The image and voice of the cackling, well-fed soldier from behind the train station filled Emil’s mind, made him angry all over again. That Russian soldier would smoke cigarettes today. That Russian soldier would destroy food and eat well today while he, Emil, had nothing.
Nothing.
He fumed on that, understanding that other people in the world were not starving and that even some local people in Birsula were getting more than enough food on a regular basis, local people allied with the party, with Joseph Stalin.
Oddly, Emil did not feel more resentment, more helplessness. Instead, that weaselly voice deep inside him said, Go, steal from them, Emil. The party men. Steal from them and save yourself.
The thought at once terrified and thrilled him. Emil knew if he were caught, he’d be sent to a work camp. Or shot. But he didn’t dwell long on those options or the fear of them, because he knew he would soon die if he did nothing, and he rather liked the idea of stealing from the bastards watching him starve to death.
There was an inch of wet snow on the ground by the time Emil had walked through the city and found a large dacha behind a high wall. He used to see the man who lived in the house often out on the collective farm. One day the prior December, he’d seen the same man enter through the gates of this dacha.
Emil knew the man was a high-ranking party member overseeing grain production in the region. Everyone in agriculture within fifty kilometers of Birsula worked for him. Emil didn’t know the party leader’s name and didn’t want to. He was the cold bastard who’d driven them mercilessly to bring in a big harvest the year before. He was the same cold bastard who’d given it all to Stalin. And Emil was betting that he was the kind of cold bastard who could feast while his neighbors were starving to death.
For a fleeting moment, he remembered the commandment “Thou shall not steal,” then dismissed it. This was different. He was doing it to survive. And he knew for a fact that others had done much worse to survive the Horror. He’d heard of children disappearing all over Ukraine. He’d heard of people eating their young.
All Emil was doing was stealing from someone who had too much.
He went to the alley that ran behind the man’s house and others on that side of the street, meaning to look at the back of the home, close to the kitchen. If there was a kitchen, there would be a pantry or a larder. There would be food there he could steal.
Emil entered the alley at dusk, no longer thinking about how hungry he was or how tired he was. His heart raced as he anticipated figuring out how best to break into the kitchen after the man and his family and servants had gone to sleep. When would that be? Four, five hours?
He’d be smart, though. He’d wait five hours and then check the doors and the windows. Surely one of them would be left unlocked in the spring after a long, cold winter. If he had to, he’d break a pane on a basement window. He’d get inside and—
Ahead of Emil, well down the alley in back of the party leader’s house, the gate opened. A woman wearing an apron brought out a garbage can, set it by the gate with others, and then returned inside.
At once all thoughts of burglary left him. The scraps of a man who ate well could not compare to the contents of the man’s pantry, but at twenty-one, Emil had already been so badly beaten down by history and circumstance that he was past begging for better fortune.
After waiting a few anxious moments for the cook to return inside and giving in to fantasies of pork gristle or an old ham rind or a soup bone he could gnaw and crack for marrow, Emil stole toward the garbage can, so focused on the object of his desire that he did not see the other man emerge from the alley’s deeper shadows, moving fast toward that same desire.
Finally, they saw each other and stopped ten feet apart, the garbage can midway between them and to their left. It was getting dark now, but Emil knew he faced a much taller and bigger man. The height was undeniable, but the illusion of bulk could have been the long coat the shadow wore and his wild hair and unkempt beard.
His whisper came raspy, menacing in Russian. “That’s my can, friend. My alley, too. Take another step, and I will kill you.”
Emil stood his ground, studied the man’s silhouette closely, and said, “If I don’t take a step, I’ll die.”
In his years fending for himself and especially since Stalin had ordered the Holodomor, Emil had witnessed many bare-knuckle fights and even crowd brawls over food. And he’d had to defend and fight for himself more times than he could count. From every fight he’d been in or watched, he had learned lessons and had come to recognize that where you hit a man was far more important than how hard you hit him. The ones who survived and thrived in food brawls knew where to strike a man to break him down, not to merely hurt him, but to injure him badly enough and painfully enough that he was out of the fight, at least for that day.
No matter their size or shape, Emil had noticed that the toughest men completely lost their humanity once they decided to fight, completely lost their basic compassion for fellow human beings. They seemed to turn calm, cold, animal, able to shut out everything except thoughts
