Under a Blood Red Sky (36 page)

Yuri kicked a stone with his toe. ‘Must be important.’

‘It is.’

Yuri’s eyes brightened with interest. ‘What’s it about?’

Pyotr almost told him. It was on the tip of his tongue, the words that would betray Sofia. He wanted so much to spit them out of his mouth.
She’s dangerous
, but a strange quivering feeling in the depth of his stomach held him back. He knew that everything Yuri had said this morning about needing people to rethink was right. It made sense, of course it did. He wanted to do what was right but, now that it came to doing it, he wasn’t so sure. Once out there, the words would gain a kind of life of their own and he could never take them back. If he told Yuri, Yuri would tell the Chairman, the Chairman would tell the OGPU police and they would march in and arrest her and then… His mind couldn’t go further.

‘Well?’ Yuri urged. ‘What is it-’

At that moment Anastasia came hurtling down the dusty street and skidded to a halt in front of them. Trickles of sweat were carving tracks through the dirt on her thin face. She often helped her father with hoe or sickle in the fields and it was obvious that’s where she’d just come from. Her fingernails were filthy.

‘What are you doing here, Pyotr?’ She grinned at him. ‘Not in trouble, are you?’

‘Of course not,’ Pyotr objected.

‘He’s got secret information to tell the Chairman,’ Yuri said grandly.

‘Really?’ The girl’s eyes widened. ‘What is it?’

Pyotr felt himself cornered. ‘It’s about a girl in this village,’ he said in a rush. ‘About her anti-Soviet activity.’

To his astonishment, tears leapt into Anastasia’s eyes and she started to edge fearfully away from him.

‘I must go home now,’ she blurted out and ran off down the road, her hair flying out behind her, dust kicking up behind her heels. Quite clearly Pyotr could see the bulges under her faded yellow blouse, at the back where it was tucked into her shorts. The four bulges jiggled as she ran.

‘Yuri,’ he said to distract his friend’s attention from noticing them, ‘I’m not waiting any longer.’

Anastasia had stolen potatoes. Only two weeks ago a woman in a village the other side of Dagorsk was sentenced to five years in one of the labour camps for stealing half a pud of grain from her
kolkhoz.
Suddenly dismay spilled into his mind. If he told Chairman Fomenko about Sofia, wasn’t it his duty to tell about Anastasia too? He looked up and saw his father striding up the street towards him.

‘What are you up to, boys?’

‘Nothing much.’

‘You’re standing on the Chairman’s doorstep for nothing much?’

But instead of being annoyed Papa was laughing and his face was free from the usual shadows it wore after a day’s work. Ever since he’d come back from the conference yesterday, he’d been in a good mood. It must have gone really well in Leningrad.

‘Good evening, Comrade Pashin. Dobriy vecher,’ Yuri said politely. ‘Have you heard if there’s any news yet about the sacks of grain that went missing?’

That was typical of Yuri, always digging around for information. But Papa wasn’t pleased and his face lost its smile.

‘I know nothing at all about that. Come, Pyotr,’ Papa said firmly, taking hold of his son’s arm. ‘We’re going to Rafik’s house.’

They walked up the road in an awkward silence.

‘Why do you dislike him, Papa?’

‘Dislike who?’

‘Yuri.’

‘Because I don’t want the young fool turning you into him.’

‘No, Papa. I think for myself.’

His father halted in the middle of the street and turned to him. ‘I know you do, Pyotr. I’ve seen the way you make your choices after working out what’s right and what’s not.’ He smiled. ‘I admire that.’

Pyotr felt a kick of pride. And it must have shown in his face because Papa seized him in his arms, holding him tight against his chest as though his own heart could pump its blood into his son’s veins.

It was the first time Pyotr had ever been inside the gypsy’s
izba
. It smelled funny and half the forest appeared to be dangling from the roof beams. He hung back near the door, unwilling to go too deep.

‘Dobriy vecher,’ Papa said to Rafik. ‘Good evening.’

‘Dobriy vecher, Pilot. And good evening to you too, Pyotr.’

The gypsy was swallowed up by a huge maroon armchair. He was grinning at Pyotr, his eyes crinkled up at the edges. ‘How’s the colt up at the stable?’

‘He bit Priest Logvinov today.’

Rafik laughed. ‘He has spirit, that one. Like you.’

Pyotr gave a quick nod. The fugitive woman was seated opposite Zenia at the table and the gypsy girl had laid out a row of playing cards, the rest of the pack still in her hand. Her black eyes smiled a welcome. Pyotr studied the cards with interest. They were like no others he’d ever seen. Instead of the usual numbers on them they had pictures, and not just boring old kings and queens. There was a hangman and an angel with wings spread wide. Pyotr slid a step closer.

‘I’m pleased to see you’re feeling better, Rafik,’ Papa said.

‘Much better.’

‘Good.’

Then his father turned to the two women at the table and gave them a small old-fashioned bow, which surprised Pyotr. What was going on?

‘Good evening, Sofia.’

She swivelled in her chair, stretching out one of the long golden legs that Pyotr remembered from the forest. He had avoided looking at her face so far, but now he risked it. Immediately he wished he hadn’t, because he couldn’t look away. Her eyes were shining, deep blue and swirling with light the way he imagined the sea to be. Her lips opened a fraction when she looked up at Papa, just as Anastasia’s did at school when she looked at Yuri’s slice of bread and honey. As if she wanted to eat him. And Papa was doing the same. Pyotr felt a flutter of panic in his stomach.
Look away, look away
.

‘I have a surprise for you all.’ His father turned to him. ‘For you too, Pyotr.’

‘What is it, Papa?’

‘The
Krokodil
is coming to Dagorsk next week.’

All sense of danger and fugitives vanished right out of Pyotr’s head and he gave a shout of delight that filled the room. ‘Can we go and see it, Papa? Which day? How long will it be here? Can we take Yuri too and-’

His father chuckled. ‘Slow down, boy. Yes, of course we’ll go and see it.’ He turned back to the others in the room and said with that formal little bow again, ‘You’re all invited.’

‘I’ll come,’ Zenia said at once and dealt another card. A golden chalice.

Rafik shook his head and ran a hand roughly through his thick black hair. ‘I don’t ever leave Tivil, but the rest of you go and enjoy yourselves.’

‘What is the Krokodil?’ Sofia asked.

‘It’s an aeroplane,’ Pyotr explained excitedly. ‘One that’s painted to look like a crocodile.’

Mikhail nodded and sketched its outline in the air. ‘It’s one of the squadron of Tupolev PS-9s – they’re part of Stalin’s propaganda drive. It flies round the country to demonstrate Soviet progress to the people. The idea is to give film shows and hand out leaflets and things like that. One of the Politburo’s better ideas we think, don’t we, Pyotr?’

‘Yes,’ Pyotr grinned.

‘Pilot.’ It was the gypsy.

Something in the way he said it made everyone turn to look at Rafik. He’d left the chair and was standing rigidly in the centre of the room. His hands were pressed to his temples as though holding in something that was trying to get out. His black eyes looked sick.

‘Pilot!’ This time it was a shout. ‘Get out of here, now, quickly! Run!’

Instantly Zenia was at his side.

‘Tell us, Rafik.’

‘They’re coming for him, to seize him. Run, Mikhail!’

Sofia leapt to her feet.

‘Papa?’ Pyotr cried out.

‘Go, Mikhail,’ Sofia urged. ‘Go.’

But his father didn’t move. ‘What the hell do you mean, Rafik? Who on earth is coming for me?’

The door burst open with a crash. Uniforms streamed into the room.

Dagorsk July 1933

The cell door slammed shut behind Mikhail. The stench hit him like a blow to the face. How many men in here? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? In the semi-darkness he couldn’t tell, but there was no air to breathe, no place to sit.

It was night, but a grubby blue light glimmered faintly behind a metal grille on the ceiling, like a malevolent watchful eye over the prisoners. This was a different world he’d entered. His first instinct had been to lash out at his captors and now he bore the rewards of that. A split lip, a rib that grated at each breath, a kneecap booted out of place.

Fool, he’d been a bloody fool not to control his temper. But the soldiers took no notice when he pointed out that they were making a terrible mistake and that he’d done nothing to warrant arrest. Then the sight of Pyotr being slapped like a puppy for clinging to his father had brought his walls of control tumbling down. He fought to remember now, snatching at images that kept fading from his grasp.

Most clearly he could summon up Pyotr’s frightened young face and Sofia’s urgent mouth arguing with the officer, her eyes blazing. Hazier was Rafik, silent and remote, and Zenia at the table with her head in her hands, hiding behind her mane of black hair. And then there was the memory of Sofia begging. It drifted in and out. But oddly it wasn’t the soldiers she was pleading with, it was Rafik, imploring him for something, down on her knees and begging. Then Pyotr’s panicked shout…

Pyotr. Dear God, who will take care of my son?

As he stood upright by the door, his back away from its foul surface, he shut his eyes. In the silence he heard a drip-drip-drip, the cell walls running with damp, and then a sudden movement. A huddled figure trampled over sleeping forms and there were cries of ‘bastard’ and ‘shithead’, but most didn’t move, locked in their own despair and private nightmares. The figure reached the overflowing slop-bucket only just in time. The stench worsened.

Earlier the prison guards had taken pleasure in their work as they’d ripped out his bootlaces and tossed aside his belt. Stripped him naked. He knew its purpose was to humiliate and belittle, to humble his arrogant subversive soul so that the interrogator’s job would be that much easier when it came to the time for questions. In return he had given nothing but stone-hard hatred. They’d thrown his clothes back at him and marched him, hands clasped behind his back, down long grey corridors to this underground overcrowded cell. Into this different world.

This was the new reality and he’d better get used to it. Stuck in this wretched hole. He would still be here tomorrow, and the next tomorrow and the tomorrow after that. He spat on the floor, spitting out his fear, and he searched his mind for something clean and cool and strong to hold on to. He found a pair of eyes. Eyes that looked at him straight, blue as a summer sky and bright with laughter. He drew them to him and filled every part of his mind with them, even the dark rotten places where he didn’t like to look.

‘Sofia,’ he whispered. ‘Sofia.’

Sofia queued. Hour after hour, till her feet went numb and her heart ached and her hand itched to bang on the hatch to demand attention. The long L-shaped office was painted green and smelled of disinfectant. Someone had placed a vase of vivid red flowers on the window sill. Most of the people in the queue were women: wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, all in search of their loved ones. Some with desperate eyes and panicked faces, others with the patience of the dead, shuffling forward with no hope.

So why come? Sofia wondered.

But in her heart she knew. You hold on with every sinew left in you because if you don’t, what is there? Nothing. You lie down and die. And if you die, they win. No. Nyet. She said it aloud in the room.
No. Nyet
. Others stole a surprised glance at her but she ignored them and turned to Mikhail’s son at her side, a slight silent figure who had barely spoken a word all day.

‘Pyotr.’

He lifted his head.

‘Pyotr, are you hungry? Would you like some bread?’

She spoke quietly to avoid the envious ears around her, holding out a small slice of black bread wrapped in greasepaper that Zenia had pushed into her hand before she’d left the house early this morning. Pyotr shook his head. His fists were sunk deep in his pockets and his shoulders were hunched over, so that he looked like a wounded animal. She touched his arm but he flinched away.

‘Not long now,’ she said.

‘That’s what you said two hours ago.’

‘Well, this time it must be true.’

He looked at the twenty or more people ahead of them and at those behind them in a queue that snaked out the door, then shrugged his young shoulders. She wanted to rub his bony back, to brush his hair off his face, to raise his head and coax some energy back into him. From the moment the troops drove off with Mikhail in the black prison van, the boy had lost his hold on who he was. He had turned grey, empty, colourless. Sofia had seen too many like that in the camps, seen the grey slowly darken and turn black and the black turn to death. Or worse than death, to nothingness.

She seized his shoulder and shook him till she saw a flash of annoyance in response.

‘Better,’ she snapped. ‘Your father is in prison. He’s not dead and he’s not in a labour camp. Not yet. So don’t you dare give up on him, do you hear me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Say it.’

‘Yes, I hear you.’

‘Better. Very soon now we’ll find out exactly what he’s accused of.’ She glanced over at the hatch with impatience. ‘If ever that snail-faced bastard decides to speed things up.’

An old woman was standing in front of the uniformed official, tears running down her cheeks, trying to thrust a brown paper package through the hatch. ‘Give him this,’ she was sobbing, ‘give my boy-’

‘No parcels,’ the bored official rapped out and slammed down the shutter.