Under a Blood Red Sky

24

Davinsky Camp July 1933

‘Sofia is dead.’

‘No. You’re lying.’

‘Anna, you’ve got to stop this. This stupid waiting.’ Tasha glanced up from the cards in her hand. ‘You’ve got to accept the fact that she’s not coming back. Not ever. For fuck’s sake, who in their right mind would turn up in this shithole unless-’

‘Shut up, Tasha,’ Anna said, but without rancour. ‘Sofia will come.’

They were sitting on Anna’s bed board playing poker with shabby homemade cards and, as usual, Nina was winning. The stakes were threads of cotton yanked from their skirts.

‘Nina, you’ll be opening a clothing factory soon,’ Anna laughed and threw down her hand of cards in disgust. ‘Who dealt me this rubbish?’

‘I did.’ It was the new girl, Lara. She was nineteen and tall, with pale skin and pale hair. None of them mentioned it, but she reminded them of Sofia. Somehow filled a gap for them all. ‘Anna,’ she asked with a quick flick of an ace, ‘what makes you believe she’ll come back? The temptations out there must be so strong.’

Tasha and Nina exchanged glances but Anna ignored them. ‘You don’t know her,’ she said firmly.

‘But Tasha has a point, she can’t be in her right mind to risk coming back here.’

‘She promised me.’

‘But a promise in here,’ Lara explained gently, ‘is not the same as a promise out there.’ She nodded towards the world beyond the barbed-wire fences. ‘In the real world people don’t gamble for pieces of thread to mend their clothes. And they don’t keep insane promises.’

‘The trouble with you, Lara, is that you haven’t been in here long enough yet.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It drives us all a bit insane.’

Sofia is dead.

Tasha’s words jammed in Anna’s head like needles and she couldn’t pull them out. Yet still she refused to believe them and, as the night hours crawled past, she set about breathing life into her memories of Sofia. She was convinced that if she let her friend walk and talk and laugh and cry in her head, it would help to keep her walking and talking and laughing and crying out there in what Lara called the real world.

But at the same time she knew Tasha was right: only someone mad would return to Davinsky Camp out of choice. For the very first time doubt crept down her spine with cold fingers.

What is out there, Sofia? What is holding you?

She’ll come. I know she’ll come. She is tenacious.

Even as a girl she had possessed that tenacity. Anna recalled a story Sofia had told her one day on the trek to the Work Zone, a story about her childhood.

The sound of the whip was like a branch snapping, over and over. That was what Sofia had said. When she was eleven years old, her father was tied to a tree in the centre of the village and whipped to death in front of her. He was a priest. But in January 1917 he was known to be working with the Bolsheviks and that was as good as a death warrant. The troops of Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor of All the Russias, rode the eight versts from Petrograd, their horses’ bridles jangling in the cold still air as they entered the village, and they had unleashed their knotted knouts on him. He didn’t scream or curse, just prayed silently into the bark of the tree.

Sofia had waited till after the funeral, then in the early morning mist she plaited her long blonde hair into a thick braid down her back, pulled on her lapti boots and took herself into her father’s store shed in the back yard. There she filled a sack with a mixture of their winter-storage vegetables that she’d grown herself: potatoes, swedes and a few handfuls of turnips, and set off on the long road to Petrograd.

The heavy sack hung down her back like a dead animal. Ice lay on the sides of the road and the clouds above were a dirty white, the smears of sooty fingerprints pressed into them. She walked fast as though she could outpace the grief that snapped at her heels, taking big bites out of her. The world had shifted. She could hear it clicking into a new position both inside and outside her head. At times when she looked at the familiar landmarks along the way – the old water tower, the sawmill, the lopsided weathervane on top of the barn – she barely recognised them.

Her mind felt as brittle as the ice under her feet. She had a great desire to yell at the top of her voice, but instead she thought about her father’s limp body stretched out on the kitchen table. She had hugged it close and refused to let go. She cried into his fingers and kissed the cuts on his neck, but when they took his body away from her to put it in a box, she knew she was going to have to build a new life for herself. Her uncle had offered her his own house as a roof over her head but he’d told her it was up to her now to put aside her books – the ones she and her father had loved to read together – and start earning a living. She tightened her grip on the sack.

The city of Petrograd smelled of danger. There was a tension in the air that Sofia breathed in the moment she stepped on to its pavements and it made her blood pump faster, though she couldn’t understand why. She had always loved Petrograd – not that she’d been in its busy streets more than a dozen times in her life, but even so – with its tall pastel-painted houses, its elegant shops and the glittering people who drifted in and out of them on the wide boulevard of Nevsky Prospekt. The place pulsed with the constant noise of traffic, an animated jangling of carriages and cars and trams.

Ice edged the gutters and hung like frozen tears from the balconies, as she pushed onward to the street market in Liteiny, but business was bad there today. No one had roubles to spend. So after three hours she scooped up what was left of her sack and headed back to the bustling centre, always taking her bearings from the golden Admiralty spire just like her father had instructed her to do.

The sky was white and glossy, as if it had a store of snow up there, hidden behind glass. In her quilted coat and her bright yellow hat and mittens that she’d knitted herself, Sofia moved fast to keep out the cold. But that sense of nervousness was strong again, the feeling of a city holding its breath, and she studied the people around her carefully to discover where this strange sensation was coming from. The ones in fur coats and silk scarves hurried along the streets noisily, talking in loud voices, but the ones in the shabby jackets and the cloth caps, she noticed, huddled in tight groups on street corners among the dirty ridges of old snow, their heads close together.

She edged towards one ragged group and watched them with interest. Yes, this was where the tension lay. She could see it billowing off the men along with the smoke from the hand-rolled cigarettes they clutched between their fingers so ardently, like a badge of membership. She swallowed hard, then shifted the sack into a more comfortable position on her shoulder and headed for the huddle of three men. They were tucked in the mouth of an alleyway next to a laundry that spelled out its name in coloured glass, and she couldn’t help noticing that the shoes of all three men had holes in the toes. She moved closer, swinging her sack.

‘Go away, little girl.’

The words were muttered by the youngest of the three when he spotted Sofia standing near enough to overhear their conversation. He had very round brown eyes with eyelashes longer than a girl’s, and thin bony wrists.

‘Go away and play.’

It was the way he said play that annoyed her. ‘At least I’m busy working,’ she retorted, giving him a cool look that was meant to irritate.

It succeeded.

‘So are we, durochka.’

The second man bared small white teeth at Sofia and asked, ‘What’s in the sack, little girl?’

‘Something to interest you.’

‘What’s that? Kerensky’s head?’

The three men laughed and tugged at their caps. Sofia knew the name. Aleksandr Kerensky was head of the Provisional Government.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Vegetables. Good ones, not half rotten.’ Their mouths and their eyes opened wider at the mention of food. ‘I thought you looked hungry,’ Sofia added, keeping it polite this time.

‘Of course we’re hungry,’ the third man said in a mild voice. He was older than the other two, with deep creases scored in his cheeks and a sadness that sat around his mouth. ‘The whole of Petrograd is hungry, the bread rations are miserable…’ As he spoke a carriage swept past with four matched horses and a liveried coachman, the driver moving with easy arrogance through the slush and sending up a spray of ice on to the pavements. A slow ironic smile crept across the third man’s face and he shook his head. ‘Well, maybe not every bastard in this city has an empty belly.’

Something struck Sofia as odd then. These men were not quite what she had expected. Oh yes, their faces were sharp-edged and their clothes thin and patched, marking them clearly as part of Petrograd’s underclass, yet they didn’t stand around with a posture of defeat. Their heads were up like prize cockerels hungry for the fight. Their eyes burned with the expectation of… She struggled to work out what it was and then it came to her: the expectation of triumph.

Triumph over what?

She swung her sack again, trying to waft the smell of turnips under their noses to regain their attention. ‘Interested?’ she prodded.

The eyes of the men followed the sack.

‘We have no money.’

‘I didn’t think you did.’

‘So what do you want in exchange?’

‘Cigarettes.’

‘For yourself?’

‘That’s my business.’

‘How old are you, child?’

‘Eleven.’

‘OK, let’s have a look at what you’ve got in there.’ It was the one with the girl’s eyelashes. He reached forward to take the sack from her but she stepped back nimbly.

‘No, I’ll show it to you.’

Sofia started to open up the sack but again the bony wrist shot out and big-knuckled fingers began to close on it. Something inside her knew instinctively that if this man snatched the sack from her she would never see it again – nor any cigarettes in exchange.

‘No!’

She threw the word at him with all the strength she had and saw the man’s eyes widen with alarm. As he started to recoil, she followed it quickly with a thump of her fist right in the middle of his skinny chest. He stumbled backwards, limbs clutching at air.

‘Little devil,’ he cursed.

‘Serves you right,’ the older man chuckled.

‘Here, girl,’ said the one with the teeth. ‘If you’re so tough and want cigarettes, smoke this one.’ He thrust a smouldering butt at her. It looked disgusting. There were no more than a few puffs left in it and one end was damp with spittle.

She knew it was a test of some kind. With a casual shrug of her thin shoulders, she took the cigarette, put it to her lips and inhaled. The three men grinned as she swallowed smoke, choked back a cough and blinked furiously as her eyes filled with water. She pushed her mouth into a smile.

‘So, what’s your name?’ the older man asked.

Gently he removed the cigarette from her fingers, took a long drag on it himself and tossed the remains into the gutter where it hissed.

‘Sofia Morozova.’

The men immediately exchanged a glance.

‘Any relation to the priest, Morozov?’

The question caught her by surprise. Her throat tightened at the mention of her father. She nodded.

‘He was well-known here,’ the bony-wristed man said, and his whole manner had changed. It was as soft as his eyelashes.

‘My father.’ She managed to squeeze the words from her throat.

‘Well, Sofia,’ the older man bent towards her and lowered his voice to a whisper, ‘there’s going to be real action today, so a basinful of vegetable soup in the belly will give us all the stomach for it. My name is Igor.’ She could see his sad mouth curve into a smile. ‘I think we can do business.’

Sofia took up a position outside the Alexandrinsky Theatre, where there was a constant bustle of cars and carriages and patrons in their finery. She sneaked in close whenever she could, touting her cardboard tray of cigarettes, but more often than not she was shooed away by the uniformed attendant. It made her feel like a stray dog.

The cigarettes had been a good idea, easy to sell. Out of the forty-eight she had started with, she was down to seven. Not bad. She was looking around for her next customer when she spotted a man in a top hat and a dark cape with bright silk lining heading straight towards her on the icy pavement. He planted himself firmly in front of her and looked down at the tray through tiny half-moon spectacles. She inspected him back. He was glossy, like a fur coat is glossy. Even his hair shone like boot polish in the glow of the theatre entrance.

‘Hello, little cigarette girl.’

He picked up one of the greyish cigarettes and held it stiffly between finger and thumb as though it might bite. Then he shifted his gaze to Sofia’s face. Suddenly she felt she was the one about to get bitten.

‘It’s good tobacco,’ she lied.

‘Oh yes? So where did these come from? Stolen from your father’s pocket?’

She wasn’t going to admit they were soup cigarettes. Igor had jumped at her idea. He and his fellow strikers had stood around a big iron brazier on a patch of wasteland on the snowy banks of the Fontanka, a whole group of gaunt-cheeked faces, and heated her vegetables in a massive pan over the flames, turning them into a soup that drew men from the street corners across the city. Each paid one cigarette. Soup cigarettes.

‘Yes,’ Sofia said and looked the man straight in his soft-lidded eyes. ‘They’re from my father’s pocket.’ She paused and let her shoulders droop. ‘He’s dead.’

It made him blink. He pulled a five-rouble note from his wallet and dropped it on her tray.

‘You’re very pretty, my dear. Maybe you need someone to take care of you now.’ He slid a good imitation of a fatherly smile on to his face. ‘You don’t want to be standing out in the cold on a night like this, it could be dangerous.’

She twitched her plait, making it swing in an arc on to her shoulder. He watched it, fascinated.

‘You’ve bought my cigarettes,’ she said flatly, ‘not me.’

With a precision she was proud of, she spat on the ground next to his shoe, a habit she had acquired from her afternoon companions. If her father had been here, he’d have cuffed her, but he wasn’t here any more. She snatched up the money, thrust the tray and its contents into the man’s hands, then slipped away into the dark streets.

She should go home now. Curfew was at eight o’clock. It would be foolish to linger. But already she could hear the marchers and their shouts ringing out as they advanced on Palace Square. She’d just take a quick look. That’s all.

It was like being part of a wall. That’s what it felt like to Sofia, a good strong wall. She saw herself as a brick, a small and flimsy one admittedly, but still a brick. Her arms were linked with Igor on one side and a vociferous woman on the other, and their arms were linked with other arms, and more arms linked with more arms, right across the width of the road, hundreds of them blocking all traffic and causing chaos in the city. Behind them was row after row of other linked arms, and in other streets and other squares the demands were shouted out in voices that grew bolder with each brick added to the wall.

‘We want bread!’

‘We want work!’

‘Down with the Tsar!’

Before the crowd could finish the words, the sound of horses’ hooves was heard advancing at speed and a troop of cavalry burst into the street, charging straight at the head of the marchers with the intention of crushing the leaders. The sight made Sofia’s legs tremble but she was certain the wall would hold fast. It wouldn’t break; it was strong and invincible. Her knees felt weak and something was stopping her from breathing properly, but surely the wall wouldn’t break.

‘Igor!’ she cried out.

‘Death to the Duma!’ he bellowed at the oncoming horses. ‘Death to the Duma!’

She could see the animals’ breath now, rising like incense in the street as they came out of the darkness, and then she saw the determined faces of the soldiers, eaten into strange shapes by rage. Her heart turned into a wild thing behind her ribs and she clutched tight to the arms on either side of her.

Then the sabres flashed.

A woman screamed in pain and the wall broke. Arms were snatched away and bodies were pressed against shop fronts, anything to avoid the scything of blades as the horses charged. Sofia could hear their big hearts beating as their hooves pounded on whatever and whoever fell under them. Screams and panic flared through the crowd, people fled, stumbled, ducked into alleyways as the night air was torn apart as easily as the wall had been.

Sofia ran. Igor had been ripped from her in the stampede but the woman on her left had yanked her into a side street and together they hurtled away from the metal sound of the hooves, the echo of each other’s footsteps giving them hope. They twisted and turned and dodged round corners, ducked between fences, gasping for breath, dragging icy air into their lungs. Sofia neither knew nor cared where she was. Strange streets crowded in on her and she could hear the breath of the woman at her side growing harsher, felt her stumble.

‘This way.’ Sofia steered them into a quiet avenue where large houses were set back behind tall imposing gates. Here at last they’d be safe. She knew she should be thanking God for their escape but she could find no words for Him. Instead she felt only a dull anger simmering hot in her stomach. To be hunted through the streets like an animal filled her with sick humiliation.

‘They treat us like vermin,’ the woman whispered as she slowed to a walk.

‘I’m not a rat.’

‘You can certainly run as fast as one, girl.’

‘Are you a Bolshevik or a Menshevik?’ Sofia had heard both words thrown around this afternoon.

In the dark she could barely make out the woman’s face, but she saw the headscarf lift and heard the grunt that the woman gave. It could have meant Da. Yes. Or it could have meant Shut your mouth, suka.

At that moment a lone cavalry officer appeared at the end of the street and in a flash he had heeled his horse into a gallop, the tip of his blade carving a path through the damp night air and straight to the woman’s throat.

The woman broke into a run.

‘No!’ Sofia shouted. ‘He’ll ride us down!’

‘Stupid girl, we are going to die whatever we do.’

To Sofia’s surprise the woman dropped to her knees in the middle of the road, head bowed, hands clasped together, and started to pray.

The horseman was closing, sabre ready to strike.

When Sofia looked back on this moment, it was as if time stopped in this quiet avenue in Petrograd. Stillness filled her young mind. The panic and fear that had been banging holes in her ribs seemed to drain out of her, leaving her mind clear and white. She waited until the horseman had raised himself to a standing stance in the stirrups and the blade was cutting through the thread of the woman’s prayers as it swept towards her defenceless neck. Then Sofia leapt forward.

She came at the horse from the side and slammed her fist down on to the animal’s rump with all her strength. Startled, the creature whinnied and jinked sideways away from her, but she followed and slapped it again and again, harder each time. It reared up on its hind legs, twisting round to face its attacker. The officer shouted a command and sawed at the reins but it was too late. Unbalanced by his attempt at a sabre-strike on the woman, he was thrown backwards and crashed down on to the road.

He lay immobile. Sofia darted forward and snatched up the horse’s reins. The animal was panicked but she knew horses and was not going to let this one escape. She murmured to it, resting a hand on its sweating hide as she slowly drew the reins towards her. The horse rolled its eyes and bared its teeth at her, prancing on its toes, but it submitted to her calming touch.

The woman clambered to her feet. ‘God preserve you, my little rat!’ she shouted with a great laugh of relief, striding over to the unconscious officer lying on the freezing ground. She thudded her boot twice into the side of his head. ‘God answered my prayers, soldier.’

‘Listen!’ Sofia hissed.

A new sound broke the silence. Running feet, a troop of them, pounding the night air. Sofia stared down the road and made out a tall youth racing up towards her. Behind him a black stain spread out, flowing in all directions like spilled ink. More troops, but this time on foot.

‘Quick!’ she shouted to the woman and pulled the horse round.

By the time the youth reached them they were both on the horse, one in front and one behind the saddle, so all he had to do was make for the stirrups. As he did so he released a battle cry that ripped from his lungs and echoed from the walls around them. It both startled and delighted Sofia. Then he kicked the skittering horse into an easy gallop away from his pursuers, handling it with skill, and within seconds the troops were a receding stain once more. In Sofia’s hand was the sabre.

They rode hard and in silence, avoiding the main thoroughfares, keeping to any street that was dark and shadowy. He seemed to know the layout of Petrograd intimately, as though accustomed to chasing through its alleys, and several times he swerved under a bridge or down unexpected passageways to avoid a sudden surge of uniforms. They were everywhere, but always he kept the horse one step ahead of them.

Seated behind him, Sofia wrapped her arms around his back, feeling the strength of his spine and the rise and fall of his ribs as he breathed hard, sometimes even a sudden thud of his heart through the thin material of his jacket. At times his thick red scarf flapped at her face and he made little yips of encouragement to the horse. As they wound their way through the streets she began to recognise landmarks, a shop here, a factory there, and knew they were approaching the spot where she had entered the city just this morning. She tapped his broad shoulder blade and called out.

‘This is my road.’

Immediately he reined the horse to a walk and she slid easily off the back, landing on her feet in the snow.

‘Do svidania, young anarchist,’ he called. ‘Spasibo. Thank you, my friend.’ He waved a hand as he swung the horse’s head.

Sofia didn’t wave back. She’d not even seen more than a shadow of his face, but she watched him ride away like a ghost into the night, the woman hunched awkwardly in front of him. She waited until he had disappeared from view completely before she turned and set off on the long walk home in the dark. Only then did she let loose the wide smile that was caught on her lips and the shiver of excitement that had been trapped in her bones. Tonight she had learned a lot. With a whoop that echoed through the still air, she lifted the sabre she’d stolen from the officer and whirled it above her head in a circle, cutting slices out of the night.

But already she missed the energetic young rider, missed the warmth of his body against her chest. It was with a strange reluctance that she kept her feet walking away from the city, and one of her father’s favourite words – tenacity – floated down into her young mind, as soft flakes of snow began to fall.

The scarf, the red scarf.

That was the detail that had caught in Anna’s mind and snagged, the way a sleeve catches on a briar. She couldn’t unhook it, however hard she tried. She knew it was absurd even to wonder about it because, with so many young men fighting for the Bolsheviks under the Red Flag, half of them must have been wearing red scarves.

But she couldn’t shake her stubborn brain free from the knowledge that she had given a red scarf to Vasily that Christmas. She had knitted it herself specially for him, and he’d kissed her with a great cry of delight and sworn to wear it always.

So was it him? This impetuous horseman of Sofia’s childhood? Anna always wondered about it and the uncertainty plagued her. Vasily had always refused to take her, Anna, on any of his wild escapades, declaring it too dangerous, yet – if it was Vasily that night – he was willing to ride through the gates of hell with Sofia clinging to his back.

A tiny worm of jealousy squirmed into being and she stamped on it hard. Sofia would never betray her.