Under A Blood Red Sky Part 60

64.

Tivil Spring 1934

The air was crystal clear, and high above Tivil the wispy trail of an aeroplane skimmed across a pale blue sky. Mikhail gazed up at it, shading his eyes.

'It's an ANT-9,' Pyotr said confidently. 'The same as the Krokodil Krokodil.'

'You're right,' Mikhail grinned. 'You'll be a pilot yet.'

They were in the graveyard at the back of what was once the church, the gra.s.s still fragile with frost where the building's shadow lay, but the spring suns.h.i.+ne was tempting out the first buds. Sofia was kneeling beside Rafik's grave. In her hand she held a bunch of podsnezhniki podsnezhniki, snowdrops, their delicate heads softly swaying as she placed them in a jar on the grave.

'Where did you find the flowers so early?' Mikhail asked.

She smiled up at him. 'Where do you think?'

'Beneath the cedar tree.'

'Of course.'

She and Anna had picked them together. Sofia smiled at the memory - it was there that Anna had shyly whispered the news that she was pregnant.

'It's a secret,' Anna smiled, 'but I can't keep it from you. Now that I'm so much better, it'll be safe.'

'Have you told your husband yet?'

'Yes.'

'And?'

Anna touched her stomach. 'We're naming him Vasily.'

'Let's hope it's a boy then,' Sofia had laughed.

Now she took the white stone from her pocket and rested it on Rafik's grave.

'Why do you always do that?' Pyotr asked.

He'd grown taller in the winter months, his shoulders suddenly broader and his eyes more thoughtful. Sofia had found herself watching him and wondering.

'I do it because this stone connects Tivil to Rafik.'

She picked it up. Neither Communism nor the Church had brought peace to Tivil, but this was something different, a strength that seemed to rise from the heart of the earth itself. She looked into the boy's eyes.

'Hold the stone,' she said.

Pyotr didn't hesitate, as if he'd been waiting a long time for this moment. His hand grasped the stone and immediately his young eyes filled with light in the bright spring morning.

'Pyotr, before your Papa adopted you, did you have brothers?'

'Yes, but when I was three,' his eyes were studying the milky stone, 'they all died in the typhus epidemic.'

'Six older brothers? Making you the seventh son.'

'Yes. How do you know that?'

She didn't answer his question.

'Pyotr, would you like to come for walks with me sometimes when it's dark? And learn to shape the thoughts that form in your mind?'

Pyotr looked to his father. Mikhail gazed at his son with gentle regret and nodded. 'Take care of my son, Sofia.'

'I will, I promise.'

Pyotr stood, still fingering the stone. 'When will we start?' he asked.

Sofia gazed round at the village that was her home, at the houses so st.u.r.dy and yet so fragile in the suns.h.i.+ne.

'Tonight,' she murmured. 'We'll start tonight.'

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1.

Russia December 1917 The train growled to a halt. Grey steam belched from its heaving engine into the white sky, and the twenty-four freight carriages behind bucked and rattled as they lurched shrieking to a standstill. The sound of horses and of shouted commands echoed across the stillness of the empty frozen landscape.

'Why have we stopped?' Valentina Friis whispered to her husband.

Her breath curled between them like an icy curtain. It seemed to her despairing mind to be the only part of her that still had any strength to move. She clutched his hand. Not for warmth this time, but because she needed to know he was still there at her side. He shook his head, his face blue with cold because his coat was wrapped tightly around the sleeping child in his arms.

'This is not the end,' he said.

'Promise me,' she breathed.

He gave his wife a smile and together they clung to the rough timbered wall of the cattle wagon that enclosed them, pressing their eyes to the slender gaps between the planks. All around them others did the same. Desperate eyes. Eyes that had already seen too much.

'They mean to kill us,' the bearded man on Valentina's right stated in a flat voice. He spoke with a heavy Georgian accent and wore his astrakhan hat well down over his ears. 'Why else would we stop in the middle of nowhere?'

'Oh sweet Mary, mother of G.o.d, protect us.'

It was the wail of an old woman still huddled on the filthy floor and wrapped in so many shawls she looked like a fat little Buddha. But underneath the stinking rags was little more than skin and bone.

'No, babushka babushka,' another male voice insisted. It came from the rear end of the carriage where the ice-ridden wind tore relentlessly through the slats, bringing the breath of Siberia into their lungs. 'No, it'll be General Kornilov. He knows we're on this G.o.dforsaken cattle train starving to death. He won't let us die. He's a great commander.'

A murmur of approval ran around the clutch of gaunt faces, bringing a spark of belief to the dull eyes, and a young boy with dirty blond hair who had been lying listlessly in one corner leapt to his feet and started to cry with relief. It had been a long time since anyone had wasted energy on tears.

'Dear G.o.d, I pray you are right,' said a hollow-eyed man with a stained bandage on the stump of his arm. At night he groaned endlessly in his sleep, but by day he was silent and tense. 'We're at war,' he said curtly. 'General Lavr Kornilov cannot be everywhere. '

'But I tell you he's here. You'll see.'

'Is he right, Jens?' Valentina tilted her face up to her husband.

She was only twenty-four, small and fragile, but possessed sensuous dark eyes that could, with a glance, for a brief moment, make a man forget the cold and the hunger that gnawed at his insides or the weight of a child in his arms. Jens Friis was ten years older than his wife and fearful for her safety if the roving Bolshevik soldiers took one look at her beautiful face. He bent his head and brushed a kiss on her forehead.

'We shall soon know,' he said.

The red beard on his unshaven cheek was rough against Valentina's cracked lips, but she welcomed the feel of it and the smell of his unwashed body. They reminded her that she had not died and gone to h.e.l.l. Because h.e.l.l was exactly what this felt like. The thought that this nightmare journey across thousands of miles of snow and ice might go on forever, through the whole of eternity, that this was her cruel d.a.m.nation for defying her parents, was one that haunted her, awake and asleep.

Suddenly the great sliding door of the wagon was thrust open and fierce voices shouted, 'Vse is vagona, bistro.' 'Vse is vagona, bistro.' Out of the wagons. Out of the wagons.

The light blinded Valentina. There was so much of it. After the perpetually twilit world inside the wagon, it rushed at her from the huge arc of sky, skidded off the snow, and robbed her of vision. She blinked hard and forced the scene around her into focus.

What she saw chilled her heart.

A row of rifles. All aimed directly at the ragged pa.s.sengers as they scrambled off the train and huddled in anxious groups, their coats pulled tight to keep out the cold and the fear. Jens reached up to help the old woman down from their wagon, but before he could take her hand she was pushed from behind and landed facedown in the snow. She made no sound, no cry. But she was quickly yanked onto her feet by the soldier who had thrown open the wagon door and shaken as carelessly as a dog shakes a bone.

Valentina exchanged a look with her husband. Without a word they slid their child from Jens's shoulder and stood her between them, hiding her in the folds of their long coats as they moved forward together.

'Mama?' It was a whisper. Though only five years old, the girl had already learned the need for silence. For stillness.

'Hush, Lydia,' Valentina murmured but could not resist a glance down at her daughter. All she saw was a pair of wide tawny eyes in a heart-shaped bone-white face and little booted feet swallowed up by the snow. She pressed closer against her husband and the face no longer existed. Only the small hand clutching her own told her otherwise.

The man from Georgia in the wagon was right. This was truly the middle of nowhere. A G.o.dforsaken landscape of nothing but snow and ice and the occasional windswept rock face glistening black. In the far distance a bank of skeletal trees stood like a reminder that life could exist here. But this was no place to live.

No place to die.

The men on horseback didn't look much like an army. Nothing remotely like the smart officers Valentina was used to seeing in the ballrooms and troikas troikas of St Petersburg or ice skating on the Neva, showing off their crisp uniforms and impeccable manners. These men were different. Alien to that elegant world she had left behind. These men were hostile. Dangerous. About fifty of them had spread out along the length of the train, alert and hungry as wolves. They wore an a.s.sortment of greatcoats against the cold, some grey, others black, and one a deep muddy green. But all cradled the same long-nosed rifle in their arms and had the same fanatical look of hatred in their eyes. of St Petersburg or ice skating on the Neva, showing off their crisp uniforms and impeccable manners. These men were different. Alien to that elegant world she had left behind. These men were hostile. Dangerous. About fifty of them had spread out along the length of the train, alert and hungry as wolves. They wore an a.s.sortment of greatcoats against the cold, some grey, others black, and one a deep muddy green. But all cradled the same long-nosed rifle in their arms and had the same fanatical look of hatred in their eyes.

'Bolsheviks,' Jens murmured to Valentina, as they were herded into a group where the fragile sound of prayers trickled like tears. 'Pull your hood over your head and hide your hands.'

'My hands?'

'Yes.'

'Why my hands?'

'Comrade Lenin likes to see them scarred and roughened by years of what he calls honest labour.' He touched her arm protectively. 'I don't think piano playing counts, my love.'

Valentina nodded, slipped her hood over her head and her one free hand into her pocket. Her gloves, her once beautiful sable gloves, had been torn to shreds during the months in the forest, that time of travelling on foot by night, eating worms and lichen by day. It had taken its toll on more than just her gloves.

'Jens,' she said softly, 'I don't want to die.'

He shook his head vehemently and his free hand jabbed toward the tall soldier on horseback who was clearly in command. The one in the green greatcoat.

'He's the one who should die - for leading the peasants into this ma.s.s insanity that is tearing Russia apart. Men like him open up the floodgates of brutality and call it justice.'

At that moment the officer called out an order and more of his troops dismounted. Rifle barrels were thrust into faces, thudded against backs. As the train breathed heavily in the silent wilderness, the soldiers pushed and jostled its cargo of hundreds of displaced people into a tight circle fifty yards away from the rail track and then proceeded to strip the wagons of possessions.

'No, please, don't,' shouted a man at Valentina's elbow as an armful of tattered blankets and a tiny cooking stove were hurled out of one of the front wagons. Tears were running down his cheeks.

She put out a hand. Held his shoulder. No words could help. All around her, desperate faces were grey and taut.

In front of each wagon the meagre pile of possessions grew as the carefully h.o.a.rded objects were tossed into the snow and set on fire. Flames, fired by coal from the steam engine and a splash of vodka, devoured the last sc.r.a.ps of their self-respect. Their clothes, the blankets, photographs, a dozen treasured icons of the Virgin Mary and even a miniature painting of Tsar Nicholas II. All blackened, burned, and turned to ash.

'You are traitors. All of you. Traitors to your country.'

The accusation came from the tall officer in the green greatcoat. Though he wore no insignia except a badge of crossed sabres on his peaked cap, there was no mistaking his position of authority. He sat upright on a large heavy-muscled horse, which he controlled effortlessly with an occasional flick of his heel. His eyes were dark and impatient, as if this cargo of White Russians presented him with a task he found distasteful.

'None of you deserve to live,' he said coldly.

A deep moan rose from the crowd. It seemed to sway with shock.

He raised his voice. 'You exploited us. You maltreated us. You believed the time would never come when you would have to answer to us us, the people of Russia. But you were wrong. You were blind. Where is all your wealth now? Where are your great houses and your fine horses now? The tsar is finished and I swear to you that-'

A single voice rose up from somewhere in the middle of the crowd. 'G.o.d bless the tsar. G.o.d protect the Romanovs.'

A shot rang out. The officer's rifle had bucked in his hands. A figure in the front row fell to the ground, a dark stain on the snow.

'That man paid for your your treachery.' His hostile gaze swept over the stunned crowd with contempt. 'You and your kind were parasites on the backs of the starving workers. You created a world of cruelty and tyranny where rich men turned their backs on the cries of the poor. And now you desert your country, like rats fleeing from a burning s.h.i.+p. And you dare to take the youth of Russia with you.' He swung his horse to one side and moved away from the throng of gaunt faces. 'Now you will hand over your valuables.' treachery.' His hostile gaze swept over the stunned crowd with contempt. 'You and your kind were parasites on the backs of the starving workers. You created a world of cruelty and tyranny where rich men turned their backs on the cries of the poor. And now you desert your country, like rats fleeing from a burning s.h.i.+p. And you dare to take the youth of Russia with you.' He swung his horse to one side and moved away from the throng of gaunt faces. 'Now you will hand over your valuables.'

At a nod of his head, the soldiers started to move among the prisoners. Systematically they seized all jewellery, all watches, all silver cigar cases, anything that had any worth, including all forms of money. Insolent hands searched clothing, under arms, inside mouths, and even between b.r.e.a.s.t.s, seeking out the carefully hidden items that meant survival to their owners. Valentina lost the emerald ring secreted in the hem of her dress, while Jens was stripped of his last gold coin in his boot. When it was over, the crowd stood silent except for a dull sobbing. Robbed of hope, they had no voice.

But the officer was pleased. The look of distaste left his face. He turned and issued a sharp command to the man on horseback behind him. Instantly a handful of mounted soldiers began to weave through the crowd, dividing it, churning it into confusion. Valentina clung to the small hand hidden in hers and knew that Jens would die before he released the other one. A faint cry escaped from the child when a big bay horse swung into them and its iron-shod hooves trod dangerously close, but otherwise she hung on fiercely and made no sound.

'What are they doing?' Valentina whispered.