In 1941, the Germans executed every political officer they took prisoner, Maurice thought. I guess it’s no use expecting different behaviour from the commissars now.
They walked across the rolling fields, spread out, watching the ground carefully. The weather was warm for April, the sun high and bright. Maurice turned to watch a young officer whistling as he walked along a country road, when he heard a crackling noise from ahead. The top of the officer’s head blew away in a red shower. Maurice and the other soldiers threw themselves to the ground. Sergeants and corporals shouted “get down!” and “enemy ahead!”
Maurice heard more crackling as he threw himself into a shallow depression in the field. Something tugged at his pack as his chest hit the soil, winding him. He lifted his head and could see a gun barrel sticking out of a narrow slit in the ground.
The Reds returned fire uselessly. The slit was too small to allow anyone to hit it effectively at that range. But the Reds were angry, now. Obeying their training, they crept forward, fired a few shots and then rolled away to let another man fire from a different angle. The machine gun swept back and forth, killing three exposed Red soldiers. Then someone fired an anti-tank shell directly at the bunker.
The explosion blew earth and concrete high into the air. Maurice held onto his helmet and hoped no rocks would fall onto him. When he looked up again, Soviet men were running toward the destroyed enemy bunker.
He ran for it himself, rifle aimed ahead. There was no need. Bodies in black uniforms lay, broken, in the now-exposed strong point. Two were still alive, crawling pitifully for steps that led down to a tunnel. Oleh Vovk and another Red Army man shot them, repeatedly, until they stopped moving.
A commissar came up then and administered a single shot to the head of each SS man. Maurice turned away, his stomach churning.
“Close call, Maurice,” said Mykhailo, patting him on the back.
“Yes,” he agreed.
“No, for you, comrade. Look at your pack.”
Maurice craned his head around, but could not see his backpack. He slid it off. What the hell is he talking about?
With the pack on the ground, he could see the answer: three neat holes through the top of the pack where bullets had passed through.
They reached a farming village in the afternoon. Maurice saw Commissar Sorkin say a few words to the captain, who then passed them to the lieutenants. Schwatchko passed the orders to Sergeant Nikolaev and the boys.
“Go into the houses and get some food. And whatever else we can use,” he said. “Go two by two.”
“Just take things?” Mykhailo asked.
“You can say ‘please’ if you want to,” Schwatchko answered. He took Grigory Kornev with him. Corporal Shewchuk took Old Stepan.
“Mykhailo and I will check out that farmhouse over there,” Maurice said to the corporal. He pointed at a trim, neat white house set a little apart from the village. He wasn’t sure whether the corporal had heard him, but Shewchuk did not object when Maurice cuffed Mykhailo on the shoulder and started toward the house. “Don’t wait for us,” he joked. “We’ll catch up.”
The farmhouse was modest by German standards, but spectacular compared to most houses in Ukraine. It had escaped war damage so far, other than having the surrounding fields churned by treads, wheels and thousands of marching feet and the fences knocked down by tanks.
Maurice stepped onto the small porch and knocked boldly on the door.
A small, very nervous looking man in a white shirt and black vest opened. “Good morning, Herr bauer (farmer),” said Maurice in his polite, high-school German. “Would you have some bread for a hungry soldier of liberation?”
The farmer said nothing, but stood to one side. Maurice followed the farmer to his kitchen, where a thin blond woman stood beside the counter and two young girls hid behind her. Maurice nodded at Mykhailo, who quickly checked in every room, rifle aimed. “It’s clear,” he called in a minute. “No one else here.”
Maurice sat down at the kitchen table, setting his rifle within reach. He marveled at how clean and neat the whole house was. It had been months since he had seen any building that wasn’t an army edifice, rough and ready—they were clean, but not like this house. There were little decorations all over, crocheted doilies on the table and counters. There was running water and even an electric light on the ceiling—although it wasn’t working now.
Mykhailo sat at the table across from Maurice. “Is this the whole family?” he asked.
Maurice repeated the question in German.
“Our older son was killed two years ago in Ukraine,” the farmer said, putting his arm around his wife’s shoulders.
“Ukraine!” Mykhailo exclaimed in poor, heavily accented German. “That’s where we’re from.”
Maurice shook his head. “They don’t want to hear that now, Myko,” he said in Russian. He turned to the farmer and went back to German. “Do you have anything to eat?”
The farmer’s wife put a plate of bacon on the table, another stacked with hand-sliced bread, and then returned to the wood stove to make tea. Famished, Maurice and Mykhailo tore into the unexpected feast.
The farmer ushered his wife and daughters out of the kitchen. Maurice moved his chair so that he could see where they sat, in the living room. Where would they go? Outside are nothing but more Red Army soldiers.
The farmer returned to the kitchen table. “A Russian who speaks such polite German. Where are you from?”
“Ternopyl,” Maurice answered and sipped his tea. He wished there was some lemon to put in it.
“Where is that?”
“It’s east of L’viv. What you Germans called Lemberg, in Galizia—which we call Halychyna.”
The farmer nodded. “So you’re not Russian yourself, then, are you? You’re from the Ukraine.”
“Just ‘Ukraine.’ Not ‘the Ukraine.’ Like ‘Germany,’ not ‘the Germany.’”
“I see.” The farmer took a bottle of clear liquor from a cabinet and poured them each a small glass. “Then, my Ukrainian liberators, let us drink to the end of the war.”
The farmer’s wife stood in the kitchen doorway when the farmer poured another round of the clear liquor. The farmer himself became friendlier with each successive toast. “To freedom! To the Soviet Union! To a free Germany!” When he said “To comrade Stalin!” Maurice felt a little pang, but Mykhailo had no trouble downing another shot.
Even the farmer’s wife seemed to warm up to the Red Army soldiers after she drank a few toasts. She smiled at Mykhailo and raised a glass at the third toast “to the end of the war!”
When Maurice looked out the window again, the sun had begun to set. The shadow of the barn fell across the fields and he could no longer see, nor hear the rumble of the moving Red Army. He felt tipsy, and Mykhailo was trying to dance, without music, with the farmer’s older daughter.
Maurice picked up his rifle, feeling foolish. I can’t believe I let that get out of my grasp. “Come on, Myko, we need to find a place to spend the night,” he said, his voice slow and thick.
“You can stay in the hayloft over the barn,” said the farmer. “You may as well—you’ll never catch up with the army tonight, in the dark.
“Sounds good to me, Maurice,” Mykhailo said in Ukrainian.
“It could be dangerous,” Maurice said.
“Bah,” Mykhailo waved his hand dismissively, and nearly fell over. “If the farmer here hasn’t tried anything yet, he won’t. Besides, the whole area is full of… of… of us! Wha’s he gonna do?”