KOSTYA

1. The Genocide

1932. Mariupol, Ukraine.

Ukraine’s flag, the blue of the sky over the yellow of the wheat, was breaking its promise. Here, the earth had always generously rewarded the farmers who worked it. In summer, the steppe should have rolled in golden wheat, with the strands bowing in the wind whispering like poems without words. The black earth, rich enough to stain a man’s skin, had fed villages and empires for centuries.

But now the fields were bare. Scraped clean. Stubble and dust replaced grain, the stalks cut so short they looked wounded. The horror was man-made. The land itself was blameless.

Fruit trees were stripped months earlier—of fruit and even bark. There were no longer any pigs, goats, chickens, or horses in the yards.

Even dogs and cats vanished.

Under the collectivization law, the USSR seized farms that families had owned and worked for generations. Then the grain. Even the seed grain. The borders were sealed so that starving families could not slip out across the republic line. The word for it was unknown to the children. They knew hunger. They saw starvation everywhere they looked.

Blacklists finished what quotas began. Villages that failed to meet impossible demands were cut off entirely: no salt, no matches, no kerosene, no cloth. People were starved of food, but also everything that made life recognizable. It was punishment for the crime of being Ukrainian, for having land the state wanted and an identity Stalin found offensive to the grandeur of the USSR.

People learned to walk slowly to conserve strength, shoulders hunched as if guarding their last meal. They avoided one another’s eyes out of fear, not because they were being unneighborly. Those who still had strength dug for roots, scraped lichen from stone, boiled weeds until the pot yielded only colored water. Those who did not, lay down and waited, while their own bodies disintegrated.

In Mariupol, a quaint port city on the Sea of Azov, the famine arrived like a slow tide. It rose so gradually that people did not notice until it was at their throats.

Behind a small white house with blue shutters on a corner lot, three boys had built a tree fort from scrap lumber scavenged off broken fences and abandoned sheds. It was hardly a fort at all, just crooked boards forming a small platform in a gnarled oak tree. No roof. Yet to the boys it was a kingdom. A hiding place from the men in Moscow.

On the top step, really just a board nailed to the trunk, their names were carved with a pocketknife: PETRO, GRISHA, KOSTYA. On the step below: KEEP OUT. The last words had been Kostya’s idea. At eight, he was the youngest, and least entitled to make such proclamations, but his brothers agreed to his idea to stake their claim to this sovereign space. They sometimes grew irritated with his impatience but also praised his tenacity, though none of them could imagine how one day the latter would be tested beyond endurance.

This afternoon, Kostya sat cross-legged, playing fivestones with small rocks he’d polished in the creek. He had sandy brown hair. His shirt, passed down from Grisha, who had received it from Petro, hung loose on his narrow shoulders. His trousers were cinched with rope. There wasn’t a belt small enough.

From their height in the fort they could see the side street.

They could also see the body. And the black shimmer of flies around him.

The old man lay half in the road, clothed, bloated, his cheek turned into the dirt as if he had tried to taste the earth and found nothing there either.

Kostya kept his eyes on the stones. Children learned early what to look at and what to pretend not to see. His fingers were thin, the knuckles too sharp for an eight-year-old, and when he tossed the stones his wrist showed a corded bone.

Petro, twelve and therefore the leader, leaned with his back against the oak trunk that supported the fort. He did not watch his brothers so much as the world beyond them. He watched the bend in the road, where people appeared and disappeared. Hunger had sharpened him. He spoke less now, and when he did, it was with caution.

Grisha, eleven, lay on his stomach and peered through a gap in the boards at the yard below. He could see Mama’s empty garden where the last potatoes and corn had been dug up a week ago.

Sometimes he still acted like the boy he had been. He was the quiet one. He still asked questions, though fewer now. When he laughed, the sound came thin and brief, as if it lost its way before reaching his eyes.

Kostya rolled a stone across his skin, then tossed it upward and reached for another. His fingers missed. The stone clicked against the plank and skittered away. He gathered the rest and tried again. Missed again. In better times he had been quick as a sparrow. Now his hands shook, his fingers clumsy, as if his body were forgetting how to be a child.

“Your turn,” Kostya said, lifting his chin up toward Petro.

His voice came out hoarse. They had learned to conserve water by not speaking unless necessary, but the silence in the fort had grown heavy, and someone had to break it.

Petro shook his head slowly. “I’m not playing.”

“You have to. It’s your turn.”

“I said no.”

Grisha rolled onto his back and stared up through the leaves, already yellowing despite the season. “We’re not playing because it’s too hot.”

It was not too hot. Heat was the least of their discomforts. None of them wanted to say what they were thinking: that games felt foolish when a dead man lay in the road, when their bellies cramped with emptiness, when Mama was inside trying to invent supper out of nothing, when Papa came home each day with less strength in his shoulders and more silence in his mouth. And Grandpa was so thin he could barely move.

As if summoned by thought, their mother’s voice floated up from the back door. “Boys! Papa will be home soon. Go fetch loboda for supper.”

Supper.

The word hung in the air like a cruel joke. Loboda was a weed, a plant that grew wild along fences and in vacant lots.

Now it was life itself. Boiled into a thin green broth, it filled the stomach for an hour and gave almost nothing in return.

Kostya gathered his stones and tucked them into his pocket. He climbed down first, bare feet finding familiar knots in the trunk. Petro followed, then Grisha. On the ground they stood blinking in the harsh sunlight, adjusting from their small kingdom back to the world below.

Their clothes were clean. Mama insisted on that. But they couldn’t afford to replace torn clothes. When they turned toward the house, the truth of their bodies could not be ignored: hollow cheeks, shadows beneath eyes too large. In those eyes lived knowledge no child should have—the knowledge of what it meant to starve.

Petro rested a hand on Kostya’s shoulder. The weight of it was almost nothing, but the gesture from the older brother always meant a lot.

“You can start the fire, Grisha,” Petro said. “I’ll go with Kostya.”

Grisha nodded and went inside without argument.

Petro and Kostya moved through the side yard and out the crooked front gate. They turned onto the dirt road that ran beside their property, the road that passed beneath the tree fort.

The road where the old man lay.

Disturbed by their footsteps, the flies rose in a cloud. The buzzing filled the stillness. Kostya tried to hold his breath as they passed, but his lungs were weak and he had to gasp before they had gone ten steps. His throat burned.

“He’s still here,” Kostya said. The boys had first noticed him yesterday.

The words were unnecessary, but Kostya was so bewildered by it all. And he needed to mark the man’s presence, somehow. The man had once been somebody’s child. Somebody’s husband. Somebody’s neighbor.

Petro said nothing. He stared once, then looked away. His eyes had hardened in recent months, for a boy forced to grow old too quickly. He had stopped asking why. Petro had learned to accept what was. He would always say, “Just focus on what we can do.”

They walked another block. Houses on either side showed the famine’s handwriting: gardens scraped bare, windows cracked, doors left open because there was nothing worth stealing. Some stood empty—abandoned by those who had fled, died, or been taken when men with clipboards came demanding more grain than was possible to provide.

Across the street, a sound cut through the hush: the high, thin wail of a child.

Kostya looked, but immediately wished he hadn’t.

A toddler crawled across the body of a woman sprawled on the side of the road. The child pawed at her face, tugged her hair, pressed a cheek against skin that no longer held warmth, as if touch alone might coax life back. The cry was for something older than food or comfort. Something without language.

Kostya turned away. He had nothing to give. The sound followed him anyway, burrowing a deep memory.

Petro watched with hard eyes. He had a cold resolve that frightened Kostya. Petro’s eyes showed a determination to live, even if it meant learning how to keep walking without caring.

They went on.

Near the edge of the village stood a communal pit. It was not a cemetery, only a wide trench dug when individual burials became impossible. Beside it, a wagon pulled by a small emaciated horse, its bed stacked with bodies wrapped in white sheets. Two men—prisoners, judging by their clothes—dragged them out and laid them into the earth. The horror of it seemed routine.

The pit smelled of soil and something beneath soil. Kostya’s stomach clenched for reasons that had nothing to do with hunger.

Each day the pit grew wider and deeper. No names were spoken. Lives disappeared as if they had never been.

Kostya counted seven.

Seven more.

He wondered who did know their names. For the first time, he wondered if anyone would remember his.

“Come on,” Petro said, tugging his sleeve. “We must find the loboda before dark.”

They turned into a vacant lot where a house had once stood. Only the foundation and a chimney jutting upward like a broken finger remained. Everything else had been pulled apart for firewood.

Beyond the lot, the woods began with a dense thicket of birch, oak, and wild shrubs left untended. In better years, children came here to pick berries. Now the berries were gone.

Two gaunt men knelt near the entrance, plucking weeds and stuffing them into sacks. Neither looked up. Everyone knew the etiquette of hunger: you do not acknowledge another scavenger.

Petro led the way deeper along a narrow trail. The ground softened underfoot, damp in places where the sun couldn’t reach. After a minute he stopped.

“There,” he pointed. “This looks decent.”

A patch of pale green leaves on thin stalks spread across the ground. Loboda was unremarkable in any other time, but to the starving, they were life.

They knelt and began pulling.

The work was steady and quiet, and for some reason Kostya remembered an evening last winter when Papa brought home small scraps of wood and metal and shaped them into toys just to hear his sons laugh.

He thought of Papa, forced by the quotas, to leave early every morning to work first at a collective farm, before putting in the rest of the day holding his regular job at the mechanic shop. Yet he returned each evening, apparently tired, still with a shining light inside him when he greeted his family. Papa always kissed Mama’s cheek.

He remembered Grandpa pushing his bowl away yesterday. “You boys need it,” Grandpa always said, his voice stern, as if refusing food were a kind of duty.

He recalled how Mama always put less in her own bowl and gave more to the boys.

Soon each boy had a bundle. The leaves wilted quickly in the heat.

“This is enough,” Petro said. “Let’s go.”

They were weak but they were still boys. Somewhere beneath fear and exhaustion remained a spark of what they had been. So they jogged along the trail, not far or fast, but together. A reminder that their bodies still belonged to them. They still had memories of sprinting.

The sun was low when they reached home. The western sky burned orange and pink, and long shadows stretched across the yard. Smoke rose from the chimney. Through the open door came Mama’s humming, thin but steady, as if sound itself were holding the walls upright.

Grisha knelt by the black iron stove, feeding sticks into the flames. Mama stood at the counter cleaning the dishes.

Petro and Kostya handed her the loboda. She accepted it with a tired smile. She had aged a decade in a year. Her dark hair was threaded gray, but her hands remained gentle.

“We got a lot,” Kostya said, trying to sound hopeful. “Mostly green.”

“That is good, my love,” Mama said. “That is very good.”

As she did each night, she pulled one ear of corn from a pile in the cabinet and peeled it. She poured some water hauled from the well that morning into the kettle and put the corn in. Then she put the kettle on the stove.

She rinsed the weeds and the leftover corn husk. She ripped the husk into small pieces and tossed it and the loboda into the kettle.

Soon the room filled with the thin, grassy smell of boiling corn and loboda. Kostya would always associate this smell with survival and with shame.

They could all see the last of the corn from the garden resting on the shelf. The pile was down to five ears.

Papa entered. He was a tall man. His clothes hung loose on his frame. But his eyes, when they found his sons, still held light. He tried to smile, and the effort itself was a kind of courage.

“Good evening,” Papa said. “How are we doing, boys?”

“Papa!” Kostya ran to him and wrapped his arms around his waist. “Good. We are good.”

“Fine,” Petro said.

Papa drew Petro and Grisha into the embrace as well. For a moment they stood together, taking strength from touch since food could not provide it. Papa’s shirt smelled of oil and metal—the honest smell of work. Kostya pressed his face into it and inhaled. Papa had come back. These days, that couldn’t be assumed.

On the wall hung a faded photograph from the Great War. Young men in uniform, rifles on their shoulders. Among them, barely recognizable, was Papa. He looked proud and strong.

Grandpa sat by the window, watching the last light fade. He had grown so thin his bones showed beneath the skin. His hands trembled. His breath came shallow. His eyes remained sharp.

He reached into his pocket and set two medals on the table. They glimmered.

“Boys,” Grandpa said. “I have saved these a long time. They will stay in this room now. Do not ever take them out.”

Petro was sitting on the bench beside the table. He turned one over carefully. To Kostya, it looked heavy and precious.

Kostya leaned impatiently into Petro’s shoulder. “Let me see. Is this yours, Grandpa?”

Petro scolded, “Calm down. We can all see it.”

“That one is mine,” Grandpa said. “The other is your papa’s. For bravery.” He paused. “His brigade was captured in Odessa. Hard labor in Austria-Hungary.”

The boys listened with admiration. But war stories were scars, not entertainment.

“He escaped,” Grandpa said. “Walked home. Over a thousand kilometers through enemy territory. With nothing but the clothes on his back.” His eyes shone. “If he had not been so strong, you boys would not exist.”

He tried to laugh, but could only cough instead. “Remember that. Strength runs in this family. The strength to do work that seems impossible.” His gaze held each boy in turn.

Darkness fell. Papa took a thin pine splinter, a luchyna, and lit it from the stove. Resin caught and flared, and the small flame licked up the wood with a bright impatience. They could not afford kerosene anymore. The luchyna hissed and smoked, and Papa left the door open so the smoke could drift out instead of choking the room. The light it gave was poor, but it was light.

The family gathered at the table. Mama ladled soup into mismatched bowls. Papa first, then Grandpa, then Petro, Grisha, Kostya, and finally herself. The order had not changed.

“Remember, boys...” Papa waited until they all met his eyes. “I want you to eat very slowly.” He paused again. “We survive if we stick together.”

They ate in silence, savoring each sip, chewing the softened loboda as if it were meat. The soup was thin enough to see the bottom of the bowl, and still it was treated with care.

Kostya scraped the last drops from his bowl with his finger.

The luchyna burned down. Papa lit another.

The family remained seated together in the flickering light, waiting for sleep to carry them away from hunger for a few hours.