Papers
Tino gingerly bent down, loosening the leather straps, and slipped his boots out of the ski bindings. The horrible stench of a battlefield that had so recently seen violence was barely muted by the gently falling snow. The dim light of the rising sun barely made visibility more than it had been the night before. He pulled his white scarf tightly around his kneck.
As he stepped out into the hastily cut clearing, he ran his fingers along the gouges cut into trees by bullets whipping through the night. He could feel this patch of land, like a scar standing out among the densely forested land in all directions.
There were a few men hurrying about, scavenging what they could. Tino caught the eye of one, and nodded to him, but no words were exchanged. A mutual understanding passed between them, and nothing more was needed.
He knew he should say something to the soldier. After all, he was the embodiment of the nation the man was defending. Should he not offer some words of comfort and reassurance? Had he not come here to do just that? But he could think of nothing to say. There were no words.
His eyes passed over Russian soldiers. Or at least, they tried to. But the bodies of the frozen men drew his violet eyes. He was fascinated, in a horrible, sick way, by the way the men lay. They were so lifelike, as if they had died moments ago instead of hours.
The wind picked up, and papers were lifted high into the snowy sky, swirling around, not unlike the snowflakes that were falling steadily upon the grim scene. They were pieces of Russian manuals, explain how to work the complex machinery that lay in pieces in the nearby forest. Propaganda in Tino's own language meant to be distributed to his own people. He reached for one, floating above his shoulder, but it drifted like a particularly elusive leaf falling from a tree in autumn, just outside the reach of his extended hand. It lay to rest on the chest of a man.
His khaki uniform was speckled with white flecks of fallen snow, slowly covering the bloodstains that had spread across the fabric in the night. He looked peaceful, his eyes closed. In his hands, he held a paper loosely. But unlike the ones that were scattered around the clearing, this was obviously not a result of a mass printing, meant to be read and shared by many. It was clear by the messy scrawl, the way it had been folded and unfolded many times, and by the fact that the man had taken his land seconds on this earth to remove it from his jacket and hold it in his hands, that this piece of paper was meant for only him.
Tino kneeled in the snow, careful not to go too near to the man. He leaned in slightly, just enough so he could make out the hastily written text on the worn page.
He grimaced at the words, not because of what they said, but simply the fact that he could read them. That the foreign alphabet on the page meant something to him was a sign of too many years in Ivan's house.
Curiously, the Finnish man gripped the top of the page and pulled gently. For despite his distasteful memories of the language, leaving the letter's contents a mystery was no longer an option.
'My Dear Kostya,' it began. Tino looked up over the top of the letter at the pallid face below him.
' I received your last letter just before the birthday of our little Maxim. He's three years old now, and missing his Papa dearly. Your sister comes by sometimes to help me care for him, but we are all anxiously waiting for you to return home… '
Tino sighed and gently blowed away pure white snowflakes that were settling on the graying paper.
He read the entire thing, learning about the live that the man who lay lifeless before him used to lead. It was the small things, the little details, the things that could not immediately be associated with a corpse, that made him so dead. This man had a wife, someone who loved him, and a son who was young and wishing for his papa to return home. He had a family, a sister, a mother, a father. He had dreams and hopes, and people who wished for him to achieve these things. He had made choices, some for the better, some for the worse, and now whether he regretted them or not, there was nothing he could do about it. And now he was gone and there was a gaping hole where his life used to be, taking along with it the places where the lives of the people he had mattered to overlapped. Somewhere in the Soviet Union, a young woman would soon be crying, holding her young son and telling him it was all going to be okay.
As Tino's eyes reached the end of the page, he became aware of the tears that had formed in the corners of his eyes.
The snow was thickening, the flakes no large, but falling at a greater volume and seemingly faster than minutes before. Tino bent down once again, carefully returning the letter to the man's hands.
He looked directly up, watching the white flecks twirl downward from the grey expanse above his head. His breath rose in thin plumes and mixed in with the greys and white of the sky.
He needed to finish this, what Ivan had started. He didn't want these people, these soldiers who did not want to be here, to die pointlessly, but what choice did he have? He was powerless as he was a force to be reckoned with.
His footsteps were almost instantly wiped out as he walked back to where his skis had been balanced up against a tall pine. The men who had been at the site of the battle earlier had either left or were no longer visible due to the falling snow.
Tino lay his skis down and began to strap his boots into them. He had seen enough, more than he had ever wanted to.
As he skied back through the woods, he saw the papers that had littered the clearing and the surrounding forest being slowly concealed by the whites of the falling snow. He wondered if that wasn't not for the better.
***
Hello Fanfiction,
I got the idea for this scene after reading some descriptions of Winter War battle scenes written by reporters who'd gone to the battlefields a few days after the battles had taken place. So that's kind of what's going on here.
For those of you who don't know, in 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland, intending to take it over quickly and without much loss on the Soviets part. However the Finns had other ideas. Unaccustomed to the Finnish terrain, and being forced to deal with the extremely cold temperatures of that year, the Soviets were having their own troubles, nevermind the highly organized and well-trained Finns. Though they were outnumbered 3-1, the Finns put up quite a fight, much to the surprise of their Soviet neighbours.
But the details are a story for another day, and I don't want to make the historical notes too long.
If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading and let me know what you think.
North-north-west