Under a Blood Red Sky

by Kate Furnivall

  ‘Don’t dare what?’ Sofia asked under her breath.

  ‘Don’t you dare even think that you won’t come through this. Now get on that road in my place and haul stones. At least they’re dry.’ Anna seized the shovel from where it had fallen and set to work in the water.

  Sofia scrambled up on to the road and for a second stared down at Anna’s blonde head, as if she were memorising every hair on it. ‘One day, Anna, I’ll repay you for this.’

  After that, Sofia became ill. They’d both known she would but the speed of it shocked them.

  ‘Tell me something happy, Anna,’ Sofia had said. ‘Make me smile.’

  It was gone midnight and they were sitting on the floor of the barrack hut, backs to the wall in their usual place. It was only four days after the accident and Sofia could sense Anna’s concern like something solid in her lap.

  Neither said much but they weren’t fooling each other. The injured hand was worse, much worse, and Sofia’s skin had grown dry and feverish. Her cheeks were so flushed that Anna told her she looked almost healthy, which made Sofia laugh, but what little flesh she still had left was melting away, leaving just bones and sharp angles behind. Her work rate was too slow to earn anywhere near the norm and, even though Anna fed her friend pieces of her own meagre paiok, Sofia couldn’t always keep it down. The fever made her vomit.

  Sofia cradled her throbbing hand against her breast and said once more in a low whispery voice: ‘Tell me something happy, Anna.’

  From somewhere nearby came the popping sound of thumb-nails crushing the plump, grey bodies of lice, but when Anna started to weave her words, all else, including the pain, began to melt away into the darkness. That was the time Anna told her about when Vasily taught her to ice skate on the frozen lake. At the end of it Sofia had laid her head on Anna’s shoulder and chuckled.

  ‘I believe,’ she said softly, ‘I am falling in love with your Vasily.’

  ‘I’m going to lose my hand.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve seen it, Anna.’

  ‘Go to the medical hut when we get back to the Zone.’

  They looked at each other. Both knew that was a stupid statement. The feldshers wouldn’t bother with a bandaged hand. Besides, infections were so rife in the medical hut that if you were well when you went in there, you would almost certainly be dead by the time you came out. TB was endemic in the camp, bloody lungs eaten up with it and spreading the disease with every cough.

  ‘I was planning,’ Sofia said calmly, ‘on getting hold of Nina’s saw and asking you to cut off my hand.’

  Anna stared hard at her. The punishment for self-mutilation was a bullet in the brain. ‘No,’ she said sharply, ‘we must think of something better than that.’

  Anna did think of something else but it wasn’t something better.

  At the time the hut was full of uneasy rumours. They rustled in the air like wind in the forest as the ragged prisoners huddled on their bunks and told each other it was the woman’s own fault. That stupid woman. They were talking about the opera singer.

  She’d been shot. A quick bullet in the back of the brain. You don’t break the rules, not where everyone can see. The guard learned the same lesson but his was a harder one: he was forced to face an execution squad made up of his own colleagues. That way they all learned the lesson. Sofia shuddered when she recalled how close Anna had come to bursting into song that day on the road.

  ‘Here, this will help.’ Cradling her friend’s hand gently, Anna had started to unwind the slimy piece of rag that bound it.

  Sofia didn’t even open her eyes. She was lying on the bed board, her breath fast and shallow, her skin splitting wherever it was touched. She felt that she had already sunk beyond reach. She hadn’t worked for days and in this camp if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat.

  ‘Sofia,’ Anna said harshly, ‘open your eyes. Come on, show me you’re alive.’

  The blonde eyelashes fluttered but not enough to open her eyes.

  ‘Try harder,’ Anna insisted. ‘Please.’

  With a huge effort, Sofia opened her eyes.

  The sight of the hand was almost too much to bear. It was a black and swollen piece of rotten meat with great splits between the fingers, wounds that oozed foul-smelling pus. Each time Anna bathed it, strips of flesh floated away.

  ‘My poor Sofia,’ Anna breathed. She brushed a hand over Sofia’s burning forehead, sweeping the hair off her face. It was soaked in sweat. ‘This will help,’ she murmured again, ‘it’ll make you well.’

  She wrapped a poultice of green and orange lichen around the hand, working it in between the fingers and up the skeletal wrist. As she did so, though she was gentle, Sofia shuddered and a trail of bile trickled from the corner of her mouth. Anna slipped a strip of shredded leaves mixed with butter between Sofia’s cracked lips.

  ‘Chew,’ she ordered. ‘It’ll help the pain.’

  She watched like a hawk as Sofia’s jaw slowly attempted movement.

  ‘Anna.’ A raw whisper.

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Tell me . . . where did this come from?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, just swallow it. There’ll be more tomorrow, I promise.’

  The leaves were followed by a nugget of pork fat. Sofia’s cloudy blue eyes had fixed on Anna’s face with an expression of confusion and then, as understanding abruptly dawned on her sluggish mind, it changed to one of despair. She moaned, a deep, bone-aching sound that made Anna flinch. There was only one way a woman prisoner could lay her hands on the guards’ pork fat in this camp and they both knew what it was. Sofia felt dirty. Inside her body and under her skin she could feel the dirt, gritty and hard. Her good hand reached across and clung to Anna’s wrist.

  ‘Don’t,’ Sofia hissed. A tear slid out, creeping across her cheek and down to her ear. ‘Don’t do it any more, I beg you. I won’t eat the food.’

  ‘Sofia, I want a friend who is alive. Not one rotting in the stinking pit of corpses they dump in the forest.’

  ‘I can’t bear it.’

  ‘If I can, you can,’ Anna raised her voice in a sudden outburst of anger.

  Sofia stared at her friend for a long time. Then, slowly, her fingers uncurled from Anna’s wrist and, with gentle soothing strokes, they caressed her arm like a mother would a child’s.

  ‘Now,’ Anna said fiercely, ‘eat this.’

  Sofia opened her mouth.

  Two years and eight months had passed since that day. Yet the memory of it still had the power to rip something open inside her and make her want to shake Anna. And hug her, hug her to death. From where Sofia was sitting on the floor waiting for the next over-adventurous mouse to venture into the hut, she could see the blonde head tossing from side to side on the crowded bed board. She could hear the coughs despite the cloth jammed over the mouth.

  ‘Anna,’ she whispered, too low for anyone to hear, ‘I haven’t forgotten.’

  She dipped her forehead to her knees. Whatever it takes, Anna. Vasily had to be the key. Anna had no family and she was far too weak to make the thousand-mile journey through the taiga, even if she could escape from this hell-hole, so there was only one answer. Sofia would have to find Vasily and hope he would help. Hope. No, that was far too weak a word. Believe. That was it. She had to believe that first, she could find him, secondly that he would be willing to help Anna even though he hadn’t seen her for sixteen years - and if she was brutally honest with herself, was it likely he’d risk his life? And thirdly that he had the means to do so.

  She lifted her head and grimaced. Put like that, it sounded absurd. It was an insane and impossible idea, but it was all she had to cling on to. She nodded firmly.

  ‘Vasily,’ she breathed, ‘I’m trusting you.’

  The risks were huge. And of course there was the small matter of how she herself would escape from under the malevolent, watchful gaze of the guards. Hundreds tried it every year but few made it more than a verst or two. The tracker dogs;
the lack of food; the wolves; the cold in the winter. In the summer the heat and the swarms of black mosquitoes that ate you alive - they all defeated even the most determined of spirits.

  She shivered, but it wasn’t from the cold. A part of her tired brain had just caught a glimpse of something that she’d almost forgotten about. It was something bright and breathing, and it shimmered just on the far edge of her vision where it flickered, tempting her.

  It was freedom.

  4

  Davinsky Camp March 1933

  The sky was a vast and vivid lake of blue above Anna’s head. She smiled up at the sun climbing slowly over the tree line, into the freedom of the wide open sky. She envied it its space.

  Anna was lying on her back thinking the day was a good day. She wasn’t cold because around her neck lay a thick wool scarf that Nina had won in a poker game and it kept her warm. Her boots were dry and she wasn’t walking. She was riding in the back of an open truck and it felt like being on holiday. Yes, today was definitely a good day.

  ‘Anna! Are you all right?’

  The question came from Sofia. Anna smiled at her and nodded. They were packed together with eighteen others, all sitting on the floor of the truck, their bodies keeping each other warm. Everyone was so relieved not to be making the two-hour trek on foot along snow-covered trails to the usual Work Zone that there was a sense of delight in the small work gang. It briefly eased the permanent lines of tension across the women’s foreheads and the tightness around their mouths. Roll-call in camp had been fast and efficient for once, then a truck had backed up into the compound and dropped its tailgate. A group of twenty prisoners was selected at random to climb into the back. Puffing smoke from its exhaust pipe like a bad-tempered old man, the truck rolled through the double set of gates and out into the forest.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked a small Tartar woman with a heavy accent.

  ‘Who cares? Wherever it is, this beats walking,’ someone responded.

  ‘I think they’re going to shoot us and dump our bodies in the forest.’

  It was a young girl who spoke. On her first day as a teacher in Novgorod she was denounced by a pupil for mentioning she thought that, as an artistic form, the Romanov symbol of the double-headed eagle was more attractive than the stark hammer and sickle. Now an inmate of Davinsky Camp, every day she voiced the same fear. Shot and dumped. Anna felt sorry for her.

  ‘No, it’s obvious,’ Sofia said. ‘They’re short of labour somewhere, so they’re trucking us in to do some dirty job, I expect.’

  But no one seemed to worry about what lay ahead. There was really no point, so they all chose to enjoy this moment. There was even raucous laughter when Nina suggested they were being taken to set up a publichniy dom, a brothel in one of the men’s camps.

  ‘I used to have beautiful tits,’ Tasha grinned. ‘Great big fleshy melons you could stand a teacup on. I’d have been the star of any brothel.’ She patted her flat chest. ‘Thin as a stick I am now, just look at me. They’re nothing but scrawny pancakes but I could still give any man his money’s worth.’ She rippled her body in a parody of seduction and everyone laughed.

  ‘Are you all right, Anna?’

  It was Sofia again.

  ‘I’m fine. I’m watching the birds, a flock of them over there above the trees. See how they swoop and swirl. Don’t you wish you were a bird?’

  Sofia’s hand rested for a moment on Anna’s forehead. ‘Try to sleep,’ she said gently.

  ‘No,’ Anna smiled. ‘I’m content to watch the birds.’

  The truck’s engine growled its way across the flat marshy wasteland and jolted them over the slippery ice. Anna squinted at the flock in the distance. It occurred to her that they were moving strangely.

  ‘Are they crows?’ she asked.

  ‘Anna,’ Sofia whispered in her ear, ‘it’s smoke.’

  Anna smiled. ‘I know it’s smoke. I was teasing you.’

  Sofia laughed oddly. ‘Of course you were.’

  The work was quite bearable. For one thing it was indoors inside a long well-lit shed, so the usual north wind that greeted their arrival in a desolate and ravaged landscape was not the problem. Anna tried not to breathe too deeply but the dust and the grit in the air made her cough worse, and she had to wrap the scarf tightly round her mouth.

  ‘It looks like we’ve come to party in hell,’ she muttered as they clambered from the truck.

  ‘No talking!’ the guard shouted.

  ‘It’s a fucking gold mine,’ Tasha said under her breath and made a furtive sign of the cross in front of her.

  Ugly black craters stretched out before their eyes as though some alien monster had bitten vast chunks out of the land and stripped it of all vegetation. It was how Anna imagined the moon to be, but here, unlike on the moon, ants scurried all over the craters. Except they weren’t ants, they were men. Working at depths of thirty or forty metres, with barrows and pickaxes and shovels, and raising the rocks out of the huge craters via an intricate network of planks that looked like a spider’s web. The never-ending ear-splitting sound of hammering, and the speed with which the men raced up precipitous planks behind their over-laden barrows to fulfil their brigade’s norms, set Anna’s head spinning. It made road building look like child’s play.

  ‘In there. Davay, davay! Let’s go!’ the guard shouted, aiming the women in the direction of the wooden shed.

  The work was simple, sorting rocks. At one end of the long shed was a large metal drum that tumbled the rocks from the barrows down a chute and on to a conveyor belt. It rattled noisily the thirty-metre length to the other end. The women had to sort the rocks, either to be hammered into smaller sizes or to be crushed under a giant steam hammer that ripped through the eardrums like a blowtorch. The air was so thick with rock dust that it was impossible to see clearly across to the thin line of windows on the far wall. Anna could feel the pain in her chest worsen as she worked. Her head throbbed in time to the steam hammer.

  Somebody was laughing. She could hear them, but for some reason she couldn’t see them. The rocks on the conveyor belt started to retreat inside grey shadows that looked like ash tipped into the air, and she began to wonder if the problem was in her eyes rather than in the shed. She hesitated, then slowly raised her hand in front of her face. She saw nothing but ash.

  ‘Back to work, bistro!’ yelled a guard.

  Her lungs were shutting down, she could feel it happening, starving her brain of oxygen. She dragged at the air in a last desperate gasp but it was far too late. She felt herself fall.

  ‘She needs injections of calcium chlorate. That’s what they’d use to cure her.’

  ‘Anna, talk to me.’

  Anna could hear Sofia’s voice. It drifted softly down to her where she lay flat on her back, though for the moment she had no idea where that was.

  ‘Come on, Anna. You’re scaring me.’

  With an effort of will that left her quivering, Anna clambered up from the dark towards the voice, but instantly regretted it when the raw agony in her lungs returned. The jolting under her body told her exactly where she was: back in the truck. She thought about opening her eyes but they had lead weights on them, so she gave up. Still voices curled around her.

  ‘She’s too sick to work any more.’

  ‘Keep your voice down. If the guards hear, they’ll just dump her over the side of the truck to freeze to death.’

  ‘What she needs is proper treatment.’

  ‘And proper food.’

  A harsh laugh. ‘Don’t we all?’

  Sofia’s voice again, warm on Anna’s skin. ‘Wake up, Anna. Bistro, quickly, you lazy toad. I’m not fooled, you know. I can tell you’re . . . just pretending.’

  Anna forced her eyes open. The world jumped sharply into focus and she could smell the mouldy odour of damp earth as it emerged from its winter freeze in the forest. She was lying flat on her back, the sky black and sequinned above her, while much closer Sofia’s face swayed into v
iew.

  ‘So you’ve bothered to wake up at last. How are you feeling?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘I know you are.’ Sofia’s voice was bright and cheerful. ‘So stop pretending.’

  Anna laughed.

  ‘I’ve decided,’ Sofia announced. ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Leaving.’

  ‘Leaving where?’

  ‘Leaving Davinsky Camp. I’ve had enough of it, so I’m going to escape.’

  ‘No!’ Anna cried, then looked quickly about her and lowered her voice to a small whisper. ‘You’re insane, you mustn’t even try. Nearly everyone who tries it ends up dead. They’ll set the dogs on your trail and when they catch you they’ll put you in the isolator and we both know that’s worse than any coffin. You’ll die slowly in there.’

  ‘No I won’t, because I won’t let the bastards catch me.’

  ‘That’s what everyone says.’

  ‘But I mean it.’

  ‘So did they, and they’re dead. But if you’re so hell-bent on going, I’m coming too.’

  Anna couldn’t believe she’d said the words to Sofia. She must be out of her mind. Her presence on the escape attempt would be a death sentence for both of them, but she was in such despair over what Sofia was planning that she just wasn’t thinking straight.

  ‘I’m coming too,’ she insisted. She was leaning against a tree trunk, pretending she didn’t really need it to hold her upright.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Sofia said calmly. ‘You wouldn’t get ten miles with your lungs, never mind a thousand. Don’t look at me like that, you know it’s true.’

  ‘Everyone says that if you try to escape through the taiga, you must take someone with you, someone you can kill for food when there’s nothing but starvation left. So take me. I know I’m ill, so I won’t mind. You can eat me.’

  Sofia hit her. She swung back her arm and gave Anna a hard slap that left a mark on the cheek. ‘Don’t you ever say that to me again.’