One Night in Winter (32 page)

‘You go in first,’ he ordered.

He bent down and scooped up some snow and rubbed it bracingly into his face, onto his lips that still tasted of her. You fool, Satinov, he told himself, after all these years without so much as a glance at another woman, how could you behave like this now?

Yet he felt as if some metaphysical change had taken place inside him. Could one moment like that so change a man? He shook his head. Not Hercules Satinov, surely.

THE THREE SCHOOLGIRLS
sat in the Bolshoi box, buzzing with Crimean champagne and excitement because they had never had such a good view of the stage. But Rosa was a little drunk: she was so slight that the bubbles had gone straight to her head. No sooner had they sat down than she closed her eyes and put her hands to her temples. ‘Oh my God, I feel dizzy, I feel sick!’

‘She can’t be sick here!’ hissed Minka.

‘Imagine if she was sick over the edge onto the orchestra!’ replied Serafima. ‘I’ll take her home.’

‘No,’ said Minka. ‘I’ll go. I’ve shown off my dress, been admired, drunk champagne. I really don’t need to see the ballet yet again.’

‘Oddly, I’m in the mood now,’ Serafima said, waving goodbye as her two friends left.

Alone in her splendid box, she looked out on to the stage, glorying in her isolation until, well into Act Two, a young man in an American uniform joined her. He seemed surprised to find her there, and did not sit next to her but left two seats between them. He placed his cap on one of them.

Serafima looked over at him covertly. He seemed very different from his compatriots she’d met earlier, who were boorish and strapping. In contrast, he was tall and slim, and obviously cultured too for he was watching the ballet intently, his delicate lips smiling as the dancers performed their most challenging steps, sometimes just nodding thoughtfully at the music with which he seemed familiar, a finger marking the tunes.

When the interval came, he got up and left without glancing at her. She remained in her seat, wondering what to do. She was far too bashful to go to the bar on her own without Minka and Rosa’s support, but she felt a bit lonely, sitting in her box as the audience poured out to drink and smoke. So, after a minute, she ventured into the scarlet-carpeted corridor to stretch her legs, and there he was: the slim American, smoking a cigarette. Everyone else must have already bolted for the bar because they were alone.

‘A truly wonderful production,’ he said in perfect Russian. ‘Lepeshinskaya’s the best dancer in the world at the moment.’

‘Do you go to the ballet . . . in America?’ she asked, speaking English.

He smiled sweetly at her. ‘Your English is better than my Russian.’ He offered her a cigarette from a silver box and she took it.

‘I think Lepeshinskaya’s still developing as a dancer,’ Serafima said.

‘I don’t agree,’ he said, lighting her cigarette. ‘I think she’s already reached perfection. My question is: how long can perfection last?’

‘Does it matter when it’s timeless?’

He seemed delighted with this question and, glancing at the stairs (she guessed he was calculating how long before the crowds would be returning; seconds, she thought), he started to ask tentatively, ‘I don’t usually ask but . . . I was thinking . . . Would you think me—?’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ she interrupted him, amazed at her own brash certainty – and suddenly blushing (how she hated this ridiculous tendency to blush); she had ruined the moment before it had even begun.

‘Will you come for a walk afterwards?’ he asked shyly and she was delighted he was not asking her for a drink, after all.

‘Yes, I’d like that,’ she said.

‘Meet me fifteen minutes after the ballet in the street behind the theatre.’ He stopped, looking uncertain; almost, Serafima thought, as though he was blushing too. ‘May I ask you your name?’

She told him.

‘Romashkin? Like the writer?’

‘My father,’ she said, expecting him to say, like everyone else, ‘Ahh, you’re the film-star’s daughter,’ but he did not say anything more and she appreciated his tact.

‘And yours?’ she asked.

‘I’m Frank Belman.’

The following afternoon, Satinov was heading out of the Front’s staff conference in the library when he bumped into Dr Dorova. They looked at each other, unsure of the right thing to do or say.

‘You’re still here?’ he said curtly. Too curtly, he thought afterwards.

‘I’m working,’ she said. ‘I’ve been out in the field with our medics since dawn and there’s a lot more to do. I’m reporting to the comrade marshal,’ and she carried on towards the conference in the library.

Smoke was billowing in the light of low green lamps when Satinov joined them later, and a crowd of officers and adjutants was leaning over the map on the billiard table.

‘Comrade Doctor Dorova,’ said Marshal Rokossovsky, ‘what do you need?’

‘A new field hospital needs to be established before the offensive,’ replied Dashka.

‘Agreed,’ said Rokossovsky.

‘I therefore need a site easily reachable from the front with the appropriate facilities, space for five hundred beds, and mattresses, and transport.’

‘Women are so much more efficient than men,’ Rokossovsky said to a chorus of male laughter.

‘And that’s not all they’re good for,’ croaked one of the generals. Satinov felt a sudden rush of irritation that he swallowed with some difficulty.

‘What more do you need, comrade doctor?’ he asked.

‘I need to look at the site. I must drive out there tonight and check it, so that we can begin setting up at dawn. It’s already getting dark.’

Rokossovsky, a cigarette between his teeth, ran one hand through his cropped grey-blond hair and peered at the map again. ‘Who can see an appropriate site?’

‘I can,’ said Satinov, stretching over. ‘Here. A shooting lodge. On the main roads. Close to the railway. Just a few kilometres behind the front.’

‘Approved!’ said Rokossovsky. ‘Thank you, Comrade Dorova. Let’s move on. Quartermaster, please report!’

Dashka came round to Satinov’s side. He had a map pin in his hand. ‘Comrade doctor,’ he said, ‘here’s your site. There! I’ll mark it for you.’ He pushed the pin into the map.

‘I see,’ she said, leaning over to put her finger on the spot so that he could smell her spicy scent and see her dimpled wrists.

FRANK BELMAN. CAPTAIN
Frank Belman of the US Army. He looked too young to be a captain. As Serafima waited for him in the small street behind the Bolshoi, close to the dressing rooms, she was impressed by his discretion: he had not said a word to her in front of anyone else; he ignored her in the box after their short chat just as he had before; and she saw that, while the street had been crowded by theatregoers for ten minutes after the ballet had ended, it was now completely deserted. Unlike the boisterous Americans in the bar, he seemed to have an understanding of the Soviet system. Even though it was wartime and so many girls were keen to bag an American, Serafima knew from the comments of her parents’ friends in the leadership that already there were signs that this would not be acceptable for much longer.

She looked up, and there he was: a solitary figure, no longer in uniform, but wearing a flat cap and dark blue greatcoat, a cigarette between his lips. He was even taller than her but with his smooth pink cheeks and wide eyes he resembled a provincial poetry student. He smiled and gave a jaunty two-fingered salute as if to say: Here I am and, boy, isn’t this a blast!

Soon she was at his side. He took her arm and they walked away from the theatre, as if they had done so many times before. First they discussed the ballet rather earnestly until he said, ‘I’m being a bit of a phony. I really love the ballet but I’m no expert. I only started to attend here in Moscow. You know much more about it than me.’

‘I come all the time,’ she said. ‘But not so much for the ballet. For us, it’s a . . .’

‘A breath of the old world?’ he suggested.

‘Yes. The thirties were so hard and the war’s been terrible but now we’re winning, it’s brought some glamour back to Moscow. Not much . . .’

‘But just enough?’

‘Well, everything’s relative, but for a Muscovite—’

‘The Bolshoi’s like the aristocratic ball in
War and Peace
?’

‘Frank, it seems you’re finishing my sentences.’

‘Or you’re stealing my thoughts, Serafima.’

They both laughed.

‘How old are you?’

‘I’m twenty-two,’ he said.

‘I’m still at school,’ she said. ‘But it’s my last year.’

‘I know,’ he said, looking at her openly for the first time. ‘I can tell.’

They were still walking when the blizzard struck, and soon the snow was so dense that they could not see ten metres in front of themselves.

Serafima knew that wartime had intensified life: people lived, loved, died faster than before. But the affinity between her and Frank made her uneasy and suspicious. She had never been in such a situation before, never met a man like this, yet alone talked in this manner. She had to wonder: was Frank Belman the sort of man who regularly asked out Russian girls after only two minutes of conversation? How did he know to change out of his American uniform? He may look like a sincere intellectual, she thought, but was he actually a cynical seducer come to drab Moscow to turn the heads of girls eager for the slightest glint of faraway cities? An American spy? Was this a set-up? How could she know? And yet somehow she thought she did.

‘How did this happen?’ she asked, stopping suddenly and turning to him.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, that I’m here with you now. Did you choose me specifically or was it by chance?’

Frank laughed, and Serafima noticed the way the thick snowflakes were settling on his dark lashes, even longer than hers, she noticed jealously. ‘You chose me. First, you were alone in the box, my box; second, you watched the ballet and never me; third, you didn’t run to the bar like every other girl but just waited for the next act. So I knew you weren’t like the others.’

‘How do I know you’re not?’

‘Do I seem like the others?’

‘No. But I don’t really know many other men.’

He put a hand on her arm. ‘Look, I know what you’re getting at because I asked you out so quickly. But I saw that I had just one minute before you left and I’d never see you again. You’re wondering if I’m an agent of the capitalist-imperial powers and I do admit I wondered how a beautiful girl happened to be in my box, alone, on the very evening I decided to come to the ballet.’

She smiled uncertainly. She had not thought of this.

‘So you were wondering whether I am a spy?’ She paused. ‘I don’t think I am – unless it’s possible to be a spy without knowing it.’

‘That’s a very Russian idea,’ he answered. ‘But let me tell you I’m an attaché, a diplomat in uniform, at the American Embassy. I interpret for the ambassador. But I guess you’d say I’m a real damned capitalist.’

‘You’re from a rich family?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you live in a mansion?’

‘My parents do.’

‘Do you have repressed Negro servants in white gloves?’

‘No gloves, but our butler is black.’

‘Does he wear a white coat like in the movies?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, as a good Communist, I declare you the enemy. I suppose you must be what we call a bloodsucker of the working class?’

He was, he told her, one of those Americans who were as at home in the country houses of England as he was in the mansions of Long Island. His father was Honorius Belman, president of the Southern-Eastern Union Railway Corporation, a Texan born in a log cabin, but he, his son, had been educated at Groton and Harvard where he’d studied Russian. Frank told her how he played polo with plutocrats like the Rockefellers, that his father was a donor to FDR’s campaigns and that he had spent a holiday working in the White House. All of which explained why he had not been impressed by her own famous parents, Serafima realized.

After walking for hours, they were back where they had started. They reached the Metropole Hotel across the square from the Bolshoi. A hotel? He did not seem that sort of man. But perhaps all men were that sort of man, Serafima thought as the doorman in his green braided uniform bowed and the revolving doors spun them into the scarlet lobby.

Frank bought her two shots of vodka at the Metropole bar but, to Serafima’s relief, he didn’t mention anything about taking a room. There was a jazz band playing and, on the dance floor, the uniforms of a dozen nations danced the foxtrot. Men’s shoulderboards and shiny boots, the bare shoulders and permed tresses of scarlet-lipped girls shimmered around them. They stood watching for a moment as the vodka restored her. She was dreading him asking her to dance. She hated foxtrotting. She had no natural rhythm, and her clumsiness would ruin everything.

‘Do you . . . like to d-dance?’ Frank asked over the sound of the band. When she came to know him better, she would realize that he stammered slightly when he was nervous.

‘If you want to,’ she answered, frowning.

‘You look cross,’ he said. ‘You’ve looked cross ever since we came in here. When you’re cross, you lower your eyebrows so you look like an angry swan. More beautiful than ever but quite frightening!’

‘Well, the angry swan says sorry. It’s because . . . I’m not sure I like being here.’

‘But I thought all girls loved to dance,’ he said, looking anxious.

‘Yes, most do – but not all.’

He cleared his throat a little. ‘I have a confession to make. Although I’m told that every man must be able to foxtrot, I can’t dance at all. I hate dancing . . . I’m sorry. I’m not much of a date, am I?’

‘Oh Frank, I hate dancing too. And I can’t foxtrot or anything else. I can only talk and walk.’

So out they went, back into the night, Frank quoting poets that few Westerners knew: Akhmatova, Pasternak, Pushkin, Blok. They walked across the Stone Bridge opposite the Kremlin. Through the snow, they could hardly even see the towers, gates and stars under its camouflage netting.