Free Tin Sky by Ben Pastor

crossroads. In each case Bora promptly stopped the vehicle a few metres back and turned off the engine. The military police let him pass every time, without paying much attention to the Panzer non-com in the passenger’s seat. Then it was fields and ravines again, demolished farmhouses, rank grass and flowers going by, concealing or half-concealing the thickly manned expanse on this side of the Donets.
    Khan looked outside. At last he spoke, the cigar butt lodged in the corner of his mouth. “So. What marks did you get on the paper concerning your relative?”
    Bora was grateful to be addressed again. “Top marks, Commander. Mostly because I engaged in a sort of samokritika , by self-critically mentioning my hunch that Uncle Terry hadn’t fallen after all; far from it: that he’d gone on to a glorious military career in the Soviet Union.”
    “Intriguing. Give me a fresh cigar.”
    Bora did, holding out the lighter to his passenger. “ Such are the vagaries of fate , I commented, listing the arguments in favour of my thesis. You’ll appreciate it took some gumption for an officer cadet to make such an assertion in Cavalry School.”
    Khan took a puff. “You may have a cigar, too.”
    Not to mention his weeks in a Prague hospital battling pneumonia, Bora had quit smoking in June 1941, clearing his nostrils and lungs for heightened perception during reconnaissance duty. A cigar was the last thing he needed, but he deftly took out a second Soyuzie and lit it.
    They smoked from the upcoming crossroads to the other side of the tracks north of Bestyudovka without a word, facing away from each other, sending an acrid cloud up to the canvas top of the car and out of the side openings.
    “May I ask you a question, Commander Tibyetsky?”
    “Only if it doesn’t relate to my present task.”
    “It doesn’t. During the civil war, would you have defeated Ungern had his troops not mutinied on the way to Tibet?”
    “Absolutely. He was finished.”
    Silence again. Near Babai, less than ten kilometres from the Kharkov city limits, Khan seemed to lose a shade of his coolness for the first time. Had he betrayed himself? No. Bora simply felt it, and couldn’t have said why. The sensation was gone as soon as it came, and what in the Russian had actually occasioned it?
    By the time they reached the city gates, Khan was again a paragon of composure, on the side of a traveller’s boredom.Eyes closed, he kept his arms loosely folded on his hefty chest.
    “Did any of yours go crazy last winter?” The question came wholly unexpectedly. Pointless to wonder whether Khan had enough information about Bora to know he’d been at Stalingrad; besides, Stalingrad was on Bora’s mind but not necessarily his passenger’s. Bora’s delay in answering could in itself be a reply. Khan bit his cigar, without opening his eyes. “Some of ours did. Not to speak of civilians. If you don’t have a strong ideology, you go mad.”
    “Well, I think you can go mad regardless of ideology.”
    It ended there. They were now in the industrial periphery of the city, where unkempt open spaces alternated with built-up manufacturing areas; sluices and service roads ran side by side along torn fences, blind walls. Ruined smokestacks, like towers beheaded, formed pyramids of reddish bricks. The secondary lanes Bora was following, muddy with broken pipes, wormed through piles of rubble.
    Looking out for the first time in several minutes, Khan remarked, “Not exactly the high road to town.”
    Silently Bora considered his options. The most hazardous part of the trip lay just ahead, in the last two kilometres leading to the Velikaya Osnova district. Overhead the day, perfectly clear until now, was beginning to turn. A ridge of clouds to the west would soon swallow the setting sun, and there might be rain coming. Bora took it as an omen. “From here on, for credibility, the lower in rank ought to drive,” he said, braking and then stopping for the time needed to