Under a Blood Red Sky (9 page)

‘Pyotr.’ It was Anastasia.

‘Yes?’

‘Look.’

Her little bony hand was pointing beyond the broad cedar tree that marked the start of the village to a spot in the distance, where a ball of dust was rolling its way along the unpaved road towards them, slicing through the flat fields of cabbage on either side. Traffic on the road was always light, usually no more than a few carts a day and, on rare occasions, a car or truck. One of the boys in the Octobrians, the group for younger children, had also spotted the dust trail and was giggling with excitement, fingering the badge on his shirt. It was in the shape of a red star with a picture at its centre of Lenin as a curly-haired baby, the pride and joy of every young Octobrian who wore it. Pyotr and Yuri were too old for that now. They wore instead the scarlet triangular tie and their badge of membership to the Young Pioneers.

Pyotr forgot the woman in the forest and felt the little boy’s excitement slide into his own head when he saw who was driving the cart that was trundling up the valley. It was Aleksei Fomenko.

The cart stopped outside the school yard. The piebald horse in the shafts tipped its back foot on edge to rest it and snorted loudly. Yuri leapt to his feet, dragging Anastasia with him.

‘It’s Comrade Fomenko. Come on, let’s wave to him.’

‘No.’

Pyotr stood up beside her. ‘Why not? What’s wrong?’

‘He took Masha last week.’ Anastasia’s face had gone blank but the mouse-freckles on her skin stood out like warning spots. ‘He just drove that cart of his right up to our back yard and took her.’

‘No, Anastasia.’

Pyotr didn’t know what to say. Masha was the Tushkov family’s last sow. All they had left. Without her…

‘Here,’ he said and thrust his share of the biscuit into her hand.

She crammed it into her mouth.

‘The pig was beautiful,’ Pyotr said and saw a spark of pleasure brighten her pale eyes, but her pointed chin gave a brief quiver. She put both her hands on top of her head and turned away, her elbows hiding her face.

Pyotr’s chest hurt, though not from the running. He grasped Anastasia’s wrist because he didn’t know what else to do, and squeezed it. He was shocked to find it no thicker than a spichka, a matchstick, in his hand, just pale see-through skin stretched tight over a bundle of mouse bones. He glanced over at the rest of his classmates in their shorts, the girls in white blouses, the boys bare to the waist. When had they turned into scarecrows? Why hadn’t he noticed?

‘It’s Comrade Fomenko’s job,’ Pyotr whispered.

‘To take our only pig?’

‘Yes, of course it is,’ Yuri said with determination. ‘We’re a
kolkhoz
, a collective farm. It’s his duty to do his job properly.’

‘Then his job is wrong.’

Yuri shook his head fiercely at her. ‘You mustn’t say things like that, Anastasia. You could be put in prison for that.’

‘Maybe it was a mistake,’ Pyotr suggested.

‘Do you think it might be?’ Anastasia’s eyes gleamed with hope and Pyotr was furious with himself for putting it there, but he couldn’t bear to let her down now. He straightened his shoulders and ran a damp palm over his rumpled hair. He swallowed hard.

‘I’ll go and ask him.’

Aleksei Fomenko was the Chairman of Tivil’s
kolkhoz
, the valley’s collective farm, which was called
Krasnaya Strela
, the Red Arrow. Though he was no more than thirty years old, he controlled it all: he was the one who decided the work rotas, allotted the rate of labour days, made certain the workforce was in place each day – and ensured the fulfilled quotas were sent off to the
raion
centre on time. He had arrived from the
oblast
Central Office four years ago and brought order to a haphazard farm system that was so behind on taxes and quotas that the whole village was in danger of being labelled saboteurs and put in prison. Fomenko had set them straight. Pyotr worshipped him.

He was talking to the teacher in front of the schoolhouse, a neat white-washed building with a newly tiled roof. Pyotr walked along the side of the cart but it was too high for him to see inside, so he slunk round to the back where a young liver-coloured filly was tethered to the hinge of the rear flap. She was long-backed and skittish, eager to barge her way to freedom. Pyotr tried to soothe her but she would have none of it and attempted to nip him with her big yellow teeth, but the halter was too tight.

‘Comrade Chairman.’

This was the first time Pyotr had ever spoken to Aleksei Fomenko, though he’d seen and heard him often enough at the compulsory political meetings in the assembly hall. He felt his cheeks flood scarlet and his gaze found refuge on Aleksei Fomenko’s boots. They were good boots. Strong. Proper factory-made ones. Not like the ones Papa wore, hand-stitched by a half-blind old cobbler in Dagorsk.

‘Not now, Pyotr,’ his teacher said firmly.

‘No, Elizaveta,’ intervened Fomenko, ‘let’s hear our young comrade. He has the look of someone with something to say.’

Elizaveta Lishnikova touched the elaborate knot of grey hair at the back of her head, a gesture of annoyance, but she said no more. Pyotr looked up at Aleksei Fomenko, grateful for the warmth of his words. Deep-set grey eyes were watching him with interest. The face was strong, like his boots. Straight thick eyebrows. And despite wearing a loose work tunic he looked lean – and authoritative, exactly the way Pyotr longed to be.

‘Well, what is it, young comrade? Speak up.’

‘Comrade Chairman, I… er…’ His palms were hot. He brushed them on his shorts. ‘I have two things I wish to say.’

‘Which are?’

‘Comrade Chairman, last week you took a pig from the Tushkov family.’

The eyes narrowed. ‘Go on.’

‘It’s just that… you see, I thought that perhaps it was a mistake… and if I explained to you then-’

‘It was no mistake.’

‘But they can’t survive without Masha. Really they can’t.’ The words came out in a rush. ‘They have eight children, Comrade Chairman. They need the pig. To sell her litters. How else will they eat? And Anastasia is so…’ He saw Chairman Fomenko’s eyes change, somehow sink deeper in his head, but he didn’t know what it meant. ‘… So thin,’ he finished weakly.

‘Listen to me closely.’ The Chairman placed a hand on Pyotr’s bare shoulder. Pyotr could feel the strength in it, as the man’s grey eyes fixed on his. ‘Who do you think feeds the workers in our factories? In the towns and cities, all the people making our clothes and our machines and our medical supplies, all the men and women in the shipyards and down the mines? Who feeds them?’

‘We do, Comrade Chairman.’

‘That’s right. Each
kolkhoz
, each collective farm, must fulfil its quota. It supplies the raion, the district, and each district supplies the oblast, the province. That’s how the great proletariat of this vast country is fed and clothed. So which is more important, young comrade? The individual? Or the Soviet State?’

‘The Soviet State.’ Pyotr said it passionately.

Fomenko smiled approval. ‘Well spoken. So which one matters more, the Tushkov family or the State?’

Pyotr was caught unawares by this sudden twist and felt the inside of his stomach burn. How had he come to this choice? He dropped his gaze, scuffed his feet on the brown grass and stared again at the strong boots. Their owner was waiting for an answer.

‘The State.’ It came out as a whisper.

‘That is why I took the sow.’ The voice was gentle. ‘Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Comrade Chairman.’

‘You agree it was right to take the sow?’

‘Yes, Comrade Chairman.’

‘Good.’ He released Pyotr’s shoulder. ‘And what was the second thing you wanted to talk to me about?’

Pyotr hated himself. He no longer cared about the second thing.

‘Well?’ Fomenko urged.

‘It’s the filly,’ Pyotr muttered. ‘The tether rope is too short and the halter too tight.’

‘You have good eyes, young comrade. The filly has thrown a shoe.’ He reached into his pocket, pulled out a fifty kopeck coin and tossed it in the air. The sunshine snatched at it. ‘Here, catch. You’re obviously a bright lad and know something about horses. Take her up to the blacksmith for me.’

Pyotr caught the coin and glanced at Elizaveta Lishnikova. She nodded.

‘Take Anastasia with you,’ she said, and there was a surprising softness in her voice that was usually reserved only for the younger children.

It made his shame worse, knowing she’d heard every word. His cheeks burned. He ran from the adults, unhitched the filly and as he trudged up the street in the dust with Anastasia in tow, he threw her the fifty kopeck coin. ‘You can have it.’

‘Thanks, Pyotr. You’re the best friend in the world.’

Sofia’s eyes opened into darkness. Her brain stalled and almost slid back into the soft safe blankets of sleep but she caught it just in time.

Where were the candles? What happened to the girl?

She sat up. Mistake. The room splintered and lights flashed inside her eyes. She waited until the pieces slotted back together. She was on a bed, fully clothed, her fingertips told her that much. So far, so clear. She took a deep breath.

What else?

She was frightened. A tight ball of barbed wire was knotted in her chest but that was nothing new.

What else?

Her head hurt.

What else?

The darkness. It was changing, breaking down as her eyes grew accustomed to it, into different shades of black and grey. She swung her feet to the floor, aware for the first time that she was not wearing shoes, and stood up. Not good, but not as bad as she expected. She took another breath and headed for the grey. It was a door. Her hands explored strong planks of wood pitted with knots and saw-marks, held shut by a wooden latch on a string. Around the edge of it crept a whisper of daylight. Sofia put her ear to it and listened. No sounds. Just more silence and the thump of her own heartbeat battering her eardrums.

She lifted the latch. It opened on to a low-beamed living room with rough split-timber walls, unpainted, a carved chest in one corner and in the centre a home-built table with two upright chairs. At one end stood the
pechka
, a large stove, and, more surprisingly, a big maroon armchair turned to face the stove. The rough floor was covered with woven rushes and the air smelled heavily of herbs, which was hardly surprising as bunches of all kinds of dried leaves were pinned around the walls in a fragrant frieze.

More to the point, the room was empty. No girl and no brown spoon. Over to her left was a window that revealed a dusty patch of road outside and next to the window was the door. She ran for it and breathed a sigh of relief as her fingers easily lifted the metal latch and she stepped over the threshold.

‘You’ll need shoes.’

She stopped dead. The voice had come from behind her, a man’s voice. Dimly, like a muted echo from a dream, she recalled hearing the same voice before, murmuring to her with strange unfathomable words while she was unconscious. Slowly she turned. At first, after the scorching brightness of outside, she could make out nothing different in the room, but then a movement drew her attention to the faded maroon chair. There was a face, an upward curve of a gentle mouth, a shock of dense black hair swept straight back and an even blacker pair of eyes in a narrow face. He was watching her.

How had she not noticed him?

‘Don’t you want shoes?’

He spoke quietly. He was leaning round the edge of the armchair, most of him still hidden from view by the upright back of it, though his legs in scuffed brown leather trousers stuck out clearly and his bright yellow sleeve lay along the armrest.

‘Don’t you want shoes?’ he asked again.

She had forgotten her feet were bare. She glanced over her shoulder at the sunlit slope, a tumble of honey-coloured rocks that led up to the forest edge where secrecy and safety beckoned. Run, she told herself,
just run
. She’d come too far and worked too hard to risk losing her precious freedom now. She had to choose.

‘Yes, I want my shoes.’ Her tongue was dry in her mouth.

‘I’ll fetch them for you.’

He stood and moved away from the chair. He was shorter than she’d realised, not even as tall as herself, and older than his eyes and his hair indicated. Probably fifty, with the kind of skin that was swarthy and lined from years of living outdoors in the eye of the wind, like the traders who travelled up from Kazakhstan with their mountain horses. There was little flesh on his spare frame but his arms looked muscular.

‘Please hurry,’ she urged.

He smiled, the gentle mouth curving more, and he walked over to the oak chest by the wall.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I have no weapon hidden here.’

He lifted the lid and extracted a pair of shoes. Slowly, so as not to startle her, he came forward and placed them on the table, then he backed off and stood next to the stove. He was tempting her back in, like you tempt a horse into a stall with an apple. She made her choice and walked back into the
izba.

In some subtle way that she couldn’t quite explain, the feel of the room had changed. The smell of herbs was no longer suffocating but refreshing, and the place seemed to possess a kind of enticing peace. Sofia gave her head a sharp shake to clear it and cursed her confusion. Was it the result of the bang on the head or the residue of all that brown liquid still swilling through her veins? She looked at the shoes.

‘Those aren’t mine,’ she said.

‘Yours are worn through. Holes in both soles and tied together with string. I thought you might prefer these.’

He spoke about them as if they were a pack of cheap
makhorka
tobacco instead of possessions that some would kill for. Well-softened pigskin stitched on to double thickness rubber soles. New shoes. Who on earth could find new shoes these days? And then give them away? But she wasn’t going to argue with him. Instead she strode over to the centre of the room, snatched up the shoes and slipped them on her feet. They fitted perfectly.