There has been no movement for days. The White Army surrounds the town from the West bank of the Volga and more. General Anton Denekin entered the city 7 days ago. Those loyal to the cause have scattered or holed up as best they could. The Red Army is outnumbered and there have been no reinforcements from Moscow. Hold firm they said. The silence, broken only by intermittent gunfire, is oppressive. The townspeople are isolated and in despair. The food is slowly being consumed and soon tummy’s will hurt for hunger and desperate men will venture out into the fields and raid the stores the White Army guards  just outside the city’s main square.

Anya and her sisters huddle in checked cotton aprons and starched white girdles. There is nowhere to go and nothing to do but wait. Her fingers are red and raw from scrubbing the hard wood floor. Her hair straggling loose from her kerchief and drooping over her tired eyes. Her mother stands at the one window staring out over the hard, wet earth to the outbuildings and beyond. Her father has gone out, left in the evening the night before bundled and taking a loaf of brown bread wrapped in cloth.  What will happen to them? Will not the new guard send help? Anya longs to leave their home and make her way across the dark edges of the river. To see the lights and mark the armies in their lines along the roads. Sitting like frightened chattel with her mother and sisters in her home, this is not what she is.

Anya has not heard from Oleg for a year. When last she’d received a letter, brown and battered, stained and scuffed, it was weeks old. He sounded so far away. His voice downtrodden and weary. She remembers his soft kisses and the stroking of her hair. She remembers other things. Things that redden her cheeks with heat. A memory so clear. Or was it a dream?

She suddenly feels the weight of the locket around her bent neck. It hangs like a lump of iron cutting into her skin. She cannot allow herself to cry over this. There has been loss everywhere. But also progress. Inch by inch, day by day. Card by card. Voice to voice. Down with the Imperialists. Down with the Tsar. Vladimir Lenin speaks to them of a country ruled by the people. Soldiers, peasants, workers alike.  Anya has been a part of this. She has been a courier for the past four years. Passing cards and letters and sometimes memorized messages between those in her town of Volgograd and the surrounding areas to contacts passing by. Representatives of the same goal, the Bolshevik Party, led by a young Joseph Stalin. 

Two years ago Anya was again approached. This time with instructions. Who among those living in and passing through the port are loyal to the Tsar’s White Army? Anya avoids this role. It reeks of treachery. She does want to be a part of the new movement, she does want to emerge victorious and free to shape her own destiny. But she does not want to betray her people, those who have yet to let go of the past. A new ‘secret police’ was formed. The stories emerge from Moscow of the Cheka led by Feliz Dzerzhinsky and the “Red Terror”.

A strange silence envelopes them and a sound like the earth sucking in its breath. Anya gets to her feet and wrapping a print shawl around her head she marches to the door and leaves, ignoring the hisses of Yula behind her. The streets are deserted and a low fog hangs in the air. She hurries down the lane and as she comes around the corner of the last shop, a small dry goods store with new green paint and a hanging sign with a picture of a nag, a sudden vibration knocks her off balance and she crouches by the wide window. Her ears are humming with a strange whistling. There are shouts nearby and the sharp sound of automatic gunfire. The sound of running feet and eyes on her.

What is she doing here? She curses herself silently for her impetuousness. He skin itches and she walks further down the lane. From a dark doorway a man’s shape covers the moonlit street. Her wrists are grabbed and wrapped painfully together the bones grinding into each other.  Her breath catches in her throat as she is led quickly inside. It’s the church. Small and shadowed. The colored glass dingy, dust clinging to the corners.

“Anya Belov?” A rough voice. Anya cannot answer. Her eyes are on the bodies. So many of them. Dirty white sheets covering them. They are lined up near the wooden pews. She can still make out the dirty boots. Some small, some large. Here and there a small leather shoe, buckled on the side. A girl’s shoe. Anya still cannot speak. Her voice is gone. Suddenly the stench hits her nostrils and she reels back. The smell of blood and ….other things.  Near the end she sees one more set of boots. These she recognizes. She’s used a hard brush to scrub them and just recently repaired the sole with a paste. Her father’s boots.

Her arm is taken roughly and her gaze is ripped away from those boots. She stumbles and feels the burn of hot wax on her arm and hand. She’s knocked over one of the blunt flickering yellowed candles lining the alter. For a moment she is terrified. Her skin is on fire and as she frantically rubs at her arm it appears to peel off in strips. A scream is caught in her throat. It’s only wax. The hot wax hardening on her arm and crumbling at her worrying fingers.

The man pushes her roughly to the ground and her knees strike the stone earth with a sharp crack.

“Anya Belov?” He says again.

Her voice has left her. In front of her lies a body. And another one beside it, and another one beside that one. There are strands of long blond hair peeking out from under a sheet and the strands are stuck to the stone by globs of thick red. Anya hears a low whimper and realizes it’s come from her.

A click like a firecracker sounds at her ear and her head is shoved brutally. She wants to close her eyes but cannot. They are frozen open and begin to feel itchy and dry. But she cannot blink. She cannot breathe. An inky blackness seeps over her and she knows no more.

Next Chapter: Volgograd Russia, January 1920