One Night in Winter

1

THE BEST SCHOOL in Moscow, thought Andrei Kurbsky on his first day at School 801 on Ostozhenka, and, by some miraculous blessing, I’ve just made it here.

He and his mother were far too early and now they hovered in a doorway opposite the school gates like a pair of gawping villagers. He cursed his mother’s anxiety as he saw she was holding a checklist and running through his paraphernalia under her breath: satchel – yes; white shirt – yes; blue jacket – yes; grey trousers – yes; one volume Pushkin; two notebooks; four pencils; packed lunch of sandwiches… And now she was peering into his face with a maddening frown.

‘Oh Andryusha, there’s something on your face!’ Drawing out a crumpled hankie from her handbag, she licked it and started trying to scrub away at his cheek.

This was his first memory of the school. They were all there, the threads that led to the killings, if you knew which to follow. And they began with his mother scrubbing him while he tried to wave her away as if she was a fly buzz-bombing him on a summer’s day.

‘Stop it, Mama!’ He pushed her hand away and proudly rearranged his spectacles. Her pinched, dry face behind metal spectacles infuriated him but he managed to suppress it, knowing that the satchel, blazer, shoes had been provided by begging from neighbours, appealing to cousins (who had naturally dropped them when his father disappeared), trawling through flea markets.

Four days earlier, 9 May 1945, his mother had joined him in the streets to celebrate the fall of Berlin and the surrender of Nazi Germany. Yet even on that day of wonders, the most amazing thing was that, somehow during the laxer days of wartime, they had been allowed to return to Moscow. And even that did not approach the true miracle: he had applied to all the schools in central Moscow expecting to get into none but, out of all of them, he had been accepted by the best: the Josef Stalin Commune School 801, where Stalin’s own children had been educated. But this astonishing good news immediately sent his mother, Inessa, into a new spiral of worry: how to pay the school fees with her librarian’s salary?

‘Look, Mama, they’re about to open the gates,’ Andrei said as a little old Tajik in a brown janitor’s coat, wizened as a roasted nut, jingled keys on a chain. ‘What gates!’

‘They have gold tips,’ said Inessa.

Andrei examined the heroic figures carved on the two pilasters in the Stalin imperial style. Each pillar was emblazoned with a bronze plaque on which, in golden silhouettes, he recognized Marx, Lenin and Stalin.

‘The rest of Moscow’s a ruin but look at this school for the top people!’ he said. ‘They certainly know how to look after their own!’

‘Andrei! Remember, watch your tongue…’

‘Oh Mama!’ He was as guarded as she was. When your father has disappeared, and your family has lost everything, and you are hovering on the very edge of destruction, you don’t need reminding that you must be careful. His mother felt like a bag of bones in his arms. Food was rationed and they could scarcely afford to feed themselves.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘People are arriving.’ Suddenly children in the school uniform – grey trousers and white shirt for boys, grey skirt and white blouse for girls – were arriving from every direction. ‘Mama, look at that car! I wonder who’s in it?’

A Rolls-Royce glided up to the kerb. A driver with a peaked cap jumped out and ran round to open the door at the back. Andrei and Inessa stared as a full-breasted woman with scarlet lips, a strong jaw and jet-black hair emerged from the car.

‘Look, Andryusha!’ exclaimed Inessa. ‘You know who that is?’

‘Of course I do! It’s Sophia Zeitlin. I love her movies. She’s my favourite film star.’ He had even dreamed of her: those full lips, those curves. He had woken up very embarrassed. She was old – in her forties, for God’s sake!

‘Look what she’s wearing!’ Inessa marvelled, scrutinizing Sophia Zeitlin’s checked suit and high heels. After her, a tall girl with fair curly hair emerged from the Rolls. ‘Oh, that must be her daughter.’

They watched as Sophia Zeitlin straightened her own chic jacket, checked her hairdo and then cast a professional smile in three directions as if she was accustomed to posing for photographers. Her daughter, as scruffy as the mother was immaculate, rolled her eyes. Balancing a pile of books in her arms and trying to keep her satchel strap on her shoulder, she headed straight towards the school gates.

Inessa started to brush imaginary dust off Andrei’s shoulders.

‘For God’s sake, Mama,’ he whispered at her, pushing her hand away. ‘Come on! We’re going to be late.’ Suppose his classmates first sighted him having his face cleaned by his mother! It was unthinkable.

‘I just want you to look your best,’ Inessa protested but he was already crossing the road. There were not many cars and Moscow looked faded, scarred, weary after four years of war. At least two of the buildings on Ostozhenka were heaps of rubble. The Kurbskys had just reached the pavement when there was a skidding rush and a Packard limousine, black and shiny, sped towards them, followed by a squat Pobeda car. Braking with a screech, a uniformed guard with waxed moustaches leaped from the passenger seat of the Packard and opened the back door.

A man climbed out of the car. ‘I recognize him,’ Andrei said. ‘That’s Comrade Satinov.’

Andrei remembered him in Pravda wearing an entire chest of medals (headline: ‘Stalin’s Iron Commissar’) but now he wore a plain khaki uniform with just a single Order of Lenin. Arctic stare, aquiline nose: emotionless discipline, Bolshevik harshness. How often had he seen that face on banners as big as houses, on flags aloft in parades? There was even a city in the Urals called Satinovgrad. His mother squeezed his arm.

‘It’s quite a school,’ he said. The bodyguards formed a phalanx around Comrade Satinov, who was joined by a tiny woman and three children in school uniform, two boys who were Andrei’s age, and a much younger girl.

Hercules Satinov, Politburo member, Secretary of the Party, Colonel General, approached the school gates holding his daughter’s hand as if he was leading a victory march. Andrei and his mother instinctively stepped back and they were not the only ones: there was already a queue at the gates but a path opened for the Satinovs. As Andrei and his mother followed in their wake, they found themselves right behind the Satinov boys.

Andrei had never been so close to a leader before, and glanced back anxiously at his mother.

‘Let’s step back a bit.’ Inessa gestured: retreat. ‘Best not to be too far forward.’ Rule number one: Don’t be noticed, don’t draw attention. It was a habit born of long misfortune and suffering in this flint-hearted system. Years of being invisible in crowded stations where they feared their IDs would be checked.

Torn between fearful caution and the craving to rub shoulders with his new classmates, the Golden Youth of Moscow, Andrei couldn’t take his eyes off the nape of Comrade Satinov’s neck, shaved military style. And thus it was that before many minutes had passed, they found themselves near the very front of the line, almost between the two gold-crested pillars of the school gates, under a hot Moscow sky so cloudlessly blue it seemed bleak.

Around Andrei and his mother, the crowd of parents – well-dressed women, men in golden shoulderboards (he saw a marshal up ahead) and creamy summer suits, and children in the red scarf of the Pioneers – pressed close. Beside him, Inessa was sweating, her face made ugly by worry, her skin dry as grey cardboard. Andrei knew she was only forty – not that old – yet the contrast with the glossily coiffed mothers of the school in their smart summer frocks was all too obvious. His father’s arrest and vanishing, their banishment from the capital, seven years’ exile in Central Asia, all this had ground her to dust. Andrei felt embarrassed by her, irritated by her and protective of her, all at the same time. He took her hand. Her crushed, grateful smile made him think of his father. Where are you, Papa? he wondered. Are you still alive? Was their return to Moscow the end of their nightmare or yet another cruel trick?

Comrade Satinov stepped forward and a woman in a sack-like black shift dress, which made her resemble a nun, greeted him.

‘Comrade Satinov, welcome. I’m Kapitolina Medvedeva, School Director, and I wish on behalf of the staff of the Stalin School 801 to say that it is a great honour to meet you. At last! In person!’

‘It’s good to be here, comrade director,’ replied Satinov with a strong Georgian accent. ‘I’ve been at the front and haven’t done a thing with the children since the twenty-second of June 1941’ – the day Hitler invaded Russia, as Andrei and every Russian knew – ‘but now I’ve been summoned back from Berlin to Moscow.’

‘Summoned,’ repeated the director, blushing faintly because ‘summoned’ could only mean an order from Marshal Stalin himself. ‘Summoned by…’

‘Comrade Stalin has instructed us: now the war is over, we must restore proper Russian and Soviet values. Set an example. The Soviet man is a family man too.’ Andrei noticed that Satinov’s tone was patient and masterful yet never arrogant. Here was Bolshevik modesty. ‘So you might be seeing too much of me at the school gates.’

Director Medvedeva put her hands together as if in prayer and took a deep breath. ‘What wisdom! Comrade Satinov, of course we know your family so well. Your wife is such a valued member of staff and we are accustomed to prominent parents here but, well, a member of the Politburo – we… we are overcome, and so honoured that you’ve come personally…’

The boy in front of Andrei was shaking his head as he listened to this performance. ‘Mother of God, you’d have thought Papa was the Second Coming!’ he said aloud. Andrei wasn’t sure whom he was addressing. ‘Are we going to have this bowing and scraping every time he drops us off at school?’ It was one of Satinov’s sons, who had half turned towards Andrei. ‘It’s bad enough having a mother who’s a teacher but now… oh my God. Nauseating.’

Andrei was shocked at this irreverence, but the dapper boy, with polished shoes, creased trousers and pomade in his bouncy hair, seemed delighted at the effect he was having on the new boy. He gave Andrei an urbane smile. ‘I’m Georgi Satinov but everyone calls me George. English-style.’ The English were still allies, after all. George offered his hand.

‘Andrei Kurbsky,’ said Andrei.

‘Ah yes. Just back in the city? You’re the new boy?’ asked George briskly.

‘Yes.’

‘I thought so.’ And the smile vanished. Without it, George Satinov’s face looked smug and bored. The audience was over – and Andrei felt himself falling back to earth.

‘Minka!’ George was embracing a curvaceous girl with dark skin. ‘What’s news?’ he was asking.

Andrei paled a little and felt his mother beside him again. They both knew what George had meant by ‘Just back in the city?’ He was tainted by exile, the child of a Former Person.

‘Don’t expect too much. They’ll all want to be your friend in the end,’ whispered Inessa, squeezing his arm sweetly. He was grateful for it. The girl called Minka was so pretty. Would Andrei ever be able to talk to her with George Satinov’s confident, carefree style? Her parents stood behind her with a little boy. ‘That must be her mother over there. I recognize her too. It’s Dr Dashka Dorova, Health Minister.’ Minka’s mother, brown-skinned and dark-eyed, wore a cream suit with pleated skirt more suited for tennis than surgery. The most elegant woman Andrei had seen in Moscow stared momentarily at Inessa’s darned stockings, scuffed shoes and the aubergine-coloured circles under her eyes. Her husband was also in uniform but tiny with prematurely white hair and the pasty skin of the Soviet bureaucrat: the Kremlin Tan.

Andrei was just trying to regain his natural optimism when his mother pulled him forward.

‘Thank you, comrade director.’ Satinov had assumed a winding-up tone. ‘We appreciate your work too.’ Director Medvedeva almost bowed as the Satinovs processed inside, and then she turned to Andrei, her face a mask of solemn rectitude once again.

‘Yes?’ she asked.

As he looked beneath the lank hair and beetly brows into her severe eyes, he feared that she would not know his name or, worse, would know it in order to send him away. Inessa too shook her hand with an expression that said, ‘Hit me. I’m used to it, I expect it.’

‘Mama, how will we pay for this school?’ he had asked Inessa only that morning, and she had answered, ‘Let’s live that long first.’ Would he be unmasked as the son of an Enemy of the People and expelled before he had even started?

Director Medvedeva grudgingly offered a hand so bony the fingers seemed to grind: ‘The new boy? Yes. Come see me in my office after assembly. Without fail!’ She turned to the Dorovs: ‘Welcome, comrades!’

Red heat spread through Andrei’s body. Director Medvedeva was going to ask how he would afford the fees. He recalled how often the tiniest signs of hope – his mother finding a new job, a move into a larger room in a shared apartment, permission to live in a town nearer Moscow – had been offered and then taken away from them at the last moment. He felt his composure disintegrating.

The vestibule led to a long corridor.

‘Shall I come in with you?’ Inessa asked him. There was nothing so daunting as the first day at a new school, yet one moment he needed her warmth beside him, the next she metamorphosed into steel shackles around his ankles. ‘Do you need me, darling?’

‘Yes. No. I mean—’

‘I’ll leave you then.’ She kissed him, turned and the crowd swallowed her up.

Andrei was on his own. Now he could remake himself: reforging was a principle of Bolshevism. Stalin himself had promised that the sins of the father would never be visited on the son but Andrei knew they were – and with a vengeance.

2

ANDREI STOOD ALONE for a moment in the doorway that led into School 801’s main corridor and took a deep breath that smelled of his new life: the bitter disinfectant of the washrooms, the sweet floor polish of the parquet floors, the scent of the glamorous mothers, the acrid whiff of vodka on some teachers’ breath, and, stronger than anything, he inhaled the oxygen of hope. Then he plunged into the crowd, looking at the walls, which were decorated with framed posters of Young Pioneers on camping trips, cartoons of Timur and his Team on their wartime adventures, and lists of otlichniki, the ‘excellent ones’, the highest-achieving children.

Yes, he was inside – and he felt his resilient cheerfulness vanquishing George Satinov’s disdain and the director’s sinister summons. There right in front of him was the film star Sophia Zeitlin, talking to Comrade Satinov. He could not help but stare. He had never seen two such famous beings making ordinary conversation. It was like a newsreel in real colour. He could hear their voices. Do they breathe like us mortals, he wondered; then he caught himself with a laugh. Of course they did.

Satinov’s plain-clothed bodyguards were peering at him contemptuously, and he turned, almost knocking into Sophia Zeitlin’s daughter – and stopped, not sure what it was about her that caught his attention. Of course, the fact that she rode to school in a film star’s Rolls-Royce explained some of it.

She moved heedlessly with the long-legged, unregimented spirit of a much younger girl. Her curly fair hair was unbrushed, her face and skin clear of make-up, yet Andrei sensed a natural authority of the most elementally basic kind, the power of someone who expected admiration and whose expectation was self-fulfilling. Her green eyes met his for a second, and Andrei noticed that her long black eyelashes and wide sensuous mouth were so striking that they entirely overshadowed her laddered stockings and the old-fashioned white pinafore buttoned up to the neck that she was wearing.

As Sophia Zeitlin and Comrade Satinov advanced down the corridor, greeting everyone, Zeitlin’s daughter, noticing perhaps that Andrei was watching her, raised her eyes towards the heavens, a complicit gesture that seemed to say her mother embarrassed her too.

‘Serafima!’ It was Satinov’s son again. ‘Good holidays? What’s news?’ It seemed to be George’s catchphrase, Andrei thought.

Andrei was following Serafima and George down the corridor when the bell rang. The parents started to retreat and the children headed for assembly. Serafima and George watched Dr Dashka Dorova and her desiccated husband pass.

‘What an affinity of opposites Minka’s parents are,’ said George.

‘He’s just like… yes, an uncooked chicken cutlet!’ said Serafima.

‘That’s exactly what he’s like!’ chuckled George. And Andrei smiled too. Serafima’s wicked comment was spot on.

The children flowed one way and the parents the other. When Comrade Satinov passed, he nodded brusquely at Andrei, who had no idea how to react (salute? No!) but was borne on down the corridor by the crowd.

In the school gymnasium, ranks of wooden seats had been placed beneath thick ropes that hung like giant nooses from the rafters of a high wooden ceiling. Exercise ladders ran up the walls and a wooden horse was stored near the back beside the Lenin Corner’s white bust of Lenin. Seats for the teachers were arranged in two rows on the wooden stage. Director Medvedeva’s stood in the middle: the only one with arms and a cushion. The school was a mini-Russia, thought Andrei. Every institution had its hierarchy just like the Party. Giant portraits of Stalin and the leaders hung from the walls behind (yes, there, fourth in order, was Satinov).

For a moment, Andrei panicked as the five hundred pupils found their friends. They were all greeting each other after the holidays – what if he couldn’t find a seat? He caught George’s eye for a moment but George looked away. ‘Minka, I’ve saved you a seat,’ he called out. ‘Serafima, here!’ Sitting between Minka Dorova (daughter of the Uncooked Chicken) and Serafima (daughter of the film star), George radiated the pinked-cheeked satisfaction of the boy who believes he is in his rightful place. A tall red-haired boy rushed to get the seat next to Serafima.

Andrei looked for a seat for what seemed like a horribly long time before sitting down with relief on one of the empty chairs opposite George and Serafima. A slim pale girl with fair hair sat down beside him. She looked at George and his friends, and then turned to Andrei as if she had just awoken from a dream.

‘Oh, hello. You’re new?’

‘Yes,’ said Andrei.

‘Mmm,’ she murmured. ‘I’m Rosa Shako.’

She must be Marshal Shako’s daughter, thought Andrei, who’d seen the air force commander just outside the school. When they’d shaken hands, she gazed over at George’s row as if she’d forgotten him again.

‘Those are my friends,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you meet George outside school?’

‘Not really.’

‘It must be hard arriving for the last term of the year,’ she said. Andrei thought that with her blue eyes and flaxen ringlets she looked just like an angel in a children’s book. ‘You see the red-haired boy?’

‘The one who’s sitting next to Serafima?’

A cloud crossed her face. ‘That’s Nikolasha Blagov. My friend.’ She’d opened her mouth to say something else when – hush – everyone’s voices sank to a whisper. The teachers entered, filing in order of importance down the aisle and up the steps to the stage in exactly the same way Stalin and the Politburo entered at Congresses.

‘Do you know who they all are?’ asked Rosa kindly.

‘I only know her,’ said Andrei as Director Medvedeva herself marched forward on to the stage, followed – presumably – by her deputy, a man whose greasy straggle of auburn hair, brushed over his baldness, had the texture of a woven basket.

‘That’s Dr Rimm,’ whispered Rosa as he passed them. ‘Serafima, who thinks up all the nicknames, calls him the Hummer. Listen.’ Comrade Rimm was loudly humming a tune that was unmistakably ‘May Comrade Stalin Live Many, Many Long Years’.

‘Quiet, George,’ said Dr Rimm in a high voice. ‘Eyes straight ahead, Serafima. Sit up straight. Discipline!’

Then came the rest of the teachers. ‘That’s Comrade Satinov’s wife, Tamara,’ said Rosa. ‘She teaches us English.’

A strapping old gentleman, whose wrinkly knees the colour of tanned leather were framed between flappy blue shorts and scarlet socks, entered next. ‘That’s Apostollon Shuba, our physical instructor. Do you think he looks like a sergeant major in the Tsarist army? Well, he was!’

‘Really?’ How on earth had this relic with the pitchfork-shaped moustaches survived the Terror? Andrei thought. But he was one of a generation of children brought up to believe that discretion was the essence of life, so he said nothing.

One seat was still empty. And then a teacher in a baggy sand-coloured suit and striped socks jumped nimbly on to the back of the stage. A murmur buzzed through the children.

‘Always last,’ said Rosa softly. ‘Let’s see! Look at that new canary-yellow tie! That’s Benya Golden, our Pushkin teacher.’ Andrei saw an agile, balding man with receding fair hair and a playful smile slip into his seat. ‘Serafima calls him the Romantic. If you’re lucky you’ll be in his class; if you’re unlucky, you’ll get Rimm the Hummer.’

Another bell heralded a rigorous silence. Director Medvedeva tapped her baton on her lectern. ‘Welcome back to the school in our era of the historic victory won by the genius of our Leader, Comrade Stalin.’ She turned to Dr Rimm, who stepped forward.

‘One question, Komsomolniki!’ he piped in a voice that might, on the telephone, be mistaken for that of a soprano. ‘If you had to lose all your possessions or your Komsomol badge, which would you choose?’

A boy with his hair brushed back in a slick wave like the Soviet leaders stood and led the reply: ‘All our possessions!’ he cried.

Andrei recognized him as the other Satinov boy.

‘It’s George’s brother Marlen,’ confirmed Rosa in his ear. She smelled of rosewater. ‘Are you a Komsomol, Andrei?’

Andrei wished he was – but there was no place for tainted children in the Young Communists.

‘Young Pioneers! Rise! Young Pioneers, are you prepared?’ shouted Dr Rimm. The red-scarfed Pioneers replied as one.

‘Always prepared!’

‘Bravo, Pioneers.’ Dr Rimm scanned the gym. Andrei was too old to be a Pioneer now, but he would have given anything to wear the red scarf.

Director Medvedeva tapped her baton. ‘Would Mariko Satinova come up to the rostrum,’ she said. That family are everywhere, thought Andrei as a little girl with plaits and a red scarf appeared on the side of the stage.

Tap, tap from the director’s baton: the sign to a young blonde teacher at the piano, who started to bang out the opening bars that Andrei knew so well.

‘And who’s the pianist?’ he asked.

‘That’s Agrippina Begbulatova, the assistant music teacher,’ answered Rosa as the little girl started to sing the first lines of the schoolchild’s anthem, ‘Thank you, Comrade Stalin, For Our Happy Childhood’. Andrei could sing it in his sleep; in fact, sometimes he did.

Director Medvedeva made announcements about the term: about the Pioneers camping at Artek in the Crimea; the second eleven football team would play the VM Molotov Commune School 54. Benya Golden seemed to regard many of these bulletins as faintly amusing, noticed Andrei as the teachers filed out, and the school term began.

Director Medvedeva was writing at her desk when Andrei was ushered in to see her. Her office was furnished with a single Bakelite phone, a small photograph of Stalin, and a tiny safe. (Andrei knew that the number of phones, and the size and quality of Stalin portraits and safes were all measures of power.) A banner across one entire wall declared: ‘Thank you, dear marshal, for our freedom, our children’s joy, our life.’

She gestured towards a wooden chair. ‘Welcome to the school. We forge new Soviet citizens, understand?’

Andrei waited miserably for the ‘but’ which he knew from bitter experience would not be long in coming.

‘But you have a tainted biography. Most of my colleagues here don’t approve of your admission. I doubt it will work out, but it’s only for a term. I shall watch you for the slightest sign of deviationism. That will be all, Kurbsky.’

He walked with heavy steps to the door as she too stood up briskly. ‘You must go to your first class. Follow me!’

Andrei’s mind whirred: should he ask about the fees? What was the point? It sounded as if she would get rid of him soon enough. Their footsteps echoed along the wooden corridor, which was by now deserted. Trying to keep up with her, Andrei thought her flaky skin and lank hair had never enjoyed the kiss of sunlight in all her life. At last, she stopped outside a closed door and gestured to him to come closer.

‘You won’t be paying school fees.’

Andrei opened his mouth to ask how, why? But she silenced him with a glance.

‘Do not discuss this, Kurbsky. Understood? Here’s your class.’ She turned like a sentry and the march of her metal-heeled boots receded down the long corridor.

Andrei wanted to scream with relief, but knew he must not. Tell no one. Reveal nothing. Analyse its meaning later. Struggling to control his breathing, he steadied his shaking hands and knocked on the door.

His first lesson was Russian literature but he did not know if he would get Dr Rimm or Teacher Golden. Which would be more helpful? As he opened the door, twenty-five sets of eyes swivelled towards him – and Andrei immediately noticed with a mixture of thrill and anxiety that Serafima, the Satinov brothers and the severe red-haired boy named Nikolasha were in his class. Only Rosa nodded at him.

‘Ah – a stranger!’ said Benya Golden, who was sitting languidly in his chair with his feet on the desk. ‘Come on in! We’re just starting.’

‘Am I in the right class? Is this Russian literature?’

‘Some of it is, some of it isn’t.’ The class laughed at Benya Golden’s insouciance. ‘You wish to join our fraternity of dear friends, beloved romantics, wistful dreamers?’

‘Um, I think so.’

‘Name?’

‘Kurbsky, Andrei.’

‘Take a seat. Nikolasha Blagov, move up and make space.’ The red-haired boy was again sitting next to Serafima, and, with much sighing, sulkily moved his books. Serafima in turn had to move up too. Nikolasha muttered to himself as Andrei sat next to him.

‘Now, Kurbsky,’ said Benya Golden. ‘Where are you from?’

Andrei hesitated. ‘Well, I was in Stalinabad but I’ve just come back to Moscow—’

‘Stalinabad! The Paris of Central Asia!’ Nikolasha exclaimed in a deep voice that seemed to crack at the wrong moments. A boy with long black hair sitting right behind them sneered: ‘The Athens of Turkestan!’ They all knew why someone like Andrei had ended up living in a Central Asian backwater. It was his tainted biography all over again.

‘Who asked you, Nikolasha?’ Benya Golden snapped. Jumping to his feet, he walked across to the boy with the long black hair: ‘Or you, Vlad? There’s nothing less attractive than Muscovite snobbery. Your presence in this class by no means a fait accompli. I hear Dr Rimm’s classes are much more fun than mine!’

Nikolasha glanced back at Vlad and both seemed to shrink at Benya Golden’s threat. Andrei noted that Nikolasha was the leader and Vlad the henchman in a group of youths who seemed to take their long hair and intellectual tastes very seriously indeed.

‘Let’s welcome Andrei, you inhospitable bastards. If Director Medvedeva’s put him in our class, there’s a reason. This term we’re doing Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.’

Benya Golden stepped back on to the platform where his desk stood and picked up a book.

‘Eugene Onegin,’ he said. ‘Most of us know some of this text. What about you, Andrei Kurbsky?’

Andrei’s reply earned a murmur of approval from the class. Serafima looked up, surprised – or did he imagine that?

‘Good! I bet it feels good to be back in Moscow,’ Benya Golden said, smiling at him.

Emboldened by Golden’s enthusiasm, Andrei continued:

‘Now I see why the director placed you in my class, Kurbsky.’ Golden climbed up to stand on his chair, holding his volume in one hand. ‘Nikolasha, blow your bugle!’

Nikolasha had taken an instrument from its case beside him and, self-consciously shaking his red locks, he stood up and blew his trumpet as if he was heralding a medieval king.

‘Your hair’s even longer this term,’ Benya Golden said to him. ‘Is this new coiffure a romantic affectation? My colleagues won’t like it. They might even think you were cultivating the un-Bolshevik image of a young romantic. Right! Now, welcome to Onegin. Prepare to be dazzled by the bard of Rus himself. There’s such richness in its pages that it never loses the capacity to surprise and delight us. Is this an “encyclopaedia of Russian life”? Is it a tragedy, comedy or romance?’

As Golden talked, Nikolasha had sat down, replaced his trumpet and was earnestly writing notes in an exercise book with scarlet velvet covers. When he saw that Andrei was looking, he muttered, ‘Mind your own business,’ and moved the book as far from Andrei as he could.

‘Is Onegin himself a dreary misanthropic narcissist or a victim of love and society? Is Tatiana a dull provincial, unworthy of such passion, or a paragon of Russian womanhood? Is this a guide how to love today? Yes, Demian Dorov?’

‘Surely only the Party can guide our lives today?’ Andrei recognized the pointy face and red scarf of the school’s Chief Pioneer.

‘And Comrade Stalin!’ interjected Marlen Satinov.

‘Comrade Stalin what?’ Benya Golden asked, still standing on his chair on the platform.

‘Only Comrade Stalin’, declared Marlen, ‘and the Party can guide our lives. You’re in danger of bourgeois sentimentalism.’

‘Well, thank you for reminding us,’ said Golden. ‘But I’m just teaching Pushkin here. Now let us begin. Ready?’ Benya Golden closed his eyes. ‘Mobilize the senses, dear friends, beloved romantics, wistful dreamers. Remember: life is short. It’s an adventure. Anything is possible! Breathe with me!’ He inhaled through his nose, and the children did the same. All exhaled together. Andrei looked around the room to see if anyone was laughing or rebelling, but Nikolasha gave him a grave look as if he was proposing blasphemy while Serafima took a breath with just a hint of amusement on her face to tell him that she knew he was looking at her. So he joined in with the insanity and had just exhaled again when Golden, not even opening his book, declaimed the first lines, his right hand raised and open as if reciting a spell: ‘My uncle, a man of firm convictions…’And on he went, reciting the text with such grace that the children listened in silence – until George Satinov put up his hand.

‘Yes?’ said Benya Golden.

‘I just wondered what Pushkin really means by the mysteries of the marriage bed?’

This sparked much sniggering from the back of the class.

Nikolasha turned round. ‘This is about love,’ he hissed.

‘Grow up, George,’ echoed his ally, Vlad, who seemed to support Nikolasha in everything.

‘You’re thinking of Rosa, aren’t you?’ teased George.

‘No, he’s dreaming of Serafima,’ said Minka Dorova. More laughter. Rosa blushed while Serafima ignored Nikolasha completely; Andrei realized that she hadn’t so much as acknowledged him all morning.

Benya Golden put his hands over his ears: ‘George! Minka! How can you slaughter the poetry with your tawdry innuendoes?’ Andrei had never seen a teacher who so relished, even encouraged, the mischief of his class. ‘Back to the divine poetry!’ Golden sat back on his chair. ‘Serafima, are you with us this morning? Tell us how Onegin falls in love with Tatiana, an innocent provincial girl.’

As Serafima read, the class became quiet again. Andrei watched her, fascinated, and realized everyone else was watching her too. She wasn’t as pretty as Rosa, nor as alluring as Minka in the back row, yet her startlingly green eyes were sprinkled with gold that glinted from under her black eyelashes. Was she agonizingly shy and simply unaware of her power? Andrei couldn’t work it out.

‘Well done, Serafima,’ said Golden, stopping her at last. Serafima looked up at him and smiled. ‘That’s enough for today. Andrei, I want you to stay behind.’

The children gathered their books, chairs grinding on the echoing floors. As George Satinov passed their desk, Nikolasha showed him the velvet-covered notebook and whispered something.

‘As you can see,’ said Benya Golden when they were alone, ‘my pupils are as serious about their little knots of friendship as they are about their poetry. But although some of them are the sons and daughters of our leaders, they’re mostly good kids. Anyway, even they were impressed by your knowledge of Pushkin, as was I.’

‘Thank you,’ said Andrei.

Golden patted Andrei on the shoulder. ‘Cheer up. You’re going to be a success here.’

‘I’m… I’m very happy to be here.’

‘You’ll end up being friends with Serafima’s group, don’t you worry. But I know it’s not easy coming back.’

‘You do?’

‘Yes,’ said Golden. ‘Because I haven’t been back in Moscow for long myself.’

Andrei looked up at the teacher, at his receding, light hair now greying, his dimpled chin, his lined face. His smile seemed genuine – but was it? Andrei knew it was better to say nothing more. Consulting his timetable, he hurried to find his next class.

At lunchtime, Andrei ate his sandwich of black bread with a gherkin at his desk, content to be on his own for a moment while Nikolasha and his friends Vlad, George and Rosa pushed some desks together to form an ink-stained table where they shared their fish, beef, cheese and tomatoes. It seemed that Nikolasha was never alone, never without an entourage of pale, floppy-haired creatures who looked as if they never took any exercise or ventured outside. Nikolasha was reading to them from his red velvet notebook and they whispered excitedly. Andrei felt pangs of disdain and envy – but he remembered his father and he knew neither of these sentiments was worthy of him. He finished his sandwich and as he walked past them, he saw Nikolasha giving his notebook to George.

‘You can read it, George,’ he was saying, ‘but take it seriously and I want it back tomorrow. With your comments.’

‘Of course, of course,’ replied George jovially.

Afterwards, as Andrei was hurrying up the corridor to his next lesson, he heard the squish of plastic soles on the parquet floor behind him. He turned and a white, freckled face hove into view. Nikolasha Blagov was so tall that he hunched over as he walked. As always he was followed by the dark-haired cadaverous figure of Vlad, as well as the fey Rosa Shako.

‘What do you think of Teacher Golden?’ Nikolasha asked lugubriously. His voice was so deep that his words came out slurred as if his tongue were a wooden spoon. Vlad and Rosa both leaned in to hear his answer.

Andrei hesitated, cautious of making some terrible mistake on his first day. ‘Interesting,’ he said finally.

Nikolasha shook his head as if disappointed. ‘Is that all you have to say?’ He leaned over as if about to impart a most perilous secret. ‘You’d best be careful. Things are different here.’

‘Has Serafima said anything to you yet?’ asked Vlad.

‘Serafima? I don’t even know Serafima.’

‘Serafima really understands poetry,’ said Nikolasha solemnly. ‘Well, you obviously haven’t made the grade, even if you can pull a few Pushkin quotes out of the air.’

‘What grade?’

‘You’ll see. Think on it.’

He and Vlad slunk off around the corner. Rosa lingered a moment and touched Andrei’s hand. ‘He takes it all very seriously but he’s so clever and original, you’ll see.’

Andrei’s first day at School 801 was almost over. His last lesson: Communist ethics with Dr Rimm, a pedant compared with Benya Golden, Andrei thought. Rimm’s sand-coloured Stalinka tunic was so tight that it only accentuated the lumpiness of his figure. The class stood to attention when he entered and remained standing until he moved his hand downwards in a silent gesture of command. After a turgid hour, during which Demian Dorov and Marlen Satinov competed with Dr Rimm to quote from the works of Stalin and Lenin, while the rest of the class yawned, wrote notes to each other and tried to stay awake, Andrei was the last out of the room.

As he left, he noticed Nikolasha’s red velvet notebook on the floor next to George Satinov’s desk. I’ll return it to them tomorrow, he thought and put it in his satchel.

3

FIVE P.M. AT the Golden Gates. This, thought Andrei, watching the limousines picking up his schoolmates, truly was the age of new freedoms, new pleasures. Chauffeurs and army batmen leaned against the curvaceous flanks of their Packards and Lincolns, smoking cigarettes, sweating in the sun. There were some mothers waiting but most Bolshevik women worked. The nannies, a tribe of florid Matryoshkas, peasant women in housecoats, stood separately, laughing at their own jokes. You couldn’t mistake them for the mothers, thought Andrei, and the two groups never spoke.

He stopped between the gold-tipped pillars of the gates, looking for – what? His mother to turn up and collect him in a giant limousine? No chance of that, but he had half expected she might take time off work to meet him. Still, he was relieved that she wasn’t there. Instead he was hoping that he might see Serafima and her film-star mother again… when she slipped right past him.

‘You do know your Onegin,’ Serafima said softly. ‘I’ll bet Nikolasha’s jealous.’ He noticed, all over again, her heart-shaped face, her white skin, and those amused green eyes. She did not stop to hear his answer, which was just as well because he could not think how to respond. Later, a host of witty answers would come to him.

The Rolls was waiting for her, the chauffeur leaning on the grille, cigarette between his metal fangs. There was no sign of her parents. But she did not seem pleased: ‘Thanks for coming, Khirochenko,’ she said. ‘But I’ll walk. Tell Mama I don’t need the car.’ The driver shrugged as she walked away from him into the balmy streets; the poplar blossoms whirled around her like a haphazard escort.

As the chauffeurs pulled away, Andrei yearned to be part of the lives of these golden children. Calm down, he told himself, you’re in their school, you’re in their lives. Soon you too will be in their group.

Holding his school satchel, he walked through the streets. He could feel the heat rising from the paving stones. Around him, the capital of Soviet victory looked like a defeated city. He saw crumbling buildings, their façades peppered with shrapnel, windows shattered, roads pockmarked with bomb craters. Everything – the walls, the houses, the cars – everything except the scarlet banners was drab, beige, peeling, khaki, grey. But the faces of the passersby were rosy as if victory and sunlight almost made up for the lack of food, and the streets were crowded with pretty girls in skimpy dresses, soldiers, sailors and officers in white summer uniforms. Studebaker trucks, Willys jeeps and the Buicks of officials rumbled by – but there were also carriages pulled by horses, carts heaped with hay or bedding or turnips, right in the middle of this spired city with its gold domes. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes in the heat and the world went a soft orange, Andrei heard laughter and singing and he was sure he could hear the city itself healing in the sunshine. Down Ostozhenka he walked, then round past the National Hotel and the Kremlin, and up Gorky Street, past the House of Books on the right, and the City Soviet on the left.

When he peered through one of the archways, he saw goats and cattle in the yard, wrangled by an old peasant with a red kerchief on her head and a crook in her hand. Yet this was the city that had defeated the Hitlerites and stormed Berlin! What pride he felt in the greatness of his Motherland, what horror at its cruelties. The old hag squatted to piss, still with a cigarette between two stumps of teeth. Andrei sighed: he loved his Moscow. He was almost home.

He turned into the next archway, walked into the courtyard through the vegetable gardens planted amongst the heating pipes, and then entered the doorway of a 1930s apartment block. He climbed the concrete stairs with its fermented vegetable smell of shchi soup and vinegary urine to the second floor where he shouldered open the door of their apartment. A radio was on, Levitan was reading the news in his authoritative, sonorous voice and there was a row going on. In a corridor that had neither carpet nor paint, Ivanov, a middle-aged scientist from Rostov, was screaming at one of the skinny Goldberg children: ‘You little cockroach, you drank my milk. I’ll report you to the committee. I’ll have you slung out of here…’

The door to the left opened and the stink of fresh human dung made Andrei’s eyes water even before Peshlauk, an antique but indestructible colossus, staggered out, pulling up his giant-girdled trousers. ‘I’ve delivered a veritable baby in there!’ he boasted.

Another of the Goldberg children – how many were there: four, five? A plague of undernourished rats – shoved past Andrei. ‘Hey, don’t push me,’ he said, but then he remembered that no one in the Soviet Union respected personal space. Everyone existed in a state of neurotic anxiety, but as his mother always told him: The key to survival is to be calm and save yourself. Never ask anyone what they did before and what they’re doing next. Never speak your mind. And make friends wherever you can.

‘Mama!’ Andrei went into their little room with its two campbeds packed close together. It often smelled like a rabbit hutch but it was in Moscow and it was theirs.

‘Just close the door,’ said Inessa, who lay on her bed, reading about the Japanese war in Pravda. The European war was over and now Stalin was in on the kill of Japan. She patted the bed next to her. ‘Tell me about the school.’

‘Have you got any food?’

‘Of course, Andryusha. You must be so hungry. Cheese and black bread. Have a look in Aladdin’s Cave.’

Andrei climbed over the other bed and, crouching down, edged a breeze-block out of the wall and brought out the cool cheese. Their apartment had no fridge. In winter they kept their milk fresh by hanging it out of the window, but in summer, this was the best way to preserve perishables, as well as keeping it out of the hands of the Goldberg children or Peshlauk’s churning bowels.

Inessa smiled weakly as she watched him eat and when he’d regained his energy, he beamed at her.

‘Good news, Mama! I’m accepted into the school and my fees are paid!’

‘Oh darling.’ She hugged him, and then looked anxious. ‘Who by? What’s going on?’

Andrei told her exactly what had happened, and watched as his mother’s uneasiness cleared. Surely this was evidence of a new era? And a new era meant the return of Andrei’s father.

‘Andrei,’ she whispered, moving closer to him. ‘Do you think…’

‘Don’t think, Mama. How often have you told me that?’

‘Yes, but…’

‘Don’t hope, because if we’re disappointed again, it’ll kill us one more time.’

She nodded, and dabbed her eyes. Quickly, to change the subject, he told her about the school: about the director, and Dr Rimm – yes, every school had a few of those – and then he described the literature teacher Golden. ‘I’ve never had a lesson like that. It was such fun. He brought it to life and there was something in the way he talked about poetry…’

‘A teacher like that in a school like yours… something’s really changing,’ she said.

‘And, Mama, he said he’d only just returned to Moscow too.’ She was about to ask more about Golden but by now, he was describing Serafima (her eyes, the way she dressed), the airy swagger of George, and creepy Nikolasha and his Gothic retainers, Vlad and Rosa.

‘Be careful of these princelings,’ Inessa was telling him. ‘Factions are dangerous, Andrei. Remember whose children they are…’

But Andrei wasn’t listening: he was already on his way to the bathroom with his satchel. No one was in there because no one in their right mind would visit it after Peshlauk – but he didn’t care.

He locked the door. He could actually taste the shit in the air and he didn’t dare look down into the bowl, but just sat on the edge and, like a miner who has stolen a diamond, he pulled out his treasure, titled the Velvet Book of Love. It was just a plain exercise book with velvet glued on to the covers. But it was new and Nikolasha had only just started writing in it.

So, thought Andrei, Nikolasha has a little club. Most schools had literary and theatre clubs, but this seemed different. He read on: Membership: secret.

Not that secret! Vlad and Rosa had to be members too, maybe Serafima, and certainly George.

A knock on the bathroom door made Andrei jump. He had forgotten where he was. The book showed that something, perhaps the war, perhaps their privilege, had changed these children, and allowed them the freedom to take a risk.

‘Are you going to be long?’

It was Kozamin the bus conductor.

Andrei gave a bovine groan, one of the repertoire of noises essential to communal living. ‘Five minutes. Aaaagh!’

‘Take your time,’ said Kozamin.

The Game! Andrei smiled to himself but he narrowed his eyes and reread it. Could this have been written with a hint of cunning to conceal its real spirit? These days, everything – from the government announcements in the newspapers to the tedious ramblings of teachers – was in a hieroglyphic code. Nothing quite meant what it said – and sometimes it meant the exact opposite. But Nikolasha’s target was obvious. Science and planning. That was the Communist Party. The cold machine of history. Communism. Love and romance. That was what Communists called ‘bourgeois sentimentalism’.

Andrei put down the book. In the adult world, in a more oppressive time like 1937, this might have been dangerous anti-Soviet talk. But things had become much more easy-going in the war. No one could take Nikolasha’s silly writings seriously, could they? Still, he remembered the wisdom of his father and his mother’s warnings. These children were not of his world, and yet he longed to know them better.

4

‘MAY I HAVE a word?’ Andrei said to George. They were in school a few days later, and the bell for lunch had just rung.

‘A word?’ George turned round as he followed Nikolasha and Vlad out of the classroom.

‘It’s private.’

‘Private? How can it be?’

No grand duke of the old days, thought Andrei, could equal the sneering haughtiness of a Communist prince.

‘You’ve lost something and I’ve found it.’

George frowned. ‘Something containing mysterious scribbles?’

Andrei nodded.

‘I’ll be with you in a second,’ George called over to Minka and Serafima, who were waiting for him, sandwich boxes in hand. ‘Come with me.’ And he pulled Andrei through the washrooms into the room where sports equipment was stowed, and school mischief hatched.

‘Thank God you’ve got it,’ George said, looking a good deal less confident than he had a minute earlier. ‘Nikolasha makes such a big thing of it. He keeps asking for it back, but I keep telling him I’m still studying it with sacred passion.’

‘Well, here it is,’ said Andrei, drawing the book out of his satchel.

‘You’ve rescued me,’ said George. Andrei held out the book and George put his hands on it and turned breezily to go – but when he tried to take it, he found that Andrei was still gripping it. ‘What are you doing?’ asked George.

‘Have you read it?’

‘No, I didn’t have time – but you obviously have. Are you offering to brief me?’

‘It’s a romantic manifesto that could be described as bourgeois sentimentalism…’

George hesitated for a moment. ‘Thanks for the warning – but Pushkin is the Party’s favourite poet. I’m just worried about Nikolasha finding out I lost it.’ He waved it away genially. ‘So let’s keep this between ourselves and I’ll find a way to say thank you. I’ll see if I can get you into the Fatal Romantics’ Club.’

‘I would like that,’ replied Andrei, letting go of the book as it disappeared into George’s satchel.

‘It won’t be easy to get you in,’ George continued. ‘Nikolasha’s a fanatic. But you really should be a member – you know your Pushkin better than any of us.’

Andrei opened his hands, palms up, as his curiosity got the better of him. ‘One final thing. What is the Game?’

George was already half out of the door but he turned back. ‘It’s Nikolasha’s obsession. You’ll find out. For now, we’ve got to eat lunch. Will you join us in the gym?’

The gym was usually empty for lunch and the children ate their sandwiches perching on its chairs and soft mats. But when George and Andrei found the girls, Minka was obviously upset. ‘Look what’s happening to my little brother,’ she said.

The Director of Physical Education, the moustachioed Apostollon Shuba, was standing with one hand on the wooden horse and a whistle in his mouth. His face was a deep shade of teak. A class of younger children in shorts and T-shirts stood to attention in a line on the other side of the horse. Alone at the far end of the gym was the frail figure of Senka Dorov, whom Andrei had last seen at that morning’s drop-off with his father. Senka looked as comfortable in sports kit as he would in a deep-sea-diving outfit. He gave his sister a beseeching ‘rescue me’ look with his big brown eyes, but it was too late.

‘Right, boy,’ Shuba barked. ‘Fifth attempt! No one leaves until you get over the horse!’

‘But I never will,’ said Senka in his high voice.

‘Defeatism is not Soviet!’

‘I’m not one of your strapping horse-vaulting heroes. Surely even you can see that,’ Senka said.

‘Hurry up, Senka! We’re hungry!’ cried one child.

‘SILENCE!’ Shuba ordered, pointing at the wooden ladders on the wall. ‘Next one to speak must touch the ceiling twenty times!’ He blew the whistle. Senka took a breath and then ran very fast towards the horse, jumped on to the springboard but then, like a racehorse refusing a jump, shied away.

‘Do you call yourself a Soviet man?’ Shuba yelled. ‘AGAIN!’ Another blast on the whistle.

‘I can’t do it, and I won’t do it,’ Senka shouted, bursting into tears.

‘You’ll do it if you die here!’ Shuba bellowed back, at which Senka suddenly grasped his chest, fought for breath and then fell to the floor.

‘He’s collapsed!’ cried a voice from the class. ‘He’s ill! He’s dying!’

‘He’s faking,’ replied Shuba, marching over. There was total silence in the gym.

‘Oh my God,’ said Minka, stepping forward.

‘Is he OK?’ asked George, taking her hand. ‘Minka!’

‘GET UP, BOY!’ ordered Shuba. ‘If you’re scrimshanking’ – he used old military slang – ‘you’ll pay for this.’

‘What if he isn’t?’ asked one of Senka’s classmates.

‘All right, at ease,’ said Shuba finally. ‘Briusov, get me some water.’ He leaned over Senka and slapped his cheeks a couple of times with a leathery hand. When the water arrived, he splashed it on Senka’s face. Senka appeared to stir.

‘Where am I? Am I at school?’

‘Don’t give me that,’ Shuba growled, breathing heavily.

Senka remained lying down.

‘Please don’t make me do it again.’

‘I knew it! You are going to do it again,’ Shuba said, straightening up. ‘And then you’re going to touch the ceiling a hundred times!’

‘I get dizzy up ladders, and might fall off,’ replied Senka. ‘I have blocked sinuses.’

‘I’ve seen Russian heroes die in battle! How do you think we won this war? By fainting in the gym? I’m training another generation of warriors to defend our Soviet paradise. The Party demands sacrifice and hardness. Can everyone hear me? NO ONE MOVES UNTIL THIS USELESS BOY GETS OVER THE HORSE!’ He blew the whistle, but Senka did not move.

‘We need warriors,’ Senka agreed, ‘but we also need thinkers and I’m one of those. Comrade Stalin also said that “we must value our cadres” and even if I’m not a future warrior, I am a future cadre. I must warn you that if I die of a heart attack, Teacher Shuba, it will be all your fault.’ Senka managed to raise his head and look around the class. ‘And there are lots of witnesses.’

Shuba stood back, scratched his head and chewed the end of his moustaches. ‘You’ll pay for this, you little poodle! I’m reporting you and your lies to Director Medvedeva. Class dismissed!’ He marched off and Minka ran up to Senka, who, thought Andrei, had made an astonishing recovery.

‘Somehow,’ Minka said as she rejoined him and George after Senka had gone off to change, ‘the Little Professor always gets his way.’

‘Little Professor?’ asked Andrei.

‘That’s what we call Senka in my family,’ explained Minka. ‘My mother says it’s because he’s precociously precious.’

George put his hand on Andrei’s shoulder. ‘Minka,’ he proposed. ‘Let’s get Andrei into the Romantics.’

‘Teacher Golden will approve,’ she said. ‘You know he was quite famous once.’

‘Golden? Never!’ said George.

‘Benya Golden…’ Andrei said, remembering how his mother had reacted when he’d said the name the previous evening. It had taken him back to his childhood. Nine years earlier – another life. They lived in Moscow, in a spacious apartment, then, and his father had presented his mother with a blue book entitled Spanish Stories. ‘Inessa, you’ve got to read this book by Golden, it’s spun gold…’

Two years later, his father had gone. Andrei remembered find-ing Spanish Stories, looking at its cover, embossed with a Spanish bull and red star, and going to the first page to begin reading. And Inessa taking it away quickly. ‘No one reads Golden any more,’ she had said, and Andrei had never seen the book again.

Benya Golden was lingering in the school common room. He was late for his own Pushkin class but a man like him who had suffered so much and only returned from the darkness by a series of miracles should enjoy life, he thought. He was so lucky to be there, to be teaching Pushkin, to be breathing. No one quite knew what he had been through but he, more than anyone in the room, knew how flimsy was fortune.

He lay full length on the leather divan peering over the Leningrad satirical magazine, Krokadil, as the young piano teacher, Agrippina Begbulatova, known (to him alone) as Blue-Eyes, brewed the chai in a Chinese teapot, laying out cups and saucers for everyone.

Director Medvedeva, owl-shaped horn-rimmed spectacles on the bridge of her nose, groaned loudly as she marked papers at the long table – one of the signs, along with noisy chomping at meals, of a woman who has lived alone for too long. But, Benya thought, she had taken a risk by giving him this job, and he was truly grateful.

Her deputy Dr Rimm had been trying to get Benya sacked ever since. He was ostentatiously reading a copy of Comrade Stalin’s History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course – as if anyone, even someone as slavishy drear as Rimm, could actually read that unadulterated gibberish. Rimm kept changing position with little preening sniffs and looks around the room to check everyone had noticed his virtuous reading. And Apostollon Shuba had just come into the common room, cursing wildly about the laziness, cowardice and softness of the school’s spoilt brats. Now he was studying the football scores in Pionerskaya Pravda while chewing a sprig of his magnificent moustaches.

‘Tea’s ready,’ Agrippina said sweetly. Benya watched her pour the chai for the teachers in order of seniority while reliving the way he had undressed her, opened her long legs and stroked her with his fingers, his tongue, his cock, just twenty minutes earlier, in his one-room apartment round the corner. They had enjoyed forty-nine minutes of dizzy pleasure and she had not even had time to wipe herself before rushing back – a thought that now thrilled him.

No one knew of course. The secret particularly delighted Benya because his fellow teachers were perfect examples of the new generation of tight-arsed Soviet prigs. Agrippina was as pretty as she was pure, a Soviet virtue she liked to promote by saying ‘I don’t believe in gossiping about people’ and ‘I believe a Soviet girl must keep herself for husband and children’, sentiments she seemed to believe absolutely when she said them.

When Benya was not reading (he was a voracious reader) or talking, he was assailed by his epicurean passion for women, poetry, food, the senses. Once he had been a well-known writer who had reported on the Spanish Civil War and known Picasso and Sartre. But he had lost the two jewels of his life. He had lost contact with the daughter of his marriage when she and her mother emigrated to the West. And he had lost the only woman he’d ever truly loved, a woman whose memory caused a jolt of agony, even now. She had been an official’s wife, a mother, an Old Bolshevik. In 1939, she had fallen into the abyss of ‘Soviet justice’ – and he had fallen with her. When, or if, she returned, he would be waiting for her. It was a promise he intended to keep.

Dr Rimm left to teach Communist history. Benya looked at his watch. He was now five minutes late for his favourite class. He finished his tea and hurried out, noticing as he did so, a badly typed envelope in one of the pigeonholes. As he passed Dr Rimm’s classroom, he peeped around the door. ‘Comrade Rimm,’ he said, ‘you have a letter.’

He entered his classroom and was at once enveloped in the affection and respect of the pupils. Their vivacious chatter delighted him: Nikolasha was showing Vlad Titorenko some pages of his obsessional project in his velvet-covered notebook. Both boys sported Byronic hairdos as a tribute to their romanticism. It was surely only a matter of time, Benya decided, before Dr Rimm brought in an army barber. The new boy, Andrei Kurbsky, had turned out to know even more Pushkin than the others. And there was Serafima – listening to him with her head on one side, beautiful without believing it, drawing the eyes of the boys without being aware of it. Even now, Nikolasha was looking back at her; Andrei too. But there was another reason Benya appreciated her: she, more than anyone else, reminded him of his lost love, the woman who’d disappeared before the war.

He could not believe his own luck at landing this job, at teaching literature to children who loved it as much as he did. It was his Second Life and he’d been reborn. He could no longer write. That reed was broken yet he could teach – and how! But he was marked with the black spot: how long could it last? He wanted to share all he knew before it was over.

‘Dear friends, beloved romantics, wistful dreamers!’ He clapped his hands and opened his Onegin. ‘It’s the night of the fateful ball’, he said, ‘that causes the duel. Just imagine the excitement. Everyone is waiting for Lensky the fiancé to arrive. How does Tatiana feel to see Eugene Onegin?’

Golden pauses, and then cries: ‘Oh, the agony of her suffering! But who can give us some idea of what she’s going through? Andrei?’

‘I’m not sure… Isn’t love just a thing in novels and songs?’

‘Who agrees with Andrei? Nikolasha?’

Nikolasha sat up. ‘The absence of love means death,’ he stated, his deep voice cracking. ‘Like Romeo and Juliet. Antony and Cleopatra.’

Golden looked interested. ‘So you are saying love reaches its apotheosis in death? Doesn’t it perish when life is extinguished?’

‘On the contrary,’ replied Nikolasha. ‘Death makes love immortal. Isn’t that the lesson of Pushkin’s duel? How to be a Russian, how to be a lover, how to live and die.’

‘But love is just amorous obsession, surely?’ blurted out George.

‘Class is what matters,’ said George’s brother, Marlen. He had one of those Bolshevik names – a combination of Marx-Lenin – that were fashionable in the 1920s, thought Benya, and now mercifully assigned to the dustbin of history. ‘The rest is just bourgeois sentimentalism, a very dangerous thing.’

‘Whom do you agree with? Serafima?’ said Golden. As he had expected, everyone turned to Serafima.

‘I’m not sure I can say…’ said Serafima.

‘Have a go, Serafima Constantinovna,’ Golden coaxed her. ‘Illuminate our darkness.’

She put her head on one side. ‘Well…’ She spoke very softly so that Nikolasha and Andrei had to lean over to hear her. ‘I would say that in Onegin Tatiana dreams of nothing else. She can’t eat or sleep. She protects the secret in her heart. No one else has suffered or celebrated love like her. Love is all that matters.’ She looked around. ‘That’s what I think.’

George Satinov and Minka pulled Andrei into the doorway as Dr Rimm waddled past and down the corridor. Both were shaking with laughter. George grabbed Andrei’s cuff: ‘Come here! Watch the Hummer.’ They followed Dr Rimm towards the common room.

‘He’s looking back. Pretend to read the notices,’ whispered Minka.

Dr Rimm had stopped outside the common room where the teachers’ post was placed in pigeonholes.

‘Now – look,’ said George as Dr Rimm picked up his mail, leafing through papers, until he suddenly held up an envelope. ‘He’s got it!’

Dr Rimm peered around, up and down the corridor, and then, stuffing all the other papers back into his pigeonhole, he hurried off with the envelope to the teacher’s lavatory. When he came out, he was singing so loudly and tunelessly that he was almost dancing. As he passed them, they struggled not to giggle.

‘What was that letter?’ demanded Andrei.

‘You can keep a secret, can’t you, Andrei?’

‘Of course.’

‘He can,’ agreed Minka. ‘Let’s tell him.’

They pulled him down the corridor and outside into the little yard by the science laboratory. No one was there.

‘Read this,’ said George, handing him a piece of paper. ‘This is the next one.’ It was typed in capitals:

‘Oh my God!’ said Andrei. ‘He thinks…’

‘That’s the fun of it,’ replied Minka. ‘Don’t you love it? “As only two Bolsheviks can love”! That was my idea.’

‘Who do you think he thinks wrote it?’

‘Director Medvedeva perhaps?’ George was laughing so much that he could barely get the name out.

Andrei was amazed. This could only happen now, after the war. George’s father was a leader, his mother was a teacher; and both Minka’s parents were important. Andrei knew that only two such privileged children would dare to contemplate a trick like this, and on the First Secretary of the School’s Communist Party Committee. That stuff about ‘loving like a Bolshevik’ was perilously disrespectful. In the thirties, people had received nine grams in the back of the neck for less…

‘Kurbsky?’

Oh my God! Rimm was calling him. George and Minka vanished as the teacher summoned him from the doorway. As he went back inside to face Rimm, Andrei wished he had known nothing about the spoof love letters.

‘Kurbsky,’ said Dr Rimm jocosely, ‘I hear your Pushkin is more than proficient.’

‘Thank you, Comrade Rimm.’ The title ‘Comrade’ meant Rimm was a member of the Communist Party.

‘You might have heard of my class on socialist realism?’

‘Of course.’

‘I teach literature as it should be taught,’ Rimm said, and Andrei knew he was referring to Benya Golden’s class. Rimm hesitated, and then his eyes rolled as he checked they were alone in the corridor. ‘Are you happy in Teacher Golden’s… group, where Pushkin is taught, I understand, without class consciousness at all, merely as the cravings of bourgeois romanticism? Would you like to switch?’

‘Thank you, Dr Rimm. I am content in whatever class the director places me.’

‘Your answer is correct,’ he said. ‘But bear in mind that it is the Party that teaches us the only way to analyse literature. The non-Party path has no future. You’re intelligent. I know your tainted file, but remember this is the school that Comrade Stalin chose for his own children. If things go well for you, there’s Komsomol, and perhaps the Institute of Foreign Languages. Do you understand me?’

Andrei had dreamed of wearing the Komsomol badge. The cleansing of his tainted past would mean that he could join the Party and follow his heart into academia or the diplomatic corps. His mother had warned him; now Dr Rimm was doing the same thing. The antics of the Fatal Romantics could ruin his rehabilitation. But as Andrei hurried towards his next lesson, he sensed it was already too late.

5

‘KURBSKY! ARE YOU Kurbsky?’

A strapping security officer in MVD blue tabs loomed up in front of Andrei outside the school at pick-up a few weeks later. He was someone’s bodyguard no doubt, but Andrei’s heart still missed a beat: he remembered the night, long ago, before the war, when the Chekists had come to arrest his father, when men in boots had tramped with ominously officious footsteps through the apartment.

‘I… I am,’ stammered Andrei.

‘Are you a sissy like those floppy-haired friends of George? Do you read girlish poetry? Do you pick flowers? Do you fold your britches before you fuck a woman – or do you just rip ’em off, toss ’em aside and go to it like a man?’ asked the security officer.

Andrei opened his mouth to answer, but then closed it again.

‘Just joking, boy.’ He introduced himself: ‘Colonel Losha Babanava, chief of security for Comrade Satinov,’ and Andrei’s hand was crushed in a throbbingly virile handshake. Losha’s accent was thickly Georgian, his barrel chest was covered in medals, and his red-striped britches were skin tight. Andrei noticed his ivory-handled Mauser in a kid-leather holster, and how his teeth gleamed under an extravagantly winged set of jet moustaches.

‘George is waiting in the car with his brother and sister. You, boy, have been invited to tea with the Satinovs.’

The officer guided Andrei by the shoulders towards a ZiS limousine.

‘Hello, Andrei,’ said George through the open window. ‘Get in.’

Losha opened the door and Andrei saw George, Marlen and little Mariko in the back seat, which was almost as large as his bedroom. George gave him a smile. ‘You see the door and windows? Fifteen centimetres thick. Armour-plated! Just in case anyone tries to assassinate Marlen.’

‘Why would anyone want to kill me?’ asked Marlen, looking around.

‘Because you’re so important in the school. Our enemies will certainly know you’re school Komsorg.’

‘Really?’ Marlen seemed pleased by this.

Losha slammed the door; then, whistling at the ‘tail’, the small Pobeda car filled with guards behind them, he placed his hairy hands on the car roof and swung himself into the front seat as if he was leaping into a saddle. ‘Foot down!’ he barked to the driver. The cars accelerated together, the driver spinning the white leather steering wheel and manipulating the brakes to give unnecessary screeches of burning rubber that made passersby jump out of the way as the little convoy careered past the Kremlin.

‘Your papa was up all night and he’s been in the office since dawn,’ Losha told the Satinov children, nodding at the red crenellated walls of the Kremlin and lighting up a cigarette. ‘I’ll be picking him up in a moment…’ Then, with a creaking of leather and a whiff of cologne, Losha swivelled around and pointed at a girl on the pavement. The chauffeur, also in uniform, craned his head to look – and almost crashed the car. ‘Hey, Merab, eyes on the road!’ Losha turned back to the children. ‘You see those Russian guys? No rudeness intended, Andrei, but most of ’em don’t know how to handle a woman. Russian girls are always looking sideways. Do you know why?’

Andrei shook his head.

‘They’re always looking for a Georgian guy, that’s why! You understand me, right?’ He slapped his palms together. ‘Kerboosh!’

The drive from Ostozhenka to Granovsky Street took only a few minutes. Soon they were turning into a small street, and guards were waving them through the checkpoints into a car park.

‘Welcome to the Fifth House of the Soviets,’ said George as a guard from the Pobeda car behind them jumped out and opened the door for them.

‘Out you get, youngsters,’ said Losha. ‘I’ve got to get to the Little Corner and pick up the big man.’ Banging his hands on the dashboard, he gestured to the chauffeur to drive on, leaving Andrei and the Satinovs standing amidst a collection of beautiful cars.

‘Whom do these all belong to?’ asked Andrei.

‘Well,’ explained George. ‘Most of the leaders live here. But these are ours – you’ve seen the big one, but then there’s the Cadillac, the Dodge, and that open-topped Mercedes came from Berlin. It belonged to Goebbels. Or was it Himmler?’

‘Do you use them all?’

‘Of course not. Papa couldn’t care about cars and stuff. But no one turns down a gift from the Central Committee.’

Andrei looked around him at the cars shimmering in the sunlight, then up at the pillared pink building above.

‘Recognize that Rolls-Royce?’ George asked. ‘Serafima lives here too. It’s the only privately owned Rolls in Moscow.’

A guard opened the back door of the apartment building, and Andrei and the Satinovs walked up a flight of wide, marble steps.

George pushed open the door on the first floor. Inside, a dazzling corridor of parquet and crystal chandeliers beckoned. So this is how the grandees live, thought Andrei as the maid, a swarthy but cheerful girl in a white and black uniform, hugged each of the children, kissing them several times on the face and shepherding them down the corridor.

‘Go on,’ she called after them. ‘I’m cooking up a Georgian feast. Oh and your big brother’s here. Hurry!’

The smell of spicy vegetables, melting cheese and roasted chicken curled through the airy spaces of the apartment. They passed through a reception room with a grand piano, Persian rugs, photographs of the children, a display case of turquoise china, an oil painting of Stalin – larger than life – at the front holding binoculars (could it be an original by Gerasimov, Andrei wondered?). Then they were in a small wood-panelled room filled with books and papers.

‘This is Papa’s study. We never look over there.’ George pointed at the heap of beige files on the desk marked ‘Central Committee. Top Secret.’ Andrei glanced at them: were they signed by Stalin himself? George opened a wooden case, took out four discs and, placing them carefully on the turntable mounted in a laminated wooden cabinet, he turned a knob. The turntable started to whirl, a long arm with a needle jolted into place, and the jazz songs of Utesov started to play.

‘It’s a gramophone from RCA, America,’ said George. ‘It can play the discs one by one – and isn’t the sound beautiful?’

‘It’s not bad,’ Andrei said, absolutely dazzled by what he was seeing.

‘And this has just arrived.’ George was pointing at a bizarre glassy tube set in another elegant wooden cabinet.

‘What a weird contraption. What is it?’

‘That’, said George, ‘is a machine called an iconoscope – or a television – and it shows a picture…’

‘Really? But how—’

‘Come on.’ Andrei could hear the sound of laughter, sizzling food and clinking cutlery as they ran through into a huge kitchen, where the Satinov family sat at a mahogany table while Leka, the maid, was juggling at least three steaming pans on the stove.

‘Andrei Kurbsky!’ His English teacher, Tamara Satinova, George’s fine-boned stepmother, was shaking his hand. ‘You’re the new boy in my English class. Come on in and have some khachapuri.’

Andrei’s eyes widened at the steaming Georgian dish, somewhere between a pizza and a cheesecake, and the sheer quantity of other food on the table in front of him.

‘We eat a lot of Georgian food here. Here’s lobio – bean soup – and this is chicken satsivi…’ Andrei did not want to admit he had never tried such things but Tamara seemed to understand this, and made him feel so at home that he started to help himself.

A young man in air force uniform with the gold star of the Order of the Red Banner on his chest sat at the head of the table. ‘Aha, George’s new friend,’ he said, shaking his hand. Andrei knew this was Major David Satinov, newly returned from the war. He almost bowed before this heroic pilot who had been shot down and wounded.

Mariko, the six-year-old, was sitting on her mother’s knee, holding a toy dog.

‘Leka, would you make Mariko a hot chocolate?’ asked Tamara.

Mariko was tiny and dark with her hair in braids woven over the top of her head. ‘Meet my dog,’ she said to Andrei, holding up the shaggy toy, a black Labrador. ‘Stroke her fur. Isn’t she silky? I run a school for female dogs called the Moscow School for Bitches. Today they’re studying Pushkin like all of you.’

‘Ah, Andrei,’ said Tamara. ‘You should know that if you enter this home, you have to embrace Mariko’s School for Bitches! But now, quiet, darling, I’m listening to your big brother.’

‘Well, these new planes turn well,’ said David, ‘but there’s a problem with them…’

‘Don’t say another word about that,’ said Tamara with uncharacteristic sharpness.

There was silence. They were all aware that men had been arrested and shot for criticizing Soviet technology.

‘But everyone in the air force is talking about it,’ David protested.

Tamara glanced at Andrei, the outsider, as Losha Babanava strode into the kitchen. ‘The big man’s home!’ he said.

The gaiety vanished, and the air changed, as it does when snow is imminent. All the boys stood up sharply: the power of the Soviet State had entered the room in tunic and boots, with a spareness of emotion and economy of movement. Taut as a bowstring, his hair razor-cut and greying at the temples, Comrade Hercules Satinov greeted the children as if he was reviewing a regiment.

Each of the boys kissed their father thrice: ‘Hello, Father,’ they said formally. Satinov took Mariko into his arms, lifted her high and kissed her forehead.

Andrei was captivated by his presence, and terrified. He imagined the deeds of Satinov’s long years with Stalin: the struggle with Trotsky, the war against the peasants, the spy hunt of the Terror, the war. What secrets he must know; what things he must have seen. He personified tverdost, hardness: the ultimate Bolshevik virtue. Only when he kissed Tamara and rested his hands on her hips did Andrei glimpse the sort of warmth that he remembered seeing between his own parents.

‘How was school, Tamriko?’ Satinov asked her.

She sighed. ‘As always, too many papers to mark,’ she said. ‘Do you need anything? Coffee?’

Satinov’s grey eyes examined Andrei. ‘And who’s this?’ he asked George, who took Andrei’s arm and pushed him forward.

‘Father, this is my new friend Andrei Kurbsky from school. He’s just arrived.’

‘Just arrived?’ said Satinov sharply.

‘From Stalinabad. For the last term.’

Satinov took Andrei’s hand. The grip was tight and dry as a saddle. ‘Stalinabad? What’s the name again?’

‘Kurbsky.’ Andrei could almost hear Satinov’s bureau of a mind flicking through an index of files marked ‘Central Committee. Top Secret.’ What if he asked questions about his father?

‘You’re always welcome here, Andrei,’ said Satinov at last.

‘Thank you, Comrade Satinov.’

Satinov looked him up and down. ‘What do you want to do for your motherland?’ he asked.

Everyone went silent.

‘He’s going to be a professor. He really knows his Pushkin,’ George broke in. ‘He’s going to the top of the class.’

Satinov frowned. ‘So he’s another of your cloud-dwellers, George? At your age, I had no time for literature. I was a revolutionary. Pushkin’s a symbol of our national greatness, of course, but why study him?’

‘Because Pushkin teaches us about love,’ insisted George. ‘We need food and light scientifically – but none of it matters without love.’

‘For God’s sake, George! What nonsense. We created the first socialistic state. We fought our enemies in a battle of survival – and we’ve won. But the Motherland is ruined. Starving. We need to rebuild. We don’t need poetasters but engineers, pilots, scientists.’

‘Yes of course,’ agreed Andrei.

Satinov took out a cigarette – and Losha jumped forward to light it; he then saluted and withdrew. ‘David, how’s the new plane?’

‘Flying well, Father.’

‘Good. Well, I’ll leave you to your poems, boys.’ He nodded at Andrei, then he said curtly to his wife: ‘Tamriko?’

She followed him out of the room, and the barometer in the room rose again.

‘Father has something to tell her,’ explained George as he led Andrei back to his father’s little study with the gramophone. He closed the doors, restarted the jazz records and lay down on the sofa with his legs crossed. ‘They whisper in the bathroom. He never tells us of course. The less we know the better. Now he’ll have a nap for a few hours, and then probably he’ll be summoned very late for dinner.’

‘You mean—’

‘Don’t say the name, you fool,’ said George, pointing heavenwards. Then he whispered, ‘If you work for Stalin, you call him the Master but never to his face. In documents, he’s Gensec for General Secretary. The generals call him “Supremo”; in the Organs, it’s “the Instantsiya”. And when anyone says “the Central Committee”, they mean him.’

‘So he’ll be having dinner in the Kremlin?’

George sat up. ‘Don’t you know anything? He works at the Little Corner in the Kremlin but he really lives in the Nearby Dacha outside Moscow where my father and the Politburo meet late into the night over dinner. Then my father has to change and shave and be back in his office first thing in the morning. We hardly see him.’

‘He was at the fall of Berlin, wasn’t he?’

‘Oh yes, and at Stalingrad,’ said George proudly. ‘Now the war’s over, Father says he wants to see more of us – which means taking us to school, with all the bowing and genuflecting that entails. Pure hell! But no one tells my father what to do. No one except…’ And he pointed towards heaven again: Stalin.

‘I’d better be getting home,’ said Andrei. ‘My mother worries.’

George put his hand on Andrei’s arm with all the warmth that was lacking in his father. ‘Listen, Andrei, I know you want to get into the Komsomols and I’ve been singing your praises to Marlen. But it would be fun to have you join us in the Fatal Romantics’ Club. We’re planning to play the Game.’

Andrei felt a stab of excitement. This was what he really wanted – wasn’t it?

‘But there’s a problem,’ George continued. ‘It’s Nikolasha’s club and he wants to make it harder to join than the College of Cardinals or the Politburo. And Nikolasha says he’s not sure about you.’

Andrei swallowed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He doesn’t know you as well as I do,’ George said. ‘Anyway, he says Serafima has the casting vote.’

‘Serafima? But Serafima doesn’t know me either. And I’m not sure sure she cares about anything, especially not the Fatal Romantics’ Club.’

‘But Nikolasha cares about her, and that’s the important thing.’

‘But isn’t he with Rosa? She adores him.’

George nodded. ‘She does, but Nikolasha lives for Serafima. In fact, sometimes I think the entire Fatal Romantics’ Club is really for her.’

Andrei stood up. He cared about this more than he meant to – and he had shown it all too clearly.

‘You helped me out,’ George said, standing too, ‘and I know you’re one of us. They’re planning to play the Game right after the Victory Parade so you have to join before then. It’s a special ritual.’

George led Andrei out of the study, across the corridor to his bedroom where he pulled from under his bed an olive-green leather case, which he flicked open. There, lying in red velvet, were two nineteenth-century duelling pistols.

‘Beautiful,’ said Andrei. He closed his eyes, remembering his Onegin.

Andrei admired the pistols: the bevelled barrels, polished wood, burnished steel. ‘Are they real?’ he asked.

‘I doubt it. We borrow them from the Little Theatre. They use them in plays,’ George said, laughing. ‘And we’re going to use them in the Game – you’ll see.’

A few streets away, School 801 was not quite empty. The janitor mopped the floors of the empty corridors with the disinfectant that gives schools their characteristic pungency, and the director, Kapitolina Medvedeva, was alone in her office planning how the school would celebrate the Victory Parade on 24 June. It was getting closer. A few Komsomols and Pioneers would be chosen to serve in honour guards. And when she thought about this, she wished she could include Andrei Kurbsky because she knew how much it would mean to a boy of tainted biography.

The report on her desk showed that Andrei was thriving in the school and she was proud that she had overruled Rimm to let him in.

‘I wish to register my disapproval of the acceptance of a child of an Enemy of the People,’ Rimm had said. He believed Medvedeva was not Party-minded enough, and he wanted her job. She knew that every school, every institution had a Rimm. They were usually cowards so she’d stood her ground.

‘Fine,’ Rimm had surrendered. ‘Let him in if you must, but a family like his won’t be able to pay the fees.’

‘Actually, comrade, they can afford the fees,’ she’d responded, and smiled as she thought about the opportunity she was giving Andrei. He was her special project and she approved of his neat, reserved appearance, his parted brown hair and dark-framed spectacles. And he was already friends with George Satinov, Minka Dorova and Rosa Shako.

Kapitolina Medvedeva was a devout Communist, who believed that loving children too much made them egotistical. She was proud to be the director of a school with pupils from such eminent Party families. She was not impressed by the clammy and rather menacing pallor of Comrade Dorov, but his wife Dashka managed to be both chic and a doctor. Marshal Shako, the commander-in-chief of the air force, was the very model of a Soviet commander. And as for Comrade Satinov, he was so impressive that, when she spoke to him, she stammered and over-egged her compliments. There was something about Comrade Satinov. Perhaps it was because he was the real thing: he had done time in the Tsar’s jails, helped storm the Winter Palace in 1917, known Lenin, spent the winter of ’42 in Stalingrad. And no one was closer to Stalin himself.

Kapitolina Medvedeva had taught Stalin’s own children just before the war. Svetlana loved history – and came almost top of her class. But Kapitolina had failed to teach anything to his son, Vasily. The boy had been a delinquent scoundrel. Still, it must be hard to have the greatest titan in world history as your father.

She looked down at her desk to read Benya Golden’s report on Andrei. The hiring of Golden was another decision she had made over Rimm’s head, and he had turned out to be the best teacher she had ever known. Besides, how could any headmistress pass up the chance to employ the author of Spanish Stories?

She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. When she put them on again, she noticed that she could see herself in the reflection on her polished inkwell. Was it the distortion of the reflection or did she really look that frayed? What a sight she was! She had grey streaks in her hair, and her nose was more like a beak! There’s not much one can do with a face like mine, she thought.

She was a spinster, living alone in one room in a kommunalka on the outskirts, her only luxury being a little set of antique Tolstoys in brown leather bindings. A woman had more important tasks in life than lipstick and dresses, she told herself. The school was her mission in life, and she had to be as hard and modest as a Bolshevik should be.

She had taken two risks in her professional life but both were consistent with her mission: to educate and enlighten – even in an age of ice.

She looked at her watch. It was after seven, and she had nowhere else to be. She sighed, admitting to herself that she now groaned aloud when she got out of bed or the bath – or when she sipped at a particularly delicious soup. She was fifty-two. Getting older.

She closed her eyes, thinking about Benya Golden. She enjoyed having him around the school, and when he fixed her with his playful blue eyes, she actually blushed. Sometimes she dreamed of him at night. She knew he would be wonderful to kiss and she felt that the touch of his hands would transform her. Her hair would grow thicker; her skin would become as rich and tanned as that of Minka’s mother, Dashka Dorova. With him, she could become the woman she had always wanted to be.

She shook her head. Golden was a real gamble, not just because Dr Rimm had denounced his teaching style as ‘a bourgeois circus act of philistine anti-Party hucksterism’. She didn’t know the details of his case, of course; only the Organs, the secret police, knew that, but she knew that no one had expected Golden to return from prison or exile or wherever he’d been. The Organs hadn’t stopped her hiring him so they must have checked him out and cleared him, but however charming and exuberant Golden was, he still had the power to destroy her.

‘Don’t you know what Golden is? He bears the mark of Cain on his forehead. He’s like a leper!’ Rimm had whispered to her. ‘He’s a “lucky stiff”. He’s come back from the dead.’

‘He’s alive now,’ she’d replied. ‘And that’s what matters.’

She perused the report again, but thoughts of Golden and Andrei still filled her mind. Andrei was a safer bet than Golden, but he too was a liability who could harm her. Because what no one else knew – least of all Andrei himself – was that she had accepted him into the school not in spite of his tainted background but because of it. And she was paying his fees out of her own salary.

Yes, she thought now, I may be on my own and getting older, but I believe that everyone’s capable of redemption, no matter who they are.

6

ANDREI EMERGED FROM the Granovsky building into the blinding sunlight. On Gorky Street, Moscow’s main thoroughfare, he passed soldiers, not much older than him, in uniforms, laughing with their sweethearts. Their careless happiness was infectious. He was convinced that his life had changed, and couldn’t wait to tell his mother about how the Satinovs lived, about the glacial grandeur of Comrade Satinov, about George’s hints concerning the Fatal Romantics’ Club and their esoteric rituals. Then he saw her. A tall girl with blond hair crossing Gorky Street without looking in either direction so that cars braked around her. She wore her school blouse buttoned right up to the neck and long sleeves, even though it was a glorious summer evening. She turned purposefully into the House of Books, Moscow’s best bookshop.

Andrei had no money to spend and he was already late for supper but he followed her inside. The books of Marx, Lenin, Stalin were displayed at the front alongside the romantic war poems of Simonov, the novels of Gorky and Fadayev, the screenplays of Constantin Romashkin (yes, Serafima’s father). Where was she?

Immediately, Andrei was soothed and inspired by the smell of new books – by the acrid glue and the fresh leather as well as the mustiness of old ones that were almost rotting on the shelves. He scanned students and pensioners, spotted a titian-haired lady in a fuchsia trouser suit, a government apparatchik in a blue suit and peaked cap, but no sight of Serafima.

Andrei had no plan, no particular idea, just the optimism of a summer’s day, and the boost of tea at the Satinovs, as he climbed the stairs to the second floor. Perhaps he had imagined her, he thought, as he surveyed the gorgeously bound special leather volumes on the shelves around him. He went deeper into the metal forest of the bookstacks. Then, as a hunter senses the quick breath of a deer in the woods, he knew she was there. He pulled out a book by Ernest Hemingway in English and, peering through the gap, he saw her. She was leafing through a book, intensely, as if searching for a line. And her head was on one side, that winning mannerism that he had noticed in class.

‘Serafima?’

She started. Green eyes speckled with gold looked at him questioningly. ‘Teacher Satinova recommended Hemingway and I just found For Whom the Bell Tolls and you were just looking at… oh, Galsworthy. The Forsyte Saga. Isn’t that about a bourgeois-capitalist dynasty in London?’

‘What if it is?’ Serafima asked.

Andrei saw the other book she was holding. ‘The Age of Innocence? Edith Wharton on the corrupt haut-bourgeois customs of robber-capitalism in old New York?’

She looked at the book, as though surprised she was holding it, and then up at him again. Her intense gaze made him feel he was being very tedious.

‘If I was reading Fadayev would it tell you something different about my character than if I was reading Wharton or Akhmatova? Are you analysing me by what I read?’

‘No, of course not.’ Feeling embarrassed, Andrei tried a different tack. ‘What’s Edith Wharton like?’

‘Just like our own barons and princelings here. Our secret world is just like hers but with one crucial difference – it’s Edith Wharton with the death penalty.’ She smiled at him, and he felt the rays of the evening sun were shining right on to him. He noticed she had one very pointed tooth to the right of her front teeth.

Then he glanced around, concerned; no one had overheard her. Things were different for people like Serafima, he told himself. She could say what she liked.

‘I’ve got to go.’ She replaced the books and headed for the stairs. ‘By the way, why are you following me?’

‘I wasn’t… I happened to be looking for the same books.’ Andrei knew that he needed to be a better liar to survive in this milieu. ‘I’d heard about the House of Books but I hadn’t had time to pop in until today…’

Serafima looked back at him. They were now on the street outside, and he was about to be dismissed.

‘I’m on my way to the Bolshoi to see Prokofiev’s new ballet…’ she began, but her words were lost in the skid of tyres.

An open-topped Packard had performed a U-turn on Gorky Street and swung towards them so recklessly that its wheels ground against the pavement.

Andrei pulled Serafima out of peril’s way, conscious of the perfume on her neck.

‘God, he almost hit us. What an idiot!’ he exclaimed.

‘Hey, Serafima!’ called the driver. He had a cigarette between his teeth, and was wearing an air force colonel’s shoulderboards. ‘I’ve been meaning to come round ever since I saw you outside school. I was going to surprise you and pick you up at the gates. Wouldn’t that be good for your standing? My sister and I were at School 801, you know. How’s that lesbic witch of a director and that preening motherfucker Rimm?’

‘Still haunting us,’ Serafima said coldly.

Andrei sensed her distrust, her unease.

‘I was just going to grab a drink at the Cocktail Hall. Hop in, darling.’

‘Thank you, but I can’t right now. I’ve got homework.’

‘Your mother won’t mind, I can tell you. She thinks I am a good thing. I love her movies. Come on!’

A diminutive man got out of the car, wearing skin-tight britches, shiny boots, an array of medals. His dark brown hair was brushed back in a wave. He kissed her hand, old-style. ‘Are you going to make me – me of all people – beg?’

Serafima glanced at Andrei. ‘I’m with my best friend, Andrei. He comes too.’

‘Sure,’ said the man. ‘I get it. Best friend comes too! Get in, Andrei.’

He held open the back door and Serafima stepped inside. As Andrei got in beside her, the man ground the car into gear, backed it into the middle of Gorky, and accelerated into the path of a Studebaker truck that swerved to avoid them. A couple of militiamen watched, but did nothing to stop him.

‘Do you know who he is?’ whispered Serafima. ‘He’s Stalin’s son, Vasily. Be careful, OK?’

After a couple of minutes, Vasily swung the car to the right, stopped, and ran round to help Serafima out. They were in a cul-de-sac. In front of them was a plain wooden door guarded by a muscle-bound Uzbek in a crimson blouse.

‘You’re not going in, you hayseed,’ he was telling a cavalry lieutenant with his girl. The queue of people snaked around the corner. When he saw Vasily, he changed his tune: ‘Good afternoon, Colonel!’ he said, shoving the others out of the way and opening the door with a bow. ‘Welcome to the Cocktail Hall. Go right in!’

Vasily and Serafima swept in, but Andrei hesitated.

‘Not you, schoolboy. Scat!’

‘But I’m with them! Serafima!’ Andrei called out, hating the whine of his own desperation. Vasily Stalin raised a hand without even turning.

‘Your lucky day!’ The Uzbek opened the door, and Andrei caught up with Serafima in a crowded rabbit warren of booths and alcoves, all richly upholstered with scarlet silk and pine panelling.

Vasily knew everyone. He kissed the raddled hag at the cloakroom, and the moment he entered the little bar, he began holding court like a chieftain. He was embraced by a drunk pilot, a fat general and two girls in tight cocktail dresses with décolletages. But he seemed happiest to meet a bald toad with a squint who wore three watches on his wrist.

‘Hail the King of Sturgeon!’ he shouted. ‘Send some steaks over to the dacha!’

Another man, dressed in a zoot suit like an American Negro in a jazz band, with two-tone shoes, approached him.

‘Fancy a Schiaparelli ballgown that once belonged to a Viennese princess?’ the man asked in a Hungarian accent. ‘For your lady? How about this ring? You can find anything in Europe these days if you know where to look.’

Vasily turned away, and ordered cocktails from an Armenian waiter in a brocade waistcoat.

‘Who are these people?’Andrei asked Serafima.

‘These characters’, whispered Serafima, ‘are the styliagi. Muscovites with style!’ (She did a good American accent.)

The cocktails arrived. Andrei sipped his and it made his eyes water.

‘Who’s the schoolgirl, Vaska?’ the man with the squint asked.

‘Sophia Zeitlin’s daughter. I’m on my knees begging her for a date, but she won’t even look at me. Hey, Serafima, how do you like your cocktail?’

‘It’s vile,’ said Serafima, looking haughtier than ever. ‘I want to go home.’

‘Good idea,’ said Vasily. ‘My home.’

Andrei could scarely remember the journey to Vasily Stalin’s house. His head was spinning from the orange cocktail he had consumed too quickly at the Cocktail Hall. Leaving the city, they sped through pine woods dyed red by a sinking summer sun. Somewhere along the way, Vasily drew his Nagan pistol and fired it as he overtook a truck. ‘That’ll teach the fucker!’ he shouted.

Now they were pulling into a driveway. They were waved through a heavily guarded checkpoint, the barrier rising as Vasily put his foot down, throwing up clouds of dust. At last they stopped outside a white-pillared mansion in colonial, southern style, and went inside.

‘Bring drinks! Where’s the food! Fetch the gramophone!’ cried Vasily, his voice high, his eyes wild. ‘Welcome to Zubalovo. My parents used to live here. Now it’s mine.’

Minutes later, Andrei was next to Serafima at a table covered in Georgian snacks and bottles of exotic liqueurs Andrei had never even heard of. Vasily was at the gramophone playing records as guests arrived and started to dance. ‘Listen – this is American jazz, the music of the oppressed Negroes!’ He cackled with laughter.

‘Hey kiddo,’ he said, his eyes in his pinched, sallow face narrowing at Andrei. ‘You’re not drinking. That’s an insult! Don’t forget my father’s a Georgian. Or rather he used to be a Georgian. Now he’s a Russian.’

‘I’m not a great drinker,’ confessed Andrei.

Vasily handed Andrei and Serafima shots of something disgusting called Fernet Branca. ‘No heeltaps!’ he said.

Andrei looked at his drink, feeling sick.

‘Best to drink, dear,’ said Serafima.

Vasily pointed at him. ‘I’m watching you!’

Andrei downed his Fernet Branca shot. Around him, the party, the dancers and the sitting room seemed to twist and wave like a mirage in the desert. Two girls from the Cocktail Hall were dancing closely together, each holding a cigarette but somehow not burning each other. Rivulets of mascaraed sweat streamed down their faces so they looked like half-naked coalminers in the rain. A captain was doing the lezginka in just his boots and britches. And, at the centre, Vasily stood clapping his hands, checking the gramophone while drinking vodka, Armenian cognac, Crimean champagnski, Georgian wine and brightly-coloured liqueurs from a fleet of glasses and bottles.

Andrei looked at Serafima, who looked as alone and vulnerable as he was. How were they going to get away? He felt very far from Moscow; they had no car, no means of escape. His mother would be worried about him. And what would Serafima’s parents think?

A dapper air force officer sat down at their table. ‘What the hell are you two doing here?’ he asked. It was David Satinov, George’s older brother. ‘Who brought you?’

Serafima pointed at Vasily Stalin. ‘We didn’t have much choice in the matter, actually.’

David Satinov shook his head. ‘I might have guessed. This is no place for schoolgirls.’

Vasily had rejoined them. ‘David, a toast to my father. To Stalin! To our brave pilots!’ Everyone drank to this amidst a chorus of cheers.

‘Tell me this, David, why do our planes keep crashing?’ Vasily asked suddenly, leaning across the table.

‘Soviet planes are the best in the world,’ said David.

‘If there are faults in our planes, I’ll tell my father. We’ve got to find the criminals who send our boys up in coffins! Their heads will roll, David.’

‘Yes, Vaska,’ said David.

‘You know why I’m celebrating?’

David shook his head.

‘I’ve just been promoted to general. My father trusts me again. He’s forgiven me.’ Tears pooled in his fallow, wounded eyes.

‘Congratulations.’ And David embraced Vasily.

‘Serafima! I’ll take you flying in my plane,’ cried Vasily. ‘We’ll dive so low, the peasants will hide in their haystacks. Let’s celebrate. Come on, dance!’

‘Hey, Vaska, go easy on her, she’s young,’ said David.

But Vasily Stalin pulled Serafima into the crowd. ‘Let’s foxtrot.’ He took her in his arms, his hands cruising her hips, running through her hair… She stiffened as he squeezed her, and Andrei could see her discomfort. Several other girls started to gyrate around Vasily; while trying to dance with all of them, he loosened his grip on Serafima, who, somehow, a moment later, managed to slip out of the crowd.

David was waiting for her.

‘Come on, you two.’ He gestured towards Andrei. They trailed him through the party, out of the front door, down the steps towards the cars, where chauffeurs and guards stood smoking and chatting.

‘Is it the poetry sissy from school?’ boomed Colonel Losha Babanava. ‘Not enjoying the party?’ Then he saw Serafima. ‘What’s she doing? She’s too young to be here!’

‘We need to go home,’ said Andrei. David Satinov stood behind them.

‘Take the kids home, Losha. I’ll square it with General Stalin.’

Losha Babanava sang a Georgian song as he drove Andrei and Serafima home through the warm darkness.

In the back of the car, Serafima rested her head on Andrei’s shoulder. ‘You’re so dependable, Andrei,’ she said sleepily. ‘Thank you for not abandoning me. I don’t think I’d have managed if you hadn’t been there.’

Andrei dreamed that she was his girl. He would invite her to stroll around the Patriarchy Ponds and the Alexandrovsky Gardens. He’d hold her hands and recite a verse by Blok, Akhmatova, or even Pushkin. Dizzy with drink and the smell of her skin, he stroked her hair as he stared at the straight, empty road back to Moscow, guarded by an army of silvery birches, lit by the face of a full Russian moon.

7

‘ANDRYUSHA,’ GEORGE CALLED to him the next morning as they rushed along the parquet corridor towards Mrs Satinova’s English lesson. ‘A word!’

Andrei turned and George pulled him into the changing room. He checked there was no one in the lavatory by kicking open the doors of the two cubicles, and then turned on the tap. ‘I heard from my brother David about last night. Don’t speak about it to anyone, will you?’

‘Of course not,’ Andrei said, knowing that only a fool would ever gossip about anything that concerned the Leader.

‘People could lose their heads over those faulty planes,’ George said urgently. ‘It never happened. Oh, and David said you acquitted yourself well. And Serafima… Well, Serafima says you were heroic.’

After school, Andrei walked to the Patriarchy Ponds. His head ached, and he felt sick. His mother had been distraught when he arrived home in the early hours of the morning; she’d taken him in her arms, mewing plaintively. It had irritated him enormously but there was nothing he could do to stop her. Now he should be feeling pleased with himself, he thought. He had met and survived the attentions of Vasily Stalin; he had shaken hands with Comrade Satinov; yet he was still alone, observing the tankmen and pilots buying their girls ice creams or iced lemonades. Old ladies sat watching the ducks. Mothers let their toddlers play on the grass. Nothing had really changed.

‘Shall I buy you an ice cream?’ The voice was soft as a kitten’s but it still made him jump. It was Rosa Shako, daughter of the air force commander.

‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’ she said. ‘Do you want to go for a walk in the Sparrow Hills, escape the traffic and everything else…?’

‘I don’t feel very well today, Rosa. I think I should get home.’

‘But I have Papa’s car,’ said Rosa, waving towards a limousine parked nearby.

‘Can’t we do it tomorrow?’

Her hand gripped his arm with a force that surprised him.

‘You don’t understand. Nikolasha’s waiting at the cemetery for us. He’s inviting you. It’s his place. And he’s never invited you before. You need to come.’

‘But, Rosa—’

Rosa let go of his arm and placed her slender hands together almost as if she was praying. ‘Andryusha’ – she lisped like a child – ‘please. If you don’t come, it’ll be my fault. Nikolasha’s so unforgiving. I can’t disappoint him.’

‘In what way?’ he asked, a little intrigued.

‘Nikolasha says it’s impossible to compromise in the way we live. If we compromise, it’s not worth living at all.’

‘And you believe that?’

Rosa appeared amazed that anyone could question anything that Nikolasha said.

‘He’s a true original, the ultimate romantic. He guides me. He’s not like anyone else I’ve ever met – surely you can see that? I think one day he’ll be famous, don’t you, Andrei? So are you coming? They’re all going to be there.’

‘All?’ Andrei asked. And when Rosa nodded, he knew he had to be there too.

It was already getting dark, and jagged splinters of scarlet zigzagged across the sky as Andrei opened the gate of the cemetery and then stepped aside to allow Rosa to lead the way.

Inside the cemetery, buzzing with midges, the gravestones were overgrown with green ivy; Andrei could see that rich families from the nineteenth century had built their tombs here: some were like little marble houses with pilasters and capitals and arches. It took him a moment to find his friends in the rosy graininess of a summer dusk, but then he saw the candles, their flames dancing in the still, sultry air.

Vlad Titorenko greeted him in a green frock coat and britches. ‘Nikolasha’s expecting you,’ he said to Andrei. ‘The Romantics are gathered.’

‘Come here!’ It was Nikolasha. He was standing beside an ornate tomb covered with candles and decorated with crosses, carved names, and embellished with moss and old beer bottles.

‘Quiet, please. Everyone ready?’ said Vlad. ‘Let us begin. First everyone take one shot glass of vodka. Andrei, you stand there – and you may take a glass.’

Andrei, holding the thimble of vodka, was on his own on one side of the tomb and on the other stood the Fatal Romantics. He could see Minka and George and Rosa, all of whom were dressed in nineteenth-century costumes; surely Serafima was also here somewhere?

The Velvet Book, an illuminated candelabrum and a dark green leather case lay on the tomb itself and, all around them, the dark cemetery flickered with scores of candles. Corny, certainly, but melo-dramatic, undoubtedly.

‘Fatal Romantics,’ said Nikolasha solemnly, his freckles buried deep in his white skin. ‘This is the temple of the Fatal Romantics’ Club. Let us welcome a neophyte: Andrei Kurbsky.’

‘Do I… do I need a costume?’ stammered Andrei, feeling self-conscious in his grey trousers and white shirt.

‘Wait please!’ mouthed Nikolasha testily. He cleared his throat. ‘Fatal Romantics, I hereby declare that we are in session. I open the Velvet Book. Its words are secret; few names are inscribed in its sacred pages.’

Andrei glanced at George, who gave him a wink. Andrei looked away and Nikolasha continued, his unnaturally deep voice wavering a little as he chanted like a pagan priest.

‘First, let us together declare our essential beliefs. Vlad, you may lead us.’

‘Fatal Romantics,’ started Vlad and then, all together, they chanted, ‘WE BELIEVE IN A WORLD OF LOVE.’

‘How will we live in this steely age?’

‘LOVE IS OUR LODESTAR.’

‘What is our choice?’

‘LOVE OR DEATH.’

‘Do we fear death?’

‘WE FEAR NOT DEATH. IF WE LIVE WITHOUT LOVE, LET US DIE YOUNG!’

‘And if we die?’

‘OUR LOVE WILL BE IMMORTAL.’

‘Let us drink to love,’ Nikolasha declared.

The Romantics downed their vodka, but, troubled by the anti-Party talk of death and love, Andrei hesitated.

‘You may drink, Andrei,’ Nikolasha commanded. Feeling a little like he had done the previous evening, Andrei swallowed. The vodka was like a red-hot bullet in his belly.

There was a loud sigh and then a burp, and George started to giggle; Minka too fought back a laugh that travelled up her nose and emerged as a strangled sneeze that made George shake with laughter.

‘George!’ snapped Vlad.

‘Don’t spoil it,’ added Rosa.

‘Sorry,’ said George.

‘While we’re here at a sitting of the Romantic Politburo, we can quite easily vote out a member,’ explained Nikolasha with the weariness of a severely tried teacher. ‘Now. Let us begin our meeting. Membership of our sacred brotherhood is select and secret. Andrei Kurbsky, what is your choice?’

‘Umm… love or death?’

‘Yes. Andrei, you have been called here to enter our Club of Fatal Romantics. Do you wish be considered for inscription in the Velvet Book of Love?’

Andrei nodded.

‘Andrei, I should explain that in our membership, there are two grades. The first is candidate membership and candidates are welcomed to our meetings. But to play the Game, to wear the costume and bear the pistol, one must be a full member of our Politburo.’

Andrei understood this system perfectly because that was how the Communist Party worked: you first became a candidate member and then a full member – and the whole country was run by the Politburo.

‘One day in the distant future you may be honoured by being considered for full membership but tonight you have been chosen as a candidate member of the Fatal Romantics’ Club. Step forward and place your hand on the leather case on the tomb. Now recite with all of us: LOVE OR DEATH!’

‘LOVE OR DEATH!’

‘Andrei, welcome to our society. I hereby write your name in the Velvet Book of Love.’ Nikolasha scribbled portentously in the book. ‘Toast our new candidate.’

Rosa refilled the glasses.

George swigged back two shots. ‘Can we talk now?’

‘Now for item two on the agenda,’ Nikolasha said, ignoring him. ‘We propose to play the Game in full costume after the Victory Parade on the twenty-fourth of June. On the far end of the Great Stone Bridge where the road will be closed.’

‘Is that wise?’ asked Minka. ‘On such an important day?’

‘Why not?’ answered Vlad. ‘We’ve played it in the street before. People love Pushkin.’

‘So shall we vote?’ asked Nikolasha.

They all raised their hands just like Politburo members at a Party Congress. Nikolasha counted them with his pen. ‘Passed.’

‘So what do you think of my costume, Andrei?’ asked Minka, coming around the tomb. She struck a pose.

‘You look lovely,’ said Andrei, smiling at her.

‘You may watch us play the Game although, as a candidate, Andrei, you may not participate,’ continued Nikolasha, ‘but you realize that the duel in Eugene Onegin, echoed later in Pushkin’s own fatal duel, is the essential expression of our belief in romanticism.’ He raised the leather case on the tomb and the members bowed their heads, all except Andrei who looked at it – and George who was pouring out another vodka shot. It was the case that George had showed him at his apartment. Within lay the two antique duelling pistols borrowed, presumably with the costumes, from the Little Theatre.

Rosa said, ‘Who dies tonight? Let’s play…’ Then she recited:

She offered the case to Nikolasha who chose one pistol, and then she handed it to Vlad who took the other.

‘Are you happy with your weapon, Mr Lensky?’ Rosa asked Vlad. He nodded. She turned to Nikolasha. ‘And you, Mr Onegin?’

‘Are the pistols charged and ready to shoot?’ he asked.

She nodded formally.

Vlad and Nikolasha held their pistols upright like crucifixes in church and proceeded ritualistically out into the graveyard where a twenty-yard path was marked out by candles.

‘The duellists shed their cloaks and wait,’ said Nikolasha. He and Vlad shed their frock coats, George marked out thirty paces, and the boys stood facing each other. Their ruffled white blouses glowed in the moonflooded twilight, and the oiled steel of the pistols glimmered.

Rosa’s voice rang out: ‘“Approach at will.”’ The boys walked towards each other.

‘Four fateful steps… Five paces more.’

Nikolasha lowered his pistol slowly and, closing one eye, he aimed the barrel at Vlad’s chest, saying as he did so:

Vlad raised his pistol too and took aim. But Nikolasha, playing Onegin, was ahead of him: he started to squeeze the trigger.

Andrei found it hard to breathe. It was all very silly, this ritual of amateur dramatics, yet there was something enthralling about it. The black thuja trees, the candles casting long shadows over the graves, the swirling teenage emotions and the macabre drama of fatal duels touched him. They were play-acting, but every Russian had lived Pushkin’s duels, the passion plays of the Russian soul.

The trigger clicked, and there was a deafening crack and an orange flash. Vlad held his chest, tottering. Red blood soaked his white shirt. He fell.

Nikolasha, narrating every movement with the correct words from Pushkin, ran to Vlad, knelt beside him, called his name and then, standing over his ‘body’, the Fatal Romantics recited together:

The Game was over, and Andrei could breathe once more. Half an hour later, as Rosa was collecting the glasses, she tripped and knocked one off the tomb.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered, picking up the shattered glass from the ground.

‘You’re so clumsy, you spoil everything,’ Nikolasha snapped in a spasm of cruelty that made Andrei wince for her. ‘You just don’t have the sensory talents for passion. But Serafima has it in spades. Serafima understands poetry. Without her, the Fatal Romantics wouldn’t exist. Don’t you agree, Rosa?’

Rosa’s pale face flushed. ‘At least I’m here this evening,’ she said. ‘Serafima’s not. Where is she, Nikolasha?’

‘She said she might come later,’ he said.

‘Well, I hate to tell you, but I don’t think she’s coming.’ Rosa turned to Andrei. ‘But that makes no difference. Even when she doesn’t deign to join us, she’s always here.’

And that was when Andrei realized why Nikolasha was so peevish. Serafima hadn’t come and Rosa’s devoted presence reminded him of her absence. Andrei understood how he felt. Ever since he’d arrived at the school, he had wanted to join the Fatal Romantics’ Club. Now he was in – but without Serafima, he didn’t give a kopeck whether his name appeared in the Velvet Book of Love or not.

8

A COLUMN OF mechanical khaki dinosaurs, T-34 and heavy KV tanks, rumbled down Gorky Street the next morning as Andrei walked to school. One lurched to a halt, shook and broke down, spluttering black diesel smoke. Phalanxes of soldiers drilled on Red Square, horses clattered on the cobbles, and the roar of the machinery and bark of drill sergeants sounded louder, more urgent: a symphony of rising excitement. It was five days until the Victory Parade, and Moscow had become a stage with a vast cast of foreigners arriving each day: Chinese, Americans, even Fijians and Africans, filled the hotels. Women were on the streets too – peasants offering fruit and flowers and sometimes a knee-trembler in an alleyway. The roads were crammed with trucks and self-propelled guns; and one could not move at the Belorussian Station for soldiers in army green and navy blue, all arriving to march past Stalin.

At assembly in School 801, Director Medvedeva announced the Pioneers who would go on a special camping trip.

‘I hate camping,’ whispered Senka Dorov, who was sitting next to Andrei. ‘It’s cold and uncomfortable and the food’s horrid. Why’s everyone in the Soviet Union so obsessed with camping?’

But Andrei was looking for his fellow Fatal Romantics. There they were – all together a few benches away: Minka and George, Vlad more cadaverously pale than ever, Nikolasha with Rosa Shako, her eyes as always seemingly half closed, at his side. But where was Serafima? Try as he might, Andrei couldn’t find her.

At lunch break, Andrei bumped into George and Minka, who were running down the central corridor towards the lavatories. Dr Rimm was following them.

‘Chin up, girl!’ he cried at Minka. ‘Discipline. The world’s eyes are settled on Moscow. Five days until the parade. Long live Stalin. No smirking, Andrei Kurbsky – tuck your shirt in!’

As soon as he’d passed, George pulled him into the cloakroom. ‘Have you noticed anything special about Dr Rimm?’ he whispered.

‘He’s excited about the parade,’ said Andrei.

‘No, silly, he’s quivering with love,’ added Minka.

‘You haven’t sent him another letter, have you? The more you send, the more dangerous it’ll be if he ever finds out.’

‘How can he?’ George was laughing. ‘We’ve been sending him special ones for the Victory Parade. We’re going to post this to him right now.’ He showed it to Andrei.

He didn’t see Serafima until that afternoon at pick-up.

‘I hear they let you in to the Fatal Romantics’ Club.’ She’d come up behind him. Andrei jumped a little and he remembered the drive back from Vasily’s.

‘I’m sure you told them to.’

‘Why would anyone listen to me?’ She smiled as they walked through the Golden Gates.

‘Will you be playing the Game?’ he said, desperate to detain her. ‘You’d suit the costumes.’

She stopped, her head on one side in that way of hers that made him feel he had her full attention – just for a moment. ‘You mean I’m old-fashioned?’

‘I like the way you dress.’

‘You admire my Bolshevik modesty?’

‘It just makes you even more—’

‘A compliment from Andrei?’ She cut him off. ‘Don’t we have enough romantics here already?’

‘But you’ll be at the Victory Parade?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You don’t sound very excited.’

‘My parents are excited. I’m not very interested in howitzers and tanks.’ She leaned towards him. ‘But I’m looking forward to the Game afterwards.’

‘Why’s it all so secret?’

‘Don’t you see? In our age of conspiracy, everything is conspiratorial. Even having a picnic or reading poetry.’

They’d reached the street and, with a wave, she was gone.

Andrei hesitates for a moment or two – and then he follows her. She doesn’t notice, so entirely is she in her own world. She pushes her hair back from her face, and when her head turns a little, showing the perfect curve of her forehead, he sees that her lips are moving: she’s talking to herself, to someone, all the time. Up Ostozhenka she goes, past the Kremlin, Gorky Street, and into the House of Books. Up the stairs to the Foreign Literature section. She looks at the same books. Then she’s off again.

Often she looks up the sky, at trees, at ornaments on buildings. Three soldiers point and whistle at her. She walks down another street, and men look after her. She notices none of them. Several times, he wants to shout, ‘Wait! Stop!’

He longs to know what she’s saying and to whom. She skips up the steps of the Bolshoi Theatre and vanishes into the crowds waiting for curtain-up.

9

THE GOLDEN GATES resembled a parade ground the next morning. Comrade Satinov was in full dress uniform, boots, medals and braid. There was Rosa’s father, Marshal Shako, with his spiky hair, snub nose and Tartar eyes, in jodhpurs and spurs that clanked on the flagstones.

‘I’m rehearsing for the Victory Parade,’ he growled at Director Medvedeva. Then he spotted Serafima, whose waist he tweaked as he passed. ‘You’re a beautiful girl. Just like your mother!’ he bellowed.

‘Behave yourself,’ said Sophia Zeitlin, waving a jewelled finger at him. ‘Men get more excited about dressing up than women,’ she added, and Andrei realized she was talking to him. ‘Are you Serafima’s friend, Andrei?’

He blushed. ‘Yes.’

‘Serafima told me how kind you were during your trip to the country house of a certain air force general.’ She drew him aside confidentially and took his hands in hers. ‘It’s hard for a mother to say this but may I speak frankly?’

Andrei nodded.

‘I’m concerned about her, and suspect she may be meeting someone after school. Her father and I know she has her admirers, but you probably know more than we do. If you do, dear, may I count on you to tell me?’

Andrei started to say something but stopped himself. Was she referring to the Fatal Romantics’ Club?

‘Oh Mama, leave poor Andrei alone,’ said Serafima, coming to his rescue.

Sophia laughed. ‘I was only inviting Andrei to dinner with us at Aragvi tonight, wasn’t I, Andrei? I’ll send the car for you.’

A summer evening in a street just off Gorky. Outside the engraved glass doors of the Aragvi Restaurant, a moustachioed Georgian in traditional dress – a long cherkesska coat with bullet pouches and a jewelled dagger hanging at his belt – stood as if on sentry duty. He opened the door for Andrei, who stepped hesitantly inside a panelled restaurant with tables on the ground floor.

Andrei looked around him. The place was crowded, every table taken. He felt the thrill of a famous restaurant, the sense of shared luxury, the glimpse into the lives of others, lives unknown and unlived. Where were Serafima and her mother? There, making their way towards some stairs at the back that led to the main part of the restaurant. He hurried to join them, and together they entered a space that contained more crowded tables as well as closed alcoves on a second-floor gallery where a moon-faced and very sweaty Georgian in a burgundy tailcoat sang ‘Suliko’, accompanied by a guitarist.

Sophia Zeitlin embraced the tiny maître d’ who wore white tie, white gloves and tails: his skin was so tautly stretched over his cheekbones that you could almost see through it.

‘Gamajoba, Madame Zeitlin!’ the man declaimed operatically. ‘Hello, dear Serafima! Come in! And who’s this? A new face?’

‘This is Longuinoz Stazhadze,’ said Sophia to Andrei. ‘The master of Aragvi and’ – she raised her hand in mock salute – ‘one of the most powerful men in Moscow.’

He’s wearing face powder, noticed Andrei.

People from many different tables hailed Sophia Zeitlin, and then Minka appeared as if from nowhere.

‘Andrei! Serafima! We’re expecting you!’ Minka led them to a table heaped high with dishes – satsivi, khachapuri, lobio… Waiters brought more to form a precarious ziggurat of plates. Longuinoz crooked his fingers, and more waiters bearing chairs above their heads wove amongst the closely packed tables, laying out new places just in time for Andrei, Serafima and Sophia to sit down.

The whole Dorov family was there, Senka perched on his mother’s knee.

‘Andrei,’ Senka called out, ‘do you like my suit?’

‘You look just like a real little professor,’ Andrei agreed, laughing.

Their host, Genrikh Dorov, ordered Telavi wine Number 5. His wife, Dashka Dorova, embraced Sophia, and pulled up a chair next to hers.

‘Have a martini,’ she suggested in her rather exotic Galician accent.

‘I’ll have a cosmopolitan. American-style,’ Sophia declared.

‘Eat up, children,’ said Genrikh, who seemed too puny to be a Party bigshot.

Andrei scoured the restaurant. In the far alcove, next to a table of American officers, sat Comrade Satinov and family. George, next to him, made frantic wing-flapping gestures while pointing at Genrikh Dorov. Andrei smiled back at him to signal that he understood. Genrikh Dorov, the Uncooked Chicken, was looking more uncooked than ever.

‘There’s a happy family,’ joked Minka, who was next to Andrei. She was pointing at Nikolasha Blagov sitting in silence with his parents at a poky corner table.

‘I wonder if they’re sending Nikolasha’s father abroad as ambassador?’ asked Serafima.

As they watched, Nikolasha sulkily pushed back his chair and stood.

‘Uh-oh,’ said Minka. ‘He’s heading this way!’

The two girls laughed at what happened next as Nikolasha became stranded in the middle of the restaurant as streams of Georgian warriors flowed around him, balancing plates of lobio for the group of Americans at one of the larger tables.

‘You know the Game is just Nikolasha’s way of seeing you, Serafima. That’s what it’s really about,’ said Minka.

‘I don’t think Papa would approve of your game,’ said Demian Dorov prissily. ‘Papa would say it’s un-Bolshevik.’

‘Are you going to tell him?’ asked Minka. ‘You’d be a real creep if you did.’

Demian raised his finger. ‘I’m just saying: be careful. There’s something sinister about Nikolasha’s obsession with death.’

Andrei looked up as Nikolasha loomed over them. ‘My father’s been sent to Mexico as ambassador,’ he said dolefully.

‘Surely you don’t have to go too?’ Minka was sympathetic.

‘He says I must. It makes tomorrow night especially significant,’ said Nikolasha. ‘It could be the last Game!’ He leaned down to whisper to Serafima and then Minka.

‘I think we should invite Andrei to play it this time,’ said Serafima suddenly.

‘But Andrei’s not a full member. He only became a candidate last week. He’s not ready,’ Nikolasha protested.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Andrei. ‘I can just watch.’

‘Do you want me to come?’ Serafima looked intently at Nikolasha, who shifted uncomfortably.

‘Very much.’

Andrei saw her green eyes shine as she leaned forward.

‘Then Andrei plays the Game. If you want me, you must include him too.’

10

THE MORNING OF the Victory Parade, and the rain was pouring down on the soldiers, tanks, horses and, amongst the throng of Muscovites on the streets, Andrei and his mother, Inessa. He was, he thought, the only one of his new friends not to have a seat in the grandstand on Red Square. Wearing hats, galoshes and anoraks, they’d got up early to find a good place at the bottom of Gorky Street to watch the show.

A roar. ‘That’s Stalin arriving!’ said the woman next to Andrei. As the orchestra of fifteen hundred musicians played Glinka’s ‘Glory’, blasted out of giant but tinny loudspeakers mounted on the backs of trucks, Andrei and Inessa could just make out Marshal Zhukov, on a white horse, riding out of one of the Kremlin gates to meet Marshal Rokossovsky in the middle and take the salute. Tanks, howitzers and horsemen passed; flanks of steel and muscle glistened in the rain. They saw soldiers bearing Nazi banners, scarlet and black, like a Roman triumph, and heard their passionate ‘URRAH’ as they tossed them at the feet of their leader, the Great Stalin.

Afterwards, the roads were clogged with tanks and jeeps, crowds of soldiers and civilians.

‘What a shame it rained,’ Andrei said to his mother. But he was not really thinking about the rain. ‘Mama’ – he turned to her and put his arms around her – ‘do you think—’

‘Do I think Papa will come home now?’ she finished his thought perfectly. ‘Hush.’ She looked around, even though no one could hear in that din of singing and shouting, footsteps and rain. ‘Lower your voice.’

‘I’m sure they will all come back now, won’t they? I feel it,’ Andrei whispered. ‘I so want him back.’ It was something they had never said to each other, because it was so raw even after all these years.

‘Darling Andryusha, don’t wish for anything too much. They say you can’t live without hope but I think hope’s the cruellest trick of all. I survive by not expecting much.’

‘But, Mama, there are so many out here today who must be like us. And I know they’re all thinking like me. Surely there’ll be an amnesty, and everyone will come back?’

Inessa closed her eyes for a moment to collect herself and when he looked at her bone-weary face, he realized that she was steeling herself for him. ‘Don’t forget him. Never forget him. But go forward now, darling. Just look forward.’

Andrei felt a lurch of disappointment. He sighed and dropped his arms, stepping away from her. ‘I’m meeting my friends on the Stone Bridge at five.’

‘To read Pushkin? Are you dressing up?’

‘Oh Mama, do you think I’d look good in a top hat and velvet coat? No, I’m too late to find a costume.’ They laughed as he pushed his way into the crowds – and afterwards, when he had so many long nights to replay everything, he wished he had said goodbye properly, and told her that he loved her.

‘Be careful, you’re all I’ve got. Off you go then!’ she called after him as she let him step into his new world.

Andrei fought his way up the steps. Soldiers, in cloaks and mantles and greatcoats, caps over their eyes, visors running with droplets, were singing on the bridge. Strangers hugged one another and swigged from vodka bottles handed through the crowd. It was hard to see far through the rain and the mist – he kept having to wipe his glasses – but as the crowd closed around Andrei, so closely packed that it took the weight off his feet, he looked back at the red walls of the Kremlin, the stars atop the towers, the gold of the Great Palace, the onion domes, streaked with light in the sheets of rain, and he thought that somewhere in there was Stalin himself, and with Stalin were Comrades Satinov and Dorov, and probably Sophia Zeitlin, famous people whom he now knew. He’d even dined with them at Aragvi. What were they doing at this moment? He knew Satinov, and Satinov knew Stalin, so he, Andrei, was just a few steps from the greatest man in the world.

‘Andryusha!’ It was Minka and she was holding the hand of Senka, who was wearing a new suit under a yellow raincoat – just like a grown-up.

‘Hello, Little Professor,’ said Andrei. ‘I see your mama let you out?’

‘You’re not wearing fancy dress either?’ said Senka. ‘I don’t blame you. Minka isn’t dressed up. Is it only those credulous imbeciles who take the Game seriously?’ He pointed along the bridge, over the massed heads and bobbing caps, and there was Nikolasha, towering above everyone else in the crowd, at the other end where the road was barricaded to create a wide pedestrian walkway. He was resplendent in an olive-green frock coat and boots, his strawberry-red hair coarsened and rusted by the rain. Shoving through the crowd to get across the bridge, Andrei greeted George and Marlen Satinov, who had their little sister Mariko with them, and nodded at Vlad, who was also in costume. But where was Serafima?

‘She’ll come, don’t you worry,’ said Nikolasha. ‘See?’ He smiled triumphantly.

And there she was, in a blue dress and Peter Pan collar, soaked by the rain which had frizzed her hair into uncontrollable curls. Andrei couldn’t stop looking at her. He scarcely paid attention as Nikolasha clapped his hands and Vlad handed him the Velvet Book.

‘Comrade Romantics,’ Nikolasha declared formally, ‘I am recording the first attendance of Andrei Kurbsky as a full member qualified to play the Game.’ The crowd was so noisy that Andrei could barely hear him and it was hard to stay with the others, such was the shoving of the crowds. But everyone was in a good mood that day and when George and Minka began to pour out shots of vodka and hand round the glasses, a spotty sailor grabbed one and quaffed it and soon it seemed as if they were providing drinks for the entire Baltic Fleet.

‘Are you a theatre troupe?’ asked one of them, pulling on Nikolasha’s frock coat.

Rosa, in a purple cloak over a red dress with golden appliqué, fought her way through the mass of passersby. ‘Sorry, Nikolasha, I couldn’t get through. Here they are!’ She handed him the pistols in their little green case. She bowed before Nikolasha who nodded back.

‘Comrade Romantics…’ he started in his solemn high priest’s voice. ‘We’re here as always to celebrate poetry over prose, passion over science. What is our choice?’

‘LOVE OR DEATH,’ replied Vlad and Rosa. ‘WITHOUT LOVE, LET US DIE YOUNG!’

‘Let the Game begin!’ said Nikolasha, but his incantation was drowned out by the sailors singing ‘The Blue Shawl’, and then ‘Katyusha’ – for Katyusha was a song as well as a movie.

‘Get on with it or we’ll lose each other!’ George shouted, swigging the vodka.

‘What? I can’t even hear myself!’ shouted Nikolasha, nodding at Vlad, who held up the case and showed them the two duelling pistols. As he chose his pistol, Nikolasha stowed the Velvet Book in the pistol case – out of the rain.

‘Who dies today? Let’s play…’ said Rosa but her little cooing voice was lost in the roar of the crowd.

No one saw what happened next. They were separated by the currents of the crowd that carried Andrei so far from the others that he lost Serafima altogether and could only just see Nikolasha’s head in the distance when the two shots rang out. Amidst the sudden hush that followed, the rain stopped and with it time itself. Slow steam arose from the sweating, damp crowds, the sticky air congested with white poplar pollen instantly, mysteriously unleashed, and that red head was nowhere to be seen.

When he found them again, standing startled and horrified around the bodies, Andrei looked at his friends, at the other Fatal Romantics – and, across the bodies, his eyes met Serafima’s in a kind of horrified complicity. And then time speeded up again.

In front of him two army medics were working on the bodies, and a clearing had opened up in the dense pack of people. Policemen were running from both directions. And he saw the duelling pistols on the ground, one shattered into pieces, and the Velvet Book, splayed open on the wet ground, its covers all muddy. The police were holding people back, placing bollards around the scene and asking questions.

‘Are you friends of these two?’ a police officer asked, a burly fellow with a Stavropol accent and a paunch. ‘Pull yourselves together. Say something!’

‘Yes we are.’ Andrei stepped forward, conscious that Vlad beside him was shaking in his bedraggled frock coat.

‘Are you actors or something? Do you dress up like this all the time?’

‘We’re not actors,’ Vlad said and began to cry.

‘Christ! What about you, girl?’ said the policeman, pointing at Minka, who was hugging her little brother, Senka.

‘Come away, Senka, I’m taking you home.’

‘But look at that pistol – it’s in pieces – and the Velvet Book’s all torn,’ said Senka, crouching down to look.

‘Leave all that; the police will need them,’ said Minka.

‘No one’s going anywhere yet,’ ordered the policeman, turning to Serafima. ‘You there! What’s your name?’

‘I’m Serafima Romashkina.’ Andrei could tell she was struggling to hold her nerve by being icily calm and formal. Yet she had blood on her hands – she must have got to her friends first.

‘Like the writer?’

‘He’s my father.’

‘You’re kidding. So your mother’s Sophia Zeitlin?’

‘Yes,’ said Serafima.

‘I’m a fan. I loved Katyusha. What a movie! But you don’t look like her at all.’

‘Look, our friends are lying there and you’re just—’

‘So what were you doing here, Serafima Romashkina?’ The policeman was now brandishing a little notebook and pencil that seemed too small for his thick fingers.

‘We were all meeting here. After the parade. Just for fun.’

‘M-e-e-ting,’ said the policeman, trying to write this down. Andrei realized he was drunk. Most of Moscow was drunk and several of the policemen at the scene were struggling to stand up at all. ‘Why the hell are you in fancy dress?’

‘We’re in a dramatic club,’ said Serafima.

‘What the fuck is that?’

‘They’re playing the Game,’ blurted out little Mariko Satinova from the back of the group. Andrei noticed Marlen was standing in front of her so she could not see the bodies or the blood.

‘Give me your name and address and you can take the little ones home.’

‘Satinov,’ said Marlen.

‘Satinov? Like the Politburo member?’

‘Yes, I’m Marlen Satinov.’

‘And I’m Mariko, his sister,’ added the little girl.

‘Mary mother of Christ!’ said the policeman, pushing back his cap and wiping his forehead. ‘GRISHA, GET THE FUCK OVER HERE!’ he yelled, turning around.

A pimply policeman who did not look any older than the schoolchildren ran over, looking anxious. ‘Yes, captain?’

‘Run fast as you can over to the guardhouse at Spassky Gate’ – he pointed towards the Kremlin tower – ‘and ring Lubianka Square. Tell them we have a double killing with special characteristics. It’s for the Organs. Tell them to send someone down here fast. Go!’

Andrei watched the young policeman running; just as he reached the sentry box with its telephone link to the MGB, the Ministry of State Security, he jumped as the sky boomed and a galaxy of fireworks exploded above the Kremlin.

The roar of the crowd spread from the bridge along the packed embankments and bridges of the River Moskva, but Andrei only had eyes for the policeman gesticulating as he told the guards to ring their superiors. He imagined phones ringing from guardhouses up the vertical hierarchy – captains to colonels, generals to ministers – all the way to Lubianka Square and thence to the Kremlin itself.

Around him, the fireworks made the night into a daylight that turned the two bodies on the bridge red and white and green as those supernovas flashed above them in crescents and stars and wheels.

Serafima stood beside him. In the dazzling, bleaching light he saw her tears, and, for a moment, it felt as if they were quite alone. Then he took her in his arms as a stab of sheer dread pierced his innards.

‘It’s begun,’ she kept saying. ‘It’s begun.’

It was only much later that he’d understand that she was not just crying for their dead friends and the pasts they shared, but for their futures. And for the secret that she cherished more than life itself.