Kate Furnivall - Under a Blood Red Sky

Today. Today would be the beginning.

Rafik stood in the privacy of his own room and held the stone in the palm of his hand. No larger than a duck egg and white as a swan’s throat. He’d brought out the white pebble from its bed of scarlet because he could sense danger gathering, sabres rattling, like troops lining up for battle.

It grieved him deep in his heart to know his beloved Tivil was under threat once more tonight, and each time he closed his eyes he could see the blonde-haired one, Sofia, tall and slender. She appeared to him like a blade, glinting and well honed. He could see the fine edge of her slicing through the dark dense mass that was the danger. Behind his eyes a pinpoint of pain began to throb. With a sudden urgent need, he rested his thumb on the smooth white pebble and felt its coolness against his skin. It brought to mind the ancient strength of his ancestors and cleared his mind. Now the Sight came to him more readily.

The stone had been passed down through his gypsy line for generations, father to son, and was said to have come originally from the stone that was rolled aside from the tomb of Jesus Christ in the Holy Land. Each time it lay in the centre of his palm he was acutely aware that each person who owned it imparted a sliver of their strength to its tightly packed crystals. He could sense the vibration of white life inside them.

A flame burned on the shelf. It rose out of a bowl of fragrant oil, a slender cord of smoke twisting up from the tip of the flame to the ceiling, where it settled and gathered around the large black eye painted there. Solidified like a shield. His thumb lingered over the pebble. Caressed its smooth carapace, traced a circle around it, a circle of protection. Once more round the stone.

Rafik stared at it intently.

A third time round the circle, his thumb anointing the pebble with oil this time and he could almost hear it breathing. He circled again. Again. Again.

Then he uttered a long, intricate curse in a language so strange and brittle that it rattled against the shield of smoke above his head. From the table he lifted a knife, its ivory handle carved in the shape of a serpent, and laid the tip of the blade on the inside skin of his own forearm. He drew a fine line until a trickle of red ran down to his wrist where it formed a shallow pool. He let it gather. Then tipped it.

Three drips on the stone.

‘Zenia.’

His daughter came into the room at once. Her body was sheathed in a flowing red dress tied with a wide gypsy waistband, and fresh tendrils of forest greenery wove a plait around her neck. He thought how beautiful she looked, how like her dear dead mother. She gazed at the stone in his hand with alert eyes, bright and black and curious. Yet for her it possessed no resonance. Whenever she handled it and turned it over and over on her palm, it was nothing but a white pebble with a faint web of silvery veins threaded through it, an ordinary stone. He knew it frustrated her that she could not sense her ancestors within it, and though he would never breathe a word of it aloud to her, his own disappointment was even greater than hers.

‘Go with her tonight, my Zenia. But don’t let her know you are my sight.’

‘Yes, Rafik.’ She paused. ‘Is she in danger so soon?’

‘It comes from two directions. Make sure you guard her well.’

‘And you?’

Rafik closed his fist over the stone and swept it briefly through the candle flame. ‘Darkness is coming to Tivil tonight. Fire and darkness. The fire will burn the one she loves and the darkness will quench the furnace in her.’

‘You are prepared?’ Zenia asked, her voice unsteady.

He lifted the stone and laid it against his temple, held it there, listening to something inside his head. His brow furrowed and a pulse beat strongly in his neck.

‘I am prepared.’

‘But will you fall ill?’

He smiled, a deep and tender smile. ‘Don’t be frightened, daughter. She is here.’

Pyotr liked the meetings. He loved to sit right at the front of the assembly hall, under the nose of the speaker. Every week he arrived early with his Young Pioneer shirt freshly ironed by himself, knees and hands scrubbed clean, hair slicked down into temporary submission. His eyes, like his cheeks, were shining.

‘Dobriy vecher. Good evening, Pyotr.’

A large figure with a smooth shaven head and a spade-shaped black beard took the place next to him. The boy felt the bench sag beneath the man’s weight and heard its groan of protest.

‘Dobriy vecher, Comrade Pokrovsky.’

The blacksmith, too, invariably selected the front bench at these weekly meetings but for quite different reasons from Pyotr’s. Pokrovsky liked to question the speaker.

‘Your father not here again, Pyotr?’

‘Nyet. He’s working late. At the factory.’

‘Hah! Tell me an evening that he’s not working late when there’s a meeting going on here.’

Pyotr felt his cheeks flush red. ‘No, honestly, he’s busy. Producing army uniforms, an important order. Directly from Moscow. He’s been told to keep the factory working twenty-four hours a day if necessary because what he does is so important. Clothing our brave soldiers.’

‘Proudly spoken, boy.’

Pokrovsky grinned at him. The black bush covering his mouth parted to reveal large white teeth, and it seemed to Pyotr that the blacksmith looked impressed. That made him feel less sick about his father’s absence.

‘It’s important work,’ the boy said again and then feared he was insisting too much, so shut up.

But his mood was spoiled. He slumped back on the bench and wished his friend Yuri would arrive. He stared moodily around at the plain walls that had once been covered in colourful murals of Christ and the disciples; at the remains of the ornate icons on the pillars, though most of the carving and decoration had been hacked off, leaving behind jagged edges. All the religious images had been white-washed into a clean and bland uniformity. This pleased Pyotr. As did the metal table set up on a low platform in front of him where the gilt altar had once stood, and the two sturdy chairs that waited for the speakers under the poster of the Great Leader himself. Beside it hung another, a bright red poster declaring, Smert Vragam Sovietskogo Naroda. Death to the Enemies of Soviet People.

This was as it should be. Plain. Real. For the people. Just like Father Stalin had promised. Pyotr and Yuri had read all the pamphlets, learned the Party slogans by heart and Yuri kept telling him that this new world was for them. Pyotr so wanted to believe him, he really did, but sometimes a little worm of doubt wriggled through the slogans, making holes in his certainty. Today, though, the warmth of comradeship swept through his young blood – he could feel it in the hall among the constant murmur of voices.

He looked behind him to where the benches were filling up. Most of the villagers were still in their work clothes of coarse blue cotton, though some of the younger women had discarded their dusty headscarves and changed into colourful blouses that stood out in the drab crowd. The gypsy girl was one. Her scarlet blouse with little puff sleeves looked dramatic against her long black curls, but she kept her eyes lowered and her hands quietly resting in her lap, as if she were still in a church. Pyotr always had the feeling she didn’t quite belong in the village, though he wasn’t sure why.

‘Privet, Pyotr. Hello.’

It was Yuri. He arrived in a scramble of long limbs and squeezed himself in next to Pyotr at the end of the bench, immaculate in his white Young Pioneer shirt and red neckerchief. Only then did Pyotr notice that his own ironing efforts weren’t nearly as effective as Yuri’s mother’s.

‘Have you heard?’ Yuri bent his ginger head to Pyotr’s. He was always one to know the latest news.

‘Heard what?’

‘That Stirkhov is coming to address us tonight.’

Pyotr’s chest tightened just for a second. ‘Why? What have we done?’

‘Don’t be stupid. It’s an honour for us to have the Deputy Chairman of the whole district here.’

‘No, Yuri, Stirkhov only ever comes to Tivil to complain.’

The bulky figure of Pokrovsky leaned close, so close Pyotr could see where the black bristly hairs of his neatly trimmed beard were beginning to turn white in places.

‘This time,’ the blacksmith said, fixing them with his dark eyes, ‘the bastard is probably checking up on people who don’t attend these meetings.’

Even Yuri could not suppress a shiver. His father attended diligently but his mother always claimed she was too ill. Pyotr thought of his own father and felt that horrible tightness in his chest again.

‘You wait and see, Pokrovsky,’ he blurted out. ‘Papa is soon to be awarded the decoration Hero of Labour First Class for his work for the Soviet State.’

Pokrovsky slapped a hand down on Pyotr’s fragile shoulder and roared with laughter, so loud that others in their row turned and stared.

‘May God forgive you, boy, for telling such lies in His church.’

***

It was the hands. That’s what Pyotr decided. The way they moved through the air, strong and controlling. Wide slicing gestures to underline words; sharp jabs to force a point home. Even the flat palm to silence a rowdy voice from the floor. The hands held the power. Aleksei Fomenko, as Predsedatel kolkhoza, Chairman of the collective farm, had been speaking for an hour and a half, and Pyotr couldn’t take his eyes off him. He was seated behind the table, broad-chested and so full of energy that his lightweight brown jacket didn’t look strong enough to contain him.

So far he had been listing the recent quotas set by the Central Control Commission, naming the shirkers who had fallen behind on their labour days and urging them all to greater achievements. Fomenko leaned forward as he spoke, fixing his audience with a sharp gaze and scanning each villager in the hall. No one escaped.

‘Beware of complacency,’ he urged. ‘We are nearly at the end of Stalin’s First Five Year Plan that is building our country into the leading industrialised nation in the world. We have swept aside the superstitions of the past’ – here his eyes turned to a tall, bony man with fierce eyes, a lion’s mane of chestnut hair and a straggly red beard, but his open shirt revealed the tip of a large wooden cross hanging round his neck – ‘and the concept of servitude has been replaced by the doctrine of freedom.’

He clenched both fists.

‘A new world is emerging. One that will sweep away the mistakes of past centuries, and we are the engine that drives it. Yes, you and I. And collectivism. Never forget that. The grip of the kulaks – those rich bourgeois farmers, class enemies who laughed at the tears of the poor and exploited you all, lashing your backs with their tyranny and their knout – their grip is broken thanks to the inspired vision of our Great Leader.’

Fomenko turned to the giant poster of Stalin’s all-powerful face, swathed in the red banners that hung behind him. ‘Our Great Leader,’ he repeated.

A murmur rippled through the gathering. But nobody picked up the invitation, so it was Yuri who leapt to his feet.

‘Long live our Great Leader!’ he shouted.

‘Fine words,’ Fomenko said solemnly. ‘It takes a boy to show the rest of you the way. This young tovarishch, this comrade, is a true proletarian, a man of the future.’

A woman in the row behind Pyotr rose and echoed, ‘Long live our Great Leader!’

‘Josef Stalin, the Father of Our Nation,’ Fomenko’s voice filled the hall right to the rafters where the debased remains of the saints stared down on them, ‘is the one who is carrying throughout this great Union of Soviets the torch that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin lit for us. Stalin is the one who is ridding us of the saboteurs and subversives, the wreckers and the spoilers who would destroy the drive forward of the great Five Year Plan.’ The Chairman linked his hands together, fingers firmly entwined. ‘We must unite in the great fight towards the Victory of Communism.’

‘What about some great bread to eat instead of a great fight?’ Pokrovsky the blacksmith demanded.

Yuri scowled at him. Pyotr felt himself caught between the two of them. Hesitantly he rose to his feet and in a quiet voice he declared, ‘Comrade Stalin will feed us.’

Beside him he heard the blacksmith groan and he felt himself yanked back down on the bench. Black fingernails like cockroaches sank into his freshly scrubbed flesh as they tried to hold him back, but Pyotr was determined now and started to sing the words of the Internationale: ‘Arise you workers from your slumber…’