Nikolai

Ruth Lawlor[dropcap style= boxed]H[/dropcap]e felt the bitter cold seep through his pores as he paused; his head tilted upwards, listening for something, anything other than the harsh grating of the deep winter wind in his ears. He was not a superstitious man but the sight of crimson tracks in the snow had unsettled him. He froze for only a moment, but it was enough for the fear to seize him in a desperate grasp. Suddenly, inexplicably, he felt completely and utterly alone.He glanced back at the easy smile of his companion and felt a sudden anger rising from within him. His duty was to protect the younger man trailing behind, an expression of bemused interest and childlike innocence eternally occupying his face. He was almost a brother to him, a brother born not of the union between man and woman but through a loving friendship, a friendship that he now knew would come to cost him dearly.

But then there were his lips; God’s gift to him as a man and as a lover, something to soften the harsh lines of his face and hint at the goodness that lay within him, buried somewhere like a corpse in the snow.

The voice of the teenager reached him through the blizzard, barely that of a man, his words clipped as he struggled to move his frozen lips.“You must not hide things from me, Sokolov,” he said evenly. “I see what you see. I am not afraid.”“I see nothing,” the older man replied, turning away. “Come. We must not stop here.”Sokolov was a difficult man to read, to understand. He was a strange creature, his arms lean and strong, his eyes betraying a deep, bitter history and his face marked with the scars of time long gone. His pallor was almost transparent despite the sallow hue to his skin, the caramel brown so rich it was almost yellow. He stood out against the wilderness of white, his dark skin and hair not fully hidden by the old furs that he wore.  His features were hard and chiselled as though carved from the very ice upon which he walked, yet this was an ice that would never melt for he was frozen from within, hardened by his own legacy.He was unusually handsome, despite a vast array of flaws. The eyes were both too narrow and far apart, the nose too large, the ears carelessly arranged in hair that was too long, like a mismatching pair of shoes that you wear anyway, because that’s what you’ve always done. But then there were his lips; those soft, red lips, so out of keeping with the dark shades of his complexion and even his character. They drew the eye to his face and gave it a disconcerting beauty. Uncannily feminine, the colour of blood spilled and fallen rose petals, they were God’s gift to him as a man and as a lover, something to soften the harsh lines of his face and hint at the goodness that lay within him, buried somewhere like a corpse in the snow.And his eyes were strange to behold, a startling cloudy blue set in a visage carved from some deep mahogany marble, if such a thing ever existed. It was almost as though there had been a mix-up in the workshop where he was moulded – there was doubtless an Aryan child somewhere with the chocolate-brown eyes that should have been his.Often he stared directly ahead as though lost in another place, not speaking for hours at a time. He never smiled, or rarely anyway, save for those precious few moments when he would laugh uncontrollably at possibly nothing at all, before the sound would fade and he became silent once more.The cold pressed more on him as he walked, his head bowed, muscles tensed. Long ago he realised that he had come to the boundaries of Dante’s own hell, not a ring of flame but a frozen wilderness of blood and guilt, the very ground on which he now walked. This was the land that both man and God had forsaken, a barren wasteland fit not even for sinners and slaves.The younger man came to stand beside him, a startling contrast to his companion. Smaller and stockier, his face bore the mark of adolescence, a hapless wonder that the world had not yet corrupted. He was as fair as the other was dark, his skin once tanned in the summer, but turned to the palest gold as they had left the sun behind them long ago. White-gold hair hung low in his eyes; keen, piercing eyes, the sign of an intelligence and fierce loyalty that would come with maturity and time.The boy’s sudden question startled him. “Where do we go when we die, Sokolov?”His reply was slow, almost hesitant, though he had known from the start what his answer would be.“The man who fights against his country and betrays her and deceives her, he will exist forever in the Russian winter, a spirit with no soul, wandering in the in-between. But the man who dies in the name of this country, with this country in his heart, he will be buried in the snow and become part of this very earth; each raindrop will bear his name and he will return to that from which he was made, living forever in each Russian child that is born, in every word that is spoken.”“And you, Sokolov, where will you go?”His shoulders dropped and his eyes grew sad. “I will go where the winds take me, my friend.”They fell silent then, each man troubled by his own thoughts of death, each knowing that they were never far away from God’s open arms. Sokolov no longer counted the days as they struggled through the mountains. He had long forgotten what the purpose was; only the boy kept him going, still smiling, still dreaming those dreams that only he could see.In the end it was not the desert that killed him, but desolation. As he laid his head on the frozen earth, he felt a hollow chill deep inside him, the empty chasm that remained as his pounding heart left him, lost in the Russian snows. Around him, nature paused, mourning her lost warrior, lamenting the one who had tried so hard.The young boy stayed with him until the end. He did not speak but let the dying wind whisper his friend’s last eulogy, knowing as he did so that he would not go on alone. From the ice he had come and to the ice he would always return.And so Nikolai came to rest on the hard snow, his head beside the other’s, crystals of cold clinging to his skin as his eyes closed for the final time. In the beginning the warmth of his breathing melted the ice but gradually it, too, began to slow as his body shut down, shielding itself from the cruelty of the elements. The rise and fall of his chest was almost disguised by the soft flutter of snowfall, his skin pale as the lonely moon.He had lived with his friend and so too would he die with him. That night the winter took him, and in the morning the fresh snow fell like teardrops from heaven, the final reminder that two men had fought for freedom, for all the living, and for all the dead.