Under a Blood Red Sky

50

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. Candles thickened the air they breathed. Standing stiffly beside the bed were Pokrovsky, Elizaveta Lishnikova and the gypsy daughter, Zenia. Not one 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 centre 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.

His heart went out to her as she knelt on the floor in supplication.

‘Help her, Rafik.’ He let his anger show. ‘You alter reality. Well, you 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. 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 and took a threatening step towards Mikhail.

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

Sofia’s eyes grew wide. He took her hand and placed the white stone cautiously on her palm, as if it might burn her, but 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 settled 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, 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 towards 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.’

The smile vanished. ‘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 hurried over to them, her skirt tangling round her legs in her haste, her hair bobbing loose. ‘Pyotr,’ she called out, ‘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 there was something 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 quarrelled? 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 jewellery.’

‘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’s 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 discoloured 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, 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 the large wooden cross at his throat. His gaunt cheeks were grey. ‘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.’

‘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 of 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 hard core under the kolkhoz office building.’ He pointed a finger out into the gloom that had enveloped the village. ‘Round 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 round the door and raced down the path that led round the building, the damp evening air cool in his lungs. The plinth was there, just where the priest 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 metre 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 enamelled casket. It was the most beautiful object Pyotr had ever set eyes on, its surface inlaid 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 colours he’d never seen before, molten glowing stones.

‘Sofia,’ he whispered, ‘these could buy you the world.’