Sofia rose from her chair and went over to him. Tentatively her fingertips stroked his soft cropped hair, and a sweet image of it longer with young Anna’s fingers entwined in its depths arose in her head. He had cut off Vasily’s hair as effectively as he’d cut off his heartbeat. Time alone was what he needed now, time to breathe. So she walked into his tiny kitchen to give him a moment, filled a glass with water, and when she returned she found him sitting in the chair, his limbs loose and awkward. She wrapped his hand around the glass. At first he stared at it, uncomprehending, but when she said, “Drink,” he drank.
Then she squatted down on the board floor in front of him and in a quiet voice started to tell him about Anna. What made her laugh, what made her cry, how she raised one eyebrow and tipped her head at you when she was teasing, how she worked harder than any of his kolkhozniks, how she could tell a story that kept you spellbound and carried you far away from the damp miserable barrack hut into a bright shining world.
“She saved my life,” Sofia added at one point, but she didn’t elaborate and he didn’t ask for details.
Gradually Aleksei Fomenko’s head came up and his eyes found their focus once more; his limbs remade their connection and his mind regained control. As Sofia talked, a fragile smile crept onto his face. When finally the talking ceased, he took a deep breath, as though to inhale the words she had released into the air, and nodded.
“Anna always made me laugh,” he said in a low voice. “She was always funny, always infuriating.” The smile spread, wide and affectionate. “She drove me mad and I adored her.”
“So help me rescue her.”
The smile died. “No.”
“Why not?”
He stood up, towering over her where she still crouched on the floor, and he spoke quietly, the turmoil hidden away, concealed deep inside. His wolfhound leaned against his thigh, and he rested a hand unconsciously on the wiry head.
“You have to understand, comrade,” he said. “Sixteen years ago, to satisfy my own anger and lust for vengeance, I slit a man’s throat. As a result Anna’s father was shot and her life destroyed. That taught me a lesson I will carry to my grave.”
His gray eyes were intent on Sofia’s face, and she could feel the force of his need to make her understand.
“I learned,” he continued, “that the individual need doesn’t matter. The individual is selfish and unpredictable, driven by uncontrolled emotions that bring nothing but destruction. It is only the need of the whole that counts, the need of the state. So however much I want to rescue Anna from her . . . misery”—he closed his eyes for a second as he said the word—“I know that if I do so . . .”
He broke off. She could see the struggle inside him for a moment as it rose to the surface, and his voice rose with it.
“You must see, comrade that I would lose my position as chairman of the kolkhoz, and everything that I have achieved here—or will achieve in the future—would be destroyed because they would revert back to old ways; I know these people. Tell me which counts for more? Tivil’s continued contribution to the progress of Russia and the feeding of many mouths, or my and Anna’s . . . ?” He paused.
“Happiness?”
He nodded and looked away.
“Need you even ask? You’re blind,” Sofia said bitterly. “You help no one, nor do you think for yourself anymore.”
Something seemed to snap inside him, because without warning he bent down and yanked her to her feet, his fingers hard on her arms.
“Thought,” he said, his face close to hers, “is the one thing that will carry this country forward. At the moment Stalin is pushing us to great achievements in industry and farming, but he is at the same time destroying one of our greatest assets—our intellectuals, our men and women of ideas and vision. Those are the ones I help to . . .” He stopped and she saw him fighting for control.
His hands released her.
“The radio in the forest,” she said in a whisper. “It’s not to report to your OGPU masters. It’s to help—”
“It’s part of a network,” he said curtly, angry with her and angry with himself.
“The previous teacher here who spoke out of turn?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“And others? You help them escape.”
“Yes.”
“Does anybody else in Tivil know?”
He drew in a harsh breath. “Only Pokrovsky, and he is sworn to secrecy. No one in the network knows more than one other person within it. That way no one can betray more than one name. Pokrovsky provides . . . ‘packages’ and forged papers for them—where he gets them, I don’t ask.”
Sofia recalled the ink stamp and magnifying glass on Elizaveta Lishnikova’s desk. She could guess. She also recalled Pokrovsky’s hard face when she accused him of working for both sides. She was angered at her own blindness and walked over to the open door, where she stood looking out at the village.
“Chairman Fomenko,” she said softly, “I feel sorry for you. You have hidden from yourself and from your pain so deeply, you cannot—”
“I do not need or want your sorrow.”
But he came up behind her, and she could feel him struggling with something; a faint hissing sound seemed to emanate from him. She could hear it clearly though the room was silent.
“What is it?”
She turned and looked into his eyes and for a moment caught him unawares. The need in them was naked.
“What is it?” she asked again, more gently.
“Tell her I love her. Take my mother’s jewels, all of them, and use them for her.”
She slid the damaged necklace from her pocket and slipped a single perfect pearl off its strand, took his strong hand in hers and placed inside it the pale sphere that had lain next to his mother’s skin. He closed his fingers over it. His mouth softened, and she felt the shudder that passed through him. In the same moment she replaced the necklace in her pocket and removed the white pebble. With her other hand she rested her fingers on Fomenko’s wrist and pressed deep into his flesh as she’d seen Rafik do, touching the hard edges of his bones, his tendons, his powerful pulse, seeking him out.
“Vasily,” she said firmly, fixing her gaze on his, “help me to help Anna. I can’t do it alone.”
Something seemed to shift under her fingers, she felt it, as though his blood thickened or his bones realigned. A tiny snick sounded in her head and a thin point of pain kicked into life behind her right eye.
“Vasily,” she said again, “help Anna.”
His eyes grew dark, but his lips started to curl into a soft acquiescent smile. Her heart beat faster.
“Chairman Fomenko.” A boy’s voice shouted out from the street and a scurry of footsteps came hurtling up to the doorway. It was a clutch of seal-haired youths still wet from the pond. “Is it all arranged for tomorrow?”
Fomenko jerked himself back to the present by force of will and wrenched his wrist from her hold. His eyes blinked again to refocus on the world outside his head.
Sofia stepped out into the street. She’d lost him.
“Is what arranged for tomorrow?” he demanded.
“The wagons to take everyone to Dagorsk. Like you promised last week.” The boy’s face was eager.
“A holiday,” chirped a blond snippet of a child. “To see the Krokodil airplane and hear our Great Leader’s speech.”
Fomenko straightened his shoulders and gave a harsh cough as though trying to spit something out. “Yes, of course, it’s all arranged.” With a brisk nod of his head he moved back into the house and shut the door.
Sofia stood there while the boys raced away down the road, skipping over the ruts and yelling their excitement. The sky had darkened, and a solitary bat swooped low overhead. She watched a yellow glow spring to life in Fomenko’s izba as he lit the oil lamp inside, but outside, Sofia felt no glow. Just the pain behind her right eye.
FIFTY-THREE
THE night was unbearable without her. Mikhail spent the
dark hours with his own demons and wrestled with the knowledge Sofia had given him.
Aleksei Fomenko. The name was branded into his brain. Fomenko was Vasily Dyuzheyev, the killer of his father. Yet at the same time Fomenko was the son of Svetlana Dyuzheyev, the woman Mikhail himself had killed in cold blood.
They were bound together, Fomenko and himself, bound in some macabre dance of death. Both servants of the state and both sent to the same peasant raion to drag it into the twentieth century, where on both of them the burden of responsibility weighed heavy each day as they wrestled with the need to lead others out of the past and into a brighter firmer future. So similar, yet so different.
Mikhail hated him as much as he hated himself. And he hated the hold that Fomenko—as Vasily—seemed to have on Sofia. The image of her beautiful lithe body and proud mind, with its unshakable loyalty to those she loved, swamped his thoughts as he paced through the hours of the night.
“Sofia,” he said to the moon when it slipped out from behind the clouds and trickled into his bedroom, “don’t think I will let you go so easily.”
His decisions started to harden. He owed Fomenko, an eye for an eye. He owed Anna, a life for a life. But most of all, he owed himself.
JUST before dawn she came to him. Slid into his bed, her feet chill on his and her heart beating as fast as a bird’s.
She smelled so strongly of forest secrets that he almost asked her where she’d been and what she’d been doing, but he remembered Rafik and said nothing. Instead he enfolded her in his arms. They lay like that, bodies molded to each other, silent and still, until the first fingers of daylight touched her hair and painted a blush on her cheek. She kissed his throat, a soft possessive brush of her lips.
“You’re not Anna’s,” she whispered.
"No,” he said firmly, “I’m not Anna’s.”
WAKE up, you lazy toad. Rise and shine.”
Pyotr burrowed deeper into his pillow and ignored his father’s urging, but the bedcover was whisked away and a hand lifted him bodily from the bed.
“Papa!” he moaned. “It’s vikhodnoy, a holiday.”
“We have a busy day ahead of us. Get dressed,” his father said and strode from the room. “Don’t forget, your friend Yuri will be here soon.”
Of course. Pyotr started to hurry, but suddenly he remembered the jewels they’d found yesterday and his heart gave a kind of hiccup inside his chest. He wanted desperately to tell Yuri about them but knew he couldn’t. It was a secret, not even to be shared with his best friend. When he’d stared into the casket at the fiery jewels behind the assembly hall he’d felt their power in a way he never expected, so strong it made him nervous. He’d cradled an emerald ring in his hand, unwilling to let it go, and it shocked him, that feeling. Because he truly believed in sharing, really he did, an equal portion for everyone, no selfish bourgeois elitist values.
So where had it come from, this greed squirming inside him? Chairman Fomenko had been released, and Pyotr knew for certain it was because of the power of the pearls. That meant corruption. So he should speak out, loud and clear. It was his duty. Speak out about the existence of these corrupting jewels, that was what Yuri would say.
But how could he without denouncing Papa and Sofia? And without putting Chairman Fomenko’s freedom at risk? What was right and what was wrong?
He pulled on his shorts roughly. Life was too confusing. He shook his head and in a flash his thoughts shifted to the arrival of the Krokodil airplane today. Instantly his mood changed and excitement surged through him, whooshing up from his toes and setting his scalp tingling. Quickly he yanked on his shirt. He’d worry about the jewels tomorrow.
THE wide green meadow stretched out, lazy in the sunshine on the far side of Dagorsk, and from every direction carts and wagons and rattling bicycles were descending on it. Tents had sprung up all over its surface like mushrooms, and men in red armbands were running around blowing whistles, shouting orders, and waving batons, but nothing could subdue the spirit and energy of the crowd that surged onto it.
Pyotr loved every single second of it. Even the journey in the ramshackle old wagon had been fun. It was packed with villagers from Tivil, and he’d sat squashed close to Yuri at the back, legs dangling over the tailboard. Dust swirled up from the track into their mouths, coating their tongues, but everyone sang to the playing of an accordion, loud and boisterous. It was like going to a party. Somewhere up ahead in the first wagon were Papa and Sofia and Zenia, but the children of the village were bundled into the second one with their teacher, and even Comrade Lishnikova was laughing and wearing a bright red flowered shawl instead of her usual gray one. Today was going to be special. At the meadow they tumbled from the wagon in a flurry of pushing and shoving and high-pitched squeals.
“The aircraft isn’t due for another half hour,” Elizaveta Lishnikova announced.
“Can we look inside the film tent?” Pyotr asked.
“Yes, you may go and explore first, but when I blow my whistle I expect you all to line up just the way we practiced.”
“A guard of honor,” Yuri whooped.
She smiled, and her long face creased in amusement. “That’s right.” She seized the hand of a tiny child who was about to wander off. “And I’m relying on you Young Pioneers to do it right and show the little ones the way. In front of all the other brigades from the raion, I want you to make me proud of you.”
“We will! For our Great Leader,” Pyotr shouted and everyone gave the Pioneer salute, eyes shining. “Bud gotov, vsegda gotov! Be ready, always ready!”
The schoolteacher looked fondly down at her thin-faced flock but didn’t join in the salute. “Here,” she said, drawing a leather purse from her bag. “Line up.”
The twenty-two children shuffled quickly into an obedient single file, and into each eager hand she placed a rouble. Never before had she done such a thing.
“Spasibo.”
“Go and buy yourselves some treats.”
They were off and running like mice in a cornfield, skipping and skittering between the groups of women in flower-printed dresses and the kolkhoznik men from other villages in their flat caps, as well as the older, more disdainful youths from Dagorsk’s factories.
“This way,” Pyotr yelled.
He dragged Yuri over to a stall that sold konfetki, and they spent a delicious ten minutes deciding which sweets to buy. Yuri chose a sugar chicken on a stick, but Pyotr bought one of the petushki, a boiled pine cone, and started to pop the seeds into his mouth. Scattered among the crowds were other Young Pioneers from other brigades, also in white shirts and scarlet triangular scarves, and they eyed each other with interested rivalry. Later there would be races.
“You’ll beat them,” Yuri said confidently. “Easy.”
“Da, of course I will,” Pyotr agreed, and he put a swagger in his step, though in his heart he was far from certain.
Together they headed for the largest of the tents. “Come on,” Yuri yelled as he broke into a run.
I’M going to be a fighter pilot,” Pyotr announced as he and Yuri emerged from the film show. They had just sat wide-eyed through the footage of the May Day Parade in Red Square for the third time, and their pulses were still beating to the powerful rhythm of the martial music. Pyotr began to swing his arms in imitation of the soldiers on screen, his legs striding out in a stiff-kneed goosestep.
Yuri giggled and copied his military bearing, puffing out his chest and grinning. “I want to become a tank driver when I leave school. Did you see those machines? Aren’t they massive? They’ll stomp all over Germany in no time if they give us any more trouble.”
The boys marched around the field in unison, swerving to avoid a bald man with a tattoo on his arm rolling a wooden cask over to one of the tents. Yuri was clutching a pamphlet in his hand, and on the front of it was printed in big red letters, BEWARE OF ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE AMONG YOU.
“I wonder,” Yuri said, flapping the pamphlet as he marched, “who are the
enemies in Tivil?”
Pyotr missed his step. His cheek flushed. “Maybe there aren’t any,” he said quickly.
“Of course there are. Have you forgotten that our Great Comrade Stalin tells us they are everywhere, hiding among us. Most of them employed by foreign powers to—”
“Why on earth would a foreign power be interested in what goes on in our village?”
“Because we provide the food to feed the factory workers, stupid,” Yuri scoffed.
Pyotr was stung. “I bet I know more about enemies in Tivil than you do.”
“You don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
They stopped in the middle of the field and glared at each other. Not far away the band struck up a marching tune, but neither boy wished to set off again.
“Name one,” Yuri challenged.
“I could if I wanted.”
“You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Tell me.”
Pyotr shook his head firmly. “No.”
“I knew it. You don’t know . . .” He gave Pyotr’s shoulder a scornful shove.
It was the shove that did it, as if Pyotr were a stupid child to be pushed around. His cheeks darkened and he gave Yuri’s chest a thump with his fist, not hard, but hard enough to show he was serious.
“I’ll tell you only if you promise to keep it secret.”
Yuri’s eyes gleamed. “Go on, tell me,” he urged. But he didn’t promise.
PYOTR was desperate to find Sofia. He had to talk to her, to warn her. His heart was squeezed tight inside his chest as he scoured the field, trying to catch a glimpse of white-blond hair and a cornflower dress. He zigzagged behind the tents, and with every step he swallowed hard, attempting to swallow the shame.
The Red Scarf Page 40
