THAT night Tivil was stripped naked and raw. That was how it seemed to Pyotr.
"Stay indoors, Pyotr. And keep the house locked.”
Those were Papa’s words. With a frown he lit himself a cigarette, ruffled Pyotr’s hair, and was about to disappear back out into the chaotic night when he stopped abruptly. He looked across at Sofia Morozova, assessing her. Mikhail Pashin had kept a firm grip on her arm, as well as on Pyotr’s, when they left the church and he’d marched them both straight to the safety of his own home. Now he was leaving them.
“Will you do something for me?” he asked her. “Take care of my son tonight?”
“Of course. I’ll guard him well.”
Pyotr wanted to die of shame, but his father nodded, satisfied, and stepped out into the road. A cold drizzle was falling as he pulled the door closed behind him, and Pyotr could see the raindrops like diamonds in his father’s dark hair. He tried not to be frightened for him. They were left standing in the tiny porch where boots were kept, the fugitive and himself, just the two of them alone in the house, eyeing each other warily. Pyotr picked up the oil lamp that Papa had lit on the shelf by the door and walked into the living room with it, hoping she wouldn’t follow, but she did. Right on his heels.
Neither spoke. He placed the lamp on the table and headed straight for the kitchen. There he poured himself a cup of water, drank it down slowly, counted to fifty in his head, and went back into the living room. She was still there. She was leaning over the half-constructed model of a bridge on the table, one of the tiny slivers of wood between her fingers. Dozens of them were scattered over the surface, little lightweight girders.
“Don’t touch,” he said quickly.
“It must take a lot of patience to make.”
“Papa is building it.” He shuffled nearer. “I help.”
She gazed at it, very serious. “It’s beautiful.”
He stared at one of the elegant wooden towers. Said nothing.
“What bridge is it?”
“The Forth Bridge in Scotland,” he lied.
“I see,” she nodded.
“Don’t touch,” he repeated.
She put down the piece of wood and looked around the room.
“You have a nice house,” she said at last.
He wouldn’t look at her. Of course it was a nice house, the nicest in the village. A huge pechka stove provided the heart of the izba, which had good-sized rooms, a large kitchen, and a handsome samovar decorated in Hochloma style. The house was light and airy, and the furniture was smart and factory bought, not hand hewn. He glanced around proudly. It was a house fit for a director of a factory, with the best wool runners on the brown-painted floor and curtains from the Levitsky factory’s own machines. Only now did it occur to Pyotr that it might seem rather untidy to an outside eye.
“May I have a drink?” she asked.
He looked at her. Her cheeks were pink. Maybe she was hot. He didn’t want to give her a drink, he wanted her to go, to leave him alone, but . . .
“A drink?” she repeated.
He scuttled back into the kitchen just as the cuckoo clock struck ten o’clock, and quickly he poured her a few drops of water in the bottom of the same cup he’d used. He didn’t bother washing it. But when he hurried back into the living room she was crouched down in front of the three-cornered cupboard where Papa kept his private things. In one hand was an unopened bottle of vodka, a shot glass in the other.
“That’s Papa’s.”
“I didn’t think it was yours.”
“Put it back.”
She smiled at him, a very small movement of her lips. Pyotr watched her unscrew the cap and pour into the glass some of the liquid that looked like water but wasn’t. He didn’t know what to say. She carried the bottle and the untouched vodka over to the armchair and sat down in it. She raised her glass to him.
“Za zdorovie!” she said solemnly.
“That’s Papa’s chair.”
“I know.”
“How can you know?”
“There are lots of things I know about your father.”
She tipped her head back and threw the shot of vodka down her throat. Her blue eyes widened and she murmured something.
“I’m going to tell,” he said quickly.
“Tell what?”
“Tell Chairman Fomenko that you’re a fugitive.”
“I see.”
She poured herself another shot of vodka and drank it straight off. She closed her eyes and licked her lips, breathing lightly. Her eyelashes lay like threads of moonlight on her cheeks.
“What makes you think I’m a fugitive?” she asked without opening her eyes. “I was just taking a break on my journey south, resting up in the forest.” Quietly she added, “You have no proof.”
He said nothing.
“I don’t want trouble,” she said.
“If you don’t want trouble, why did you go to the meeting tonight?”
“To find you.”
His stomach lurched.
“I had no idea when I met you in the forest that you are Mikhail Pashin’s son.”
Pyotr just stared at his shoes. He’d forgotten to clean them.
“Where is your mother?”
He shrugged. “She left. And never came back.”
“I’m sorry, Pyotr. How long ago?”
“Six years.”
“Six years is a long time.”
He looked up at her. Her eyes were wide open now and filled with an emotion he couldn’t make out. There was a sudden shout in the street and running footsteps. Pyotr felt a desire to be out there.
“Are you really a tractor driver?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Honestly?”
“Yes.” She smiled at him, and he felt the sweet honey once again slide down his throat. She leaned forward, chin propped delicately on her hand. “Pyotr, please. We can be friends, you and I.”
He could sense the strands of her web twisting through the air toward him, so fine he couldn’t see them but he knew they were there. In her drab clothes she looked so harmless, but he recognized the determination in her, the same way he recognized the coming of thunder behind the gray skirts of a storm cloud. He turned and ran out of the house.
ELIZAVETA Lishnikova stood in the doorway of the schoolhouse and saw the boy race up the street as if his shirttails were on fire and disappear into the night. A light drizzle was falling but still she stood there, tense as she listened to the shouts and cries of panic that tore through the village. Black shapes moved stealthily through the darkness, and she caught sight of a fragile stick of a child creeping along the side of the fence that bordered the school. Her heart sank for the little one.
“Anastasia,” she called out. “Come here.”
The girl hesitated, eyes wide with fear. Under her arm she clutched a bundle of material.
“Come here, child.” Elizaveta inserted a touch of her headmistress tone into the command.
The girl sidled through the front gate and scurried up the front path, her hurried footsteps like the pitter-patter of a mouse. She hunched in front of Elizaveta, her head hanging down, an expression of dismay on her narrow little face. The bundle in her arms was wrapped inside a piece of striped pillow ticking covered in damp patches from the rain.
Dear God, are we reduced to using our children to do our dirty work?
“What are you doing wandering around loose tonight, Anastasia?”
“The soldiers came to our house,” the child whispered. Her nose was running and she wiped it on her sleeve.
“All the more reason to stay at home with your parents, I’d have thought.”
“My father told me to . . . take something,” she sniffed, “. . . and run.”
She clutched the something closer to her bony chest, and the material moved in protest. The unmistakable squawk of an angry chicken issued from it.
“Why bring it here to the school, Anastasia?”
The top of
the girl’s mousy head nodded vigorously. “Pyotr told me to. He said . . .” Her small voice trailed away.
“What did Pyotr say?”
“He said the soldiers won’t search the schoolhouse for food.”
“Did he indeed?”
“He said it’s the safest place to be tonight.”
“I see.”
The hopeful eyes looked up at her, straggly wet rat’s-tails of hair stuck to her cheeks.
“Very well, Anastasia. This once you may go into the classroom. Sit there in the dark and make no sound. Keep your bundle quiet too. Wring its damn neck if you have to.”
The pale face looked up at her with a gaze of adoration that Elizaveta knew she didn’t want or deserve. All she could think of was that a chicken was not worth the risk she was taking. A man, yes. A chicken, no. For one brief second, her mind flitted back to a time thirty years ago when her father’s glittering dining table would have boasted six roast chickens on it for one family supper alone, with the scraps thrown to the dogs at the end. Now she was risking her life for just one of the stupid creatures. The world had turned upside down.
In the street a pair of OGPU troops were forcing their way into the house opposite. Elizaveta stepped quickly back into the hallway, and Anastasia popped through the door and ducked into the schoolroom. Once inside, her small body became suddenly livelier and she held her head at a more confident angle on the stalk of her neck as she grinned up at Elizaveta.
“Pyotr was right,” Anastasia chirruped. “He’s always right.”
Elizaveta sighed and turned her attention back to the street. Chairman Fomenko was just striding into the house opposite with a sharp word on his tongue, and Elizaveta felt an urge to go out there and rap her cane across his hands. What did the man think he was doing? You can’t bleed a village dry and still expect its denizens to work for you. Yet sometimes the blasted man astonished her with his unexpected gestures of generosity, like when he personally drove one of the kolkhoz carts to take all the schoolchildren to the May Day celebrations in the next valley or when he dug up his own vegetable plot to provide a party for the whole village on Stalin’s birthday, with soup and black bread and boiled chicken.
Off to one side she caught sight of a flash of blond hair in the torchlight. It was the stranger, the gypsy’s so-called niece. Now why was she running about in the dark? And right near the church too. Elizaveta’s heart thumped in her chest. Was the girl leading the troops to the church? Would they discover the chamber?
Pokrovsky, where are you?
Dear God, that was one of the reasons she’d not married. It was always the same. When you need a man, he’s never there.
RAFIK fought them with his mind, one by one. He drew no blood, except in his own brain, but he raged.
The uniforms came. In ones and twos and threes. Their heads full of dry lifeless straw that he could ignite with a touch of his finger and a look from his eyes. He manipulated their feeble thoughts. House by house he turned them back, bought time for goods to vanish from larders into the forest’s sanctuary. Sacks of grain, haunches of pork, slabs of cheese, they slipped away into the darkness. But the uniforms crawled everywhere, too many for him. The pain started when six faced him at once. Six was too many; they drained his strength, and when he saw the woman in the house weeping, entreating the stone faces to leave her family something to eat, he knew the cost he would pay if he didn’t stop.
But he didn’t stop and now he was paying it. A red hot pain erupted inside his brain. He staggered in the street, tasted blood.
“Zenia,” he breathed.
Before the sound was out of his mouth, his daughter was there at his side in the shattered darkness, a tiny vessel of green fluid in her hand. Her gaze sought his and he saw the fear for him trapped in her eyes, but not once did she tell him to cease what he was doing.
“The potion won’t stop the damage.” She soothed his temples with a cloth that smelled of herbs. “But it will mask the pain, so you’ll be able to continue. If you choose to.”
Her black eyes begged him not to.
He touched his daughter’s cheek and tipped the dark green liquid down his throat.
TWENTY
SOFIA was desperate. She couldn’t find the boy. She slipped between the izbas, hugging the darkness, avoiding the torches and the swaying lamps and the voices giving orders. She searched everywhere, but he was gone.
In the chaos around her she seized the shoulder of a woman who was hurrying from her house, a scarf hiding her face from the troops that had fanned out through the village.
“Have you seen Pyotr Pashin?”
But the woman scuttled past her, bent double over a sack clutched in her arms, and melted away into the forest. In the center of the single street, blocking any movement, was a hefty truck, growling noisily and edging its way from house to house. At the back it was an uncovered flatbed already piled with more than a dozen sacks of various shapes and sizes, men in uniform hurling them up to a pair of young soldiers who were stacking them efficiently. Sofia tried to edge past it.
“Dokumenti? Identity papers?”
Sofia swung around. Behind her a man was holding out his hand expectantly. He wore a long coat that flapped around his ankles and a rimless pair of spectacles that were spattered with rain.
“Dokumenti?” he said again.
“They’re in my house, just over there.” Calm, keep calm.
“Fetch them.”
“Of course, comrade.”
Walk. Don’t run. Past the truck and down behind one of the houses. Everywhere voices were raised in anger and in entreaty. She reached the gypsy’s house, breathless, but it was empty, though voices at the rear caught her attention and she crept over to find Zenia talking quietly with one of the procurement officers. He was pointing at the rows of vegetables. Silently Sofia slipped away and doubled back into the street. Where now? Where was the boy? Where?
She dodged down an alleyway between izbas and immediately spotted the tall figure of Mikhail Pashin. She opened her mouth to call out but swallowed the words just in time. He was carrying a torch in one hand and had the other arm around the shoulders of a young woman, so that their heads were close. Sofia recognized her at once. The mother of the blond child, Misha, the one to whom she told the story.
It was like drowning. She felt her lungs fill with something that wasn’t air.
He was walking Lilya Dimentieva into her house as if he owned it, Mikhail Pashin slinking to his lover’s bed. Sofia leaned against the wall behind her. A harsh moan escaped her. He had one son. Perhaps two. What chance did she and Anna have? She crouched down on the damp ground as the rain ceased and hid her face.
SOFIA.”
It was Rafik.
"What are you doing out here?” His voice was faint.
“Searching for Pyotr Pashin. Have you seen the boy?”
He shook his head. It was that movement, slow and heavy, that made Sofia peer through the night’s drizzle more closely, and what she saw shocked her. His black eyes were dull, the color of old coal dust. Sweat, not rain, glimmered on his forehead.
“Rafik, are you wounded?”
“No.”
“Are you sick?”
“No.” It was little more than a breath.
“Let me take you home.” She lifted his hand in hers. It was ice cold. “You need—”
The crash of a rifle butt came from within the house beside them. He withdrew his hand.
“Thank you, Sofia, but I have work to do.”
He headed off with an uneven gait toward a group of approaching uniforms, and her confidence in him was shaken. He was going to get himself killed if he interfered.
PYOTR was running up to the stables when Sofia stepped out of the darkness and caught him. Her fingers fastened around his wrist, and he was astonished at the strength in them. One look at her face and it was clear she wasn’t going to let him go this time.
“Privet,” she said with no hint of annoyance t
hat he’d run off before. “Hello again.”
“I was just going to check on Zvezda,” he said quickly. “Papa’s horse. To make sure he wasn’t taken by the troops.”
She paused, considered the idea, and then nodded as if satisfied and led him up the rest of the narrow track to where the stable spread out around a courtyard. Once inside the stables she released his wrist and lit a kerosene lamp on the wall in a leisurely way, as if they’d just come up for a cozy chat instead of to escape from the soldiers. Pyotr wouldn’t admit it, but he had been frightened by the savagery of what was tearing his village apart tonight. Her blue eyes followed his every move as he refilled Zvezda’s water bucket, the horse’s warm oaty breath on his neck, and for some reason her gaze made him feel clumsy.
“Zvezda is growing restless,” she said, and she lifted a hand to scratch the animal’s nose.
Pyotr wrapped an arm around the muscular neck and embedded his fingers in its thick black mane. The other horses were whinnying uneasily from their stalls, and it dawned on Pyotr that something wasn’t right, but he couldn’t work out what. It must be because of Sofia, he told himself. But when he slid his eyes toward her, she didn’t look threatening at all, just soft and golden in the yellow lamplight. He was just beginning to wonder whether he’d gotten her all wrong when she put a finger to her lips, the way she did in the forest that time.
“Listen,” she whispered.
Pyotr listened. At first he heard nothing but the restless noises of the horses and the wind chasing over the corrugated-iron roof. He listened harder, and underneath he caught another sound, a dull roar that set his teeth on edge.
“What’s that?” he demanded.
“What do you think it is?”
“It sounds like . . .”
“Pyotr!” The tall priest burst into the stables and instantly checked the dozen stalls to ensure the horses were not panicked. “Pyotr,” he groaned, “it’s the barn, the one where the wagons are kept. It’s on fire.”
His windblown hair leaped and darted around him as if the fire were on his shoulders. His angular frame shuddered disjointedly while he moved from one horse to the other, patting their necks and soothing their twitching hides. He was wrapped in a horse blanket that was more holes than blanket.
The Red Scarf Page 13
