Kate Furnivall - Under a Blood Red Sky

He stood in the middle of the room and stared down at the half-built model of the bridge on the table. ‘It’s the Brooklyn Bridge,’ he said flatly. ‘In America. It spans the East River between New York and Brooklyn.’

‘I thought it was the Forth Bridge.’

‘No.’ He frowned. Why was he talking about bridges? ‘The Forth Bridge is cantilevered, this one is a suspension bridge.’ He ran a finger along the top of one of the towers, picking out the intricate woodwork. ‘An amazing feat of construction in the 1870s. Fourteen thousand miles of wire holds it together and each cable has a breaking strain of twelve thousand tons. Its main span is five hundred metres and…’ Slowly he shook his head from side to side. ‘What was I thinking? That one day I could become an engineer again instead of a miserable factory manager? I was a fool.’

With a sudden jab of anger he hammered his fist down on top of the bridge, bringing it crashing down in a thousand pieces as each miniature girder sprang apart.

‘Mikhail!’

‘I’ve been living in a dream-world,’ he said sourly and swept the mess on to the floor. ‘I thought that I could rebuild the past, I could create a new family with Pyotr and you and that one day my dedication to the State’s demands would win me the reward of a job that I could love again.’ He placed his foot on one of the replica masonry anchorages lying on the floor and crushed it. ‘No more dreams.’

‘Why should knowing that Anna is alive destroy your dreams? Is your life so unbearable without her?’ Her eyes were fierce. ‘She still loves you.’

‘Loves me! She should loathe me.’

‘Why? Because you never came for her? Don’t worry, she knows you tried. Maria told her when she went to the apartment in Leningrad.’

‘She saw Maria?’

‘Yes. That was where she was captured. But Maria showed her the name and address you’d written down, so that’s why I came here to Tivil, to find you.’ She paused, her voice briefly unsteady. She studied her hands and tapped the two scarred fingers against her knee as if reminding herself of something. ‘Anna loves you… Vasily. She always will, till her dying breath.’

Mikhail strode across the room, seized her wrists and yanked her to her feet. As he stood there holding her he knew he’d lost her. Something deep inside him started to haemorrhage.

‘I’m not Vasily,’ he said coldly.

He felt her go rigid, but he couldn’t stop now.

‘Vasily Dyuzheyev knifed my father to death that winter’s day in 1917 on the Dyuzheyev estate. My father was the soldier in charge of the patrol, but my contribution to the massacre was twice Vasily’s. I shot his mother and I shot Anna Fedorina’s father in cold blood.’ He shook Sofia, shook her hard. ‘Now tell me,’ he demanded, ‘that she loves me. Now tell me… that you love me.’

It took them time, knot by knot, to untangle the truth. Again and again they came back to Maria to discover that she lay at the heart of the confusion. Mikhail was pacing back and forth across the room, hands dragging through his hair, trying to rip his skull apart. He could scarcely bear to look at Sofia. She was hunched in his chair, knees up under her chin, arms wrapped round her shins, eyes dark and impenetrable.

‘You say Maria told Anna that Vasily visited her twice. That he wrote down the name Mikhail Pashin with an address in Tivil and the Levitsky factory. But that wasn’t Vasily. That person was me. And according to your talk with Maria’s sister-in-law, the second man was Fomenko. You see, I only went to see her once.’ Mikhail recalled the day. The tiny apartment, stiflingly hot, and the white-haired woman so eager to please and so painfully damaged by the stroke. ‘I had no idea she believed I was Vasily Dyuzheyev. I’d been searching for her for years.’

‘Why?’

Mikhail stopped pacing. ‘Isn’t it obvious? Because I killed the child’s father. I wanted to find Anna Fedorina and do what I could to make amends for what I’d done to her family. I discovered that her mother had died years earlier and that the woman with her was her governess. But…’ he spread out his arms in a gesture of despair, ‘both vanished off the face of the earth. It was a time of chaos and disappearances were common. The civil war started and normal life became… impossible.’

‘Mikhail,’ Sofia asked quietly, ‘how old were you when you shot Svetlana Dyuzheyeva and Doktor Fedorin?’

‘Fourteen.’

‘Only three years older than Pyotr.’

Mikhail shuddered. ‘I was so like him at that age. So totally convinced that Bolshevism was the universal truth that would cleanse the world. All else was lies.’

‘Tell me what happened.’

‘I stood shoulder to shoulder with my father that day and mowed down the idle bourgeoisie like rats in a barrel.’ He turned his back on Sofia. ‘Why torment ourselves? You cannot despise me more than I despise myself for what I did. And the ultimate irony is…’ he gave a bitter laugh, ‘that all this time the boy who cut my own father’s throat that day has been living right here beside me in Tivil. Aleksei Fomenko turns out to be Vasily Dyuzheyev under another name.’

He slumped down in a chair at the table. ‘Neither he nor I recognised each other after all these years, but I hated him anyway for being the kind of person I used to be. And he hated me for having lost my faith. I was a threat. It didn’t matter how many quotas I exceeded at the factory, my mind wasn’t a Bolshevik mind and Fomenko wanted me to relearn the faith. He is a blind idealist.’

‘Don’t,’ Sofia said.

Mikhail looked at her and something wrenched in his chest. She was perched forward on the edge of his big armchair, her hair bright in a splash of sunlight, her eyes huge and sunken in her skull as though they could only look inward.

‘Sofia,’ he said gently, ‘until you came into my life I was incapable of loving anyone. I didn’t trust anyone. I despised myself and believed that others would despise me too, so I was wary in relationships. I went through the motions but nothing more. Instead I gave my love to an aircraft or a well-turned piece of machinery or…’ he gestured at the mess of wooden struts on the floor.

‘And to Pyotr.’

‘Yes, and to Pyotr.’ The hard muscles round his mouth softened. ‘When I came to this village six years ago, riding up the muddy street into my exile from Tupolev, and spotted this scrap of a child being tossed into a truck about to be carted off to some godforsaken orphanage, I saw Anna Fedorina in him, as she was on the doorstep all those years before – the same passion, the same fury at the world. So I carried the fierce little runt into my house and I petted and protected him the way I couldn’t protect her. I grew to love him as my own flesh and blood.’

‘But you still kept trying to find her.’

‘Yes.’ He cleared a space on the table in front of him, making room for his thoughts. ‘One day I did a favour for an officer in OGPU and in return he tracked down Maria for me. But I swear I only went there once, Sofia.’

Sofia nodded. ‘Maria muddled the two of you up in her head. She even told Irina the wrong names.’ Her words were heavy and lifeless. ‘Both tall with brown hair and grey eyes. She got it…’ she clenched her teeth, ‘… all wrong.’ Her gaze fixed on his face. ‘Like I did,’ she whispered.

‘No matter what happens now, I want you to know I love you and will always love you.’

She leapt to her feet, shaking her head violently. ‘No, Mikhail. I came here because I swore an oath to Anna. To find Vasily and to destroy the killer of her father if I could. Instead I’ve destroyed Vasily.’