The Red Scarf

by Kate Furnivall

  “Where is she?” he’d asked.

  “In a labor camp in Siberia.”

  He’d sunk his head in his hands and uttered a long moan, but when eventually he looked up, she was gone. He pulled on his clothes and hurried to the house, fearful that she had left, but no, she was sitting in his chair, face composed, eyes calm. Only her skin was the color of rain, a strange translucent gray that held no life in it.

  He stood in the middle of the room and stared down at the half-built model of the bridge on the table. “It’s the Brooklyn Bridge,” he said flatly. “In America. It spans the East River between New York and Brooklyn.”

  “I thought it was the Forth Bridge.”

  “No.” He frowned. Why was he talking about bridges? “The Forth Bridge is cantilevered; this one is a suspension bridge.” He ran a finger along the top of one of the towers, picking out the intricate woodwork. “An amazing feat of construction in the 1870s. Fourteen thousand miles of wire holds it together, and each cable has a breaking strain of twelve thousand tons. Its main span is five hundred meters and . . .” Slowly he shook his head from side to side. “What was I thinking? That one day I could become an engineer again instead of a miserable factory manager? I was a fool.”

  With a sudden jab he brought his fist down on top of the bridge, bringing it crashing down in a thousand pieces as each miniature girder sprang apart.

  “Mikhail!”

  “I’ve been living in a dream world,” he said sourly, sweeping the mess onto the floor. “I thought that I could rebuild the past, I could create a new family with Pyotr and you, and one day my dedication to the state’s demands would win me the reward of a job that I could love again.” He placed his foot on one of the replica masonry anchorages lying on the floor and crushed it. “No more dreams.”

  “Why should knowing that Anna is alive destroy your dreams? Is your life so unbearable without her?” Her eyes were fierce. “She still loves you.”

  “Loves me! She should loathe me.”

  “Why? Because you never came for her? Don’t worry, she knows you tried. Maria told her when she went to the apartment in Leningrad.”

  “She saw Maria?”

  “Yes. That was where she was captured. But Maria showed her the name and address you’d written down, so that’s why I came here to Tivil, to find you.” She paused, her voice briefly unsteady. She studied her hands and tapped the two scarred fingers against her knee as if reminding herself of something. “Anna loves you . . . Vasily. She always will, till her dying breath.”

  Mikhail strode across the room, seized her wrists, and yanked her to her feet. The hairs on his neck and his arms were alive and quivering, and as he stood there holding her he knew he’d lost her. Something deep inside him started to hemorrhage.

  “I’m not Vasily,” he said coldly.

  He felt her go rigid, but he couldn’t stop now.

  “Vasily Dyuzheyev knifed my father to death that winter’s day in 1917 on the Dyuzheyev estate. My father was the soldier in charge of the patrol, but my contribution to the massacre was twice Vasily’s. I shot his mother and I shot Anna Fedorina’s father in cold blood.” He shook Sofia, shook her hard. “Now tell me,” he demanded, “that she loves me. Now tell me . . . that you love me.”

  IT took them time, knot by knot, to untangle the truth. Again and again they came back to Maria to discover that she lay at the heart of the confusion. Mikhail was pacing back and forth across the room, hands dragging through his hair, trying to rip his skull apart, and he could scarcely bear to look at Sofia. She was hunched in his chair, knees up under her chin, arms wrapped around her shins, eyes dark and impenetrable.

  “You say Maria told Anna that Vasily visited her twice. That he wrote down the name Mikhail Pashin with an address in Tivil and the Levitsky factory. But that wasn’t Vasily. That person was me. And according to your talk with Maria’s sister-in-law, the second man was Fomenko. You see, I only went to see her once.” Mikhail recalled the day. The tiny apartment, stiflingly hot, and the white-haired woman so eager to please and so painfully damaged by the stroke. “I had no idea she believed I was Vasily Dyuzheyev. I’d been searching for her for years.”

  “Why?”

  Mikhail stopped pacing. “Isn’t it obvious? Because I killed the child’s father. I wanted to find Anna Fedorina and do what I could to make amends for what I’d done to her family. I discovered that her mother had died years earlier and that the woman with her was her governess. But”—he spread out his arms in a gesture of despair— “both vanished off the face of the earth. It was a time of chaos, and disappearances were common. The civil war started and normal life became . . . impossible.”

  “Mikhail,” Sofia asked quietly, “how old were you when you shot Svetlana Dyuzheyev and Doktor Fedorin?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Only three years older than Pyotr.”

  Mikhail shuddered. “I was so like him at that age. So totally convinced that Bolshevism was the universal truth that would cleanse the world. All else was lies.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I stood shoulder to shoulder with my father that day and mowed down the idle bourgeoisie like rats in a barrel.” He turned his back on Sofia. “Why torment ourselves? You cannot despise me more than I despise myself for what I did. And the ultimate irony is”—he gave a bitter laugh—“that all this time the boy who cut my own father’s throat that day has been living right here beside me in Tivil. Aleksei Fomenko turns out to be Vasily Dyuzheyev under another name.”

  He slumped down in a chair at the table. “Neither he nor I recognized each other after all these years, but I hated him anyway for being the kind of person I used to be. And he hated me for having lost my faith. I was a threat. It didn’t matter how many quotas I exceeded at the factory, my mind wasn’t a Bolshevik mind, and Fomenko wanted me to relearn the faith. He is a blind idealist.”

  “Don’t,” Sofia said.

  Mikhail looked at her, and something wrenched in his chest. She was perched forward on the edge of his big armchair, her hair bright in a splash of sunlight, her eyes huge and sunken in her skull as though they could only look inward.

  “Sofia,” he said gently, “until you came into my life I was incapable of loving anyone. I didn’t trust anyone. I despised myself and believed that others would despise me too, so I was wary in relationships. I went through the motions but nothing more. Instead I gave my love to an aircraft or a well-turned piece of machinery or . . .” He gestured at the mess of wooden struts on the floor.

  “And to Pyotr.”

  “Yes, and to Pyotr.” The hard muscles around his mouth softened. “When I came to this village six years ago, riding up the muddy street into my exile from Tupolev, and spotted this scrap of a child being tossed into a truck about to be carted off to some godforsaken orphanage, I saw Anna Fedorina in him. As she was on the doorstep all those years before. The same passion, the same fury at the world. So I carried the fierce little runt into my house and I petted and protected him the way I couldn’t protect her. I grew to love him as my own flesh and blood.”

  “But you still kept trying to find her.”

  “Yes.” He cleared a space on the table in front of him, making room for his thoughts. “One day I did a favor for an officer in OGPU, and in return he tracked down Maria for me. But I swear I only went there once, Sofia.”

  Sofia nodded. “Maria muddled the two of you up in her head. She even told Irina the wrong names.” Her words were heavy and lifeless. “Both tall with brown hair and gray eyes. She got it”—she clenched her teeth—“all wrong.” Her gaze fixed on his face. “Like I did,” she whispered.

  “No matter what happens now,” he said fiercely, “I want you to know I love you and will always love you.”

  She leaped to her feet, shaking her head violently. “No, Mikhail. I came here because I swore an oath to Anna. To find Vasily and to destroy the killer of her father if I could. Instead I’ve destroyed Vasily.”


  FIFTY

  SOFIA begged. It pained Mikhail to see it, this wild independent spirit abasing itself.

  "Please, Rafik, please. I implore you.”

  She was on her knees on the wooden floor before the gypsy, clutching his wiry brown hands in her pale ones, her lips pressed to his knuckles, her eyes unwavering on his face.

  “Please, Rafik, I beg you to do for Aleksei Fomenko what you did for Mikhail.”

  The gypsy again shook his head. “No.”

  The bedroom was small and gloomy. Mikhail found it acutely uncomfortable with six people crowded in it and candles that thickened the air they breathed. Standing stiffly beside the bed were Pokrovsky, Elizaveta Lishnikova, and the gypsy daughter, Zenia. None of them smiled a welcome.

  What the hell was going on here?

  The row of candles on the shelf sent out a twisting, shifting light that coated faces with touches of gold, while above them a giant eye on the ceiling stared down at a crimson cloth spread out on the bed. A white stone lay in the center of it like a milky eye. Mikhail had the disturbing sense of having stepped into another universe, one that sent shivers down his spine. He wanted to laugh at it, to scoff at these grim faces, but something stopped him. That something was Sofia.

  She knelt on the floor in supplication.

  “Help her, Rafik.” He let his anger show. “You alter reality, well, alter hers.”

  “No, Mikhail,” Rafik said, his black eyes intent on Sofia’s face. “I don’t alter reality. All I do is alter people’s perception of it.”

  “Please,” Sofia whispered into the silence.

  “No.” It came from Pokrovsky. His huge hands were still blackened from the forge, but his presence in the room altered its balance in some important way. The bullet-shaped crown of his shaven head almost touched the eye on the ceiling, and whatever the force was that beamed down from that strange symbol, it made Pokrovsky a different man from the friend Mikhail had many times laughed with over a glass or two of vodka.

  “No,” Pokrovsky repeated.

  “No,” Elizaveta said in her clear precise voice.

  “No,” Zenia echoed.

  The silence shivered. Shadows tilted up and down the lengths of green curtain around the rough-timbered walls, and the stone gleamed white on the bed. Sofia dragged a breath through her teeth.

  “Why, Rafik?” she demanded. “It was my mistake, not Fomenko’s. I was the one who stole the sacks of food from the secret store in the church and hid them under his bed when he was out in the fields. You know no one locks their doors during the day here in Tivil. I broke that trust and I denounced him to Stirkhov. It wasn’t his dishonesty, Rafik, it was mine, I swear it.” She pressed her forehead to his hands.

  Rafik stepped back, removing his fingers from her grasp. His slight figure stood stiff and stern.

  “Sofia, I will tell you this. Chairman Aleksei Fomenko has taken from Tivil everything that belonged to the village by right, and he has left us gaunt and naked. He has stripped the food from the mouths of our children to feed the voracious maw that resides in the Kremlin in Moscow. Above all else on this earth, it is my task to protect this village of ours, and that’s why I never leave it. If that means protecting it from Aleksei Fomenko at the cost of his life, so be it.”

  “So be it,” intoned the others. The candle flames flared higher.

  Sofia rose to her feet. She begged no more. Instead she moved to the door, and Mikhail loved her for the proud way she walked.

  “Rafik,” he said fiercely. “She needs help.”

  The deep lines on Rafik’s face were etched white. He shook his head.

  Mikhail strode to the bed and seized the stone. “Give her this.”

  “Put it back,” Pokrovsky growled, taking a threatening step toward Mikhail.

  Rafik held up a hand. “Peace,” he murmured. For a long moment the gypsy scrutinized the stone in Mikhail’s hand, and then slowly he nodded. “Give it to her, Mikhail.”

  Sofia watched as Mikhail took her hand and placed the white stone cautiously on her palm, as if it might burn her. The moment it touched her skin, something in Sofia’s eyes changed. Mikhail saw it happen—something of the wildness vanished and in its place came a calm determination.

  Please God, Mikhail prayed to the deity he didn’t believe in, don’t let her be harmed by it.

  PYOTR was halfway through scraping burned clinker off a big flat shovel when he saw his father in the street. Pokrovsky had left him at the smithy with instructions to clean all the tools.

  “Papa,” he called out.

  A line of blue shadows was sliding down from the forest and slowly swallowing the village, so for a moment Pyotr missed the slight figure pacing beside his father, but the last rays of sun painted her hair almost red as she turned her face toward the forge. She waited in the middle of the road, still and silent in the dust, while his father came over. Somewhere a woman’s voice was raised in scolding a child. A dog barked. The wind stilled. An odd feeling crept over Pyotr, a sense of stepping over a line.

  “Papa,” he said, throwing down the spade. “I’ve been thinking.”

  His father smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “About what?”

  “About Chairman Fomenko.”

  “Don’t concern yourself, Pyotr. Finish up here and come home.”

  “I’ve worked it out, Papa. Chairman Fomenko would never steal from the kolkhoz, you know he wouldn’t. He’s innocent. Someone else must have put those sacks under his bed, someone vicious who wanted to—”

  “Leave it, Pyotr. The interrogators will have thought of that, I assure you. So forget it.”

  Just then Sofia came over to them. “Pyotr,” she said, “you and I have work to do.”

  She put her hand in her pocket and drew out the iron key.

  ALL three of them searched the hall, but something was wrong, Pyotr could feel it. He scuttled around between the benches, scraping at the floorboards with one of Pokrovsky’s knives, seeking another piece of string that would lead to a new hiding place. But all the time he was aware of the odd silences. They filled the hall, banging into the roof timbers and rattling the windows.

  “Have you searched in that corner, Papa?”

  “Sofia, look at this. The plank looks uneven here.”

  “What about that brick patched with cement?”

  He kept up the chatter, filling the gaps, not letting the silences settle. Why didn’t they speak to each other? What had happened? But his words weren’t enough, and the gaps were growing longer. As soon as they’d entered the hall and Sofia locked the door behind them, he noticed the way she and Papa wouldn’t look at each other. Had they quarreled? He didn’t want them to quarrel, because that might mean Sofia would leave.

  “What are we searching for?” Papa had asked.

  “A box of jewelry.”

  “Whose jewels?”

  Pyotr shrugged and looked across at Sofia. She was examining a wall with her back to them, standing in a patch of soft lilac light that filtered through the window.

  “Whose jewels?” Pyotr echoed.

  “Svetlana Dyuzheyeva’s,” she answered without turning.

  Papa stiffened.

  “We’re not stealing,” Pyotr said quickly.

  “If they belong to someone else, then it’s stealing.”

  “No, Papa, not if we use them to do good.” Pyotr could feel his cheeks burning, and he knew that what he’d said wasn’t quite right. “We searched before. Sofia tried to find them to use them to rescue you when—”

  “Did she indeed?”

  “And now we have to find them to use them for Chairman Fomenko. That’s right, isn’t it?” He aimed the question at Sofia’s back.

  “Yes.”

  That was when the pool of silence started to flow under the door into the hall, and Pyotr had to keep throwing words into it to stop it drowning them. They explored even the faintest nook or hint of a crevice, trailing fingers around bricks and behind beams.
His father searched in a brisk methodical manner at one end of the hall, Sofia at the other, but her shoulders were hunched, her skin almost blue in the strangely discolored light. Pyotr kept talking.

  “I think this looks a good place. The plaster is loose.”

  “Papa, that board creaked when you stood on it, try it again. Look at this, Sofia, it—”

  A fist banged outside on the oak door. Pyotr’s tongue tingled with fear. Soldiers? He swallowed hard and knew in his heart that what they were doing in the hall was wrong.

  “Pyotr,” his father whispered urgently. “Come here.”

  Pyotr scampered over a bench and was seized by his father’s strong hands. Immediately he felt better. Sofia appeared at Papa’s side, though Pyotr hadn’t heard or seen her move. And for the first time the two of them looked at each other, really looked, speaking only with their eyes in a language Pyotr couldn’t understand. Sofia pointed to Pyotr and then to a spot by the entrance. Mikhail nodded, whisked Pyotr over there, and pressed him against the wall behind the heavy door, its rough surface cold on his bare arms. The knock came again, rattling the iron hinges. Pyotr watched in astonishment as his father took Sofia’s face between his hands and kissed her lips. For half a second she swayed against him and Pyotr heard her murmur something, and then just as suddenly they were apart again and Sofia was reaching for the key.

  “Who is it?” his father demanded in the big voice he used for his factory workers.

  IT was Priest Logvinov. He’d come straight from the stables and stank of horse oil and leather. Pyotr had his eye to a knothole in the door as it stood open.

  “What is it you want, Priest?” Mikhail asked curtly.

  Pyotr saw the priest clutch at the large wooden cross at his throat. His gaunt cheeks were gray. “Mikhail, my friend, I’m looking for the girl.”

  “Which girl?”

  Sofia stepped into view. “This girl?”

  The priest nodded, his expression uneasy. “You asked me before about a statue of St. Peter.”