“Of course.”
“Then let’s take it to Rafik.”
“Not you.”
“What?”
“I want you to stay here. In the hallway. Don’t leave it.”
“Why?” Sofia was impatient to return to Mikhail.
“In case the troops come searching. They most likely won’t but . . . they might.” The older woman’s careful brown eyes scanned Sofia appraisingly. “You look the kind of person who could keep them out of my school. Guard it well. I’m trusting you.”
With a whisk of her gray shawl over her head, the teacher was gone, the door slamming shut behind her. Sofia paced the scuffed boards in frustration. She wanted to be out there, ensuring that Mikhail and Rafik were not tossed into the truck in place of the sacks. She hated being left behind to watch over some irrelevant little schoolhouse.
What was there to guard anyway, other than some pieces of fine furniture? And what did Elizaveta Lishnikova mean when she said Sofia was the kind of person who could keep the troops out of the school? That she was in league with the OGPU forces? That she would argue well against them? Or that she had the youth and the feminine wiles to turn troops from their course?
Oh, to hell with the woman! Sofia banged her fist against the wall in frustration.
That was when she heard the noise. A tiny whimpery sound, like a mouse in pain. She wondered if it could be a creature that had fled from the barn fire. It stopped as suddenly as it started. Sofia resumed her pacing of the narrow hallway, her mind struggling to make sense of what she’d seen Rafik do to the officer and to Mikhail with what looked like no more than a touch of his hand. But before she’d conjured up the intense gaze that had burned in the gypsy’s eyes, the noise started up again. Louder now. A recognizable wail this time.
It seemed to be coming from behind the other door in the hall, the one she assumed led into the schoolroom. Her breath grew shallow and she could feel the hairs rise on the back of her neck, but she wasn’t going to stand here doing nothing. She lifted the oil lamp from its bracket and pushed open the door. The lamplight leaped in ahead of her, looping in great swaying arcs through the pitch darkness, jumping off the windows and lighting up a clutch of small pale circles. It took her a second to recognize them as faces. Children’s faces, pale and wide-eyed with fear.
Children from less than five years old up to ten or eleven, each one silent at a desk. Eleven pale moons in the darkness and in front of each one on the desktop lay a bundle of some sort, some large and lumpy, others small and smelly. Nearly all the children had their thin arms wrapped protectively around the bundle of food they had saved from their homes, and one older boy had a zinc bucket at his feet piled high with what looked like grain of some sort.
The noise was coming from a tiny girl. She was sobbing, and an older girl had her hand clamped across the little one’s mouth, but still the mouse-pain sound squeezed its way out. Quickly Sofia took the lamp back into the hall and replaced it in its bracket, so that no light showed in the schoolroom. She returned to the children and as she shut the door behind her, she heard their collective sigh. She groped her way to the teacher’s chair at the front and sat down.
“Now,” she whispered softly, “I’ll tell you a story. But you must stay quiet as little mice.”
TWENTY-TWO
PAPA,wake up. Please, wake up. You’re late.”
Mikhail opened his eyes and a spike of morning sunlight lanced into them. He winced. He was on the floor of his own living room, curled up in his coat, a bottle nestled to his chest. An empty bottle. He swore softly under his breath, only to discover that his mouth tasted like cow dung.
“Papa, you got drunk!”
Mikhail sat up and scrubbed a hand through his hair. The ceiling swooped, then settled, and a heavy pulse started up behind his eyes and echoed dully in his ears. His mind struggled. It felt oddly empty, like the inside of a drum, just full of vibrating air. And a soft female voice whispering words he couldn’t quite catch in his ear.
“I wasn’t drunk, Pyotr.”
“You were, you know you were.” The boy’s toffee-toned eyes glared, a long sulky beat. “And now you’re late for work.”
“What time is it?”
“Eight-thirty.”
“Chyort!”
Mikhail felt an unfocused anger rise inside him, he wasn’t sure at what or at whom, but he knew that somehow he had lost control and he hated his son seeing him like this. “Pyotr,” he said sharply, “I’ll drink if and when I have a mind to. I don’t need your permission, boy.”
“No, Papa.”
Mikhail rose to his feet and groaned. Fuck it, this was a hangover like none he’d experienced before. His whole brain felt dislocated. He made his way out to the tub of water in the backyard, stuck his head in it, and kept it there until blood reached his brain. Today he’d have to ride Zvezda hard if he was to be at his desk before the blasted factory foreman started getting ideas above his station.
His shirt was wet around the collar and stank of alcohol, and of something else. He sniffed the sleeve cautiously. Was it her? The scent of her skin on his arm. The sudden memory of Sofia’s face in the darkness, her mouth soft and full as she whispered words to him. What words? Damn it, what words? He couldn’t remember. He shook his head viciously, and it splintered into jagged pieces but nothing became clearer. Had the vodka done this or . . . Dimly he recalled Rafik being there last night. What had the gypsy to do with it? Still feeling uncomfortable, he headed back into the house, where the boy was staring out of the window.
“Pyotr,” he said gruffly, “you know I’m like a bear with a sore head if I sleep too long. You were right to wake me. Spasibo.”
His son continued to look out at the street, his back rigid, elbows stiff at his sides. Mikhail felt an urge to wrap his arms around his stubborn son’s young frame, to hold on to it, to keep it safe and guard it from grain hunters and fire starters and slogan sellers. Instead he went into his own room, shaved, and changed his shirt, and when he came out again Pyotr was waiting for him.
“Papa, what happened last night?”
Last night. Mikhail shook his head again to try to clear the blurring that smudged his thoughts at the very mention of last night. What did happen? And why did he feel Sofia so close?
“What happened to the grain and the sacks, Papa? All the piles of them that the procurement officers stacked in the truck. People are saying it was stolen. That you were . . . involved.”
The boy’s face was tense, as if frightened to hear the answer. They both knew of the infamous case of the boy Pavlik, who only last spring had reported his own father to the authorities for anti-Soviet activities; the Politburo had used it as a major propaganda tool. One of Pyotr’s feet kicked again and again at the floorboards.
“No grain was taken,” Mikhail said firmly. “There were only four sacks.”
“They say that’s not true.”
“Then they’re lying.”
Their gaze locked on each other.
“Pyotr.”
The boy shuffled his feet.
“Pyotr, stay away from the barns today. That fire didn’t light itself, and Fomenko will be looking for a culprit.”
THE fresh air cleared Mikhail’s head. Dusty white clouds trailed along the top of the ridge on each side of him as he cantered down the dirt road past the cedar tree that marked the village boundary and out into the valley, which lay before him sun-baked and vibrant with movement. The bushy green foliage of the potato crop rustled in the fields, and stooped figures wielded hoes and rakes along the long mounds of them. The whole kolkhoz workforce was already hard at it, striving to fulfill Aleksei Fomenko’s labor quotas. One thing Mikhail couldn’t deny was that Fomenko had pulled and prodded and bullied the Tivil collective farm into some semblance of productivity. He might be a bastard, but he was an efficient bastard.
Above, a solitary skylark soared up into the blinding blue sky, its wings fluttering like heartbeats, and Mikhail e
nvied it its effortless flight. He used to work at the N22 aircraft factory in Moscow and he missed that wonderful sense of freedom that came with flight, but freedom was a word that had no meaning these days. With a shake of his head he wondered how Andrei Tupolev was getting on with the development of the ANT-4 airplane, and allowed himself a moment to indulge in the images of its corrugated duralumin skinning, like wave ripples in the sand. And the full-throated roar of its hefty twin engines that . . .
Abruptly he cut off the sounds in his head. Why torment himself? Those days were gone. He heeled Zvezda into a longer stride, and the horse huffed through its broad nostrils, pricked its ears, and responded with ease. They were traveling fast, kicking up a trail of dust behind them, the valley widening out into the flat plain dotted with clumps of pine and alder along the silver twist of the river. It came as a surprise when he looked up and spotted a lone figure standing at the roadside some way ahead. His heart gave a kick of pleasure.
He recognized her at once, that distinctive way of cocking her head to one side, as if expecting something special from him. She was watching him, a hand shielding her eyes. The worn material of her skirt was almost transparent in the strong sunlight, and her fine fair hair ruffled around her face in the breeze. He reined Zvezda to a walk and approached with care, so as not to coat her in dust.
GOOD morning, Sofia Morozova. Dobroye utro. You’re a long way from home.”
She looked up with a wide generous smile. “That depends where home is.”
The smile was infectious. “Are you walking all the way to Dagorsk?”
She flicked at a fat blowfly that was irritating the horse’s eye. “I was waiting for you.”
“I’m glad, because I have something to ask you.”
Mikhail slid off the saddle and landed lightly in front of her, the reins loose in one hand. The top of her head came up to the level of his lips, no higher, but a good height for a woman.
“Do you know what happened to the grain last night?” he asked, aware again of that odd disconcerting uncertainty in his mind at the mention of it.
Her eyes were an intense piercing blue. They caught his attention and held it with their directness, but now she was looking at him as though disturbed by the question.
“You were there,” she said and shifted her gaze away from him and toward the village. “You saw them.”
“That’s what I don’t understand.” He ran a hand through his windblown hair and found himself studying the long white curve of her neck, exposed by the way she’d tucked her silver-blond hair behind her ear where it caught the sunlight. “I was there,” he said. “But somehow it’s all mixed up and I can’t make sense of it. Pyotr claims I was drunk, and God knows I have a sledgehammer at work in my head this morning, but . . .”
She turned to look at him expectantly.
He shook his head. “I remember the fire, and you at the pump and a man with spectacles sweating over my best vodka, but then . . .” He stepped closer. “Just tell me, Sofia, how many sacks of grain were in the truck before everyone ran off to fight the fire?”
For a moment Mikhail thought she wasn’t going to reply. Something in her eyes changed; a shutter slid down inside them, he could almost hear it rattle into place. Before she even spoke, he knew she was going to lie to him, and for some reason he couldn’t quite understand, it made him feel sick.
“Mikhail, there were four sacks on the truck before the fire started and four sacks still there at the end of the night.”
He said nothing.
“Rafik is sick,” she said.
He tried to find a connection between Rafik and the truck and almost caught hold of it this time, but it slipped through his fingers and vanished.
“I’m sorry to hear that Rafik is unwell,” he said.
“You don’t look so good yourself.”
“That’s because I need to know what went on last night. Please, Sofia, tell me.”
She looked away.
He seized her arm. The feel of it, the strength contained within its slender form, reminded him suddenly of having that same feeling at some point the previous evening, a point when he was standing close to her in the darkness, his skin touching her skin, her breath warm on his ear. But why? Where? That was when the blurring started again, like mist on the tips of a tree’s branches, swaying and shifting so that there were no clear edges. His mind shied away from last night as Zvezda shied at a snake.
He shook her arm. “How many sacks, Sofia?”
“Four.”
“The truth?”
“Four.”
A stab of anger made him drop her arm, and in one easy stride he swung himself back up into the saddle, but whether the anger was at her for lying or at himself for not remembering, he chose not to ask. The old leather of the saddle creaked, and a small green lizard scuttled between Zvezda’s hooves. The girl flicked her hair so that it sprang out from behind her ear, luminous in the clear air. All these things registered in Mikhail’s head, each with the kind of indelible imprint that he knew meant he would not forget this moment.
He gathered the reins in one hand, on the verge of urging the horse into a gallop, but at the last second he looked down again at Sofia. And something in her held him, something in her intent gaze. Something he couldn’t leave behind. He stretched out an arm. Instantly she seized it and he swept her up onto the horse behind him.
TWENTY-THREE
AT first neither spoke. Sofia leaned forward and felt the hard muscles on each side of Mikhail’s ribs where she rested her hands lightly to hold on. The moment her feet lifted off the ground as she swung up on the horse, she felt the past drop from her arms like a heavy bundle of dead sticks she’d been dragging around with her, and she left them there, lying in a spiky jumble in the dirt.
She’d have to pick them up. Of course she would, she knew that. But later. Right now she felt alert, happy, and alive, and all that mattered was being here on his horse. With him so close she could smell the fresh clean male scent of him and study the strong curve of the back of his head and spot how his shirt collar was fraying where it chafed against his skin. She wanted to wrap her arms around his body and hold herself tight against him, feeling his sun-warmed back against her breasts, to burrow inside his jacket and shirt, her cheek next to his naked skin, and listen to his heart beating. But she didn’t.
Instead she held on lightly and let her own body move with the rhythm of the horse beneath her. It was traveling at a good pace. Fields of potatoes flitted past in long straight ridges as far as the eye could see, occasionally edged with a haze of clover flowers that drew the greedy bees to them. Was she a greedy bee? Drawn to her own personal flower?
But he wasn’t hers. She was stealing him. An ache started up in her chest and her fingers fluttered involuntarily against his ribs, making him half-turn his head to her.
“Are you all right back there?” he asked.
She could see a shadow on his jaw where he hadn’t shaved well this morning and the dark length of his eyelashes.
“I’m fine. Your horse must possess a strong back to carry the two of us so effortlessly.”
Mikhail laid an affectionate hand along the horse’s neck, fingers kneading the heavy muscles. “You and I are no more than a gnat’s wing to Zvezda. He’s used to hauling massive carts all day around Dagorsk.”
“For your factory?”
“No, for a Soviet haulage business. You didn’t think he rested in a stall with a hay net and a young filly to amuse him till sundown, did you?” he laughed. “Like I’m sure Comrade Deputy Stirkhov does all day.”
She could feel the laughter under the tips of her fingers, vibrating his rib bones, and it sent a joyous echo through her own veins.
“Mikhail, you are too free with your insults.” She pointed up to a wood pigeon whose heavy wings clattered noisily as it swooped low over their heads. “I expect that bird is in the pay of Deputy Stirkhov, carrying our every word back to its master.”
He
laughed again and raised two fingers in an imitation gun, aiming at the pigeon.
“I mean it,” she said softly. “You should take more care.”
He shrugged his big flat shoulder blades as if she’d laid an unwelcome weight on them. “Of course you’re right. You’d think I’d have learned by now. That’s why I’ve washed up here in this backwater instead of . . .” His words trailed into a sigh.
"Instead of where?”
“Moscow.”
“Did you like Moscow so much?”
“I liked the Tupolev aircraft factory.”
“Is that why Rafik calls you Pilot?”
“Yes. But I was never a pilot. I’m an engineer. I worked on the engine designs and stress testing of the ANT planes.”
“That must have been exciting.”
A pause. Two dragonflies chased alongside for an iridescent second before darting back to the river.
“Yes.” That was all he said.
“Very different from a clothing factory out here in the middle of nowhere, that’s certain,” she said lightly. “Sewing machines aren’t much good at flying.”
He laughed once more, but this time the sound of it was empty. “Oh yes, I’m well and truly earthbound these days.”
It wasn’t hard to picture him soaring through the blue sky, eyes bright with joy, mouth shouting insults at the silent clouds to his heart’s content. But she didn’t ask the obvious question, made no attempt to search out the why or the how. Instead she laid her cheek against his shoulder. They rode like that in silence and she could feel the thread between them spinning tighter, drawing them together till she wasn’t sure where she ended and he began.
After several minutes, as though he could hear her thoughts, he said flatly, “I was dismissed. I wrote a letter. To a friend in Leningrad. In it I complained that some of the equipment was agonizingly slow in arriving at the N22 factory because of incompetence, despite the fact that Stalin himself claimed to be committed to expanding the aircraft industry as a major priority.”
The Red Scarf Page 15
