One Night in Winter (36 page)

Suddenly Beria was elbowing him hard in the side. ‘What is this? You’re not listening to Josef Vissarionovich? Are you talking to yourself? Wake up, you drunken motherfucker. Comrade Stalin was asking you about Berlin.’

Stalin was looking right at him, peering into his soul.

‘Perhaps Comrade Satinov is tired? Well, we all are. What is it, boy? Drink, weariness, war or love?’

The other leaders laughed. ‘Drink!’ cried Khrushchev.

‘Or is it love?’ teased Beria.

‘Not our Hercules. Surely not,’ said Stalin. ‘He’s far too uxorious! Our Choirboy! Our straight arrow.’

‘Either way, you’ve got to drink a forfeit shot for your rudeness,’ Beria said. ‘There – now drink that! No heeltaps!’

Satinov drank the vodka in a single scourging gulp, and the next that Beria demanded, but if anything it made the images of Dashka even more vividly delicious. He fought back the urge to sob uncontrollably.

‘What is it, comrade?’ asked Stalin, sounding cross and impatient. ‘Does Comrade Satinov wish to retire and sort himself out?’

‘Absolutely not,’ replied Satinov firmly, remembering that in the thirties, Stalin often destroyed those leaders who were no longer competent and hard-working. (Yet even as he reviewed that terrifying prospect, some madness within him was saying, I don’t care if I get nine grams in the neck. Only Dashka matters. I’d die for her and if I can’t have her, let everything end.) ‘In fact, Josef Vissarionovich, I would be happy to curate more ministries if you trusted me to take on more.’

‘Like what,
bicho
?’

‘At the front, I learned a bit about medical supplies . . .’ Oh my God, he should retract this, but it was too late. ‘If you wished it, I’d be happy to supervise the Ministry of Health.’

Stalin narrowed his hazel-specked eyes. His peacocks cried in the gardens outside, a haunting sound. Inside all was silent. ‘Good,’ he said finally. ‘Why not? Health’s in a mess like everything else. Sort it out.’

Afterwards, Satinov stood next to Mikoyan at the urinals downstairs. ‘Careful, Hercules,’ said Mikoyan, an Armenian and the most decent of the leaders. ‘Are you mad? Only a suicide dozes off when Stalin’s talking to him.’

Satinov hoped dinner would go on all night, and that sometime in the early hours, he would stagger out into Stalin’s garden of peacocks and roses – and never wake up.

The true Bolshevik shouldn’t and can’t have a family because he should devote himself wholly to the Party.

Josef Stalin

DASHKA WAS STRUGGLING
to live. It was as if the air filling her lungs was turning to glue, as if she was wading through setting concrete. With Minka and Senka gone, every moment was dominated by a crushing sadness. If she stopped for a moment, she knew she would collapse and she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to get up. Genrikh’s mechanical nature and his fanatical Bolshevism were also beginning to drive her to the edge. Was his obedience to Stalin and his devotion to Chekist justice more important than her, than Senka and Minka? Yet the harsh, strong Genrikh
was
her family; her one concern was her children and they would only return if she was with him.

Now, at the Golden Gates as she walked Demian to the door of the school, she saw Hercules Satinov, magnificent in his general’s summer uniform, but as drawn and weary as she. She knew she shouldn’t speak to him. Yet she was terrified that he would look into her eyes as she had once looked into his, and they’d remember all that had passed between them.

The very thought of her adorable Senka missing her, crying in his bed, hating the food, literally made her sick – and that was before she even considered his fear during the interrogations; and what if he suffered an asthma attack? These horrors seemed to be swarming over her, within and without. Please God, let them be kind to him and let him come home soon!

She glanced at the parents, bodyguards and teachers surrounding her. It was a typical drop-off, but their lives were ticking over while hers was now utterly still. Nothing was the same for her; everything, even the sunlight and the summer show was stained a funereal black.

Surely Hercules would know something about Senka? She had to quiz him. Fast. Yet she feared somebody might overhear their anguished conversation, notice the way they leaned towards each other. Any mistake now could cost Senka and Minka dear, and that would make her hate Hercules. When he looked at her, a pulse started on his cheek and she could sense a stormy interior of repressed emotion.

‘Good morning. I wonder if the weather will change?’ she asked him now. ‘The sunshine is . . . blinding me. I don’t think I can take much more.’

‘Don’t look at the sun,’ Satinov replied, speaking slowly and carefully. ‘It may be blinding you now, but it won’t always be so bright.’ Was he saying: let the investigation take its course and your children will be back soon?
What
was he saying? What is this system we’ve created that treats children in this way? She wanted to scream at Satinov:
What do you know?
But she mustn’t scream, she mustn’t stare at the sun, she knew she was being tested and she must reveal nothing of her fear and anger. Dissemble, she told herself, but it was almost impossible. It hit her in her belly again and a cramp twisted her insides as if someone was turning a corkscrew in her womb. For a moment, she felt as if she might fall.

‘Understood, understood,’ she said. ‘But will the weather change soon?’

‘It is changing,’ he said. What did he mean? That the investigation was coming to an end, that Senka and Minka were coming home? ‘Dashka,’ he said, leaning into her. ‘I’ve heard that there is rain coming . . .’

‘Rain?’ she asked desperately. ‘But the children won’t feel the rain because they’re inside?’

‘Precisely,’ said Satinov. ‘A few drops may fall on them but
we
are the ones who will get wet.’

‘We will?’

‘The future of Communism’, he said carefully, ‘depends solely on Soviet youth.’

Dashka blinked hard, concentrating on what this meant. Surely he was saying that they were no longer so interested in the children. Her insides relaxed and then tightened like a noose. Or did he mean they were deploying their children against
them
, their parents? Another cramp in her womb made her wince and she pressed her hands on her belly. The deep ache inside her meant she was bleeding. She was not surprised: everyone had an Achilles heel and this was where despair and panic always hit her. But she was wearing a cream-coloured suit, and she was quite unprepared for this. She was late for a meeting at the ministry and now she was bleeding. She had to rush home to change. But then something made her stop: she realized that she had not even asked about Satinov’s family. How was Tamara and where was Mariko? Only Marlen was with him. ‘I’ve got to run,’ she said. ‘Is Mariko here? I didn’t see her.’

Satinov’s expression softened for a telling instant. ‘She can’t come to school at the moment,’ he said haltingly.

Mariko too? She was only six, four years younger than Senka! What must he and Tamara be going through?

‘You too?’ she whispered. Sympathy for him and, yes, Tamara welled up in her. She fought the urge to touch him. Her affection for him rushed through her. If she lingered, it would devour her. But simultaneously disgust, regret, guilt galloped over those feelings and purged her. She shivered at what she had once done.

She suddenly understood that their children were being used against them. What if Senka said something foolish? What about Minka? Would any of them survive this?

‘
THERE’S NO NEED
to get rough,’ said Benya Golden to Colonel Likhachev. ‘Just ask and I’ll tell you. I’ve nothing to hide and you know my secrets better than I.’ Benya was a connoisseur of Chekist investigations and he knew how they metamorphosed from one stage to another just as he knew that while many leaders had the power to initiate and intensify cases, only Stalin could redirect, redesign and resculpt one.

‘Let’s talk about your life, Prisoner Golden.’

Benya observed his interrogator under the light of the naked bulb that swung low over the table like a censer in an Orthodox church, and noticed how the swollen red pores of his face were evenly spaced, as if by design.

‘I honestly can’t understand how you ever got a job at that school. In fact I can’t understand how you’re even amongst the living. Let’s see . . .’ He consulted his file. ‘Born Lvov. In 1939, you were found guilty of terroristic conspiracy. Death sentence commuted to twenty-five years in the camps but in June 1941, you were allowed to join one of the
shtraf
battalions . . .’ Likhachev looked at him searchingly with something approaching respect. ‘You don’t look like a tough guy.’

‘I’m not,’ Benya admitted.

Likhachev lit a cigarette. ‘How on earth did you get to join them?’

Benya shrugged: ‘I just don’t know.’ In the catastrophic retreats of June 1941, when Hitler’s panzers were racing towards Moscow and millions of soldiers were being encircled and captured, some desperado criminals in the Gulag camps were allowed, as a special favour, to join the penal battalions – the
shtraf.

Benya Golden was a political prisoner and ‘politicals’ were not allowed to join even the
shtrafniki.
But there were a few exceptions: Benya applied because he wanted to defend Russia against the Nazis and because he knew he would perish in the camps anyway. His request was permitted.

‘So,’ Likhachev said, ‘you owe your life to a bureaucratic mistake. We’ll look into that.’

The
shtrafniki
were given impossible tasks – do-or-die missions: clearing minefields, defending doomed positions. They were fed one-tenth of the usual rations of a Red Army soldier and, guarded by the secret police, could be shot without explanation or trial for the slightest infraction. If they served well, they could, in the rarest cases of heroic bravery, earn their freedom. But that was almost unheard of. The
shtrafniki
did not live that long.

‘How did a puny Yid like you survive?’ Likhachev asked.

To his own surprise, Benya had been a savage warrior. His officers recommended him for the star of Hero of the Soviet Union but as an ex-political, he could not receive it. Wounded and discharged in 1943, he applied for a teaching job at School 801 and, surprisingly, got the position.

But whatever horrors he had been through, he knew he was still himself, or at least a damaged, cynical, heartbroken version of what he had once been. And a half-man, Benya Golden thought now, is harder to hurt than a whole one. Only his body could be destroyed. That was why he sat calmly in one of the rooms he remembered from six years earlier, and waited for the session to begin.

‘From the moment you arrived at School 801, you set out to undermine Marxist-Leninist ideology,’ Likhachev was saying.

‘No,’ Benya replied. ‘I wanted to teach literature as I thought it should be taught.’

‘What other way is there but the Party’s way?’

‘I’m not political.’

‘You poisoned the minds of the children with romantic philistinism, manifested by the Fatal Romantics’ Club.’

‘Not at all. I love Pushkin. I had one chance to create a love of literature in young people. In the thirties, I loved a woman. Pushkin was our poet. Our poem, the poem of our true love, was “The Talisman”,
so when I was close to Pushkin, I was close to
her
.’

‘You disgust me, Yid,’ snarled Likhachev. ‘You wormed your way into that school to corrupt the leaders’ children and launch a conspiracy to assassinate Comrade Stalin.’

This
answered one of Benya’s big questions. When they started to arrest more children, he’d realized that this was no longer just about the deaths of two teenagers. Somehow this had become ‘a conspiracy’.

‘I was never part of any plot,’ he replied, ‘unless it was a conspiracy to love
Eugene Onegin
.’

‘Was the conspiracy led by “NV”?’

‘There was no conspiracy. As for “NV”, did that stand for Blagov’s name? Nikolai Vadimovich?’

‘Do you take us for fools? It’s not Blagov.’

‘Then I don’t know an NV.’

‘What does NV
mean in
Onegin
?’

‘Ah. In
Onegin,
it would be Nina Voronskaya,’ Benya said thoughtfully. ‘She’s the only NV in the poem. I’ll recite it for you. Onegin sees Tatiana next to this lovely society hostess:

Benya shut his eyes, taking consolation from the lines.

‘Is there a page number for this reference?’ Likhachev asked.

‘Page? Chapter eight, stanza sixteen, I think.’

Likhachev wrote this down in his childish handwriting. ‘And this NV has to stand for a girl, right?’

Benya Golden was tempted to laugh, so simplistic was the implication of Likhachev’s question. A conspiracy; an unknown person named after an
Onegin
character? Could the person they were looking for be a girl after all?

‘I know my Pushkin,’ he said guardedly. ‘But I don’t know if NV was animal, vegetable, or mineral.’

‘
GOOD MORNING, LITTLE
Professor. Rise and shine!’ said the buxom prison warder whom Senka had nicknamed Blancmange. ‘Have you got any new words to teach us?’

Senka noticed her new tone. He was still in the silk striped pyjamas he had been wearing when he was taken; it was past time he changed them. His mother would never let him wear the same pyjamas for so long!

‘Did you sleep at all?’ asked Blancmange.

‘I slept better.’

‘Good. You need to rest for what’s ahead!’

An hour later, Blancmange brought his breakfast. She smiled at him, ruffled his hair and even presented him with an extra two pieces of Borodinsky bread and a huge triangle of goat’s cheese. ‘You’ve lost weight, young man. We need to feed you up. They’ll be back in a minute to take you down for your daily chat.’