The Red Scarf

by Kate Furnivall

  “I did.”

  Pyotr heard the rise of hope in her voice.

  “I’ve come here because . . .” Logvinov paused, looked wistfully out into the street. “. . . because . . .” He sighed deeply. “Dear Lord in heaven, I don’t know why I’ve come. Just that I felt . . . drawn here.”

  Pyotr noticed the pebble then. He couldn’t see Sofia’s face on the other side of the door but he could see her hand at her side, and in it she held a smooth white stone.

  She spoke softly. “Tell me, Priest, what have you come to say?”

  “I told you of the statue of St. Peter inside the church.”

  “Yes.”

  “But there used to be another.”

  “Where?”

  “Outside, at the back of the church. It was a magnificent marble statue that the Komsomol devils smashed to pieces and used as hardcore under the kolkhoz office building.” His arms were jerking like a puppet’s while he pointed a stick finger out into the gloom that had enveloped the village. “Around the rear of the church beside the buttress, you’ll see the old plinth where it used to stand, covered in moss now.”

  “Thank you, Priest.”

  "Go now,” Pyotr heard his father say kindly, “before you become too involved.”

  Logvinov hesitated, then carved the sign of the cross in the air and left.

  Pyotr squirmed around the door and raced down the path that led around the building, the damp evening air cool in his lungs. The plinth was there, just where the priest had said.

  “You dig,” Sofia urged.

  Pyotr scrabbled like a dog in the dry crumbling earth, using his hands and Papa’s knife to make a hole a meter deep. His breath came fast with excitement.

  “I feel it,” he cried when the blade touched something solid.

  It was a box made of rough pine and wrapped up in sacking. Inside it, enveloped in a sheet of leather that had gone stiff with age, lay a small enameled casket. It was the most beautiful object Pyotr had ever set eyes on, its surface embedded with ivory peacocks and green dragons that Papa said were made of malachite. He lifted it carefully and placed it in Sofia’s hands.

  “Spasibo, Pyotr.”

  She slid open the gold catch and lifted the lid. Pyotr gasped as he caught sight of colors he’d never seen before, molten glowing stones.

  “Sofia,” he whispered, “these could buy you the world.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  THE pearls hung from Sofia’s hand like a string of snowflakes, each unique in itself, yet perfectly matched to its fellows.

  “Comrade Deputy Stirkhov, I think these might help you decide.”

  She dangled the triple strand of pearls over his desk and set them swaying slightly, wafting the sweet smell of money in the direction of his wide nostrils. Behind his spectacles his eyes had grown as round as the pearls themselves, and his lips had parted as if preparing to swallow them. He held out a hand.

  “Let me see them. They may be fake.”

  Sofia laughed. “Do they look fake?”

  The creamy translucence of the pearls lit up the office.

  “I want to check them over.”

  He tried to take the necklace from her, but she stepped back and lifted them out of his reach. He was seated behind his desk and half-rose from his chair, but one look at her face made him change his mind. In front of him on a soft square of white cotton lay a brooch. It was made of silver gilt in the shape of a long-legged borzoi hound, and in its mouth it carried a dead pheasant studded with emeralds. Stirkhov’s eyes slid from the pearls to the brooch and back again. Sofia could see the greed grow the more it fed on them.

  “Half now,” she said, “and half when the job is done.”

  Stirkhov puckered his smooth forehead, not understanding.

  “I’ll make it easy for you,” she smiled and drew a small pair of sewing scissors from her pocket.

  Comprehension dawned.

  “No.”

  “Yes,” she said, snipping through the strands. Pearls cascaded onto the desk, bouncing and skidding off its glossy black surface like hailstones. Stirkhov scrambled to collect them.

  “You stupid bitch.”

  “Half now,” she repeated, “and half when the job is done.”

  She walked to the door, a section of the necklace still in her hand.

  “I could have you arrested,” he snarled.

  “But then you’d lose these, wouldn’t you?” she smiled coolly.

  She slipped the pearls into her pocket and was out of the building before he could change his mind.

  PATIENCE.”

  She was inside Aleksei Fomenko’s house. The izba that was so bare inside, it scarcely looked lived in. She saw no reason not to be here, as she’d invaded his privacy once already, more than invaded it when she’d stuffed sacks under his bed. She’d violated it. So it was easy to break the trust of an unlocked door a second time and walk into the chairman’s house.

  “He’ll come,” she told herself, curling her fingers around the stone in her pocket. It lay there, cold and stubborn. She was staring out the back window over the neat rows of beetroot and rutabagas and turnips in his plot of land, all regimented and weed-free. Like his house.

  Vasily, oh Vasily. How could I have gotten it so wrong? You gave me no sign, no warning. How could I love someone who doesn’t exist? Something hurt in her chest, a real physical pain. It felt as though her heart were spilling hot blood into her chest cavity with each beat of its muscle.

  Vasily, how did you become Fomenko? What happened to you?

  She touched the board where he cut his bread, the skillet in which he fried his food, the towel where he dried his hands, searching for him. She walked into his bedroom, but it was like coming into a dead person’s room. A bed, a stool, hooks on the wall for his clothes. She brushed her fingers over the three checked work shirts that hung there, and they felt soft and worn. She scooped a handful of cloth up to her face, inhaled the scent of it. It smelled clean and fresh, of pine needles. No scent of him, of Aleksei Fomenko. He hid even that.

  On a shelf stood a mirror and a dark wooden hairbrush. She picked up the brush and ran it through her own hair as she gazed into the glass that was speckled with black age spots. No sign of him there, only her own reflection, and that was the face of a stranger. She went over to his plain pinewood bed. It was covered by a patchwork quilt over coarse white sheets but when she lifted the top one, there was no imprint of his body underneath. She touched his pillow and it felt soft. That surprised her. She had expected it to be hard and unyielding, like his ideas. She bent over and placed her cheek on it, sank into its feathers and closed her eyes. What dreams came to him at night, what thoughts? Did he ever dream of Anna? Her hand slid under the pillow, feeling for any secret talisman but found nothing, and when she stood upright she felt a dull kind of anger rise to her throat.

  “You’ve killed him,” she shouted into the dead air of this dead house. “You’ve killed Vasily.” She felt hollow and bereft.

  She picked up the pillow and shook it violently. “You had no right,” she moaned, “no right to kill him. He was Anna’s. I know I borrowed him, but he was always Anna’s and now you’ve killed her as surely as you killed him.”

  She hurled the pillow across the room. It hit the log wall and slithered to the floor, and as it did so something tumbled out of the white pillowcase. Something small and metal rattled into a corner as though trying to hide. Sofia leaped on it. She picked it up, placed it on the palm of her hand, and studied her find. It was a pillbox fashioned out of pewter, small and round and gray. A dent on one side. It reminded her of the pebble in her pocket. She opened it and inside lay a lock of blond hair, bright as sunshine.

  SHE waited, her skin prickling with impatience as she watched the sun march across the room from one side to the other. At some point she drank a glass of water. And all the time she brooded about Mikhail Pashin and about who he really was. About what he’d done. About what she, Sofia, had sworn to do to
him.

  She peeled back each layer of pain, like stripping bark, and looked at what lay underneath. It was a mass of confusion and error that encased a ferocious belief in ideas at the cost of all else. Mixed up in it all was such passion and hatred, yet at the same time she could see the black shadow of a desperate remorse and repentance. She forced herself to look at them, to pick through them all one by one and face up to what she found.

  Oh my Mikhail, you made yourself suffer for what you did. You scourged yourself like the penitents of the Church, but found no divine forgiveness at the end of it. Instead you constructed a life for yourself that tried to atone, and you did it with as much care as you built your bridge. I don’t want to smash my fist on it and bring it crashing down now. But . . . you killed Anna’s father.

  Again and again darkness descended on Sofia as she sat there alone. What kind of mind? What kind of person? What kind of boy shoots human beings in cold blood? She took out the pebble and placed it on her lap but it lay lifeless, a dull white. Yet as she stroked its cold surface, she felt herself change. A vibration rippled through her body and she almost heard the stone hum, high-pitched and faint inside her head. Its color seemed to gain a sheen, just like a pearl.

  Was she imagining this? Was Rafik imagining it all? The seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. Was it true? And if it was, did it mean anything at all? Vasily was gone. That knowledge, that the Vasily she had loved in the camp no longer existed, had torn an important part of her away, and it left a terrible hollowness inside, like hunger. But worse. It gnawed at her with sharp rodent teeth. Now Vasily was gone and she was mourning the loss of him. She moaned and rocked herself in Vasily’s chair, but finally she sat up and wrapped her fingers tight around the stone.

  “Anna,” she said firmly, “wait for me. I’m coming.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  WHAT are you doing in my house?”

  Sofia felt a wave of sorrow for the tall arrogant man whom she had wronged. He stood in the doorway with no marks on him—none that showed anyway—but something about him looked bruised, something in his dark eyes.

  She remained seated. “Comrade Fomenko, I am here to tell you something important.”

  “Not now.”

  He walked over to the enamel jug of water on the table and drank greedily from the glass beside it, as if to flush away something inside himself. For a long moment he closed his eyes, his lashes dark on his cheek, and she knew she was intruding unforgivably.

  He turned to her, his voice cold. “Please leave.”

  “I’ve been here all day, waiting for you.”

  “Why on earth did you assume I would return from prison today?”

  “Because of these.”

  She held up the remains of the pearl necklace. They shimmered in the last of the evening light that tumbled through the window, and his mouth seemed to spasm. He drew in a breath, then fixed his gaze on her face.

  “Who are you? You come to this village and I try to help you because . . . you remind me so much of someone I once knew, but you look at me with such anger in your eyes and now invade my house when all I want is to be alone. Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “I am a friend.”

  “You are no friend to me.” He put down the glass, leaned against the edge of the table, and shook his head, his arms folded across his broad chest. “So why the pearls?”

  “I used half of them to bribe an official to set you free. These”— she cradled the pale beads in the palm of her hand where they chittered softly against each other—“are promised to him now that you are home again.”

  He stood staring at the pearls. She thought she could see recognition of them in his eyes, of the necklace and its distinctive gold clasp, but maybe she was wrong. Maybe it was something else. He was hard to decipher.

  “Who are you?” he asked again in a low voice.

  “I told you, I am a friend.”

  Abruptly he walked to the front door and held it open. Outside, the wolfhound lazed in the sun. “Get out before I throw you out.” He didn’t shout. Just quiet words.

  Sofia rose and moved closer. She noticed a rip in the collar of his shirt, a rust-colored smear on one cuff that looked like dried blood. He was in need of a shave. Her heart went out to him, this man she’d both loved and hated.

  “Vasily, I am a friend of Anna Fedorina.”

  She saw the shock hit him. A shudder. Then so still, not even his pupils moved.

  “You are mistaken, comrade.”

  “Are you telling me that you are not Vasily Dyuzheyev, only son of Svetlana and Grigori Dyuzheyev of Petrograd? Killer of the Bolshevik soldier who murdered your father, protector of Anna Fedorina who hid under a chaise longue, builder of snow sleighs and agitator for the Bolsheviks. That Vasily. Is that not you?”

  He turned away from her, his back as straight as one of his field furrows. For a long period neither spoke.

  “Who sent you here?” he asked at last without looking at her. “Are you an agent for OGPU, here to entrap me? I believe it was you who placed the sacks under my bed. I could see the hate in your eyes when the soldiers came for me.” He breathed deeply. “Tell me why.”

  “I thought you were someone else. I am not with OGPU, have no fear of that, but I did make a terrible mistake and for that I do apologize. I was wrong.”

  Still he gazed out at the soft evening clouds, at a skein of geese that arrowed across them. “Who did you think I was?”

  “The boy soldier who shot both Anna’s father and Svetlana Dyuzheyeva. ”

  No response. Her heart pounded. “Vasily, speak to me. She’s alive, Vasily, Anna Fedorina is alive.”

  It was like watching an earth tremor, a quake from somewhere deep below the world’s surface. His broad shoulder blades shifted out of alignment and his muscular neck jerked in spasm but he didn’t turn. He just tightened his folded arms around himself as though holding something inside.

  “Where?”

  “In a labor camp. I was there with her.”

  “Which one?” Barely a whisper.

  “Davinsky camp in Siberia.”

  “Why?”

  “For nothing more than being the daughter of Doktor Nikolai Fedorin, who was declared an enemy of the people.”

  No more words. Neither of them could find any. The black shadow of Vasily lay across the wooden floor between them like a corpse.

  THEY drank vodka. They drank till the pain was blunted and they could look at each other. Sofia sat in the chair, upright and tense, while Fomenko fetched a stubby stool from the bedroom and folded himself onto it, his lean limbs orderly and controlled once more. She wanted him to shout at her, to bellow and scream and accuse her of false betrayal. She wanted to be made to suffer the way she’d made him suffer.

  But he did none of these things. After the initial shock, he snapped back from the edge of whatever abyss had opened up, and his strength astounded her. How could he hold so much turmoil within himself, yet seem so calm? His self-control was ironclad, so strong that he even smiled at her, a dry sorrowful smile, and ran a steady hand over the head of the dog now stretched out at his feet. Its brown eyes watched his face as attentively as Sofia did.

  “Comrade,” he said, “I am glad Anna has a friend.”

  “Help me, Vasily, to be a true friend to her.”

  “Help you how?”

  “By rescuing her.”

  For the first time the firm line of his mouth faltered. “I have no authority to order any kind of release in—”

  “Not with orders. I mean together, you and I, we could go up there. You could authorize travel permits and we—”

  “No.”

  “She’s sick.”

  “I’m very sorry,” he said quietly.

  “Sorry means nothing. She’s going to die. She’s spitting blood and another winter up there will kill her.”

  A dull mist seemed to settle behind his eyes, blurring them. “Anna,” he whispered.

  “Help he
r.”

  He shook his head slowly, full of regret.

  “What happened to you?” she demanded. “When did you lose your ability to care for another human being? When your parents were shot, was that it? Did that moment smother all feelings in you for the rest of your life?”

  In the gathering gloom he stared at her in silence.

  “You don’t understand, comrade.”

  “Make me, Vasily, make me understand. How can you abandon someone you loved, someone who still loves you and believes in you and needs you? How does that happen?” She leaned forward, hands clasped. “Go on, tell me. Make me understand.”

  “I traced Maria, her governess. I wanted to . . .” Suddenly words failed him.

  With a groan he rose to his feet, walked over to the vodka on the table, and took a swig straight from the bottle.

  “Comrade Morozova, my feelings are my own business, not yours. Now please leave.”

  "No, Vasily, not until you tell me—”

  “Listen to me, comrade, and listen well. Vasily Dyuzheyev is dead and gone. Do not call me by that name ever again. Russia is a stubborn country; its people are hardheaded and determined. To transform this Soviet system into a world economy—which is what Stalin is attempting to do by opening up our immense mineral wealth in the wastelands of Siberia—we must put aside personal loyalties and accept only loyalty to the state. This is the way forward, the only way forward.”

  “The labor camps are inhuman.”

  “Why were you sent there?”

  “Because my uncle was too good at farming and acquired the label kulak. They thought I was ’contaminated.’ ”

  “Do you still not see that the labor camps are essential because they provide a workforce for the roads and railways, for the mines and the timber yards, as well as teaching people that they must—”

  “Stop it, stop it!”

  He stopped. They stared hard at each other and the air between them quivered as Sofia released her breath.

  “You’d be proud of her,” she murmured. “So proud of Anna.”

  Those simple words did what all her arguments and her pleading had failed to do. They broke his control. This tall powerful man sank to his knees on the hard floor like a tree being felled, all strength gone. He placed his hands over his face and released a low stifled moan. It was harsh and raw, as though something was ripping open. But it gave Sofia hope. She could just make out the murmur of words repeated over and over again. “My Anna, my Anna, my Anna . . .” The dog stood at his side and licked one of his hands with a gentle whine.