Under a Blood Red Sky

by Kate Furnivall

  ‘So be it,’ intoned the others. The candle flames flared higher.

  Sofia rose to her feet. She begged no more. Instead she moved to the door and Mikhail loved her for the proud way she walked.

  ‘Rafik,’ he said fiercely. ‘She needs help.’

  The deep lines on Rafik’s face were etched white. He shook his head.

  Mikhail strode to the bed and seized the stone. ‘Give her this.’

  ‘Put it back,’ Pokrovsky growled and took a threatening step towards Mikhail.

  Rafik held up a hand. ‘Peace,’ he murmured. For a long moment the gypsy scrutinised the stone in Mikhail’s hand, then slowly he nodded. ‘Give it to her, Mikhail.’

  Sofia’s eyes grew wide. He took her hand and placed the white stone cautiously on her palm, as if it might burn her, but the moment it touched her skin something in Sofia’s eyes changed. Mikhail saw it happen. Something of the wildness vanished and in its place settled a calm determination.

  Please God, Mikhail prayed to the deity he didn’t believe in, don’t let her be harmed by it.

  Pyotr was halfway through scraping burned clinker off a big flat shovel when he saw his father in the street. Pokrovsky had left him at the smithy with instructions to clean all the tools.

  ‘Papa!’ he called out.

  A line of blue shadows was sliding down from the forest, slowly swallowing the village, so for a moment Pyotr missed the slight figure pacing beside his father, but the last rays of sun painted her hair almost red as she turned her face towards the forge. She waited in the middle of the road, still and silent in the dust, while his father came over. Somewhere a woman’s voice was raised in scolding a child. A dog barked. The wind stilled. An odd feeling crept over Pyotr, a sense of stepping over a line.

  ‘Papa,’ he said, throwing down the spade. ‘I’ve been thinking.’

  His father smiled but it wasn’t a happy smile. ‘About what?’

  ‘About Chairman Fomenko.’

  The smile vanished. ‘Don’t concern yourself, Pyotr. Finish up here and come home.’

  ‘I’ve worked it out, Papa. Chairman Fomenko would never steal from the kolkhoz, you know he wouldn’t. He’s innocent. Someone else must have put those sacks under his bed, someone vicious who wanted to—’

  ‘Leave it, Pyotr. The interrogators will have thought of that, I assure you. So forget it.’

  Just then Sofia hurried over to them, her skirt tangling round her legs in her haste, her hair bobbing loose. ‘Pyotr,’ she called out, ‘you and I have work to do.’

  She put her hand in her pocket and drew out the iron key.

  All three of them searched the hall, but there was something wrong. Pyotr could feel it. He scuttled around between the benches, scraping at the floorboards with one of Pokrovsky’s knives, seeking another piece of string that would lead to a new hiding place. But all the time he was aware of the odd silences. They filled the hall, banging into the roof timbers and rattling the windows.

  ‘Have you searched in that corner, Papa?’

  ‘Sofia, look at this. The plank looks uneven here.’

  ‘What about that brick patched with cement?’

  He kept up the chatter, filling the gaps, not letting the silences settle. Why didn’t they speak to each other? What had happened? But his words weren’t enough and the gaps were growing longer. As soon as they’d entered the hall and Sofia locked the door behind them, he noticed the way she and Papa wouldn’t look at each other. Had they quarrelled? He didn’t want them to quarrel because that might mean Sofia would leave.

  ‘What are we searching for?’ Papa had asked.

  ‘A box of jewellery.’

  ‘Whose jewels?’

  Pyotr shrugged and looked across at Sofia. She was examining a wall with her back to them, standing in a patch of soft lilac light that filtered through the window.

  ‘Whose jewels?’ Pyotr echoed.

  ‘Svetlana Dyuzheyeva’s,’ she answered, without turning.

  Papa stiffened.

  ‘We’re not stealing,’ Pyotr said quickly.

  ‘If they belong to someone else, then it’s stealing.’

  ‘No, Papa, not if we use them to do good.’ Pyotr could feel his cheeks burning and he knew that what he’d said wasn’t quite right. ‘We searched before. Sofia tried to find them to use them to rescue you when—’

  ‘Did she indeed?’

  ‘And now we have to find them to use them for Chairman Fomenko. That’s right, isn’t it?’ He aimed the question at Sofia’s back.

  ‘Yes.’

  That’s when the pool of silence started to flow under the door into the hall and Pyotr had to keep throwing words into it to stop it drowning them. They explored even the faintest nook or hint of a crevice, trailing fingers around bricks and behind beams. His father searched in a brisk methodical manner at one end of the hall, Sofia at the other, but her shoulders were hunched, her skin almost blue in the strangely discoloured light. Pyotr kept talking.

  ‘I think this looks a good place. The plaster is loose.’

  ‘Papa, that board creaked when you stood on it, try it again. Look at this, Sofia, it . . .’

  A fist banged outside on the oak door. Pyotr’s tongue tingled with fear. Soldiers? He swallowed hard and knew in his heart that what they were doing in the hall was wrong.

  ‘Pyotr,’ his father whispered urgently. ‘Come here.’

  Pyotr scampered over a bench and was seized by his father’s strong hands. Immediately he felt better. Sofia appeared at Papa’s side, though Pyotr hadn’t heard or seen her move. And for the first time the two of them looked at each other, really looked, speaking only with their eyes in a language Pyotr couldn’t understand. Sofia pointed to Pyotr and then to a spot by the entrance. Mikhail nodded, whisked Pyotr over there and pressed him against the wall behind the heavy door, its rough surface cold on his bare arms. The knock came again, rattling the iron hinges. Pyotr watched in astonishment as his father took Sofia’s face between his hands and kissed her lips. For half a second she swayed against him and Pyotr heard her murmur something, then just as suddenly they were apart again and Sofia was reaching for the key.

  ‘Who is it?’ his father demanded in the big voice he used for his factory workers.

  It was Priest Logvinov. He’d come straight from the stables and stank of horse oil and leather. Pyotr had his eye to a knothole in the door as it stood open.

  ‘What is it you want, Priest?’ Mikhail asked curtly.

  Pyotr saw the priest clutch the large wooden cross at his throat. His gaunt cheeks were grey. ‘Mikhail, my friend, I’m looking for the girl.’

  ‘Which girl?’

  Sofia stepped into view. ‘This girl?’

  The priest nodded, his expression uneasy. ‘You asked me before about a statue of St Peter.’

  ‘I did.’

  Pyotr heard the rise of hope in her voice.

  ‘I’ve come here because . . .’ Logvinov paused, looked wistfully out into the street, ‘because . . .’ He sighed deeply. ‘Dear Lord of Heaven, I don’t know why I’ve come. Just that I felt . . . drawn here.’

  Pyotr noticed the pebble then. He couldn’t see Sofia’s face on the other side of the door but he could see her hand at her side and in it she held a smooth white stone.

  She spoke softly. ‘Tell me, Priest, what have you come to say?’

  ‘I told you of the statue of St Peter inside the church.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But there used to be another.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Outside, at the back of the church. It was a magnificent marble statue that the Komsomol devils smashed to pieces and used as hard core under the kolkhoz office building.’ He pointed a finger out into the gloom that had enveloped the village. ‘Round the rear of the church beside the buttress, you’ll see the old plinth where it used to stand, covered in moss now.’

  ‘Thank you, Priest.’

  ‘Go now,’ Pyotr heard his father say ki
ndly, ‘before you become too involved.’

  Logvinov hesitated, then carved the sign of the cross in the air and left.

  Pyotr squirmed round the door and raced down the path that led round the building, the damp evening air cool in his lungs. The plinth was there, just where the priest said.

  ‘You dig,’ Sofia urged.

  Pyotr scrabbled like a dog in the dry crumbling earth, using his hands and Papa’s knife to make a hole a metre deep. His breath came fast with excitement.

  ‘I feel it,’ he cried when the blade touched something solid.

  It was a box made of rough pine and wrapped up in sacking. Inside it, enveloped in a sheet of leather that had gone stiff with age, lay a small enamelled casket. It was the most beautiful object Pyotr had ever set eyes on, its surface inlaid with ivory peacocks and green dragons that Papa said were made of malachite. He lifted it carefully and placed it in Sofia’s hands.

  ‘Spasibo, Pyotr.’

  She slid open the gold catch and lifted the lid. Pyotr gasped as he caught sight of colours he’d never seen before, molten glowing stones.

  ‘Sofia,’ he whispered, ‘these could buy you the world.’

  51

  Sofia stood in Deputy Stirkhov’s office. The pearls hung from her hand like a string of snowflakes, each unique in itself, yet perfectly matched to its fellows.

  ‘Comrade Deputy, I think these might help you decide.’

  She dangled the triple strand of pearls over his desk and set them swaying slightly, wafting the sweet smell of money in the direction of his wide nostrils. Behind his spectacles his eyes had grown as round as the pearls themselves and his lips had parted, as if preparing to swallow them. He held out a hand.

  ‘Let me see them. They may be fake.’

  Sofia laughed. ‘Do they look fake?’

  The creamy translucence of the pearls lit up the office.

  ‘I want to check them over.’

  He tried to take the necklace from her but she stepped back and lifted them out of his reach. He was seated behind his desk and half rose from his chair, but one look at her face made him change his mind. In front of him on a soft square of white cotton lay a brooch. It was made of silver gilt in the shape of a long-legged Borzoi hound and in its mouth it carried a dead pheasant that was studded with emeralds. Stirkhov’s eyes slid from the pearls to the brooch and back again. Sofia could see his greed grow the more it fed on them.

  ‘Half now,’ she said, ‘and half when the job is done.’

  Stirkhov puckered his smooth forehead, not understanding.

  ‘I’ll make it easy for you,’ she smiled, drawing a small pair of sewing scissors from her pocket.

  Comprehension dawned.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said and snipped through the strands. Pearls cascaded on to the desk, bouncing and skidding off its glossy black surface like hailstones. Stirkhov scrambled to collect them.

  ‘You stupid bitch.’

  ‘Half now,’ she repeated, ‘and half when the job is done.’

  She walked to the door, a section of the necklace still in her hand.

  ‘I could have you arrested,’ he snarled.

  ‘But then you’d lose these, wouldn’t you?’ she smiled coolly.

  She slipped the pearls into her pocket and was out of the building before he could change his mind.

  ‘Patience.’

  She was inside Aleksei Fomenko’s house. The izba that was so bare inside, it scarcely looked lived in. She saw no reason not to be here, as she’d invaded his privacy once already - more than invaded it when she’d stuffed sacks under his bed. She’d violated it. So it was easy to break the trust of an unlocked door a second time and walk into the Chairman’s house.

  ‘He’ll come,’ she told herself and curled her fingers round the stone in her pocket. It lay there, cold and stubborn. She was staring out of the back window over the neat rows of beetroot and swede and turnips in his plot of land, all regimented and weed-free. Like his house.

  Vasily, oh Vasily. How could I have got it so wrong? You gave me no sign, no warning. How could I love someone who doesn’t exist?

  Something hurt in her chest, a real physical pain. It felt as though her heart were spilling hot blood into her chest cavity with each beat of its muscle.

  Vasily, how did you become Fomenko? What happened to you?

  She touched the board where he cut his bread, the skillet in which he fried his food, the towel where he dried his hands, searching for him. She walked into his bedroom, but it was like entering a dead person’s room. A bed, a stool, hooks on the wall for his clothes. She brushed her fingers over the three check workshirts that hung there and they felt soft and worn. She scooped a handful of cloth up to her face, inhaled the scent of it. It smelled clean and fresh, of pine needles. No scent of him, of Aleksei Fomenko. He hid even that.

  On a shelf stood a mirror and a dark wooden hairbrush. She picked up the brush and ran it through her own hair as she gazed into the glass, speckled with black age spots. No sign of him there, only her own reflection - and that was the face of a stranger. She went over to his plain pinewood bed. It was covered by a patchwork quilt over coarse white sheets, but when she lifted the top one there was no imprint of his body underneath. She touched his pillow and it felt soft. That surprised her. She had expected it to be hard and unyielding like his ideas. She bent over and placed her cheek on it, sank into its feathers and closed her eyes. What dreams came to him at night, what thoughts? Did he ever dream of Anna? Her hand slid under the pillow, feeling for any secret talisman but found nothing. When she stood upright she felt a dull kind of anger rise to her throat.

  ‘You’ve killed him!’ she shouted into the dead air of this dead house. ‘You’ve killed Vasily!’

  She picked up the pillow and shook it violently. ‘You had no right,’ she moaned, ‘no right to kill him. He was Anna’s. I know I borrowed him, but he was always Anna’s and now you’ve killed her as surely as you killed him.’

  She hurled the pillow across the room. It hit the log wall and slid to the floor, but as it did so something tumbled out of the white pillowcase. Something small and metal rattled into a corner as though trying to hide. Sofia leapt on it. She picked it up, placed it on the palm of her hand and studied her find. It was a pill box fashioned out of pewter, small and round and grey. A dent on one side. It reminded her of the pebble in her pocket. She opened it and inside lay a lock of blonde hair, bright as sunshine.

  She waited, her skin prickling with impatience. She watched the sun march slowly across the room from one side to the other. At some point she drank a glass of water. And all the time she brooded about Mikhail Pashin and about who he really was. About what he’d done. About what she, Sofia, had sworn to do to him.

  She peeled back each layer of pain, like stripping bark, and looked at what lay underneath. It was a mass of confusion and error.

  Oh, my Mikhail, you made yourself suffer for what you did. You scourged yourself like the penitents of the Church, but found no divine forgiveness at the end of it. Instead you constructed a life for yourself that tried to atone and you did it with as much care as you built your bridge. I don’t want to smash my fist on it and bring it crashing down now. But . . . you killed Anna’s father.

  Again and again darkness descended on Sofia as she sat there alone. What kind of mind? What kind of person? What kind of boy shoots human beings in cold blood? She took out the pebble and placed it on her lap but it lay lifeless, a dull white. Yet as she stroked its cold surface, she felt herself change. A vibration rippled through her body and she almost heard the stone hum, high-pitched and faint inside her head. Its colour seemed to gain a sheen, just like a pearl.

  Was she imagining this? Was Rafik imagining it all? The seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. Was it true? And if it was, did it mean anything at all? Vasily was gone. That knowledge, that the Vasily she had loved in the camp no longer existed, had torn an important part of her away. It left a
terrible hollowness inside, like hunger. But worse than mere hunger, it was starvation at some deep level. It gnawed at her with sharp rodent teeth. Now Vasily was gone and she was mourning the loss of him. She moaned and rocked herself in Vasily’s chair.

  Finally she sat up and wrapped her fingers tight round the stone.

  ‘Anna,’ she said firmly, ‘wait for me. I’m coming.’

  52

  ‘What are you doing in my house?’

  Sofia felt a wave of sorrow for the tall, arrogant man whom she had wronged. He stood in the doorway with no marks on him, none that showed anyway, but something about him looked bruised, something in his dark grey eyes.

  She remained seated. ‘Comrade Fomenko, I am here to tell you something important.’

  ‘Not now.’

  He walked over to the enamel jug of water on the table and drank from the glass beside it, greedily, as if to flush away something inside himself. For a long moment he closed his eyes, his lashes dark on his cheek, and she knew she was intruding unforgivably.

  He turned to her, his voice cold. ‘Please leave.’

  ‘I’ve been here all day, waiting for you.’

  ‘Why on earth did you assume I would return from prison today?’

  ‘Because of these.’

  She held up the remains of the pearl necklace. They shimmered in the last of the evening light that streamed through the window. His mouth seemed to spasm. He drew in a breath, then fixed his gaze on her face.

  ‘Who are you? You come to this village and I try to help you because . . . you remind me so much of someone I once knew, but you look at me with such anger in your eyes and now invade my house when all I want is to be alone. Who are you? What are you doing here?’

  ‘I am a friend.’

  ‘You are no friend to me.’ He put down the glass, leaned against the edge of the table and shook his head, his arms folded across his broad chest. ‘So why the pearls?’