I look at her.
She’s taken a large pistol from her coat pocket.
‘This gun’s too big for me,’ she says to the people around us. ‘So if I start shooting, who knows where the bullets will go.’
Heads turn away and eyes stare at everything except my rucksack. Anya puts the gun back into her coat.
I look at her bruised eye.
She pretends not to notice, but sees that’s not working. She sighs and squeezes towards me until her lips are close to my ear.
‘This morning,’ she says, keeping her voice low, ‘I discovered another reason why Gogol wants to kill us. The penicillin wasn’t real.’
I stare at her.
‘Lipzyk cheated on the deal,’ she says. ‘Sent Gogol fake medicine. When I found out, I went straight to Lipzyk and gave him an earful. Told him he’d put all our lives at risk, including a baby. Which must have made him feel guilty, because he lost his temper and hit me.’
Anya stares out the window.
I do too, struggling to take this in.
Gogol could have sold that penicillin to a hospital. Innocent people could have died.
I thought Doctor Lipzyk was just a brilliant doctor with an incurable dose of selfishness and greediness.
He’s worse than that.
Anya has been staring out the train window for ages. Her face sometimes sad, sometimes angry.
I’ve been feeding Pavlo, and explaining to him why going to Ukraine is best for him.
I think it helped.
Him and me.
Now I want to help Anya.
I know usually a doctor should wait until a patient asks for treatment, it’s called medical ethics. But I’m hoping it doesn’t count with friends.
I move closer to her so the other people in the train corridor won’t hear.
‘Anya,’ I say. ‘Tell me what’s wrong with you, please.’
She glares at me.
I try not to think about the gun in her pocket.
‘This isn’t fair,’ I say. ‘We’re in this together. You can’t help me and not let me help you.’
Anya gives a loud angry sigh. Then her shoulders sag and she stares at the floor.
‘You can’t help me, Felix,’ she says. ‘What’s wrong with me is I’m a bad person. I’m as bad as Lipzyk. If you knew everything about me, you’d be disgusted.’
I don’t know what to say.
Tears are rolling down Anya’s cheeks.
Not angry ones, sad ones.
The train slows down as it goes through a station. The name of the station slides past the window. I’m so lost in my thoughts, I don’t recognise the name until we’re through and picking up speed again.
Dodoczne
The word on the back of the horrible photos in Doctor Lipzyk’s secret cupboard.
I don’t know what Anya’s done, but looking at the tears on her miserable face, I can’t believe it’s as bad as she thinks.
I put my hand on her arm.
‘Anya,’ I say. ‘Sometimes we do things. All of us.’
She sniffs and wipes her eyes.
‘Not you, Felix,’ she says. ‘You don’t do bad things.’
I wish I could help her feel better. I want to give her a hug. Instead I tell her about something bad I’ve done. About breaking into Doctor Lipzyk’s secret cupboard. About the Dodoczne photos.
Anya takes it all in.
Silently.
Thinking.
‘I heard him use the word Dodoczne once,’ she says. ‘When I asked him about it, he told me to never mention it again.’
We both stare out the window, lost in our thoughts.
We do that all the way to Ukraine.
Except, as we discover, the train doesn’t go all the way to Ukraine.
, I hope, we’ll be out of this cold dark forest.
And in a Ukrainian village.
Fingers crossed that Ukrainian families are more welcoming than Ukrainian forests.
‘Polish trains, what a joke,’ says Anya as we struggle through the wet tangled undergrowth. ‘You’d think now the war’s over, trains could manage to cross the border like they used to.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I say. ‘We’ll be there soon.’
I hope.
A map would help. But at least I know we’re heading east.
‘You’re incredible,’ says Anya. ‘Cabbage vodka and a compass.’
She gives me a grin until a wet branch slaps her in the face.
I hope Pavlo doesn’t hear her swearing. It’s good of her to carry him, and she’s very considerate the way she takes the weight of his bag in her arms so he doesn’t get too jostled. But it wouldn’t be fair on a nice Ukrainian family if the first word they hear from Pavlo is a body part that only doctors should mention.
We struggle on through the forest for hours. Not much moonlight. Quite a bit of swearing.
Then suddenly we’re at the edge of the trees.
In front of us, down a hill, the dark outlines of village roofs.
‘Yes,’ says Anya. ‘At last.’
‘Hold on,’ I say. ‘It’s after midnight. If we go down there now and wake people up, they probably won’t be in a very kind mood. We don’t want them grumpy when they meet Pavlo. Let’s have a rest and wait till daylight.’
I can see Anya doesn’t think that last bit is a totally brilliant idea.
‘A rest?’ she says. ‘Where?’
I wipe the forest drips off my glasses and peer around.
Not too far away is a big dark shape, square corners black against the night sky.
‘It’ll be dry and a bit warmer in that barn,’ I say.
Anya stares at it suspiciously.
‘We can eat in there,’ I say. ‘Pork fat.’
‘Alright,’ she says. ‘But I’m checking for animals first.’
She heads towards the barn. Suddenly a beam of light slices through the darkness.
I’m about to throw myself into the mud when I remember I don’t need to do that any more. There aren’t Nazis any more.
The beam of light is coming from Anya.
She’s got a torch.
Incredible. Only the military have torches.
I run over to her.
‘Put it out,’ I say. ‘We don’t want the locals thinking we’re soldiers stealing their pigs.’
‘I thought you said the locals are all asleep,’ says Anya, shining the torch into the barn.
She sees it’s empty and turns the torch off.
‘Where did you get that?’ I say.
‘I took it from a Russian soldier,’ says Anya.
I stare at her.
The moon comes out from behind a cloud. I can see from her face she’s telling the truth.
‘While he was dying,’ she says.
Oh.
I wish I hadn’t asked.
‘See, Felix?’ says Anya quietly. ‘You were right. We all do things. But some of us do things that are worse.’
The pork fat was delicious and this straw is dry and warm and it feels good.
Not the prickles and the insects.
Just lying here with Pavlo and Anya.
‘Shhh, little one,’ I say when Pavlo starts to whimper and cry, which he does sometimes when he’s been thirsty and he’s drunk his milk too fast.
I wish I had some sugar water, but I don’t.
Anya sits up and puts Pavlo on her shoulder. She jiggles him gently and pats his back.
‘I think this is what you do,’ she says.
I watch her.
One of the good things about being thirteen is that your heart is young and strong, so it can fill up with feelings like mine is now and get bigger without bursting.
Well, that’s my medical opinion.
‘I remember when I first saw you and Pavlo,’ says Anya quietly. ‘I thought to myself, I wish I was in that family.’
I look at her, surprised.
My mind starts putting things together.
Is that how Anya discovered where we live? Because she started following us?
Was that her on next door’s roof a couple of nights ago when I thought it was Gogol?
‘It was just a silly dream, I knew that,’ she says. ‘So I carried on working hard with the gang. So I could stay in the orphanage.’
We sit in silence for a while.
‘Anya,’ I say. ‘You were wrong before. Nothing about you would disgust me.’
I didn’t plan to say that, it just came out.
Anya carefully lays Pavlo, who’s asleep, on the straw.
She lies down again. So do I.
Anya doesn’t say anything for a while.
‘Thanks,’ she says after a bit. ‘But I don’t think you should say that until you know the truth.’
‘What is the truth?’ I say.
Anya goes silent again.
I look away so she doesn’t feel crowded, but I can hear her soft breathing.
‘A few months ago,’ she says, ‘before I moved into the orphanage, I was living on the streets. Three Russian soldiers found me one night in a cellar. I was asleep. They woke me up.’
Anya pauses, then carries on.
‘You’re a doctor,’ she says, ‘so you know about soldiers in wartime. About some of them anyway. About the things they do to women.’
I nod. I do know.
‘They make women have sex with them,’ I say quietly. ‘Or they kill the women.’
‘I knew that Russian soldiers did both of those things a lot,’ says Anya. ‘So I knew I was in trouble. I don’t speak Russian. The soldiers drew two little pictures in a notebook. To show me they were giving me a choice.’
Anya stops and breathes hard for a while. When she speaks again, her voice is a whisper, shaky with tears.
‘You can guess the choice I made.’
I nod in the darkness.
My chest is hurting as I also begin to guess how she’s felt since.
‘Afterwards,’ says Anya, ‘they left me on the rubble. But I pulled myself together and followed them. They did a lot more drinking. I spent the time choosing a lump of brick. One of them went into an alley to relieve himself. I went in after him.’
She doesn’t say any more. She doesn’t need to. I’ve seen the torch.
I’m feeling so sad for her I can’t speak.
I reach out to touch her arm, to let her know the only disgust I’m feeling is for grown-ups who behave like lumps of cancer.
Before I can, Anya gets up and runs to the other side of the barn and is sick. I don’t blame her. I would if I was her, thinking about all this.
I go over and put my arm round her.
Gradually her body stops heaving.
I wipe her mouth with my shirt sleeve. She kneels down and starts shuddering again. This time with tears.
I kneel next to her and keep my arm round her. I remember what she said about no cure. I wish I could tell her there is, that the human heart can always be cured, but I’m just a trainee and I’m not sure.
After a while we lie down again, one on each side of Pavlo.
I slide my arm through the straw, past Pavlo’s head, until I’m holding Anya’s hand.
She doesn’t say anything. We stay like that, not moving, not speaking, for a while.
‘You’re a good person, Felix,’ says Anya.
Slowly she lets go of my hand and rolls over onto her side.
‘Goodnight,’ she says.
‘Goodnight,’ I say.
I’m glad we’re in this barn.
I like barns.
In this terrible world, barns are safe.
, I hope, this horrible dream will end.
Lights. Voices. Rough hands on me.
I open my eyes.
And yell.
It’s not a dream.
A burning torch, blinding. My clothes undone. Men standing over me, three or four, pointing, faces twisted with hatred, shouting.
In another language, but one word I recognise. I know it in several languages. You have to.
‘Jew.’
They’re staring at my private part.
One of the men swings at my head with a scythe. I roll to one side. The blow misses. The sharp blade jams into the dirt floor.
I kick out at the man. All the men.
‘Stop it,’ screams a voice.
The men freeze.
Anya is on her feet, aiming her gun at them.
I grab Pavlo, who is howling. Get him far away from the men. To the back of the barn.
Anya is screaming at the men. They start moving towards her.
She shoots one.
He falls and the others back off.
I look around wildly. Rotting planks at the back of the barn. I kick them and my leg crashes through. I kick more. And again.
‘Anya,’ I yell.
She glances round, still pointing the gun at the men.
Backs towards me.
‘You first,’ I yell at her.
The men are starting to advance.
‘Give me the gun,’ I say to her. ‘You take Pavlo. I’ll hold them off.’
The men rush us.
Anya shoots another one.
I clasp Pavlo tight and grab Anya with my other hand and crash us all through the hole except there’s nothing on the other side and we’re falling in blackness and I don’t have Pavlo any more.
My arms are empty.
‘Pavlo!’ I scream.
Icy water. Smashing into it. Under. Up with a desperate yell. Anya flailing next to me. Fast water sweeping us away.
Empty arms.
‘Pavlo,’ I scream again.
Fast water. In my throat. Drowning my screams. Drowning my sobs.
Empty arms.
Nothing.
I open my eyes.
Daylight.
My head hurts.
It’s my glasses. They’re still wedged painfully on my face. Gabriek is always telling me to take them off before I lie down.
Where am I?
Mud. I’m lying on cold wet mud. Shivering. Everything’s cold and wet. My feet are in a river. Just shallow water, so that’s alright.
No it’s not. Next to me on the mud is a sodden pink coat.
‘Anya,’ I croak. ‘Pavlo.’
Please.
Please let them be alive.
Both of them cuddling on the mud together, waiting for me to find them.
While I struggle to my feet, I think about Anya and all the things she’s done for me.
Rescued me.
Protected me.
Even though, when she needed those things herself, there was nobody to rescue and protect her.
I make a vow.
If they’re still alive, I will never leave them again. I will give them good protection.
For ever.
‘Felix.’
Anya’s voice, calling.
I turn round
She’s walking slowly towards me through the reeds. Stumbling in the shallow water.
Crying.
Carrying a tiny sodden bundle.
, I hope . . .
No I don’t.
What’s the point.
We stop walking when we get to the forest.
There are voices and dogs in the distance, but I don’t care. Neither does Anya.
We kneel in the mud and dig with our hands.
Before we put Pavlo into the earth, we do what we can for his little body. Carefully pick the gravel out of his skin from his journey down the river. Gently remove the silt from his mouth.
Then Anya and I wrap Pavlo in his blanket and lay him in his little grave.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper to him.
Anya does too.
Slowly, handful by handful, we say goodbye.
* * *
We don’t say anything to each other.
We haven’t got the words.
Some stories don’t need words. You know some stories in your heart.
You know you
did your best and it wasn’t enough.
You know you had hope for the world and it wasn’t enough either.
I’m sitting with my back against a tree, cold wet grey forest all around. There’s nowhere else to go.
I’m not sure where Anya is. I can’t hear her so maybe she’s gone back to Poland. It doesn’t matter. She’s better off without me. No vow I make will be enough to protect her.
I close my eyes.
This is what hurts most about being a human.
Doesn’t matter how big your heart is, or how high your hopes are, or how far you go to try to make things right, in this world it’s never enough.
‘Felix.’
I wipe my eyes.
Anya is kneeling next to me.
‘Felix, I need your help,’ she says.
I try to explain to her that I’m the wrong person. I remind her what happened to the last person who needed my help. We still have some of his grave under our fingernails.
‘There’s another baby,’ says Anya.
I look at her.
I don’t understand.
She places my hand on the damp wool of her jumper.
On her belly.
I stare at her.
She nods.
I read in Doctor Lipzyk’s library how being pregnant is one of the things that make women throw up, but I had no idea . . .
I struggle to find the words.
‘The Russian soldiers?’
Anya nods again. ‘I found out a few weeks ago,’ she says. ‘It’s why I moved into the orphanage. So I’d have a doctor around.’
‘Did he know?’ I say. ‘That you’re having a baby?’
Anya shakes her head.
‘Lipzyk thought I was just swapping gang chores for food and a room,’ she says. ‘Until yesterday. He must have guessed. He asked me and I told him.’
‘And he still hit you,’ I say.
‘I hit him first,’ says Anya. ‘After he told me he didn’t want trash in his house.’
I can see her doing it.
‘You did the right thing, leaving,’ I say. ‘Your baby will have a better life away from that place.’
‘That’s what I was thinking until yesterday,’ says Anya. ‘But after what happened last night, I can’t take the risk. My baby will be half-Russian. Most of Europe hates Russians now. At least at Lipzyk’s house my baby will be safe and well fed.’
She’s looking at me pleadingly.
‘I need to get back as quickly as possible,’ she says. ‘To say sorry. To ask his forgiveness. Will you help me?’