‘It’s what’s inside that counts,’ she’d have said, flicking the grit from Anna’s skin. ‘The outside – well, that’s just onion peel.’

It was with Sofia in the early spring before her escape that this particular guard had hammered into Anna’s mind the level of degradation they had reached. It was a time when the long winter nights were growing shorter, and the dull skies that for many bleak months had sagged low enough to touch the tips of the pine trees abruptly lifted. The sun was climbing higher each day and the air had begun to sparkle with a clarity that dazzled the eyes. Lungs stopped hurting, skin started to heal. Muscles became warmer, worked faster.

‘Smoke break! Perekur! ’

‘Axe sharpening!’ Sofia shouted across the rows of felled trunks to the nearest guard. ‘For two.’

‘Bistro! ’ he grumbled. ‘Quickly!’

Sofia beckoned to Anna and led the way to the ditch on the edge of the forest, dug out as a latrine for the hundreds of workers. Behind it lay a boulder that was still half buried in snow. Sofia slid easily down the other side of it into a steep-sided hollow, at the bottom of which flowed a steady stream of melt water. Immediately she crouched at the water’s edge, honing her axe blade with smooth strokes on one of the wet stones. She turned her head, not breaking the action, and smiled at Anna. It always astonished Anna, that smile, because it still contained so much hope. How had she kept it all in there, hidden behind her cool blue eyes? Was there a secret store of it inside her thin chest?

‘A guard is coming,’ Anna warned.

Sofia shrugged, her hands still scything the blade expertly across the stone.

‘He likes to kill, this one,’ Anna said.

Only yesterday this same guard had clubbed to death a woman from the Tver region for no more than stumbling and sending the top branch from the pile in her arms crashing down on his foot. Sofia looked up towards the forest and made a little grimace as she saw that the guard had arrived on the boulder above them.

‘What the fuck do you scum think you’re doing?’ His rifle was pointed at Anna’s head. ‘I didn’t give you bitches permission to stop to sharpen axes.’

‘It’s our smoke break,’ Anna pointed out. ‘We’re not wasting work time, and anyway we did ask permission.’

‘We want to work more efficiently for our Great Leader and Wise Teacher,’ Sofia said coldly. ‘We don’t intend to hold back our brigade from meeting their norm.’

The guard’s eyes narrowed and he pushed back his shapka hat with the tip of his rifle. Neither prisoner moved a muscle and finally he nodded.

‘Go ahead. Bistro!’

Anna knelt down beside Sofia and started to hone her blade, but she was nowhere near as expert as Sofia. The axe was a sad and pathetic object with its chipped blade and its head bound in place by string and a scrap of wire, but the haft was strong and well shaped to the curve of a hand. Sofia took it from Anna with the flicker of a smile and again resumed the steady rhythmic sharpening of the steel on the flat wet rock, first one side, then the other. She made it look easy.

‘Your fingers have the skills of a swordsmith,’ Anna murmured. They were long and muscular except for the two that were scarred.

‘After my father was whipped to death,’ Sofia whispered under her breath, ‘I worked on my uncle’s farm for years. But anyway, I was the last in a line of seven daughters, so my father taught me the skills of the son he never had.’

‘No talking!’ the guard yelled and suddenly leapt down on to the stretch of shingle below, so that he was only half a dozen strides from them.

Anna saw him glance furtively back over his shoulder to ensure no one had followed and immediately she knew he intended trouble. She stood quickly and faced him. He hadn’t shaved this morning and his heavy jaw was dark and threatening, his eyes hungry. His nose was crooked as though it had been broken at some time, and Anna experienced a strong urge to break it again – with her axe. Lazily he swung the point of the rifle till it was aimed at Sofia’s unprotected back. Sofia must have sensed the threat but she didn’t move. Just her hands, snick-snick-snick as they sharpened. The guard licked his soft lips.

‘I don’t like you,’ he snarled at Sofia.

‘I don’t like you either,’ she answered softly, without turning round. She might have been talking to the axe blade.

‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t put a bullet between your ribs.’

Anna stepped quickly between them, blocking his view of the figure still at the water’s edge.

‘Ah, pretty one, so you want to play, do you? I tell you what,’ his mouth spread into a wide wolfish grin that revealed teeth as crooked as his nose. ‘I won’t put a bullet through your disrespectful friend if you give me a kiss from those luscious red lips of yours.’

Anna felt a hot rush of fury, less for the guard’s abuse of her than for the fact that he made her want to kill him in cold blood. That raging desire frightened her. She started to move towards him.

‘Nyet! No, nyet!’ It was Sofia. She was rising from the ground, uncurling like a snake, the axe already swinging in her hand.

But Anna threw herself forward before Sofia could reach him, clasped her arms round the guard’s hard-muscled neck and pressed her lips on his mouth. It tasted foul, of tobacco smoke and onions and acid lust. She wanted to spit, to bite, to rip his face off with her teeth. But his lips were opening under hers, yawning into a pair of cavernous jaws that started to devour her. She fought to pull away but his arms were strong around her, jerking her body into hard contact with his. Their coats were bulky between them but his hand pushed in, squeezing, pinching, prodding at her breast. His tongue rammed into her mouth, huge and choking. She couldn’t breathe.

‘Enough!’ Sofia’s voice, ice cold.

Abruptly he was gone from Anna. His smell still clung to her body but he had backed off and was staring at Sofia. She was standing with his rifle in her hands. She had snatched it from him while his mind and his hands were in his trousers.

‘Shoot him,’ Anna hissed.

‘Hush,’ Sofia murmured soothingly. Her face was bone white. ‘Here,’ she said to the guard and threw him the rifle.

Anna was sure he would shoot them both but some deep part of him had lost its nerve. He stared grimly into Sofia’s cold eyes, spat an oath at them both, then leapt on to the boulder and disappeared back to the Work Zone.

Anna bent over and vomited the taste of him from her mouth.

A soft hand touched the back of her head. ‘Anna.’

Anna straightened, wiped her mouth on her sleeve. ‘How many more years of this can we take? We should have let the bastard shoot us.’

‘No, Anna,’ Sofia said fiercely. ‘Don’t ever think that.’

‘Why didn’t you kill him while you had the chance?’

‘Because they’d all have been down on us like a pack of hounds, tearing us to shreds and relishing every second of it. Men such as these enjoy their work. When I was very young and my father was out performing his priestly duties in Petrograd with me on his back, men just like this one – except they wore the Tsar’s colours instead of Stalin’s – came to our house and killed my mother and six sisters.’ Her eyes had darkened and the shadows beneath them had sunk into deep purple hollows.

‘Sofia,’ Anna said quietly, ‘not all men are like that.’

Sofia laughed, a harsh scathing sound as chill as the melt water. ‘So how in God’s name do you know which ones you can trust?’

39

Dagorsk July 1933


Mikhail wasn’t frightened of the pain. Of course it would be bad, he was under no illusion about that, but they hadn’t brought him here to kill him. Not yet anyway. So they’d make sure he survived the beatings. No, what frightened him was the degradation. The humiliation. Their obscene seizing of his sense of self and wiping the floor with it, ripping him apart mentally.

They would be expert at it, he was in no doubt of that. And he knew he was a proud man, too proud maybe. Would he, Mikhail Pashin, the person he knew so intimately and had learned to both love and hate with a passion over thirty years of life, would he survive? Not his body. Him. His self.

That’s what frightened him.


The cement floor was wet, freshly hosed down. Barefoot, Mikhail was marched into the empty cell by two warders, hands cuffed behind his back. The door swung shut with a heavy metal clang. The warder with the lean face and impatient eyes locked it with an iron key that was attached to his belt by a chain, then he turned a smile on Mikhail. Except it wasn’t a smile, it was a baring of the teeth. The second warder sniggered in anticipation. He was a solid big-muscled ox of a man with almost no forehead, and broad beefy fists which he flexed and unflexed while the pupils of his vodka-shot eyes grew huge with desire. An objective part of Mikhail’s mind registered that these two men were well chosen for the work. But the subjective part of his mind, the part that knew how to hate, hated them as bastard brutes who needed to be put down the way you put down a mad dog. He could smell the rabies on them.

Fight or yield? It would make no difference. Two heavy rubber nightsticks and a metal bar would be the victors. Fists that were chained behind your back were no fists at all. He had no weapons, except his hatred. His heart was pounding but he kept his breath steady and his body braced for the first blow. Casually he spat on their freshly hosed floor.

The metal bar swung. He ducked and it whistled past his ear, but from the other side a fist sledgehammered into the exact centre of his chest. He made no sound. A brick-hard rubber stick slammed on to his mouth, blood exploded on his teeth and he spat out a sliver of something white.

‘Is that all you’ve got?’ he taunted.

The next blow crashed down on the spot between his neck and his arm, sending pain searing through his skull. Neither his shoulder nor arm would move. With a bellow of rage he rammed his head into the lean one’s jaw and had the satisfaction of hearing a sharp click as something snapped. A high scream, like a pig’s squeal, issued from the warder. Immediately a crunch from the metal bar to the back of Mikhail’s legs brought him buckling to his knees. Then it came, the real pain. Again and again, blows like rain. To his back. His ribs. Knees. Kidneys. The nape of his neck. The soles of his naked feet. Worse. To his testicles. That pain was special. White hot. A steel furnace, flames leaping and scorching his every nerve-end, a throbbing sickening agony.

‘Confess!’ one of the warders roared in his ear.

He was disintegrating. He could feel the parts inside him coming loose.

‘Devil curse you, you bastards,’ he spat through blood.

An explosion of pain registered in his brain, but he could no longer tell where it came from in his body. At long last, he let go. He stopped holding the parts together. He couldn’t breathe.


Sofia hitched a lift back to Tivil. Pyotr swung himself up on the back of the cart beside her, relieved to catch his breath. She’d set a punishing pace on the road that he couldn’t match. It was as though the visit to the prison had knocked all the air out of him. Old Vlasov had come clattering up behind them with his horse and two-wheeled cart, empty now that he’d delivered his load of logs to the bakery in town. They jumped on and Pyotr threw himself on his back among the sawdust where he wrapped an arm tight across his eyes, hiding from the world outside. Hiding from himself and from his betrayal.

He didn’t look at Sofia but he could feel her seated next to him, upright and alert, hugging her knees. The road was rough, the sky grey-bellied. When Pyotr eventually rolled on to his side he saw a flight of swallows dipping over the river, but today he had no interest in them and he studied Sofia instead. Deep in thought, she had the knack of being very still, so still she became almost invisible, like an animal in the forest. He wondered what made her like that.

‘Sofia.’

She turned to him, her gaze coming from somewhere far away.

‘I didn’t mean it.’

‘I know you didn’t.’ Her voice was gentle.

‘He is my father.’

‘Of course he is. He loves you, Pyotr, and you love him.’

‘You won’t…’ He hesitated.

‘No, I won’t tell him.’

Pyotr grunted a kind of thanks. ‘He’s been… better.’

‘Better than your real father, you mean?’

‘Yes. He never beats me and more than anything he wants me to have schooling. He says it’s the way forward for Russia. And he doesn’t get drunk.’ He laughed. ‘Not all the time anyway.’