As Emil trudged through Birsula six months into the Holodomor, he had the wind in his face, and he was lost in a series of dull, repetitive thoughts of fear and want. He didn’t realize that he’d wandered to a road that ran along the rear of the rail yard and the train station.

Emil had not wanted to come to this place ever again, but there he was, and he looked all around now, seeing newly starved corpses and the near dead sprawled against the fence that surrounded the rail yard. Scattered among them and still standing, the merely starving and desperate clung to the chain-link fence, looking at a small mountain of wheat not eighty meters away.

Four armed soldiers stood around the huge wheat pile while others worked at it with shovels, turning the grain over, exposing the kernels to the mist so when the sun returned and beat down on enough food to feed the city for weeks, it all would simply rot. Emil did not want to look at the wheat, but he could not help himself. He went around a weeping woman holding her dying child and to the fence where he gazed at the grain as if it were a mirage or dream.

He fantasized what he might do with his pockets and hands full of that wheat. He could almost smell the bread in the oven.

One of the soldiers laughed. Emil heard him, shook off the fantasy, and then saw him. Cigarette in his mouth. Hacking laugh. He’s not starving, is he?

The more Emil thought about the well-fed Russian soldiers deliberately destroying food in front of starving people, the more a primal anger flared in him. What had he ever done to Joseph Stalin? What had any of his family done to Joseph Stalin? Why would you kick good farmers off their land and then deny food to innocent people?

Why would a just, kind, and benevolent God let this happen?

Since the Horror began, Emil had been to the rail station twice before, and each time he’d left feeling helpless and doubting the existence of a power beyond himself. Before he could sink into those dark feelings this time, he remembered his father telling him that God helps those who help themselves.

But then a weaselly voice inside him said, Trust in no power but your own, Emil. If you want to be saved, save yourself.

At once unnerved and emboldened by that voice, Emil decided he would have to venture outside the city again. He would walk and search until he found food or dropped dead in his tracks. He pondered which direction to go in. To the east, he might find an unharvested beet or turnip patch. But he decided instead to head west toward farmland that had creek bottoms running through it.

From his days on the farm, Emil knew that by early March, creek bottoms that had not flooded were often green and lush with edibles if you knew what you were looking for. He might find the baby ferns his mother used to pick and cook or pickle in brine. Or baby asparagus shoots. Or mushrooms. Or freshly laid duck eggs. Or the carcass of a winter-kill rabbit, still frozen in the last of the snow.

Or he might walk until his legs would not work anymore.

Emil had seen the way starving people went from walking and talking to suddenly tipping over on legs that would no longer support them. Then they just lay there, some of them mewing like newborn kittens, begging their mothers for milk.

Go west, he thought, and tore himself away from the fence around the rail yard. Those creek bottoms.

But within blocks, Emil knew he would not make it to the first of the creeks nearly five kilometers away. Or if he did make it, unless he was lucky and found food immediately, he’d probably die there. He was simply too weak to walk all that way and then forage.

All he really needed was just a little food. A little food and he could make the walk with enough energy left to find his next meal and the one after that.

It began to snow. Emil sat down by the side of the road to conserve his energy and to decide whether to seek shelter or food. Across the street, in a little park, he noticed a starving woman, who stumbled, sprawled, and did not move. He felt sorry for her, and if he could have helped her, he would have. If he’d had food, Emil would have given her some. But he was beyond being shocked at people suddenly collapsing. He saw it happen nearly every day now.

The image and voice of the cackling, well-fed soldier from behind the train station filled Emil’s mind, made him angry all over again. That Russian soldier would smoke cigarettes today. That Russian soldier would destroy food and eat well today while he, Emil, had nothing.

Nothing.

He fumed on that, understanding that other people in the world were not starving and that even some local people in Birsula were getting more than enough food on a regular basis, local people allied with the party, with Joseph Stalin.

Oddly, Emil did not feel more resentment, more helplessness. Instead, that weaselly voice deep inside him said, Go, steal from them, Emil. The party men. Steal from them and save yourself.

The thought at once terrified and thrilled him. Emil knew if he were caught, he’d be sent to a work camp. Or shot. But he didn’t dwell long on those options or the fear of them, because he knew he would soon die if he did nothing, and he rather liked the idea of stealing from the bastards watching him starve to death.

There was an inch of wet snow on the ground by the time Emil had walked through the city and found a large dacha behind a high wall. He used to see the man who lived in the house often out on the collective farm. One day the prior December, he’d seen the same man enter through the gates of this dacha.

Emil knew the man was a high-ranking party member overseeing grain production in the region. Everyone in agriculture within fifty kilometers of Birsula worked for him. Emil didn’t know the party leader’s name and didn’t want to. He was the cold bastard who’d driven them mercilessly to bring in a big harvest the year before. He was the same cold bastard who’d given it all to Stalin. And Emil was betting that he was the kind of cold bastard who could feast while his neighbors were starving to death.

For a fleeting moment, he remembered the commandment “Thou shall not steal,” then dismissed it. This was different. He was doing it to survive. And he knew for a fact that others had done much worse to survive the Horror. He’d heard of children disappearing all over Ukraine. He’d heard of people eating their young.

All Emil was doing was stealing from someone who had too much.

He went to the alley that ran behind the man’s house and others on that side of the street, meaning to look at the back of the home, close to the kitchen. If there was a kitchen, there would be a pantry or a larder. There would be food there he could steal.

Emil entered the alley at dusk, no longer thinking about how hungry he was or how tired he was. His heart raced as he anticipated figuring out how best to break into the kitchen after the man and his family and servants had gone to sleep. When would that be? Four, five hours?

He’d be smart, though. He’d wait five hours and then check the doors and the windows. Surely one of them would be left unlocked in the spring after a long, cold winter. If he had to, he’d break a pane on a basement window. He’d get inside and—

Ahead of Emil, well down the alley in back of the party leader’s house, the gate opened. A woman wearing an apron brought out a garbage can, set it by the gate with others, and then returned inside.

At once all thoughts of burglary left him. The scraps of a man who ate well could not compare to the contents of the man’s pantry, but at twenty-one, Emil had already been so badly beaten down by history and circumstance that he was past begging for better fortune.

After waiting a few anxious moments for the cook to return inside and giving in to fantasies of pork gristle or an old ham rind or a soup bone he could gnaw and crack for marrow, Emil stole toward the garbage can, so focused on the object of his desire that he did not see the other man emerge from the alley’s deeper shadows, moving fast toward that same desire.

Finally, they saw each other and stopped ten feet apart, the garbage can midway between them and to their left. It was getting dark now, but Emil knew he faced a much taller and bigger man. The height was undeniable, but the illusion of bulk could have been the long coat the shadow wore and his wild hair and unkempt beard.

His whisper came raspy, menacing in Russian. “That’s my can, friend. My alley, too. Take another step, and I will kill you.”

Emil stood his ground, studied the man’s silhouette closely, and said, “If I don’t take a step, I’ll die.”