Under a Blood Red Sky (15 page)

Urgently he scanned the bobbing heads. Where was Pyotr? He would be here somewhere. His son’s seemingly infinite capacity for absorbing Communist propaganda made Mikhail clench his teeth, but right now all he wanted was to find him and get him safe. Tonight there would be violence.

Even as the thought entered his head, the crack of a rifle shot ricocheted through the night air outside, bouncing off the izba walls and sending shivers through the valley. A woman screamed inside the hall.

By now the crowd was thinning. A stone abruptly exploded in through one of the side windows as somebody expressed their rage, scattering glass and drops of rain over the empty benches. Mikhail took a deep breath.

‘Pyotr!’ he roared.

‘Papa!’

A huge wave of relief rushed through Mikhail as he caught sight of his son. The boy was right at the front, struggling ineffectually in the massive grip of Pokrovsky. The blacksmith was holding him there, indifferent to Pyotr’s kicks, quietly keeping him out of harm’s way. Mikhail raised a hand to Pokrovsky.

‘
Spasibo
,’ he mouthed. ‘Thank you.’

Pokrovsky allowed a thin smile in acknowledgement, but his eyes moved to the broken window and the lifeless leaves swirling in on the wind like omens. The big man ran the edge of his free hand across his own broad throat.
Smert.
Death. It was out there.

‘You always seem to be the bringer of bad news.’

Mikhail did not pause in his efforts to elbow a path down to the front of the hall but glanced fleetingly at the person who had spoken. To his surprise it was the girl he’d met in that candle-lit moment before dawn this morning, the gypsy’s niece, the one who seemed to have come from a different world. Her strange blue eyes looked at you as if seeing someone else, the someone you keep hidden from public gaze. She was standing in the aisle in front of him, still as stone, letting the flow of people break and reform around her. She was smiling at him. What the hell was there to smile about?

‘These days most news is bad news,’ Mikhail muttered.

She nodded but her words told a different story. ‘Not always,’ she said.

He wanted to push past to reach Pyotr but something about her held him there for a moment, and when an elderly babushka elbowed him against her, he found himself staring deep into her face, only inches from his own. He could smell the sweet scent of juniper on her breath.

She was painfully thin, bones almost jutting through her skin, and she had the bruised shadows of semi-starvation in the hollows of her face. But her eyes were extraordinary. Wider and bluer than a summer sky, glittering in the light from the lamps, full of something wild. And they were laughing at him. For one strange and unnerving second he thought she was actually looking right into him and rummaging through his secrets. Abruptly he recalled the veiled threat she’d made the last time he spoke to her and he forced himself to recoil.

‘You should go home,’ he said, more abruptly than he intended.

‘Home?’ She cocked her head to one side and studied him. ‘Where is home?’

‘You’re living with the gypsies, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then show some sense. Go and stay there. This night has only just started.’

‘You and I,’ she said in a voice so low he barely heard it in the hubbub around him, ‘have only just started.’

He frowned and shook his head. Each time they met she seemed to have a way of knocking him off balance. He broke free from her smile. ‘Pyotr!’ he shouted again.

The boy was released and started to clamber over the benches towards him. But halfway down the hall Priest Logvinov was standing erect like a scarecrow, raised up on one of the bench seats, his red hair like flames around his head, the cross brandished like a weapon.

‘Abomination!’ he boomed out. ‘Thou shalt have no other god before me, saith the Lord.’ His finger pointed at Stirkhov’s chest, as if it would drill through to the blasphemous heart within it.

‘Don’t, Priest,’ Mikhail shouted.

He saw Stirkhov, alone now on the platform, deliberately push over the metal table so that it fell with a screech on to the floor. With no sign of haste the
Raikom
Deputy drew a Mauser pistol from inside his leather jacket and pointed it straight at the ranting figure less than ten metres in front of him.

‘Priest! Get down!’ Mikhail bellowed, hurling himself towards the bench.

But it was the strange girl who saved him. ‘Aleksandr Stirkhov,’ she called, loud and clear above the noise in the hall. The muzzle of the gun wavered as he turned his head.

All she did was smile at him, but instantly the soft pink tip of Stirkhov’s tongue peeked out from between his lips.

Her smile widened, warm and distracting.

Time enough. For Mikhail to reach the exposed priest, drag him down into the crowd and push him along with the jostling flow to the door.

‘
Christe eleison
,’ the priest uttered solemnly in Latin. ‘Christ have mercy on us in this unbelieving world.’

Suddenly Pyotr’s worried face appeared at Mikhail’s elbow. He seized his son’s arm in one hand and the girl’s in the other and propelled them both through the door.

Davinsky Camp July 1933

Anna stole half a potato from the camp kitchen. She was getting good at it. Or was it just that she was becoming invisible? It was more than possible.

When she looked at her arms and legs all she could see beneath the mosquito bites was a skeleton covered in an almost transparent grey film, so transparent that she could see the bones underneath. They peered through in glimpses of white. She sometimes prodded them with her finger – to test how strong they were, she told herself, but really it was to make sure they were still there.

She didn’t want to steal the potato, any more than she’d wanted to steal the bread last week or the greasy strip of pork fat the week before that. Each time she knew she’d be caught, and each time she was. A shriek of protest from a kitchen worker; a firm grip dragging her to the floor. But always too late. She’d already crammed the food into her mouth before they could wrench it back from her. She’d taken the punishment beatings and prayed that the white sticks under her skin wouldn’t snap. So far they hadn’t, but they’d come close. If she was caught stealing again they’d shoot her.

She felt the solid lump of boiled potato work its way, one millimetre at a time, down into her stomach where it settled warm and comforting, like a friend. She patted the hollow cavity where she assumed her stomach still lay. No, not
like
a friend. Because of a friend. Because of Sofia.

Anna smiled and felt absurdly happy. She had achieved something positive, keeping herself alive for one more day, and it had been so simple this time, she couldn’t believe it.

‘You!’ a guard, the one with scabs on his eyebrows, had yelled at her when she was left behind in the yard after roll-call. ‘Get over here.
Bistro!’

She had to concentrate when she moved, was conscious of sliding one foot forward, then the other, then the first one again. Like pushing logs uphill. She was slow and he was impatient, so he clipped her elbow with his rifle butt.

‘Unload those boxes into the kitchen. And be careful,
suka, you stupid bitch. They’re new.’

It was that easy. Shift boxes. Unload pans. Keep eyes on floor. Place each iron pot on shelf. Slip potato in pocket. No beating. No punishment cell.

‘For you, Sofia,’ she whispered and again rubbed the contented spot where the potato lay. She’d promised herself and she’d promised Sofia. But waiting was hard and time after time she had to oust the thought that it would be much easier to lie down and die. With a raw gasp, she started to cough.

Are you coming, Sofia? Or is life out there too good?

‘Listen!’ Anna exclaimed. She paused from her task of stripping branches, axe in mid-air. ‘Listen to that.’ The other prisoners hesitated.

It was birdsong. A pure silken note that rose and fell and filled the air with the sweet sound of freedom. It set up an ache in Anna’s heart.

‘Get on with your work, if you’ve any sense,’ growled the short Muscovite who had toiled all day beside Anna with the silent precision of a machine and never missed her norm.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Anna insisted.

‘What good is beauty to me? I can’t eat it.’

Anna returned to lopping limbs off the tree. The tall graceful pine lay stiff as a fallen soldier at her feet, oozing its sticky sap. She had long ago passed the point where she felt any sorrow for the forest and the systematic massacre of thousands of trees taking place within it, because in a labour camp there was no room for such feelings. Nothing existed except work, sleep and food. Work. Sleep. Eat. Above all, eat. It frightened her sometimes to feel that her humanity was slipping away from her and she feared she was becoming no more than a forest animal, chewing on twigs and scrabbling in the earth for roots.

And then a small drab-brown bird opened its beak and the sound that poured forth brought her winging back to the human race. To the memory of a Chopin waltz and a young man’s arm sweeping her off her feet. The ache grew worse inside her.

‘Yes,’ she said to the bent back of the woman from Moscow. ‘You can feed on beauty.’

‘
Blyad!
’ the woman swore contemptuously. ‘You’ll be dead before the year is out.’

Anna had no intention of dying. Not yet anyway.

She sank her axe into the scented white wood with determination, sweeping away the last tangle of feathery branches and moving on to the next trunk in the row. Around her, for as far as she could see, bent figures chopped and hacked and cursed their way through the thousands of felled pines, preparing them for their rafting trek downriver. Anna slapped a hand on the insects that settled greedily on her sweat-soaked skin. The mosquitoes were even worse than usual today. The sun burned above her, heating up this water-logged landscape so that the marshes hummed with newly-winged life. The insects drove everyone mad. But she’d promised Sofia that she would hold on.

Sofia, be quick.

She wouldn’t let herself think of the possibility that Sofia might be dead. It was too agonising a thought, too black and too huge to fit inside her head. Instead she watched the forest each day for movement among the trees, for a shadow that shouldn’t be there. She remembered clearly the first time she ever laid eyes on Sofia. It was back in the bitter winter of 1929 when Anna had not long been a prisoner in the camp and was as green and as soft as the wood she was chopping into.

‘Davay! Davay! Let’s go, scum of the earth!’

The guards had stamped their feet on the hard packed snow, in a hurry to move the prisoner brigades on to the next timber haul a verst away.

‘
Bistro! Quickly!’

Anna had cursed her axe. It was too small and too blunt, the useless blade had stuck fast in the wood.

‘
Bistro! ’

Anna had knelt on the branch, widening the gap between it and the trunk, and yanked the blade free. Everything hurt: the muscles in her back; the skin on her knees; the blisters on her feet; the tendons in her wrists; even the teeth in her head. And now lesions were appearing on her face and they frightened her. She’d hacked again and again at the last two branches but each time an iron-hard knot in the wood resisted her blows. She began to panic.

Frantically she tore at the branch with her hands, aware of the other brigades moving off, but her gloves had ripped and pain stabbed into her finger. A hand, strong and muscular, pulled at her shoulder and pushed her roughly to one side before she could object. An axe swung in a wide arc a hand’s breadth from her cheek, a blue smear in the white air, its blade finely honed. It had sliced neatly through the branch, which flew off with a crack into the trampled snow, followed almost instantly by the second one. The tree was stripped and ready to be hauled.

Anna had studied the owner of the axe. She was a tall young woman, wearing the regulation rough camp dress swamped under a padded jacket with her prison number on front and back, and a wool cap with earflaps tied under her chin. Her legs were wrapped in layers of rags and on her feet were shoes cobbled together out of birch bark and old rubber tyres, held together by string.

‘
Spasibo
,’ Anna had said gratefully.

Axe blows meant using energy and energy was like gold dust round here, so you didn’t waste it on others. Anna’s rescuer looked back at her with large blue eyes, her skin as grey as the sky. But no lesions.

‘
Spasibo
,’ Anna said again.

‘Your chopping technique is all wrong,’ the other prisoner said. ‘Swing higher and the axe head gains momentum.’ She had shrugged and started to walk away.

‘My name’s Anna,’ Anna called to her retreating back.

The young woman turned, stared thoughtfully, eyes narrowed against the wind.

‘I am Sofia.’

That was in 1929, only four years ago, yet it felt like a lifetime. Back in the time when four hundred grams of stinking black bread a day had seemed like starvation. When it lay heavy as damp clay in the stomach while she strove to work harder in the forest, now that her technique with the axe had improved. The camp Commandant made clear the simple rule: the more you worked, the more you ate. But only when she and her brigade reached the full norm would she receive the full ration
paiok
of seven hundred grams.

‘For seven hundred grams of bread I would sell my soul.’

She hadn’t meant to say it out loud. But she’d noticed odd things happening to herself in those early days of shock at finding herself a prisoner: at night, when her dreams grew too painful, she was digging her nails into her thigh so fiercely that they left scarlet welts in her flesh; and she’d started speaking aloud the thoughts that were meant to stay in her head. That worried her. She was losing control. She’d glanced round the barrack hut to see who may have heard.