Under a Blood Red Sky

by Kate Furnivall

  ‘Here, chew on this.’ She pushed it between her friend’s lips.

  Anna took it and chewed, until eventually she dragged a shallow breath into her lungs and then another. Slowly the rhythm returned.

  ‘I found the house in Liteiny district,’ Anna whispered, ‘the one where Maria’s brother, Sergei Myskov, and his wife, Irina, lived. It was only round the corner from the tap factory.’ She paused, resting a moment, her sunken blue eyes on Sofia’s face. ‘I remembered the iron staircase and the kolodets, a courtyard with a well at its centre. And there was a lion’s head carved above the archway. It frightened me when I was young.’

  ‘You two!’ The guard had caught sight of them. ‘Get back to work.’

  ‘Da,’ Sofia called out, ‘right away.’ She started to move, as if to do as ordered, and the guard turned away.

  ‘Anna, there’s no time now and you’re not—’

  But Anna seized Sofia’s wrist. Her grip was still strong. ‘Listen to me. It’s important. You must remember this, Sofia. It will help you.’

  Sofia lifted her hand to wipe the sweat from her friend’s gaunt face, but Anna swept it aside impatiently. The flash in her blue eyes reminded Sofia of the old Anna.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Anna hissed. ‘Just listen.’

  Sofia laid aside the axe and crouched beside her, attentive.

  ‘By the time I found the apartment building it was raining. I was wet through but I barely noticed, I was so excited at the prospect of seeing Maria again after nine years. When I knocked, the door to the apartment on the first floor was opened by a youth with wavy brown hair and ears that stuck out like a baby elephant’s. I recognised him at once.

  ‘“Sasha?” I gasped. It was Sasha, Irina’s son. He was about eleven then. “I’m a friend of your Aunt Maria.”

  ‘“Tiotya Maria doesn’t have friends.”

  ‘What did he mean? Why didn’t Maria have friends?

  ‘“Where does she live now, Sasha?”

  ‘“Here.”

  ‘“Here?” This was too easy. “May I come in and see her?”

  ‘He stepped back and called over his shoulder, “Tiotya Maria, a visitor for you.”

  ‘“Who is it, Sasha?”

  ‘It was Maria’s voice. I rushed into the room and a pale-faced woman with white hair was sitting in a chair by the window. It was a much older Maria, but still my dearest governess.

  ‘“Maria,” I breathed, “it’s me.”

  ‘A tremor ran through the silent figure, then tears started to slide down her cheeks.

  ‘“My Anna,” she sobbed, and the fingers of one hand clawed at the air to draw me to her chair.

  ‘I clasped my arms around her neck, while she touched my wet hair and murmured soft words against my cold skin.

  ‘“Why didn’t you come?” I whispered the words. “I waited for you.”

  ‘Maria placed a shaky hand over her eyes. “I couldn’t.”

  ‘“Why didn’t you write?”

  ‘“Aunt Maria had a stroke.” It was Sasha’s voice. I had forgotten he was even still in the room. “It happened when she was tortured.”

  ‘My thoughts beat panicked wings in my head. White hair? Maria could not be more than forty. Why white hair? Her eyes were still beautiful, still luminous brown, but over them hung a veil, gossamer-fine, and behind it lay a world of bafflement and confusion. And she hadn’t risen to her feet to greet me. It all made agonising sense.

  ‘“Oh Maria, my poor dearest Maria. Why didn’t you ask your brother Sergei to write to me? I’d have come . . .”

  ‘Maria’s eyebrows gathered in a lopsided frown and she murmured, “Hush.” She glanced quickly in Sasha’s direction and then back again to my face. “It’s not important.”

  ‘“Of course it’s important. I would have taken care of—”

  ‘“No, no, not you, Anna Fedorina,” Sasha interrupted roughly. “My parents would never have written to you or wanted you in this house.” He stood with his hands on his hips and his chin jutting forward. “Aunt Maria suffered the stroke when she was tortured on account of her connection with your family, with you and your father and your father’s friends. I grew up on the story of how her hair turned white overnight in the prison cells. Your father was declared a Class Enemy and—”

  ‘“Shut up!” I shouted.

  ‘“Leave us, Sasha,” Maria moaned. “Please.”

  ‘He glared at me for a long moment before marching out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Quiet settled after that. Maria dismissed my apologies for what she’d suffered, so instead I kissed her, told her I loved her and would take care of her now that I had found her again. I made us tea from the samovar in the corner of the cramped room, then I pulled up a stool and told tales of my long years in Kazan. As the daylight started to fade from the room, I risked the question that burned inside me.

  ‘“Did you ever hear what happened to Vasily?”

  ‘Maria laughed, soft and low like in the old days. “How you worshipped that boy! You used to trail round after him like a little shadow. Do you recall how you used to make him dance with you? Or maybe you’ve forgotten that.”

  ‘“No, I haven’t forgotten.”

  ‘“And he adored you.” She chuckled again. “He came looking for you, you know.”

  ‘“When? When did he come?”

  ‘“I’m not sure, I can’t . . . Think, stupid brain, think.” Maria rapped her knuckles against her own forehead. “I forget everything now.”

  ‘I stroked the skin soothingly. “It’s all right, there’s no rush. Take your time. Can you remember what he looked like?”

  ‘The crooked mouth smiled its crooked smile. “Oh yes, he was tall. Grown into a man.”

  ‘“And still as handsome?”

  ‘“Yes, still as handsome. He came twice and told me he’d changed his name for safety.”

  ‘“To what?”

  ‘Again the look of bewilderment.

  ‘“Did you tell him where I was, Maria?”

  ‘“No, my love, I’m sorry. I couldn’t remember where you were.”

  ‘“Was he . . . disappointed?”

  ‘“Oh yes. That’s why he came twice. To see if I had remembered.” Tears filled her eyes. “But I couldn’t.”

  ‘I hugged her close and whispered without hope, “Where is he living now?”

  ‘To my surprise Maria nodded. “He wrote it down.”

  ‘From a large battered canvas bag that lay at her feet she withdrew a bible, its cover well-worn to a faded black. Tucked inside its pages was a scrap of grey envelope and on it printed in black letters: Mikhail Pashin, Levitsky Factory, Dagorsk. Home: Tivil Village, near Dagorsk. But just as I was holding the piece of paper in my hand, the door to the room crashed open and uniforms marched into the small space, their leather boots and broad shoulders swallowing up the air around us. Five stern faces turned on me. Behind them, with the sternest face of all, stood eleven-year-old Sasha.

  ‘“Anna Fedorina?” The officer had a black Cossack moustache that seemed to bristle and threaten, but his eyes were calm. “You are Anna Fedorina, daughter of Doktor Nikolai Fedorin who has been declared an Enemy of the People.”

  ‘“But that was years ago.”

  ‘The officer gave me a smile that was not a smile. “We don’t forget. Or forgive.”

  ‘Strong hands seized my arms and dragged me off my feet.

  ‘“Anna!” Maria screamed, with all the power of her frail lungs, her one good hand clawing the air again. “Let me kiss her, let me kiss my Anna goodbye.”

  The soldiers hesitated, then thrust me at Maria’s chair. Maria clamped her arm fiercely round my neck and buried her face in my hair, kissing my cheek, my jaw, my ear, all the time whispering, whispering, whispering. So that when the rough hands stole me from Maria’s grasp, I was aware of nothing but those words:

  ‘“His mother’s jewels. In a box. He’s buried them in the church under St Peter’s feet. He told me. In the
village where he lives.”’

  35

  ‘Where are you going, Comrade Morozova?’

  Sofia had risen to her feet in the conference hall. She couldn’t bear it inside this hothouse of lies and paranoia a moment longer. All the promises of quotas impossible to achieve, and the incessant ranting against wreckers and saboteurs - it set off a griping pain in her stomach, as though rats were chewing in there.

  Alanya Sirova’s expression was poised halfway between curiosity and suspicion. ‘Are you leaving?’

  ‘Da. Yes, I have work to do.’

  ‘But I thought—’

  ‘While Comrade Direktor Pashin and Comrade Boriskin are away reporting to the Committee,’ Sofia tossed her pad and pen on the lap of Alanya’s navy blue suit, ‘I want you to take notes of everything that goes on here.’

  The secretary’s cheeks glowed pink with pleasure. ‘Spasibo, comrade. I won’t let you down, I promise.’

  It made Sofia want to cry.

  The streets of Leningrad had changed. As Sofia walked their pavements she began to wish she hadn’t come back. The tall pastel-painted houses with ornate window frames and wrought iron balconies, houses she had once thought so smart and elegant, had been transformed into sooty drab buildings crammed full of sooty drab people who scurried to the bread queues and the candle queues and the kerosene queues, where they waited for hours like sheep in a slaughter house. Their clothes were shabby and their chins tucked tight to their chests. Against the cool breeze that skimmed off the canals? Or against the expression in other people’s eyes? Suspicion was so strong in the air, she could smell it.

  As she hurried down Nevsky the trams rattled past her, packed with grey empty faces. The new factories pumped a thick filth into the air that settled like widows’ weeds over the buildings. When Sofia leaned eagerly over the bridge, as she had as a child to catch sight of the Fontanka, the stench that drifted up from it caught at her throat and made her eyes water. What were they dumping in there?

  She was here to search out the apartment where Anna had lived briefly with Maria and Irina, but had no exact address to go on. She walked fast along the bank of the Neva, over the little humpback Gorbatiy Mostik and then turned left across Liteiny Bridge. Once in the Liteiny district she set about combing the spider’s web of streets with their dismal tenements, but it took her an hour to find it. The tap factory. It was still there.

  What else had Anna told her?

  An iron staircase. A kolodets and a lion’s head carved above an arch. But the dark rows of crumbling tenements all seemed to have iron staircases to the upper storeys and courtyards where ragged children crawled among the woodpiles. It was only when she spotted the lion’s head above one of the arches that Anna’s voice pulsed in her ears. ‘You must remember this, Sofia. It will help you.’ She walked the street twice just to make sure no other lions were lurking nearby, and then approached the entrance. It was like all the others: no paint, with cracked and swollen woodwork. She lifted the big knocker and rapped it.

  A woman’s wrinkled face peered round the door.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m looking for Maria Myskova. I believe she may live here.’

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  The woman was wrapped in a thick woollen headscarf, despite the heat of the day, and wore a dark brown blanket draped around her shoulders. In the gloomy hallway her head appeared disembodied. Her eyebrows were drawn together above what was clearly a glass eye, but her other brown eye was bright and intensely curious.

  ‘Who are you, girl?’ she demanded, holding out a hand for identification papers.

  Sofia stood her ground without giving her name. ‘Maria used to live here with Comrade Sergei Myskov and his wife and child. On the first floor. Do you know where they are now?’

  ‘At work.’

  ‘You mean they still live here? When will they be home?’

  ‘Who wants to know?’ The woman’s eye gleamed.

  ‘Are you the dezhurnaya?’

  ‘Da. Yes, I am.’ She unwrapped the blanket enough to reveal an official red armband.

  Everyone knew that caretakers were paid informers of the State Police, keeping a watchful eye on the comings and goings of their building’s inhabitants for OGPU. The last thing Sofia wanted was to rouse those wasps from their nest.

  ‘I’ll come back later if you’ll tell me when they—’

  The crash of a piece of crockery followed by a man’s voice raised in a curse erupted from somewhere at the back of the hallway. The woman swivelled round with a squeal and scurried back into the shadows towards a door that was half open. Sofia didn’t hesitate. She stepped inside and leapt up the stairs two at a time, trying not to inhale the smell of boiled cabbage and unwashed bodies that seemed to breathe out of the fabric of the building. It brought the stink of the barrack hut at Davinsky Camp crashing into her head.

  When she reached the first-floor landing she turned to her left, where a boarded window let in a few dim streaks of light. To her surprise, packed tight against the wall of the dingy corridor, were three beds, low and narrow. One was tidily made with a folded quilt, the second was a jumble of stained sheets and the third was occupied by a bald man stinking of vomit whose skin was yellow as butter. This was Sofia’s first experience of the communalka, the shared apartments where several families were crammed into the space that had once belonged to only one.

  She squeezed past the first two and spoke in a whisper to the man in the third.

  ‘Do you need anything . . .?’

  It was a stupid question. Of course the poor wretch needed something - something like a decent bed in a decent hospital with decent food and medicines and clean air to breathe, but he didn’t reply. His eyes were closed. Maybe he was dead. She felt she should tell somebody. But who? On tiptoes, so as not to wake him, she crept to the door at the end of the landing and knocked quickly. The door opened at once. A dark-haired woman stood in front of her, shorter than herself but broad across the bust. Sofia smiled at her.

  ‘Dobriy vecher,’ she said. ‘Good evening. I am Anna Fedorina.’

  ‘She’s dead. Maria died two years ago. Another stroke.’

  The words were stark, but Irina Myskova spoke them gently.

  ‘I’m sorry, Anna, I know how much she cared for you. It’s so sad that she didn’t live to see you released.’

  ‘Tell Sasha that.’

  The woman’s face stiffened at the mention of her son. His part in Anna’s arrest seemed to sit uneasily in Irina’s heart and she ran a hand across her large bosom, stilling whatever turmoil simmered there. Her clothes were neat but old, the material of her skirt darned in several places. The apartment was the same, clean and tidy with striped homemade poloviki rugs on the floor. Everything looked old and well used. Only the white plaster bust of Lenin gleamed new, and the bright red posters declaring Forward towards the Victory of Communism and We swear, Comrade Lenin, to honour your command. Sofia ignored them and looked across at the chair by the window. It was Maria’s chair, standing empty now, clearly not used by the family any more.

  ‘Sasha was only doing his duty,’ Irina insisted loyally.

  Sofia hadn’t come here to argue. ‘Those times were hard and . . .’

  ‘But you’re looking well, Anna,’ Irina interrupted. She eyed Sofia’s new dress and her shining blonde hair thoughtfully. ‘You were pretty as a child, but now you’ve grown quite beautiful.’

  ‘Spasibo. Comrade Myskova, is there something of Maria’s I could have? To remind me of her?’

  Irina’s face relaxed. ‘Of course. Most of her possessions have gone . . . Sold,’ she added self-consciously. ‘But Sergei insisted on keeping a few things back.’ She walked over to a cupboard and drew from it a book. ‘It’s Maria’s bible.’ She offered it to Sofia. ‘Maria would have wanted you to have it, Anna.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Sofia was touched by the gift. The feel of the book under her fingers, its pages so soft and well thu
mbed, raised a sudden sense of her own childhood and her own father’s devotion to bible study. She handled it with care.

  ‘Thank you,’ she murmured again and moved towards the door.

  ‘Wait, Anna.’ Irina came over and stood close.

  ‘What is it?’ Sofia felt an odd rush of sympathy for this woman, caught between her love for her son and her love for her husband’s dead sister. Gently she said, ‘What’s done is done, Irina. We can change the future but we can’t change the past.’

  ‘Nyet. And I wouldn’t wish to. But . . . if I can help you . . . I know from Maria that you were always fond of the Dyuzheyevs’ boy.’

  ‘Vasily?’

  ‘Did Maria tell you he came here once? He’s going under a different name now.’

  ‘Yes. Mikhail Pashin. She said he came twice.’

  ‘I wasn’t here, but I believe it was only once. Maria got confused sometimes. The other time it was a different man altogether who came to see her.’

  ‘Do you know who?’

  ‘Anna, I think you should know that the man had come trying to find you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Da. It seems he was the young Bolshevik soldier, the one who shot your father and Vasily’s mother. He was searching for you.’

  Sofia’s heart seemed to hang loose in her chest. ‘Who was he?’

  ‘That’s the odd thing. He said he’d been sent to work in a village in the Urals.’

  ‘His name?’

  ‘Maria wasn’t any good at remembering, but she told Sasha the name and he remembered it.’

  ‘What was it?’ She held her breath, and a sense of foreboding chilled her, despite the heat in the apartment.

  ‘Fomenko. Aleksei Fomenko.’

  Mikhail didn’t sleep. The journey home was hard with no overnight stops. They slept sitting upright in their seats as the train ploughed its way through the darkness, its lonely whistle startling the wolves as they prowled the forests. Rain fell spasmodically, pattering against the black windows like unseen fingers asking to be let in.