“How many Germans? Where did they come from? How were they equipped?”
“I c-couldn’t tell. Everything went too fast.” He sank his face into his left palm and shuddered. “Too terrible.”
She gnawed her lip, angry. “If you’re with the Sixty-Second, you’ve had months of combat experience. The enemy drove you back from—Ostrov, was it? All the way across the plain to here. And still you couldn’t pay attention to what was going on around you.”
He braced himself. “I can, can try to remember.”
“That’s better. Take your time. Unless something dislodges us first, we’ll be sitting where we are till we’ve seen what headquarters ought to know about. Whatever that may be.”
She checked the windows, came back, sat down again before him, took his good hand. Now that he was out of immediate danger, nature wanted him to sleep and sleep and sleep, but that couldn’t be- allowed. What he had suffered wasn’t overpoweringly severe, he was young and healthy, and when she spoke soothingly she saw how her femaleness helped rouse him.
Fragment by fragment, a half-coherent story emerged. It appeared the Germans had been reconnoitering. Their force was small, but superior to the Russian squad. Knowing themselves to be in hostile territory, they had kept totally alert and seen an opportunity to ambush Pyotr’s group. Yes, clearly they wanted prisoners to take back. Katya knew a grim hope that he was in fact the single survivor.
A scouting mission was a strong indication of a major attack hi the works. She wondered if she ought to consider that this information fulfilled her task, and return with it at once. Of course, when the squad failed to report, the officer who dispatched it would guess the truth; but that might not be for a considerable time. No, probably the story wasn’t worth as much as tile possibility of her gaining more important knowledge here.
Send Pyotr? If he didn’t make it, the Red Army wouldn’t have lost much. Unless he blundered into captivity. Could he hold out a while under torture, or would his broken body betray him into betraying her? It wasn’t a chance she wanted to take. Nor was it fair to him.
Helping him summon forth what his whole being cried out to forget—that wrought a curious intimacy. In the end, while they shared water and bread, he asked shyly, “Are you from hereabouts, Katya Borisovna?”
“No. Far to the southwest,” she answered.
“I thought so. You speak excellent Russian, but the accent— Though it isn’t quite Little Russian either, I think.”
“You’ve a sharp ear.” Impulse seized her. Why not? It was no secret. “I’m a Kazak.”
He started. Water spluttered from his lips. He wiped them, a clumsy, shaken gesture, and said, “A Cossack? But you, you’re well educated yourself, I can hear that, and—”
She laughed. “Come, now. We’re not a race of horse barbarians.”
“I know—”
“Our schooling is actually better than average. Or used to be.” The ray of mirth vanished behind winter clouds. “Before the Revolution, most of us were fanners, fishers, mer-“chants, traders who went far into Siberia. We did have our special institutions, yes, our special ways.” Low: “Our kind of freedom.”
That was why I drifted toward them after I ceased teaching embroidery at the cloister school in Kiev. That is why I have been with them and of them, almost from their beginnings, these four hundred years. A scrambling together of folk from Europe and Asia, down along the great rivers and over the unbounded steppes of the South, armed against Tatar and Turk, presently carrying war to those ancient foes. But mainly we were smallholders, we were a free people. Yes, women also, not as free as men but vastly more than they had come to be everywhere else. I was always a person in my own right, possessed of my own rights, and it was never very hard to start a new life in another tribe when I had been too long in one.
“I know. But— Forgive me,” Pyotr blurted. “Here you are, a Soviet soldier, a patriot. I heard that, well, that Cossacks have gone over to the fascists wholesale.”