Since that day, Ulya regularly brought little parcels with food for them. Anna showed her where she kept the key for the entrance door, and Ulya could come even when Anna was at the hospital.
The child was sickly, her hair just a down, her little body a rack of ribs. She hardly had eaten anything and didn’t show sympathy to Ulya, however hard she tried to win over her heart. Every time she appeared, the girl studied her for a few moments as if she were a complete stranger and never took anything from her hands. Ulya sought to interest her with Ewald’s present, but the girl’s indifferent eyes glided over the gorgeous doll with no change of expression.
59
August 1944-Winter 1945
Little by little, the population returned to Vitebsk. A few found their houses fit for habitation. Others built shacks of board debris, broken bricks, and pieces of tin. Many dug out holes, adapting them for housing. Right in front of them, in-between some bricks, on a piece of iron, they set kettles or soldiers’ cauldrons to cook their food.
Quickly, Ulya settled into the work routine and the end of summer, autumn, and winter of 1945 passed in cataloging the names, dates, and all supportive information about the collaborationists from the available and mounting sources. Everyone seemed happy to point out a former Polizei, adding to the pile of tips on Ulya’s table.
Her monotonous work was sometimes interrupted by being summoned for a confrontation with a detainee suspected of cooperating with the enemy. Were they all collaborators or German agents who betrayed their Motherland? All these old men and women? Their old age couldn’t fool SMERSH; they knew the main objective of SD selecting residents for sabotage missions and intelligence in the rear of the Red Army was old people or invalids not subjected to mobilization. “Sonny, what do you want from an old woman like me?” Women wailed. “Dear man, look at me, what use is such a grandpa?” They punched themselves in the chest or lifted a crutch or a stick, claiming their innocence. What their fate was after the interrogation, Ulya did not know. Execution of the sentence belonged to another department. What wasn’t a secret was that train after train full of people kept moving eastward. To Siberia, to gulags it was rumored.
She didn’t delude herself: a vague shadow of suspicion would always hang over her head as well and who knew what could surface from the murky ocean of interrogations of everything and everyone. What if Hammerer survived?
Meanwhile, the Soviet armies freed the Baltic Republics and continued toward Germany, liberating Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia on their way. On January 12, 1945, the Vistula-Oder operation began. By the end of the month, the Soviet armies came to Oder.
The uneventful flow of days was interrupted on the evening of February 18, 1945. On her way to Kommunisticheskaya, Ulya let her mind slip back to a week before, the sense of mirth welling up inside her at meeting the girl. Will little Lyubochka allow me to stroke her head again? She exhaled a long sigh of contentment and the next moment, two bullets whistled past her head. She stumbled and felt a tingle run down her spine. On instinct—her lock knife not an adequate defense against a gun—she ran over to a half-destroyed shack about twenty meters from the path. Just two steps away from her goal, another gunshot ripped through the air. She glanced back and through the gathering darkness, saw a shadow throw itself behind a pile of rubble.
Inside, she ducked and peered through a windowless opening at the darkening sky. The crows, startled by the shots, circled above the roofless structure with ominous cries.
Who was the gunman? Not an experienced shooter. But who then, and why?
She crouched in the corner of a crumbled wall and looked round it, her ears on alert. There was only stillness beyond. Then, something flitted across the corner of her vision. Swinging round, she stepped back. As the sound of the scurried steps faded into the distance, she peered in the direction but saw nobody. Whoever it was had disappeared behind the demolition heaps, leaving her with a horrid sense of foreboding at her back.
60
March 1945
It happened on one of the early spring days when from a pile of complaints, Ulya pulled a four-fold piece of paper reading in uneven handwriting, with grammar mistakes of an uneducated person. “G.P. Dobrova. Born January 3, 1894. I live at Nekrasov Street, 21. I suffered from the accursed fascists. I must report. I have information about a woman. She collaborated with Germans. She slept with a Nazi. A just punishment caught up with her at the hands of Partisans. It served her right. She left a German bastard girl behind. I know where she lives. On Kommunisticheskaya 11. I want to help. To get rid of any damned German from our city. I am a true patriot of my Soviet country.”
The snitch’s last name, Dobrova, meant “good-hearted” person. Nasty pig.
Ulya tucked the denunciation into her jacket pocket. Just the thought of what would happen to the girl if she were taken from Anna, her only relative, made Ulya ball up her hands into fists. Anna’s fate would be as bleak as the girl’s, too.
Ulya paused for a brief moment before the decision formed in her mind. She grabbed a box of matches and a stack of old newspapers and exited the building.
Gusts of wind whirled clouds of soot-covered snow across the rubble as she headed to Nekrasov Street. The
