Kate Furnivall - Under a Blood Red Sky

‘And why was that?’

Keep it calm. Wrap the anger in a tight shell of control. Play it their way.

‘Because I made an error. I criticised the system of delivery. I was so eager to build the ANT-4 aeroplane for our Great Leader that I allowed my disappointment at the delay in the arrival of some essential items of equipment to cloud my judgement.’

‘You admit you were wrong.’

‘I admit it freely. I didn’t consider the magnitude of what our Leader had undertaken. I know now that the railways had to be expanded first before they could deal with the loads they had to carry.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I was young and foolish.’

The slanting eyes watched him for a long while, then, with a sudden push of his chair, its legs squealing over the tiled floor, the interrogator rose and started to pace back and forth across the narrow space behind his desk.

‘Don’t lie to me, you filthy wrecker.’

‘I am no wrecker.’

‘Don’t lie to me. You tried to wreck the Tupolev factory and now you are wrecking the Levitsky factory. Working against the forces of progress outlined for us all in the First Piatiletka. It is people like you who cause the shortage of goods.’

‘No, I told you we exceeded our targets.’

‘Who is paying you?’

That came as a shock. ‘Nobody.’

‘You were seen with a German diplomat in Moscow.’

‘That’s a lie.’

‘I am the one who decides what is a lie and what is not!’ the examiner shouted across the desk. Spittle gathered in the corner of his mouth.

‘This is a mistake.’

‘Are you saying that the Soviet Intelligence System is wrong?’

‘Only that this is-’

‘You were seen to wreck the Tivil Red Arrow kolkhoz Grain Procurement system.’

‘No.’

‘Yes. There are witnesses.’

‘Who?’

‘Silence, scum. Who is paying you? Foreign powers are frightened of our great success. It is well known that they employ subversives to destroy our industry, subversives like you who commit treason and deserve to be shot.’

Mikhail’s blood was pounding. This was worse than he expected.

‘Confess the truth, you piece of dog shit.’

‘I am innocent of these charges, I swear it. I am a Communist, loyal to Russia.’

The interrogator stopped pacing as abruptly as he’d started. With exaggerated steps he returned to the desk and lowered himself on to the seat once more. His enraged expression melted away. He looked at Mikhail with disappointment in the line of the mouth, disapproval in the narrowing of the eyes.

‘Examiner, you are wrong. I swear to you I had nothing to do with the grain in Tivil.’

The interrogator sighed and shook his head with studied regret. ‘Let’s start again.’

‘I’ve told you everything.’

‘Name?’

‘You know my name.’

‘Name?’ A hand slammed on the desk. ‘Name?’

Davinsky Camp July 1933

‘It’s a railway.’

‘What?’

‘They’re saying we have to build the railway.’

‘Oh, fuck.’

Anna looked round the group of women lined up with her outside the medical hut. They’d already been waiting in the yard for an hour, stripped to their ragged underwear. An emaciated bunch with ribs popping out like elbows and knees wider than their thighs. Most had sores of some kind or other. A railway? How could this army of skeletons construct a railway?

‘Why on earth would they want a railway up here anyway?’ Anna asked. ‘There’s nothing but trees.’

‘Trees and mosquitoes,’ one woman groaned and swatted an insect on her arm.

Each year, as soon as the surface snow melted in the forest, the area became a quagmire of marshy ground, covered by a constant layer of stagnant water where the huge mosquitoes loved to breed in their millions. They were the curse of the summer. Infected bites caused more deaths than anything else at this time of year.

‘Gold,’ Nina said and went back to picking a thorn out of her thumb.

‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s gold up here.’

‘Christ,’ a freckled girl from Leningrad exclaimed, ‘just tell me where.’

‘I heard they’re opening another mine and transporting more male prisoners up here to work it.’

The men’s labour camp was only four versts away and was twice the size of the women’s. They were the ones who felled the pines in the first place and hauled them down to the river when the women had finished trimming them. Throughout the summer great rafts of trunks floated downstream to the timber yards and one of the most feared jobs was riding on them.

‘Rail work is savage,’ Nina groaned.

‘That’s why they’re putting us through this charade of a medical. ’

‘What do they do?’ the freckled girl asked.

‘They just stand around gawping,’ Tasha sneered, ‘while a man in a white coat tells you to strip naked so he can pinch your buttocks to test your muscle tone. Then he listens to your lungs.’

‘And the swines prod you,’ Nina added, ‘in places they don’t need to prod you.’

Anna frowned at her. ‘Don’t scare her, Nina.’

The older woman shrugged. ‘That’s nothing. Something to be scared of is what I heard the bastard shitheads did to one of the men who broke an ankle out in the forest the other day when a tree crashed on it.’

‘What?’

‘The guards knew he was no use to them any more so they tied him naked to a tree and took bets on how long it would take him to die from mosquito bites.’ She leaned forward and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Apparently they settled in black swarms on his balls and-’

‘Shut up, Nina,’ Anna snapped.

‘Oh come on, I want to hear-’

‘Scum!’ A guard in the hut doorway waved a rifle in their direction. ‘Get in here. Bistro! ’

At once they trooped silently into the hut, where a row of tables was set up. Behind each sat one of the favoured prisoners who worked for the administration and had achieved a status within the camp that brought them the first rung of power. They ate more and laboured less.

One had a bored expression on her face and was crossing prisoners’ numbers off a list as they stood in front of the table. Beside her sat a cheerful-looking man wearing metal-rimmed spectacles and a white coat. A stethoscope hung from his neck.

Behind them both stood a guard. Anna knew him at once and gave him a long sullen look. For a moment he rested his tongue between his teeth, then treated her to a slow interested smile.

‘Strip,’ he ordered.

Anna hated that guard more than any other. Each time their paths crossed, just the sight of his smug face and his thick greedy fingers made her feel as though she were part of some lesser species that he could stamp on whenever the mood took him. It made no difference whether she was clothed or not. His gaze on her flesh was sticky as slug slime slithering down her skin, and at times she had even scooped up handfuls of dirt from the ground and rubbed it over her arms and legs, rubbed it hard to rid herself of its residue. When she came out of the medical hut she did it again, grabbed the dirt and scrubbed. It gave her a strange level of relief, but it also made her smile because she knew, if Sofia were here, that her friend would have raised a sceptical eyebrow and given that low laugh of hers.

‘It’s what’s inside that counts,’ she’d have said, flicking the grit from Anna’s skin. ‘The outside – well, that’s just onion peel.’

It was with Sofia in the early spring before her escape that this particular guard had hammered into Anna’s mind the level of degradation they had reached. It was a time when the long winter nights were growing shorter, and the dull skies that for many bleak months had sagged low enough to touch the tips of the pine trees abruptly lifted. The sun was climbing higher each day and the air had begun to sparkle with a clarity that dazzled the eyes. Lungs stopped hurting, skin started to heal. Muscles became warmer, worked faster.