‘Good. I was just checking.’

‘Remember, Sofia, they look for scapegoats when things go wrong. They attacked Bukharin and even Rykov, though he was Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. Just sit there with your pen and pad, take notes, look serious and say nothing.’

She nodded, her blonde hair bobbing skittishly in the last of the sunlight. ‘Now tell me,’ she said, totally flooring him with that sideways smile of hers. ‘What are the arrangements for sleeping tonight?’

He pulled a face and gave a savage snort. ‘Not good, I’m afraid.’

Mikhail stubbed out a cigarette and lit another. It burned a hole in the darkness of the flat wilderness around him. He was leaning against the wall of the hotel where they were spending the night, though hotel was really too grand a word for it. A wooden building packed with rooms like matches in a box, all crushed against each other. The occupants were carefully supervised and accounted for to OGPU.

He’d been a fool to bring her on this trip, to risk her safety, but to leave her behind in Tivil would have been like leaving behind part of himself. And she’d wanted to come, she’d made that clear with a kiss. He inhaled deeply, recalling the sweet softness of her lips on his in the stables. The night was dark now. Clouds had edged their way down from the north, and he wondered if Sofia were asleep in her bed. Or wide awake, listening to the snores of Alanya Sirova in the bed beside her, and thinking of… what? What do you think of, Sofia?

Mikhail couldn’t sleep, so he’d come outdoors in the hope that the night wind would flush the unwanted memories from his mind. It was always the same when he travelled to Leningrad. It was like travelling back in time, back to his boyhood in St Petersburg. The train that carried him westward and then north towards the Gulf of Finland seemed to unravel his life with each turn of its wheels, as though pulling at the delicate thread he’d used to stitch the years together. The experience was so vivid that it startled him. The whoosh of steam from the engine and the echoing sob of its whistle through ancient forests stirred up images from the past and set them tumbling through his mind.

He didn’t want to eat. And he couldn’t sleep. The important conference lay ahead of him, but his thoughts were elsewhere, just when he needed to be sharp. Two more days of this journey to Leningrad, pistons thundering beneath him as loud as in his head, pointless delays when the train would be shunted into sidings for idle hours at a time. Two more days to drag his senses back to the present.

Which meant only two more days of her soft arm at his side and blue cornflowers spilling on to his knee. But what then?

34

How do they do it?

Sofia gazed around at the sea of faces, at the concentration on them. Did they really care so much or was it all an act?

The great dome above the hall was supported by massive pale marble pillars. Beneath it rows and rows of packed seats curved in a wide sweeping arc. Sofia tried to concentrate on the speeches, but it was impossible. However eagerly she made herself start listening to each new delegate up on the rostrum, boredom invariably seeped in, as lists of production figures and target levels were recited for each raion. The only rousing moments came when Party slogans were hammered out with fists on the lectern and a thousand voices roared back from the floor as one.

The pillars. Her eyes were drawn to them, instead of to the pad on her lap. Bone-white pillars. Tall and graceful, like pine trees stripped of bark. She couldn’t keep her eyes off them. Each one made her think of Anna, still out there in the forest, her blade slicing through the flesh of a tree. Don’t stop, dear Anna. Breathe, my friend, breathe. She swallowed the rage that rose in her throat at the injustice of it, but she must have made some noise because in the next seat Alanya Sirova turned and studied her.

‘Are you all right?’ Alanya asked.

‘I’m fine.’

Still Alanya stared at her. ‘You haven’t written down anything for the last half an hour.’ She nodded at Sofia’s blank page.

Sofia turned her head to look into the suspicious brown eyes. The two women’s communication had so far been stilted, despite sharing a bedroom at night and being seated next to each other for the last six hours in the conference hall. Sofia could feel Alanya’s curiosity like something palpable crouched between them, and was amused by her sudden show of concern.

‘Comrade Sirova,’ she said in a muted tone, giving it just the right touch of condescension, ‘I am listening. This delegate on the platform,’ she gestured to the bearded man in the shabby brown suit speaking so passionately in favour of engineering expansion, ‘is telling us something that is crucial to our understanding of how the Levitsky factory can be moved forward, step by step, until it is able to surpass even our Great Leader’s targets of technological development and progression. It is essential to think things through first and write afterwards.’ She narrowed her gaze. ‘Do you understand me?’

‘Yes, comrade, yes, I do.’ The sleek brown head nodded eagerly.

‘And,’ Sofia continued, ‘I advise you to bear that in mind – if you want to progress further than a lowly secretary. I’m sure you have the ability to do so.’

Alanya’s ambitious eyes gleamed behind the thick lenses of her spectacles and her sallow cheeks took on a pinkish tinge. ‘Spasibo, comrade. I promise I will in future.’

Sofia allowed herself a faint smile. That was Comrade Sirova dealt with. She turned back to the pillars, to the pine trees.

It was out among the pine trees one hot mosquito-ridden afternoon that Sofia had learned from Anna about her visit to Maria, the woman who had been her governess. Maria who, during all those years when Anna was living with a distant cousin in a village hundreds of miles away near Kazan, had never come for her. Never once wrote. Never got in touch. Nothing. As though Anna had ceased to exist. Anna had waited and waited, had pinched her own skin to make sure she was still real, always believing that one day Maria would come. Her lonely young heart clung to Maria’s words: ‘I promise I’ll come for you.’

But she didn’t come.

Now in the damp forests of a Siberian Work Zone, Anna shook her head sadly. ‘I was foolish. I wouldn’t let it go. So when the woman who had taken me in suddenly died – she was trampled by a bull when I was twenty-one – I spent a time grieving for the stern old vixen. Then I took the small amount of money she left me in her will, bought myself a train ticket and travel permit and went in search of Maria. It took me months to get a seat on a train, but finally I travelled back to Leningrad.’

Sofia was honing Anna’s axe, squatting down among the wood-chippings with a flat stone in front of her, keeping down below the eyeline of the guards. Anna was leaning back against a tree trunk, each breath wheezing as she spoke.

‘Don’t talk, Anna. Rest your poor lungs.’

‘No, you must know this. For when you go.’

She didn’t say where, just go. It wasn’t something they talked about, but they both knew it would be soon.

‘Very well, tell me,’ Sofia said, one eye on the nearest guard. His back was turned to them for the time being.

Anna sighed with satisfaction. ‘I found the house.’

She stopped as if that were enough, and when Sofia looked up she saw Anna’s eyes had closed, her thin chest struggling. Her lips were turning blue. Quickly Sofia drew from her pocket her last small scrap of black bread, crushed with the pulp of pine seeds from the forest floor.

‘Here, chew on this.’ She pushed it between her friend’s lips.

Anna took it and chewed, until eventually she dragged a shallow breath into her lungs and then another. Slowly the rhythm returned.