‘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?’

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.’

He hadn’t meant to say it to her. Any of it.

She studied him solemnly. ‘Your father is a loyal citizen of Russia.’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘Don’t doubt him.’

‘He’s read all Lenin’s and Stalin’s writings, like The State And Revolution, and I’m always pushing the latest pamphlets under his bedroom door for him to read at night when he gets home.’

She smiled. ‘I bet he appreciates that.’

‘He does.’

‘Who are you trying to convince, Pyotr? Me? Yourself? Or the men in the interrogation room?’

‘Papa will be released if he is innocent,’ he insisted.

‘And is he innocent? Or did he take the grain off the truck? What do you believe?’

The question knocked a hole in Pyotr’s chest, letting in the confusion once more. He threw himself back on the floor of the cart and this time wrapped both arms across his face.

‘I don’t know,’ he muttered.