“I need to check on the goat,” Katya announced. She couldn’t stand being in the house another minute. Kolya had been able to escape, working on and off in the collective horse barn all winter, but Katya hadn’t left the house to work for the collective since her mother fell ill. Now, in the dead of winter, they had no food or work for her, so what was the point?
“Fine,” Kolya said. He pulled his coat off and hung it near the pich to dry. He stilled, his expression inscrutable as his eyes fell on his child at her breast.
Flustered, she pulled her shirt closed and set the sleeping child on the bed. “I’ll bring back some goat’s milk for supper.”
Kolya nodded and angled his head toward her mother. “How is she?”
“Not well,” Katya replied, her mind churning as she came back to the problem at hand and her struggle to find a way to tell him what Mama had requested.
“I wish we could do something to make this easier on her. It’s hard for her to know she can’t take care of us anymore,” Kolya said.
Katya rubbed her hands together and squared her shoulders. Maybe it would be best to just say it, and then leave. Then he could think it over on his own. “Actually, she has asked something of us.”
He looked up from the chair near the stove where he sat warming his hands.
“She wants us to marry. For Halya’s sake,” Katya blurted out in a rush, her face flaming with embarrassment. “I don’t feel right about it, but she made me promise. I couldn’t refuse her.”
Katya lowered her head in shame, waiting for his condemnation. She only hoped he understood it was something she’d promised to her dying mother out of obligation, and not something she wanted for herself.
He remained silent so long that she finally snuck a glance at him.
“Why not?” He shrugged as her eyes met his. “What harm can it be to tell her we will? There are no priests left to marry us, anyway. By the time someone comes along, we’ll either all be dead, or this will be a distant memory and she will understand it wasn’t necessary anymore.”
His cold appraisal of the situation stung. Katya had no wish for him to embrace the idea, but the complete ambivalence of his attitude made the situation even harder to accept than the rejection she’d expected.
“Fine, then it’s settled.” She pulled on her coat and left the house without meeting his stark, haunted eyes again.
Outside, the cold air made her hot face burn. So, they would tell her mother they’d marry. That wasn’t so bad, really. It would make Mama happy. And, like Kolya said, they didn’t have to go through with it. There were no priests left to perform the ceremony.
She arrived at her aunt and uncle’s abandoned farm without any memory of the actual walk there, and as soon as she entered the yard, she felt a difference in the air. Something was off. Something was missing.
Fear seized her gut, and she ran into the barn. No bleats of excitement greeted her. The barn, typically filled with the warm, musky scent of the goat, now felt cold and stale. Honey was gone.
Katya tried to control her panic, but it coursed through her like a swollen river, and a despondent sob choked her.
No more milk. No breeding Honey again to get another kid and milk next fall. No promise of fresh goat meat if they became desperate. All of it was for nothing. Someone had stolen her.
Christmas passed by with no celebration—not even the typical plate set out at the table for deceased family members. Mama would have set out a plate if she was well enough to get out of bed, but Katya couldn’t bring herself to hope that Alina or Pavlo or anyone else would visit. She wasn’t sure what she believed anymore, but if someone had the chance to escape this hell, dead or alive, she certainly didn’t want to invite them back.
They didn’t have a Christmas meal to speak of anyway. Instead of the traditional twelve dishes of food, Kolya flushed out field mice burrows with water to steal their tiny stashes of stored grains. Katya ground the kernels up with oak tree bark, combined the mixture with water, and made pancakes.
The cold days passed slowly, and a few weeks after Katya’s promise to her mother to marry Kolya, a gentle knock sounded on the door. Mama barely moved at the noise; her life linked to this world by only a thread.
Katya glanced up in surprise. They didn’t have many visitors these days, and the visitors they did have banged loudly before barging in and yelling to turn in their food for quotas.
Kolya cracked the door and queried into the dark, “Who’s there?”