The Red Scarf

by Kate Furnivall

  Fomenko turned to the giant poster of Stalin’s all-powerful face that hung swathed in red banners behind him. “Our Great Leader,” he repeated.

  A murmur ran around the gathering. But nobody picked up the invitation, so it was Yuri who leaped to his feet.

  “Long live our Great Leader,” he shouted.

  “Fine words,” Fomenko said solemnly. “It takes a boy to show the rest of you the way. This young tovarishch, this comrade is a true proletarian, a man of the future.”

  A woman in the row behind Pyotr rose and echoed, “Long live our Great Leader.”

  “Josef Stalin, the Father of our Nation”—Fomenko’s voice filled the hall right to the rafters, where the debased remains of the saints stared down on them—“is the one who is carrying throughout this great Union of Soviets the torch that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin lit for us. Stalin is the one who is ridding us of the saboteurs and subversives, the wreckers and the spoilers who would destroy the drive forward of the great Five-Year Plan.” The chairman linked his hands together, fingers firmly entwined. “We must unite in the great fight toward the victory of Communism.”

  “What about some great bread to eat instead of a great fight?” the blacksmith demanded roughly.

  Yuri scowled at him. Pyotr felt himself caught between the two of them. Hesitantly he rose to his feet and in a quiet voice he declared, “Comrade Stalin will feed us.”

  Beside him he heard the blacksmith groan and felt himself yanked back down onto the bench. Black fingernails like cockroaches sank into his freshly scrubbed flesh, but Pyotr was determined now and started to sing the words of the Internationale, “Arise you workers from your slumber . . .”

  “Comrades.”

  The man who spoke was seated next to Fomenko at the table, a stocky figure with a smooth well-fed face, wiry hair, and oddly colorless eyes. He wore a sleek leather jacket that even Pyotr could see would have fed Anastasia’s family for a month. He was the district party deputy chairman, sent by the Raikom, and however much Yuri insisted it was an honor to have him at their meeting, it didn’t feel like that to Pyotr. It felt more like a rebuke.

  “Comrades.” The man paused. Waited for absolute quiet.

  Fomenko eased back in his chair, instantly yielding control to his superior, but Pyotr saw the heel of his boot grind down on the floor. The hall fell silent.

  “Comrades, I am proud to be here. With you, my brothers, the workers of Red Arrow kolkhoz. You all know me. I am Deputy Chairman Aleksandr Stirkhov from the Raion Committee. I am, always have been, and always will be a man of the people. I bring a message from our committee. We praise what you have achieved so far in this difficult year and urge you to greater efforts. The failure of the harvest last autumn was the work of wreckers and saboteurs, funded by foreign powers and their spies who plot to destroy our great new surge forward in technology. Throughout parts of Russia it meant we had to tighten our belts a notch or two . . .”

  “Or three,” a man called out from somewhere in the hall.

  “Your own belt doesn’t look so tight, Deputy Stirkhov.” Another voice.

  “Listen to me, Comrade Deputy, I lost my youngest child to starvation. ” This time Pyotr recognized the voice. It was Anastasia’s mother. He would never forget the morning he’d seen her rocking the dead baby in her arms. Anastasia had missed school that day.

  Stirkhov pursed his mouth. “Admittedly some shortages have occurred.”

  “It’s a famine,” Pokrovsky declared at Pyotr’s side. “A fucking famine. People dying throughout—”

  “Comrade Deputy Stirkhov is a busy man,” Fomenko interrupted quickly. “He is not here to waste time listening to your accusations, Pokrovsky. There is no famine. That is a rumor spread about by the wreckers who have caused the shortages through their sabotage of our crops.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  Stirkhov rounded on the blacksmith. “I remember you. You were a troublemaker when I was here before. Don’t make me note you down as a propagator of negative statements, or . . .” He left the threat unsaid.

  Everyone knew what happened to agitators.

  Pokrovsky hunched his massive shoulders as though preparing to swing his hammer on his anvil, but he said nothing that the deputy’s ears could pick up.

  “Blacksmith.” Stirkhov spoke quietly. He lifted a sheet of paper from the pile on the table. “I have here a list of items you made and services you performed in this village that were not strictly for the kolkhoz, not for the collective farm at all, in fact.”

  Pokrovsky ran a hand over his shaven head in a gesture of indifference. “So?”

  “So you made a metal trough for Lenko’s chickens, you repaired a stove chimney for Elizaveta Lishnikova, you mended the wheel on Vlasov’s barrow, a pan handle for Zakarov . . .” He raised his reptilian eyes and studied Pokrovsky. “Need I go on?”

  “No. What is your point?”

  “My point is whether you were paid for these items.”

  “Not paid, exactly. But they thanked me with vegetables or a chicken, yes. And Elizaveta Lishnikova darned my shirts for me. I’m not much good with a needle.” He held up his thick muscular fingers. There was a gentle titter among the benches. “As I said, not paid, exactly.”

  “Without your services, those gifts—and I have a long list of them here—would not have been given to you, so I believe we can class them as payment.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Which makes you a private speculator.”

  There was a hush. An intake of breath.

  Pyotr wasn’t watching Deputy Stirkhov anymore. His eyes were on Chairman Fomenko, and he saw the stiffening of the sinews in his strong neck. Everyone knew what happened to speculators. Pyotr felt a moment’s panic and glanced swiftly around him.

  That was when he saw her, the figure at the back near the door, standing as motionless as a deer. It was the young woman from the forest, the one with the moonlight hair, and her blue eyes were fixed on him. He felt his throat tighten, and he looked away quickly. Why was she here, the fugitive? A wrecker and a saboteur come to make trouble? Should he speak out? Could he? If only he possessed Yuri’s absolute certainty of action in a black-and-white world. He dragged in a deep breath and jumped to his feet again.

  “Comrade Chairman, I have something to say.”

  SEVENTEEN

  SOFIA could see what was coming. Quickly she stepped into the aisle between the rows of benches.

  "Comrade Deputy Chairman.”

  She spoke out clearly, overriding the boy’s thin voice. Instantly all eyes swung away from him and focused on the newcomer. A murmur trickled around the hall. “Who is she? Kto eto?”

  “State your name, Comrade,” ordered Stirkhov.

  “My name is Sofia Morozova.” Her heart was kicking like a mule. “I’ve traveled down from Garinzov, near Lesosibirsk in the north, after the death of my aunt. I am the niece by marriage of Rafik Ilyan, who cares for your horses.”

  Heads turned to Zenia, who was seated next to the tall man with the lion’s mane. She nodded, but kept her eyes fixed firmly on the bench in front and said nothing. Sofia wanted to shake her.

  “What is it you wish to say, Comrade Morozova?” Stirkhov asked.

  He had one of those oily half-smiles on his face, the kind she knew too well, the kind that made her want to spit.

  “Comrade Deputy, I have come to this meeting to offer my labor for the harvest.”

  It was Chairman Aleksei Fomenko who responded. “We welcome laborers at harvest time when the hours are long and the work is hard. Have you done fieldwork before?”

  She stared straight back at him, at the strong lines of his face. His observant gray gaze made her palms sweat.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve done fieldwork.”

  “Where?”

  “On my aunt’s farm.”

  Voices erupted along the benches.

  “I could use her in my brigade.”

  “We need her in the potato fie
lds,” a woman shouted out. “It’s hard, mind.”

  “She doesn’t look as if she’s up to it, Olga. All straw limbs.”

  “I’m strong,” Sofia insisted.

  A woman in a flowered headscarf and rubber boots reached out from the nearest bench and prodded Sofia’s narrow thigh with a callused finger. “Good muscle.”

  “I’m not a horse,” Sofia objected, but good-naturedly.

  The women laughed. Aleksei Fomenko rapped on the table.

  “Enough! Very well, Sofia Morozova, we will find you work. And I presume Rafik will speak for you.”

  “Yes, my uncle will speak for me.”

  “Have you registered at the kolkhoz office as a resident?”

  “Not yet.”

  For the first time he paused. She saw the muscles around his eyes tighten and knew he had started to doubt her. “You must do so first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Of course.”

  The boy’s brown eyes were dark with fury as he prepared to speak again, and that was when she played her trump card.

  She smiled straight at the boy and said, “I am a qualified tractor driver.”

  PYOTR felt his fear of her melt. One moment it was like acid in his throat, burning his flesh, and the next it tasted like honey, all sweet and cloying. He was confused. What had she done to him? She was an enemy of the people, he was convinced of it. Why else would she be a fugitive in the forest? But when he looked around at the faces, he couldn’t understand why they couldn’t see it too. What was she? A vedma? A witch?

  “Pokrovsky,” he whispered.

  “What is it, boy?”

  “I still have something to say.”

  “Just sit still and shut up,” Pokrovsky growled with irritation. His attention was on the stranger.

  Pyotr knew that tractor drivers were worth more than the finest black pearls of caviar from the Caspian Sea. The state ran tractor courses at every Machine and Tractor Station throughout the country, and a tractor driver was paid more in labor-days, sometimes even in cash, but so far no one in the Tivil kolkhoz had succeeded in gaining a place on one of the overcrowded courses. The fugitive had chosen the perfect golden key to open the door into the kolkhoz, because a tractor would halve the intensive work of the coming harvest.

  “A tractor driver?” Fomenko repeated.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “You have the MTS certificate?”

  “I have the certificate.”

  She was lying, Pyotr was certain she was lying. He could hear the little worms of deceit wriggling against each other as they burrowed into her words.

  “This is excellent news,” Stirkhov said. “Otlichnaya novost. The whole village will of course benefit, but . . .” He paused, his pale eyes suddenly flatter and harder. “But tonight I have come to inform you all of the quotas you are to fulfill with this year’s harvest. The state demands that your quota of contributions be raised.”

  A ripple of shock ran through the hall, and one woman started to cry in harsh dry sobs. Moans made a rustling sound like rats in stubble. Then came the anger. Pyotr felt it like a wave of hot air, thick on the back of his neck, and he was sure the fugitive woman was in some strange way the cause of this dismay, that her presence was drawing disaster to his village.

  “Silence!” Fomenko rapped on the table. “Listen to Comrade Stirkhov.”

  “We’re listening,” Igor Andreev, a brigade leader, said reasonably. His hunting dog whined at his knee. “But last December the Politburo ordered the seizing of most of our seed grain and our seed potatoes to feed the towns and the Red Army, so the harvest this season is smaller than a shrew’s balls. We can’t even fulfill the present quotas.” He stared dully up at Fomenko. “Chairman, we’ll be eating rats.”

  “If you work hard,” Fomenko said quietly, “you eat. Stalin has announced the annihilation of begging and pauperism in the countryside. Work hard,” he repeated, “and there will be enough for everyone to eat.”

  Stirkhov applauded vigorously. “Listen, comrades, only this week Stalin is opening the Belomorskiy Kanal. One hundred twenty million tons of frozen earth were removed by sheer hard work, and now the Baltic Sea is linked to the heartland of Russia. The trade increase in timber alone will bring a flood of prosperity and hard currency to our great Soviet State and its people. So do not talk of failure. See what can be achieved when we work together and follow the vision of our leader.”

  It was Leonid Logvinov who rose to his feet, the ginger-haired man they still called Priest, though his church was long gone. One hand clutched the ancient wooden crucifix at his neck.

  “God forgive your murdering ways,” he thundered, “and the blaspheming lies of your Antichrist.”

  “Too far, Priest, you’ve gone too far.”

  Stirkhov pounded his fist down on the metal table. But at the same moment the large oak door at the far end slammed open with a crash, rebounding on its hinges, and a wave of cold air swept into the hall. Mikhail Pashin strode into the central aisle, his brown hair windblown, his suit creased.

  “Papa,” Pyotr cried.

  But Mikhail Pashin didn’t hear. “Get out of here, all of you,” he shouted. He pointed a finger at the men behind the table on the platform.“They’ve tricked you, those two. They’ve kept you in here while the forces of the Grain Procurement Agency are ransacking your houses. They’re tearing your attics apart, hunting out hidden stores of grain, stripping your larders, and stealing your chickens to fulfill their quotas.”

  Alarm ripped through the benches. Panic forced everyone to their feet.

  “Go home,” Mikhail shouted above the noise. “Before you starve.”

  MIKHAIL Pashin could barely contain his anger. He expelled his breath violently and stepped aside to let the panicked villagers pass. They were pushing and pressing, struggling and shouting, a hundred of them fighting to get through the door as if the blue-capped wolves were actually nipping at their heels. It seemed to Mikhail that they were turning into sheep. Ever since the introduction of collectivization, starving peasants had thronged every railway station, clawing their way into the towns and cities, selling their souls for a few kopecks. Stalin was snipping off their tails, yet they didn’t even bleat.

  Urgently he scanned the bobbing heads. Where was Pyotr? He would be here somewhere. His son’s infinite capacity for absorbing Communist propaganda made Mikhail clench his teeth, but right now all he wanted was to find him and get him safe. Tonight there would be violence. Even as the thought entered his head, the crack of a rifle shot ricocheted through the night air outside, bouncing off the izba walls, sending shivers through the valley. A woman screamed inside the hall, but the crowd was thinning. A stone abruptly exploded in through one of the side windows, scattering glass and drops of rain over the empty benches, as somebody expressed their rage. Mikhail took a deep breath.

  “Pyotr!” he roared.

  “Papa!”

  With a huge sense of relief Mikhail caught sight of his son. Right at the front, struggling ineffectually in the massive grip of Pokrovsky. The blacksmith was holding him there, indifferent to the boy’s kicks, quietly keeping him out of harm’s way. Mikhail raised a hand to Pokrovsky.

  “Spasibo,” he mouthed. “Thank you.”

  Pokrovsky grinned in acknowledgment, but his eyes moved to the broken window and the lifeless leaves swirling in on the wind like omens. The big man ran the edge of his free hand across his own broad throat. Smert. Death. It was out there.

  YOU always seem to be the bringer of bad news.”

  Mikhail did not pause in his efforts to elbow a path down to the front of the hall but glanced fleetingly at the person who had spoken. To his surprise it was the girl he’d met in that candlelit moment before dawn this morning, the gypsy’s niece, the one who seemed to have come from a different world. Her strange blue eyes looked at you as if seeing someone else, the someone you keep hidden from public gaze. She was standing in the aisle in front of him, still as stone, lett
ing the flow of people break and re-form around her. Smiling at him. What the hell was there to smile at?

  “These days most news is bad news,” Mikhail muttered.

  “Not always.”

  He wanted to push past to reach Pyotr, but something about her held him there for a second, and when an elderly babushka elbowed him against her, he found himself staring deep into her face, only inches from his own. Smelling the sweet scent of juniper on her breath.

  She was painfully thin, bones almost jutting through her skin, and she had the bruised shadows of semistarvation in the hollows of her face. But her eyes were extraordinary. Wider and bluer than a summer sky, glittering in the light from the lamps, full of something wild. And they were laughing at him. For one strange and unnerving second he thought she was actually looking right into him and rummaging through his secrets. Abruptly he recalled the veiled threat she’d made the last time he spoke to her, and he forced himself to recoil.

  “You should go home,” he said, more abruptly than he intended.

  “Home?” She cocked her head to one side and studied him. “Where is home?”

  “You’re living with the gypsies, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then show some sense. Go and stay there. This night has only just started.”

  “You and I,” she said in a voice so low he barely heard it in the hubbub of voices around him, “have only just started.”

  He frowned and shook his head. Each time they met she seemed to have the knack of knocking him off balance. He broke free from her smile. “Pyotr!” he shouted again.

  The boy was released and started to clamber over the benches toward him. But halfway down the hall Priest Logvinov was standing like a scarecrow, raised up on one of the bench seats, his red hair like flames around his head, the cross brandished like a weapon.

  “Abomination!” he boomed out. “Thou shalt have no other god before me, saith the Lord.” His finger pointed at Stirkhov’s chest, as if it would drill through to the blasphemous heart within it.