‘Papa?’ Pyotr cried out.

‘Go, Mikhail,’ Sofia urged. ‘Go.’

But his father didn’t move. ‘What the hell do you mean, Rafik? Who on earth is coming for me?’

The door burst open with a crash. Uniforms streamed into the room.

37

Dagorsk July 1933

The cell door slammed shut behind Mikhail. The stench hit him like a blow to the face. How many men in here? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? In the semi-darkness he couldn’t tell, but there was no air to breathe, no place to sit.

It was night, but a grubby blue light glimmered faintly behind a metal grille on the ceiling, like a malevolent watchful eye over the prisoners. This was a different world he’d entered. His first instinct had been to lash out at his captors and now he bore the rewards of that. A split lip, a rib that grated at each breath, a kneecap booted out of place.

Fool, he’d been a bloody fool not to control his temper. But the soldiers took no notice when he pointed out that they were making a terrible mistake and that he’d done nothing to warrant arrest. Then the sight of Pyotr being slapped like a puppy for clinging to his father had brought his walls of control tumbling down. He fought to remember now, snatching at images that kept fading from his grasp.

Most clearly he could summon up Pyotr’s frightened young face and Sofia’s urgent mouth arguing with the officer, her eyes blazing. Hazier was Rafik, silent and remote, and Zenia at the table with her head in her hands, hiding behind her mane of black hair. And then there was the memory of Sofia begging. It drifted in and out. But oddly it wasn’t the soldiers she was pleading with, it was Rafik, imploring him for something, down on her knees and begging. Then Pyotr’s panicked shout…

Pyotr. Dear God, who will take care of my son?

As he stood upright by the door, his back away from its foul surface, he shut his eyes. In the silence he heard a drip-drip-drip, the cell walls running with damp, and then a sudden movement. A huddled figure trampled over sleeping forms and there were cries of ‘bastard’ and ‘shithead’, but most didn’t move, locked in their own despair and private nightmares. The figure reached the overflowing slop-bucket only just in time. The stench worsened.

Earlier the prison guards had taken pleasure in their work as they’d ripped out his bootlaces and tossed aside his belt. Stripped him naked. He knew its purpose was to humiliate and belittle, to humble his arrogant subversive soul so that the interrogator’s job would be that much easier when it came to the time for questions. In return he had given nothing but stone-hard hatred. They’d thrown his clothes back at him and marched him, hands clasped behind his back, down long grey corridors to this underground overcrowded cell. Into this different world.

This was the new reality and he’d better get used to it. Stuck in this wretched hole. He would still be here tomorrow, and the next tomorrow and the tomorrow after that. He spat on the floor, spitting out his fear, and he searched his mind for something clean and cool and strong to hold on to. He found a pair of eyes. Eyes that looked at him straight, blue as a summer sky and bright with laughter. He drew them to him and filled every part of his mind with them, even the dark rotten places where he didn’t like to look.

‘Sofia,’ he whispered. ‘Sofia.’

Sofia queued. Hour after hour, till her feet went numb and her heart ached and her hand itched to bang on the hatch to demand attention. The long L-shaped office was painted green and smelled of disinfectant. Someone had placed a vase of vivid red flowers on the window sill. Most of the people in the queue were women: wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, all in search of their loved ones. Some with desperate eyes and panicked faces, others with the patience of the dead, shuffling forward with no hope.

So why come? Sofia wondered.

But in her heart she knew. You hold on with every sinew left in you because if you don’t, what is there? Nothing. You lie down and die. And if you die, they win. No. Nyet. She said it aloud in the room. No. Nyet. Others stole a surprised glance at her but she ignored them and turned to Mikhail’s son at her side, a slight silent figure who had barely spoken a word all day.

‘Pyotr.’

He lifted his head.

‘Pyotr, are you hungry? Would you like some bread?’

She spoke quietly to avoid the envious ears around her, holding out a small slice of black bread wrapped in greasepaper that Zenia had pushed into her hand before she’d left the house early this morning. Pyotr shook his head. His fists were sunk deep in his pockets and his shoulders were hunched over, so that he looked like a wounded animal. She touched his arm but he flinched away.

‘Not long now,’ she said.

‘That’s what you said two hours ago.’

‘Well, this time it must be true.’

He looked at the twenty or more people ahead of them and at those behind them in a queue that snaked out the door, then shrugged his young shoulders. She wanted to rub his bony back, to brush his hair off his face, to raise his head and coax some energy back into him. From the moment the troops drove off with Mikhail in the black prison van, the boy had lost his hold on who he was. He had turned grey, empty, colourless. Sofia had seen too many like that in the camps, seen the grey slowly darken and turn black and the black turn to death. Or worse than death, to nothingness.

She seized his shoulder and shook him till she saw a flash of annoyance in response.

‘Better,’ she snapped. ‘Your father is in prison. He’s not dead and he’s not in a labour camp. Not yet. So don’t you dare give up on him, do you hear me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Say it.’

‘Yes, I hear you.’

‘Better. Very soon now we’ll find out exactly what he’s accused of.’ She glanced over at the hatch with impatience. ‘If ever that snail-faced bastard decides to speed things up.’

An old woman was standing in front of the uniformed official, tears running down her cheeks, trying to thrust a brown paper package through the hatch. ‘Give him this,’ she was sobbing, ‘give my boy-’

‘No parcels,’ the bored official rapped out and slammed down the shutter.

Pyotr looked frightened. Sofia touched his arm and this time he didn’t pull away.

‘Your father is a valuable worker for the State, Pyotr. They won’t waste his knowledge and expertise by-’

‘He’s not my father,’ Pyotr shouted at her, his cheeks suddenly bright red with shame. ‘He’s a thief. He deserves to be locked up.’

‘Name?’

‘I’m enquiring about Mikhail Antonovich Pashin. He was taken from Tivil last night but-’

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m here with his son, Pyotr Pashin.’

‘Papers?’

‘These are Pyotr’s.’

‘And yours?’

‘I’m just a friend. I’m helping Pyotr to find out what-’

‘Your name?’

‘Sofia Morozova.’

‘Papers?’

Sofia hesitated. ‘Here. It’s my resident’s permit at the Red Arrow kolkhoz in Tivil, though I don’t see why I-’

‘Wait.’

The shutter slammed shut.

‘Sofia.’

‘No need to whisper, Pyotr. It’s all right, we’re outdoors now. No one can overhear.’

‘I know what happens when a person is arrested.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes. It happened to Yuri’s uncle. The person is interrogated, sometimes for months, and if he’s innocent he’s freed, so… Why are you laughing?’

‘No reason. Go on.’

‘So do you think Papa will be freed?’

‘The bastards wouldn’t tell us anything today, where he is or what he’s charged with. But I insisted he’s innocent.’

‘So he’ll be freed?’

Sofia’s heart went out to the boy. She swung him to face her, her hands pinning the slender bones of his shoulders.