Kate Furnivall - Under a Blood Red Sky

His foreman had let him down badly. What was the point of bemoaning the lack of a skilled workforce in a peasant community when even a cabbage-head like Boriskin knew that such complaints would lose them important orders? And, more crucially, lose them the vital supply of raw materials. God knows, there was enough friction at the conference without adding to it needlessly. That was the trouble with some of these blasted jumped-up union men, they had no idea how to-

He stopped himself. He’d have to deal with Boriskin’s idiocy – or was it wilful incompetence intended to make Mikhail himself look bad? – back in the office. Not tonight. Tonight he’d had enough. Instead he brushed his cheek across the soft silk of Sofia’s hair and marvelled that even with the stink of his own cigarettes and a fat cigar smouldering with the man in the seat opposite, her hair still smelled fresh and sweet. Its fragrance reminded him of bubbling river water. He listened for her breathing but could hear nothing above the thunder of the wheels beneath him.

His own part in the conference had gone smoothly. The report he’d delivered to the Committee had been well received – it could hardly be otherwise, considering the production figures he was presenting to the hatchet-faced bastards – and his speech to the delegates in the hall had been suitably dull and steeped in boring numbers. No one had listened but everyone had applauded and congratulated him at the end. That’s the way it worked. You protect my back, I’ll protect yours . Mikhail took a long frustrated drag on his cigarette. No, he couldn’t complain about the conference. It was the rest of it that disturbed him on a much deeper level. The way Alanya attached herself to Sofia and stuck tight as a tick to her side so it was impossible for him to make time alone with Sofia. And then there was the small matter of her disappearance.

Damn it. Where did she go?

It was late in the evening before she returned, and to explain her absence he’d made up some claptrap about her attending a dinner with the members of the Party elite. But that had backfired because, when she reappeared, Alanya and bloody Boriskin had both fussed over her like mother hens and asked who had been at the dinner and what they’d had to eat. He chuckled to himself at the memory. Sofia had handled it brilliantly. She’d given Mikhail that slow mischievous smile of hers, then put a finger to her lips as she shook her head at Alanya.

‘No details, Comrade Sirova. Wait till you are invited to such an event, then you will learn for yourself.’

‘Of course, comrade. You’re right.’

Boriskin nodded pompously and Mikhail had to fight to keep a straight face, but nothing was the same after that. In some indefinable way, she withdrew into herself. Oh yes, she still slid him secret smiles and brushed her shoulder against his jacket, or let her fingers entwine with his when no one was looking. But it wasn’t the same. And on several occasions he caught her gazing at him, when she thought he wouldn’t notice, with an expression in her eyes that frightened him. It was as if a light had been turned off. Something dark had crept in in its place.

What had happened to her during those missing hours?

He eased Alanya off his shoulder and back on to her own headrest, then turned and gently kissed the top of Sofia’s head.

‘Stay, my love, stay with me,’ he whispered.

He stroked her hand, running his thumb over the tight white scars, lifting them to his lips. As he kissed them, her fingers came to life and curled round his jaw, their tips stroking him, sending a fierce heat rippling through his body.

‘Mikhail,’ she whispered, ‘kiss me.’

While the rest of the carriage slept, he took her beautiful face in his hands and kissed each delicate part of it, her eyes, her nose, her cool forehead, the sweep of her chin, even the sweet tips of her pearly ears. She uttered a soft little whimper. Finally he kissed her lips and tasted her. And knew it was a taste he could never give up.

Pyotr put on a clean white shirt, dusted off his shoes and combed his hair. He thought about what he was about to do. It frightened him a little. He licked his teeth to moisten them. In the kitchen he cut himself a slice of black bread but his stomach was too churned up to eat, so instead he drank a glass of water and left the house.

Each person must be reborn. Each person must be taught to rethink.

That’s what it said in the Communist pamphlet he kept under his pillow. That’s what Yuri had explained to him in detail today at Young Pioneers.

Everyone will have a new heart.

Yes, Pyotr understood that. Unless you erased the old and the bad, how could there be room for the new and the good? Which was why he was going to speak to Chairman Aleksei Fomenko. She’d be grateful in the end, the fugitive woman, he was sure she would. When she had her new heart.

Pyotr knocked on the black door that belonged to Chairman Fomenko, making a spider scuttle sideways across the wooden panel. When he received no answer he knocked again, but still no response. He stood on the doorstep so long his shirt grew sticky. The sun slid behind the mountain ridge and shadows crept up the street towards him as workers started leaving the fields.

‘Hey, Pyotr, what you doing?’

It was Yuri, his face flushed from running.

‘I’m waiting for the Chairman.’

‘What for?’

‘I’ve something to tell him.’

Yuri kicked a stone with his toe. ‘Must be important.’

‘It is.’

Yuri’s eyes brightened with interest. ‘What’s it about?’

Pyotr almost told him. It was on the tip of his tongue, the words that would betray Sofia. He wanted so much to spit them out of his mouth. She’s dangerous , but a strange quivering feeling in the depth of his stomach held him back. He knew that everything Yuri had said this morning about needing people to rethink was right. It made sense, of course it did. He wanted to do what was right but, now that it came to doing it, he wasn’t so sure. Once out there, the words would gain a kind of life of their own and he could never take them back. If he told Yuri, Yuri would tell the Chairman, the Chairman would tell the OGPU police and they would march in and arrest her and then… His mind couldn’t go further.

‘Well?’ Yuri urged. ‘What is it-’

At that moment Anastasia came hurtling down the dusty street and skidded to a halt in front of them. Trickles of sweat were carving tracks through the dirt on her thin face. She often helped her father with hoe or sickle in the fields and it was obvious that’s where she’d just come from. Her fingernails were filthy.

‘What are you doing here, Pyotr?’ She grinned at him. ‘Not in trouble, are you?’

‘Of course not,’ Pyotr objected.

‘He’s got secret information to tell the Chairman,’ Yuri said grandly.

‘Really?’ The girl’s eyes widened. ‘What is it?’

Pyotr felt himself cornered. ‘It’s about a girl in this village,’ he said in a rush. ‘About her anti-Soviet activity.’

To his astonishment, tears leapt into Anastasia’s eyes and she started to edge fearfully away from him.

‘I must go home now,’ she blurted out and ran off down the road, her hair flying out behind her, dust kicking up behind her heels. Quite clearly Pyotr could see the bulges under her faded yellow blouse, at the back where it was tucked into her shorts. The four bulges jiggled as she ran.

‘Yuri,’ he said to distract his friend’s attention from noticing them, ‘I’m not waiting any longer.’

Anastasia had stolen potatoes. Only two weeks ago a woman in a village the other side of Dagorsk was sentenced to five years in one of the labour camps for stealing half a pud of grain from her kolkhoz. Suddenly dismay spilled into his mind. If he told Chairman Fomenko about Sofia, wasn’t it his duty to tell about Anastasia too? He looked up and saw his father striding up the street towards him.