The younger Leonid’s posture betrayed no tension at all. The only sign that he was even alive was a nervous tapping of his foot. No matter how often Grandmother scolded him to stop, he could not still the tapping. Right then, she did not even comment on it. Her own fingers rapped out the same agitation atop the table.
It must have been hours. No one approached the cottage. The older Leonid felt his body unclench, muscles loosening. He took the water from the table and sipped it. It tasted of metal and sulfur. The same as it had always tasted, the only water he had ever known. He wondered why he noticed these flavors now. He sighed, and then his grandmother sighed. The younger Leonid kept tapping his foot. And then he stopped.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
The older Leonid realized he had stopped listening for the approach of the soldiers. He forced the invisible arms of his ears out farther, past the walls and the surrounding forest. He heard nothing, though, except the ambient wind. “I hear noth—” he began, but then the sound reached him, a noise carried barely above the wind. One quick pop. It was fainter, but Leonid recognized the sound from before. A shot fired from a Russian rifle.
“Stay here,” said Grandmother.
She went to the door and cracked it open, leaning her ear to the gap. She closed the door.
“They’re coming,” she said.
“But the sound was far away,” said the older Leonid.
“Then there is more than one group of them. I heard steps coming from the path.”
The older Leonid was not sure whether to believe her. Sometimes she had trouble hearing him speak from across the cottage. Outside, on windy days, she would often ask him to repeat himself two or three times before she finally understood what he said. She might have just heard the rustle of branches in the breeze.
A knock came on the door.
“Come in,” said Grandmother.
The door opened, and the barrel of a gun jutted through, followed by the soldier who held it. After him came another gun followed by another soldier. The first soldier kept an eye on the table while the other used her rifle to poke through the items on the shelf beside the stove. There was not much there to see.
“Does anyone else live here?” asked the second soldier. She spoke in broken Ukrainian, with an accent that made her difficult to understand.
“Just the three of us,” said Grandmother.
The soldier pointed to the twins. “Father?”
“He died in the war.”
The soldiers looked at each other and nodded. They lowered their weapons.
The second soldier stepped toward the table and looked closely at the boys. She said a word in Russian.
“I don’t understand,” said Grandmother.
“The word, I do not know it. Two people who are the same.”
“Twins,” said Grandmother.
“Yes, twins.”
The first soldier pulled out a notepad from one of his uniform’s many pockets and wrote something down. The second soldier pointed to one of the full cups of water on the table.
“May I?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Grandmother.
The soldier took the cup and gulped down half its contents. Water glistened on her upper lip. She licked it away. She returned the cup, making an extra effort to set it in the exact same spot from which it had been taken.
“Thank you,” she said.
The soldiers left and shut the door behind them. Grandmother rose from the table, and refilled her cup from the urn. She downed the water in gulps even greater than those of the soldier. She tried to hide a burp behind her hand, but the boys heard it anyway. Resting one hand high on the wall and leaning forward, she sucked in deep, deliberate breaths. Even on the worst day, the Leonids had never seen her look so tired.
She returned to the table, and the three of them listened again for noises that might let them know what was happening in the rest of the village. But no noise came until the train whistle sounded, followed by the faint chugging as the train climbed the mountain back up the pass.
THE VILLAGE SAT silent and listless as the Leonids followed Grandmother down the main path. A few of the cottage doors gaped, swaying in the breeze, but no one could be seen inside, no voices were heard. Squirrels sometimes chittered from a tree branch, but the squirrels were few. Grandmother knocked on the door to the Shvetses’ cottage. No answer. It was as if the train had taken everyone when it departed.
A little farther on, soft murmurs intruded on the silence. At first they sounded far away, but then through an overhang of trees the speakers became visible, a knot of them outside the Tarasenkos’ cottage. Everyone who was missing from their own homes seemed to be gathered there. Beyond them, the hole in the wall, fixed not hours before, was back, the new boards pried away and missing.
“Why would they take the boards?” asked the younger Leonid.
Grandmother did not answer, edging toward the cottage with short steps. The other villagers watched her approach. She pushed through them to the wall and peered into the hole. She held her hand to her mouth as if to stifle a yawn. The Leonids peeked around her.
Mr. Tarasenko lay flat on his back on the floor, unmoving. His dingy shirt now sported three crimson blossoms, two over his stomach and one on his chest. The same color was dripped on the table, on one of the chairs, and in streaks across the floor. Red footprints surrounded the body like the steps to a frantic dance.
Grandmother pulled the Leonids away. The younger, though, wrenched himself free of her grip and leaned his head all the way through the hole. Grandmother released the older Leonid, and he gazed through the hole from a few steps away. One of the villagers sat with Mrs. Tarasenko on the straw-stuffed bed in the corner. Mrs. Tarasenko’s hands were red, and her fingers choked a blood-soaked rag.
The older Leonid placed his hand on his brother’s shoulder and drew him away from the hole.
“Careful, or you’ll fall through,” said the older Leonid.
They stood at the edge of the clustered villagers as Mrs. Kharms explained that the soldiers had seen the fresh wood on the wall and decided to take it. No one knew why. Mr. Tarasenko had risen to protest, but with his bad back stumbled forward instead, directly into one of the soldiers. The soldier reacted by releasing two shots into Mr. Tarasenko’s stomach from only centimeters away.
“How do you know all this?” asked Grandmother.
“Mrs. Tarasenko was strangely calm when we arrived,” said Mrs. Kharms. “In shock, I suppose. She told us the details as if she was talking about cooking.”
She continued, explaining how Mr. Tarasenko had collapsed back onto the floor, like he was now, but still breathing, rubbing at his stomach like scratching an itch. That was how Mrs. Tarasenko described it, like an itch. He might as well have already been dead, two bullets in him and no doctor. The first soldier, the one who had fired, backed away, bumping into the door. Tears were in his eyes but he wasn’t exactly crying. The other soldier, a higher rank, knelt over Mr. Tarasenko, lifting up his shirt to inspect the wound. He apologized several times. There was nothing he could do. He stood, sighted his rifle, and fired one shot into Mr. Tarasenko’s chest.