Was he meeting someone?

That time when she hid down by the stream and came back to find the two men in the hut and the horse outside, she was sure now that it had been Fomenko and that the dog had been Hope. But this time there was no other man. This time he was on his own, alone and secretive. Secrets always meant weakness. Know your enemy. Know his weakness. She listened to the sounds of the night, eyes fixed on the yellow rectangle of the window, but a sudden snort right behind her made her leap from her position. Her blood raced. She swung round but could make out nothing among the black shapes of the forest.

A person? A moose? Even a bear?

Damn it, she wasn’t waiting to be clawed to death. Ducking low, she crept out into the clearing, aware that she was now visible to watchful eyes. She moved silently to the window and with caution peered in at one corner, but she needn’t have worried. Aleksei Fomenko was kneeling on the dusty floor, totally engrossed. His long back in the familiar work shirt was angled towards her, but she could just see that he was bent over a hole in the flooring. A hole? She hadn’t noticed one when she slept here. It was explained by the sight of two wooden planks lying to one side, the floorboards, and next to them a candle, its flame casting uncertain light round the room. Sofia eased further along the window frame and over his shoulder she caught a glimpse of what was holding his attention so seriously. A khaki-green square object. It took her a moment to recognise it for what it was

A two-way radio, all dials and pointers and knobs. A sudden burst of static took her by surprise and she ducked down below the sill, her breath raw in her throat. A secret radio. Why did the Chairman need a secret radio?

As she crouched low to the earth, her mind struggled to find an explanation. Was it to connect him directly to OGPU, to give him a direct line to the secret police where he could betray the secrets of his kolkhozniki in private? But what was wrong with the office telephone? Did this radio bypass the normal channels and take him straight to the man at the top? She shook her head. No, she told herself, don’t get carried away. Probably just a secret lover crooning sweet-talk in his ear. She decided to risk another glimpse and slid up slowly till her eyes were again on a level with the cobwebbed glass. This time she took in more of what was in front of her: the stillness of Fomenko’s powerful shoulders, the earphones on his head, the mouthpiece he was murmuring into, the notebook open at his side and covered with lines of dense writing.

Why on earth would he need notes for a lover?

With a small sense of shock she became aware of the dog. It was stretched out on the floor, licking dirt from one paw with long sweeps of its tongue, but abruptly it stopped. Its head lifted, eyes and ears alert. It gazed at the closed door and, making no sound, it raised its lips to show its teeth in a silent snarl. Sofia didn’t know what its quick ears had picked up but she wasn’t going to hang around to find out. She pushed herself away from the hut and raced away back down the track to Tivil.

Davinsky Camp July 1933

After the business with the cat, Anna lay awake, propped upright against the damp wood of the hut wall to ease her breathing. Beside her on the bed board lay a squat, nervy woman, who spent every waking hour angry and resentful to the point where she could barely sleep at night. She lay on her side staring wide-eyed at the degraded world inside the hut, hating it with a passion that was killing her.

Anna didn’t want to be like that. She didn’t want to hate until that was all that was left inside her. She’d seen it again and again, the way prisoners died from hate, and she tried to spit its insidious bitter taste from her mouth, but sometimes it was hard. Especially without Sofia to make her laugh. She missed Sofia.

Ever since the cat she had missed Sofia even more. Sofia would have known how to rid her head of the images that swarmed inside it. It was that stupid cat’s fault, scratching Tasha’s hand like that. Because now that Anna had let that terrible day back into her head, it settled there, gnawing at her and refusing to go away. Even as she hacked away at the branches all day in the forest, trying to block her mind with thoughts of the futile arrogance of the guards or the fragrance of the pine sap, the memory sank its powerful teeth into her and kept dragging her back to Petrograd and that cold winter of 1917.

She had became a shadow after her father died in the snow, no longer a person, just a twelve-year-old shadow inside a cramped and stuffy apartment that belonged to Maria’s brother, Sergei, and his wife, Irina. Her skin turned grey, she rarely spoke and only picked at the barest crumbs of food. But she learned to call Maria Mama and she wore a plain brown peasant dress without complaint and ate black bread instead of white. At night she shared Maria’s narrow cot and spent the hours of darkness lying obediently on the sour-smelling mattress. She never seemed to close her eyes. They had changed from their bright cornflower blue to a dull muddy colour that matched the winter gloom of the River Neva. Yet still she wouldn’t cry.

‘It’s not natural,’ Irina said in a low voice. ‘Her father has just died. Why doesn’t she cry?’

‘Give her time,’ Maria murmured to her sister-in-law as she ran a hand over the silky blonde head. ‘She’s still too shocked.’

‘A shock is what that girl needs,’ Irina said and mimed a quick little slap with her hand. ‘It’s like having a corpse in the house.’ She shivered dramatically. ‘The child gives Sergei and me the creeps, she does. How you can sleep with her in your bed, I don’t know.’

‘Irina, please. She’s silent but she’s not deaf.’

‘No, you’re not deaf are you, Anna? Just wilful. Well, child, it’s time to snap out of it and give your poor Maria a chance to get on with her own life. She’s starting a new job tomorrow and can’t spend time fretting about you.’

Anna’s muddy eyes turned to Maria, panic fierce in them. ‘Can’t I come with you?’ Her voice was barely a whisper. ‘I can work too.’

‘No, my love.’ Maria kissed her forehead in the dark. ‘I’m working in a factory, putting washers on taps. It’ll be noisy and dirty and unimaginably boring. You’ll enjoy it much more here with little Sasha and Aunt Irina.’

‘You might die tomorrow. Among the taps.’

Maria put an arm round Anna and rocked her gently. ‘Neither of us will die, I swear to you. You must wait patiently for me to return.’

A soft moan escaped from the back of Anna’s throat.

Anna spent the day at the window. She kissed Maria goodbye at the door of the first-floor apartment and then ran to the window to wave to her all the way down the street, but the moment Maria was out of sight, a suffocating blackness swarmed into her mind. It stopped her breathing. Air wouldn’t go into her lungs and sometimes she had to beat her ribs with her fists, pushing her chest in and out to make air suck in and blow out. Irina clipped her round the ear for doing it, saying she was being silly and mustn’t scare Sasha, who was watching Anna from his colourful rag-rug with a big grin on his face. His ears, which stuck out like wings, listened to every sound she made.

Anna counted. She counted her fingers, she counted the number of blue flowers on the wallpaper, the spots on Sasha’s chin, the chimneys on the roofs, the tiles on the house opposite, the people in the street, the pigeons in the gutter. She even tried to count the snowflakes when they fell from a colourless sky but that was too hard. Only when the sky grew dark and Maria came home, only then did Anna believe Maria was still alive.