What was Sofia up to?
Lock-up was any moment and if she were locked out of the hut she’d die of hypothermia overnight. The cookhouse? The dump? The banya? The laundry? Anna skimmed past them all, keeping to the shadows, but there was no sign of her. Her breath came in painfully short gasps and she told herself it was the cold, not fear, but she was frightened. Ever since that moment when the guard had tried to kiss her lips the evening before last, Sofia had changed.
As she ducked her head against the wind, a sound caught her ears. It was a man’s voice and he was growling. There was no other word for the animal noises he was making. Anna recognised the sound at once, a sound she knew far too well, a sound that made her feel sick. She ran. Nobody ever ran in Davinsky Camp, but she ran behind the tool hut and, in the dense shadows, she found them, Sofia and Mishenko. They were almost knee-deep in snow and jammed up against the hut wall, Sofia’s skirt up round her waist, his hands clutching her pale white buttocks as he thrust into her again and again. The animal growls sounded as though they were tearing her insides out, like wolves at a deer’s tender belly.
Anna loathed the man for what he’d done to herself and now for what he was doing to Sofia. She opened her mouth to scream at him but, at that exact moment, with head thrown back and his face in a rictus that looked like agony, he finished the job and instantly withdrew. The sudden silence came as a shock.
He turned away to adjust his clothing for only a split second, but that split second was all the Four Horsemen needed to gallop down on him with a vengeance. Quick as a rat Sofia drew a rock from her jacket and brought it down on the back of his skull with all her strength. He collapsed forward, face in the snow, with no more than a soft grunt. Sofia threw herself on his back and kept pounding till Anna caught her by the wrist.
‘Enough, Sofia, that’s enough. You must stop now.’
‘It’ll never be enough.’
‘He’s dead.’
A sigh rose up from somewhere deep in Sofia’s chest and she stood up, her whole body shaking and her eyes unrecognisable. They gleamed white in the shadows and she was breathing hard.
‘Yes,’ she said harshly. ‘He’s dead. He won’t be bothering you again.’
‘He won’t be bothering either of us.’
Anna took her trembling friend into her arms and held her close, rocking her gently. They stood like that for a long time despite the sub-zero temperature, listening to each other’s heartbeat.
‘Lock-up,’ Anna whispered. ‘We must be quick.’
It was the work of two minutes to scoop out a man-sized hole in the deep snowdrift against the rear of the hut and bundle the dead meat inside it. The snowdrift would not melt until spring and by then who would care? They kicked fresh snow over the mound, prayed for a blizzard overnight, then ran back to their hut before the door was locked. The knowledge that in their pockets they carried a pack of Belomor cigarettes, a steel lighter, a penknife, half a bar of chocolate and a wristwatch gave them a wild energy that made them laugh out loud. A haul like that would feed them most of the winter.
47
Tivil July 1933
Sofia waited in the dark, tense and breathing hard. She was standing by the cedar tree at the gateway to Tivil. He would come, she was certain he’d come. The night sky was overcast, dark and damp, with a spit of rain in the wind. When her limbs started to shiver she was glad, because it meant the scorching heat within her was leaking out. In the silence, in the cold, she heard Rafik’s words again: Reach deep into yourself, you are strong.
Strong?
She didn’t feel strong, she felt battered and exhausted. She wanted to weep with need. Questions crashed round her brain: what exactly was it that Rafik could see inside her? What happened inside that chamber? Who were those silver-haired people and why had the bats come for her? And would Mikhail come? Would he? She had to believe he would, whether as a result of Rafik’s weird ceremony or simply because Fomenko had responded to her veiled threat and decided to throw his weight around in the right places. Whichever it was she didn’t care, so long as he came. She took a deep slow breath to calm her quivering mind and felt the night breeze wash through her lungs, flushing out the panic.
Mikhail, my Mikhail. Come to me.
She murmured the words aloud and heard a flutter of wings for a second, but when she looked up the sound was gone and she wondered if her tired mind had imagined it. On the edge of Tivil she could sense the air somehow growing thinner, the danger sharper. The scars on her fingers ached the way they only did when she was nervous.
Reach deep.
Her eyes scoured the blackness for a long time and saw nothing. And then a tingling sensation started in the soles of her feet, spreading to the palms of her hands, and suddenly her heart tightened in her chest. Her legs started to move and at first she was aware of the ruts under her feet, of stones and potholes, of stumbling awkwardly in the darkness and then she was flying down the road, racing towards him, arms outstretched, raindrops brushing her cheek.
Mikhail was in her arms, warm and safe and alive. For a second she was frightened her senses were betraying her. This wasn’t real, just another version of her desire unfolding inside her head. But his clothes stank, dried blood lay stiff on his collar, his unshaven jaw felt rough against her skin. His poor lips were swollen. But not too swollen to press hard on hers or to whisper into her mouth over and over, ‘Sofia, my love, Sofia.’
He washed in the yard at the back of the house. A dim pool of light spilled from the room’s oil lamp but most of the yard lay in shadows. She watched him from inside as he stripped off every filthy scrap of clothing, threw it in a pile on the ground and set light to it. The flames were small and smouldering in the damp air but they sent golden fingers of light shimmering up his long naked thigh and gleaming over the strong curve of his buttock. Sofia felt a surge of desire but, as the shadows shifted and draped themselves over him like a cloak, she moved away from the window to give him his privacy.
When he eventually entered the room he was wearing a clean black shirt and trousers. At the sight of her tucked into his big wing chair his face broke into a smile of relief, as though he feared she might have gone. His eyes were a dull and damaged grey that bruised her heart. One eye and his lips were swollen, a tooth chipped, and he was moving awkwardly, something hurting inside, but when she started to ask he dismissed it as nothing.
She rose, kissed his mouth, gently soothing it with her tongue, and eased him into the chair. She curled up at his feet with her chin resting on his knee. Her hands began to stroke the calves of his legs, drawing the anger from his muscles, willing her strength into him. The familiar masculine scent of him at last silenced the trembling in her chest.
‘You look wonderful,’ he said and tenderly touched her cheek, as if it were the finest fragile porcelain. His finger traced the line of her lips. ‘You shine.’
She kissed the tip of his finger. ‘I missed you.’
He ruffled her blonde hair and twisted a lock of it round his forefinger as though attaching her to himself. The silence between their words dropped away. He cupped his hand round the back of her head, cradling it.
‘You were with me,’ he whispered, his gaze intent on her face. ‘All the time you were with me.’