Under a Blood Red Sky

17

Sofia could see what was coming but she didn’t blame the boy when he leapt to his feet. He was trapped. Enticed by the burning zeal. She’d seen it growing in his face each time he turned to glare at the stolid peasants around him, and in the way he leaned further and further away from the dissident blacksmith towards the eager young boy at his side, the one who looked as though he’d stepped out of a propaganda poster.

No, she didn’t blame him. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t fight him. Quickly she stepped into the aisle between the rows of benches.

‘Comrade Deputy Chairman.’

She spoke out clearly, overriding the boy’s thin voice. Instantly all eyes swung away from him and focused on the newcomer. A murmur trickled round the hall. ‘Who is she? Kto eto? ’

‘State your name, Comrade,’ ordered Stirkhov.

‘My name is Sofia Morozova.’ Her heart was kicking like a mule. ‘I’ve travelled down from Garinzov, near Lesosibirsk in the north, after the death of my aunt. I am the niece by marriage of Rafik Ilyan who cares for your horses.’

Heads turned to Zenia, who was seated next to the tall man with the lion’s mane. She nodded, but kept her eyes fixed firmly on the bench in front and said nothing.

‘What is it you wish to say, Comrade Morozova?’ Stirkhov asked.

He had one of those oily half-smiles on his face, the kind she knew too well, the kind that made her want to spit.

‘Comrade Deputy, I have come to this meeting to offer my labour for the harvest.’

It was Chairman Aleksei Fomenko who responded. ‘We welcome labourers at harvest time when the hours are long and the work is hard. Have you done field work before?’

She stared straight back at him, at the strong lines of his face. His observant grey gaze made her palms sweat.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve done field work.’

‘Where?’

‘On my aunt’s farm.’

‘What kind?’

‘She kept pigs. And sowed oats.’

Enthusiastic voices erupted along the benches.

‘I could use her in my brigade.’

‘We need her in the potato fields!’ a woman shouted out. ‘It’s hard, mind.’

‘She doesn’t look as if she’s up to it, Olga. All straw limbs.’

‘I’m strong,’ Sofia insisted.

A woman in a flowered headscarf and rubber boots reached out from the nearest bench and prodded Sofia’s narrow thigh with a calloused finger. ‘Good muscle.’

‘I’m not a horse,’ Sofia objected, but good-naturedly.

The women laughed. Aleksei Fomenko rapped on the table.

‘Enough! Very well, Sofia Morozova, we will find you work. And I presume Rafik will speak for you.’

‘Yes, my uncle will speak for me.’

‘Have you registered at the kolkhoz office as a resident?’

‘Not yet.’

For the first time he paused. She saw the muscles round his eyes tighten and knew he had started to doubt her. ‘You must do so first thing tomorrow morning.’

‘Of course.’

The boy’s head jerked round to face her, his brown eyes dark with fury as he prepared to speak. That was when she played her trump card.

She smiled straight at the boy and said, ‘I am a qualified tractor driver.’

Pyotr felt his fear of her melt. One moment it was like acid in his throat, burning his flesh, and the next it tasted like honey, all sweet and cloying. He was confused. What had she done to him? She was an Enemy of the People, he was convinced of it. Why else would she be a fugitive in the forest? But when he looked around at the faces he couldn’t understand why they couldn’t see it too. What was she? A vedma? A witch?

‘Pokrovsky,’ he moaned.

The blacksmith glanced down at him. ‘What is it, boy?’

‘I still have something to say.’

‘Just sit still and shut up,’ Pokrovsky growled. His attention was on the stranger.

Pyotr knew that tractor drivers were worth more than the finest black pearls of caviar from the Caspian Sea. The State ran tractor courses at every Machine and Tractor Station throughout the country and a tractor driver was paid more in labour days, sometimes even in cash, but so far no one in the Tivil kolkhoz had succeeded in gaining a place on one of the overcrowded courses. The fugitive had chosen the perfect golden key to open the door into the kolkhoz because a tractor would halve the intensive work of the coming harvest.

‘A tractor driver?’ Fomenko repeated.

‘Yes,’ she answered.

‘You have the MTS certificate?’

‘I have the certificate.’

She was lying, Pyotr was certain she was lying. He could hear the little worms of deceit wriggling against each other as they burrowed into her words.

‘This is excellent news,’ Stirkhov said, ‘otlichnaya novost. The whole village will of course benefit, but…’ He paused, his pale eyes suddenly flatter and harder. ‘But tonight I have come to inform you all of the quotas you are to fulfil with this year’s harvest. The State demands that your quota of contributions be raised.’

A ripple of shock ran through the hall and one woman started to cry in harsh, dry sobs. Moans made a rustling sound like rats in corn stubble. Then came the anger. Pyotr felt it like a wave of hot air, thick on the back of his neck. He was sure the fugitive woman was in some strange way the cause of this dismay, that her presence was drawing disaster to his village.

‘Silence!’ Fomenko rapped on the table. ‘Listen to Comrade Stirkhov.’

‘We’re listening,’ Igor Andreev, a Brigade Leader, said reasonably. His hunting dog whined at his knee. ‘But last December the Politburo ordered the seizing of most of our seed grain and our seed potatoes to feed the towns and the Red Army, so the harvest this season is smaller than a shrew’s balls. We can’t even fulfil the present quotas.’ He stared dully up at Fomenko. ‘Chairman, we’ll be eating rats.’

‘If you work hard,’ Fomenko said quietly, ‘you eat. Stalin has announced the annihilation of begging and pauperism in the countryside. Work hard,’ he repeated, ‘and there will be enough for everyone to eat.’

Stirkhov applauded vigorously. Yuri did the same, and a handful of others clapped with token enthusiasm.

‘Only this week,’ Stirkhov announced, puffing out his chest inside his leather jacket, ‘Stalin is opening the Belomorskiy Kanal. One hundred and twenty million tons of frozen earth were removed by sheer hard labour and now the Baltic Sea is linked to the heartland of Russia. The trade increase in timber alone will bring a flood of prosperity and hard currency to our great Soviet State and its people. And to you as well, brothers of Tivil, so do not talk of failure. See what can be achieved when we work together and follow the vision of our Leader.’

It was Leonid Logvinov who stood up first, the ginger-haired man they still called the Priest, though his church was long gone. Logvinov’s skeletal arm held his wooden crucifix out in front of him, pointing it straight at Stirkhov.

‘God forgive your murdering ways,’ he thundered, ‘and the blaspheming lies of your anti-Christ.’

‘Too far, Priest, you’ve gone too far.’ Stirkhov pounded his fist down on the metal table. But at the same moment the large oak door at the far end slammed open with a crash, rebounding on its hinges, and a wave of cold air swept into the hall. Mikhail Pashin strode into the central aisle, his brown hair windblown, his suit creased.

‘Papa,’ Pyotr cried.

But Mikhail Pashin didn’t hear. ‘Get out of here!’ he shouted. He pointed a finger at the men behind the table on the platform. ‘They’ve tricked you, those two. They’ve kept you cooped up in here while the forces of the Grain Procurement Agency are ransacking your houses. They’re tearing your attics apart, hunting out hidden stores of grain, stripping your larders and stealing your chickens to fulfil their quotas.’

A moan ripped through the benches. Panic forced everyone to their feet.

‘Go home!’ Mikhail shouted above the noise. ‘Before you starve.’

Mikhail Pashin could barely contain his anger. He expelled his breath violently and stepped aside to let the panicked villagers pass. They were pushing and pressing, struggling and shouting, a hundred of them fighting to get through the door as if the blue-capped wolves were actually growling at their heels. It seemed to Mikhail that the people were turning into sheep. Stalin was snipping off their tails yet they didn’t even bleat, despite the fact that ever since the introduction of collectivisation starving peasants had thronged every railway station, clawing their way into the towns and cities. He’d seen them himself, begging in the streets of Kharkov and Moscow, selling their souls for a few kopecks.

Urgently he scanned the bobbing heads. Where was Pyotr? He would be here somewhere. His son’s seemingly infinite capacity for absorbing Communist propaganda made Mikhail clench his teeth, but right now all he wanted was to find him and get him safe. Tonight there would be violence.

Even as the thought entered his head, the crack of a rifle shot ricocheted through the night air outside, bouncing off the izba walls and sending shivers through the valley. A woman screamed inside the hall.

By now the crowd was thinning. A stone abruptly exploded in through one of the side windows as somebody expressed their rage, scattering glass and drops of rain over the empty benches. Mikhail took a deep breath.

‘Pyotr!’ he roared.

‘Papa!’

A huge wave of relief rushed through Mikhail as he caught sight of his son. The boy was right at the front, struggling ineffectually in the massive grip of Pokrovsky. The blacksmith was holding him there, indifferent to Pyotr’s kicks, quietly keeping him out of harm’s way. Mikhail raised a hand to Pokrovsky.

‘Spasibo,’ he mouthed. ‘Thank you.’

Pokrovsky allowed a thin smile in acknowledgement, but his eyes moved to the broken window and the lifeless leaves swirling in on the wind like omens. The big man ran the edge of his free hand across his own broad throat. Smert. Death. It was out there.

‘You always seem to be the bringer of bad news.’

Mikhail did not pause in his efforts to elbow a path down to the front of the hall but glanced fleetingly at the person who had spoken. To his surprise it was the girl he’d met in that candle-lit moment before dawn this morning, the gypsy’s niece, the one who seemed to have come from a different world. Her strange blue eyes looked at you as if seeing someone else, the someone you keep hidden from public gaze. She was standing in the aisle in front of him, still as stone, letting the flow of people break and reform around her. She was smiling at him. What the hell was there to smile about?

‘These days most news is bad news,’ Mikhail muttered.

She nodded but her words told a different story. ‘Not always,’ she said.

He wanted to push past to reach Pyotr but something about her held him there for a moment, and when an elderly babushka elbowed him against her, he found himself staring deep into her face, only inches from his own. He could smell the sweet scent of juniper on her breath.

She was painfully thin, bones almost jutting through her skin, and she had the bruised shadows of semi-starvation in the hollows of her face. But her eyes were extraordinary. Wider and bluer than a summer sky, glittering in the light from the lamps, full of something wild. And they were laughing at him. For one strange and unnerving second he thought she was actually looking right into him and rummaging through his secrets. Abruptly he recalled the veiled threat she’d made the last time he spoke to her and he forced himself to recoil.

‘You should go home,’ he said, more abruptly than he intended.

‘Home?’ She cocked her head to one side and studied him. ‘Where is home?’

‘You’re living with the gypsies, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then show some sense. Go and stay there. This night has only just started.’

‘You and I,’ she said in a voice so low he barely heard it in the hubbub around him, ‘have only just started.’

He frowned and shook his head. Each time they met she seemed to have a way of knocking him off balance. He broke free from her smile. ‘Pyotr!’ he shouted again.

The boy was released and started to clamber over the benches towards him. But halfway down the hall Priest Logvinov was standing erect like a scarecrow, raised up on one of the bench seats, his red hair like flames around his head, the cross brandished like a weapon.

‘Abomination!’ he boomed out. ‘Thou shalt have no other god before me, saith the Lord.’ His finger pointed at Stirkhov’s chest, as if it would drill through to the blasphemous heart within it.

‘Don’t, Priest,’ Mikhail shouted.

He saw Stirkhov, alone now on the platform, deliberately push over the metal table so that it fell with a screech on to the floor. With no sign of haste the Raikom Deputy drew a Mauser pistol from inside his leather jacket and pointed it straight at the ranting figure less than ten metres in front of him.

‘Priest! Get down!’ Mikhail bellowed, hurling himself towards the bench.

But it was the strange girl who saved him. ‘Aleksandr Stirkhov,’ she called, loud and clear above the noise in the hall. The muzzle of the gun wavered as he turned his head.

All she did was smile at him, but instantly the soft pink tip of Stirkhov’s tongue peeked out from between his lips.

Her smile widened, warm and distracting.

Time enough. For Mikhail to reach the exposed priest, drag him down into the crowd and push him along with the jostling flow to the door.

‘Christe eleison,’ the priest uttered solemnly in Latin. ‘Christ have mercy on us in this unbelieving world.’

Suddenly Pyotr’s worried face appeared at Mikhail’s elbow. He seized his son’s arm in one hand and the girl’s in the other and propelled them both through the door.