Under a Blood Red Sky

22

‘Papa, wake up. Please, wake up. You’re late.’

Mikhail opened his eyes and a spike of morning sunlight lanced into them. He winced. He was on the floor of his own living room, curled up in his coat, a bottle nestled to his chest. An empty bottle. He swore softly under his breath, only to discover that his mouth tasted like cow dung.

‘Papa, you got drunk!’

Mikhail sat up and scrubbed a hand through his hair. The ceiling swooped, then settled, and a heavy pulse started up behind his eyes and echoed dully in his ears. His mind struggled. It felt oddly empty, like the inside of a drum. And a soft female voice whispering words he couldn’t quite catch in his ear.

‘I wasn’t drunk, Pyotr.’

‘You were, you know you were.’ The boy’s eyes glared, a long, sulky beat. ‘And now you’re late for work.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Eight-thirty.’

‘Chyort! ’

Mikhail felt an unfocused anger rise inside him – he wasn’t sure at what or at whom, but he knew somehow he had lost control and he hated his son seeing him like this. ‘Pyotr,’ he said sharply, ‘I’ll drink if and when I have a mind to. I don’t need your permission, boy.’

‘No, Papa.’

Mikhail rose to his feet and groaned. Fuck it, this was a hangover like none he’d experienced before. His whole brain felt dislocated. He made his way out to the tub of water in the back yard, stuck his head in it and kept it there until blood reached his brain. Today he’d have to ride Zvezda hard.

His shirt was wet round the collar and stank of alcohol, and of something else. He sniffed the sleeve cautiously. Was it her? The scent of her skin on his arm? The sudden memory of Sofia’s face in the darkness, her mouth soft and full as she whispered words to him. What words? Damn it, what words? He couldn’t remember. He shook his head but nothing became clearer. Had the vodka done this or…? Dimly he recalled Rafik being there last night. What had the gypsy to do with it? He headed back into the house where the boy was staring out of the window.

‘Pyotr,’ he said gruffly, ‘you know I’m like a bear with a sore head if I sleep too long. You were right to wake me. Spasibo.’

His son continued to look out at the street, his back rigid, elbows stiff at his sides. Mikhail felt an urge to wrap his arms round his stubborn son’s young frame, to hold on to it, to keep it safe and guard it from grain hunters and fire starters and slogan sellers. Instead he went into his own room, shaved, changed his shirt and when he came out again Pyotr was waiting for him.

‘Papa, what happened last night?’

Last night. Mikhail shook his head again, trying to clear the blurring that smudged his thoughts at the very mention of last night. What did happen? And why do I feel Sofia so close?

‘What happened to the grain and the sacks, Papa? All the piles of them that the Procurement Officers stacked in the truck. People are saying it was stolen. That you were… involved.’

The boy’s face was tense, as if he was frightened to hear the answer. They both knew of the infamous case of the boy, Pavlik, who only last spring had reported his own father to the authorities for anti-Soviet activities and the Politburo had used it as a major propaganda tool. One of Pyotr’s feet kicked again and again at the floorboards.

‘No grain was taken,’ Mikhail said firmly. ‘There were only four sacks.’

‘They say that’s not true.’

‘Then they’re lying.’

The boy shuffled his feet.

‘Pyotr, stay away from the barns today. That fire didn’t light itself and Fomenko will be looking for a culprit.’

The fresh air cleared Mikhail’s head. Dusty white clouds trailed along the top of the ridge on each side of him as he cantered down the dirt road, past the cedar tree that marked the village boundary and out into the valley which lay before him, sun-baked and vibrant with movement. The bushy green foliage of the potato crop rustled in the fields and stooped figures wielded hoes and rakes across the long mounds. The whole kolkhoz workforce was already hard at it, striving to fulfil Aleksei Fomenko’s labour quotas. One thing Mikhail couldn’t deny was that Fomenko had pulled and prodded and bullied the Tivil collective farm into some semblance of productivity. He might be a bastard, but he was an efficient bastard.

Above, a solitary skylark soared up into the brilliantly blue sky, its wings fluttering like heartbeats. Mikhail envied its effortless flight. He used to work at the N22 aircraft factory in Moscow and he missed that wonderful sense of freedom that came with flying, but freedom was a word that had no meaning these days. He wondered how Andrei Tupolev was getting on with the development of the ANT-4 aeroplane, and allowed himself a moment to indulge in the images of its corrugated Duralumin skinning, like wave ripples in the sand. And the full-throated roar of its hefty twin engines that-

Abruptly Mikhail cut off the sounds in his head. Why torment himself? Those days were gone. He heeled Zvezda into a longer stride and the horse huffed through its broad nostrils, pricked its ears and responded with ease. They were travelling fast, kicking up a trail of dust behind them, the valley widening out along the silver twist of the river into a flat plain dotted with clumps of pine and alder. It came as a surprise when he looked up and spotted a lone figure standing at the roadside some way ahead.

He recognised her at once, that distinctive way she had of cocking her head to one side, as if expecting something. She was watching him, one hand shielding her eyes. The worn material of her skirt was almost transparent in the strong sunlight and her fine fair hair ruffled round her face in the breeze. He reined Zvezda to a walk and approached with care, so as not to coat her in dust.

‘Good morning, Sofia Morozova. Dobroye utro. You’re a long way from home.’

She looked up with a wide generous smile. ‘That depends where home is.’

The smile was infectious. ‘Are you walking all the way to Dagorsk?’

She flicked at a fat blowfly that was irritating the horse’s eye. ‘I was waiting for you.’

‘I’m glad, because I have something to ask you.’

Mikhail slid off the saddle and landed lightly in front of her, the reins loose in one hand. The top of her head came up to the level of his lips, no higher. A good height for a woman.

‘Do you know what happened to the grain last night?’ he asked, aware again of how disconcertingly foggy his mind became at the mention of it.

Her eyes were an intense piercing blue, capturing his attention and holding it with their directness. But now she was looking at him strangely, as though disturbed by the question.

‘You were there,’ she said, shifting her gaze away from him and towards the village. ‘You saw them.’

‘That’s what I don’t understand.’ He ran a hand through his windblown hair and found himself studying the long white curve of her neck, exposed by the way she’d tucked her silver-blonde hair behind her ear, just where it caught the sunlight. ‘I was there,’ he said. ‘But somehow it’s all mixed up in my mind and I can’t make sense of it. Pyotr claims I was drunk, and God knows I have a sledgehammer at work in my head this morning, but…’

She turned to look at him expectantly.

He shook his head. ‘I remember the fire, and you at the pump and a man with spectacles sweating over my best vodka but then…’ He stepped closer. ‘Just tell me, Sofia, how many sacks of grain were in the truck before everyone ran off to fight the fire?’

For a moment Mikhail thought she wasn’t going to reply. Something in her eyes changed, a shutter slid down inside them. Before she even spoke, he knew she was going to lie to him. For some reason he couldn’t quite understand, the thought made him feel sick.

‘Mikhail, there were four sacks on the truck before the fire started and four sacks still there at the end of the night.’

He said nothing.

‘Rafik is sick,’ she said.

He tried to find a connection between Rafik and the truck, almost catching hold of it this time before it slipped through his fingers and vanished.

‘I’m sorry to hear that Rafik is unwell,’ he said.

‘You don’t look so good yourself.’

‘That’s because I need to know what went on last night. Please, Sofia, tell me.’

She looked away.

He seized her arm. The feel of it, the strength contained within its slender form, reminded him suddenly of having that same feeling at some point the previous evening, a point when he was standing close to her in the darkness, his skin touching her skin, her breath warm on his ear. But why? Where? That’s when the blurring started again in his mind, like mist on the tips of a tree’s branches, swaying and shifting so there were no clear edges. His mind shied away from last night like Zvezda shied at a snake.

He shook her arm. ‘How many sacks, Sofia?’

‘Four.’

‘The truth?’

‘Four.’

A stab of anger made him drop her arm and in one easy movement he swung himself back up into the saddle, but whether the anger was at her for lying or at himself for not remembering, he couldn’t tell. The old leather of the saddle creaked and a small green lizard shot out from between Zvezda’s hooves. The girl flicked her hair so that it sprang out from behind her ear, luminous in the clear air. All these things registered in Mikhail’s head, each with a kind of indelible imprint. He knew he would not forget this moment.

Gathering the reins in one hand, and on the verge of urging the horse into a gallop, at the last second he looked down again at Sofia. And something in her held him. Something in her intent gaze, something he couldn’t leave behind. He stretched out an arm. Instantly she seized it and he swept her up on to the horse behind him.