A Child s Wooden Pistol

An Eye for an Eye By Evgeny Ganin

(Translated from the Russian by Maria Amadei Ashot)

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If you come across someone about to topple over, give them a shove.
F. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christian

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The Sixth Book
A Child’s Wooden Pistol


Chapter One
USLANKA

1
Being the oldest brother, Vasilii crafted a child’s plaything for his little cousin, six year-old Evgeny – a little wooden pistol. Before the war, such toy munitions would have been used to fire green peas exclusively, but in the summer of 1942, the little pistol was only good for shooting tiny pebbles, because Concentration Camp No. 8 of the chain of Ilyinsk Finnish concentration camps created for the ethnic Russian civilian population of Karelia and situated along the banks of the lovely Olonka River, had completely run out of peas and grain; all that remained for food were the sickly-coloured nettles that hid under the snow, rotting potatoes the frost had withered, and the beetroot mess of the camp’s starvation rations. The operating assumption was that Hitler’s swift triumph over the USSR would immediately lead to the automatic transfer of Karelia into the holdings of Great Finland. In accordance with the Finno-Germanic treaty, all the ruesses would be deported to the Siberian tundra, to the rump territories of Ruessland, where they would gradually become extinct via natural attrition under the effects of the elements. Thus, from the earliest days of the war, an intensive programme of Finnization was undertaken across these ancient Slavic lands, spearheaded by the stirring motto: Finland for the Finns alone.
The ethnic Russian inhabitants of Karelia were driven en masse behind barbed wire enclosures. The peaceful life of the recent past seemed some distant fairy tale: it felt as if a hundred years had passed – although in fact it had been a matter of just a few months, of the previous year, before the war – since the large Panin clan had enjoyed a serene, expansive existence in its ancestral hamlet, Uslanka.
It was a settlement, some would say a village, with a distinctly feminine aura, coquettishly resting upon the crest of a hillside fronting a broad curve of the legendary Svier River; Matushka-Svier (“Mother Svier”), they called this river of bounty: and it had been there since long before the time of Peter and the great reforms. Eight imposing wooden homesteads, with intricately carved white shuttered window frames, gazed humbly out through pristine panes upon the steamships and barges that plied the waters below, solemnly wending their way from the capital city of St. Petersburg – across the Ladoga – into the Onega, and back. One longed to believe that this tiny hamlet that all the world had forgotten ever even existed had been infused, once and forever, with the unassuming Grace of the north.
It was a different kind of life entirely, on the other shore. A small town, Vazhiny, boiled over with bustle and noise there: it had land council meetings, church services, schoolwork for children; its administration issued resolutions and directives; its general store bought and sold; its marketplace was in perpetual uproar. In the evenings, the married women would sit in neat rows on log benches warmed by the day’s sun, and sing sweet, drawn-out melodies. The street artists would call out the quaint popular ditties, accompanying themselves on button-boxes with the measured clatter of wooden spoons adding percussion; their womenfolk would stamp their heels hard on the springy grass, casting passionate glances sidelong at the musicians; and sometimes, they would succumb to impulse and fight for the affections of these lasses, like prancing cockerels, only with fists. When spring came, the lads and lasses would frolic in the haylofts, and by the autumn there would be weddings amongst them. That was the way of life in Vazhiny – but in Uslanka, a magnificent tranquil beauty always reigned, giving steady, uninterrupted rise to new, flaxen-haired lives in every season. In spring and fall, the young ones would travel by boat to school; in winter they would make the trip over the ice, covered in sheepskins, racing in horse-drawn sleighs to chip away at “the granite of knowledge,” as it was called. In the summers, the wild Uslanka forest beckoned, with its mushrooms and berries longing to be picked.
They skinned their backsides raw galloping over the fields on unsaddled horses. They fed crows from the palms of their hands. They played gorodki, lapta, skalki, and, naturally enough, up to their knees in the swift, transparent waters of the chilly Svier, they fished until blue, until their teeth would ring with chattering.
Imperceptibly, the youngsters grew up and moved to Peter (as the Imperial capital would be forever called). There, they entered the ranks of the urban professionals, with never a look back to their earlier life in the country, as peasants.
In the middle of the hamlet – at the uppermost spot on the hill overlooking the bend in the river – stood, majestically, the two-storied wooden home of the Panin family. It was the classic Russian country estate with the bright main room for receiving guests, with four broad windows across the front; with the sloping façade leading to the upper storey, for storing hay for the winter; with dry cellars and dark, insulated pantries; ringed by an enclosed garden of flower beds; redolent with the fragrance of hay, freshly-baked bread, roasted mushrooms and all kinds of preserves cooked up by Baba Anna. The tranquillity of Uslanka was made perfect by the distant interpealing of the muted bells of cows out at pasture, and birdsong.
Behind the Panin homestead loomed the black denseness of the Karelian forest, replete with cuckoos, squirrels and plump game birds. Puzzling footpaths, laid down by who knows whom, would force vacationing city slickers into confused peregrinations through the woods. The fauna, unacquainted with fear, filled the environs with all kinds of mysterious rustling, the hooting of screech-owls, the knocking of woodpeckers and nocturnal calls. At the very edge of the forest, lost in a high thicket, a smallish lake shone brightly, tantalizingly, complete with its own ancient steam-bath cabin.
Winding like a ribbon of serpentine, a mysterious horse path shimmied away into the gloaming of a stand of birches.
No one who had ever lived in this forest had ever, ever fought a war with anyone. It was said that a Wood-Spirit lived there, as well as the legendary Sivka-Burka, the Wise & Magical Mare of fairy tales.



2

The war reached Uslanka twenty-four hours late. The inhabitants of the hamlet had lived for centuries using the light of a lit, thin wand of wood after dark. There were no telephones, no electricity. Newspapers arrived a week after the date. No one crossed to this side of the Svier unless they had good cause. Somewhere else bridges were already being blown up; cities were burning; streams of blood were beginning to gush – but in Uslanka, it was still a time of pre-war peace: quiet, calm, serene. Only on Monday, that 23rd of June in 1941, did Dmitri Ivanovich Panin take his small boat out at daybreak, crossing early to the other side, to Vazhiny, on matters relating to the collective farm, only to turn right around and come straight back, a dreadful sight of worry and consternation. Passing by his house, he hobbled directly to Uslanka’s fire alarm bell – actually, it was big iron wheel from an old-model tractor, that had been suspended suitably at the meeting ground – and immediately began to beat a tocsin, furiously, calling all the people to a village meeting. They rushed in to the summons:
“Where’s the fire? What’s burning?”
“Worse than fire. War! The German’s trying to get on top of us again!” Grimly Dmitri Ivanovich relayed his news to the entire collective farm.
Lives ground to a halt. It took some time to round up all the men of mobilisation age. The women quickly threw together a communal feast. After abundant libations punctuated with tearful words of encouragement and parting; after speeches proclaiming that ‘Holy Russia can always count on her own Russian muzhik to leave his plough and come to her defense,’ the reserve soldiers quickly packed their modest field rucksacks in the early morning, and left in the designated military wagons for the Podporozhye (the area that lay beyond the river’s rapids), to the assigned mobilization point, from which they would never return home. All that remained in the village were the young ‘uns, the women and Dmitri Ivanovich Panin in charge. Back in the first German war, Ivanovich had taken a ball of shrapnel in the knee: a painful little present from the Kaiser, lodging permanently under his kneecap. Needless to say, no one was asking him to the war. Instead, the new world war herself came quickly up to his own front door.




3

It was a week later – 29 June 1941 – that two fighter planes came roaring at them along the river. They flew low, brazenly, just above the surface of the water. German warplanes. On the wings of the wasp-like bodies of the rapier-nosed fighters, the Teutonic crosses and swastikas were vividly emblazoned, vain beauties showing off. Even the faces of the pilots could be clearly seen. Their helmets covered with tightly wound black fabric turned every which way, as if mounted on swivelling hinges. All the village boys came spilling out onto the sloping hillside overlooking the Svier. And why wouldn’t they? Never before in their lives had they seen real fighter planes. Their curious eyes gleamed with joy. The cross-marked warriors soared up into the sky, vertically, like candles; they rolled over their wings, swooped down and raced along the river. The lead pilot waved at the boys. But as they reached the vast meadow, the warplanes’ sirens began to howl in a vile way; they banked their wings sharply, as if standing on edge, veered suddenly at a sharp angle and, twin vultures, headed straight for the main artery to Vazhiny. A green military one-and-a-half ton truck was running like mad along the shoreline road, a great trail of dust following in its wake. The mischievous lights of gunfire started up dancing beneath the warplanes’ wings: Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta… A fiery tracer slammed into the light truck. The vehicle careened wildly along the road, missed the turn and went flying over a drainage ditch, as if heading into the clouds. Then the heavy engine dragged it back down to earth; the truck’s hood scraped against the cliffside; it somersaulted in the air and fell, stone-like, into the shallow waters of the Svier along its banks. The wheels were still spinning madly, scattering drops of spray in every direction, when the wounded Red Army soldier leaped clear and immediately began to climb up the slope, clambering eagerly toward the paved roadway. Flailing wildly with his arms, his legs sinking into the loosely packed river sand, he made no progress at all. One of the airplanes made a sweeping and deliberate turn, approaching with precision from the wooded side: under its wings, the bright little flames of the machine guns jumped up and down.
The truck driver was literally sliced in two by the tracer fire. A lump of bloodied flesh rolled back down towards the semi-submerged truck.
Dmitri Ivanovich leaped out from under the ground, and bellowed at the shell-shocked boys with all his might:
“In the cellar with you, you little bastards! Brainless whelps! Come on! Run for it! Run! Save yourselves! Quick! Quick!”
The boys vanished from the slope, as if the wind had carried them away.

4

Seven minor sons had come to take shelter under the protective wing of Dmitri Panin, each one younger than the next. His own mother, Grandmother (babushka) Anna, was there; his wife, Katerina with her nursling, Lyusenka; Haritina, the wife of his younger brother, Peter, with their five-year-old son, Evgeny, from Leningrad.
The war instantly bonded all the inhabitants of Uslanka. Every pre-war disagreement was forgotten. At the general village meeting, they all agreed: “We evacuate together on the last steamboat out.”
They loaded up the boats with all their worldly goods, clothes and provisions; then, throwing the remaining fuel pallets onto the shore, they sat down, prepared to wait patiently for the paddle-wheel steamboat, the Ivan Turgenev.
Early the next morning, they could hear the distant rhythmic splashing of the antique steamboat’s paddle as it came down the river. The beautiful white Ivan Turgenev was moving along at top speed. Quickly they boarded their boats, but the ship never slowed for them. Its steam engine was operating at maximum capacity.
A long, low blast of the horn came over the water from the Ivan Turgenev. The captain appeared on the bridge, a megaphone in his hand:“I can’t take you. The ship’s overloaded! There’s no more room!”
Every inch of deck space was studded with people’s heads. They leaned against each other everywhere, holding on for dear life. There were many children. Stretchers with the wounded had been hoisted up to the roof of the captain’s bridge. Many more people were crammed into the suspended lifeboats.
“Don’t come any closer! The wake of my ship will capsize your boats!” shouted the captain into the megaphone, hoarsely. “I am overloaded! There is nothing I can do about it!”
The women began to weep and keen – and then the children started crying. Dmitri Ivanovich ordered the boats back to shore.

5

The day of the evacuation was a day of tender sunshine, warm and bright. Sadly Haritina watched hope sail away towards the Onega.
“What will become of us?”
But before the Turgenev had even made it past the bend that skirted the great green meadow, that same familiar pair of German warplanes could be heard screaming across the sky. This time, they began dumping their bombs on the steamboat. The Ivan Turgenev had neither cannon, nor machine guns. There was no one, nothing, to prevent the planes from taking careful aim at the ship with their bombs. One bomb dropped right into the smokestack of the vessel. The Turgenev was lifted out of the water and broken in two. Black smoke rose in a tall column. The water around the boat began to boil. The bow and the stern of the ship tipped straight up towards the sky and then instantly vanished beneath the waters. It was as if the boat had never even existed. An odd collection of bundles, benches, suitcases, life preserver rings, splintered wood from the lifeboats floated down the river. But no heads of any human passengers ever appeared on the surface. The whirlpools had sucked every living being down into the depths.
One minute later, and in the very same spot where the steamboat had just been passing, out of the depths of the river there appeared huge greasy bubbles rising to the surface; the grey silt and muck from the riverbed churned; bits of rubbish floated up; unneeded life vests floated, in irregular circles, amidst the white bellies of dead fish. The twin fighters made their victory swoop, circling vulture-like over the watery graves and then, rocking back comfortably on their wings, disappeared in the direction of Finland.
The Svier slowly bore away the evidence of the crime. It seemed as if the people who had been sailing past had never even been born, had never lived. Nothing was left to feel happy about: not the sun; not the pristine water; not the fresh, crisp air. For a long time to come, bitterness coloured over the vivid beauty of the natural landscape into the monochromatic hue of grief. Mama was shivering. Babushka Anna kept blessing herself with the sign of the cross. The village was downcast; a hush came over us. Only Dmitri Ivanovich carried on, issuing his directives in a commanding tone of voice:
“We must urgently leave for the taiga, to the logging station. We can wait it out there. I’ll give you one hour to pack! We have just the one mare. We’ll load up the wagon with the littlest ones, provisions, the hens in baskets, warm clothes… Tie the cows up by the horns with a single rope and attach it to the wagon. Take only the most essential things. We’ll wait it out at the logging station. When the shooting quiets down a bit, that’s when we’ll come home. Maybe by then the Red Army will have chased the Finns and Hun back out, give them a proper licking to boot. There’s no way we can stay here. They’ll bomb us into bits, just like the Ivan Turgenev. We should be grateful to the captain, Pavel Feodorovich Napryakhin, for refusing to take us aboard. Saved our lives, he did. The whole river, this Svier of ours, loved him. A treasure of a man, a heart of gold! Everybody knew him. He was our sole connecting thread, our only link between this wilderness and Peter, the big world out there. And now that thread’s been broken. Peace to your mortal remains, captain! Peace to all these slaughtered innocents! Let us pray for the souls of those who perished here!”
There were prayers.
Then there was silence.
“And where do we go from here?” the women started up, all of a sudden. “If our men don’t come back soon? What then? Are we going to be guerrillas in the forest, with our babies in our arms?”
“I’m not God, women! I don’t know. All I know is we need to survive somehow! We need to save our young ‘uns, any which way we can! How many youngsters do we have in our Uslanka? Why, forty one souls, count ‘em! Five at the breast, ten too small for school, and the rest of them all old enough to get into serious mischief. Each one of them needs looking after, a sharp pair of eyes. And how many grown-ups do we have left? Fifteen! And that’s not even counting me, a lame cripple. And each one of us is going to have death chasing after us, day and night. Peace won’t be coming back soon. We have to save our children! Because, if they die, who’ll be lifting Russia out of the ashes when this is over?”

6

An hour later the hamlet was empty of people.
The village force, comprising one horsepower, hastily made its way into the narrow birch-lined trail of the forest clearing.
It was drifting into oblivion, that caravan consisting of a single wagon and six cows tied together by their horns with a single rope. They were bound for oblivion themselves, that chain of women on foot with children in their arms. They hurried to hide from big troubles under the crowns of their beloved forest.

On the third day of their forest life, a troop of German cyclists dropped by for a visit. Zhenya was petrified with fear.
Back in Leningrad, he had seen plenty of pictures posted on virtually all the houses of 12 Red Army Street, just across from house number 7, where they lived. The window of the bakery where Zhenya liked to pop in for Tula spice-cakes featured a large colored picture depicting a German soldier in a helmet with horns, with the face of a monster, his tusks rending the flesh of a little Russian boy. The sleeves of his uniform had been rolled up. The hirsute arms were drenched in blood up to the elbow. Zhenya, recognizing himself in the boy, was overcome with horror: the same fair hair, the same grey eyes, the same kind of shirt and the same short pants. Forgetting all about his Tula pastry, he rushed headlong back to the entry way leading into his house. His mother greeted him with a reproach:
“Where did the devils take you this time? What’s wrong with you? You’re white as a sheet! What happened?”
“Nothing, Mommy!”
“Nothing? Well, that’s good, my son! Tomorrow we’re leaving for the country, to stay with babushka Anna for a while – to get away from the war.”
But as it turned out that they had come closer to the war than ever.
And there they were now, right in front of him: living-breathing Germans, the real thing, come riding into their camp on bicycles!
Zhenya was expecting to see terrifying monsters; instead, he saw cheerfully upbeat, good-looking young men in smart military uniforms. It was quite obvious that these Germans were not planning to make a meal of any of them. Their helmets hung loosely from the handlebars of their bikes. They smiled pleasantly, and laughed.
Zhenya meekly appeared from behind his mother’s back. One of the soldiers, wearing an iron cross on his military shirt, squatted down in front of him and held out a small bar of chocolate wrapped in gold-colored paper:
“Bitte!”
“Danke!” answered Zhenya’s mother on his behalf. The German said something else, rapid-fire, but Zhenya understood not a word. The soldier stroked the Russian boy’s head affectionately, and then pointed to his own unkempt hair. The hair on both heads was the same color. Zhenya smiled at the German and put the candy in his mouth. The German carefully perched the child on the frame of his bike and gave him a gingerly ride around the clearing. Everyone smiled in a friendly way.
The officer in charge of the reconnaissance troop led Dmitri Ivanovich aside and ordered him, in broken Russian:
“Go back to your village! Home, zurueck! Verstehen?”
The soldiers donned their helmets; checked their weapons; waved, and then cycled off deeper into the Russian forest, in the direction of Leningrad.

7

Barely three days had passed, yet the village was already unrecognizable. Only two houses of the original eight remained relatively intact: the Panins’ and the Kiselyovs’, that was also the community general store. The remaining six homesteads had all been dismantled log by log and converted into rafts for making ferries. The Panin homestead had been looted and turned into a ruin. The old wooden steam-bath by the pond had been burnt down. All the windows in the house had been smashed. The great white carved shutters and awnings, the oak doors had all been torn from their hinges. Everywhere there were scattered the shards of babushka’s clay pots, pitchers and crockery. Down from eviscerated featherbeds and pillows floated in the air like a cloud of white snow. No one was allowed into the houses. Babushka Anna, the palms of her hands on her cheeks, could not tear away her eyes, full of tears and sorrow, from the devastation of the Panin family seat – an estate founded a century earlier by Dmitri Ivanovich’s own great-grandfather, an officer exiled for supporting the Decembrists, married to a Frenchwoman who had fled to Russia from the tyranny of the French revolutionaries.
The cows and the mare were requisitioned. They were only allowed to take along whatever they could carry in baskets and in small knapsacks over the shoulder. The people of Uslanka showed no emotion. There were no tears. They marched them onto a ferry and transported them over to Vazhino. Its populace had already been taken away. Instead, there were many Finnish soldiers: digging trenches, setting up defenses, erecting dots, dzots, barricades; they slept, ate, played, produced tinny melodies on small harmonicas. The Uslanka clan was quickly divided up between three Russian vehicles captured as war trophies. The Finnish sergeant counted up the women and children prisoners and gave the order to the drivers to go. Mama had barely enough time to persuade the driver to put Zhenya up front. The sergeant took the wheel of the first truck himself, and the column set out over the road, pockmarked by exploded shells, and now a military highway. It was a lazy progress, taking pains to go around bumps and potholes. Mounds of burnt-out tanks, weapons and vehicles filled the cuvettes along the way. From time to time they passed the hulks of shot down planes. Everywhere around they saw the corpses of Red Army soldiers in unnatural poses as death had taken them. Their faces had already turned black. Silently, the women peered into the faces of the dead, trying to make out the features of their own husbands, sons, and kin. A light breeze played with the white sheets of orders, letters, leaflets, maps and staff cards. The sweetish odor of decomposing flesh mixed with exhaust fumes wafted through the air. Well-fed feral dogs ambled through the trees.

8

In late June, 1941, the Wehrmacht’s efreitor Hans Park, together with his entire regiment, prepared for deployment to the Eastern front. Because his birthday was coming up, the commander of his unit granted him three days’ leave to see his parents, in Dresden. He was turning 20. Hans clicked his heels, saluting, and immediately left for his boyhood home.
He rang up his fiancée, Elsa, and invited her to his birthday party.
Hans’s father and mother were professors at the conservatory of music. Mama was an opera singer, Papa a concert pianist.
A luxurious chocolate cake decorated with lit candles greeted Hans and Elsa when they walked in. Mischievous Hans blew out the candles in one breath. His father sat down at the grand piano and began playing Wagner. Everyone applauded and took turns kissing Hans.
The kiss with Elsa went on for a time. A tear rolled down her cheek. Hans hugged her close and whispered in her ear: “Wait for me! I’ll be back! You just wait with all your might…”
Later, they drank champagne, toasting Hans, his parents, Elsa, love, a German victory, and the wisdom of Hitler.
“Don’t be concerned for me!” began Hans’s farewell speech. “I will return from the East victorious, safe and sound! This war will be over before the autumn begins. Russia is a colossus teetering on clay feet. One touch and it will topple over. We shall smash Bolshevism! And once again I will be playing my favorite Schumann on this grand piano.”
When father and son were finally alone, Karl embraced Hans and said, quietly:
“God grant that the Russian bullet with your name on it flies past you and misses, my son! I have been in Russia. I know this country and her people. Once, I played Tschaikowsky before the Russian Czar Nicholas. His wife, the Czarina, was German. The Emperor himself spoke better German than our own beloved Fuehrer. The audience in St. Petersburg was magnificent, warm and welcoming. Oh, what a beautiful, wealthy city it was, St. Petersburg. A brave, courageous people. You don’t know the Russians. You will be liberating them from the Bolshevism of the Jews. You will not have an easy time of it, my boy.”
Before he left, Mama gave Hans a gift: a warm knit sweater to wear under his uniform, woollen socks and winter g loves:
“Russian winters can be severe. Maybe you will find these useful. I am giving them to you just in case!”

9

 The regiment was being deployed to the East via Norway and Finland. On the border with the USSR, they transferred the forces onto enormous armoured transport vehicles on caterpillar tractor tracks and rushed them into battle. Their orders were to reach the offensive frontier, annihilate the enemy and arrive at the right bank of the Svier. Thereafter, based on the circumstances of combat, to force the river and cross over. Their goal: the total siege of Boslhevism’s cradle, the city of St. Petersburg.

The road wound its way through the dense and beautiful Karelian forest. The heavy behemoth-like vehicles slowed down as they approached a wooden bridge. The field officer in charge of traffic twirled his stick, indicating when the road was open for movement. Hans was seated next to the driver and had a clear view of the huge carcasses of the camouflaged vehicles crawling along before them.
The first armored transport vehicle started over the bridge; its front wheel rolled onto a wide, loose plank: instantly, the plank shot up, almost vertical.
“Mein Gott! What is that?!” Hans saw a Russian soldier nailed to the bridge’s plank with a single three-sided bayonet. The driver laughed, imitating a Berlin radio host:
“And here’s a Russian sentry on duty, saluting our valiant German forces! Achtung! Achtung! Look, we have exclusive access to a unique specimen of butterfly from the Russian collection of rarities! Nicely mounted! And our valiant German soldiers…”
“Were there fierce battles here?” Hans interrupted him.
“In some parts. There’s no continuous front here. The battle lines of the Russian front pass even through the outhouses. You think you’re going to take a crap, but don’t even think of taking your finger off your automatic pistol! A Russian will even spend hours up to his neck in shit, just to take you out when your guard’s down.”
“Who did this?” asked Hans, shouting to drown out the roar of the motor.
“Oh, it’s just a joke of the front line troops. The usual kind of soldiers’ pranks. You’ll see much more dramatic things in the Russian war. They don’t fight by the rules here, you know. Barbarians!”
The armoured vehicles of the German infantry continued to roll on, with the same deliberate slowness they used in war games. Carefully they crossed over the wooden bridge, and with each new vehicle that crossed, the Russian sentry appeared, then fell back down.
Park stared at the Russian without blinking. He managed to make out some of his features: one of his eyes was open, the other obscured by a clot of blood. The mouth was slightly open. A silent shriek of pain had frozen on his bloodied lips. The closely-shaved neck was covered with fine blond stubble. The face was waxen. He looks my age, he thought. He looks like a German. A Russian triple-shaft gun was tied on to his hand. The trademark Budenny hat with its red cloth star had been affixed to his head at a slant.
Once dead, a soldier is no longer the enemy. Still, it was a chilling sight, the corpse mounted on a plank with a single bayonet.
Hans continued to focus on the face of the Russian sentry, receding into the distance. His driver only watched the road:
“Go on, feast your eyes! Get used to it, wormfood! This is no picnic we’re heading for: it’s war against the Russians! Russia isn’t France, you know: you won’t be getting coffee and there won’t be girls for hire to while away the idle hours. It isn’t even like Poland! There’s no heroic cavalry here, charging tanks with swords drawn. Here, you’ll see soldiers diving under tanks with armfuls of grenades, even without any orders. Here, they fight all day, all night, using anything at all. They run out of ordnance, and fight with their fists, their feet, their teeth; with gun butts and helmets. They’ll get roaring drunk on schnapps and swarm your machine guns like locusts, armed only with trench shovels. They aren’t even human. They’re dumb swine. There are thousands of them all around you here, dead and rotting. Goebbels was right to say: ‘When the enemy won’t surrender, he must be destroyed!’ As soon as you meet them in battle, once one of these stinking Ivans kills one of your comrades, you will discover for yourself how much joy there is to get out of every dead Russian. The good Russians are the dead ones.”
Finally, the plank with the sentry flipped up for the last of the vehicles to cross: the red star on the Budenny cap flashed by and disappeared.
“Auf wiedersehen, russische schweine!” muttered the driver.

10

The armoured transport vehicle slowed down, passing by the captured trophy trucks that had moved to the shoulder and stopped, yielding the road. A jaunty Finnish flag jutted out over the flanks of each passing vehicle. Their hoods were marked with the white chalk designs of the Suomi swastika. Russian women filled the backs of the trucks, sitting on their bundles. Some of them had nursing infants asleep in their laps, wrapped in baby blankets.
“Where are they being taken?” asked Hans.
“Oh, the devil knows!” muttered the driver in reply. “Maybe to a soap factory. Or maybe they’re just being taken out of the combat zone.”
Hans noticed a small Russian boy sitting next to the driver in the second truck. The boy, his eyes wide and staring, watched the column of German armor with a curious and inquisitive gaze.
“God! Children here! In the midst of all this horror!”
For a moment, Hans contemplated the impossible: what if someday, sometime, Russian soldiers came marching into the Vaterland! War’s capricious hammer-pendulum might after all swing in any direction…
“Oh, no! That can never happen! I believe in Germany! I believe in the wisdom of our leader! I believe in the strength and the intelligence of our people. The Aryan race is invincible. No one will ever defeat the German soldier!”
Hans finally regained his composure an jour later, when his column was gaily rolling along a straight highway to the sounds of cannon fire. The Eastern front was advancing to meet him at the rate of rolling tanks. A nauseating anxiety began to gnaw at his heart. He couldn’t help imagining himself nailed to some plank by a three-sided Russian bayonet, and shuddered: a desire to live came over him, with a force he had never known before:
“What a great good it is, to sit quietly at home, seated in front of the old family concert grand, to draw forth the magical sounds of Schumann from this cherished instrument. Schumann also visited Russia. They loved classical music in Russia. Robert Schumann played his music in St. Petersburg. Oh, this mysterious St. Petersburg! Here it is, right near me here, just across the Ladoga, an arm’s length away! Soon we will be there! And I, a simple German officer of the Third Reich, will be able to play Wagner’s triumphal music in the famous columned hall of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. Such a magnificent dream is worth fighting for, and living for! Everything is going along perfectly, kamrad!”
But Hans’s rosy fantasies evaporated as soon as he heard the orders being transmitted over the radio by his regimental commander:
“ Achtung! The regiment is entering a zone of potential combat with the enemy. Check and ready your weapons for battle! Check the explosives in the grenades! Increase the distance between vehicles! Bypass the entrenched firing positions of the enemy! Do not engage in prolonged combat! Engineers: mine the side roads. Defuse the mines on approaching bridges and hold them! Use fire-launchers against dots, dzots, firing positions! No prisoners! Be the first to fire, do not hold back! Our mission is to capture the city of Podporozhye! Gott mit uns! Forward!”
The engines of the war machines roared into life. Storming fighters appeared in the sky overhead. The infantry troops deployed on foot.
They moved carefully through the forest, stretched out into a line, ready to unleash a whirlwind of fire at any moment. They advanced guardedly, under cover of tanks.
To the left of the roadway, the young officer saw the corpses of Russian soldiers, strewn chaotically through the sparse firs. Among them, a slain girl caught his eye. Next to her corpse, a Finnish soldier squatted on his heels, staring sorrowfully at the exposed youthful breasts.
A burnt-out tank stood in a fork of the road. The Russian defender was halfway out of the turret. He had been burned alive, but had not raised his arms in surrender; his gun was still in his hands. The Red Army soldier looked like some kind of surreal black statue, imbued with symbolism and evocative of an unyielding, unbroken will. Hans felt a chill of fear at the sight. It was not fear for his life, however. He felt, rather, as if the music of peace, that music of Schubert’s that had been the one absolute in his formation, and that sang constantly in his soul, had suddenly died. Hans began to feel within himself the birth of a savage beast.

11

Like many six-year-old boys, Zhenya loved to play at war under Mama’s table: he adored lead soldiers, toy weapons, little play tanks, guns, airplanes. Only now, here, on a forest road in wartime he was actually seeing, for the first time, in front of him, real armored vehicles. Enraptured, he gazed upon the roaring, screeching playthings of the grownup world, and envied them their ‘real-life, flesh-and-blood’ soldiers, seated in actual drivable tanks. But when the lead vehicle in the column rode onto the bridge and its right front wheel caused the bloodied Russian soldier to flip into view, Zhenya shrieked wildly from the horror. Fear dwells outside our consciousness. For the first time in his life, he had seen a dead human being.
Even ants fear death.
The reality of death terrified Zhenya. The games of childhood had ended. The fear of eternal darkness pierced all of his small body. Right then and there, he had been transformed into an adult. War ages even children.
In the back of the light truck, the womenfolk of Uslanka also began to wail and to keen:
“Aiyee! Look, isn’t that Vanya Klyukvin from Vazhiny!” Babushka Anna sobbed out loud. “Vanyusha!”
“Yea… ah-ah-ah-ah!” the other captive women joined in, sobbing and howling. “And poor Nyura! Nyura, his Ma! Nyura, from the Vazhiny parish, where is she now, his mother? Oh, my dearies! Does she know her precious boy is here? Here! Do you see what they do to them, these monsters! These anti-Christs! These godless ones! Desecrating the dead!”
They passed Selga. They left behind Olonets.
An hour later, the column turned into a country road headed towards the Olonka River.
“Looks like we’re headed for the fishing camp at Ilyinsk,” thought Panin. “In my younger days, used to be I’d catch koreshka here with nets, and pike, too, with a fly. Ah, those were some good pike we had here back then.”
The concentration camp was already operational and ready to receive civilian prisoners; the barbed wire had been hung; machine guns poked out from the watch towers; the camp beds had been erected and the graves dug, as well.
“Now what? How are we supposed to manage here? Well, all that’s left is just to survive! What else is there? All the people here are our own kind, Russians. Cramped, but friendly, even through the barracks are already full to bursting with prisoners…”
Room was made for the new arrivals. Quietly, calmly they exchanged what unreliable rumors they had come across. They divided up the sleeping space as best they could. Looking around, they noticed that the window frames had been boarded up solid, but there were no bars on them.
“Who needs bars here? Where can you run to, with babies yet? There’s the treacherous cold Ladoga in front of you, and impassable swamplands behind you.”
In the barracks, though, there are big Russian stoves, intact and warm. The sourly acrid smells of children’s potties are bearable – at least it’s your own family’s stink! All will work itself out, all will be well.
Strange though it may seem, the large massing of people was accepted calmly by the prisoners. The women immediately set about washing the floors, sweeping out the cobwebs, clearing out debris. They fired up the stoves, producing cast iron pots, crockery, dishware, spoons and cups from their knapsacks; they unwrapped their bundles of provisions, opened up their baskets with vegetables and mushrooms; procured pot-holders from somewhere, and went down to the river for clean water.
And then came the aroma of fresh borshch, mushrooms sautéed with onions and roasted potatoes. The kids, having been the first to sample babushka’s treats on their empty stomachs, now led by their curiosity, scrambled all over the camp, exploring it; while lively pre-war smiles appeared on the adults’ faces: We’ll live again, wait and see! Where hasn’t our girl been missed! Russians will sing cheerful songs even in their own graves, provided there was drink there and food to chase it with. It won’t be the first time that we Russians have to survive captivity! Even before the war, that wasn’t really freedom, but we still lived! We sang songs, we danced, we loved, and we made children.

12

After two weeks of camp life, once all the produce brought from home had been consumed. It became clear, then, that the large Panin clan could not hope to survive the winter of 1941 on camp rations alone. The spectre of death by starvation loomed.
Babushka Anna stocked up on herbs, brewed teas and potions out of evergreens to keep scurvy at bay; Dmitri Ivanovich organized search teams to look for hidden stores of food, being certain that the prudent local fisherfolk, forced to abandon their homes in haste, had as a matter of course buried some of their supplies.
He assembled all his boys – including little Zhenya – and issued them each a rifle ramrod, seeing as there were plenty of these lying around. As he distributed the thin steel rods, he gave his orders:
“Look for the buried treasures everywhere: in old garden plots, in little storage shacks, in abandoned pigpens and chicken coops. The autumn rains have passed; the soil is soft. Poke the ramrods in at an angle. If you feel something hard there, come and get me, straight away. Don’t go digging around by yourselves: you might hit a mine. When you want me to come with you, make it quiet, no fuss. No one must know about what we find. It’s our own great big family secret! Not a word to anyone, not even a half-word! Everybody understand? Any questions?”
All the children nodded their heads up and down in concert.
There were no questions. Their hunger was a constant presence. And hunger can be an excellent teacher. Everyone did exactly as the patriarch told.
The first treasure trove – a barrel of salted fish – was unearthed by eight-year-old Shurik. It had been buried in a sand dune. Vasili took up hunting curious squirrels with a slingshot, and became proficient at catching voles with improvised mouse-traps he put together. Big Zhenya dug up a fishing net somewhere and was constantly catching small fry in the Olonka: minnows, spiny fish… They would dry them in the stove for reserves. Little Zhenya found a cavalry saddle in a woodshed. The saddle was almost new, from czarist times, ancien regime, of the kind an officer might own.

In that hungry winter of 1941, they ate that saddle: carved it up into narrow strips, soaked them in water, ran them through the meatgrinder. The resulting mince was mixed with flour ground out of nettles, and shaped into tiny ovals. Granny Anna fried up these camp ‘delicacies’ in fish oil she somehow managed to extract out of the fish Big Zhenya caught, while heating them.
The children gobbled up the ‘horsemeat cutlets’ with great relish: they smacked their lips with delight, licking their fingers; at night they dreamt of their grandmother’s pre-war sweet-cheese pastries, of rye bread with milk, of fresh carrots from the kitchen garden, of jacket potatoes drizzled with sour cream and scrambled eggs. But the more they raved about delicious cooking, the hungrier they felt. Many of the prisoners of Camp No. 8 began to exhibit signs of dystrophy. Mass starvation began. The camp cemetery rapidly began to fill, small mounds of earth marking the graves. Dmitri Ivanovich set about whittling crosses.
One day, a great sadness came over Little Zhenya: despondent, he stared out the window at the barbed wire, at the watch tower with its guard, and sighed.
“What are you sad about, my son?” asked Mama.
“Remember, last summer, before all these wars, when we were still living in Uslanka with Papa, at the summerhouse, and Baba Anna was always forcing me to eat fresh bread with butter?”
“Of course I remember,” Mama smiled. “You would even go hide from your granny, in the hayloft.”
“Such a stupid fool I was then, Mama! Granny would give me this great big hunk of bread, still warm from the oven, and all over it she would spread butter straight out of the churn…And what would I do? I’d lick off all the butter, and then take the bread slices and chuck them behind the chest in the bedroom… I’d throw away the bread! Think of it, Mama! Because if I could only get behind that chest right now, and pull out all that bread I threw away, I could eat it, right now… I’d eat it all. I’d even give you a bite, Mamochka.”
Mama put her arms around her little boy and silently wept.

13

Mama-Inna (Haritina) was madly in love with Papa, her husband.
No sooner had Zhenya been born, than her love doubled again. Peter insisted that Inna leave her job as a nursery school teacher and devote herself entirely to their son. Petya made good money at the factory where traditional musical instruments were manufactured; they lived in a large room of a communal flat and, quite a rarity for the times, was fully able to support a family. Peter Ivanovich had graduated with distinction from the academy of forest management and worked productively as chief of the department of wood preparation for manufacturing, so essential to the making of guitars, mandolins and balalaikas. And he himself played both the guitar and the mandolin, respectably well.
He had met Inna somehow by chance, at a party. She could sing the old Russian romances very well, and the young engineer accompanied her splendidly on his guitar. They would often be invited to attend family celebrations together, as a result. The famous romance that began, ‘Our campfire shines brightly…’ had come to mean so much to both of them, that he proposed.
It was a modest wedding.
The longed-for pregnancy was not long in coming. As soon as Zhenya started kicking in his mother’s belly, Peter would pick up his guitar, sit down next to his wife, and together they would sing:

My campfire shines bright,
Sparks vanish in flight;
No one sees us in the darkness --
At the bridge we’ll meet tonight!

Peter and Haritina wanted a son so utterly, that God heard them: nine months after the wedding, Evgeny was born.
Her professional training in child development helped Inna bring up her boy. She followed the precepts of the science strictly, yet administered them with great doses of motherly love. At an early age, the boy started talking, then singing, drawing, daydreaming. Mama would frequently take Zhenulya out for walks in the fresh air, to play in playgrounds; she took him out on skis and in a sled. Anything she did for her son, she considered to be her most important work. In the evenings and on weekends, Zhenya belonged to his father.
Father and son were friends. Peter conversed with him as he would have with an adult. Sometimes Inna reproached him for this:
“Petya, you’re spoiling him! You must be more stern! You’re his father!”
“Love can’t spoil a child,” Peter would answer, embracing his wife. “We’ll give him a sister for a present, in a year or two, and after that, God willing, a little brother. Zhenya will take on the duties of the eldest brother, you’ll see.”
“And I’m all for that!” Inna would whisper, coquettishly, clinging to her husband.
One time, in the year before the war, the mother’s parents invited their friends, family and in-laws to a New Year’s Eve party. Inna was busy in the kitchen with babushka Anna, while Papa set the festive table, arranging the plates, shot glasses, wine glasses, wines and vodkas, cold hors d’oeuvres, and the seating plan. In the place of honor at the head of the table he put a special armchair, for babushka Anna. She had come to visit Petrusha, her favorite son, in order to see her grandson for the first time.
This grandson wanted to help the grownups. But the grownups told him to play with his toys instead. Zhenya had no desire to be a child.
Mama and Grandmama were making frequent trips back and forth from the kitchen into the main room, ferrying steaming dishes and all kinds of delicacies from the stove to the table. Everyone had forgotten about Zhenya. Zhenya, meanwhile, had taken his seat in the place of honor at the head of the table, and clutched at the tablecloth with both little fists. Children love to be the center of attention. His mother tried to move him to another chair.
“This is where your grandmother will be sitting, Zhenyusya!”
The son remained adamant, and silent. Mama decided to apply force:
“Enough of this nonsense! Get out of this chair!”
Zhenyusya did not simply start to cry – he began to sob with particularly great effect.
His father came running at the first sounds of his distress:
“What happened?”
“See for yourself! Evgeny has taken over the place of honor where our guests should sit, and won’t budge from the spot!”
“Leave Zhenya be!” said the father, losing his temper. “My son is the guest of greatest honor in my house!”
“Absolutely right!” piped in Babushka Anna, joining the fray. “It doesn’t matter where I sit: it’s not as if I’ll get any younger for it!”
The guests began to laugh.
Magnanimously, they let Evgeny stay put and turned their attention to the tradition of making New Year’s toasts instead. Zhenya was inundated with presents; naturally enough, he could not sit still in his place of honor for very long. Within minutes of the scene, he had forgotten all about his tantrum and had visited every single lap available, in turn. And babushka Anna was seated in her place of honor, after all.

14

In the spring, his parents brought five-year-old Evgeny to stay with his grandmother in the country, at their summerhouse. The village lads immediately took their guest from the big city to the barnyard, to show him the sights and the local news. These key events unfolded on the broad sloping incline made of logs that led to the second-story hayloft of the Panin homestead. It was to this precise spot that the very latest news of all was used to flying in: it was a young pet raven. The children had picked him up as a hatchling in a field, that spring. The young bird had an injured wing. Most likely it had tumbled badly from its nest.
The youngsters had nursed the baby raven back into full form, helped him and freed him once he was strong again. The grateful bird had not forgotten his carers. All they needed to do was hold out their hands, with the palms cupped together into a kind of little boat, and put some seeds there – instantly he would arrive, out of nowhere it seemed, almost as if he fell out of the sky. Fearlessly he perched on the tips of their fingers. One by one, businesslike, he would consume the seeds, and fly away.

The children decided to introduce their big city guest, Zhenya, to this living young raven they had made a pet of.
Yevgeny closed his eyes. He cupped his hands as instructed into a little boat, and extended his arms. As soon as his fingertips felt the touch of the bird’s tiny talons, his eyes opened of their own accord: a young raven sat, perched, on the very tips of his fingers, his head swivelling back and forth. With great dignity and composure, he pecked intermittently at the seeds. Evgeny was afraid to breathe, to move in any way. As soon as he had finished feasting, the young raven turned his tail to Evgeny’s face, lifted his feathers and… plop, plop!… deposited a little pile of droppings right into Zhenya’s upturned palms.
The lads fell over laughing. Zhenya burst into bitter tears and walked carefully to his Mama, his arms still outstretched. She came running out into the yard at the sound of her son’s distress.
“What happened, sunshine?”
“Look!” sobbed Zhenya, holding out his palms, which were filled with bird droppings.
“But why did you bring it here to me?”
“Well, who was I to take it to? Why did he have to poop in my hands?”
“Who?”
“The little raven!”
“Oh, but that’s for luck, my boy! A baby raven is just a small bird, not very smart, and you’re a big boy already! You don’t poop in people’s hands anymore, now do you? You know how to talk even! Here, let me wipe your little palms clean. You see! Isn’t that nice now? That little raven hasn’t learned human language yet, so he was speaking to you in his own bird’s way. Don’t cry, Zhenya! It was just his way of saying thank you! Remember, son, there’s ancient folk wisdom amongst our people: a bird’s droppings, if they fall on your head, or into your hands, are a good omen, a sign of presents to come, of good fortune!”

15

From inside their concentration camp, the episode with the young raven seemed some distant silly fancy to both Inna, the mother, and Evgeny, the son. By February of 1942, after all the secret stores of food had been consumed, Dmitri Ivanovich realized that death by starvation lay in wait for his clan.
Each day, several prisoners succumbed to the famine. The camp population was melting away. The Finns were not in any way troubled by this situation.
Panin urgently convened a meeting the adult members of the family.
“If we don’t find some way of getting more food, we’ll all perish. The children will be the first ones to die. They lose fat faster than grownups.”
“You have a plan, don’t you, son?” asked babushka Anna.

“In the buffer zone of the camp, where the camp’s guards live, next to the soldiers’ mess, there’s a hole where they dump the food waste.”
“But how can we reach it?” asked Inna, joining in. “The guards in the watch towers will mow down the children with machine gun fire, in a heartbeat.”
“They won’t notice the littlest ones.”
Babushka Anna leaped to her feet. “You can’t possibly be thinking of sending our babies out to a certain death?”
“Calm down, Ma! We haven’t any other choice. It won’t be a certain death, either. Only the smallest ones will be able to sneak across under the barbed wire at night, at any rate: Sasha, Tolya and your Zhenya, Haritina. They’re skinny lads, agile, quick-witted. All the Finnish guards will see will be your typical little snow mounds. It’ll never even occur to them that it’s children. And we have no choice.”
Everyone sorrowfully agreed. The women stitched together white robes out of bed sheets, for camouflage. Shedding copious tears, mama Inna dressed her six-year-old for his deadly nocturnal mission. Once again, Dmitri Ivanovich repeated his instructions to his infiltrating force.
“If you see the searchlight, freeze, bury your face in the snow. Don’t move. Stay perfectly still. Not a twitch. Stick close together, no lagging. The hole where they dump the food waste is right next to the fence. Wait for the cook to throw out the remains of the supper. They won’t have time to freeze. Quickly fill your sacks with the leftovers and back you go, exactly the same way as before. No snivelling. Once you’re back safe, you have my permission to bawl your guts out, if that’s what you want.”
The boys got as far as the barbed wire uneventfully. One by one, they crawled under the fence to the longed for hole.
It was not a long wait. The door to the mess hall opened and the orderly on duty brought out two buckets of waste to dump. Under the beam of the searchlight, they felt a delicious vapor rise from the spot. The soldier quickly left the chill air to go back into the warmth. The searchlight blinked off. Instantly, the boys flung themselves at the aromatic waste. Quickly they filled their pouches with the remains of the soldiers’ evening meal. They hooked the straps over their shoulders and crawled back towards camp.
Zhenya was in the lead. Then came Shurik. Tolya was bringing up the rear. A terrible fear of darkness drove little Zhenya to go as fast as he could.
They were almost back in the camp itself when he lost his nerve: he jumped up and began to run – and at that very second, slipped into a large funnel shaped drain, its sides covered in ice. He tried to climb out, but couldn’t: his body kept rolling back to the bottom along the icy walls of the hole. The terror and embarrassment of his situation made Zhenya cry. Suddenly he heard Tolik whispering in the darkness:

“Zhek, catch my strap! Hold on! We’ll haul you out of there!”
The searchlight burst into action and all three flung themselves into the bottom of the trap.
Tolik took out his pocket knife and began carving grips into the walls of the icy prison.



16

The children were late.
The adults sat waiting, in chilling expectation of bursts of machine-gun fire. But all was calm.
The young providers arrived, overheated and exuberant. Their fear had evaporated. They told their tale with gusto, tripping over each other in their excitement, interrupting the narrative with all the gory details. Their happiness knew no bounds. Little Zhenya felt himself a true hero. And the family found itself supplied with soldiers’ leftovers: pieces of bread, potatoes, broken crackers and wafers, the remains of vegetables and even pork bones with bits of meat on them. On many another occasion, the boy-infiltrators made their risky journey to the other side of the barbed wire, and the hole where the food waste got dumped. Each time, their expeditions ended safely, without shots fired.
When the white nights began, in the spring, these forays for provisions became even more dangerous. But by then the main feat had been achieved: the Panin clan had survived without losing a single member to starvation. Both famine and disease had passed by their children altogether.
In the spring, mama Inna stepped outside the barracks one evening, to get some fresh air. The brightly lit nights of the North had extended the limits of day beyond the confines of the established curfew. At the behest of the camp’s commandant, Captain Laakso, all the watches and clocks owned by the prisoners had been confiscated. It seemed to Inna that she still had quite a long time to be out, before curfew arrived. Strolling along the shores of the Olonka, she thought wistfully about the happy times before the war.
Walking back to the barracks, she did not notice a sergeant of the camp’s guards, Louri Virtanen, leering shamelessly at her from the back. The Russians had their own name for him: “Koira,” which they derived from the Finnish word for ‘hound.’ They called him that because he was well-known for his bitter hatred of all the ruesses.
Back in the winter campaign, he had sustained a concussion from a Russian shell. His health status caused him to be transferred from the 13th infantry regiment to a guard unit in the rear. In 1939, his fiancée had perished in Helsinki, under the rubble of a house destroyed by a bomb from a Russian bomb transporter. He joined the Schuetzkor and enlisted as a volunteer for the war front. He was convinced that the Russians were exclusively to blame for all his personal sorrows. He did not take offense at being nicknamed Koira. In fact, he took pride in it, explaining to anyone who would listen that he was “a true Finnish guard dog, prepared to give up his life for Finland, his motherland, at any moment.” In the concentration camp, Koira sported his personal Schuetzkor uniform with flair. He was proud of the special emblem on the uniform’s sleeve; the distinctive badge of Finnish Karelia figured prominently on his officer’s sash. The sergeant was thoroughly steeped in such an intense hatred for all Russians, that he was fully capable of coolly shooting to death any ruess who annoyed him, for any reason, without regard for age or sex.
Stalking Russian women was the shellshocked sergeant’s favorite pastime. Curfew violations were the ideal pretext. He found himself sexually aroused by sneaking up on young women and pricking their breasts with the sharp tip of his bayonet, whether in a kind of teasing play or in explicit threat, they could not tell.
For some time he had been watching the city girl from Leningrad, Haritina, with lust written in his eyes.
A glance at his watch established that Madame la ruesse had been grossly violating the established curfew for a full ten minutes now! His face glowed with delighted anticipation:
“Perfect!” The sergeant took a mental note of the circumstance. “Madame is brazenly trampling upon camp laws!”
Koira touched Inna’s back with the tip of his bayonet.
“Halt! Hands up! You have transg-ruess-ed the rules of order! Now I will have to teach you some discipline, rue-ssy.”
Inna raised her arms high and slowly turned to face Koira. With a crooked leer, the sergeant attempted to use his bayonet tip to undo the top button of her bodice. All at once, Inna grasped the sharp bayonet blade with both hands and moved the carabine’s barrel to the side. With the reflexive reaction of a seasoned soldier, he yanked the bayonet knife from between Inna’s palms: blood dripped to the ground. Koira took a step back and – exactly as trained – smashed Inna across the side of the head with the butt of his weapon.
It had not been a powerful blow, but it knocked Inna out. She fell. Koira stared at the carabine’s butt in dumb stupefaction.
He walked off to the wall of the barracks and spent a long time relieving himself against it.
Dmitri Ivanovich, his face contorted with hatred, had watched the entire scene, helplessly. Koira knocked on his window and motioned several times beckoningly with his hand, inviting him to come out into the open air and remove the body of the curfew violator who had shamelessly broken the law. Dmitri and Katerina rushed headlong out of the barracks. Carefully they lifted up Haritina and carried her into their abode.
Zhenya rushed about his mother’s insensate body in a frenzy, his searching looks fixed on the face of Dmitri Ivanovich: “Mama hasn’t died, has she? She’ll get better, won’t she? Mama, mummy, mummykins! Please don’t die, I beg of you! Please don’t die! Mama Inna!
What’s wrong? How will I live without you, my Mama, my Mamochka…”
Mama Inna was just thirty years old then. She was young, strong, beautiful; she loved to dance, to sing, to laugh, to play at life…. Zhenya thought that his mother had died. But she survived.
A week later, she regained consciousness and slowly began to improve. Zhenya never left her side for a moment. He tried to make her laugh and constantly stroked her hair.

17

The young son decided to exact vengeance upon his mother’s tormentor: he decided to kill Koira. He talked Vasili into making him a little wooden pistol.
Vasili was sixteen. The lad had hands of gold. He would carve doves, spoons, shot glasses, drinking cups, plates from wood; he could craft amazing boxes with secret compartments and hidden locks; he made whistles and wooden flutes to play on, and even whittled out a special little chair for his baby sister Lyudmila’s night-time potty. To carve out a little wooden pistol for Zhenya was a bit of passing fun for Vasili. Three days later, Evgeny’s ‘weapon’ was ready. It was perfect in every way: the children’s toy fired little pebbles with all the force of a rubber band stretched tight. Evgeny was pleased. The little rock projectile would fly three to four metres.
Zhenya decided to carry out his plan of vengeance on a summer Sunday. That day, a group of children from Camp No. 8 had been given permission to visit Camp No. 9, which held the civilian prisoners of war from Vazhiny – relatives and friends of the Uslanka folk. Sergeant Louri Virtanen was ordered to accompany the underage visitors as their guard. Koira carefully tallied up the child prisoners, slung his carabine over his shoulder and gave the order to head out. Babushka Anna walked at the head of the column of children. Zhenya marched next to Koira. Hidden in the pocket of his little boy’s pants he had the toy wooden pistol. His small palm gripped the handle tightly.
They had marched some two hundred metres beyond the gates of their camp when Koira ordered the children to stop: he wanted to refresh himself with a swig of vodka from his flask. For Evgeny, the moment of vengeance had arrived.
Koira unscrewed the cap of the flask and, tossing his head back, poured a dose of hard liquour into his throat.
Evgeny took out his wooden pistol and took aim at the heart of the Finnish sergeant.
Koira tilted his head back down and began to screw the cap back onto the flask.
And that was when he saw the small Russian boy, his left eye closed, aiming right at his heart with a gun made of wood.
At first, as the alcohol rushed to his head, the sergeant could not comprehend what he was seeing. Zhenya released the rubber band with his little thumb, and called out in a loud voice:
“Bang!”
A tiny pebble came shooting out of the little pistol’s barrel and struck the Finn’s uniform. Koira went white. He realized that this Russian child was not playing at war. He was fighting a battle that, to him, was genuine. The boy wanted him dead! The sergeant recognized as a certainty that, sooner or later, this little ruessy boy would succeed in killing him.

Koira went berserk. The kid had turned into his mortal enemy. The kid was a real, living, breathing Russian soldier. The vodka, now thoroughly mixed with his surging blood, attacked his brain.
Shaking with hatred, he approached Evgeny. He snatched the little wooden weapon from the boy’s hand. He flung the ‘munition’ to the ground and proceeded to stomp on it furiously with his heavy boots, reducing it to splinters. Yanking his carabine from his shoulder, he readied it with a jerk and shoved a cartridge roughly into the chamber…
Zhenya understood he was about to be slaughtered. He set off running wildly back towards the camp, towards his mother, Inna. The sergeant raised the rifle and took aim at the fleeing boy’s back.
Babushka Anna threw herself like a fury at Koira. She hung upon the rifle barrel, trying to force it away from the direction her grandson had taken:
“Don’t you shoot him, you bastard! Shoot me instead! God is watching!” shrieked Anna, in a high, shrill, piercing cry, mixing Russian, Swedish, Finnish words. “Don’t stain your soul with such a terrible crime! Don’t murder a child! He’s an innocent child! Don’t kill him!”
Koira was trying to kick her away with his legs, but Anna continued to grab at his boots, to pull on his sash, doing anything she could to keep him from aiming properly.
“Stop! You already killed my son, Peter. Now you want to kill my grandson. And over what? Over a toy pistol? I won’t let you! Kill me instead! Kill me! I’ve lived my life already! Spare that child! God is watching!”
Zhenya tripped and fell. Koira lowered his gun. The intoxication had passed as suddenly as it had come over him. To kill a child does not come easily, even in war.
The children, frightened out of their wits, had formed a silent huddle. Once again, the soldier raised his flask to his lips.
Anna rushed towards her grandson. She turned him over, face up. He was unconscious. The eyes had rolled back into his head. His short pants were wet from both front and back.
The grandmother lifted him up into her arms and ran, as quickly as she could, carrying him back to their concentration camp.
The sergeant motioned again with his hand, signalling to the children, and the column of captive ruesses began to march again, this time heading back home, to their own camp. Koira walked unsteadily, stumbling, and behind him, single-file, like ducklings following a duck, the Russian prisoner children marched in halting step.

A year later, Vasili did finally ambush Koira at a time when the prison camp guards had been forced into a hasty retreat. He shot Koira dead – from a proper metal pistol, this time, that he had spent almost two years assembling in secret. Koira had taken a moment’s break to duck into a stand of trees on the banks of the Olonka, from a great urge to go. He had just dropped his pants and squatted down under a pine tree, when Vasya’s bullet found the back of his head – for Aunt Inna, for little Zhenya, for all the sadistic abuse he had heaped on all the rue-sses. With a strong shove from his legs, Vasili sent the corpse of the Finnish sergeant tumbling off the bluff, into the swift waters of the pristine Olonka.