Knocks on the door broke the silence, and Lena burst into the house, her red face wild with rivers of tears and a tiny baby nestled in her arms.
“Lena! What’s this about?” Katya tucked the blankets around Halya, then wrapped a shawl around her shoulders. She pulled a chair up next to the pich and ushered her cousin toward it. Kolya put one of their precious pieces of dismantled barn wood in it and built the fire up.
“I had to come here. I couldn’t go home.” Instead of sitting, she paced erratically around the room.
“Where did you get this child?” Kolya asked. His hair, rumpled from sleep, reminded Katya so much of Pavlo that a pang of longing shot through her. She had to avert her gaze before she could gather her thoughts.
“I found him. I walked to town to try to trade for some food, and I heard him crying in a house I passed. The whole family had passed away. Mother. Father. Two other children. His dead mother held him in her arms on her bed. If I hadn’t found him when I did, he would have died like them.”
Katya peered down at the baby in Lena’s arms. From its tiny stature, she guessed it couldn’t have been more than a few months old. Blankets wound around it until only large eyes peeped out of the gaunt face. Ukraine did not produce rosy, chubby-cheeked babies anymore.
“So why did you come here?” Kolya asked.
Lena dropped her gaze. “I can’t take care of a baby. And you already have Halya here. I thought it might be easier…” She looked at Katya and trailed off.
Katya closed her eyes and saw the tiny black shoe poking out of the woodpile. She shuddered and pulled her shawl closer. “We’ll take the baby.”
“What? Katya, I don’t know how we’ll care for another child.” Kolya glanced over at Halya. “We are hardly providing well enough for this one.”
“She is loved!” Lena cried. “That’s the most important thing. Here, hold him.”
Lena thrust the baby into Katya’s arms, and an ache stabbed through her womb. This slight boy reminded her so much of Viktor. She touched his soft cheek, and he stared up at her with big blue eyes.
Lena wiped her nose and backed out the door before Kolya could protest or ask any further questions. “Thank you, Katya. You are your mother’s daughter, no doubt. I have to go now, before Ruslan realizes I’ve been gone too long.”
The baby gave a soft mewl and Katya gasped as raw emotion swelled in her throat. Her rational mind warned her that this was a terrible idea. She’d already lost one baby, and now she had Halya to care for as her own. But a long dead part of her came back to life as she looked down at the sweet child. How could she not try to save a baby so much like her own?
For three weeks, she fed both children. Her own milk long gone, she’d prepare a watery gruel consisting of ground cattail roots, acorns, and tree bark. Some days, Kolya would come home with something caught in the snares, and Katya would make a meat broth for the babies. But game became harder and harder to find. The days stretched on until a week passed since they’d had any broth or meat.
Kolya walked in the door empty handed. “Nothing again today.”
“He won’t eat anything.” Katya set the baby she’d christened Denys, after her lost little cousin, down on the bed and picked up Halya. She eagerly lapped up the gruel Denys had turned his head away from. “I’m afraid his body cannot process it any longer.”
Kolya didn’t respond. Despite her best efforts, the baby boy was fading before their eyes. Katya winced as she watched his attempt to smile, his thin lips momentarily curving up to look more like a grimace than a grin. His large head wobbled with the valiant effort, his neck no longer strong enough to support it. Exhausted from the hard work, he lay back down on the pillow, too weak to even cry.
“Maybe you can ask one more time at the collective for some goat’s milk?” Katya suggested.
“I tried this morning.” He sat down at the table. “They laughed at me.”
“We just need to make it through today. Tomorrow will be better,” Katya murmured into Halya’s hair.
“What did you say? Tomorrow will be better? Bah!” Kolya snorted in disgust. “What could possibly happen tomorrow? We’re tossed a scrap of bread for a day’s labor? Or maybe they don’t come and steal the food from our table?” He dragged the back of his hand across his eyes as his voice dropped to a fractured whisper. “We get our spouses back?”
Katya recoiled as the truth of his words pierced her. “We must try to keep our hope alive.”