The Child Thief Read Online Free PDF

ran a hand across my beard. ‘Do you think a man could find a taste for it?’
    Natalia sat back. ‘That’s too horrible to even think about.’
    I had seen it before. After we’d fought the small detachment of red soldiers, we’d entered the skeletal village to look for food and survivors. The povolzhye famine was not
yet in full swing, but grain requisitions, disruptions to agriculture and drought had squeezed everything from the Volga-Ural region, and disease and starvation was spreading. First the war with
the central powers, then the civil war had taken the heart and life from the country and it was beginning to die. People were so hungry that seed grain was eaten before it could be sown. Farm
animals had all been butchered, as had dogs, cats, anything that would provide meat. People foraged for whatever sustenance they could find because their cellars and their bellies were empty. They
ate rotten potatoes, grass, nettles, bark from the trees. They filled themselves with water, distending their stomachs, swelling their legs, making their eyes bulge and their skin sag. And finally
they dropped in the streets with no one strong enough to bury them or take them away. Then came rumours that people had begun to eat their own dead.
    I had found evidence in that unnamed village. A place with no more than a few homes scattered around smallholdings which had been ransacked and burned, the charred wood blackened and bleak.
    We had checked each home that was still intact, knocking on the doors and going inside to search for food, but we didn’t need to open cupboards because they were already left open to
display their emptiness. We looked beneath tables and searched cellars, stepping over the wasted bodies of women and children left to rot. We covered our faces and noses, searching only because we
were desperate and because desperate men will do almost anything they have to do to survive. And then I discovered the one thing I would not do.
    In one house I found an emaciated man standing by a large pot that boiled on the wood-burning stove. He was like a dead man animated, a corpse dressed in rags. And, at his feet, a naked body
with slices of flesh cut from the backs of its legs.
    ‘Luka.’
    ‘Hmm?’ Once more Natalia jarred me from my memories. ‘What?’
    She drew her arms around herself and stared at the wall. I didn’t know if she was looking to where our children lay asleep or simply trying not to look at the stranger smothered in
blankets by the fire. ‘You really think someone might do that when they didn’t have to?’
    ‘Are there people who like it, you mean? I don’t know. Maybe it’s possible.’
    ‘We can’t have him in our house. We have to get him out.’
    ‘Right now he’s harmless.’
    ‘So why are you watching him? And why do you have that?’
    I smiled without humour and lifted the pistol. ‘To be safe.’
    ‘You should have left him,’ she said. ‘Out there.’
    ‘That’s what Viktor said.’
    ‘So maybe he was right.’
    ‘He would have died.’
    Natalia shrugged.
    ‘Would you want that?’ I asked. ‘Would you want to go to bed each night, knowing your husband and son had left a man to die?’
    ‘You were a soldier,’ she said. ‘I manage to sleep knowing you’ve done the kind of things soldiers do.’
    ‘This is different. What kind of a person would I be if I didn’t do something to help? What kind of a human being would I be?’
    She remained silent.
    ‘There are things on his sled,’ I told her. ‘Things he has with him that make me think he’s a veteran.’
    ‘Of what? Which war?’
    I looked down at the pistol. ‘I’ve seen weapons like this before. Some of the German soldiers carried them. The Bolshevik commissars used something similar during the civil war, but
this one came from a German. The number on the handle tells me that. This man might have fought the Germans, Natalia, and that means he was in the Imperial Army like me. It’s like he’s