Under a Blood Red Sky

3

Sofia leaned against the hut wall, shutting her mind to the icy draughts, and let Anna’s words echo quietly in her head.

That’s forgotten.

Two years, eight months ago. Sofia pulled off the makeshift mitten on her right hand, stitched out of blanket threads and mattress ticking, and lifted the two scarred fingers right up to her face. She could just make out the twisted flesh, a reminder every single day of her life. So no, not forgotten.

It had started when they were taken off axing the boughs from felled trees and put to work on the road instead. It was progressing fast. The prison labour brigades were not told from where it had come nor where it was headed, but the pressure was hard and unrelenting and it showed in the attitude of the guards, who grew more demanding and less forgiving of any delays. People started making mistakes.

Sofia had reached such a state of exhaustion that her mind was becoming foggy and the skin on her hands was shredded, despite the makeshift gloves. Her world became nothing but stones and rocks and gravel, and then more stones and more rocks and more gravel. She piled them in her sleep, shovelled grit in her dreams; hammered piles of granite into smooth flat surfaces till the muscles in her back forgot what it was like not to ache with a dull, grinding pain that saps your willpower because you know it’s never going away. Even worse was the ditch digging. Feet in slime and filthy water all day and spine fixed in a permanent twist that wouldn’t unscrew. Eating was the only aim in life and sleep had become a luxury.

‘Can any of you scarecrows sing?’

The surprising request came from a new guard. He was tall and as lean as the prisoners themselves, only in his twenties and with a bright intelligent face. What was he doing as a guard? Sofia wondered. Most likely he’d slipped up somewhere in his career and was paying for it now.

‘Well, which one of you can sing?’

Singing used up precious energy. No one ever sang. Besides, work was supposed to be conducted in silence.

‘Well? Come on. I fancy a serenade to brighten my day. I’m sick of the sound of your fucking hammers.’

Anna was up on the raised road crushing stones into place but Sofia noticed her lift her head and could see the thought starting to form. A song? Yes, why not? She could manage a song. Yes, an old love ballad would-

Sofia tossed a pebble and it clipped Anna’s ankle. She winced and looked over to where Sofia was standing three metres away, knee-deep in ditch water, scooping out mud and stones. Her face was filthy, streaked with slime and covered in bites and sweat. The summer day was overcast but warm, and the need to keep limbs completely wrapped up in rags against the mosquitoes made everyone hot and morose. Sofia shook her head at her friend, her lips tight in warning. Don’t, she mouthed.

‘I can sing,’ came a voice.

It was a small, dark-haired woman in her thirties who’d spoken. The prisoners close by looked up from their work, surprised. She was usually quiet and uncommunicative.

‘I am an…’ The woman corrected herself. ‘I was an opera singer. I’ve performed in Moscow and in Paris and Milan and-’

‘Excellent! Otlichno! Warble something sweet for me, little songbird.’ The guard folded his arms around his rifle and smiled at her expectantly.

The woman didn’t hesitate. She threw down her hammer with disdain, drew herself up to her full height, took two deep breaths and started to sing. The sound soared out of her, pure and heart-wrenching in its astonishing beauty. Heads lifted, the smiles and tears of the workers bringing life back into their exhausted faces.

‘Un bel dì, vedremo levarsi un fil di fumo sull’estremo confin del mare. E poi…’

‘It’s Madame Butterfly,’ murmured a woman. She was hauling a wheelbarrow piled high with rocks into position on the road.

As the music filled the air with golden enchantment, a warning shout tore through it. Heads turned. They all saw it happen. The woman had dropped her barrow carelessly to the ground as she’d stopped to listen to the singing, and now it had started to topple. It was the accident all of them feared, to be crushed beneath a barrow-load of rocks as they plunged over the edge of the raised road surface. You didn’t stand a chance.

‘Sofia!’ Anna screamed.

Sofia was fast. Knee-deep in water she was struggling to escape, but her reflexes had her spinning out of the path of the rocks. A great burst of water surged up out of the ditch as the rocks crashed down behind her.

Except for one. It ricocheted off the rubble that layered the side of the new road, it came crunching down on Sofia’s right hand, just where her fingers were clinging on to the bank of stones.

Sofia made no sound.

‘Get back to work!’ the guard yelled at everyone, disturbed by the accident he’d caused. Anna leapt into the water beside Sofia and seized her hand. The tips of two fingers were crushed to a pulp, blood spurting out into the water in a deep crimson flow.

‘Bind it up,’ the guard called out and threw Anna a rag from his own pocket.

She took it. It was dirty and she cursed loudly. ‘Everything is always dirty in this godforsaken hole.’

‘It’ll be all right,’ Sofia assured her, as Anna quickly bound the scrap of cloth round the two damaged fingers, strapping them together, one a splint for the other, stemming the blood.

‘Here,’ said Anna, ‘take my glove as well.’

There was an odd chalky taste inside Sofia’s mouth. ‘Thank you,’ she muttered.

Her eyes stared into Anna’s and, though she kept them steady, she knew Anna could see something shadowy move deep down in them, like the first flutter of the wing of death.

‘Sofia,’ Anna commanded, thrusting the injured hand first into her own glove and then into Sofia’s wet one for greater protection against knocks, ‘don’t you dare.’

Sofia reclaimed her hand and looked at the bulky object as though it didn’t belong to her any more. They both knew infection was inevitable and that her body lacked sufficient nutrition to fight it.

‘Back to work, you two!’ the guard shouted. ‘And no talking.’

‘Don’t dare what?’ Sofia asked under her breath.

‘Don’t you dare even think that you won’t come through this. Now get on that road in my place and haul stones. At least they’re dry.’ Anna seized the shovel from where it had fallen and set to work in the water.

Sofia scrambled up on to the road and for a second stared down at Anna’s blonde head, as if she were memorising every hair on it. ‘One day, Anna, I’ll repay you for this.’

After that, Sofia became ill. They’d both known she would but the speed of it shocked them.

‘Tell me something happy, Anna,’ Sofia had said. ‘Make me smile.’

It was gone midnight and they were sitting on the floor of the barrack hut, backs to the wall in their usual place. It was only four days after the accident and Sofia could sense Anna’s concern like something solid in her lap.

Neither said much but they weren’t fooling each other. The injured hand was worse, much worse, and Sofia’s skin had grown dry and feverish. Her cheeks were so flushed that Anna told her she looked almost healthy, which made Sofia laugh, but what little flesh she still had left was melting away, leaving just bones and sharp angles behind. Her work rate was too slow to earn anywhere near the norm and, even though Anna fed her friend pieces of her own meagre paiok, Sofia couldn’t always keep it down. The fever made her vomit.

Sofia cradled her throbbing hand against her breast and said once more in a low whispery voice: ‘Tell me something happy, Anna.’

From somewhere nearby came the popping sound of thumb-nails crushing the plump, grey bodies of lice, but when Anna started to weave her words, all else, including the pain, began to melt away into the darkness. That was the time Anna told her about when Vasily taught her to ice skate on the frozen lake. At the end of it Sofia had laid her head on Anna’s shoulder and chuckled.

‘I believe,’ she said softly, ‘I am falling in love with your Vasily.’

‘I’m going to lose my hand.’

‘No.’

‘You’ve seen it, Anna.’

‘Go to the medical hut when we get back to the Zone.’

They looked at each other. Both knew that was a stupid statement. The feldshers wouldn’t bother with a bandaged hand. Besides, infections were so rife in the medical hut that if you were well when you went in there, you would almost certainly be dead by the time you came out. TB was endemic in the camp, bloody lungs eaten up with it and spreading the disease with every cough.

‘I was planning,’ Sofia said calmly, ‘on getting hold of Nina’s saw and asking you to cut off my hand.’

Anna stared hard at her. The punishment for self-mutilation was a bullet in the brain. ‘No,’ she said sharply, ‘we must think of something better than that.’

Anna did think of something else but it wasn’t something better.

At the time the hut was full of uneasy rumours. They rustled in the air like wind in the forest as the ragged prisoners huddled on their bunks and told each other it was the woman’s own fault. That stupid woman. They were talking about the opera singer.

She’d been shot. A quick bullet in the back of the brain. You don’t break the rules, not where everyone can see. The guard learned the same lesson but his was a harder one: he was forced to face an execution squad made up of his own colleagues. That way they all learned the lesson. Sofia shuddered when she recalled how close Anna had come to bursting into song that day on the road.

‘Here, this will help.’ Cradling her friend’s hand gently, Anna had started to unwind the slimy piece of rag that bound it.

Sofia didn’t even open her eyes. She was lying on the bed board, her breath fast and shallow, her skin splitting wherever it was touched. She felt that she had already sunk beyond reach. She hadn’t worked for days and in this camp if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat.

‘Sofia,’ Anna said harshly, ‘open your eyes. Come on, show me you’re alive.’

The blonde eyelashes fluttered but not enough to open her eyes.

‘Try harder,’ Anna insisted. ‘Please.’

With a huge effort, Sofia opened her eyes.

The sight of the hand was almost too much to bear. It was a black and swollen piece of rotten meat with great splits between the fingers, wounds that oozed foul-smelling pus. Each time Anna bathed it, strips of flesh floated away.

‘My poor Sofia,’ Anna breathed. She brushed a hand over Sofia’s burning forehead, sweeping the hair off her face. It was soaked in sweat. ‘This will help,’ she murmured again, ‘it’ll make you well.’

She wrapped a poultice of green and orange lichen around the hand, working it in between the fingers and up the skeletal wrist. As she did so, though she was gentle, Sofia shuddered and a trail of bile trickled from the corner of her mouth. Anna slipped a strip of shredded leaves mixed with butter between Sofia’s cracked lips.

‘Chew,’ she ordered. ‘It’ll help the pain.’

She watched like a hawk as Sofia’s jaw slowly attempted movement.

‘Anna.’ A raw whisper.

‘I’m here.’

‘Tell me… where did this come from?’

‘It doesn’t matter, just swallow it. There’ll be more tomorrow, I promise.’

The leaves were followed by a nugget of pork fat. Sofia’s cloudy blue eyes had fixed on Anna’s face with an expression of confusion and then, as understanding abruptly dawned on her sluggish mind, it changed to one of despair. She moaned, a deep, bone-aching sound that made Anna flinch. There was only one way a woman prisoner could lay her hands on the guards’ pork fat in this camp and they both knew what it was. Sofia felt dirty. Inside her body and under her skin she could feel the dirt, gritty and hard. Her good hand reached across and clung to Anna’s wrist.

‘Don’t,’ Sofia hissed. A tear slid out, creeping across her cheek and down to her ear. ‘Don’t do it any more, I beg you. I won’t eat the food.’

‘Sofia, I want a friend who is alive. Not one rotting in the stinking pit of corpses they dump in the forest.’

‘I can’t bear it.’

‘If I can, you can,’ Anna raised her voice in a sudden outburst of anger.

Sofia stared at her friend for a long time. Then, slowly, her fingers uncurled from Anna’s wrist and, with gentle soothing strokes, they caressed her arm like a mother would a child’s.

‘Now,’ Anna said fiercely, ‘eat this.’

Sofia opened her mouth.

Two years and eight months had passed since that day. Yet the memory of it still had the power to rip something open inside her and make her want to shake Anna. And hug her, hug her to death. From where Sofia was sitting on the floor waiting for the next over-adventurous mouse to venture into the hut, she could see the blonde head tossing from side to side on the crowded bed board. She could hear the coughs despite the cloth jammed over the mouth.

‘Anna,’ she whispered, too low for anyone to hear, ‘I haven’t forgotten.’

She dipped her forehead to her knees. Whatever it takes, Anna. Vasily had to be the key. Anna had no family and she was far too weak to make the thousand-mile journey through the taiga, even if she could escape from this hell-hole, so there was only one answer. Sofia would have to find Vasily and hope he would help. Hope. No, that was far too weak a word. Believe. That was it. She had to believe that first, she could find him, secondly that he would be willing to help Anna even though he hadn’t seen her for sixteen years – and if she was brutally honest with herself, was it likely he’d risk his life? And thirdly that he had the means to do so.

She lifted her head and grimaced. Put like that, it sounded absurd. It was an insane and impossible idea, but it was all she had to cling on to. She nodded firmly.

‘Vasily,’ she breathed, ‘I’m trusting you.’

The risks were huge. And of course there was the small matter of how she herself would escape from under the malevolent, watchful gaze of the guards. Hundreds tried it every year but few made it more than a verst or two. The tracker dogs; the lack of food; the wolves; the cold in the winter. In the summer the heat and the swarms of black mosquitoes that ate you alive – they all defeated even the most determined of spirits.

She shivered, but it wasn’t from the cold. A part of her tired brain had just caught a glimpse of something that she’d almost forgotten about. It was something bright and breathing, and it shimmered just on the far edge of her vision where it flickered, tempting her.

It was freedom.