The Red Scarf

by Kate Furnivall

  “Help me to help you,” she begged.

  His eyes locked on the pebble. Its milky surface seemed to pull at him, so that he stumbled toward it, but suddenly the uniforms surrounded him. With a bellow of rage the big blacksmith charged forward, Zenia at his side.

  “If you take one more step, it will be your last.” The officer’s voice rang out through the bleak landscape. A solitary crow drifted overhead, folded its wings, and sank down on to the white fields in silence.

  Rafik shook his head. He laid a gentle hand on each of his companions in turn, on Pokrovsky’s barrel chest, on Elizaveta Lishnikova’s proud shoulder, on Zenia’s pale damp cheek. He caught hold of the priest’s hand for a moment, staring deep into his eyes, and then released him in mute farewell. When finally he stepped away from them, the three uniforms moved with him.

  “Comrade,” he called to the officer, “leave my friends in peace. I am the one you—”

  Before he’d finished speaking Sofia stepped forward, and her hands were on the wrists of two of the OGPU men. She was pressing their flesh and murmuring to them. Time hung lifeless in the white fog. The metallic click of a rifle bolt sounded loud in the silence. “Get away from her. Come over here.”

  The officer was gazing fixedly at Sofia, but he was speaking to Rafik.

  “Sofia, don’t.” It was Mikhail speaking. “I love you, Sofia.” His voice was urgent. “Don’t risk it all. You are needed.”

  The two men she had been murmuring to were standing oddly, their jaws slack, their spines soft, and Rafik was smiling strangely at Sofia.

  “Mikhail is right,” Rafik said. “You are needed.” He placed his thumb in the center of her forehead. “I have faith in you, daughter of my soul.”

  “I’ll say it only once more. Come here,” the officer snapped.

  Instead of obeying the order, Rafik turned and walked in the opposite direction toward the village.

  “Rafik!” It was Zenia’s desolate cry.

  “I cannot leave Tivil.”

  His voice carried to them through the fog and Sofia heard his words echo, rebounding in her head, a split second before the shot rang out in the still air. The gypsy’s wiry frame jerked. His arms flew out like wings, and then he crumpled to the snow and a stain spread from under him. The air suddenly seemed heavy.

  “Run, Pyotr, run! Fetch Chairman Fomenko.” It was Mikhail’s voice, quick and decisive.

  Pyotr ran. Sofia couldn’t feel the ice freezing her cheeks or the snow treacherous under her feet; all she could feel was a huge hole in her heart.

  SIXTY-THREE

  THE pebble crouched in Sofia’s hand and she didn’t move, didn’t breathe.

  "Rafik, don’t leave me.”

  The words trailed out of her in a long low cry of despair, but Rafik was gone. The pain of it pooled in her chest and she closed her eyes, but dark places started to open up in her mind, lonely places she didn’t want to visit. She shivered uncontrollably, and abruptly warm arms were around her and air rushed back into her lungs. Mikhail was speaking to her. She didn’t hear the words but she heard the love in them, felt the strength of them banish the loneliness.

  “Come,” he said.

  He led her to where Rafik lay in the snow. Zenia had turned over her father’s body so that his black eyes gazed sightlessly up at a crow that hovered overhead, its ragged wings whispering words that only he could hear. The gypsy girl lay across Rafik’s chest, her wild tangle of black hair writhing, dry sobs shaking her. Around her stood the teacher, blacksmith, and priest, faces gray with shock. Snowflakes had started to come spinning down in great white spirals, the first icy blast of a purga, a sudden snowstorm blowing up, and dimly Sofia became aware of angry voices behind her. She turned to see Aleksei Fomenko, a tall and broad figure in his fufaika coat, arguing with the OGPU officer, with the wolfhound as always at his side.

  “You had no right to come into my village to arrest a kolkhoz member without informing me first.”

  “I am not answerable to a village chairman.”

  “It looks like you’ve more than done your job,” Fomenko growled with fury. “Now leave.”

  “My men will search his house first.”

  “No,” Sofia whispered. The strange mystical contents that lay in Rafik’s house would condemn the whole village.

  Mikhail stepped forward to stand beside Fomenko, eyes narrowed against the falling snow. “Look, he was just a gypsy who was good with horses, nothing more, a man who understood their moods and could get a solid day’s work out of them. And now he’s dead. You’ll find nothing in his house except a few pots of stinking grease for softening bridles.”

  “So you knew this enemy of the people?” the officer demanded with interest.

  Sofia’s heart slid somewhere cold.

  But Mikhail was careful. “I knew him only as someone who lived in Tivil. We didn’t share a glass of vodka together, if that’s what you mean.” He nodded at the officer and banged his hands on his arms in a noisy show of the shivers. “It’s cold, comrade. The coming storm will trap you here in Tivil if you don’t hurry. Get back to Dagorsk with your men; this business is finished.”

  Sofia could feel an uneasy suspension of breath around her, and barely noticeable in the darkening of the light she moved close and touched the officer’s pale horse on its big shoulder muscle. It bared its teeth but didn’t bite, though the white threads of its tail twitched like serpents. Leave.Just leave. After a long thoughtful moment the officer shrugged and said no more but swung his horse’s head and, hunched against the wind, cantered off through the snow at the head of his troop. The purga swallowed them.

  THE figures stood motionless in a moment of shock, and then Mikhail quickly wrapped one arm around Sofia, the other around Pyotr. “We must get Rafik’s body out of the storm.”

  But before they could move, Elizaveta spoke out in a voice that was astonishingly powerful against the rising wind.

  “Listen to us, Sofia.”

  Four figures stood in a line, blocking the path into the village. Priest Logvinov, Elizaveta Lishnikova, Pokrovsky, and the weeping gypsy girl. The blacksmith had lifted Rafik’s limp body into his arms, and Zenia’s hand rested on her father’s dark head.

  “Sofia,” Elizaveta said, “we ask you to take Rafik’s place.”

  “No.”

  “Sofia,” Pokrovsky said, “you are needed.”

  You are needed. Rafik’s words.

  Sofia recoiled. “No.”

  A rustling of sound seemed to brush against her mind. She shook her head sharply. “No.”

  “Sofia.” It was the priest. He raised a hand into the snow-laden air between them but carved no cross this time. “God will grant you strength. You are the one who can help care for our village. Rafik knew it, he believed in you.”

  I have faith in you. His final words to her.

  “Nyet. No.” She inhaled deeply, ice stinging her lungs. “Mikhail, it’s dangerous. Tell them.”

  Fomenko was standing to one side, observing them in silence, his eyes intensely curious. But Sofia’s eyes were drawn to the road into Tivil and she felt it pull at her, as powerfully as the moon pulls the tide. Through the snow that was now falling fast, the village drifted into view, the izbas waiting.

  Mikhail took her hand in his. “My love, it has to be your decision, yours alone.”

  “I don’t have the strength. Not like Rafik.”

  “We will help you.”

  Sofia looked at the circle of people around her and knew that the life she’d been pretending she and Mikhail could lead elsewhere was never destined to happen.

  “I’ll be with you,” Mikhail said and his hand tightened on hers.

  The sound of Tivil breathing came to her. She didn’t want it to die, and somehow she sensed that the decision had been made long ago, before she was born. Was there any truth in what Rafik had told her, that she had inherited a special gift as the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter? She knew only that from hi
m she had started to learn a way of applying her mind, a way of shifting sand. She looked around her in the swirling snow, at these people who believed in her and who cared so passionately for their village, and she experienced a huge sense of belonging. Here was a place that pulled at her heart, a place that was home. And she owed it to Anna. My dear Anna, grow well and strong again. It’s because of you that I’m here, with this man at my side. Spasibo.

  “I’ll stay,” she said simply.

  SIXTY - FOUR

  Tivil

  Spring 1934

  THE air was crystal clear, and high above Tivil the wispy trail of an airplane skimmed across a pale blue sky. Mikhail gazed up at it, shading his eyes.

  “It’s an ANT-9,” Pyotr said confidently. “The same as the Krokodil.”

  “You’re right,” Mikhail grinned. “You’ll be a pilot yet.”

  They were in the graveyard at the back of what was once the church, the grass still fragile with frost where the building’s shadow lay, but the spring sunshine was tempting out the first buds. Sofia was kneeling beside Rafik’s grave. In her hand she held a bunch of podnezhniki , snowdrops, their delicate heads softly swaying as she placed them in a jar on the grave.

  “Where did you find the flowers so early?” Mikhail asked.

  She smiled up at him. “Where do you think?”

  “Beneath the cedar tree.”

  “Of course.”

  She and Anna had picked them together. It was there that Anna had shyly whispered the news that she was pregnant.

  “It’s a secret,” Anna laughed, “but I can’t keep it from you. Now that I’m so much better, it’ll be safe.”

  “Have you told your husband yet?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  Anna touched her stomach. “We’re naming him Vasily.”

  “Let’s hope it’s a boy then,” Sofia had laughed.

  Now she took the white stone from her pocket and rested it on Rafik’s grave.

  “Why do you always do that?” Pyotr asked.

  He’d grown taller in the winter months, his shoulders suddenly broader and his eyes more thoughtful, and Sofia had found herself watching him and wondering.

  “I do it because this stone connects Tivil to Rafik.”

  She picked it up. Neither Communism nor the Church had brought peace to Tivil, but this was something different, a strength that seemed to rise from the heart of the earth itself. She looked into the boy’s eyes.

  “Hold the stone,” she said.

  Pyotr didn’t hesitate, as if he’d been waiting a long time for this moment. His hand grasped the stone, and immediately his young eyes filled with light in the bright spring morning.

  “Pyotr, before your papa adopted you, did you have brothers?”

  “Yes, but when I was three,” his eyes were studying the milky stone, “they all died in the typhus epidemic.”

  “Six older brothers? Making you the seventh son.”

  “Yes. How do you know that?”

  She didn’t answer his question.

  “Pyotr, would you like to come for walks with me sometimes when it’s dark? And learn to shape the thoughts that form in your mind?”

  Pyotr looked to his father. Mikhail gazed at his son with gentle regret and nodded. “Take care of my son, Sofia.”

  “I will, I promise.”

  Pyotr stood, still fingering the stone. “When will we start?” he asked.

  Sofia gazed around at the village that was her home, at the houses so sturdy and yet so fragile in the sunshine.

  “Tonight,” she murmured. “We’ll start tonight.”

  Kate Furnivall was born in Wales and now lives by the sea in the beautiful county of Devon in England with her husband. She has worked in publishing and television advertising. Her love for all things Russian stems from her family history in pre-revolution St. Petersburg. Her previous book, the bestselling The Russian Concubine, is also published by Berkley. Visit her website at www.KateFurnivall.com.