One Night in Winter (30 page)

There is something beside her. One of the dogs has fallen out of the bag, and she picks it up. It smells of Mariko. She hugs the toy, and rocks herself, amazed that she, wife of a leader, respected teacher, proud mother, is lying on a floor, holding a toy, weeping.

She lies there for a long time. Finally, holding the dog to her like a baby, she staggers out, so broken that she isn’t sure she will ever be able to put herself back together again.

The rays of a sinking sun – gold and purple and white – soothe Serafima. How gorgeous the light is after her prison cell. She raises her face like a flower following the sun, noticing as if for the first time the blizzard of gossamer seeds that dance in the beams. She is free, she has preserved her secret, and now she is overwhelmed by the beauty of this evening.

Up Gorky Street to the House of Books she goes. Upstairs to the Foreign Literature section. Hemingway? Galsworthy? There it is. Edith Wharton. She opens the book hungrily, reads what is inside; then she runs downstairs and out into the streets again.

It is 7 p.m. and crowds of smartly dressed Muscovites and some foreigners are waiting to go into the Bolshoi to see Tchaikovsky’s
Swan Lake.
Serafima goes inside to the ticket office. There’s a queue. When she reaches the front, her ticket is there in an envelope.

Serafima is one of the last to take her seat in the stalls and when she’s sitting, with an old grey man on one side of her and a young girl like her on the other, she feels her face is flushing. She is happier than she’s ever been in her life – but it is more than this. His eyes are on her and she can sense the love in them. She looks up at his box and there he is. Waiting for her, loving her, as he has been since the days before the shooting and her imprisonment in Lubianka.

Later that night, Satinov is in his study at his apartment, which, with just one child at home, is much quieter than it should be. Tamara is in his arms as she tells him about Mariko.

Satinov closes his eyes. His little Mariko with her brown eyes and braided hair, hay-sweet. A spasm flutters from his stomach to his throat and spreads to his eyes and mouth, to his whole being for, in spite of his being the Iron Commissar, in spite of his being Comrade Satinov, he is out of control.

He blinks. In the mirror on the far wall, he sees himself, holding Tamara, her hair in a bun, her long neck, her jerking shoulders. And he looks deep into his own eyes and sees they are full of a terrible betrayal. Shocked, he looks away, at the photographs lined up on the desk. But instead of his children and Tamara, he sees only one woman’s face.

Yes, he is weeping for Mariko, for George, for Tamriko, but he is also weeping selfishly. For himself. And for the woman with whom he has fallen desperately in love.

Alexander Pushkin, ‘The Talisman’

HE FIRST SAW
her in January 1945 just after the Red Army broke into East Prussia. He remembers the day, the hour, the minute. They were far from Moscow on the First Belorussian Front. As the Front’s commissar, he and its commander, Marshal Rokossovsky, had fought all the way through Belorussia, and then through the wasteland of Poland to break into Germany itself. Even Germany’s humblest cottages had larders filled with sugar, bread, eggs and meat, soft beds and white pillows. Most farmers had fled from the Russians, but the few who stayed were ruddy-cheeked and well dressed. They even wore wristwatches.

The sky had been growing chalkier all day but when the snowstorm came, it took them all by surprise. Sitting in his Willy jeep, with Losha Babanava at the wheel, Colonel General Satinov watched the army pass. Howitzers pounded Nazi positions a few kilometres down the road. They were, he thought, a Mongol horde in the age of machines: the mud-streaked tanks were now covered with bright rugs on which crouched filthy infantrymen in tattered uniforms dark with machine oil, wearing rabbit hats, shaggy sheepskin coats, and often several wristwatches, brandishing guns wrapped in white rags like bandages, swigging at bottles, singing songs that were lost in the rattling screech of machinery.

Next came the gun crews, who bounced along on their caissons softened with cushions embroidered in silk, playing German accordions inlaid with jewels. Tanks, howitzers, American Willy jeeps, and Studebaker trucks: all moved past in a slow inexorable line. Then: what was this? An antique Berline carriage with swinging lanterns, pulled by horses, and a glimpse inside of an officer’s shoulderboards and a girl’s glazed kohl-smoked eyes.

A blizzard at dusk in a deserted village, dense snow quickly settling on the surrounding fields and the roofs of the cottages of Gross Meisterdorf. The soldiers sheltered nearby in whichever cottage was closest. Still in his jeep, Satinov leaned wearily forward as an NCO saluted.

‘Comrade general, the medical corps’s setting up a hospital in the church hall. They’re ready for you to inspect.’

Outside the church hall, Satinov saw soldiers carrying stretchers from a truck. Two of their soldiers were already dead. Not wounded by the Nazis, but poisoned by moonshine: alcohol made from antifreeze.

Inside a wood-panelled hall, lit with oil lamps swinging from the rafters, men were lying on the floorboards. Satinov smelled the fug of so many wartime bunkers: damp cloth and body odour, here mixed with iodine. Nurses in white smocks worked on the new arrivals. A little to his right, a female army doctor was crouched over a soldier. She was on her knees, massaging and pummelling his bare chest. ‘Come on, come back, breathe!’ she was saying. The boy spluttered and his chest lurched into movement like a rusty engine. The doctor, who wore the red cross on her arm, listened to his chest for a moment and then stood up. ‘All right, he’ll make it. Who’s next?’

Satinov watched her approach a second poisoned soldier. Again she managed to resuscitate him but afterwards, when she was standing up, she wiped her forehead and said to no one in particular: ‘Two saved; three stable; four dead.’

She saluted Satinov. ‘Welcome to the Gross Meisterdorf Hospital, comrade general. It’s not much, as you can see. They die quickly of antifreeze. Every second counts.’

She was still wearing her white sheepskin coat. A pistol rested in her belt, a stethoscope was clipped round her neck, and she wore a blue
pilotka
beret. She hasn’t had time to take it off, Satinov thought, noticing that her face was long and oval, and her straight high nose and cheeks lightly speckled with a few freckles. Even here, at the front, when she was putting all her energy into saving a life, he noticed that she had altered her uniform a little, and taken up her khaki skirt a few centimetres, to reveal her American nylons, which were dark and against regulations.

A nurse brought a tray of mugs of
chai
, very sweet, steaming. ‘Glad you’re here for these boys,’ said Satinov.

‘Are you inspecting us or just passing?’ she asked. She had a fetching accent, he realized, certainly Galician, probably from Lvov, with a Mitteleuropean touch of Yiddish.

‘Just passing. I’m on my way up to headquarters.’

‘Of course you are.’ Her eyes aglint with feisty intelligence were slightly mocking. She surely recognized him; most people did. ‘Since we have a general here, could you find us some mattresses – on your way up to headquarters?’ She gave a slightly crooked smile.

‘I’ll do my best,’ he said, feeling somehow abashed as if she was challenging him to justify his rank.

‘Thank you, comrade,’ she said, getting up and heading over towards the next wounded soldier. Her nurses followed.

Satinov opened the door. The snow had stopped. He felt the countryside was slumbering under the white blanket and that somewhere deep beneath it, nature was breathing.

Losha drove on slowly through the dark night, no headlights, the chains on their wheels clanking, their route periodically illuminated by arching tracers and explosions that dyed the sky as bright as day. Satinov looked out of the window. Sometimes the sky up ahead flashed scarlet for a moment as the howitzers fired their barrages. He thought of the doctor. Remembered her nose, its sprinkling of freckles and her brown skin. He had never asked her name.

JANUARY 1945 IN
Moscow: long fingers of ice reached down from the eaves of the houses but Serafima felt that springtime was close.

‘Let’s go to the Bolshoi tonight,’ suggested Minka. They were walking down the corridor towards the Golden Gates for pick-up. Because it was still wartime, and all their fathers were at the front, the chauffeurs, mothers and nannies did the collecting. ‘Say you will, Serafimochka!’

‘But, Minka, we only went yesterday,’ Serafima replied. ‘Is there a new production?’

‘No, it’s
Romeo and Juliet
, but I love it.’

‘Never mind Prokofiev, you just like dressing up, Minkushka,’ said Serafima with one of her rare laughs. ‘But I hate it. I always loathe the way I look.’

‘You look so lovely in that green dress of yours. All the boys think so. Everyone was admiring you – even the officers in their boxes.’

‘Really?’ Serafima was sure she was too tall and too plain; she didn’t feel at all attractive compared to her beautiful mother and her generous, confident friend. ‘I know you want to go again,’ she said. ‘Those officers were looking at you, not me. You’re such a flirt.’

‘I plead guilty,’ Minka said with a giggle. ‘I loved the way they were looking at us both. But that’s all!’

‘Oh, I wasn’t saying . . .’ Serafima knew that Minka would never go beyond the prudish limits of Soviet morality. The military fronts these days resembled Babylonian bacchanalia, but for the schoolchildren anything more than a kiss and a few lines of poetry was unthinkable.

‘Besides, dressing up is such fun,’ Minka was saying. ‘Say you’ll come tonight. You always enjoy it when you’re there. I think you like the officers’ attention too. And I already have tickets.’

And so it was that at 7 p.m. that night, Serafima, Minka and their friend Rosa Shako arrived by Metro at the Bolshoi to see
Romeo and Juliet
for the seventh time. The sky was bleached white, the air just changing to warn snow was coming. Moscow had been battered by three years of war, the Kremlin was still draped in khaki netting, its red stars dark, and Gorky Street was marked by bombs and ruined houses. The shops were rationed and people in the streets looked diminished and shabby. But victory was close, everyone knew that. All the ministries, embassies and theatres that had been evacuated to Kuybishev on the Volga were back. The nights were no longer illuminated by Nazi air raids and flak guns but by the salvoes of victory salutes by entire parks of howitzers, ordered by Stalin.

And, as Minka had predicted, the moment they pushed their way into the theatre, they started to receive attention – and they had not yet even taken off their furs and shapkas. Knowing that it matched her big brown eyes, Minka had borrowed her mother’s mink coat. Rosa was wearing her best winter fox fur, but typically Serafima, whose mother possessed the best collection of furs in Moscow, was wearing her cheap rabbit furs. Inside the lobby of the theatre, the heating, the one and only Soviet luxury, was blazing. Garlic, vodka and the smell of cabbage seemed to ooze out of the people squeezed together, but never had there been a happier crowd of Muscovites. Everyone, even the grumpy ticket collectors, even the elderly, even the drunken soldiers and sailors, was cheerful. Victory was imminent; good times were coming.

The girls, giggling as they were pushed and pulled this way and that, queued to leave their coats at the cloakroom, and then they could breathe again and the passing officers could admire their dresses. Minka Dorova was looking the most sophisticated. She was wearing a pink frock copied from
Bazaar
magazine at the couture atelier of Abram Lerner and Kleopatra Fishman where the élite wives and the leaders had their clothes made.

‘You’re outrageous!’ exclaimed Serafima, looking at Minka’s glossy, half-bared shoulders and arms. ‘No wonder you wanted to come to the ballet!’

‘Your mother’s the best!’ Rosa said enviously to Minka. ‘My mother would never take me to Lerner’s atelier.’

‘Mine’s always asking me to go,’ admitted Serafima, ‘but I can’t bear shopping with her. She’s a despot, swans around like an ageing ingénue and makes me feel awful.’

‘And yet you still look irresistible,’ Minka said, trying to work out why Serafima’s dress, done up to the neck and with cuffs to her wrists, looked so alluring.

‘Oh, nonsense.’ Serafima elbowed Minka, who tickled her while Rosa scolded them for embarrassing her at the ballet. They were not schoolgirls on an outing, she reminded them, but eighteen-year-olds on the verge of womanhood in their finest dresses.

‘Shall we have a glass of
champagnski
before we go in?’ suggested Minka, always the bon viveur of the three.

In the bar, they caught the attention of some American airmen. Joshing, toothsome, young, they were so smart in their uniforms, and their skin was as unblemished as a baby’s – and what teeth, Serafima noted, compared with the weathered complexions and golden fangs of Russian men. They possessed a lightness that she admired, even as she stood back a little awkwardly. She was happy for Minka and Rosa to flirt, and the men did not seem to notice her at all.

One of the Americans, an air force captain, a broad-shouldered athlete with a buzz cut, asked Minka for her telephone number but she did not give it to him, her refusal making her even more desirable. The other Americans teased him, ‘Oh, he don’t often get turned down! There’s a challenge, Bradley!’