Under a Blood Red Sky

64

Tivil Spring 1934

The air was crystal clear, and high above Tivil the wispy trail of an aeroplane skimmed across a pale blue sky. Mikhail gazed up at it, shading his eyes.

‘It’s an ANT- 9,’ Pyotr said confidently. ‘The same as the Krokodil.’

‘You’re right,’ Mikhail grinned. ‘You’ll be a pilot yet.’

They were in the graveyard at the back of what was once the church, the grass still fragile with frost where the building’s shadow lay, but the spring sunshine was tempting out the first buds. Sofia was kneeling beside Rafik’s grave. In her hand she held a bunch of podsnezhniki, snowdrops, their delicate heads softly swaying as she placed them in a jar on the grave.

‘Where did you find the flowers so early?’ Mikhail asked.

She smiled up at him. ‘Where do you think?’

‘Beneath the cedar tree.’

‘Of course.’

She and Anna had picked them together. Sofia smiled at the memory – it was there that Anna had shyly whispered the news that she was pregnant.

‘It’s a secret,’ Anna smiled, ‘but I can’t keep it from you. Now that I’m so much better, it’ll be safe.’

‘Have you told your husband yet?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

Anna touched her stomach. ‘We’re naming him Vasily.’

‘Let’s hope it’s a boy then,’ Sofia had laughed.

Now she took the white stone from her pocket and rested it on Rafik’s grave.

‘Why do you always do that?’ Pyotr asked.

He’d grown taller in the winter months, his shoulders suddenly broader and his eyes more thoughtful. Sofia had found herself watching him and wondering.

‘I do it because this stone connects Tivil to Rafik.’

She picked it up. Neither Communism nor the Church had brought peace to Tivil, but this was something different, a strength that seemed to rise from the heart of the earth itself. She looked into the boy’s eyes.

‘Hold the stone,’ she said.

Pyotr didn’t hesitate, as if he’d been waiting a long time for this moment. His hand grasped the stone and immediately his young eyes filled with light in the bright spring morning.

‘Pyotr, before your Papa adopted you, did you have brothers?’

‘Yes, but when I was three,’ his eyes were studying the milky stone, ‘they all died in the typhus epidemic.’

‘Six older brothers? Making you the seventh son.’

‘Yes. How do you know that?’

She didn’t answer his question.

‘Pyotr, would you like to come for walks with me sometimes when it’s dark? And learn to shape the thoughts that form in your mind?’

Pyotr looked to his father. Mikhail gazed at his son with gentle regret and nodded. ‘Take care of my son, Sofia.’

‘I will, I promise.’

Pyotr stood, still fingering the stone. ‘When will we start?’ he asked.

Sofia gazed round at the village that was her home, at the houses so sturdy and yet so fragile in the sunshine.

‘Tonight,’ she murmured. ‘We’ll start tonight.’