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tarpaulin in place. ‘Then we’ll take them to the cemetery
and bury them.’
    Viktor and Petro helped unload the man’s belongings, piling them in one corner of the barn. It wasn’t much to account for a man’s life. A few odds and ends, items one might
collect on a long search to survive. I imagined what it must have been like to pull that sled, with its ugly cargo, across the snow for so long that it had wasted a man to almost nothing. I asked
myself what could drive a man to that kind of task, and I remembered what Natalia had said about the man’s injury. A single shot that had pierced and exited his body. An expertly dressed
wound. I’d seen evidence this man might have been a soldier, maybe even fighting the Germans before we pulled away from the war, so perhaps he had learned to dress a wound. But I wondered who
he’d been running from and who might be following him. It didn’t occur to me that the stranger might not have been running from anything. Someone might have been running from him.
    I watched Petro’s eyes trying to look away from the small bodies, and was dismayed he’d been adamant about coming with us. He was strong, but he was more sensitive than his brother.
Viktor had a harder heart, a stronger constitution. What Viktor saw, he took at face value, but his brother always looked deeper. Petro had his mother’s understanding of the world, and a
thing like this would haunt him. I could see the sadness and the revulsion in both their faces, but I knew it was Petro who would see this when he closed his eyes at night.
    When everything was unloaded, we covered the children once more and Viktor and Petro took up the reins and dragged the sled outside.
    I grabbed a couple of shovels and a pickaxe from the barn and jogged to catch up with them.
    ‘Put them on the sled,’ Viktor said, but I rested them against my shoulder like weapons and walked alongside my sons as we left the gates and headed out to the cemetery that lay
behind the church.
    I scanned the doors and windows as we passed among the houses, but I didn’t notice anybody watching us. It wasn’t that I wanted to keep secrets, but I didn’t want the other
villagers to worry. They didn’t need to share this. Burying a child is hard, and they’d had their fair share of hardship.
    The people of Vyriv had endured the shortages of the famine ten years ago. They had kept their heads low and survived on what little they could produce themselves, afraid they would be noticed
in their small valley. They had been spared the cholera and the extreme starvation, but it had been no easy time for them and many had died. Natalia’s parents had been among those who were
too weak to survive the hardship. Her father collapsed in the field, at the handles of his plough. His heart failed and he fell into the freshly turned soil, dying on the land he had sown for most
of his life. Natalia’s mother saw him fall, but she was old and her painful joints made her slow. He was dead by the time she reached him, and his death weakened her will to go on.
    Seeing the destruction caused by the famine, Lenin abolished grain requisitioning, allowed free trade and the country began to recover. Vyriv, like other villages in Ukraine, enjoyed a brief
period of prosperity, and the culture was allowed to flourish for a short while. The Ukrainian language was freely spoken once more. But Lenin’s successor was more ruthless and his demands
were higher. Stalin was threatened by the prospect of an independent Ukraine. He wanted the country’s food, its blood and its sweat, so he sent his soldiers to take it.
    The arrival of the stranger in the village would put the people on edge. They would be full of fear, sense the advent of something terrible, and I wanted to keep this from them because I was
afraid of what they might do. Especially if they saw what he had brought with him. I wanted to bury the children, put them to rest without them ever coming to the