Under a Blood Red Sky

11

Sofia’s eyes opened into darkness. Her brain stalled and almost slid back into the soft safe blankets of sleep but she caught it just in time.

Where were the candles? What happened to the girl?

She sat up. Mistake. The room splintered and lights flashed inside her eyes. She waited until the pieces slotted back together. She was on a bed, fully clothed, her fingertips told her that much. So far, so clear. She took a deep breath.

What else?

She was frightened. A tight ball of barbed wire was knotted in her chest but that was nothing new.

What else?

Her head hurt.

What else?

The darkness. It was changing, breaking down as her eyes grew accustomed to it, into different shades of black and grey. She swung her feet to the floor, aware for the first time that she was not wearing shoes, and stood up. Not good, but not as bad as she expected. She took another breath and headed for the grey. It was a door. Her hands explored strong planks of wood pitted with knots and saw-marks, held shut by a wooden latch on a string. Around the edge of it crept a whisper of daylight. Sofia put her ear to it and listened. No sounds. Just more silence and the thump of her own heartbeat battering her eardrums.

She lifted the latch. It opened on to a low-beamed living room with rough split-timber walls, unpainted, a carved chest in one corner and in the centre a home-built table with two upright chairs. At one end stood the pechka, a large stove, and, more surprisingly, a big maroon armchair turned to face the stove. The rough floor was covered with woven rushes and the air smelled heavily of herbs, which was hardly surprising as bunches of all kinds of dried leaves were pinned around the walls in a fragrant frieze.

More to the point, the room was empty. No girl and no brown spoon. Over to her left was a window that revealed a dusty patch of road outside and next to the window was the door. She ran for it and breathed a sigh of relief as her fingers easily lifted the metal latch and she stepped over the threshold.

‘You’ll need shoes.’

She stopped dead. The voice had come from behind her, a man’s voice. Dimly, like a muted echo from a dream, she recalled hearing the same voice before, murmuring to her with strange unfathomable words while she was unconscious. Slowly she turned. At first, after the scorching brightness of outside, she could make out nothing different in the room, but then a movement drew her attention to the faded maroon chair. There was a face, an upward curve of a gentle mouth, a shock of dense black hair swept straight back and an even blacker pair of eyes in a narrow face. He was watching her.

How had she not noticed him?

‘Don’t you want shoes?’

He spoke quietly. He was leaning round the edge of the armchair, most of him still hidden from view by the upright back of it, though his legs in scuffed brown leather trousers stuck out clearly and his bright yellow sleeve lay along the armrest.

‘Don’t you want shoes?’ he asked again.

She had forgotten her feet were bare. She glanced over her shoulder at the sunlit slope, a tumble of honey-coloured rocks that led up to the forest edge where secrecy and safety beckoned. Run, she told herself, just run. She’d come too far and worked too hard to risk losing her precious freedom now. She had to choose.

‘Yes, I want my shoes.’ Her tongue was dry in her mouth.

‘I’ll fetch them for you.’

He stood and moved away from the chair. He was shorter than she’d realised, not even as tall as herself, and older than his eyes and his hair indicated. Probably fifty, with the kind of skin that was swarthy and lined from years of living outdoors in the eye of the wind, like the traders who travelled up from Kazakhstan with their mountain horses. There was little flesh on his spare frame but his arms looked muscular.

‘Please hurry,’ she urged.

He smiled, the gentle mouth curving more, and he walked over to the oak chest by the wall.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I have no weapon hidden here.’

He lifted the lid and extracted a pair of shoes. Slowly, so as not to startle her, he came forward and placed them on the table, then he backed off and stood next to the stove. He was tempting her back in, like you tempt a horse into a stall with an apple. She made her choice and walked back into the izba.

In some subtle way that she couldn’t quite explain, the feel of the room had changed. The smell of herbs was no longer suffocating but refreshing, and the place seemed to possess a kind of enticing peace. Sofia gave her head a sharp shake to clear it and cursed her confusion. Was it the result of the bang on the head or the residue of all that brown liquid still swilling through her veins? She looked at the shoes.

‘Those aren’t mine,’ she said.

‘Yours are worn through. Holes in both soles and tied together with string. I thought you might prefer these.’

He spoke about them as if they were a pack of cheap makhorka tobacco instead of possessions that some would kill for. Well-softened pigskin stitched on to double thickness rubber soles. New shoes. Who on earth could find new shoes these days? And then give them away? But she wasn’t going to argue with him. Instead she strode over to the centre of the room, snatched up the shoes and slipped them on her feet. They fitted perfectly.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

He gave her a warm smile. ‘Enjoy them.’

‘I will.’

‘May they keep you safe.’

‘What?’

‘It seems to me you need help, that’s all.’ His voice was mild.

Sofia blinked, wary of this gentle-mannered little man and nervous of the uncertainty that had settled in her mind. She couldn’t afford uncertainty.

‘How long have I been here?’

‘Two days.’

‘Two days? It feels more like two weeks.’

‘No. It’s only two days.’

‘I was attacked.’

‘Yes, that’s right. My daughter found you stealing our vegetables. ’ It wasn’t an accusation, just a comment on how things were. ‘And you’d stolen an axe, too.’

‘You kept me prisoner.’

There was a silence. The smile had gone and a kind of stiffness altered the way he held his shoulders. Sofia knew she had offended him.

‘I tried to heal you,’ he pointed out quietly.

‘Thank you. I’m grateful.’ She recalled once more the voice murmuring strange words and the touch of cool hands on her burning forehead. ‘Is it your bedroom I’ve been sleeping in?’

‘Yes.’

‘It has no windows.’

‘I don’t need windows to see.’

She wasn’t sure what to make of that. ‘Thank you again for the use of it but now I must leave.’

She turned towards the open door. Behind her she heard his soft voice, so low she could easily have missed it.

‘You don’t have to leave.’

She chose to ignore his words and kept heading straight for freedom.

‘You can stay here. You’ll be safe.’ This time his voice rumbled round the room and echoed inside her skull.

You’ll be safe.

Out of nowhere came the sudden realisation that she was desperately tired of being frightened, of having her innards permanently twisted into knots whether she was awake or asleep. If she was going to reach Anna in time, she needed to be on the inside of Tivil, not struggling on the outside in the dead of night. Her thoughts became blurred, frayed round the edges.

‘Sit down.’ For the first time he came closer and stood with one hand on the table edge. She didn’t move.

‘Why? Why would you take me in? Without even asking why or how I came here? You must have realised that I’m… that it could make serious trouble for you and your daughter. So why take such a risk?’

The man’s small wiry frame hardened and the gentle mouth lost its curve. He placed both hands flat on the table and leaned forward.

‘If the people of this country do not help each other,’ he said fiercely, ‘soon there will be no Russia. No people. They will all be in labour camps, as prisoners or prison guards. It makes no difference which. A whole nation condemned to a slow death. The only ones left will be the sleek Politburo in Moscow, because power makes pride grow in the human heart like fat in a pig. I curse their rotten godforsaken souls. May they starve as we have starved. May they lose their wives and their children as we lose ours. May they choke on their own committees and kominterns. Let the Devil take the lot of them.’

Sofia sat down on one of the chairs. She looked up into those intense eyes and the world became a smaller place, as though just the two of them in this room existed. There was something extraordinary about this man. She had survived this far because she’d learned that trust was as fragile as a moth’s wings and you didn’t give it lightly. But she gave him a smile instead.

He laughed, a warm, fluid sound, and held out his hand. ‘My name is Rafik Ilyan. But they call me the gypsy. You and I, we can help each other.’

‘My name is Sofia,’ she said.