2. The Veridian Winter

Fort Briar was not a fort at all. It had been a brickworks, once, before the war had swallowed the eastern provinces and the provisional government had needed places to put the people it did not want. The kilns still stood at the northern edge of the compound, their tall chimneys rising against the sky like the fingers of a buried giant. In the winter of 1944, they had not been used for bricks in nearly two years, but the prisoners whispered that they had found other purposes.

Viktor Harowicz arrived at the camp on the third of September, 1943. He was twenty-three years old, and he walked with a limp that he had acquired not in battle but in a fall from a hayloft when he was sixteen. The military doctors had examined him for all of five minutes before stamping his papers with the mark that rendered him unfit for frontline service. The auxiliary guard corps was less particular. They needed men who could stand upright and hold a rifle, and Viktor met both requirements.

The train that brought him to Fort Briar was a civilian passenger carriage that had been commandeered and stripped of its upholstery. He sat on a wooden bench between two other new recruits, a middle-aged baker from the capital and a boy of nineteen who claimed to have been a university student before the conscription order had pulled him from his lectures. None of them spoke much. The countryside beyond the windows was flat and featureless, the fields reduced to stubble by the autumn harvest, the villages they passed through strangely empty.

At the station, a lorry met them. The driver was a man named Keller, a career soldier with a face like a closed fist. He did not offer his first name.

"Welcome to Fort Briar," Keller said, though his tone suggested that the welcome was a formality rather than a sentiment. "You will follow orders. You will not fraternize with the prisoners. You will not speak of what you see here to anyone outside the camp. If you violate these rules, you will be punished. Do you understand?"

The three recruits nodded. Viktor felt his stomach clench.

The lorry carried them along a rutted road through a patch of sparse woodland. The trees were birches, their white bark peeling in the autumn damp, their leaves a pale yellow that reminded Viktor of the curtains his mother used to hang in the kitchen window. He tried to hold onto that memory, the warmth of his mother's kitchen, the smell of bread and woodsmoke, but it slipped away as the camp came into view.

Fort Briar was surrounded by a double fence of chain-link and barbed wire. Guard towers stood at intervals along the perimeter, their searchlights dark in the afternoon sun but clearly functional. Inside the fence, rows of wooden barracks stretched in parallel lines, their roofs patched with tarpaper and their walls stained by weather. Beyond them, a large open yard of packed earth, and beyond that, the brickworks, its chimneys silent and cold.

Prisoners were visible everywhere. They moved in lines between the barracks and the work sites, their heads bowed, their clothing a patchwork of civilian garments and crude uniforms marked with colored patches. Viktor had seen photographs in newspapers, had heard the radio broadcasts about the necessity of detaining enemies of the state, but the photographs had been taken from a distance and the broadcasts had spoken in abstractions. Here, the reality was close enough to touch.

The lorry stopped at the administration building, a two-story concrete structure that had once housed the brickworks' offices. Keller led the recruits inside and deposited them in a waiting room with a wooden bench and a portrait of the provisional president on the wall. Viktor sat with his kit bag on his lap and tried not to think about what he had seen.

A man named Oberst Radek interviewed them one by one. When Viktor's turn came, he limped into a small office furnished with a metal desk and two chairs. Radek sat behind the desk, a file open before him. He was perhaps fifty, his hair cropped short and graying at the temples, his eyes a pale blue that seemed to hold no light at all.

"Harowicz," Radek said, consulting the file. "From the eastern provinces. Farm labor. Leg injury. Is that correct?"

"Yes, sir," Viktor said.

"You will address me as Oberst."

"Yes, Oberst."

Radek closed the file and studied Viktor for a long moment. Viktor had the uncomfortable sensation of being weighed and measured, of having his value calculated according to some scale he did not understand.

"You are not a soldier," Radek said finally. "That is good. Soldiers have habits of mind that are not suited to this work. Soldiers think in terms of honor and glory and the rules of engagement. Here, there are no rules except the ones I give you. There is no honor except obedience. There is no glory except survival. Do you understand?"

Viktor said that he did, though he was not at all certain that he understood anything.

Radek nodded. "You will be assigned to Barrack Seven. The prisoners there are mostly political detainees, women and children. They are not dangerous, but they are enemies of the state, and you will treat them accordingly. You will not speak to them except to issue orders. You will not give them anything. You will not take anything from them. If you see another guard violating these rules, you will report it to me immediately. Is that clear?"

"Yes, Oberst."

"Good. Dismissed."

Viktor rose from his chair and limped toward the door. He had his hand on the handle when Radek spoke again.

"Harowicz. One more thing."

Viktor turned.

"The prisoners will try to make you feel sorry for them. They will tell you about their families, their homes, their lives before the war. They will cry, and they will beg, and they will promise you anything if you will only help them. Do not listen. They are not people. They are the enemies of the state, and the state has placed them here to be corrected. Your sympathy is a weakness, and weakness will be punished. Do you understand?"

Viktor swallowed. "Yes, Oberst."

He left the office and walked back to the waiting room on legs that felt suddenly unsteady. The other recruits had already been assigned and led away to their quarters. A guard was waiting to escort Viktor to Barrack Seven, a squat man with a scar across his chin who introduced himself as Brenner.

"You drew the short straw," Brenner said as they walked through the compound. "Barrack Seven is the women's block. Nothing but trouble. They cry all the time, or they scream, or they just stare at you with those big empty eyes. Gives me the creeps."

Viktor said nothing. He was watching a group of prisoners dig a drainage ditch near the laundry sheds. They worked in silence, their movements mechanical, supervised by two guards with rifles slung over their shoulders. One of the prisoners, a woman with graying hair and a torn coat, stumbled and fell to her knees in the mud. A guard shouted at her to get up. She struggled to rise, her hands slipping in the wet earth, and Viktor looked away before he could see what happened next.

Barrack Seven was identical to the other buildings in the compound: a long wooden structure raised on concrete blocks, with a single door at one end and narrow windows set high in the walls. Inside, the air was cold and stale, heavy with the smell of unwashed bodies and something else, something sharp and chemical that Viktor could not identify.

The prisoners lived in two rows of wooden platforms that served as bunks, each one barely wide enough for a single person, though Viktor would later learn that they often slept two or three to a platform, huddled together for warmth. At the far end of the barracks, a stove made from an oil drum provided the only heat, and it was never enough.

There were perhaps sixty women and children in Barrack Seven when Viktor arrived. They fell silent as he entered, their eyes tracking him with a wariness that he would come to recognize as the permanent condition of the imprisoned. He stood in the doorway, his kit bag in his hand, and felt the weight of their collective gaze like a physical pressure.

Brenner assigned him a bunk in the guards' quarters, a small room partitioned off from the main barracks by a plywood wall. It contained a cot, a footlocker, and a kerosene lamp. Viktor placed his kit bag on the cot and sat down beside it, and for the first time since stepping off the train, he allowed himself to feel the full measure of his fear.

He was not afraid of the prisoners. He was afraid of what he might become among them.

The first weeks passed in a blur of routine. Viktor rose before dawn, ate a breakfast of bread and ersatz coffee in the guards' mess, and reported to the parade ground for roll call. The prisoners were assembled in rows, shivering in the morning cold, while the guards counted them and reported the numbers to the administration building. Then the work assignments were distributed. Some prisoners went to the clay pits, others to the laundry, others to the kitchens or the infirmary or the various maintenance tasks that kept the camp functioning. Viktor was assigned to supervise the laundry detail, a job that kept him mostly indoors and required little interaction with the other guards.

The laundry sheds were humid and noisy, filled with the hiss of steam and the clatter of machinery. The prisoners worked in shifts, hauling bundles of soiled clothing and bedding through a series of concrete vats filled with boiling water and harsh chemicals. The air stung the eyes and lungs, and the prisoners' hands were raw and cracked from the work. Viktor stood by the door and watched them, his rifle leaning against the wall, and tried not to think about the fact that the bundles they were washing had been taken from people who were no longer alive to wear them.

It was in the laundry that he first saw Anya Voss.

She was perhaps twenty years old, with copper hair that she tied back with a strip of rag and eyes that were the color of the winter sky. She moved through the steam with a quiet grace that seemed out of place among the drudgery, and when she caught Viktor watching her, she did not look away as the other prisoners did. She held his gaze for a moment, her expression unreadable, and then she returned to her work.

The second time he saw her, she was humming. The tune was a folk song, something old and melancholy that Viktor half-recognized from his childhood. The other prisoners glanced at her nervously, clearly afraid that the humming would draw the guards' attention, but Anya seemed not to care. She hummed as she worked, her voice barely audible above the noise of the machinery, and Viktor found himself listening for it, straining to catch the melody amid the din.

The third time, he spoke to her.

It was a mistake. He knew it was a mistake even as the words left his mouth, but the weeks of isolation and silence had worn down his defenses, and he was desperate for a human connection that did not involve Brenner's crude jokes or Keller's cold efficiency.

"That song," he said, keeping his voice low. "What is it?"

Anya looked at him with an expression that was neither fearful nor defiant. It was curious, as though she were trying to work out what kind of creature he was.

"It is called The Lament of the Grey River," she said. "It is a song from the eastern provinces."

"I know it," Viktor said. "My mother used to sing it."

Something flickered in Anya's eyes. "You are from the east?"

Viktor nodded. "A village called Ostrovka. It is not far from the river."

"I know Ostrovka," Anya said. "I had a cousin who lived there. Before the war."

They stood in the steam and the noise, two people from the same corner of a broken country, and for a moment the camp and the war and the terrible gulf between them seemed to dissolve. Then Brenner appeared in the doorway, and Viktor turned away, his heart pounding, certain that he had been discovered.

Brenner had only come to relay a message about the next shift, but the fear stayed with Viktor long after he left. He understood, with a clarity that cut through all his carefully constructed justifications, that he had crossed a line. He had spoken to a prisoner. He had shown her something of himself. He had violated the rules that Radek had laid down on his first day.

He did not care. Or rather, he cared, but the caring was not enough to stop him.

Over the weeks that followed, Viktor and Anya spoke whenever they could. Their conversations were brief and furtive, a few words exchanged in the moments when the other guards were not watching. He learned that she had been arrested for distributing pamphlets critical of the provisional government. She learned that he had been conscripted against his will, that he hated the camp and the work and the person he was becoming within its walls.

He learned that she had a sister.

"Her name is Elena," Anya said one afternoon, as she folded a stack of clean bedding. "She is eleven. She is here with me, in the barracks. I am all she has left."

Viktor thought of the children he had seen in the compound, thin and silent and old beyond their years. "Your parents?"

"Taken. Last spring. We do not know where." Anya's voice was steady, but her hands trembled as she worked. "Elena has nightmares. Every night, she wakes up screaming. I hold her until she stops, but I do not know how much longer I can do that. I do not know how much longer I will be here."

The words hung in the air between them, heavy with implications that neither of them wanted to acknowledge. Viktor wanted to tell her that she would be all right, that the war would end, that they would both survive and go home and forget that places like Fort Briar had ever existed. But the words would have been a lie, and he did not think that Anya would want to hear lies from him.

Instead, he did something more dangerous. He reached into the pocket of his coat and withdrew a piece of bread, a portion of his own ration that he had saved from breakfast. He held it out to her, his hand trembling.

Anya stared at the bread. Then she looked at Viktor, and in her eyes he saw something that he had not seen in another human being since arriving at the camp: gratitude.

"Thank you," she whispered.

She took the bread and slipped it into her sleeve, and Viktor turned away before he could see her cry.

The winter came early that year. By December, the compound was buried under half a meter of snow, and the prisoners were dying at a rate that even the administration could not ignore. The infirmary overflowed with cases of typhus and pneumonia. The burial details worked overtime, hauling bodies to a pit in the woods beyond the northern perimeter. The guards grew surly and short-tempered, their nerves frayed by the cold and the constant presence of death.

Viktor continued to bring food to Anya when he could. He brought an extra blanket that he had stolen from the supply shed. He brought a pair of woolen socks for Elena, who he had glimpsed once or twice in the barracks, a small dark-eyed girl who clung to her sister's side and looked at Viktor with an expression of pure terror.

"You are kind," Anya said to him one night, as they stood in the shadows behind the laundry shed. The moon was full, and its light turned the snow to silver. "I did not think there was kindness left in this place."

"There is not," Viktor said. "Only small failures of cruelty."

Anya smiled, and the smile broke something inside him that he had been trying very hard to keep intact.

He was falling in love with her. He knew it, and he knew that it was impossible, that the gulf between them was unbridgeable, that the camp would destroy them both before it allowed them anything like happiness. But knowing did not change the feeling. The feeling was its own reality, stubborn and irrational and entirely beyond his control.

In January, the camp commander announced a new policy. Prisoners who were deemed unfit for work would be transferred to a "recovery facility" in the northern district. The announcement was made over the loudspeakers, and the prisoners received it in silence, their faces betraying nothing. But Viktor, who had been at the camp long enough to understand its euphemisms, knew that the recovery facility was a fiction. The unfit prisoners were not being transferred. They were being eliminated.

The selections began in the third week of January. Radek himself presided over them, standing in the parade ground with a clipboard and a riding crop, pointing at prisoners with an almost casual indifference. Those who were pointed to the left returned to their barracks. Those who were pointed to the right were loaded onto lorries and driven away, and no one ever saw them again.

Viktor watched the selections from his post by the laundry shed, and each time the riding crop rose and fell, he felt a piece of himself being cut away.

On the morning of February 3, 1944, Radek summoned all the guards to a special assembly. The prisoners of Barrack Seven, he announced, had been identified as a source of unrest and resistance. As a punitive measure, eleven of them would be executed that night.

The names were read aloud. Viktor listened, his heart hammering against his ribs, praying to a God he had not believed in since childhood that one particular name would not be called.

The seventh name on the list was Anya Voss.

Viktor stood in the snow with the other guards, his rifle in his hands, and watched as the prisoners were marched out of Barrack Seven. They were eleven in number, as the order had specified. Anya was among them, her copper hair visible even in the darkness, her head held high. Behind her, at the door of the barracks, a small figure appeared. Elena. She was clutching the doorframe, her dark eyes fixed on her sister, her mouth open in a silent scream.

Anya did not look back. Perhaps she could not bear to. Perhaps she knew that looking back would break her resolve, and she needed all her resolve for what was to come.

The prisoners were marched to the northern perimeter, where a ditch had been dug in the frozen earth. The firing squad was assembled from the guards of Barrack Seven, Viktor among them. He tried to position himself at the end of the line, hoping that he might be able to fire wide, to miss, to do something that would absolve him of what was about to happen. But Keller, who was commanding the execution, moved him to the center, directly opposite a woman with graying hair whom Viktor did not recognize.

The order was given. The rifles rose. Viktor's hands were trembling so violently that he could barely hold his weapon steady. He looked at Anya, who was standing in the line of prisoners with her hands clasped in front of her, and he saw that she was looking back at him.

There was no accusation in her eyes. That was the worst part. There was only sadness, and something that might have been forgiveness, and a terrible, bottomless love for the sister she was leaving behind.

The second order was given. Viktor closed his eyes.

The volley shattered the night.

When he opened his eyes again, the prisoners were on the ground, their bodies tangled together in the ditch. The snow around them was no longer white. The guards were already beginning to disperse, their duty done, their consciences somehow intact.

Viktor stood frozen, his rifle still raised, his finger still on the trigger. He could not move. He could not breathe. He could only stare at the ditch and the bodies and the dark stain spreading across the snow.

Then he heard it. A sound that cut through the ringing in his ears and the pounding of his heart and the screaming of his own mind. A child's cry, high and keening, coming from the direction of Barrack Seven.

Elena.

She was running toward the ditch, her small legs pumping through the snow, her voice rising and falling in a wail that contained all the grief in the world. A guard moved to intercept her, but Viktor was faster. He dropped his rifle and ran toward her, his limp forgotten, his arms outstretched.

He caught her at the edge of the ditch, just before she could see what lay at the bottom. He wrapped his arms around her and turned her away, pressing her face against his chest so that she would not see the bodies. She fought him, her fists beating against his shoulders, her screams muffled by the fabric of his coat.

"Let me go," she cried. "Let me go. I want my sister. I want Anya."

Viktor held on. He held on because he did not know what else to do, because letting go would mean allowing this child to see what he had done, what he had been a part of, what he could never undo.

And as he held her, he heard a voice behind him. Radek's voice, cold and calm and utterly without mercy.

"Harowicz. What do you think you are doing?"

Viktor turned, still holding Elena against him. Radek was standing a few meters away, his pale blue eyes fixed on Viktor with an expression of mild curiosity.

"She is a child," Viktor said. His voice was shaking. "She should not see this."

"She is a prisoner," Radek said. "She will see what I decide she will see. Release her."

Viktor did not move.

Radek took a step closer. "Release her, Harowicz. That is an order."

And Viktor, who had spent his whole life doing what he was told, who had been taught from childhood that obedience was the highest virtue, who had joined the auxiliary guard because the alternative was a labor camp or worse, made a decision.

He released Elena. But instead of stepping back, he knelt in the snow and took her face in his hands.

"Go back to the barracks," he whispered, his voice low and urgent. "Go back and hide. Do not come out until morning. Do you understand?"

Elena stared at him with her dark, tear-filled eyes, and in that moment Viktor knew that she would remember his face for the rest of her life. She would remember the guard who had held her back from the ditch. She would remember the guard who had been standing with the firing squad. She would remember, and she would not forgive.

She turned and ran back toward Barrack Seven, her small figure swallowed by the shadows and the falling snow.

Viktor rose to his feet and faced Radek. The Oberst was watching him with an expression that was no longer curious. It was calculating, the expression of a man who had just identified a weakness and was already deciding how to exploit it.

"You have a soft heart, Harowicz," Radek said. "That is dangerous. Soft hearts do not survive in places like this."

Viktor said nothing.

"Return to your quarters," Radek said. "Report to my office at dawn. We will discuss your future at Fort Briar."

Viktor saluted, a gesture of obedience that felt like a surrender. He walked back toward the guards' quarters, his feet dragging through the snow, his mind empty of thought. Behind him, he heard the sounds of the burial detail beginning their work, shovels biting into frozen earth, bodies being rolled into the ditch.

He did not look back. He could not look back.

And in the shadows of Barrack Seven, a small girl with dark eyes pressed herself against the wall and clutched a piece of bread that her sister had given her two days earlier, a piece of bread that had come from the pocket of a guard's coat, and she made a promise to herself that she would keep for seventy-nine years.

She would remember. She would remember everything. And one day, when the time was right, she would make them answer for what they had done.