Kate Furnivall - Under a Blood Red Sky

What else had Anna told her?

An iron staircase. A kolodets and a lion’s head carved above an arch. But the dark rows of crumbling tenements all seemed to have iron staircases to the upper storeys and courtyards where ragged children crawled among the woodpiles. It was only when she spotted the lion’s head above one of the arches that Anna’s voice pulsed in her ears. ‘You must remember this, Sofia. It will help you. ’ She walked the street twice just to make sure no other lions were lurking nearby, and then approached the entrance. It was like all the others: no paint, with cracked and swollen woodwork. She lifted the big knocker and rapped it.

A woman’s wrinkled face peered round the door.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m looking for Maria Myskova. I believe she may live here.’

‘Who wants to know?’

The woman was wrapped in a thick woollen headscarf, despite the heat of the day, and wore a dark brown blanket draped around her shoulders. In the gloomy hallway her head appeared disembodied. Her eyebrows were drawn together above what was clearly a glass eye, but her other brown eye was bright and intensely curious.

‘Who are you, girl?’ she demanded, holding out a hand for identification papers.

Sofia stood her ground without giving her name. ‘Maria used to live here with Comrade Sergei Myskov and his wife and child. On the first floor. Do you know where they are now?’

‘At work.’

‘You mean they still live here? When will they be home?’

‘Who wants to know?’ The woman’s eye gleamed.

‘Are you the dezhurnaya?’

‘ Da. Yes, I am.’ She unwrapped the blanket enough to reveal an official red armband.

Everyone knew that caretakers were paid informers of the State Police, keeping a watchful eye on the comings and goings of their building’s inhabitants for OGPU. The last thing Sofia wanted was to rouse those wasps from their nest.

‘I’ll come back later if you’ll tell me when they-’

The crash of a piece of crockery followed by a man’s voice raised in a curse erupted from somewhere at the back of the hallway. The woman swivelled round with a squeal and scurried back into the shadows towards a door that was half open. Sofia didn’t hesitate. She stepped inside and leapt up the stairs two at a time, trying not to inhale the smell of boiled cabbage and unwashed bodies that seemed to breathe out of the fabric of the building. It brought the stink of the barrack hut at Davinsky Camp crashing into her head.

When she reached the first-floor landing she turned to her left, where a boarded window let in a few dim streaks of light. To her surprise, packed tight against the wall of the dingy corridor, were three beds, low and narrow. One was tidily made with a folded quilt, the second was a jumble of stained sheets and the third was occupied by a bald man stinking of vomit whose skin was yellow as butter. This was Sofia’s first experience of the communalka , the shared apartments where several families were crammed into the space that had once belonged to only one.

She squeezed past the first two and spoke in a whisper to the man in the third.

‘Do you need anything…?’

It was a stupid question. Of course the poor wretch needed something – something like a decent bed in a decent hospital with decent food and medicines and clean air to breathe, but he didn’t reply. His eyes were closed. Maybe he was dead. She felt she should tell somebody. But who? On tiptoes, so as not to wake him, she crept to the door at the end of the landing and knocked quickly. The door opened at once. A dark-haired woman stood in front of her, shorter than herself but broad across the bust. Sofia smiled at her.

‘Dobriy vecher,’ she said. ‘Good evening. I am Anna Fedorina.’

‘She’s dead. Maria died two years ago. Another stroke.’

The words were stark, but Irina Myskova spoke them gently.

‘I’m sorry, Anna, I know how much she cared for you. It’s so sad that she didn’t live to see you released.’

‘Tell Sasha that.’

The woman’s face stiffened at the mention of her son. His part in Anna’s arrest seemed to sit uneasily in Irina’s heart and she ran a hand across her large bosom, stilling whatever turmoil simmered there. Her clothes were neat but old, the material of her skirt darned in several places. The apartment was the same, clean and tidy with striped homemade poloviki rugs on the floor. Everything looked old and well used. Only the white plaster bust of Lenin gleamed new, and the bright red posters declaring Forward towards the Victory of Communism and We swear, Comrade Lenin, to honour your command. Sofia ignored them and looked across at the chair by the window. It was Maria’s chair, standing empty now, clearly not used by the family any more.

‘Sasha was only doing his duty,’ Irina insisted loyally.

Sofia hadn’t come here to argue. ‘Those times were hard and…’

‘But you’re looking well, Anna,’ Irina interrupted. She eyed Sofia’s new dress and her shining blonde hair thoughtfully. ‘You were pretty as a child, but now you’ve grown quite beautiful.’

‘ Spasibo. Comrade Myskova, is there something of Maria’s I could have? To remind me of her?’

Irina’s face relaxed. ‘Of course. Most of her possessions have gone… Sold,’ she added self-consciously. ‘But Sergei insisted on keeping a few things back.’ She walked over to a cupboard and drew from it a book. ‘It’s Maria’s bible.’ She offered it to Sofia. ‘Maria would have wanted you to have it, Anna.’

‘Thank you.’

Sofia was touched by the gift. The feel of the book under her fingers, its pages so soft and well thumbed, raised a sudden sense of her own childhood and her own father’s devotion to bible study. She handled it with care.

‘Thank you,’ she murmured again and moved towards the door.

‘Wait, Anna.’ Irina came over and stood close.

‘What is it?’ Sofia felt an odd rush of sympathy for this woman, caught between her love for her son and her love for her husband’s dead sister. Gently she said, ‘What’s done is done, Irina. We can change the future but we can’t change the past.’

‘ Nyet. And I wouldn’t wish to. But… if I can help you… I know from Maria that you were always fond of the Dyuzheyevs’ boy.’

‘Vasily?’

‘Did Maria tell you he came here once? He’s going under a different name now.’

‘Yes. Mikhail Pashin. She said he came twice.’

‘I wasn’t here, but I believe it was only once. Maria got confused sometimes. The other time it was a different man altogether who came to see her.’

‘Do you know who?’

‘Anna, I think you should know that the man had come trying to find you.’

‘Me?’

‘ Da. It seems he was the young Bolshevik soldier, the one who shot your father and Vasily’s mother. He was searching for you.’

Sofia’s heart seemed to hang loose in her chest. ‘Who was he?’

‘That’s the odd thing. He said he’d been sent to work in a village in the Urals.’

‘His name?’

‘Maria wasn’t any good at remembering, but she told Sasha the name and he remembered it.’

‘What was it?’ She held her breath, and a sense of foreboding chilled her, despite the heat in the apartment.

‘Fomenko. Aleksei Fomenko.’

Mikhail didn’t sleep. The journey home was hard with no overnight stops. They slept sitting upright in their seats as the train ploughed its way through the darkness, its lonely whistle startling the wolves as they prowled the forests. Rain fell spasmodically, pattering against the black windows like unseen fingers asking to be let in.

Mikhail quietly smoked one cigarette after another and tried not to move too much in his seat. Sofia’s pale head lay on one shoulder, Alanya’s dark one on the other. He didn’t much care to be used as a pillow by the secretary and knew she would be embarrassed if she realised. Why Boriskin and Alanya had swapped seats he wasn’t sure, but he suspected it had something to do with the dressing down he’d given his foreman for declaring too accurate a picture of the labour problems at the factory.