Filip stopped reading. He met Dalek’s eyes, then looked at Anton. “Did he read it?”
Dalek nodded. Despite Larisa’s efforts to spare Anton, he knew the worst of it.
Filip couldn’t think of what to say. For him, the pain of losing a wife had been like having his heart thrown into a boiler. Nothing anyone said could make it better. And worry over a baby would only add to the pain. “Anton . . . I’m sorry.”
Anton stood and rushed from the boxcar.
Dalek grabbed Filip’s arm when he turned to follow Anton out. “Let him go.”
“What if he’s going to throw himself in front of a train?” Filip didn’t think Anton would, but he’d thought about it himself a few times since Nadia had left him. He wouldn’t have actually ended his life, but he’d grown reckless on patrols. Death had less of a sting when life sank into endless hurt.
Dalek released Filip with a nod.
Anton wasn’t within sight when Filip left the boxcar, but the mutt that followed Anton around was sitting and watching. Filip followed the dog’s gaze. A muffled sob rent the air, and Filip stood back, giving his friend privacy. Time passed slowly. A few more sobs. The dog crawled closer, but it, too, held back.
Which was worse? Knowing death had taken your wife and she was gone forever, even though she’d loved you? Or knowing you’d made a mistake and your wife had left voluntarily? She was still alive, might be happy even. She’d just discarded you.
The night was quiet, so Filip stepped forward. Anton sat with his back against a crate. His gaze flickered over Filip but didn’t meet his eyes. Filip sat beside him but didn’t say anything.
Anton inhaled and swallowed. “We never even had our own apartment. Just a curtained-off section of a zemlanky. I wanted to give her more than that, more than a life on the move as part of an army.”
“You gave her a son.”
“A son who’s probably dead. You’ve seen how typhus spreads.”
“You gave her a new country.”
“What good is a new country if she didn’t live to see it? And what good is it to me if everyone I love is buried in Russia?” The pain in Anton’s voice almost choked him.
Filip didn’t reply. Nothing he said could take the pain away, and Anton deserved time to grieve. Someday, he could take comfort in the fact that he’d loved Veronika and she had loved him and they’d worked together for a dream, started a family, done what they could with what time they’d been given. But that someday wasn’t today.
The notes of Dalek’s fiddle drifted on the warm night air.
“Where is my home?” Anton whispered. “It was always supposed to be wherever Veronika was.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Nadia took a rushed bite of bread, then slowed to a more ladylike pace. Forced labor was transforming her body, making it thinner, stooping her shoulders, bending her back. But she didn’t want it to change who she was inside. Dignity and pride were all she had left. That, the clothes on her back, and the Samoyed coats she slept on.
Elena coughed. It sounded worse today. Her husband, a priest, had died the week before, and Elena moved slower and slower each day.
“How are you, Elena?”
Elena forced a half-hearted smile. “I survived another day. That’s something.”
“The road’s almost finished. Maybe our next project will be easier.”
“It might be harder.”
Nadia knew that as well as anyone, but she was desperately trying to give Elena a reason to hope.
Elena patted Nadia’s hand. Both of them had rough, blistered skin, with dirt caked into the fine lines of their palms and knuckles. “You seem sad.”
Nadia tried to shrug off the despair that huddled about each of the prisoners, ready to grab them if given an opening. It would leach away their hope—and their lives. “I miss my husband. And I lost a baby this past winter. If things had been different, I’d be showing by now.”