Light at Lavelle, page 50
After Isabelle learned this, it took her a few minutes to gather herself to speak to the man in Russian since he refused to answer questions posed to him in another language. Omelian spoke in a weak mechanical monotone, though his words were clear. His body may have been consuming itself, but his mind was sharp.
“Since 1929, the region I had authority over has turned into a lawless nightmare,” Omelian said. “And it all started with Ispas. But we have bigger problems in the Soviet Union than one ruined village. Soon weeds will grow over it. Unless the people eat the weeds. Then nothing will grow.”
“What happened in 1929 in Ispas?” she asked. She wanted from him only one thing, no matter how determined he was to give her another.
“Who cares?” Omelian said. “What’s happening now is the slow but sure destruction of Carthage.” Razrusheniye Karfagena is how Marchenko put it.
“What happened in 1929 in Ispas?” repeated Isabelle.
“Anarchy and murder,” he replied. “But it doesn’t matter anymore, don’t you understand that?”
“We’re looking for people who lived—”
“The people are dead.”
“We’re looking for the Kovalenkos,” she said, barreling through his words. “Dairy farmers. Father, brother, sons, other children. Do you have any information about them? Or the Lazars—”
When he heard the name Lazar, Omelian’s nostrils flared. An animating force ignited a spark throughout his body. He sat up. His round coal eyes fixed on Isabelle. “And you are?” he said.
“No longer questioned by you is who I am,” said Isabelle. Leaning forward, Schumann translated their back and forth into Finn’s ear. “We three are from Ispas. My father and brother—and I—left in 1919.”
“Left in 1919 but want to know about the Lazars in 1929.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. And the Kovalenkos.”
“You want to lift the coffin lid and peek inside?” Omelian said. “You won’t like what you see.”
“Just tell it.”
“In other parts of Ukraine, the farms weren’t armed,” Omelian said, “or if they were, their weapons had been seized. But where I was stationed, the land changed hands ten times in five years before, during, and after the Revolution. From Poland, to Romania, to Russia, to Austria-Hungary, to Bessarabia, back to Poland, back to Russia. And each time men fought, they took weapons from the vanquished and hoarded them like they hoarded their grain. Owning rifles and shotguns was forbidden in all of Ukraine, but the farmers in my region considered themselves to be outside the law. They unearthed their buried rifles and grenades, they sharpened their sabers, and they waited for us to come.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have come.”
“We tried to reason with them! We explained as politely as we could that there was no theirs, only ours. All farms, all land, all cattle, all grain belonged to the Communist Party. Theft of any crop was punishable by five to ten years’ hard labor. And their answer to that? To burn down their homes and burn us down along with them!”
“Is that what happened to your procurement operative Kondraty Zhuk?” said Isabelle. “Or was he spared being burned alive by being shot first?”
Omelian stopped speaking. He stared at her for a long time with a dark gaze. Isabelle stared back at him with her own dark gaze.
“Comrade Zhuk was one of my best men,” he said. “Who are you?”
“Who are you?” she said. “Tell me—was there trouble on the Lazar farm?”
“That’s where the trouble began,” said Omelian, speaking slowly and breathing rapidly. “But it didn’t end there. We suffered some casualties, yes. But we believed, after the battle on the farm and in the nearby fields, that all the Lazars had been killed.”
“As with all things,” said Isabelle, “your beliefs were wrong.”
“And then, out of nowhere, a few weeks later,” Marchenko continued, “four lawless vigilantes on horses—three men and one woman—rode through Ispas at night and murdered the guards on duty.”
“What woman?”
“What woman indeed,” Omelian said. “We were certain it was Isabelle Lazar with her Kazak brothers.” His black stare bored into her. “But if it wasn’t Isabelle, who was it?”
“Just tell it.” Oh, Cici.
“They invaded the Party Headquarters in Ispas and killed the men sleeping in their beds. They woke them, dragged them into the public square, tied them to their chairs and cut off their heads. They rode off yelling Urrah! and left them sitting headless with rifles in their hands.”
Isabelle’s hands were clenched, as if around a rifle.
“After word got around, this utterly pointless rebellion spread like wildfire throughout the countryside. When farmers in other villages heard what was possible, they also took up arms against us. But the Lazar handiwork was different. No matter how many men we put up as sentries, it wasn’t enough. They would behead the entire house guard and then line up their bodies with weapons in their hands as if ready for battle. They came at night, and you could barely hear them. They came on foot, in stealth and under cover of darkness. None of my men wanted to be on night duty because it was a death sentence. The men couldn’t shoot what they couldn’t see.
“Needless to say, with so many problems of law enforcement, my grain quota wasn’t met in 1929 despite forced collectivization. In 1930, we increased the quota and started arresting anyone caught in possession of hand mills—to stop people from stealing the wheat and making their own bread. By decree, all grinding of wheat in Ukraine was to be performed only in nationalized mills operated by the Party. In other parts of Ukraine that stood as law. But in my part? They burned the collectives and Soviet property. They beat us to death with the hand mills and then slaughtered their cattle and set their own homes on fire!”
“They wouldn’t yield their lives without a fight,” said Isabelle.
“We would send ten men, and ten men would be dead. We would send twenty men, and they too would be dead, tied up and burned alive with potatoes stuffed in their charred mouths. We came into their homes to feed the Revolution and they took our lives. We came for the grain, but they came for our heads.”
Her body in a knot, Isabelle sat and listened.
“Did the commissars in Kiev care about these added pressures in my region?” said Omelian. “Not in the least. They stopped sending me new men and told me to do a better job of keeping the men I had. You want to know what I had? Beheaded soldiers clutching rifles in their dead hands, with the words YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW written above their corpses in their own blood.
“The Lazar bandits added more and more to their ranks. It was no longer an isolated skirmish in southwest Ukraine. It was a peasant rebellion, just like the one in 1919 that killed their father Martyn Lazar.”
He glared at her.
She glared back.
“The brothers trained others to ride horses and to fight with shashkas. They trained them to steal the crops from the collectives and distribute it to the starving farmers. And each time they killed my men, they seized our weapons. Their revolution against us was being supplied by the Soviet Union itself!”
“How infuriating that must have been for you,” said Isabelle.
“Oh, we took measures. Like everywhere in Ukraine, we erected watchtowers in the middle of the fields to shoot anyone who took any crops for themselves. During the day we could see the thieves, but the outlaws learned to raid from the collectives at night.
“In the fall of 1931, in complete darkness, they somehow picked off an entire hectare of wheat! It’s an outrage! They took it brazenly to say, fuck your quota. From that point, we regarded anyone who didn’t look starved or half-dead as guilty of being a malicious hoarder of state grain. We upended their houses to find their secret stash and arrested them and their families.”
Schumann was struggling to translate for Finn, so fast and bitter came Marchenko’s words. He had his own story to tell. “When the first Five-Year Plan began in 1928, we believed that collectivization was the best solution to procure the requisite grain from Ukraine,” he said.
“As with all things,” Isabelle said, “your beliefs were wrong.”
“It wasn’t our choice. These were our orders! The country had to be industrialized. The miners in Siberia and the workers in the cities had to be fed. The quota was necessary. The wheat was the only way to buy heavy equipment from the West to modernize the Soviet Union. If we didn’t deliver, the Five-Year Plan would fail, and if it failed, the great Soviet experiment, the first of its kind in the history of man, would fail. That could never happen.”
“Yes, yes,” said Isabelle. “What happened to the Lazars?”
“The grain quota wasn’t met. So Stalin accused the Ukrainian Bolsheviks of being too lenient with the farmers forced to work the collectives. He said there were many ways other than stealing and hoarding by which some people, spurred on by irrational nationalist pride, could hurt grain production. Yes, I wanted to reply, one way was beheading my fucking men! Stalin said the farmers sowed the collective land partially, cultivated it poorly, only half reaped it—and the Ukrainian Bolsheviks like me allowed it to happen.”
Everyone in the room stayed quiet. Even Isabelle held off asking her questions.
“For four years in a row, from ’29 to ’32, the quota, increasing each year, was not met. And of course, the punishment for failing to deliver the grain also increased. We arrested tens of thousands of farmers and sent them out east into the mines. With less and less to eat, the ones left behind started going hungry in ’29, were starving in 1930, and dying in ’31. But at least in ’31, I was finally given more men, and we came into their homes with rifles and shotguns to take the grain that didn’t exist.”
“You did this in ’29, too,” Isabelle said. “What happened to the Lazars?” She couldn’t stop her hands from trembling. Omelian saw it, and Isabelle willed her hands to be still.
“Their suffering was a direct result of their own stubbornness,” Omelian said. “Their due punishment for starving us was their own starvation. They believed they knew how to live best, how to farm best, how to sow best. We came into their homes and turned them upside down looking for hidden produce. In ’30 and ’31, we still found kilos of hidden crops, but by the spring of ’32, in house after house, we found nothing but starving families. And still, in the summer of each year, we sent these skeletons out into the fields to reap the harvest and fulfil the quota. Stalin called it deliberate disruption on their part. But it was famine. They couldn’t work as they were supposed to because they were dying in their boots, right in the wheat.”
“What happened to the Lazars?”
“We stopped paying the workers on the collectives until the entire grain quota from their farms had been delivered. If they fell short, we levied all additional wheat from the farmers’ own supplies. If they resisted, we killed them. Those were our orders. It was us or them.”
“Just answer my question!” Isabelle said. “What happened to the Lazars?”
“The woman was ambushed and shot in 1931, finally,” Omelian said. “Is that the answer you were looking for?”
Behind Isabelle, Schumann and Nate cried out. She heard their sobbing.
“You want more? One of the younger Lazar brothers was killed in 1932.”
Isabelle forced herself not to cry out. She barely moved, barely breathed.
“The other two brothers disappeared, the way everyone disappeared,” Omelian said. “The beheadings stopped, praise be to the Communist Party. They were either killed or died of hunger. Famine made their defiance impossible.”
Isabelle hung her head. Behind her, Schumann was still sobbing.
“At the end of 1932, less than 5 million tons of grain had been collected, three-quarters of the total requirement for Ukraine. Personally, 75 percent seemed like a spectacular success to me. In my region, I couldn’t reach even 40 percent of the annual goal.” He appeared deeply pained by his own failures.
“Moscow was clear about who was to blame. We were—for being too soft. The harvest was poor, we were told, because we allowed the farmers to eat the brand new plantings right out of the ground. It was true, to feed themselves, they ate the seeded potatoes and onions. They ate the tomato stalks before they had a chance to bear fruit, they ate the plant matter and the leaves of every living thing they put in the earth. The weeds came up first and they ate them. Even the beetroot seeds were eaten, and those, as I’m sure you know, are inedible. But nothing was deemed inedible.”
Schumann got up and left the room. Half-able, Nate continued to translate for Finn in his father’s place.
Marchenko continued. “We quadrupled our efforts to stop them from feeding themselves. First you deliver to the state what’s demanded of you, we said, then you eat. We shot peasants eating buried horses they had dug up. We forbade farmers to catch fish in the rivers near their villages and arrested them if they did. We watched people eat meat off mice and rats and grind the rodent bones into a flour they mixed with nettles and sorrel for food. Their desperation was revolting.”
“Ask him,” Finn said, “when he’s going to get to the part where he learned the error of his ways.”
But before Isabelle could ask, Omelian spoke. “I fully believed,” he said, “as did all who belonged to the Party, that the end justified the means.”
“And when you realized that everything you believed was wrong, is that when you ran?” said Isabelle.
“You are the one who doesn’t understand,” Omelian said. “It wasn’t wrong. It was right! Everything was permitted because our cause was just. Our goal was the victory of communism over the whole world—the Soviet Union first. It was our moral duty to wipe out anything that stood in our way. Shooting small children wandering the countryside digging for onions—”
Isabelle pushed away from the table with such ferocity, her chair fell over and the table pitched to the side. She slid it out of the way and lunged toward Marchenko. Finn jumped up, certain the man was about to lose his life.
Incredibly, Nate stood back to let her do it.
“Isa!” Finn exclaimed, grabbing her arms from behind and pulling her away. “Come on, Isa . . .”
“Will you ever ever ever stop talking?” said Isabelle in a gutted voice.
As if she hadn’t spoken, Omelian went on. “. . . It was our duty to kill pregnant mothers picking off wheat from the fields. All of it was allowed and encouraged and right. We believed the Ukrainian farmer was trying to deliberately starve us to sabotage the Revolution, to upend our fight for fairness for all mankind, which was a most noble cause, the most valiant struggle. Therefore, his suffering was necessary. You may call us thugs, but we called ourselves idealists.”
“When you sold us the bill of goods on your glorious revolution,” Isabelle said, “we didn’t realize it meant we would be left penniless and starving.”
Finn picked up the chairs and the table and moved them against the window. Isabelle looked as if she might throw one or both at Marchenko’s head. Omelian remained sitting in a lone chair in the middle of the room, still talking. Isabelle stood with her back against the wall, next to Finn who stood next to Nate, who continued to translate.
“This past fall and winter there was no food for the farmers, nothing, nothing,” Omelian said. “From our towers we watched the villagers send their children to dig for acorns in the fields. They mashed the insides, cooked them, and ate them as a kind of bread. We arrested their mothers and fathers for this and sent them to the work camps. Look what they would rather do instead of working for the Soviet state, we said. They make their children dig acorns in the dirt like pigs.”
“Isabelle, come on,” Finn whispered, reaching for her twisted hands. “We’ve heard enough. Do you want to go? Let’s go.”
“But here is the thing you don’t know, Isabelle Lazar,” said Omelian Marchenko. “There was wheat to feed the Ukrainian farmer! And plenty of it. Beets and potatoes too. The OGPU was more or less fed, the army was well fed, our chairmen, commissars, propagandists, apparatchiks, land reorganization facilitators, procurement coordinators, and people’s welfare officers were all very well fed. Four months ago in January 1933, when my delegation and I took the train to attend the All-Party Conference in Kharkov, we passed by mounds of unthreshed wheat, each pile as big as this island! We passed mountains of churned butter the size of the boat I arrived on. They called it surplus and placed it near the train tracks for photographers and journalists and international correspondents to view, right next to the functioning collective farms where the workers were smiling and not emaciated, to prove to the world that talk of famine was a blatant lie, that there was abundance, not scarcity!
“That’s when I knew for sure: Ukraine was being starved to death systematically and deliberately, with the full support and cooperation of people like me. Ukraine had to be rendered powerless the way the Lazars had been rendered powerless, and the kulaks. At the Conference, not one word was spoken about our recent enemies. The kulaks didn’t exist anymore. They had been exterminated. The Ukrainian people were now enemies of the state.”
Isabelle’s arms hung at her sides. “I get it now,” she said. “Earlier, when you said Carthage, you meant the Soviet Union. A state that slaughters its children, literally, as ritual sacrifice in service of their ideals.”
“Yes, that is what I meant,” Omelian said. “And I would have continued anyway because I was a true believer. But I knew that my days were numbered—”
“Your days are numbered.”
“—when Comrade Stalin told my delegation from Kammenets that we were personally responsible for the failure to satisfy the regional quota because of our refusal to contain the anti-Soviet forces. We had allowed them to form into a rebellion that caused our procurement disaster.
“That’s when I knew I would be next. Already I’d been regularly demoted. Since 1931, I had no standing and no rank. My ration was barely above the informers’. When we returned from Kharkov, I grabbed my rifle, my pistol, and I fled. It was February and freezing and there was no food. I ate bark off the trees to survive—like an animal. I didn’t know where I was going. South maybe, trying to get to Romania. Near the river at Zhvanets, I stopped a family trying to cross at night. They were from Rykhta, a village a few kilometers from Ispas. At gunpoint I demanded food from them, but they told me about a passing rumor that if only they could get to some port on the Black Sea, they could buy passage on a ship that would take them to Italy and beyond. It sounded like a fable, frankly. They didn’t know I was a deserter. I showed them my credentials and told them they had a choice: either I shot them or they let me come with them.”
“Since 1929, the region I had authority over has turned into a lawless nightmare,” Omelian said. “And it all started with Ispas. But we have bigger problems in the Soviet Union than one ruined village. Soon weeds will grow over it. Unless the people eat the weeds. Then nothing will grow.”
“What happened in 1929 in Ispas?” she asked. She wanted from him only one thing, no matter how determined he was to give her another.
“Who cares?” Omelian said. “What’s happening now is the slow but sure destruction of Carthage.” Razrusheniye Karfagena is how Marchenko put it.
“What happened in 1929 in Ispas?” repeated Isabelle.
“Anarchy and murder,” he replied. “But it doesn’t matter anymore, don’t you understand that?”
“We’re looking for people who lived—”
“The people are dead.”
“We’re looking for the Kovalenkos,” she said, barreling through his words. “Dairy farmers. Father, brother, sons, other children. Do you have any information about them? Or the Lazars—”
When he heard the name Lazar, Omelian’s nostrils flared. An animating force ignited a spark throughout his body. He sat up. His round coal eyes fixed on Isabelle. “And you are?” he said.
“No longer questioned by you is who I am,” said Isabelle. Leaning forward, Schumann translated their back and forth into Finn’s ear. “We three are from Ispas. My father and brother—and I—left in 1919.”
“Left in 1919 but want to know about the Lazars in 1929.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. And the Kovalenkos.”
“You want to lift the coffin lid and peek inside?” Omelian said. “You won’t like what you see.”
“Just tell it.”
“In other parts of Ukraine, the farms weren’t armed,” Omelian said, “or if they were, their weapons had been seized. But where I was stationed, the land changed hands ten times in five years before, during, and after the Revolution. From Poland, to Romania, to Russia, to Austria-Hungary, to Bessarabia, back to Poland, back to Russia. And each time men fought, they took weapons from the vanquished and hoarded them like they hoarded their grain. Owning rifles and shotguns was forbidden in all of Ukraine, but the farmers in my region considered themselves to be outside the law. They unearthed their buried rifles and grenades, they sharpened their sabers, and they waited for us to come.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have come.”
“We tried to reason with them! We explained as politely as we could that there was no theirs, only ours. All farms, all land, all cattle, all grain belonged to the Communist Party. Theft of any crop was punishable by five to ten years’ hard labor. And their answer to that? To burn down their homes and burn us down along with them!”
“Is that what happened to your procurement operative Kondraty Zhuk?” said Isabelle. “Or was he spared being burned alive by being shot first?”
Omelian stopped speaking. He stared at her for a long time with a dark gaze. Isabelle stared back at him with her own dark gaze.
“Comrade Zhuk was one of my best men,” he said. “Who are you?”
“Who are you?” she said. “Tell me—was there trouble on the Lazar farm?”
“That’s where the trouble began,” said Omelian, speaking slowly and breathing rapidly. “But it didn’t end there. We suffered some casualties, yes. But we believed, after the battle on the farm and in the nearby fields, that all the Lazars had been killed.”
“As with all things,” said Isabelle, “your beliefs were wrong.”
“And then, out of nowhere, a few weeks later,” Marchenko continued, “four lawless vigilantes on horses—three men and one woman—rode through Ispas at night and murdered the guards on duty.”
“What woman?”
“What woman indeed,” Omelian said. “We were certain it was Isabelle Lazar with her Kazak brothers.” His black stare bored into her. “But if it wasn’t Isabelle, who was it?”
“Just tell it.” Oh, Cici.
“They invaded the Party Headquarters in Ispas and killed the men sleeping in their beds. They woke them, dragged them into the public square, tied them to their chairs and cut off their heads. They rode off yelling Urrah! and left them sitting headless with rifles in their hands.”
Isabelle’s hands were clenched, as if around a rifle.
“After word got around, this utterly pointless rebellion spread like wildfire throughout the countryside. When farmers in other villages heard what was possible, they also took up arms against us. But the Lazar handiwork was different. No matter how many men we put up as sentries, it wasn’t enough. They would behead the entire house guard and then line up their bodies with weapons in their hands as if ready for battle. They came at night, and you could barely hear them. They came on foot, in stealth and under cover of darkness. None of my men wanted to be on night duty because it was a death sentence. The men couldn’t shoot what they couldn’t see.
“Needless to say, with so many problems of law enforcement, my grain quota wasn’t met in 1929 despite forced collectivization. In 1930, we increased the quota and started arresting anyone caught in possession of hand mills—to stop people from stealing the wheat and making their own bread. By decree, all grinding of wheat in Ukraine was to be performed only in nationalized mills operated by the Party. In other parts of Ukraine that stood as law. But in my part? They burned the collectives and Soviet property. They beat us to death with the hand mills and then slaughtered their cattle and set their own homes on fire!”
“They wouldn’t yield their lives without a fight,” said Isabelle.
“We would send ten men, and ten men would be dead. We would send twenty men, and they too would be dead, tied up and burned alive with potatoes stuffed in their charred mouths. We came into their homes to feed the Revolution and they took our lives. We came for the grain, but they came for our heads.”
Her body in a knot, Isabelle sat and listened.
“Did the commissars in Kiev care about these added pressures in my region?” said Omelian. “Not in the least. They stopped sending me new men and told me to do a better job of keeping the men I had. You want to know what I had? Beheaded soldiers clutching rifles in their dead hands, with the words YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW written above their corpses in their own blood.
“The Lazar bandits added more and more to their ranks. It was no longer an isolated skirmish in southwest Ukraine. It was a peasant rebellion, just like the one in 1919 that killed their father Martyn Lazar.”
He glared at her.
She glared back.
“The brothers trained others to ride horses and to fight with shashkas. They trained them to steal the crops from the collectives and distribute it to the starving farmers. And each time they killed my men, they seized our weapons. Their revolution against us was being supplied by the Soviet Union itself!”
“How infuriating that must have been for you,” said Isabelle.
“Oh, we took measures. Like everywhere in Ukraine, we erected watchtowers in the middle of the fields to shoot anyone who took any crops for themselves. During the day we could see the thieves, but the outlaws learned to raid from the collectives at night.
“In the fall of 1931, in complete darkness, they somehow picked off an entire hectare of wheat! It’s an outrage! They took it brazenly to say, fuck your quota. From that point, we regarded anyone who didn’t look starved or half-dead as guilty of being a malicious hoarder of state grain. We upended their houses to find their secret stash and arrested them and their families.”
Schumann was struggling to translate for Finn, so fast and bitter came Marchenko’s words. He had his own story to tell. “When the first Five-Year Plan began in 1928, we believed that collectivization was the best solution to procure the requisite grain from Ukraine,” he said.
“As with all things,” Isabelle said, “your beliefs were wrong.”
“It wasn’t our choice. These were our orders! The country had to be industrialized. The miners in Siberia and the workers in the cities had to be fed. The quota was necessary. The wheat was the only way to buy heavy equipment from the West to modernize the Soviet Union. If we didn’t deliver, the Five-Year Plan would fail, and if it failed, the great Soviet experiment, the first of its kind in the history of man, would fail. That could never happen.”
“Yes, yes,” said Isabelle. “What happened to the Lazars?”
“The grain quota wasn’t met. So Stalin accused the Ukrainian Bolsheviks of being too lenient with the farmers forced to work the collectives. He said there were many ways other than stealing and hoarding by which some people, spurred on by irrational nationalist pride, could hurt grain production. Yes, I wanted to reply, one way was beheading my fucking men! Stalin said the farmers sowed the collective land partially, cultivated it poorly, only half reaped it—and the Ukrainian Bolsheviks like me allowed it to happen.”
Everyone in the room stayed quiet. Even Isabelle held off asking her questions.
“For four years in a row, from ’29 to ’32, the quota, increasing each year, was not met. And of course, the punishment for failing to deliver the grain also increased. We arrested tens of thousands of farmers and sent them out east into the mines. With less and less to eat, the ones left behind started going hungry in ’29, were starving in 1930, and dying in ’31. But at least in ’31, I was finally given more men, and we came into their homes with rifles and shotguns to take the grain that didn’t exist.”
“You did this in ’29, too,” Isabelle said. “What happened to the Lazars?” She couldn’t stop her hands from trembling. Omelian saw it, and Isabelle willed her hands to be still.
“Their suffering was a direct result of their own stubbornness,” Omelian said. “Their due punishment for starving us was their own starvation. They believed they knew how to live best, how to farm best, how to sow best. We came into their homes and turned them upside down looking for hidden produce. In ’30 and ’31, we still found kilos of hidden crops, but by the spring of ’32, in house after house, we found nothing but starving families. And still, in the summer of each year, we sent these skeletons out into the fields to reap the harvest and fulfil the quota. Stalin called it deliberate disruption on their part. But it was famine. They couldn’t work as they were supposed to because they were dying in their boots, right in the wheat.”
“What happened to the Lazars?”
“We stopped paying the workers on the collectives until the entire grain quota from their farms had been delivered. If they fell short, we levied all additional wheat from the farmers’ own supplies. If they resisted, we killed them. Those were our orders. It was us or them.”
“Just answer my question!” Isabelle said. “What happened to the Lazars?”
“The woman was ambushed and shot in 1931, finally,” Omelian said. “Is that the answer you were looking for?”
Behind Isabelle, Schumann and Nate cried out. She heard their sobbing.
“You want more? One of the younger Lazar brothers was killed in 1932.”
Isabelle forced herself not to cry out. She barely moved, barely breathed.
“The other two brothers disappeared, the way everyone disappeared,” Omelian said. “The beheadings stopped, praise be to the Communist Party. They were either killed or died of hunger. Famine made their defiance impossible.”
Isabelle hung her head. Behind her, Schumann was still sobbing.
“At the end of 1932, less than 5 million tons of grain had been collected, three-quarters of the total requirement for Ukraine. Personally, 75 percent seemed like a spectacular success to me. In my region, I couldn’t reach even 40 percent of the annual goal.” He appeared deeply pained by his own failures.
“Moscow was clear about who was to blame. We were—for being too soft. The harvest was poor, we were told, because we allowed the farmers to eat the brand new plantings right out of the ground. It was true, to feed themselves, they ate the seeded potatoes and onions. They ate the tomato stalks before they had a chance to bear fruit, they ate the plant matter and the leaves of every living thing they put in the earth. The weeds came up first and they ate them. Even the beetroot seeds were eaten, and those, as I’m sure you know, are inedible. But nothing was deemed inedible.”
Schumann got up and left the room. Half-able, Nate continued to translate for Finn in his father’s place.
Marchenko continued. “We quadrupled our efforts to stop them from feeding themselves. First you deliver to the state what’s demanded of you, we said, then you eat. We shot peasants eating buried horses they had dug up. We forbade farmers to catch fish in the rivers near their villages and arrested them if they did. We watched people eat meat off mice and rats and grind the rodent bones into a flour they mixed with nettles and sorrel for food. Their desperation was revolting.”
“Ask him,” Finn said, “when he’s going to get to the part where he learned the error of his ways.”
But before Isabelle could ask, Omelian spoke. “I fully believed,” he said, “as did all who belonged to the Party, that the end justified the means.”
“And when you realized that everything you believed was wrong, is that when you ran?” said Isabelle.
“You are the one who doesn’t understand,” Omelian said. “It wasn’t wrong. It was right! Everything was permitted because our cause was just. Our goal was the victory of communism over the whole world—the Soviet Union first. It was our moral duty to wipe out anything that stood in our way. Shooting small children wandering the countryside digging for onions—”
Isabelle pushed away from the table with such ferocity, her chair fell over and the table pitched to the side. She slid it out of the way and lunged toward Marchenko. Finn jumped up, certain the man was about to lose his life.
Incredibly, Nate stood back to let her do it.
“Isa!” Finn exclaimed, grabbing her arms from behind and pulling her away. “Come on, Isa . . .”
“Will you ever ever ever stop talking?” said Isabelle in a gutted voice.
As if she hadn’t spoken, Omelian went on. “. . . It was our duty to kill pregnant mothers picking off wheat from the fields. All of it was allowed and encouraged and right. We believed the Ukrainian farmer was trying to deliberately starve us to sabotage the Revolution, to upend our fight for fairness for all mankind, which was a most noble cause, the most valiant struggle. Therefore, his suffering was necessary. You may call us thugs, but we called ourselves idealists.”
“When you sold us the bill of goods on your glorious revolution,” Isabelle said, “we didn’t realize it meant we would be left penniless and starving.”
Finn picked up the chairs and the table and moved them against the window. Isabelle looked as if she might throw one or both at Marchenko’s head. Omelian remained sitting in a lone chair in the middle of the room, still talking. Isabelle stood with her back against the wall, next to Finn who stood next to Nate, who continued to translate.
“This past fall and winter there was no food for the farmers, nothing, nothing,” Omelian said. “From our towers we watched the villagers send their children to dig for acorns in the fields. They mashed the insides, cooked them, and ate them as a kind of bread. We arrested their mothers and fathers for this and sent them to the work camps. Look what they would rather do instead of working for the Soviet state, we said. They make their children dig acorns in the dirt like pigs.”
“Isabelle, come on,” Finn whispered, reaching for her twisted hands. “We’ve heard enough. Do you want to go? Let’s go.”
“But here is the thing you don’t know, Isabelle Lazar,” said Omelian Marchenko. “There was wheat to feed the Ukrainian farmer! And plenty of it. Beets and potatoes too. The OGPU was more or less fed, the army was well fed, our chairmen, commissars, propagandists, apparatchiks, land reorganization facilitators, procurement coordinators, and people’s welfare officers were all very well fed. Four months ago in January 1933, when my delegation and I took the train to attend the All-Party Conference in Kharkov, we passed by mounds of unthreshed wheat, each pile as big as this island! We passed mountains of churned butter the size of the boat I arrived on. They called it surplus and placed it near the train tracks for photographers and journalists and international correspondents to view, right next to the functioning collective farms where the workers were smiling and not emaciated, to prove to the world that talk of famine was a blatant lie, that there was abundance, not scarcity!
“That’s when I knew for sure: Ukraine was being starved to death systematically and deliberately, with the full support and cooperation of people like me. Ukraine had to be rendered powerless the way the Lazars had been rendered powerless, and the kulaks. At the Conference, not one word was spoken about our recent enemies. The kulaks didn’t exist anymore. They had been exterminated. The Ukrainian people were now enemies of the state.”
Isabelle’s arms hung at her sides. “I get it now,” she said. “Earlier, when you said Carthage, you meant the Soviet Union. A state that slaughters its children, literally, as ritual sacrifice in service of their ideals.”
“Yes, that is what I meant,” Omelian said. “And I would have continued anyway because I was a true believer. But I knew that my days were numbered—”
“Your days are numbered.”
“—when Comrade Stalin told my delegation from Kammenets that we were personally responsible for the failure to satisfy the regional quota because of our refusal to contain the anti-Soviet forces. We had allowed them to form into a rebellion that caused our procurement disaster.
“That’s when I knew I would be next. Already I’d been regularly demoted. Since 1931, I had no standing and no rank. My ration was barely above the informers’. When we returned from Kharkov, I grabbed my rifle, my pistol, and I fled. It was February and freezing and there was no food. I ate bark off the trees to survive—like an animal. I didn’t know where I was going. South maybe, trying to get to Romania. Near the river at Zhvanets, I stopped a family trying to cross at night. They were from Rykhta, a village a few kilometers from Ispas. At gunpoint I demanded food from them, but they told me about a passing rumor that if only they could get to some port on the Black Sea, they could buy passage on a ship that would take them to Italy and beyond. It sounded like a fable, frankly. They didn’t know I was a deserter. I showed them my credentials and told them they had a choice: either I shot them or they let me come with them.”
