‘It is unwise to say such things aloud,’ she warned. ‘Take care.’

He spread his scarecrow arms wide, making the colt snort with alarm. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.’

‘Priest,’ she said softly, ‘you don’t yet know what evil mankind is capable of, but if you carry on like this, believe me, you soon will. It eats into your humanity until you don’t even know who you are any more…’ She stopped.

His green eyes were staring at her with fierce sorrow. She lowered her gaze, turned away from him and asked the question she’d come to ask.

‘Was there a statue of St Peter in the church before it was closed down?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did it stand?’

‘Why the interest?’

‘Does it matter to you? I need to know where it used to stand.’

The colt suckling and the scratch of the hazel broom over the yard were the only sounds to be heard. At last Priest Logvinov scraped a hand across his fiery beard.

‘They came one Sunday morning, a group of Komsomoltsky,’ he said bitterly. ‘They tore down everything, destroyed it with hammers. Burned it all in a bonfire in the middle of the street, tossed in all the ancient carvings and icons of the Virgin Mary and our beloved saints. And what wouldn’t burn they took away in their truck to melt down, including the great bronze bell and the altar with its gold cross. It was two centuries old.’ She expected him to shout and rage, but instead his voice grew softer with each word.

‘The statue of St Peter?’

‘Smashed.’ His fleshless frame shuddered. ‘It used to stand in the niche beside the south window. Now there’s a bust of Stalin in its place.’

‘I’m sorry, Priest.’

‘So am I. And God knows, so is my flock.’

‘Stay alive. For them at least.’

‘I know thy works and where thou dwellest, even where Satan’s seat is.’

Again she had the sense of a man teetering on the edge of wilful self-destruction and it filled her with a profound gloom. Quickly she thanked him and left the stables, but as she retraced her steps down the rutted track back to the street she became uncertain as to what exactly had upset her.

What was wrong? Was it fear for Rafik? Or was it because of Mikhail? And the way Lilya had rubbed her shoulder against him as though she owned that piece of his flesh. Were her own carefully constructed defences crumbling so easily?

The wind seemed to ripple through her mind, stirring up her thoughts, and it carried to her again Priest Logvinov’s words. Fear is a stain spreading over this country. And then she understood. She’d heard almost the same words months ago from Anna’s mouth.

Anna. Whose fragile heartbeats would fade away if she didn’t reach them soon.


The church – or assembly hall, as it was now called – was the only brick-constructed building in Tivil. Grey slabs of corrugated metal tipped with soft yellow lichen covered the roof. The walls were divided by rows of narrow, tapered windows set with plain glass, though one was boarded up. A reminder of the violence on the night of the meeting. A stubby open-sided tower sat above the door. Presumably where the bell had once hung. The tower was empty now, full of nothing but warm air and pigeons.

Sofia tried the large iron handle but the door didn’t budge. She cursed and pushed harder. Chyort! But she was beginning to realise that Chairman Fomenko was not the kind of person to leave anything to chance, certainly not the safety of his assembly hall. She took a good look up and down the street but at this hour there wasn’t much activity, just a child and his goat ambling out to the fields, but closer in the shade sat two old women. They wore headscarves and long black dresses, despite the heat, and seemed almost to be part of the landscape. As Sofia approached them she realised one was reading aloud from a book on her lap.

‘Dobroye utro, babushki,’ Sofia said with a shy smile. ‘Good morning.’

The old woman with the book reacted with surprise. Her ears were not good enough to have heard Sofia’s soft footfalls. The book slid instantly under a handwoven scarf, but not before Sofia saw it was a bible. It was not against the law to read the bible but it labelled you, if you did. It marked you out as someone whose mind was not in line with Soviet doctrine, someone to be watched. Sofia pretended she hadn’t seen it.

‘Could you tell me who has a key to the assembly hall, please?’

The woman who had not been reading lifted her chin off her chest. Sofia saw the milky veil of blindness over her eyes, but her hands were busy in an effortless clicking rhythm with knitting needles and a ball of green wool.

‘The Chairman keeps it,’ she said. She tilted her head. ‘Is that the tractor girl?’

‘Da, yes, it’s her,’ responded the other. She puffed out her lined cheeks into a warm smile. ‘Welcome to Tivil.’

‘Spasibo. Where will I find Chairman Fomenko?’

‘Anywhere where work is being done,’ said the blind babushka. ‘Poleena and I expect him to arrive here any moment now to count the number of stitches I’ve knitted so far this morning.’

Both old women gave good-natured chuckles that fell into the sunlight warming their laps.

‘But his house isn’t far, just the other side of the chu… of the assembly hall. His is the izba with the black door. You could try there.’

‘Thank you. I will.’


But the black door didn’t respond to her knocks. So she retraced her steps to the church and started to circle its walls, just as she’d done before. Then it had been furtive and in darkness, her ears alert for any stray sound. This time she inspected the building openly, seeking a way in.

Edging through weeds along a narrow side-path to the gloomy rear of the church, she came to a door, so old it looked like part of the stones. It was barely head height, half hidden behind a prickly bush, and it bore the raw marks of her knife blade around its heavy iron lock. In the daylight now she fingered the stubborn lock and wondered why it looked so well oiled.

‘Trying to find something, are you?’

Sofia snatched back her fingers and swung round. Behind her stood a narrow-shouldered man in a rough smock. He was smoking the stub of a hand-rolled cigarette and had a face that made Sofia think of a rodent, small-featured, sharp-toothed.

‘I’m looking for a way in.’

‘You could always use a key, but that’s just an old unused storeroom in there.’ His expression made Sofia’s skin crawl.

‘I’m told that Chairman Fomenko has the key to the hall, but he’s not at home.’

‘Of course not. He’s out working in the fields.’

Sofia tried to step round him but he blocked her path and gave her a slow smile that she didn’t like.

‘Your name, I recall from the meeting the other night, is Sofia Morozova. Mine is Comrade Zakarov.’

Instantly Sofia’s chest tightened. She recalled Zenia’s words: Boris Zakarov. He’s the Party spy round these parts. So he wasn’t creeping up behind her by chance.

‘Why so eager to get inside our hall, Comrade Morozova?’

‘I think that’s my business, don’t you?’

‘If you made it mine, I might be able to help you.’

‘Do you have a key?’

He took a long pull on his cigarette. ‘I might.’

She stared at him coldly. ‘I dropped a key of my own at the meeting. It got lost in the stampede and I need to look for it, that’s all.’

‘What value do you put on this key of yours?’ he asked, smiling his toothy smile. ‘Worth a kiss?’

His words echoed in a cold cave inside her mind. Here’s a crust of mouldy bread. Worth a kiss? Here’s a scrap of felt for gloves. Worth a kiss? Here’s a pat of butter. Worth more than a kiss? How much more?

She brushed past Boris Zakarov without a word, only to run directly into Aleksei Fomenko himself. He was striding up from the low field by the river, a net of cabbages over his shoulder and a long-legged wolfhound at his side. He didn’t look pleased to see her idling on kolkhoz time.


First, know your enemy.

She’d learned that lesson well. Know him. And seek out his weak spot. More than anybody in the village, Aleksei Fomenko was the greatest threat to her. But his weak spot was well hidden.

His back was turned towards her as he opened the door to his house. His was a proud, muscular back that had no fear of turning on anybody – Sofia envied him that. From behind she studied the neatness of his ears, emphasised by the short cropping of his brown hair, and she felt certain his mind was equally neat. A line of sweat ran down the spine of his working man’s cotton shirt. Why on earth did this Chairman of a large collective farm concentrate so hard on being a common peasant? What was driving him?

‘Have you registered?’

His manner was curt, but the look he gave her was again one of sharp interest. It occurred to her that he was a man more curious about others than he was willing to admit. Zenia had told her he wasn’t married, so Sofia wondered what his home was like. It was clear that he expected her to wait outside, but she didn’t. After the dog entered, its claws clicking on the wooden flooring, she followed him in.

‘Yes, I have registered,’ she said.

But her eyes darted quickly round the room she’d entered. Know your enemy. What did this lair tell her about the man? It was startlingly barren. Nothing on the walls, strictly no bourgeois frills or pretensions. A chair, a table, a stove, some shelves, and that was it. Chairman Fomenko obviously didn’t believe in pampering himself. Instead of a property of distinction worthy of a kolkhoz Chairman, the house was indistinguishable from any of the other village izbas. He kept the floor well-swept and the roof beams free of cobwebs. It was the house of a tidy mind. Or a secretive one.

No clues, except the dog. Sofia extended her hand. The animal touched her fingers with its damp black nose, and when it was satisfied, it allowed her to run a hand down its grey wire-brush coat. It was an elegant Russian wolfhound, a bitch with a narrow muzzle and soft brown eyes that gazed up at Sofia with an expression of such gentleness that she felt herself fall a little in love with the creature. But it was no more than a minute before the hound returned to its position next to Fomenko’s thigh and stayed there.

‘She’s beautiful,’ Sofia said. ‘What’s her name?’

‘Nadyezhda.’

‘Hope. An unusual name for a dog.’

He rested a hand on the hound’s head, fingers instinctively fondling one of its ears. He looked at Sofia as though about to explain the name, but after a second’s thought he made an abrupt turn and picked up a large iron key from a shelf of books at the rear of the room. It was too far away for Sofia to read any of the titles. He moved briskly now as though pressed for time, but when it came to handing over the key, he paused.

‘You lost something in the hall, you say?’

‘Yes. A key.’

‘I can’t spare time to help with a search myself, comrade, but if I give you the key to use, you must return it to the office as soon as you’ve finished with it.’

‘Of course.’

‘Then report to the potato brigades.’

‘I’ll work hard.’

Still he weighed the key in his hand. She had a feeling that, despite being short of time, he still had something to say to her. That made her nervous. He subjected her to a careful scrutiny, his grey eyes so intent that she had a sudden sense of the loneliness inside this man and of the effort he put into hiding it.

‘A tractor driver will be of great use to our kolkhoz next month when we start harvesting,’ he said thoughtfully.

‘I’m glad.’ She had no intention of still being in Tivil next month.

‘But everyone knows that a tractor driver can also inflict great damage to the crops if he or – more to the point – she chooses.’

‘Comrade Chairman, I am offering myself as a helper, not a wrecker.’

‘But it is significant that the moment you appear in Tivil, a barn burns down and sacks of grain go missing.’

Sofia’s pulse thudded in her throat. ‘It is a coincidence that someone else here is manipulating.’

‘Who?’

‘How do I know?’ she shrugged. ‘I’m new here.’

‘That is my point.’ He lifted the key and tapped it against the line of his jaw. ‘Come to the office at noon tomorrow. I’d like to ask you some questions.’

‘Chairman, I take exception to such a demand. I am here to give assistance to the kolkhoz of my uncle.’

His grey eyes caught her out. ‘In which case you won’t mind answering my questions, will you?’

‘Questions about what?’

‘About where you’ve come from. Who your parents were. About your family.’ He paused again and observed her closely as he added, ‘About your uncle.’