Under a Blood Red Sky

by Kate Furnivall

She spoke quietly to avoid the envious ears around her, holding out a small slice of black bread wrapped in greasepaper that Zenia had pushed into her hand before she’d left the house early this morning. Pyotr shook his head. His fists were sunk deep in his pockets and his shoulders were hunched over, so that he looked like a wounded animal. She touched his arm but he flinched away.

  ‘Not long now,’ she said.

  ‘That’s what you said two hours ago.’

  ‘Well, this time it must be true.’

  He looked at the twenty or more people ahead of them and at those behind them in a queue that snaked out the door, then shrugged his young shoulders. She wanted to rub his bony back, to brush his hair off his face, to raise his head and coax some energy back into him. From the moment the troops drove off with Mikhail in the black prison van, the boy had lost his hold on who he was. He had turned grey, empty, colourless. Sofia had seen too many like that in the camps, seen the grey slowly darken and turn black and the black turn to death. Or worse than death, to nothingness.

  She seized his shoulder and shook him till she saw a flash of annoyance in response.

  ‘Better,’ she snapped. ‘Your father is in prison. He’s not dead and he’s not in a labour camp. Not yet. So don’t you dare give up on him, do you hear me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘Yes, I hear you.’

  ‘Better. Very soon now we’ll find out exactly what he’s accused of.’ She glanced over at the hatch with impatience. ‘If ever that snail-faced bastard decides to speed things up.’

  An old woman was standing in front of the uniformed official, tears running down her cheeks, trying to thrust a brown paper package through the hatch. ‘Give him this,’ she was sobbing, ‘give my boy—’

  ‘No parcels,’ the bored official rapped out and slammed down the shutter.

  Pyotr looked frightened. Sofia touched his arm and this time he didn’t pull away.

  ‘Your father is a valuable worker for the State, Pyotr. They won’t waste his knowledge and expertise by—’

  ‘He’s not my father,’ Pyotr shouted at her, his cheeks suddenly bright red with shame. ‘He’s a thief. He deserves to be locked up.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘I’m enquiring about Mikhail Antonovich Pashin. He was taken from Tivil last night but—’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m here with his son, Pyotr Pashin.’

  ‘Papers?’

  ‘These are Pyotr’s.’

  ‘And yours?’

  ‘I’m just a friend. I’m helping Pyotr to find out what—’

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘Sofia Morozova.’

  ‘Papers?’

  Sofia hesitated. ‘Here. It’s my resident’s permit at the Red Arrow kolkhoz in Tivil, though I don’t see why I—’

  ‘Wait.’

  The shutter slammed shut.

  ‘Sofia.’

  ‘No need to whisper, Pyotr. It’s all right, we’re outdoors now. No one can overhear.’

  ‘I know what happens when a person is arrested.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes. It happened to Yuri’s uncle. The person is interrogated, sometimes for months, and if he’s innocent he’s freed, so . . . Why are you laughing?’

  ‘No reason. Go on.’

  ‘So do you think Papa will be freed?’

  ‘The bastards wouldn’t tell us anything today, where he is or what he’s charged with. But I insisted he’s innocent.’

  ‘So he’ll be freed?’

  Sofia’s heart went out to the boy. She swung him to face her, her hands pinning the slender bones of his shoulders.

  ‘He’ll be set free,’ she told him fiercely. ‘Your father is a good man. Don’t ever believe he’s not, and don’t ever disown him again in my hearing.’

  His cheeks coloured scarlet but his brown eyes didn’t drop away. ‘He’s not my father.’

  ‘Pyotr, don’t you dare say such a thing.’

  Still the brown eyes stared miserably into hers, but his voice lowered to a whisper. ‘He’s not. Ask Rafik. My father was the miller in Tivil. Six years ago my mother ran off with a soldier to Moscow and my father burned down the mill with himself inside it.’

  ‘Oh, Pyotr.’

  ‘I had no one, no family. My father was labelled a kulak even though he was dead, so no villager would help me. The authorities were going to send me to an institution.’ He stopped and dragged a hand across his eyes. ‘But Mikhail Pashin adopted me. He was new to the village and he didn’t even know me, but he took me in.’

  Sofia drew Pyotr to her and gently stroked his hair.

  ‘He’ll be set free,’ she whispered. ‘I promise.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘I am Mikhail Antonovich Pashin.’

  ‘Occupation?’

  ‘Inzhenir. Engineer First Class. And direktor fabriki. Factory manager.’

  ‘Which factory?’

  ‘The Levitsky factory in Dagorsk. We make clothes and military uniforms. It is a loyal factory with dedicated workers. This month we exceeded our quota of—’

  ‘Silence.’

  The peremptory order made the small interrogation room shrink further. There were no windows, just a bright naked light bulb dangling from the ceiling. A metal table stood in the centre, grey and scarred, two chairs behind it, another one alone and bolted to the floor in front of it. Mikhail stood very erect, focused on what he intended to say, and forced himself to swallow his anger. He felt it burn his throat as it sank to his stomach.

  ‘Sit.’

  He sat.

  ‘Place of birth?’

  ‘Leningrad.’

  ‘Father’s name?’

  ‘Anton Ivanovich Pashin.’

  ‘Father’s occupation?’

  ‘Wheelwright. He was a man loyal to the Revolution and he died for it when—’

  ‘Why did you leave the Tupolev aircraft factory?’

  ‘I’m damned sure you know why I had to leave. It’ll be written down in that fat file in front of you. So why bother to ask me?’

  For the first time the man behind the desk showed a flicker of interest. He was tall and elegant, in a uniform that was well cut and bore a row of medals.

  ‘Answer my question.’ His eyes were slightly slanting and he had small neat features that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a woman.

  ‘I left because I was forced to.’

  ‘And why was that?’

  Keep it calm. Wrap the anger in a tight shell of control. Play it their way.

  ‘Because I made an error. I criticised the system of delivery. I was so eager to build the ANT-4 aeroplane for our Great Leader that I allowed my disappointment at the delay in the arrival of some essential items of equipment to cloud my judgement.’

  ‘You admit you were wrong.’

  ‘I admit it freely. I didn’t consider the magnitude of what our Leader had undertaken. I know now that the railways had to be expanded first before they could deal with the loads they had to carry.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I was young and foolish.’

  The slanting eyes watched him for a long while, then, with a sudden push of his chair, its legs squealing over the tiled floor, the interrogator rose and started to pace back and forth across the narrow space behind his desk.

  ‘Don’t lie to me, you filthy wrecker.’

  ‘I am no wrecker.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me. You tried to wreck the Tupolev factory and now you are wrecking the Levitsky factory. Working against the forces of progress outlined for us all in the First Piatiletka. It is people like you who cause the shortage of goods.’

  ‘No, I told you we exceeded our targets.’

  ‘Who is paying you?’

  That came as a shock. ‘Nobody.’

  ‘You were seen with a German diplomat in Moscow.’

  ‘That’s a lie.’

  ‘I am the one who decides what is a lie and what is not!’ the examiner shouted across th
e desk. Spittle gathered in the corner of his mouth.

  ‘This is a mistake.’

  ‘Are you saying that the Soviet Intelligence System is wrong?’

  ‘Only that this is—’

  ‘You were seen to wreck the Tivil Red Arrow kolkhoz Grain Procurement system.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. There are witnesses.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Silence, scum. Who is paying you? Foreign powers are frightened of our great success. It is well known that they employ subversives to destroy our industry, subversives like you who commit treason and deserve to be shot.’

  Mikhail’s blood was pounding. This was worse than he expected.

  ‘Confess the truth, you piece of dog shit.’

  ‘I am innocent of these charges, I swear it. I am a Communist, loyal to Russia.’

  The interrogator stopped pacing as abruptly as he’d started. With exaggerated steps he returned to the desk and lowered himself on to the seat once more. His enraged expression melted away. He looked at Mikhail with disappointment in the line of the mouth, disapproval in the narrowing of the eyes.

  ‘Examiner, you are wrong. I swear to you I had nothing to do with the grain in Tivil.’

  The interrogator sighed and shook his head with studied regret. ‘Let’s start again.’

  ‘I’ve told you everything.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘You know my name.’

  ‘Name?’ A hand slammed on the desk. ‘Name?’

  38

  Davinsky Camp July 1933

  ‘It’s a railway.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re saying we have to build the railway.’

  ‘Oh, fuck.’

  Anna looked round the group of women lined up with her outside the medical hut. They’d already been waiting in the yard for an hour, stripped to their ragged underwear. An emaciated bunch with ribs popping out like elbows and knees wider than their thighs. Most had sores of some kind or other. A railway? How could this army of skeletons construct a railway?

  ‘Why on earth would they want a railway up here anyway?’ Anna asked. ‘There’s nothing but trees.’

  ‘Trees and mosquitoes,’ one woman groaned and swatted an insect on her arm.

  Each year, as soon as the surface snow melted in the forest, the area became a quagmire of marshy ground, covered by a constant layer of stagnant water where the huge mosquitoes loved to breed in their millions. They were the curse of the summer. Infected bites caused more deaths than anything else at this time of year.

  ‘Gold,’ Nina said and went back to picking a thorn out of her thumb.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There’s gold up here.’

  ‘Christ,’ a freckled girl from Leningrad exclaimed, ‘just tell me where.’

  ‘I heard they’re opening another mine and transporting more male prisoners up here to work it.’

  The men’s labour camp was only four versts away and was twice the size of the women’s. They were the ones who felled the pines in the first place and hauled them down to the river when the women had finished trimming them. Throughout the summer great rafts of trunks floated downstream to the timber yards and one of the most feared jobs was riding on them.

  ‘Rail work is savage,’ Nina groaned.

  ‘That’s why they’re putting us through this charade of a medical. ’

  ‘What do they do?’ the freckled girl asked.

  ‘They just stand around gawping,’ Tasha sneered, ‘while a man in a white coat tells you to strip naked so he can pinch your buttocks to test your muscle tone. Then he listens to your lungs.’

  ‘And the swines prod you,’ Nina added, ‘in places they don’t need to prod you.’

  Anna frowned at her. ‘Don’t scare her, Nina.’

  The older woman shrugged. ‘That’s nothing. Something to be scared of is what I heard the bastard shitheads did to one of the men who broke an ankle out in the forest the other day when a tree crashed on it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The guards knew he was no use to them any more so they tied him naked to a tree and took bets on how long it would take him to die from mosquito bites.’ She leaned forward and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Apparently they settled in black swarms on his balls and—’

  ‘Shut up, Nina,’ Anna snapped.

  ‘Oh come on, I want to hear—’

  ‘Scum!’ A guard in the hut doorway waved a rifle in their direction. ‘Get in here. Bistro!’

  At once they trooped silently into the hut, where a row of tables was set up. Behind each sat one of the favoured prisoners who worked for the administration and had achieved a status within the camp that brought them the first rung of power. They ate more and laboured less.

  One had a bored expression on her face and was crossing prisoners’ numbers off a list as they stood in front of the table. Beside her sat a cheerful-looking man wearing metal-rimmed spectacles and a white coat. A stethoscope hung from his neck.

  Behind them both stood a guard. Anna knew him at once and gave him a long sullen look. For a moment he rested his tongue between his teeth, then treated her to a slow interested smile.

  ‘Strip,’ he ordered.

  Anna hated that guard more than any other. Each time their paths crossed, just the sight of his smug face and his thick greedy fingers made her feel as though she were part of some lesser species that he could stamp on whenever the mood took him. It made no difference whether she was clothed or not. His gaze on her flesh was sticky as slug slime slithering down her skin, and at times she had even scooped up handfuls of dirt from the ground and rubbed it over her arms and legs, rubbed it hard to rid herself of its residue. When she came out of the medical hut she did it again, grabbed the dirt and scrubbed. It gave her a strange level of relief, but it also made her smile because she knew, if Sofia were here, that her friend would have raised a sceptical eyebrow and given that low laugh of hers.

  ‘It’s what’s inside that counts,’ she’d have said, flicking the grit from Anna’s skin. ‘The outside - well, that’s just onion peel.’

  It was with Sofia in the early spring before her escape that this particular guard had hammered into Anna’s mind the level of degradation they had reached. It was a time when the long winter nights were growing shorter, and the dull skies that for many bleak months had sagged low enough to touch the tips of the pine trees abruptly lifted. The sun was climbing higher each day and the air had begun to sparkle with a clarity that dazzled the eyes. Lungs stopped hurting, skin started to heal. Muscles became warmer, worked faster.

  ‘Smoke break! Perekur! ’

  ‘Axe sharpening!’ Sofia shouted across the rows of felled trunks to the nearest guard. ‘For two.’

  ‘Bistro! ’ he grumbled. ‘Quickly!’

  Sofia beckoned to Anna and led the way to the ditch on the edge of the forest, dug out as a latrine for the hundreds of workers. Behind it lay a boulder that was still half buried in snow. Sofia slid easily down the other side of it into a steep-sided hollow, at the bottom of which flowed a steady stream of melt water. Immediately she crouched at the water’s edge, honing her axe blade with smooth strokes on one of the wet stones. She turned her head, not breaking the action, and smiled at Anna. It always astonished Anna, that smile, because it still contained so much hope. How had she kept it all in there, hidden behind her cool blue eyes? Was there a secret store of it inside her thin chest?

  ‘A guard is coming,’ Anna warned.

  Sofia shrugged, her hands still scything the blade expertly across the stone.

  ‘He likes to kill, this one,’ Anna said.

  Only yesterday this same guard had clubbed to death a woman from the Tver region for no more than stumbling and sending the top branch from the pile in her arms crashing down on his foot. Sofia looked up towards the forest and made a little grimace as she saw that the guard had arrived on the boulder above them.

  ‘What the fuck do you scum think you’re
doing?’ His rifle was pointed at Anna’s head. ‘I didn’t give you bitches permission to stop to sharpen axes.’

  ‘It’s our smoke break,’ Anna pointed out. ‘We’re not wasting work time, and anyway we did ask permission.’

  ‘We want to work more efficiently for our Great Leader and Wise Teacher,’ Sofia said coldly. ‘We don’t intend to hold back our brigade from meeting their norm.’

  The guard’s eyes narrowed and he pushed back his shapka hat with the tip of his rifle. Neither prisoner moved a muscle and finally he nodded.

  ‘Go ahead. Bistro!’

  Anna knelt down beside Sofia and started to hone her blade, but she was nowhere near as expert as Sofia. The axe was a sad and pathetic object with its chipped blade and its head bound in place by string and a scrap of wire, but the haft was strong and well shaped to the curve of a hand. Sofia took it from Anna with the flicker of a smile and again resumed the steady rhythmic sharpening of the steel on the flat wet rock, first one side, then the other. She made it look easy.

  ‘Your fingers have the skills of a swordsmith,’ Anna murmured. They were long and muscular except for the two that were scarred.

  ‘After my father was whipped to death,’ Sofia whispered under her breath, ‘I worked on my uncle’s farm for years. But anyway, I was the last in a line of seven daughters, so my father taught me the skills of the son he never had.’

  ‘No talking!’ the guard yelled and suddenly leapt down on to the stretch of shingle below, so that he was only half a dozen strides from them.

  Anna saw him glance furtively back over his shoulder to ensure no one had followed and immediately she knew he intended trouble. She stood quickly and faced him. He hadn’t shaved this morning and his heavy jaw was dark and threatening, his eyes hungry. His nose was crooked as though it had been broken at some time, and Anna experienced a strong urge to break it again - with her axe. Lazily he swung the point of the rifle till it was aimed at Sofia’s unprotected back. Sofia must have sensed the threat but she didn’t move. Just her hands, snick-snick-snick as they sharpened. The guard licked his soft lips.

  ‘I don’t like you,’ he snarled at Sofia.

  ‘I don’t like you either,’ she answered softly, without turning round. She might have been talking to the axe blade.