you’ve been part of my family for more than ten years and yet don’t know this?”
“I’m a dairy farmer,” he grumbled. “Can Roman milk a cow?”
“He knows what a cow does,” said Isabelle. “But yes, horses are very good swimmers. They can see at night, they can ride through forest. They were bred to handle the most difficult terrain. Our horses are a mix of the Karabakh and the Cossack Don. It’s an endurance thoroughbred juggernaut of a horse. It’s the king of horses. It can run eighty kilometers an hour for short distances and ride all day without stopping.”
He gazed at her with love and regret. “You’re going to be sorry to let them go.”
“I’m sorry for many things,” said Isabelle. The horses were Roman’s life. Of all the valuables to leave behind, they were the absolute toughest, and the main reason her brother was filled with such white-hot loathing for Zhuk and Efros and the rest of the tyrants that stomped upon Ukraine’s black earth and refused to leave them alone to live out their quiet working life in peace and joy. Boyko was their father’s horse. Fifteen-year-old Roman was present when the broodmare foaled him. Seventeen-year-old Roman held the reins as he walked next to Boyko, who pulled the carriage, in which their father’s body lay, through the streets of Ispas, to the church, to the cemetery. And tonight, twenty-eight-year-old Roman was counting on Boyko to get his wife out of Ukraine.
With one ear listening for the quail, Isabelle had hours to think about Roman and his horses, about poor Yana, and about Nikora’s wife Zoya, who’d sneaked out a week ago, by herself and on foot, just after Yana died. Zoya’s instructions were to head west, to travel only by night, to swim across the narrow Zbruch into Poland, to stop in a village called Kivka, just inside the Polish border, and to wait there for Nikora. She couldn’t remain on the farm because she couldn’t fight, and Nikora couldn’t go with her because he could.
Before Zoya left, she begged Isabelle to let her take the children. She begged her. “If I’m safe, they will be safe,” said Zoya.
“It’s you not being safe that worries me,” said Isabelle. Poland was two nights away on foot. Well-meaning Zoya was a navigator of moderate skills. Just weeks ago, she had to be taught how to use a compass. And this was the woman who pleaded with Isabelle to hand over her small sons.
That Isabelle refused was a given, but the hours she had to consider the wisdom of that refusal were not. It was an object lesson in how to poorly cope with irreducible agony. What if Slava and Maxim were meant to go with Zoya? Or what if Isabelle sent them and they got captured, or lost, or other horrors befell them when their mother wasn’t there?
But what if this way was the wrong way? What if this path was the incorrect choice?
Whatever it was, it was too late now.
Senseless hours in the dead of night while waiting for the apocalypse was too long to lie awake and think about the unthinkables.
And when it was finally time, when the hour had come with the first quail call from Ostap, she couldn’t move from her bed. She had such a short window in which to act. He called out to her again. And again.
“Isabelle, woman, wife!” Mirik cried soundlessly, only his lips moving, his frantic eyes boring into her. “You will doom us all. Please, get up. Can’t you hear the call? The hour has come.”
Isabelle, woman, wife.
Isabelle, sister, daughter, farmer, friend, are you being cast headlong into destruction the way of your father? Through death or abandonment, you are being driven from your motherland, and soon you will be left without any hope to avenge him, and all your hate will have turned further inward. You must pray there won’t be other, more current, more compelling reasons for you to shake your fists at the silent skies.
Creeping out of bed, she fell to her knees.
Don’t be pitiful. Don’t weep. They broke your house, your trade, your marriage, don’t let them break you too. They are corrupt, but you are famished. They have made of your country an open grave. Go find another Eden to reap your harvest, to tend your young, but before you go, on your knees, plead to the God who blessed you that if there’s any blood to be shed, it won’t be innocent blood.
Isabelle, woman, warrior, wife.
Isabelle, mother.
She barely kept herself from crying out.
Still on her knees but now prostrate, her head to the floor, she reached deep under her bed and from against the far wall pulled out a Mark I military trench knife, with a double-edged blade and a dagger point, and a Cossack dragoon sword, sheathed in an ornate red and violet scabbard—a curved-blade Imperial-issue shashka with a gold-plated grip wrapped in leather.
She fastened the leather sash with the shield securely to her body and then fitted the fingers of her left hand through the holes in the brass knuckle handle of the knife, gripping it like she wanted to become the blade. US 1918 was carved into the cast bronze. She wanted her soul to be carved in it.
“Oh, no! Gregor’s in the house!” Mirik was sibilating, barely audible. “I peeked out, and he’s armed and awake and at our table! What are we going to do? Why did he come back inside? He’s supposed to be outside! How am I going to get the children out? Should we abort? What if he heard something? What’s the signal to abort? Isabelle, can you hear me?”
From the floor, she rose to her feet and drew her sword. She stood erect, a black-clad angel of vengeance, gripping the Mark I knife in one hand and with her other lifting her father’s Cossack saber across her chest.
Isabelle!
The gates of life or the gates of hell are opening.
Go, and take your fate.
BOOK TWO
The Crane Wife
Past is Prologue
MAMA, MAMA.
Did Isabelle hear her sons murmuring for her, or was it the sound of the quail in the night that begged her reply?
“But the children!” Mirik mutely cried.
Isabelle pressed the brass handle of the military knife to her lips, commanding him to stay silent, and without another word, opened the door to her bedroom and strode five long steps to the dinner table where Gregor the OGPU man sat, his legs stretched out, machine gun resting on his lap. He was smoking a cigarette and looking straight at her coming for him in the dark, the swooshing metal in her hands catching the reflection of the dim blue moon.
He didn’t have time to drop his cigarette or lift his weapon or make a sound aside from an aspirating Oh. She sliced his throat with the sword from left to right and with the knife from right to left, one two, and sidestepped to avoid his spurting blood.
Lunging forward, she steadied his gun with her elbow before it could slide off his knee and hit the floor. She lay down her sword and his gun and pushed in his chair, forcing him to the table so he wouldn’t tumble over and make noise. Gregor’s head dangled and faltered and finally tipped forward on his chest, attached to his body by a flap of skin at the back of his neck.
Calmly she wiped off her two blades on the embroidered kitchen towels, replaced the saber in its sheath, slung Gregor’s machine gun over her shoulder and returned to the bedroom, where a white-faced Mirik sat panting. He looked ready to faint.
“Mirik, control your breath,” she whispered, stepping to the window and piping the low-pitched note of the common quail to let her brothers know that the first part of her mission had been accomplished. She didn’t hear a response.
“Mirik, please! Keep quiet.”
“Is Gregor still out there?”
“Yes,” said Isabelle. “But he’s been rendered ineffective. Close your eyes if you don’t want to see. I’ll guide you to the boys’ room.”
She thought Mirik might argue, insist he was fine, but he didn’t. Maybe that was best; Gregor looked a real mess. Grabbing her arm, Mirik closed his eyes, and she led him into Slava and Maxim’s bedroom. The boys were sitting tensely on the bed, dressed and ready.
“Sons, husband, tell me what you do now. Quickly. Mama must hurry.”
“I take the children down to the stables and wait for you,” said Mirik.
“No, Papa,” said Slava. “We don’t move from this room until either Mama or Cici comes to get us.”
Isabelle kissed his head. “I don’t have to worry about you boys, I see.”
“Mama, I didn’t know you had your own sword!” said Maxim, touching the scabbard attached to Isabelle’s belt.
“There’s a lot you don’t know,” Isabelle said. “Now, stay quiet. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
She nodded to Mirik and noiselessly climbed out of her children’s window. With the machine gun on her shoulder, she crept around the house. Silence was paramount. If any of the remaining four sentries made noise while being dealt with, it would alert the others and give them time to draw their weapons. A single cry in the night would awaken the men in Petka’s house. A sword, no matter how sharp, could not do combat with a machine gun. And one dead guard’s weapon could not do battle against fifteen automatics.
At night on the farm, every sound was amplified and refracted, every sound carried down the hills and over the fields. At all costs, the five sentries had to be killed in silence and fall in silence. Zhuk’s customary nocturnal urinations did not give the Lazars enough time to accomplish their task. They were counting on his distressed stomach to detain him in the long drop.
“It’s better like this,” Roman said when they were talking it through a few days earlier. “I need that man awake to see what’s coming his way.”
The Lazars had taken many precautions, but they hadn’t counted on the incessant racket made by the actual birds around their homes. The real corncrake and the true common quail didn’t shut up, and neither did the bubu-bubu owl, making the human calls nearly impossible to differentiate.
Operation Aeneas was set into motion by Zhuk himself. As soon as he walked to the outhouse, either Cici or Roman, whoever could see him clearly, would sound the warble of the quail to let everyone know to begin.
Isabelle couldn’t figure out where the plan had gone off kilter. It was fairly straightforward. Zhuk would walk to the outhouse. Quail would chirp. Ostap and Nikora would kill the guard near their house and Isabelle would kill Gregor. Corncrake was second, the unmistakable krek-krek of grinding gears, to signal the next move: the three of them flanking the three guards in the center of the cluster, preferably all at once. When they were done, they would hoot the owl signal to Roman to let him know it was his time to move. Everything before the owl call had to be done in the brief minutes Zhuk was using the privy.
Zhuk was supposed to be in the outhouse—but he wasn’t. The privy was dark. Had Isabelle commenced her part too early—or too late? She edged around the front of her house and caught a glimpse of Orlov across the clearing. So, it wasn’t too late. He was spread out on the bench at the back of her mother’s house, guarding Zhuk, his cigarette a pinpoint orange glow. Past Orlov, she made out the dark shapes of the two sentries outside Roman’s hut.
The quail had called, or so she thought, Isabelle had done her part—finally—but there was no lamp in the outhouse. Zhuk was still in his bed. The three sentries were alive, and her two youngest brothers nowhere to be seen.
The elaborate system of call and response had backfired. Either Isabelle had missed a sign, or Ostap and Nikora had. She took a breath and emitted the grating krek-krek of the corncrake. Come on, Ostap, come on, Nikora.
Before she heard her brothers’ response, the back door to her mother’s house opened and a cursing, grumbling Zhuk stumbled out in his skivvies and unlaced boots past Orlov. “Don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he mumbled. “Stomach is inside out. Third time tonight.”
“Fourth,” said Orlov.
Carrying the kerosene lamp, Zhuk walked briskly to the outhouse. The privy door closed.
Louder this time, Isabelle called out again, “Krek-krek!” like metal being sawed—and heard a quieter but definite “krek-krek” in return, all the way from Ostap and Nikora’s houses. Thank God. It was a go.
Soundlessly, nothing but a rushing shadow, Isabelle dropped the machine gun and the knife and bounded across the clearing. She didn’t draw her sword until she turned the corner and smelled Orlov’s burning cigarette. He had been leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees. The blade flashed, catching Orlov’s eye. He was quicker than Gregor. Before he turned his head, he reached for the gun that lay next to him on the bench. If he had been truly prepared to fight a war with Ukrainian ranchers who once were Cossacks, he never would have laid his weapon down in the first place. Because in three leaps Isabelle was at his side, a panther, her sword raised with both hands above his head like an executioner’s axe. With all her strength, she brought it down across Orlov’s neck, severing his jugular, carotid, and trachea, slicing his head off his shoulders. It wobbled at the last moment and would have fallen into the dust had she not dived forward and caught it by its hair. She set the dripping head on the bench, half a burning cigarette still clamped between its teeth.
Wiping her blade against Orlov’s tunic, she replaced the sword in the scabbard and grabbed his Degtyaryov. With the weapon in her hands, she called out a deep “hoo-hoo” to Roman to let him know her part was done. Moments later, her brothers signaled their own “hoo-hoo.” The two men guarding Roman and Cici were no longer a threat.
Before Ostap even finished his owl call, Roman had flung open the door and was tearing down the path to the outhouse.
He kicked away a rock and pulled up a double-barreled shotgun that lay buried shallowly underneath. From the hole in the ground, he filled his pockets with buckshot, felt in the dark through the action housing to make sure two of the shells were in position, and, hoisting the weapon to his shoulder, pulled open the privy door. The kerosene lamp swung from a hook, the light casting eerie shadows across Roman’s face. Zhuk sat on the toilet—a hole cut in the center of a slat bench. Next to him lay his pistol.
“Hey!” Zhuk said. “Close the fucking door.”
Roman didn’t reply—and didn’t close the door.
The light of the lamp was in Zhuk’s eyes; he saw only a looming shadow. “Who is it?” Zhuk said. “Who is it?” He tried to pull up his lowered skivvies, then reached across his body for the weapon but fumbled it. The gun fell out of his hand. Kicking the pistol out of Zhuk’s reach, Roman grabbed the lamp off the hook and set it on the ground.
A silent paladin, Roman stood, his feet apart, both barrels of the shotgun pointed at the man on the privy. Now Zhuk could see who it was. He gasped.
“Revolution breeds revolution, Comrade Zhuk,” Roman said. He pulled back the hammer. “You forgot whose country you are in.”
“Have you lost your mind?” Zhuk tried to screech but his voice failed him, his throat dry from shock.
“Too much power makes out of small men even smaller men,” said Roman. “I can hardly make you out, you are so tiny on your throne.”
“Orlov,” Zhuk croaked feebly, trying to yell. “Orlov!”
“Orlov is not available, he’s lost his head,” said Roman, his weapon trained on Zhuk’s heaving chest. “And you are nothing. If I turned you inside out and split you with my axe, I would find nothing. I can’t even bury you, or burn you, or scatter your dust to the wind, because you cannot bury or burn or scatter nothing.”
“Think about what you’re doing!”
“I’ve been thinking about little else, comrade,” said Roman, placing bitter emphasis on the corrupted word. His finger hooked around the front trigger. “And I’m about to show you as harshly as I can how many things in this world you don’t understand.”
“Roman! You are making a very big—”
Roman fired, emptying the right barrel into Zhuk’s disbelieving face. The sound of the shotgun in the silent night was like thunder overhead. It fluttered the bats from their perches and the quails from their marshes and the owls from their nests. It shocked the horses into high-pitched whinnying. It echoed for kilometers downwind. Before another half-second passed, Roman fired the second barrel into the slumped, unrecognizable mass that was Kondraty Zhuk.
As soon as the first blast came, Isabelle, Nikora, Ostap, and Cici kicked open the doors of Petka’s house. Barely awake Soviet men, scattered throughout the common room, scrambled for their revolvers.
“Comrades, think!” Nikora said, a machine gun pointed at the men in the open space. “In our hands are your automatic weapons. You know what they do. Each of us has 47 rounds before the drum is spent. Don’t be foolish. Put your weapons down.”
But in the bedrooms, some of the men fought against two women. One threw a knife, aimed for Isabelle’s face. It missed, lodging in the wall behind her. Isabelle raised her weapon, but Roman was already in the room. Moving Isabelle out of the way, he shot the knife thrower with the pump-action shotgun, then pointed the barrels at the second man. “Where is my mother?” said Roman in a loud terrifying voice.
