The first person Sofia saw was Zenia. The gypsy girl was standing in the shade under the spreading branches of a lime tree near the newspaper boards with her bare arms draped round the neck of a young man, his hand curled snugly round her waist. He was wearing a uniform with a pale blue cap and epaulettes, the uniform of OGPU, the State Security Police. Quickly Sofia whirled away in the opposite direction, nipped past the open archway of a market hall and ducked round a corner.

‘Ah, what have we here? The beautiful tractor driver from Tivil, I do believe.’

It was Comrade Deputy Stirkhov from Raikom. And he was blocking her path.

24

Davinsky Camp July 1933

‘Sofia is dead.’

‘No. You’re lying.’

‘Anna, you’ve got to stop this. This stupid waiting.’ Tasha glanced up from the cards in her hand. ‘You’ve got to accept the fact that she’s not coming back. Not ever. For fuck’s sake, who in their right mind would turn up in this shithole unless-’

‘Shut up, Tasha,’ Anna said, but without rancour. ‘Sofia will come.’

They were sitting on Anna’s bed board playing poker with shabby homemade cards and, as usual, Nina was winning. The stakes were threads of cotton yanked from their skirts.

‘Nina, you’ll be opening a clothing factory soon,’ Anna laughed and threw down her hand of cards in disgust. ‘Who dealt me this rubbish?’

‘I did.’ It was the new girl, Lara. She was nineteen and tall, with pale skin and pale hair. None of them mentioned it, but she reminded them of Sofia. Somehow filled a gap for them all. ‘Anna,’ she asked with a quick flick of an ace, ‘what makes you believe she’ll come back? The temptations out there must be so strong.’

Tasha and Nina exchanged glances but Anna ignored them. ‘You don’t know her,’ she said firmly.

‘But Tasha has a point, she can’t be in her right mind to risk coming back here.’

‘She promised me.’

‘But a promise in here,’ Lara explained gently, ‘is not the same as a promise out there.’ She nodded towards the world beyond the barbed-wire fences. ‘In the real world people don’t gamble for pieces of thread to mend their clothes. And they don’t keep insane promises.’

‘The trouble with you, Lara, is that you haven’t been in here long enough yet.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It drives us all a bit insane.’

Sofia is dead.

Tasha’s words jammed in Anna’s head like needles and she couldn’t pull them out. Yet still she refused to believe them and, as the night hours crawled past, she set about breathing life into her memories of Sofia. She was convinced that if she let her friend walk and talk and laugh and cry in her head, it would help to keep her walking and talking and laughing and crying out there in what Lara called the real world.

But at the same time she knew Tasha was right: only someone mad would return to Davinsky Camp out of choice. For the very first time doubt crept down her spine with cold fingers.

What is out there, Sofia? What is holding you?

She’ll come. I know she’ll come. She is tenacious.

Even as a girl she had possessed that tenacity. Anna recalled a story Sofia had told her one day on the trek to the Work Zone, a story about her childhood.

The sound of the whip was like a branch snapping, over and over. That was what Sofia had said. When she was eleven years old, her father was tied to a tree in the centre of the village and whipped to death in front of her. He was a priest. But in January 1917 he was known to be working with the Bolsheviks and that was as good as a death warrant. The troops of Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor of All the Russias, rode the eight versts from Petrograd, their horses’ bridles jangling in the cold still air as they entered the village, and they had unleashed their knotted knouts on him. He didn’t scream or curse, just prayed silently into the bark of the tree.

Sofia had waited till after the funeral, then in the early morning mist she plaited her long blonde hair into a thick braid down her back, pulled on her lapti boots and took herself into her father’s store shed in the back yard. There she filled a sack with a mixture of their winter-storage vegetables that she’d grown herself: potatoes, swedes and a few handfuls of turnips, and set off on the long road to Petrograd.

The heavy sack hung down her back like a dead animal. Ice lay on the sides of the road and the clouds above were a dirty white, the smears of sooty fingerprints pressed into them. She walked fast as though she could outpace the grief that snapped at her heels, taking big bites out of her. The world had shifted. She could hear it clicking into a new position both inside and outside her head. At times when she looked at the familiar landmarks along the way – the old water tower, the sawmill, the lopsided weathervane on top of the barn – she barely recognised them.

Her mind felt as brittle as the ice under her feet. She had a great desire to yell at the top of her voice, but instead she thought about her father’s limp body stretched out on the kitchen table. She had hugged it close and refused to let go. She cried into his fingers and kissed the cuts on his neck, but when they took his body away from her to put it in a box, she knew she was going to have to build a new life for herself. Her uncle had offered her his own house as a roof over her head but he’d told her it was up to her now to put aside her books – the ones she and her father had loved to read together – and start earning a living. She tightened her grip on the sack.

The city of Petrograd smelled of danger. There was a tension in the air that Sofia breathed in the moment she stepped on to its pavements and it made her blood pump faster, though she couldn’t understand why. She had always loved Petrograd – not that she’d been in its busy streets more than a dozen times in her life, but even so – with its tall pastel-painted houses, its elegant shops and the glittering people who drifted in and out of them on the wide boulevard of Nevsky Prospekt. The place pulsed with the constant noise of traffic, an animated jangling of carriages and cars and trams.

Ice edged the gutters and hung like frozen tears from the balconies, as she pushed onward to the street market in Liteiny, but business was bad there today. No one had roubles to spend. So after three hours she scooped up what was left of her sack and headed back to the bustling centre, always taking her bearings from the golden Admiralty spire just like her father had instructed her to do.

The sky was white and glossy, as if it had a store of snow up there, hidden behind glass. In her quilted coat and her bright yellow hat and mittens that she’d knitted herself, Sofia moved fast to keep out the cold. But that sense of nervousness was strong again, the feeling of a city holding its breath, and she studied the people around her carefully to discover where this strange sensation was coming from. The ones in fur coats and silk scarves hurried along the streets noisily, talking in loud voices, but the ones in the shabby jackets and the cloth caps, she noticed, huddled in tight groups on street corners among the dirty ridges of old snow, their heads close together.

She edged towards one ragged group and watched them with interest. Yes, this was where the tension lay. She could see it billowing off the men along with the smoke from the hand-rolled cigarettes they clutched between their fingers so ardently, like a badge of membership. She swallowed hard, then shifted the sack into a more comfortable position on her shoulder and headed for the huddle of three men. They were tucked in the mouth of an alleyway next to a laundry that spelled out its name in coloured glass, and she couldn’t help noticing that the shoes of all three men had holes in the toes. She moved closer, swinging her sack.