Biting off another square of chocolate, I went back to the German officer’s pack again and found something more disquieting: a photograph. A pretty, fair-haired woman with her arms around two gawky boys, all beaming at the camera. On the back was a woman’s writing: Mein Herz! Mit Liebe, Anna. There was a packet of letters in the same feminine script, and another in a man’s writing—the major had written his wife back, but not had time to post the letter. Even Nazi devils had families who loved them. I wondered how Anna would feel, if she’d known about Vartanov’s murdered family and whatever other crimes her husband had committed here.
A roar went up around the fire. I looked up in time to see Kostia flip Fyodor neatly on his face, pinning that huge arm behind him. Fyodor tapped out, and Kostia handed him up with a grin. Swiping his jacket from the ground, he waved off calls for a rematch and shadow-boxed briefly with Kitsenko, who was then hauled off to an arm-wrestling match with old Vartanov. My partner flopped beside me again, growing still as he saw the photograph in my hand.
“I wonder when she’ll get news of her husband’s death.” I tilted the picture. “Or how he died.”
Kostia slung his jacket over shoulders that had already begun prickling with gooseflesh in the chilly mist. “Handsome family.”
“It’s not their fault their father came here and walked into my sights.” I grimaced, looking at the major’s young sons: perhaps fourteen and sixteen years old, standing proud in Hitler Youth uniforms. “Will we end up fighting them, if this war goes on long enough?”
“If it comes to that.” Kostia did up the last of his buttons “I didn’t ask them to come here and fight me. Any more than I asked their father.”
The wrestling and catcalling died down around the fire now, as twilight fell. Once it was full dark we’d have to douse the firepit and be on the move, but a soft lull descended as purple dusk hovered. “Who’s got a song?” Kitsenko asked from the other side of the fire, and Vartanov began to sing in a cracked but still strong bass—a minor-key ballad in a Russo-Armenian dialect I could barely understand. One of my sailor recruits responded with a melancholy sea chantey; then unexpectedly Kostia’s low baritone rose. “The pale moon was rising above the green mountain . . .” Startled, I realized he was singing in English. I spoke some English—my mother had taught languages at the local grammar school—but not enough to understand all the verses. Something about Amid war’s dreadful thunder, her voice was a solace and comfort to me . . .
“What was that?” I asked my partner when he finished, and Kitsenko began singing “The Women of Warsaw” in a resonant tenor. “ ‘The Rose of Tralee.’ ” Kostia poked at the fire with a stick. “My grandmother used to sing it.”
“She spoke English?”
He hesitated, then lowered his voice even further. “She was American.”
“What?”
Kostia said something long and fluent in English, smiling at my surprise. “An Irish girl from New York who came over with a missionary group in czarist days. She’d read too much Tolstoy, had romantic ideas about Russian snows and white nights . . . Of course she fell in love with the first Siberian revolutionary she came across, and married him.” He leaned back on one elbow. “She lived a long time, past the revolution. I learned English from her.”
“Is that her copy of War and Peace you lug around everywhere?” I guessed.
Kostia looked at me, face abruptly serious. “Mila, I don’t tell people about this. Even my grandmother kept it hidden. She and my mother made sure all our documentation was lost when the family moved to Irkutsk, so it’s not on record anywhere.”
I could understand why. Contact with foreigners who had counterrevolutionary purposes—it was something the authorities took seriously. Just receiving an innocuous letter from the decadent West could be enough to land you in an interrogation room, much less having blood ties to a capitalist nation. America wasn’t exactly a friend to the motherland, especially now when they were dragging their heels on offering even a lick of support against the Hitlerites. “Does anyone else know?”