Kate Furnivall - Under a Blood Red Sky

He seized her arm. The feel of it, the strength contained within its slender form, reminded him suddenly of having that same feeling at some point the previous evening, a point when he was standing close to her in the darkness, his skin touching her skin, her breath warm on his ear. But why? Where? That’s when the blurring started again in his mind, like mist on the tips of a tree’s branches, swaying and shifting so there were no clear edges. His mind shied away from last night like Zvezda shied at a snake.

He shook her arm. ‘How many sacks, Sofia?’

‘Four.’

‘The truth?’

‘Four.’

A stab of anger made him drop her arm and in one easy movement he swung himself back up into the saddle, but whether the anger was at her for lying or at himself for not remembering, he couldn’t tell. The old leather of the saddle creaked and a small green lizard shot out from between Zvezda’s hooves. The girl flicked her hair so that it sprang out from behind her ear, luminous in the clear air. All these things registered in Mikhail’s head, each with a kind of indelible imprint. He knew he would not forget this moment.

Gathering the reins in one hand, and on the verge of urging the horse into a gallop, at the last second he looked down again at Sofia. And something in her held him. Something in her intent gaze, something he couldn’t leave behind. He stretched out an arm. Instantly she seized it and he swept her up on to the horse behind him.

At first neither spoke. Sofia leaned forward and felt the hard muscles each side of Mikhail’s ribs where she rested her hands to hold on. The moment her feet lifted off the ground as she swung up on the horse, she felt the past drop from her arms like a heavy bundle of dead sticks she’d been dragging round with her, and she left them there, lying in a spiky jumble in the dirt.

She’d have to pick them up. Of course she would, she knew that. But later. Right now she felt alert, happy and alive, and all that mattered was being here on his horse. With him so close she could smell the fresh clean male scent of him and study the strong curve of the back of his head and spot how his shirt collar was fraying where it chafed against his skin. She wanted to wrap her arms around his body and hold herself tight against him, feeling his sun-warmed back against her breasts, to burrow inside his jacket and shirt, her cheek next to his naked skin, and listen to his heart beating.

Instead she held on lightly and let her own body move with the rhythm of the horse beneath her. It was travelling at a good pace. Fields of potatoes dashed past in long straight ridges as far as the eye could see, occasionally edged with a haze of clover flowers that drew the greedy bees to them. Was she a greedy bee? Drawn to her own personal flower?

But he wasn’t hers. She was stealing him. An ache started up in her chest and her fingers fluttered involuntarily against his ribs, making him half turn his head to her.

‘Are you all right back there?’ he asked.

She could see the dark length of his eyelashes and a shadow on his jaw where he hadn’t shaved well this morning.

‘I’m fine. Your horse must possess a strong back to carry the two of us so effortlessly.’

Mikhail laid an affectionate hand on the horse’s neck, fingers kneading the heavy muscles. ‘You and I are no more than a gnat’s wing to Zvezda. He’s used to hauling massive carts all day round Dagorsk.’

‘For your factory?’

‘No, for a Soviet haulage business. You didn’t think he rested in a stall with a net of hay to chew on and a young filly to amuse him till sundown, did you?’ he laughed. ‘Like I’m sure Comrade Deputy Stirkhov spends his days.’

She could feel the laughter ripple under the tips of her fingers, vibrating his rib bones, and it echoed in a joyous rush through her own veins.

‘Mikhail, you are too free with your insults.’ She pointed up to a wood pigeon whose heavy wings flapped noisily as it swooped low over their heads. ‘I expect that bird is in the pay of Deputy Stirkhov, carrying our every word back to its master.’

He laughed again and raised two fingers in an imitation gun, aiming at the pigeon.

‘I mean it,’ she said softly. ‘You should take more care.’

He shrugged his big flat shoulder blades as if she’d laid an unwelcome weight on them. ‘Of course you’re right. You’d think I’d have learned by now. That’s why I’ve washed up here in this backwater instead of…’ His words trailed into a sigh.

‘Instead of where?’

‘Moscow.’

‘Did you like Moscow so much?’

‘I liked the Tupolev aircraft factory.’

‘Is that why Rafik calls you Pilot?’

‘Yes. But I was never a pilot. I’m an engineer. I worked on the engine designs and stress testing of the ANT planes.’

‘That must have been exciting.’

A pause. Two dragonflies chased alongside for an iridescent second before darting back to the river.

‘Yes.’ That was all he said.

‘Very different from a clothing factory out here in the middle of nowhere, that’s certain,’ she said lightly. ‘Sewing machines aren’t much good at flying.’

He laughed once more but this time it sounded empty. ‘Oh yes, I’m well and truly earthbound these days.’

It wasn’t hard to picture him soaring through the clouds, eyes bright with joy, up in the freedom of the blue sky. But she didn’t ask the obvious question, made no attempt to search out the why or the how. Instead she laid her cheek against his shoulder. They rode like that in silence and she could feel the thread between them spinning tighter, drawing them together.

After several minutes, as though he could hear her thoughts, he said flatly, ‘I was dismissed. I wrote a letter. To a friend in Leningrad. In it I complained that some of the equipment was agonisingly slow in arriving at the N22 factory because of incompetence, despite the fact that Stalin himself claimed to be committed to expanding the aircraft industry as a major priority.’

‘Foolish,’ she murmured and gently tapped his head. His hair felt soft.

‘Foolish is right.’ He leaned back a fraction in the saddle, so that his shoulder pressed harder against her cheek. ‘I should have realised all employees in such a sensitive project would have their letters monitored. Bloody idiot. It was only because Andrei Tupolev himself intervened for me that I wasn’t sent to one of the Siberian labour camps. Instead I was exiled out here in, as you so aptly put it, the middle of nowhere. But I’m an engineer, Sofia, not a bloody clothes merchant.’

‘You were lucky.’ Sofia sat up straight once more. ‘You must be careful, Mikhail.’

‘I admit I’ve had a few run-ins with Stirkhov and his Raion Committee already. I’m an engineer, and since all the big public show trials of the engineers he doesn’t trust me and is always wanting to interfere.’

‘What show trials?’

It slipped out. She wanted to cram the words back inside her mouth.

‘Sofia, you must have heard of them, everyone has. The trials of the industrial engineers. The first one was the Shakhty trial in 1928. Remember it? Fifty technicians from the coal industry. The poor bastards were accused by Prosecutor Krylenko of cutting production and of being in the pay of foreign powers. Of taking food out of the mouths of the hungry masses and of treachery to the Motherland.’

She could feel his back growing rigid.

‘Everyone clamoured for the deaths of these men, who were forced into confessing incredible and absurd crimes, slavish and servile in court. They betrayed the whole engineering industry, humiliated us. Endangered us.’ He paused suddenly and she wondered where his mind had veered to, but she soon found out.