‘Shall I tell you a story?’ he asked.
‘If it’s a funny one. I’m in the mood to laugh.’
‘I think this one will amuse you.’
She lengthened her stride to his. On either side, cabbages looked like shaggy grey chickens roosting for the night.
‘Tell me,’ she said.
‘Well, you recall the steep flight of stairs up to my office at the factory?’
‘Yes.’
He chuckled and she found herself smiling in anticipation.
‘My assistant, Sukov - remember the cheeky bastard who brought us our tea this morning? - he fell down them today. All the way from top to bottom and broke his leg in two places.’
Sofia halted and stared at his delighted smile. ‘What is remotely funny about that?’
Mikhail’s smile widened, but his eyes were dark and serious. ‘He was coming to Leningrad with me in the morning. Now it means there’s a train seat and a travel ticket going spare.’
The river gleamed like polished steel in the moonlight. Sofia waded into it, naked. Even the touch of the chill water on her skin couldn’t cool the heat in her blood.
One week with Mikhail. She was to have one whole week. Just the two of them. It was more than she’d ever dared hope for, much more. Just the thought of it set her heart drumming in her chest and she gazed up at the dazzling array of stars above, as if they’d been put there tonight just for her. She laughed out loud. The happiness wouldn’t stay inside, it just bubbled out into the silent night. She splashed a spray of water up towards the stars and laughed again when she heard a plop in the water where some night creature took fright at her antics.
Sleep had been impossible. She could no more close her eyes than she could close her heart, so she had come down to the river, alone and unseen, and washed away the dust of the fields from her limbs.
Anna, are you looking at this same moon? These same stars? Waiting for me. Oh Anna, I’m coming, I promise. Hold on. I’ll know. By the end of this week together I’ll know if I can ask him to help. Your Vasily. She hesitated, then spoke the words aloud this time so that her ears would have to hear them.
‘Your Vasily. Don’t hate me, Anna. It’s for you. I swear it’s for you.’
She plunged under the surface of the water, a cold black world where it was impossible to tell which way was up and which way was down.
A shadow, among many shadows. The night was full of them: the swaying of branches in the breeze, white drifts of mist rising to swallow the paths, a fox or a vole scampering on its nocturnal run. But still she saw the shadow.
She was dressed and standing on the river bank when the narrow track across the river changed fleetingly from silver to black, then again further along. Instantly she was alert and retreated into the overhanging curtain of a willow tree. From there she watched the shadow and quickly made out that it was a man, and that he was walking away from her. The moonlight painted the back of his head and sketched his long limbs, and for one breathless moment Sofia thought it was Mikhail come to seek her out. But then a wisp of light caught the long back of the ghost-dog at the shadow’s side and she realised it was Aleksei Fomenko with his hound.
Fomenko? What was the Chairman doing prowling the night? From behind the feathery veil of willow leaves she observed them, the way they strode along the wooded track without hesitation. Both man and animal knew the way.
The way to where?
There was just enough breeze to rustle the night. It shuffled the leaves and sighed among the branches, just enough to hide the brush of her skirt on a thorn or the crack of a twig underfoot as she followed them.
The dog worried her. The animal’s ears were sharp, but it seemed intent only on what lay ahead. Sofia stayed a good distance behind them, concentrating hard on the small sounds of their movement to guide her through the forest. They were tracking up over the ridge and her mind raced for an answer to explain Fomenko’s surprising night-time wanderings.
A lover? In the next valley?
It was possible. She’d heard no mention of any woman in his life. The idea of this self-controlled man losing himself to such an extent appealed to her, his desires getting the better of his quotas. That thought made her smile and quicken her pace. Around her the forest grew darker, the trees denser, denying the moon anything more than a trickle of its pale light through the thick canopy of foliage. The path beneath her feet became steeper as they passed from valley to valley and then higher into the mountains, and still the man and dog pushed on. Sofia’s pulse began to quicken. Thoughts flickered in her head. Moths fluttered against her face.
The dog whined as its claws scrabbled up a gulley. The sound of it was so familiar it made the hairs on the back of her neck rise. She became convinced she knew where they were heading.
The hut.
It was strange to be in the clearing again. So much had changed for her in the last few days, yet here everything seemed the same. The hut still leaned like an old man and the boughs of the fallen tree still lay white as dead bones in the moonlight, but Sofia didn’t venture among them. Instead she sheltered in the undergrowth, tight against a tree trunk, and watched a flame flare into life in the small window of the hut after Fomenko had entered with the dog.
Was he meeting someone?
That time when she hid down by the stream and came back to find the two men in the hut and the horse outside, she was sure now that it had been Fomenko and that the dog had been Hope. But this time there was no other man. This time he was on his own, alone and secretive. Secrets always meant weakness. Know your enemy. Know his weakness. She listened to the sounds of the night, eyes fixed on the yellow rectangle of the window, but a sudden snort right behind her made her leap from her position. Her blood raced. She swung round but could make out nothing among the black shapes of the forest.
A person? A moose? Even a bear?
Damn it, she wasn’t waiting to be clawed to death. Ducking low, she crept out into the clearing, aware that she was now visible to watchful eyes. She moved silently to the window and with caution peered in at one corner, but she needn’t have worried. Aleksei Fomenko was kneeling on the dusty floor, totally engrossed. His long back in the familiar work shirt was angled towards her, but she could just see that he was bent over a hole in the flooring. A hole? She hadn’t noticed one when she slept here. It was explained by the sight of two wooden planks lying to one side, the floorboards, and next to them a candle, its flame casting uncertain light round the room. Sofia eased further along the window frame and over his shoulder she caught a glimpse of what was holding his attention so seriously. A khaki-green square object. It took her a moment to recognise it for what it was
A two-way radio, all dials and pointers and knobs. A sudden burst of static took her by surprise and she ducked down below the sill, her breath raw in her throat. A secret radio. Why did the Chairman need a secret radio?
As she crouched low to the earth, her mind struggled to find an explanation. Was it to connect him directly to OGPU, to give him a direct line to the secret police where he could betray the secrets of his kolkhozniki in private? But what was wrong with the office telephone? Did this radio bypass the normal channels and take him straight to the man at the top? She shook her head. No, she told herself, don’t get carried away. Probably just a secret lover crooning sweet-talk in his ear. She decided to risk another glimpse and slid up slowly till her eyes were again on a level with the cobwebbed glass. This time she took in more of what was in front of her: the stillness of Fomenko’s powerful shoulders, the earphones on his head, the mouthpiece he was murmuring into, the notebook open at his side and covered with lines of dense writing.
Why on earth would he need notes for a lover?
With a small sense of shock she became aware of the dog. It was stretched out on the floor, licking dirt from one paw with long sweeps of its tongue, but abruptly it stopped. Its head lifted, eyes and ears alert. It gazed at the closed door and, making no sound, it raised its lip
s to show its teeth in a silent snarl. Sofia didn’t know what its quick ears had picked up but she wasn’t going to hang around to find out. She pushed herself away from the hut and raced away back down the track to Tivil.
32
Davinsky Camp July 1933
After the business with the cat, Anna lay awake, propped upright against the damp wood of the hut wall to ease her breathing. Beside her on the bed board lay a squat, nervy woman, who spent every waking hour angry and resentful to the point where she could barely sleep at night. She lay on her side staring wide-eyed at the degraded world inside the hut, hating it with a passion that was killing her.
Anna didn’t want to be like that. She didn’t want to hate until that was all that was left inside her. She’d seen it again and again, the way prisoners died from hate, and she tried to spit its insidious bitter taste from her mouth, but sometimes it was hard. Especially without Sofia to make her laugh. She missed Sofia.
Ever since the cat she had missed Sofia even more. Sofia would have known how to rid her head of the images that swarmed inside it. It was that stupid cat’s fault, scratching Tasha’s hand like that. Because now that Anna had let that terrible day back into her head, it settled there, gnawing at her and refusing to go away. Even as she hacked away at the branches all day in the forest, trying to block her mind with thoughts of the futile arrogance of the guards or the fragrance of the pine sap, the memory sank its powerful teeth into her and kept dragging her back to Petrograd and that cold winter of 1917.
She had became a shadow after her father died in the snow, no longer a person, just a twelve-year-old shadow inside a cramped and stuffy apartment that belonged to Maria’s brother, Sergei, and his wife, Irina. Her skin turned grey, she rarely spoke and only picked at the barest crumbs of food. But she learned to call Maria Mama and she wore a plain brown peasant dress without complaint and ate black bread instead of white. At night she shared Maria’s narrow cot and spent the hours of darkness lying obediently on the sour-smelling mattress. She never seemed to close her eyes. They had changed from their bright cornflower blue to a dull muddy colour that matched the winter gloom of the River Neva. Yet still she wouldn’t cry.
‘It’s not natural,’ Irina said in a low voice. ‘Her father has just died. Why doesn’t she cry?’
‘Give her time,’ Maria murmured to her sister-in-law as she ran a hand over the silky blonde head. ‘She’s still too shocked.’
‘A shock is what that girl needs,’ Irina said and mimed a quick little slap with her hand. ‘It’s like having a corpse in the house.’ She shivered dramatically. ‘The child gives Sergei and me the creeps, she does. How you can sleep with her in your bed, I don’t know.’
‘Irina, please. She’s silent but she’s not deaf.’
‘No, you’re not deaf are you, Anna? Just wilful. Well, child, it’s time to snap out of it and give your poor Maria a chance to get on with her own life. She’s starting a new job tomorrow and can’t spend time fretting about you.’
Anna’s muddy eyes turned to Maria, panic fierce in them. ‘Can’t I come with you?’ Her voice was barely a whisper. ‘I can work too.’
‘No, my love.’ Maria kissed her forehead in the dark. ‘I’m working in a factory, putting washers on taps. It’ll be noisy and dirty and unimaginably boring. You’ll enjoy it much more here with little Sasha and Aunt Irina.’
‘You might die tomorrow. Among the taps.’
Maria put an arm round Anna and rocked her gently. ‘Neither of us will die, I swear to you. You must wait patiently for me to return.’
A soft moan escaped from the back of Anna’s throat.
Anna spent the day at the window. She kissed Maria goodbye at the door of the first-floor apartment and then ran to the window to wave to her all the way down the street, but the moment Maria was out of sight, a suffocating blackness swarmed into her mind. It stopped her breathing. Air wouldn’t go into her lungs and sometimes she had to beat her ribs with her fists, pushing her chest in and out to make air suck in and blow out. Irina clipped her round the ear for doing it, saying she was being silly and mustn’t scare Sasha, who was watching Anna from his colourful rag-rug with a big grin on his face. His ears, which stuck out like wings, listened to every sound she made.
Anna counted. She counted her fingers, she counted the number of blue flowers on the wallpaper, the spots on Sasha’s chin, the chimneys on the roofs, the tiles on the house opposite, the people in the street, the pigeons in the gutter. She even tried to count the snowflakes when they fell from a colourless sky but that was too hard. Only when the sky grew dark and Maria came home, only then did Anna believe Maria was still alive.
They came for Maria in the middle of the night. They barely gave her time to pull a dress on over her nightgown, but she was quick to push Anna firmly against the wall.
‘Stay there,’ she told her fiercely.
So Anna stayed there. But when the big man in the arrogant boots and the long overcoat patted her on the shoulder and told her not to fret, she wanted to bite him. To sink her teeth into his wrist where the ugly blue veins bulged above his black leather gloves and make his blood flow on to the floorboards. Maria said little, but when she bent to pull her felt valenki on her feet, Anna could see the white skin on the back of her neck twitching as if spiders were crawling over it.
It was Sergei who put up the fight.
‘What do you want with my sister?’ he demanded. ‘She’s a good worker. She’s done nothing. We are a loyal Bolshevik family. I marched on the Winter Palace with the best of them. Look,’ he yanked open the front of his nightwear to reveal a livid scar across his chest, ‘I am proud to bear the mark of a sabre.’
‘I salute you, comrade,’ said the man in the overcoat. His face was shrewd. ‘But it’s not you we want to question, it’s her.’
‘But she’s my sister and would never—’
‘Enough, comrade.’ He held up his hand for silence, a man accustomed to being obeyed. ‘Take her outside,’ he ordered two of his soldiers.
‘Maria.’ It was Irina who darted forward. ‘Take this.’ She thrust her own warmest fur hat on to her sister-in-law’s head, a piece of cheese into her hand, and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. ‘Just in case,’ she whispered.
Maria blinked but couldn’t speak. Her face looked frozen.
Just in case? Of what? Anna wanted to scream. What would they do to her, these huge soldiers whose shoulders packed the small room with their hard muscles and their long rifles and the stink of their damp uniforms?
‘And this pretty little kitten with the eyes that would kill me.’ The officer’s laugh held no humour. ‘Who is she?’
‘She’s my niece,’ Sergei said. He placed a protective arm round Anna’s shoulders. ‘She’s not important. She helps with our own baby, so that my wife can spend more time knitting scarves and gloves for our brave soldiers.’
The man walked over, placed his hands on his knees and lowered his face until it was at the same level as Anna’s. He inspected her closely.
‘So. Shall I take you down for interrogation as well?’
Anna gave a faint nod.
He smiled a snake’s smile, and she spat at him. Her spittle hit his cheek and slithered down. Without a thought, his gloved hand slapped her face, bouncing her head off the wall. She didn’t cry, but Maria did.
‘The child didn’t mean it,’ Maria called out. ‘She’s upset and frightened. Apologise immediately, Anna.’
Anna glared at the man. She wanted him to take her wherever Maria was going, so she started gathering more spittle in her mouth.
‘Anna!’ Maria begged.
‘I’m sorry,’ Anna whispered.
Abruptly he lost interest. ‘Come,’ he said. Suddenly they were gone and only the smell of them remained.
Five days. Anna counted the breaths.
Twenty-five breaths in a minute. Fifteen hundred breaths an hour. Thirty-six thousand breaths in a day and night.
She wasn�
��t so sure about the nights. When you sleep you breathe more slowly. But alone in the bed she didn’t sleep and when she did close her eyes on the sofa during the day, she woke up with nightmares. Irina scolded her for disturbing Sasha with her screams.
Five days. One hundred and forty-four thousand breaths.
On the sixth day Maria came home.
She said little and didn’t go to work. She lay on her side on the bed hour after hour, eyes wide open. Anna sat on the floor beside the cot and twisted her fingers into the quilt because it was the nearest she could get to Maria without touching her. And she knew that if she touched the fragile figure, Maria would break.
So she sat still, made no noise, just fed tiny cubes of pickled beetroot into Maria’s mouth. They turned Anna’s fingers and Maria’s lips the colour of cranberry juice.
When eventually Maria did emerge, her hair was styled differently. Even so, it didn’t quite hide the ugly marks on the side of her neck.
‘What are they?’ Anna whispered.
‘Cigarette burns.’
‘Was it an accident?’
‘Yes,’ Maria said quietly. ‘An accident of beliefs.’
Anna didn’t understand, but she knew she wasn’t meant to.
‘You have to go.’
Anna couldn’t believe the words.
‘You have to go, Annochka. Today.’
‘No.’
‘Don’t argue. You have to go.’
Maria was holding a small hessian bag in her hand and Anna knew it contained her own few belongings.
‘No, Maria, please no. I love you.’
That was when tears started to slide down Maria’s face and the bag shook in her hand.
‘It’s time for you to go, my love,’ Maria insisted. ‘Please don’t look so terrified. Sergei is going to take you to the station and then a good kind woman will travel with you all the way to Kazan.’
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