Blood and Salt by Barbara Sapergia Read Free Book Online Page A

Zmiya,” Yuriy says. “I’m gonna take care of him. Soon.” Yuriy doesn’t smile as much as he used to.
    “Not if I take care of him first.” Ihor’s black eyes glow, his curling hair and moustache almost invisible under a lattice of snowflakes. He and Yuriy exchange a look. “He won’t know what hit him. But he’ll get the idea.”
    “Always some rotten bastard in every village,” Yuriy says, as if the camp is a kind of village. “Don’t know why that is.”
    “No,” Taras says, “not in my village.” Then he thinks of Viktor, Halya’s father, who hated him.
    Was that how things worked? There had to be one rotten bastard? He’d always thought it was just Viktor, but Yuriy seems to be saying it happens everywhere. No, couldn’t be that simple. It was just Viktor.
    But if Zmiya is the usual rotten bastard, the fact that he picks on Taras may be just a matter of bad luck. Rotten bastards would have to pick on somebody.
    He shrugs. He could deal with Zmiya himself, but he just doesn’t care enough. Let Ihor take care of it if he wants. Or Yuriy.
    At the end of the afternoon each man balances a log, ten or fifteen feet long, on one shoulder and they walk back to camp like soldiers with enormous wooden rifles. Somehow Taras stays on his feet.

    After supper he lies on the hard, lumpy bunk, pillow at his back, shins throbbing. When he and his friends got back to the bunkhouse after supper, Yuriy scooped snow into his hankie and Taras has been holding it against the bruises.
    Internees sit on bunks built in tiers along the walls or on wooden chairs around tables playing cards. Ihor blew some money he was saving for cigarettes on a new deck but now they don’t feel like playing.
    Yuriy and Ihor get up and walk slowly to the end of the building where Zmiya sleeps, or feigns sleep. They don’t say or do anything, just let him know they’re thinking about him.
    Close to Taras’s bunk, a serious looking young man with a jackknife whittles a round slab of wood. Bohdan Koroluk finds deadwood in the forest, trims it, and brings it back hidden under his sweater. He shouldn’t have a knife of any kind. Anything that could be used as a weapon was taken away when they came to the camp. By now, though, no one cares, least of all the guards, and he carves every evening.
    He carves faces. So far he’s done Yaroslav the Wise, who began to build the great Saint Sofia cathedral in Kyiv in 1037; Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the famous Cossack leader; the poet Taras Shev-chenko; and several saints Taras has never heard of. In the daytime Bohdan hides the carvings under his bunk. At night he sets them on top of his blanket and people come to look. The faces pull you in, make you long for something you can’t name. They are the most interesting thing in the bunkhouse. No, the only interesting thing. There are three other bunkhouses, but only this one has Bohdan Koroluk.
    Wind howls and spits snow against the dark windows, knifes a chill gust through the building. Bohdan has begun a new carving, of a woman this time, and Taras watches as her face slowly appears in the wood. She reminds Taras of Halya. Her direct, almost challenging look. The hint of a smile around her lips and eyes. He lets the pain go, lets thought go, and watches work roughened fingers transform the wood. For a while there’s only that face, and it eases his sadness.
    He’s aware in a distant way of marled grey eyes staring at him through hair like thin, matted straw from Zmiya’s dark corner. Zmiya looks like a half-starved rat. Or a scarecrow. Strakhopud.
    After a while he begins to hear the voices around him, swirling through the cavernous room like wind-driven snow. Voices loud or soft, high or low, all speaking Ukrainian. At the table near Taras’s bunk, Yuriy’s arguing with Myroslav, a schoolteacher in his late twenties, about hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the last strong leader of the independent Ukrainian Cossack communities in the seventeenth century.