‘You’re living with the gypsies, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then show some sense. Go and stay there. This night has only just started.’
‘You and I,’ she said in a voice so low he barely heard it in the hubbub around him, ‘have only just started.’
He frowned and shook his head. Each time they met she seemed to have a way of knocking him off balance. He broke free from her smile. ‘Pyotr!’ he shouted again.
The boy was released and started to clamber over the benches towards him. But halfway down the hall Priest Logvinov was standing erect like a scarecrow, raised up on one of the bench seats, his red hair like flames around his head, the cross brandished like a weapon.
‘Abomination!’ he boomed out. ‘Thou shalt have no other god before me, saith the Lord.’ His finger pointed at Stirkhov’s chest, as if it would drill through to the blasphemous heart within it.
‘Don’t, Priest,’ Mikhail shouted.
He saw Stirkhov, alone now on the platform, deliberately push over the metal table so that it fell with a screech on to the floor. With no sign of haste the Raikom Deputy drew a Mauser pistol from inside his leather jacket and pointed it straight at the ranting figure less than ten metres in front of him.
‘Priest! Get down!’ Mikhail bellowed, hurling himself towards the bench.
But it was the strange girl who saved him. ‘Aleksandr Stirkhov,’ she called, loud and clear above the noise in the hall. The muzzle of the gun wavered as he turned his head.
All she did was smile at him, but instantly the soft pink tip of Stirkhov’s tongue peeked out from between his lips.
Her smile widened, warm and distracting.
Time enough. For Mikhail to reach the exposed priest, drag him down into the crowd and push him along with the jostling flow to the door.
‘Christe eleison,’ the priest uttered solemnly in Latin. ‘Christ have mercy on us in this unbelieving world.’
Suddenly Pyotr’s worried face appeared at Mikhail’s elbow. He seized his son’s arm in one hand and the girl’s in the other and propelled them both through the door.
18
Davinsky Camp July 1933
Anna stole half a potato from the camp kitchen. She was getting good at it. Or was it just that she was becoming invisible? It was more than possible.
When she looked at her arms and legs all she could see beneath the mosquito bites was a skeleton covered in an almost transparent grey film, so transparent that she could see the bones underneath. They peered through in glimpses of white. She sometimes prodded them with her finger – to test how strong they were, she told herself, but really it was to make sure they were still there.
She didn’t want to steal the potato, any more than she’d wanted to steal the bread last week or the greasy strip of pork fat the week before that. Each time she knew she’d be caught, and each time she was. A shriek of protest from a kitchen worker; a firm grip dragging her to the floor. But always too late. She’d already crammed the food into her mouth before they could wrench it back from her. She’d taken the punishment beatings and prayed that the white sticks under her skin wouldn’t snap. So far they hadn’t, but they’d come close. If she was caught stealing again they’d shoot her.
She felt the solid lump of boiled potato work its way, one millimetre at a time, down into her stomach where it settled warm and comforting, like a friend. She patted the hollow cavity where she assumed her stomach still lay. No, not like a friend. Because of a friend. Because of Sofia.
Anna smiled and felt absurdly happy. She had achieved something positive, keeping herself alive for one more day, and it had been so simple this time, she couldn’t believe it.
‘You!’ a guard, the one with scabs on his eyebrows, had yelled at her when she was left behind in the yard after roll-call. ‘Get over here. Bistro!’
She had to concentrate when she moved, was conscious of sliding one foot forward, then the other, then the first one again. Like pushing logs uphill. She was slow and he was impatient, so he clipped her elbow with his rifle butt.
‘Unload those boxes into the kitchen. And be careful, suka, you stupid bitch. They’re new.’
It was that easy. Shift boxes. Unload pans. Keep eyes on floor. Place each iron pot on shelf. Slip potato in pocket. No beating. No punishment cell.
‘For you, Sofia,’ she whispered and again rubbed the contented spot where the potato lay. She’d promised herself and she’d promised Sofia. But waiting was hard and time after time she had to oust the thought that it would be much easier to lie down and die. With a raw gasp, she started to cough.
Are you coming, Sofia? Or is life out there too good?
‘Listen!’ Anna exclaimed. She paused from her task of stripping branches, axe in mid-air. ‘Listen to that.’ The other prisoners hesitated.
It was birdsong. A pure silken note that rose and fell and filled the air with the sweet sound of freedom. It set up an ache in Anna’s heart.
‘Get on with your work, if you’ve any sense,’ growled the short Muscovite who had toiled all day beside Anna with the silent precision of a machine and never missed her norm.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Anna insisted.
‘What good is beauty to me? I can’t eat it.’
Anna returned to lopping limbs off the tree. The tall graceful pine lay stiff as a fallen soldier at her feet, oozing its sticky sap. She had long ago passed the point where she felt any sorrow for the forest and the systematic massacre of thousands of trees taking place within it, because in a labour camp there was no room for such feelings. Nothing existed except work, sleep and food. Work. Sleep. Eat. Above all, eat. It frightened her sometimes to feel that her humanity was slipping away from her and she feared she was becoming no more than a forest animal, chewing on twigs and scrabbling in the earth for roots.
And then a small drab-brown bird opened its beak and the sound that poured forth brought her winging back to the human race. To the memory of a Chopin waltz and a young man’s arm sweeping her off her feet. The ache grew worse inside her.
‘Yes,’ she said to the bent back of the woman from Moscow. ‘You can feed on beauty.’
‘Blyad! ’ the woman swore contemptuously. ‘You’ll be dead before the year is out.’
Anna had no intention of dying. Not yet anyway.
She sank her axe into the scented white wood with determination, sweeping away the last tangle of feathery branches and moving on to the next trunk in the row. Around her, for as far as she could see, bent figures chopped and hacked and cursed their way through the thousands of felled pines, preparing them for their rafting trek downriver. Anna slapped a hand on the insects that settled greedily on her sweat-soaked skin. The mosquitoes were even worse than usual today. The sun burned above her, heating up this water-logged landscape so that the marshes hummed with newly-winged life. The insects drove everyone mad. But she’d promised Sofia that she would hold on.
Sofia, be quick.
She wouldn’t let herself think of the possibility that Sofia might be dead. It was too agonising a thought, too black and too huge to fit inside her head. Instead she watched the forest each day for movement among the trees, for a shadow that shouldn’t be there. She remembered clearly the first time she ever laid eyes on Sofia. It was back in the bitter winter of 1929 when Anna had not long been a prisoner in the camp and was as green and as soft as the wood she was chopping into.
‘Davay! Davay! Let’s go, scum of the earth!’
The guards had stamped their feet on the hard packed snow, in a hurry to move the prisoner brigades on to the next timber haul a verst away.