or serious injury in Mogilyovka.
“What might I call you?” he answered to Kostya’s first inquiries after his welfare.
“Konstantin,” Kostya said. “Konstantin Aleksandrovich Prilukhov. People call me Kostya. Prilukhov is spelled with a kha” – a letter, written in the Krovot alphabet as X, which represented a cross between K and H.
“How else might it be spelled?” Piech asked.
“That was what was written on my birth certificate,” Kostya answered, averting his gaze to the floor. Piech understood Kostya’s reluctance to meet his gaze. It wasn’t done to look one’s social or military superior in the eyes.
“That’s good enough for me,” Piech said. “Private, are you? May I ask…”
“…I was told that I had to come here, that there was no use for me at the front. I turned eighteen in Lipien” – the seventh month, Linden – “and I enlisted as soon as I could, but it’s too bad I…”
“Don’t panic,” Piech said. “I was only going to ask whether you knew if my family know I’m here.”
Kostya went red with embarrassment and apologised for his selfish behaviour. Piech could tell his familiarity might have induced the young man to speak out of turn, and did not particularly care to admonish him or report him to his sergeant. Alone in the hospital and without other company, having a someone to talk to regularly was a blessing. He might as well get to know him.
“But it must have been very frustrating. I do know boys who lied about their age, but I sent them back to their mothers. It’s not a place for …a teenager.” He used the Salvat word nastolatek, which could mean anything from eleven to nineteen.
Kostya queried the word, out of place in their mutual language. When Piech explained, he admitted, “Some of my friends look older than they actually are.”
“I can tell a man’s age almost to the minute. Thirteenth of Lipien, ‘fifty-fifth, am I right?”
Kostya nodded, struck dumb by Piech’s accuracy, just as everyone else did when he told them their correct age.
“Good grief, well, my nephew Michal was born in the ‘fifty-ninth, almost exactly four years younger than you. What a difference that makes at your age – the irritating little brat’s barely out of short trousers.”
“Yes, sir.” The young man’s eyes widened, impressed.
“There wasn’t a temptation for you to do the same?”
“I had to get the permission of my master, sir. I did think about running away, but I wanted somewhere to go back to when the war was over.”
“Yes, of course. That was good of you – too few young men in your position consider either their future prospects or the feelings of their masters. So – do my family know or not?”
Kostya replied to Piech’s last question that he would make inquiries. He picked up the enamel mug of soup and handed it to the frail captain, saluted, and left the room.
IV
“Prilukhov with a kha” managed to find out that Wladyslaw Piech, the recent inheritor of Dwor Kruczewski, far to the south, was aware that his younger brother was alive and had been notified the day that he was brought in.
Kostya brought the captain a letter and remained as he read it.
“Well, I’m not going back,” Piech said, firmly, without taking his eyes off the page. “I want to go back out there. We’re not finished – not remotely. Kubice hasn’t even fallen and already he wants me home. Damn him, the arrogant, cowardly sod. That witch-wife of his probably hid away all papa’s medals in the hope that that might jinx the war into grinding to a halt. Not a chance.”
Piech then asked Kostya whether he wanted to go back to the front or go home.
“I won’t lie, sir. The hospital’s a kinder place to be than the the workhouse or the brewery. The food’s better, and since I’ve been looking after you I haven’t been teased by the others. Gives me a bit of…”
“Teased?”
“They’d all ask me when I’m going to walk off with an officer and make an honest woman of myself. They called me ‘Nurse Kostya’ and worse. They do it to some of the other young lads who haven’t been elsewhere and got their hands dirty, sir, but I really wanted to fight when I joined up.”
Piech laughed at the insults Kostya was getting, but stopped when he saw the young man go red around the ears.
“I was told during my training I’d make a fine corporal if the war lasted long enough.”
“You’re certainly organised enough, and you don’t carry yourself like someone from a workhouse.”
Kostya found the last comment slightly stinging, as if his background was something to be ashamed of. However, Piech was at least ten times more respectful of him than others like him. Still, he mustn’t get above himself. This was a brief encounter in the scheme of things. He had a brewery to go back to, a trade that might bring him more dignity than some of his fellows, and he’d been lucky to miss ending up in a ditch with his brains or entrails strewn across the countryside.
“Kubice could be freed within a couple of months. They’re saying the end of Sychen.”
Piech pulled the curtain across just enough to see the whirling snow outside filling the courtyard with wind-whipped drifts. “Pah. The winters up there are so bad we could still be digging ourselves out of Velikoryb in the spring. You really aren’t a fighter yet.”
The captain’s barbs were certainly finding their target. “I’d like to be. They’re talking about pushing on into Lenkija and subduing Saulepilis, even occupying the country.”
“You keep your ears to the ground too.”
“I hear enough people talking. But they also say that we need specialist fireteams and veteran mobile troops.”
There were people needed to staff the railways, but Kostya hadn’t applied – if he couldn’t fight, he wasn’t going to leave the hospital, where at least it was warm and there was always enough food. He kept this back from Piech, eager not to show the captain he valued his security over a winter spent up to his knees in snow trying to get the front moving before the Lenks used their advantage to counter-attack.
He heard from some privates who had come back from the front wounded and put to orderly work once recovered that their lot was hardest. Ordinary soldiers shivered in barracks while their officers commandeered hotels and guesthouses and the deserted homes of those who had fled the fighting. It would be worth it to fight, but not just to be a signalman or telegraphist, and those jobs were done by skilled civilians rather than clumsy recruits. The engine drivers and firemen had almost gone out on strike when the railways had been militarised, and the army, who could not afford such protest, had accepted their right to continue in their jobs rather than give them to soldiers.
Captain Piech seemed to have something else in mind. “Would you like to be one of those veterans?”
Kostya simply smiled and nodded, and began to clear away the captain’s discarded plate, asking if he needed anything more. He said, rather hoarsely, that if the sergeant asked him, he wouldn’t mind, but it wasn’t up to him.
“Well, a fine lad like you should have that choice. You’ve only got one life to live, Kha.”
After that first introduction, Piech had regularly called him “Kha”, finding it terribly funny, and Kostya might have taken offence from anybody else.
But the captain made it sound like a pet name when he said it.
V
Yule came and went. It was a happier occasion than it had been on previous occasions. People were allowing themselves to hope that what they were now optimistically calling the “thirty-month war” would be over by the spring. The number of people being told that their loved one had been dug out of a ditch with his face blown off, identifiable only by his identity papers, had fallen away, and the papers were full of talk about what would happen to the “ten thousand traitors”, as the pre-war Lenkish population of the two cities was now being called.
Despite seldom leaving his room, Piech was even smoking by the end of the year, and demanded of the sergeant in charge of p
ersonnel that Kostya be allowed to see the New Year in with him, toast it with vodka and eat sardines from a tin spread out on bread rolls.
After midnight, the captain rapidly tired, and said to Kostya that he was going to have to decide whether to leave for the front, or to go home. His brother had written again, demanding an answer. ”What do you think? I’m getting discharged within the next week. Doctor Chislenko, gods damn him, says they need the room. I have to choose.”
Kostya didn’t speak. After their intimate conversation a few weeks earlier, they had both dampened down any expectations that something might come of it. For his part, Kostya did not want to hold the captain to anything specific, and had been given leave to go across town to his master to make arrangements about returning to work. Velikovsky made all the right noises, and was thankful that Minerva had spared his apprentice the fate of a lot of others across the city.
Kostya himself wanted to go with the captain, but that was not his choice to make.
“Come on, say something! You were quite enthusiastic the other week. Going back to your master couldn’t have been that good.”
“I-I couldn’t say, sir. I’m not qualified to make that decision for you. And Yuri Fomich was quite an agreeable a man to work with when he was sober.”
“Come on. Tell me what you would do!”
Kostya still demurred, so Piech gave him an order to answer the question.
“I don’t have a family, sir. I’d want to go back and fight, but I