“Foolish,” she murmured and tapped his head. His hair felt soft.
“Foolish is right.” He leaned back a fraction in the saddle, so that his shoulder pressed harder against her cheek. “I should have realized all employees in such a sensitive project would have their letters monitored. Bloody idiot. It was only because Andrei Tupolev himself intervened for me that I wasn’t sent to one of the Siberian labor camps. Instead I was exiled out here in, as you so aptly put it, the middle of nowhere. But I’m an engineer, for Christ’s sake, Sofia, not a clothes merchant.”
“You were lucky.” Sofia sat up straight once more, lest he hear her heart cracking with fear for him. “You must be careful, Mikhail.”
“I admit I’ve had a few run-ins with Stirkhov and his Raion Committee already. I’m an engineer, and since all the big public show trials of the engineers he doesn’t trust me and is always wanting to interfere. ”
“What show trials?”
It slipped out. She wanted to cram the words back inside her mouth.
“Sofia, you must have heard of them, everyone has. The trials of the industrial engineers. The first one was the Shakhty trial in nineteen twenty-eight. Remember it? Fifty technicians from the coal industry. The poor bastards were accused by Prosecutor Krylenko of cutting production and of being in the pay of foreign powers. Of taking food out of the mouths of the hungry masses and of treachery to the Motherland.”
She could feel his back growing rigid with rage.
“Everyone clamored for their deaths while they were forced into confessing incredible and absurd crimes, slavish and servile in court. They betrayed the whole engineering industry, humiliated us. Endangered us.” He paused suddenly, and she wondered where his mind had veered, but she soon found out.
It was in a totally different voice that he said, “You’d have to be blind and deaf and dumb not to know of the trials. They were a huge spectacle. Used by Stalin as propaganda in every newspaper and radio broadcast, in newsreels and on billboards. We were completely bombarded for months.” Abruptly he stopped speaking.
“I was ill,” she lied.
“Blind and deaf,” he murmured, “ . . . or not in a position to read a newspaper.”
“I was ill,” she repeated.
“You can read, can’t you?”
“Yes. But I had . . . typhoid fever . . . I was sick for months and read no newspapers.”
“I see.”
He said it so coldly she shivered. They rode the rest of the way into town in silence.
THE town of Dagorsk seemed to press in on Sofia as she walked its pavements alongside Mikhail. The buildings were tombstone-gray and huddled on top of each other, either old and scruffy or new and scruffy. There was beauty there in some fine old houses but it was hidden under layers of dirt and neglect. Doors and windows remained unpainted because paint was scarcer than white crows these days, and the pavements were broken and treacherous. It used to be a quiet market town tucked away on the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains, but since Stalin had vowed in 1929 to civilize the backward peasants of Russia and to liquidate as a class the kulaks, the wealthy farmers, Dagorsk had been jolted sullenly into the twentieth century. The austerities of Communism seemed to cast a shadow over the town, with shop windows like empty black holes and goods impossible to obtain.
Factories had sprung up on the edge of the town, circling it like barbed wire, and turning the air gray with the soot from their chimneys. The people had changed too. Gone was the easygoing familiarity of faces as the new forbidding apartment blocks and tenements filled up with strangers looking for work or, even worse, strangers who had been exiled to this remote region because of crimes committed against the state. Dagorsk was busy with people avoiding each other’s eyes and with cars and carts avoiding each other’s axles, as the web of suspicion and paranoia spread through the streets. Sofia felt uneasy.
“It’s always frantic here,” Mikhail said as they walked quickly past a squat onion-domed church that lay in ruins. “It’s why I choose to live out in the peace and quiet of Tivil, though I’m not so sure my son agrees with me. He’s still young. I think he’d prefer the energy of Dagorsk.”
“No, I get the feeling he likes the countryside. Especially the forest.”
“Maybe. He certainly enjoys working in Pokrovsky’s smithy in his free time.” He sounded pleased. “And you?”
“I’m not good with crowds.”
“So I noticed.”
He smiled at her, and she realized that since leaving the horse in the haulage yard and setting off on foot through the maze of streets, through the press of other people’s bodies, she had gravitated nearer and nearer to Mikhail. He had slowed his stride to her pace and brushed against her, aware of her unease. She could feel the weight of his arm beside her, the nearness of his shoulder. Did the smile mean he had forgiven her the lie?
“My spinster aunt didn’t like crowds either; she preferred pigs,” Sofia said because she wanted another of his smiles.
“Pigs?”
“Yes. One gigantic sow in particular, called Koroleva. She used to walk the pig up the mountain twice a year, regular as clockwork. It was to meet up with a farmer and his boar from the next valley who walked up from the other side of the mountain, rain, wind, or shine. They’d spend a few days up there away from all crowds while the pigs enjoyed more than just the pine nuts and then came down again until the next time.”
“I bet they produced strong litters after all that walking.”
“Yes, good sturdy ones. But as a child it took me years to realize that Koroleva wasn’t the only one getting serviced on the mountain. Regular as clockwork.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “You’re making it up.”
“No, I’m not,” she lied, flushing slightly.
They stood still for a moment, smiling into each other’s eyes. She loved him for his laugh in a world where people had forgotten how to make that sound. He threaded her arm through his and guided her along the twists and turns up to the central square, steering her past the clutching hands of the beggars who pulled at her clothes like thorns. They came to an abrupt halt at a broad crossroads where the radio loudspeakers were blaring out into the street. It was one of Stalin’s speeches read by Yuri Levitan, hour after hour of it. Oblivious to the long line of silent women outside the bakery, Mikhail turned Sofia to face him, holding her shoulders. His gray eyes were bright with curiosity, and his mouth curved in an echo of the laughter.
“Sofia, what exactly are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to visit the apteka, the apothecary on Kirov Street. For Rafik.”
She knew it wasn’t what he meant. He meant what was she doing in Tivil, but she wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. It was too soon to tell him about Anna, too soon to be certain he wouldn’t report her as a fugitive from one of the forced-labor camps. If he did, all hope of saving Anna would be lost. He kept his gaze on her face, watching her intently, and then his fingers took hold of her hand, turned it over, and placed a fifty-rouble note from his pocket on its palm. One by one he wrapped her fingers over the note.
“I must leave you now, Sofia. Go buy yourself some food.” Gently he touched a fingertip to her cheek. “Put some flesh on your bones.”
His hand was so male. She noticed that about it. She’d been cut off from maleness for so long. His palm was broad, with short hard nails on his fingertips. She took a deep breath. Now was the time to ask.
“Mikhail, will you give me a job?”
“Oh Sofia, I—”
“I’ll do anything,” she rushed on. “Sweep floors, oil machines, type invoices . . . and I can sew too if—”
A passing motorcycle roared up the street, smothering the life out of her words, but not before she had seen despair leap into Mikhail’s face.
“I’m sorry, Sofia. There are lines of people at my factory gate every day, nothing but pathetic bundles of rags and rib bones, people who are desperate.”
“I’m desperate, Mikhail.�
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He frowned. His gaze moved over her body in a way that made her blush. “You’re not starving,” he said quietly.
“No. That’s true. Thanks to Rafik I’m not starving. But—”
“And you’ll have work on the farm.” He smiled again. “I hear you’re the famous tractor driver who will lighten the load of the harvesters this autumn.”
“Work on the kolkhoz is no use to me,” she said impatiently. “I’ll do all I can for them and it’ll put a roof over my head and food in my stomach, but it won’t provide me with what I need, which is . . .” She stopped.
“Money?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, Sofia. I can’t.”
“Just one or two days a week?”
“You don’t seem to understand,” he said bleakly. “I can’t give work to everyone. I have to choose. Choose between who earns enough money to eat that day and who doesn’t.” His eyes grew as dark and dull as the pavement under their feet. “I’m forced to decide who lives and who dies. It’s”—he looked away at the road ahead—“my penance.”
“Please,” she whispered. Ashamed to beg. Their eyes held. “It is life or death, Mikhail. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t ask. I need money.”
He stared at her a moment longer, and she could see herself through his eyes. She was filled with disgust at what must look like her greed. She stepped away from him.
“Think about it, anyway,” she said, with a try at lightness and a smile that cost her dearly. “Thanks for the lift on your horse. And for this.” She held up the note and ducked out into the road, dodging a handcart piled high with old newspapers tied with wire. Her disappointment was so solid it almost choked her. She’d spoiled everything.
When she reached the other side, she turned to wave and saw that Mikhail was still standing exactly where she’d left him on the pavement, staring after her, but he was no longer alone. Beside him stood a slight female figure in a light summer dress. It had a patch near the hem but otherwise looked fresh and clean, unlike Sofia’s own shabby skirt. With a shock she recognized Lilya Dimentieva, the same woman she’d seen so intimately entwined with Mikhail last night, the one who’d come to the house to whisper with Zenia. The one with the child, Misha. That one.
She was smiling up into his face with tempting brown eyes and as Sofia watched, Lilya slipped her arm through Mikhail’s, rubbing her shoulder against him like a cat. Together they set off down the street.
SOFIA was furious. She wanted to snap something brittle between her fingers. Something like Lilya Dimentieva’s thin neck. She was furious with Mikhail and knew she had no right to be. He wasn’t hers.
She hurried down Ulitsa Gorkova with long unforgiving strides, indifferent now to the crowds milling around her, as though she could outpace the rage at that possessive little movement of Lilya’s. But she couldn’t. It burned as fiercely as hellfire, melting her from the inside.
AS Sofia emerged from the gloomy apteka into the bright sunlight on Kirov Street, she clutched Rafik’s paper package in her hand and headed down toward the factories hunched together on the riverbank. Here the River Tiva had widened out to a busy thoroughfare where long black barges nudged up alongside the warehouses and men shouted and hurled ropes. Sofia looked at its oily restless surface and wondered how far a small rowboat might travel on it. It was something to consider. Traveling back up north for thousands of kilometers on foot would take too long, and she was acutely aware that each day was a fight for survival for Anna. She had to find a way to speed up the journey, yet without money she stood no chance.
She had no trouble finding the Levitsky factory. It was an ugly red brick building that rose three stories up from the muddy bank, with derricks jutting out over the river at the rear, and at the front a set of studded pine doors large enough to swallow carts whole. Attached to it at one side was a modern concrete extension with rows of wide windows that must flood the place with sunshine.
Is she in there? she wondered. With you, Mikhail?
Are you at this very moment holding out a glass of chai to her? Or lighting her cigarette, your fingers brushing hers, so that you can lean close and smell her perfume? Even catch a glimpse down the front of her pretty summer frock? Sofia’s cheeks slowly colored. She stood outside the factory for more than an hour, and at the end of that time she shook herself and walked away, pushing past the bezprizorniki, the hollow-cheeked street urchins who scavenged on the edge of survival by thrusting whatever they had to sell under your nose. Today it was Sport cigarettes for ten kopecks each. They smelled foul. She retraced her steps to Lenin Square, dominated by an imposing bronze statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself with arm upraised in exhortation and by the colorful propaganda plakati that declared SMERT KAPITALIZMU! (DEATH TO CAPITALISM!) and WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
The first person Sofia saw was Zenia. The gypsy girl was standing in the shade under the spreading branches of a lime tree near the newspaper boards with her bare arms draped around the neck of a young man and his hand curled snugly at her waist. He was wearing a uniform with pale blue cap-crown and epaulettes, the uniform of OGPU, the secret police. Quickly Sofia whirled away in the opposite direction, nipped past the open archway of a large market hall, and ducked around a corner.
“Ah, what have we here? The beautiful tractor driver from Tivil, I do believe.”
It was Comrade Deputy Stirkhov from Raikom. And he was blocking her path.
TWENTY-FOUR
Davinsky Camp July 1933
SOFIA is dead.”
"No. You’re lying.”
"Anna, you’ve got to stop this. This stupid waiting.” Tasha glanced up from the cards in her hand. “You’ve got to accept the fact that she’s not coming back. Not ever. For fuck’s sake, who in their right mind would turn up in this shit-hole unless . . . ?”
“Shut up, Tasha,” Anna said, but without rancor. “Sofia will come.”
They were sitting on Anna’s bedboard playing poker with shabby homemade cards, and as usual Nina was winning. The stakes were threads of cotton yanked from their skirts.
“Nina, you’ll be opening a clothing factory soon,” Anna laughed, throwing down her hand of cards in disgust. “Who dealt me this rubbish?”
“I did.” It was the new girl, Lara. She was nineteen and tall, with pale skin and pale hair. None of them mentioned it, but she reminded them of Sofia and somehow filled a gap for them all. “Anna,” she asked with a quick flick of an ace, “what makes you believe she’ll come back? The temptations out there must be so strong.”
Tasha and Nina exchanged glances, but Anna ignored them. “You don’t know her,” she said firmly.
“But Tasha is right, she can’t be in her right mind to risk coming back here.”
“She promised me.”
“But a promise in here,” Lara explained gently, “is not the same as a promise out there.” She nodded toward the world beyond the barbed wire fences. “In the real world people don’t gamble for pieces of thread to mend their clothes. And they don’t keep promises that are insane.”
“The trouble with you, Lara, is that you haven’t been in here long enough yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“It drives us all a bit insane.”
SOFIA is dead.
Tasha’s words stuck in Anna’s head like needles, and she couldn’t pull them out. Yet still she refused to believe them, and as the night hours crawled past she set about breathing life into her memories of Sofia. She was convinced that if she let her friend walk and talk and laugh and cry in her head, it would help keep her walking and talking and laughing and crying out there in what Lara called the real world.
But at the same time she knew Tasha was right. Only someone insane would return to Davinsky camp out of choice, and for the very first time doubt crept down her spine with cold fingers.
“Sofia,” she murmured, “what is out there? What is holding you?”
She’ll come. I know she’ll come. She is tenaciou
s.
Even as a girl she had been tenacious. Anna recalled a story about Sofia’s childhood that she had told her one day on the endless trek to the Work Zone.
The sound of a whip is like a branch snapping, over and over. That was what Sofia had said. When she was eleven years old, her father was tied to a tree in the center of the village and whipped to death in front of her. He was a priest. But in January 1917 he was known to be working with the Bolsheviks, and that was as good as a death warrant. The troops of Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor of All the Russias, had ridden the eight versts from Petrograd, their bridles jangling in the cold still air as they entered the village, and they had unleashed their knotted knout on him. He didn’t scream or curse, just prayed silently into the bark of the tree.
Sofia waited till after the funeral, and then in the early morning mist she plaited her long blond hair into a thick braid down her back, pulled on her lapti boots, and took herself into her father’s store shed in the backyard. There she filled a sack with a mixture of their winter-storage vegetables that she’d grown herself—potatoes, rutabagas, and a few handfuls of turnips—and set off on the long road to Petrograd.
The heavy sack hung down her back like a dead animal. Ice lay on the sides of the road like broken glass, and the clouds above were a dirty white with the smears of sooty fingerprints pressed into them. She walked fast, as though she could outpace the grief that snapped at her heels, taking big bites out of her. Everything had shifted. She could hear it clicking into a new position both inside and outside her head, so that at times when she looked at the familiar landmarks along the way—the old water tower, the sawmill, the lopsided weathervane on top of the barn—she barely recognized them.
Her mind felt as brittle as the ice at her feet. She had a great desire to yell at the top of her voice, but instead she thought about her father’s limp body stretched out on the kitchen table. She had hugged it close and refused to let go. She cried into his fingers and kissed the cuts on his neck, but when they took his body away from her to put it in a box, she knew she was going to have to build a new life for herself. Her uncle had offered her his own house as a roof over her head, but he’d told her it was up to her now to put aside her books—the ones she and her father had loved to read together—and start earning a living. She tightened her grip on the sack.
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