Kate Furnivall - Under a Blood Red Sky

She touched the board where he cut his bread, the skillet in which he fried his food, the towel where he dried his hands, searching for him. She walked into his bedroom, but it was like entering a dead person’s room. A bed, a stool, hooks on the wall for his clothes. She brushed her fingers over the three check workshirts that hung there and they felt soft and worn. She scooped a handful of cloth up to her face, inhaled the scent of it. It smelled clean and fresh, of pine needles. No scent of him, of Aleksei Fomenko. He hid even that.

On a shelf stood a mirror and a dark wooden hairbrush. She picked up the brush and ran it through her own hair as she gazed into the glass, speckled with black age spots. No sign of him there, only her own reflection – and that was the face of a stranger. She went over to his plain pinewood bed. It was covered by a patchwork quilt over coarse white sheets, but when she lifted the top one there was no imprint of his body underneath. She touched his pillow and it felt soft. That surprised her. She had expected it to be hard and unyielding like his ideas. She bent over and placed her cheek on it, sank into its feathers and closed her eyes. What dreams came to him at night, what thoughts? Did he ever dream of Anna? Her hand slid under the pillow, feeling for any secret talisman but found nothing. When she stood upright she felt a dull kind of anger rise to her throat.

‘You’ve killed him!’ she shouted into the dead air of this dead house. ‘You’ve killed Vasily!’

She picked up the pillow and shook it violently. ‘You had no right,’ she moaned, ‘no right to kill him. He was Anna’s. I know I borrowed him, but he was always Anna’s and now you’ve killed her as surely as you killed him.’

She hurled the pillow across the room. It hit the log wall and slid to the floor, but as it did so something tumbled out of the white pillowcase. Something small and metal rattled into a corner as though trying to hide. Sofia leapt on it. She picked it up, placed it on the palm of her hand and studied her find. It was a pill box fashioned out of pewter, small and round and grey. A dent on one side. It reminded her of the pebble in her pocket. She opened it and inside lay a lock of blonde hair, bright as sunshine.

She waited, her skin prickling with impatience. She watched the sun march slowly across the room from one side to the other. At some point she drank a glass of water. And all the time she brooded about Mikhail Pashin and about who he really was. About what he’d done. About what she, Sofia, had sworn to do to him.

She peeled back each layer of pain, like stripping bark, and looked at what lay underneath. It was a mass of confusion and error.

Oh, my Mikhail, you made yourself suffer for what you did. You scourged yourself like the penitents of the Church, but found no divine forgiveness at the end of it. Instead you constructed a life for yourself that tried to atone and you did it with as much care as you built your bridge. I don’t want to smash my fist on it and bring it crashing down now. But… you killed Anna’s father.

Again and again darkness descended on Sofia as she sat there alone. What kind of mind? What kind of person? What kind of boy shoots human beings in cold blood? She took out the pebble and placed it on her lap but it lay lifeless, a dull white. Yet as she stroked its cold surface, she felt herself change. A vibration rippled through her body and she almost heard the stone hum, high-pitched and faint inside her head. Its colour seemed to gain a sheen, just like a pearl.

Was she imagining this? Was Rafik imagining it all? The seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. Was it true? And if it was, did it mean anything at all? Vasily was gone. That knowledge, that the Vasily she had loved in the camp no longer existed, had torn an important part of her away. It left a terrible hollowness inside, like hunger. But worse than mere hunger, it was starvation at some deep level. It gnawed at her with sharp rodent teeth. Now Vasily was gone and she was mourning the loss of him. She moaned and rocked herself in Vasily’s chair.

Finally she sat up and wrapped her fingers tight round the stone.

‘Anna,’ she said firmly, ‘wait for me. I’m coming.’

‘What are you doing in my house?’

Sofia felt a wave of sorrow for the tall, arrogant man whom she had wronged. He stood in the doorway with no marks on him, none that showed anyway, but something about him looked bruised, something in his dark grey eyes.

She remained seated. ‘Comrade Fomenko, I am here to tell you something important.’

‘Not now.’

He walked over to the enamel jug of water on the table and drank from the glass beside it, greedily, as if to flush away something inside himself. For a long moment he closed his eyes, his lashes dark on his cheek, and she knew she was intruding unforgivably.

He turned to her, his voice cold. ‘Please leave.’

‘I’ve been here all day, waiting for you.’

‘Why on earth did you assume I would return from prison today?’

‘Because of these.’

She held up the remains of the pearl necklace. They shimmered in the last of the evening light that streamed through the window. His mouth seemed to spasm. He drew in a breath, then fixed his gaze on her face.

‘Who are you? You come to this village and I try to help you because… you remind me so much of someone I once knew, but you look at me with such anger in your eyes and now invade my house when all I want is to be alone. Who are you? What are you doing here?’

‘I am a friend.’

‘You are no friend to me.’ He put down the glass, leaned against the edge of the table and shook his head, his arms folded across his broad chest. ‘So why the pearls?’

‘I used half of them to bribe an official to set you free. These,’ she cradled the pale beads in the palm of her hand where they chittered softly against each other, ‘are promised to him now you are home again.’

He stood staring at the pearls. She thought she could see a spark of recognition in his eyes, of the necklace and its distinctive gold clasp, but maybe she was wrong. Maybe it was something else. He was hard to decipher.

‘Who are you?’ he asked again in a low voice.

‘I told you, I am a friend.’

Abruptly he walked to the front door and held it open. Outside, the wolfhound lazed in the sun. ‘Get out before I throw you out.’ He didn’t shout. Just quiet words.

Sofia rose and moved closer. She noticed a rip in the collar of his shirt, a rust-coloured smear on one cuff that looked like dried blood. He was in need of a shave. Her heart went out to him, this man she’d both loved and hated.

‘Vasily, I am a friend of Anna Fedorina.’

She saw the shock hit him. A shudder. Then so still, not even his pupils moved.

‘You are mistaken, comrade.’

‘Are you telling me that you are not Vasily Dyuzheyev, only son of Svetlana and Grigori Dyuzheyev of Petrograd? Killer of the Bolshevik soldier who murdered your father, protector of Anna Fedorina who hid under a chaise longue, builder of snow sleighs and agitator for the Bolsheviks. That Vasily. Is that not you?’

He turned away from her, his back as straight as one of his field furrows. For a long time neither spoke.

‘Who sent you here?’ he asked at last without looking at her. ‘Are you an agent for OGPU, here to entrap me? I believe it was you who placed the sacks under my bed. I could see the hate in your eyes when the soldiers came for me.’ He breathed deeply. ‘Tell me why.’

‘I thought you were someone else. I am not with OGPU, have no fear of that, but I did make a terrible mistake and for that I do apologise. I was wrong.’

Still he gazed out at the soft evening clouds, at a skein of geese that arrowed across them. ‘Who did you think I was?’