Eventually she found the railway track that she and Anna had talked about, its silver lines snaking into the distance, and followed it day and night, even sleeping beside it because she was afraid of getting lost, till she came to a river. Was this the Ob? How was she to know? She knew the River Ob headed south toward the Ural Mountains, but was this it? She felt a wave of panic. She was weak with hunger and couldn’t think straight. The gray coils of water appeared horribly inviting.
She lost track of time. How long had she been wandering out here in this godforsaken wilderness? With an effort of will she made her mind focus and worked out that weeks must have passed because the sun was higher in the sky now than when she set out. As she tugged out her precious bent pin and twine that was wrapped in her pocket and started to trawl clumsily through the waves with it, it occurred to her that spring was turning into early summer, that the shoots on the birch trees had grown into full-size leaves and the warmth of the sun on her back made her skin come alive.
The first time she came across habitation she almost wept with pleasure. It was a farm, a scrawny subsistence scrap of worthless land, and she crouched behind a birch trunk all day, observing the comings and goings of the peasant couple who worked the place. An emaciated black-and-white cow was tethered to a fence next to a shed, and she watched with savage envy as the farmer’s wife coaxed milk from the animal.
Could she go over there and beg a bowlful?
She stood up and took one step toward it.
Her mouth filled with saliva and she felt her whole body ache with desire for it, not just her stomach but the marrow in her bones and the few red cells left in her blood, and even the small sacs inside her lungs. They all whimpered for one mouthful of that white liquid.
But to come so far and risk everything?
She forced herself to sit again. To wait until dark. There was no moon, no stars, just another chill damp night inhabited only by bats, but Sofia was well used to it and moved easily through the darkness to the barn where the cow had been tucked away at the end of the day. She opened the lichen-covered door a crack, listened carefully. No sound, except the soft moist snoring of the cow. She slipped through the crack and felt a shiver of delight at being inside somewhere warm and protective at last after so long outside facing the elements. Even the old cow was obliging despite Sofia’s cold fingers and allowed a few squirts of milk directly into her mouth. Never in her life had anything tasted so exquisite. That was when she made her mistake. The warmth, the smell of straw, the remnants of milk on her tongue, the sweet odor of the cow’s hide, it all melted the shield of ice she’d built for herself. Without stopping to think, she bundled the straw into a cozy nest, curled up in it, and was instantly asleep. The night enveloped the barn.
SOMETHING sharp in her ribs woke her. She opened her eyes. It was a finger, thick-knuckled and full of strength. Attached to it was a hand with a spider’s web of blue veins. Sofia leaped to her feet.
The farmer’s wife was just visible standing in front of her in the first wisps of early morning light. The woman said nothing but pressed a cloth bundle into Sofia’s hands and quickly led the cow out of the barn, but not before she’d given Sofia a sharp shake of her gray head in warning. Outside, her husband could be heard whistling and stacking logs onto a cart.
The barn door shut.
“Spasibo,” Sofia whispered into the emptiness.
She longed to call the woman back and wrap her arms around her, but she knew better. Instead she ate the food in the bundle, kept an eye to a knothole in the door, and, when the farmer had finished with his logs, she vanished back into the lonely forest.
After that, things went wrong. Badly wrong. It was her own fault. She almost drowned when she was stupid enough to take a shortcut by swimming across a tributary of the river where the currents were lethal, and five times she came close to being caught with her hand in a chicken coop or stealing from a washing line. She lived on her wits, but as the villages started to appear with more regularity, it grew too dangerous to move by day without identity papers, so she traveled only at night, which slowed her progress.
Then disaster. For one whole insane week she headed in the wrong direction under starless skies, not realizing the Ob had swung west.
“Dura! Stupid fool!”
She cursed her idiocy and slumped down in a slice of moonlight on the riverbank, her blistered feet dangling in the dark waters, closed her eyes, and forced her mind to picture the place she was aiming for. Tivil, it was called. She’d never been there. But she conjured up a picture of it with ease. It was no more than a small distant speck in a vast land, a sleepy village somewhere in a fold of the ancient Ural Mountains.
But how the hell was she going to find it?
YET now, at last, she was here. In the clearing among the silver birches, the mossy cabin with its crooked roof warm at her back, the last of the sun’s rays on her face. Here right in the heart of the Ural Mountains, but it seemed that just when she’d reached her goal, the dogs were coming for her again. The hound so close she could hear its whines.
She darted back into the cabin, snatched up her knife, and ran. Seconds later two men with rifles and a dog burst out of the tree line, but by then she had put the hut between them and herself as she raced for the back of the clearing, hunched low, breathing hard. The dark trunks opened up and she fell into their cool protection, but that was when she saw the boy. In a hollow not three paces away from him crouched a wolf.
SIX
PYOTR Pashin felt his heart curl up in his chest. He didn’t move a muscle, didn’t even blink, just stared at the creature. Its mean yellow eyes were fixed on him and he didn’t dare breathe. Never before in his young life had he stood so close to a wolf.
Dead ones, yes, he’d seen plenty of those outside Boris’s izba down in the village where their pelts were hung out on drying racks. Pyotr and his friend Yuri liked to trail the backs of their hands through the dense silky fur and even stuff a finger between the razor-edged teeth, but this was different. This wolf’s black lips were pulled back in a silent snarl, and the last thing in the whole world that Pyotr wanted to do now was stick a finger in its mouth.
He’d jumped at the chance to come hunting when Boris asked him.
“You’re a skinny runt,” Boris had pointed out. “But you’re good with the hound.”
Which meant he wanted Pyotr to do all the running. But it hadn’t turned out a good day. Game was scarce and his other fellow hunting companion, Igor, was tight-lipped as a lizard, so Boris had started in on the flask in his pocket, which only sent the day tumbling from bad to worse. It ended up with Boris giving Pyotr a clout with his rifle for not keeping a tight enough hold on the leash, which made Pyotr scoot off among the trees in a sulk.
“Pyotr, come back here, you skinny little bastard,” Boris yelled into the twilit world of forest shadows, “or I’ll skin the hide off you.”
Pyotr ignored him. He knew that what he was doing was wrong because it broke the first rule of forest lore, which is that you never lose contact with your companions. Children of the raion grew up bombarded with bedtime stories of how you must never—never— roam alone in the forest, where you will be instantly devoured by goblins or wolves or even a fierce-eyed ax man who eats children for breakfast. The forest has a huge and hungry mouth of its own, and it will swallow you without a trace if you give it even half a chance.
But he was eleven now, and he reckoned he was able to look out for himself. Anyway, he was angry at Boris for the clout with the rifle butt and also, he wasn’t sure exactly why, but . . . he felt stupid even thinking this . . . but in this part of the forest the air seemed to lick his cheek as the daylight began to fade and somehow drew him to this quiet circle of light that was the small clearing in the trees.
He caught sight of the back of the cabin, covered in bright green moss, and the fallen mess of branches sprawled lazily in the sun on the soft earth. His interest was roused. He took one more step and immediatel
y heard a low-throated sound at his feet that made the hairs rise on the back of his neck. He swung around, and that was when he saw the wolf and his heart curled up.
He didn’t dare breathe. Slowly, so slowly he wasn’t sure it was happening at all, he started to move his left hand toward the whistle that hung on a green cord around his neck. Abruptly a blur of moonlight-pale hair and long golden limbs hurtled into this stillness. A young woman was churning up the air around him, her breath so loud he wanted to shout at her, to warn her, but he could feel a wild pulse thudding in his throat that prevented it. She stopped, blue eyes wide with surprise, but instead of screaming at the sight of the wolf, she gave it no more than a quick glance and smiled at Pyotr instead. It was a slow, slanting smile, small at first, then broadening into a wide conspiratorial grin.
“Hello,” she mouthed. “Privet.”
She raised a finger to her lips and held it there as a signal to him to stay quiet, her mouth twitching as if in fun, but when he looked into her eyes, they weren’t laughing. There was something in them that Pyotr recognized. A quivering. A sort of drawing down deep into herself, the same as he’d seen in the eyes of one of the boys at school when the bigger boys started picking on him. She was scared.
At that moment it dawned on Pyotr what she was. She was a fugitive. An enemy of the state on the run. They’d been warned about them in the weekly meetings in the hall. A sudden confusion tightened his chest. Definitely a saboteur or even a spy in hiding, some kind of socially dangerous element, because no normal person behaved so oddly—did they? So he made his decision. He raised the whistle to his mouth. Later he would recall the feel of the cold hard metal on his lips and remember the hammering in his chest as the two of them stood in front of those mean yellow eyes in the shade of the big pine, saying nothing.
She shook her head, urgent and forceful, and her eyes grew darker, their pale summer blue changing as if someone had spilled a droplet of ink into each one. Just as the whistle touched his lips, she gave a strange little shudder and moved her hand quickly. He thought at first it was to snatch the whistle from him, but instead it went to the blouse buttons at her throat and started to undo them. Pyotr watched. As each button revealed more, he felt his blood rush to his face, burning his cheeks.
Her skin was like milk. White and unused below the golden triangle at her neck where the sun had crept in. The blouse was shapeless, collarless, with short embroidered sleeves and though it may once have possessed color, now it was bleached to the gray of ash. As she slid the blouse open, he caught the flash of a knife at her waistband and that gave him a shock. Underneath the blouse she was wearing only a flimsy garment of threadbare material that clung to her thin body. The sight of her fragile collarbones made him forget the whistle, but it was her breasts he stared at, where the cloth outlined them clearly. His brain told him he should look away, but his eyes took no notice.
Then once more she pressed a finger to her lips and gave him a smile that, in a strange way he didn’t understand, felt as if it stole something from inside him. It left a hole in a secret place inside him that previously only his mother had ever touched—and that was when he was just a little boy. His chest stung so badly he had to crush his hand against his ribs to stop the hurt, and by the time he looked back, she was gone. A faint movement of the branches and a shimmer of leaves, that was all that remained. Even the wolf had disappeared.
He stayed there with the whistle in his hand for what felt like forever but must have been no more than a minute, and gradually the sounds returned to him. The dog whining, the hunters calling and cursing him. A magpie rattled out its annoyance. He knew he should shout to them, it was his duty as a Soviet citizen to alert them. Quick, there’s a fugitive running down to the river. Bring your rifle. But something stubborn hardened inside his young chest when he thought of the moonlight hair, and the words wouldn’t come to his lips.
SEVEN
SOFIA stood without moving, concentrating on the sounds of the night, the rustle of some small creature as it skittered over a tree stump, a faint plop in the water, most likely a toad. Above her the sky was as black as she could wish, a warm summer night with the air moist on her skin, and no sign of the wolf. She’d seen the animal skulking around yesterday with its festering paw thick with summer flies, so knew the animal posed no threat to her or the boy. It just wanted somewhere to hide and lick its wound. No sign of the dog or the men either.
Were they listening for her, as silently as she was listening for them? Here among the trees. The silence a trap for her?
But no, OGPU troops didn’t possess that kind of patience. They liked to storm in at night and yank you from your bed when you were soft and vulnerable and at your weakest. Not this silent soulless stalking. No. Whoever the men with the rifles were, they weren’t the secret police.
She felt her pulse drop a notch and breathed more easily. Her feet made no sound as she wove between the trees heading for the cabin, the pine needles releasing their fragrance under her feet. Hunters, that was what they must have been, with their hound on the scent of . . . what? The wolf probably. Already back in their village with a glass of kvass and a hand groping the skirts of a willing wife while . . .
Someone was in the clearing. A dim light spilled from the hut, cutting a yellow wedge out of the darkness that revealed a horse tethered outside. Sofia’s heart stopped. She shrank back into the trees and merged with one of the black pine trunks, the length of her body tight against its rough bark. It smelled strongly of resin. She wanted to smell of resin too, to hide her scent in that of the tree. The light went out and instantly the cabin door opened and figures emerged. The horse whinnied a welcome and she heard two male voices speak in low whispers, but then came the excited bark of a hound and the creak of saddle leather as one of the men swung up on the horse. There was the shake of a bridle, the impatient stamp of hooves.
“Thank you, my friend,” one man said, his voice unsteady with some strong emotion. “I . . . can say no more . . . but spasibo. Thank you.”
Sofia caught the flat sound of two hands being clasped, and then the horse cantered away across the clearing, heading west. It was in a hurry. She listened for the other man and his dog, but he seemed to have vanished into the night itself. She told herself that whoever he was, he was nothing to her, just a temporary disturbance of her night’s plans. She could still make it down to Tivil village before dawn.
She released her hold on the tree and felt a tremor of anticipation tighten her skin. With a stealth and sureness that was gained from months of traveling by night, she slid away into the blackness.
SHE had picked her time well. Still a couple of hours till dawn, so the villagers had not begun to stir from the warmth of their beds. The village of Tivil lay silent in the darkness. It looked crumpled and lifeless, yet Sofia’s heart lifted at the sight of it. This was the place she’d spent months driving herself toward, and she’d pictured it a thousand times in her mind, sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, but always with one person standing at the heart of it with open arms.
Vasily. She’d found his home. Now she had to find him.
Her pulse quickened as she stared down into the valley from the forest ridge, and again into her mind sprang the question that had plagued her steps each time she’d risked her life sneaking into barns or thieving chicken eggs to survive. Was Tivil the right place? Or had she come all this way for nothing? She shivered at the thought and pushed it away out of reach, because she had staked everything on one woman’s word. That woman was Anna’s childhood governess, Maria.
How good was her word?
Maria had whispered to Anna when she was arrested that Vasily had fled from Petrograd after the 1917 Revolution and turned up on the other side of Russia in Tivil, living under the name of Mikhail Pashin.
But how good was her word?
She had to believe he was here, had to know he was close.
“Vasily,” she whispered aloud into the wind so that it would carry he
r words down to the houses below, “I need your help.”
SHE slid down from the ridge with a soundless tread. The only movements along Tivil’s dirt road were the brief flickers of shadow as clouds traced a path across the face of the moon, which had emerged from its sleep. She had observed the izbas carefully, the rough single-story houses that clung to the edge of the road, with their intricate shutters and precious patches of land staked out at the back in long rectangles. She watched till her eyes ached, trying to prize dark shapes out of a dark landscape. But nothing ruffled the stillness.
That was when she drew the knife from the rawhide pouch on her hip and finally, after so many months of effort, set foot in Tivil. It gave her a quick and unexpected surge of joy, and she felt her damaged fingertips tingle. The village was made up of a straggle of houses on each side of a single central street, mixed up with an untidy jumble of barns and stables and patched fences. It lay at the head of the Tiva Valley, which, farther down, shook itself loose and broadened into a wide plain protected by steep wooded ridges where hawks cruised by day.
At the center of the village stood the church. Now that in itself was strange. Throughout Russia most village churches had been blown up by order of the Politburo or were being used as storage for grain or manure, the ultimate insult. This one had escaped such shame, but judging by the abundance of notices pinned outside, it had been turned into a general assembly hall for the compulsory political meetings. The brick building loomed deeper black against the black sky, almost as much a presence as the forest itself, and it gave Sofia hope.
The Red Scarf Page 5
