The Red Scarf

by Kate Furnivall

  In August of that bad year the old babushka died, the one who slept next to Anna on the bedboard, and the first thing Anna did was steal her coat now that Crazy Sara had taken hers. When the early snows came she had no intention of dying. In October typhus raged through the camp, sweeping up lives as indescriminately as a fox chokes chickens in a henhouse, but both Anna and Sofia had escaped its teeth. In fact it made life a fraction easier for them because the hut became less overcrowded and Anna was able to move up to a middle bunk near a window. She also stole a second, thicker coat from a dead body.

  Work on the road was brutal as the temperatures dropped in November. Ice broke hammers and froze fingers to rocks. The snow drifted down out of a misleadingly soft pink sky, settling on the road and the bent backs of the laborers, its sugar coating transforming the scene into one of stark beauty. Except nobody could acknowledge beauty any more. They’d forgotten what it looked like. The nearest thing to beauty they ever saw was an extra bowl of kasha when the cook pocketed a bribe.

  When the long line of prisoners finally trudged back into the Zone after a two-hour march through the snow in the dark, even the searchlights looked welcoming, great moons of yellow warmth. But as Anna shuffled numbly toward the hut, head lowered against the wind, a hand pulled her out of the line and a pair of eager lips that stank of cheap beer sought hers. It was the guard, the one with the surplus of pork fat and pelmeni. Mishenko was his name, Ilya Mishenko. She tugged away from him.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” His hand strayed to her head, brushed snow from her headscarf, touched her cheek. “You aren’t very friendly anymore, are you? Not long ago you couldn’t get enough of me and all that good food I gave you, but for weeks now you’ve been as cold as this fucking weather. How about an extra blanket? Or a bowl of good meat stew to keep out the—”

  “You bastard.” She jerked herself free. “I don’t want anything. I’ve told you to leave me alone.” She gave him a bitter stare and hurried across the trodden snow toward the hut door.

  “I won’t leave you alone, you hot little cunt,” he shouted after her. “Not till you say yes again. And you will, I know you will. One day when you’re sick or hurt, you’ll say yes again.” He rammed his fur shapka tighter on his head and laughed. “It’s just a matter of time.”

  Anna’s hands blocked her ears, disgust sharp as copper on her tongue. He was dirty. She was dirty. So what was the difference between them, both exploiting what they had? But as she joined the crush to squeeze through the door into the hut, she suddenly saw Sofia standing off to one side, oblivious of the snow. Watching Ilya Mishenko.

  SOFIA avoided Anna after that, as if she too were disgusted and could not bear to be anywhere close to her. For two days she hardly came near her and it was like a knife wound, gut-ripping and unexpected. Even when Anna offered a story about Vasily as a lure, all she got was a shake of the head and “I’m too tired.”

  Anna lay on her new bedboard, the air in the hut heavy with kerosene fumes. She was fully dressed in her work clothes and padded coat because, like everyone else in the winter, you took off your clothes only for the banya, the monthly bath. The smell meant nothing, but warmth meant everything.

  She placed her mittened hands over her face and buried her nose in them, smelled all the filth and rank rotten fibers of them, felt the grit and thorns embedded in them scrape across her skin. They were disgusting. No human being should ever have to wear such foul rags. Yet she loved them. They protected her, got dirty and ragged and repulsive instead of herself. Gently she kissed the palm of each mitten.

  Couldn’t Sofia see that?

  EVENING head count was quick for once. The numbers all tallied and the commandant was sober, so the prisoners didn’t have to stand out in the freezing cold for more than forty minutes. The night sky above them was a vast black blanket speckled with what looked like fireflies they seemed so close and so bright, but in fact were stars. It hadn’t snowed today, but the previous day’s fall lay a meter thick on the ground, so that two envied brigades had remained back in the camp to shovel paths and brush the roof of the commandant’s house.

  It was almost time for the prisoners to be locked into the huts for the night, and Anna was on her bunk. The woman beside her was picking at the scabs on her legs and smiling as though it gave her pleasure, while others were shuffling around the hut or collapsed on bed-boards. But out of the corner of Anna’s eye she saw a figure slide toward the door, and despite the scarf wound around her face, Anna knew it was Sofia.

  She carried her right arm as always slung across her chest, resting the damaged hand on her collarbone. It had started to heal remarkably well in the beginning as the infection was drawn out of the flesh by the herbal potions, and the extra food had fed strength into her body, but now it had stopped. At this level of cold, nothing healed. Only the spring warmth would continue the process, so until then Sofia protected her hand with every scrap of cloth she could beg, borrow, or steal. She opened the door only a fraction and slipped out.

  Anna scrambled for her shoes and pulled them on still wet, but she snapped one of the strings that tied them on her feet, so she had to fiddle with their fixings. By the time she’d wrapped her scarf around her head and hurried outside into the freezing night, Sofia was nowhere in sight. The central compound was a large floodlit square, deserted now except for a couple of guards deep in conversation as they patrolled the perimeter. They were smoking cigarettes and stamping their feet as they walked to keep warm.

  What was Sofia up to?

  Lockup was any moment, and if she was locked out of the hut she’d die of hypothermia overnight. The cookhouse? The dump? The banya? The laundry? Anna skimmed past them all, keeping to the shadows, but there was no sign of her friend. Her breath came in painfully short gasps and she told herself it was the cold, not fear, but she was frightened. Ever since that moment when the guard had tried to kiss her lips yesterday evening, Sofia had changed.

  As she ducked her head against the wind, a sound caught her ears. It was a man’s voice and he was growling. There was no other word for the animal noises he was making, and Anna recognized the sound at once, a sound she knew far too well, a sound that made her feel sick. She ran. Nobody ever ran in Davinsky camp, but she ran behind the tool hut and in the dense shadows, she found them, Sofia and Mishenko. They were almost knee-deep in snow and jammed up against the hut wall, Sofia’s skirt up around her waist, his hands clutching her pale white buttocks as he thrust into her again and again. The animal growls sounded as though they were tearing her insides out, like wolves at a deer’s tender belly.

  Anna loathed the man for what he’d done to her and now for what he was doing to Sofia. She opened her mouth to scream at him, but at that exact moment, with head thrown back and his face in a rictus that looked like agony, he finished the job and instantly withdrew. The sudden silence came as a shock.

  He turned away to adjust his clothing for only a split second, but it was a split second when the Four Horsemen galloped down on him with a vengeance. Quick as a rat Sofia drew a rock from her jacket and brought it down on the back of his skull with all her strength. He collapsed forward, face in the snow, with no more than a soft grunt, but Sofia threw herself on his back and kept pounding till Anna caught her by the wrist.

  “Enough, Sofia, that’s enough. You must stop now.”

  “It’ll never be enough.”

  “He’s dead.”

  A sigh rose up from somewhere deep in Sofia’s chest and she stood up, her whole body shaking and her eyes unrecognizable. They gleamed white in the shadows, and she was breathing hard.

  “Yes,” she said harshly. “He’s dead. He won’t be bothering you again.”

  “He won’t be bothering either of us.”

  Anna took her trembling friend into her arms and held her close, rocking her gently. They stood like that for a long time despite the subzero temperature, listening to each other’s heartbeat.

  “Lockup,” Anna whispere
d. “We must be quick.”

  It was the work of two minutes to scoop out a man-size hole in the deep snowdrift against the rear of the hut and bundle the dead meat inside it. The snowdrift would not melt until spring, and by then who would care? They kicked fresh snow over the mound, prayed for a blizzard overnight, and then ran back to their hut before the door was locked. The knowledge that in their pockets they carried a pack of Belomor cigarettes, a steel lighter, a penknife, half a bar of chocolate, and a wristwatch gave them a wild energy that made them laugh out loud. A haul like that would feed them most of the winter.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  SOFIA waited in the dark, tense and breathing hard. She was standing by the tree at the gateway to Tivil. He would come, she was certain he’d come. The night sky was overcast, dark and damp, with a spit of rain in the wind, and when her limbs started to shiver, she was glad because it meant the scorching heat within her was leaking out. In the silence, in the cold, she heard Rafik’s words again: Reach deep into yourself. You are strong.

  Strong?

  She didn’t feel strong, she felt battered and exhausted. She wanted to weep with need. Questions crashed around her brain: what exactly was it that Rafik could see inside her and what happened inside that chamber? Who were those silver-haired people and why had the bats come for her? And would Mikhail come, would he? She had to believe he would, whether as a result of Rafik’s weird ceremony or simply because Fomenko had responded to her veiled threat and decided to throw his weight around in the right places. She took a deep slow breath to calm her quivering mind and felt the night breeze wash through her lungs, flushing out the panic.

  Mikhail, my Mikhail. Come to me.

  She murmured the words aloud and heard a flutter of wings for a second, but when she looked up it was gone, and she wondered if her tired mind had imagined it. On the edge of Tivil she could sense the air somehow growing thinner, the danger sharper. The scars on her fingers ached the way they only did when she was nervous.

  Reach deep.

  Her eyes scoured the blackness for a long time and saw nothing. And then a tingling sensation started in the soles of her feet and spread to the palms of her hands, and suddenly her heart tightened in her chest. Her legs started to move, and at first she was aware of the ruts under her feet, of stones and potholes, of stumbling awkwardly in the darkness and then she was flying down the road, racing toward him, arms outstretched, raindrops brushing her cheek.

  Mikhail was in her arms, warm and safe and alive. For a second she was frightened that her senses were betraying her. Perhaps this wasn’t real, just another version of her desire unfolding inside her head. But his clothes stank, and dried blood lay stiff on his collar, and his unshaven jaw felt rough against her skin. His poor lips were swollen. But not too swollen to press hard on hers, or to whisper into her mouth over and over, “Sofia, my love, Sofia.”

  HE washed in the yard at the back of the house. A dim pool of light spilled from the room’s oil lamp, but most of the yard lay in shadows. She watched him from inside as he stripped off every filthy scrap of clothing, threw it in a pile on the ground, and set light to it. The flames were small and smoldering in the damp air, but they sent golden fingers of light shimmering up his long naked thigh and gleaming over the strong curve of his buttock. Sofia felt a surge of desire, but as the shadows shifted and draped themselves over him like a cloak, she moved away from the window to give him his privacy.

  When he eventually entered the room he was wearing a clean black shirt and trousers, and at the sight of her tucked into his big wingback chair his face broke into a smile of relief, as though he feared she might have gone. His eyes were a dull and damaged gray that bruised her heart. One eye and his lips were swollen, a tooth chipped, and he was moving awkwardly, something hurting inside, but when she started to ask he dismissed it as nothing.

  She rose and kissed his mouth, gently soothing it with her tongue, and eased him into the chair. She curled up at his feet with her chin resting on his knee, and her hands began to stroke the calves of his legs, drawing the anger from his muscles, willing her strength into him. The familiar masculine scent of him at last silenced the trembling in her chest.

  “You look wonderful,” he said, and he tenderly touched her cheek as if it were the finest fragile porcelain. His finger traced the line of her lips. “You shine.”

  She kissed the tip of his finger. “I missed you.”

  He ruffled her blond hair and twisted a lock of it around his forefinger as though attaching her to himself. The silence between their words dropped away. He cupped his hand around the back of her head, cradling it.

  “You were with me,” he whispered, his gaze intent on her face. "All the time you were with me.”

  HE’S still asleep.”

  It was the second time Mikhail had checked on Pyotr, anxiety for the boy driving him out of his chair despite his exhaustion.

  “He was worried about you,” Sofia said as she poured out two vodkas and handed one to him when he was settled again. “But he’s fine. He’s strong.”

  “Thank you for caring for him.”

  “I did very little except take him to Dagorsk to hunt for you. We looked after each other.”

  “Come here, Sofia.”

  He held out a hand to her and when she slipped hers into it, he drew her to him onto his lap. He rested his head against hers, holding her so close she could feel the beat of his heart, and slowly the rise and fall of their inhalation and exhalation fell into step until they were breathing as one.

  “Sofia,” he whispered into her hair, “tell me what the hell is going on.”

  She was silent.

  He lifted a hand and tipped her chin up to look at him, and his eyes lingered on her face. “You were waiting for me. How did you know I was coming?”

  “I didn’t, not for certain.”

  “Sofia, I was in prison being bounced from interrogation to beating and back to interrogation, over and over, no food, no water, no sleep. I count myself lucky that I hadn’t yet had the Cupboard inflicted on me but—”

  “What’s the Cupboard?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  She kissed the bruised eye. “Tell me.”

  “It’s something the other prisoners in my cell whispered about. It’s a space one meter by half a meter and the height of a man. The Cupboard, they call it. The bastards throw you in there with four or five or even six other poor devils crammed together, all unable to move, barely able to breathe. You could be in there hours or even days with no one able to turn or sit. Most suffocate to death in it.”

  Sofia buried her face in his neck.

  “I’d have ended up in there if I hadn’t been freed, no doubt of that,” he said. His voice was savage. “Yet suddenly in the middle of the interrogation an OGPU officer marched into the room, waved around a signed release order, and I was out on the street in the rain in the middle of the night before I could say Chto za chyort! ” He knocked back the shot of vodka and shuddered.

  “And then I found you waiting for me.” He kissed her hair and gently rubbed his cheek over its silky strands.

  “You’re safe,” she whispered. “That’s all that matters.”

  “Sofia, I need to know.”

  Tenderly she took his face in her hands. “Mikhail, my dearest Mikhail, I honestly don’t know what happened. Your release could have been caused by Rafik—the gypsy has amazing powers to move thoughts—or by . . . someone else. Let’s leave it until tomorrow, my love. You’ve been through enough.” She brushed her fingers down the line of his smooth straight nose, still wonderfully unbroken, and along the curve of his broad brow.

  Mikhail frowned. His dark gaze searched her face, and their eyes held fast on each other until suddenly something deep within him seemed to open and some emotion shook his strong frame so violently that his limbs trembled under her. He groaned, and Sofia hungrily pressed her lips to his throat. When Mikhail rose from the chair with her in his arms and bore he
r from the room, she shut her ears to the accusing voice in her head, the one that said she was stealing.

  THE world had stopped spinning on its axis, Mikhail was sure of it. How else could he have been jerked from one indelible moment of hell to such abundance of perfection? Her naked skin was a pearl. Not like a pearl. It was a pearl. A creamy translucent paleness that somehow glowed from within. It made even the tips of his fingers ache with desire for her.

  They lay limbs entwined together on his bed in semidarkness, with only the faint gleam from the living room’s kerosene lamp creeping into the room, where it lay like a dog on the rag rug. Mikhail didn’t want Sofia to see his own body. It was a mess, covered in bruises and cuts and black swellings. It disgusted him, so what would it do to her? He had always taken a certain pride in his body, in its strength and its invincibility. He’d always been able to depend on it, but now his rage at those who had caused such damage to it and humiliation to him in the name of justice writhed, snakelike, in his guts.

  She seemed to sense it. Her hand slid tentatively to his stomach, where it started to circle, gently at first, then firmer, harder, fingers splayed out, and he could feel the heat build up under them, see a delicate vein pulsing at her temple as she leaned close. She was driving the hate out of his body, but just as fiercely the heat flared deep in his groin.

  His lips seized hers and his hand cradled her naked breast, small and firm and perfect in his palm. She moaned, a soft sobbing sound, and his fingers teased, stroked, and explored each delicate rise and fall of her undernourished body, the angular edge of her hip bone and the fall of her silken stomach to the dense mound of blond curls. He inhaled the exquisite scent of her, breathing it deep within himself.

  His lips caressed her eyes, her ears, the tempting hollow of her throat while his fingers searched out the moist secret places that brought forth whimpers of desire from her open mouth. His lips kissed that mouth. He adored the way she growled low in her throat when he rippled his fingers down the soft inside of her thigh and the way her whole body shuddered when he took her erect nipple in his mouth. She tasted like a clean wild creature. Not dirty like himself. However hard he’d scrubbed himself with the brush in the yard tonight, he still felt the dirt of the cells and the beatings lodged under the layers of his skin.