Kate Furnivall - Under a Blood Red Sky

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.