One Night in Winter

30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

31

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sensible Minka, thought Serafima, however much fun this might be. The rules had loosened in wartime but her father had warned her that the Party would reinforce them again afterwards. Bradley, spurred on by his friends, not only insisted on buying them four rounds of drinks but offered them some tickets in a box. ‘We’ve got some extra seats,’ he said.

‘Why don’t you need them?’ asked Minka in the perfect English she had learned in Tamara Satinova’s class.

‘We can’t stay for the show, so please take them,’ Bradley said. ‘The box will just be empty if you don’t.’

‘You’re just here for the drinks?’ said Minka.

‘And the dames!’ cried one of Bradley’s friends.

‘We’re going out to eat as soon as the play starts,’ said Bradley.

Filled with uniformed foreigners and Russian girls, the Bolshoi was the centre of all social life in Moscow, so it didn’t surprise Serafima that Bradley and his American friends were not remotely interested in Prokofiev. Even she, Rosa and Minka had seen it so often they could have danced it themselves.

‘Hey,’ Bradley continued, flashing his amazing American teeth, white and clean and big as icebergs. ‘Wanna join us for dinner?’

‘I’m sure you’ll find some girls who aren’t here for the ballet,’ replied Minka, now suddenly haughty and mock-serious. ‘But we are.’

32

SATINOV WAS STILL in East Prussia a week later. It was evening and he was in the baronial hall of a country house that was now the headquarters of the First Belorussian Front. The first Soviet troops to break into the schloss had urinated and defecated on the count’s four-poster bed (once slept in by Frederick the Great, according to a gardener who showed them round) and fired at the oil paintings of bewhiskered Junkers, and although the house had since been cleaned up, Satinov could still see the bullet marks on the walls.

‘I think the full staff can join us for dinner tonight, don’t you, Hercules?’ said Marshal Rokossovsky. They were friends, even though Rokossovsky was a real soldier, and he, Satinov, was a Party man, a member of the State Defence Committee, and Stalin’s representative.

‘Why not?’ answered Satinov, who understood by ‘full staff’ that Rokossovsky meant that the generals could invite their PPZhs (it stood for pokhodno-polevaya zhena – a field campaign wife, a pun on the Soviet machine-gun the PPSh). ‘It’s time everyone relaxed. We’ve earned it, after all.’

He looked across at Rokossovsky and raised his eyebrows as they both acknowledged the sound of shooting and cowboy whooping outside. Losha and the bodyguards were culling dinner in the deer park from their jeeps. They too were in good spirits.

Coming down for dinner that evening, Satinov relished the delicious aroma of roasting venison, the sweet smoke of apple-tree wood in the fire, and, he thought, the scent of the women present. Rokossovsky, elegant descendant of Polish nobility, enjoyed female company but disliked any hint of debauchery in his decorous headquarters. This suited Satinov, who was happily married, hated drunkenness and disapproved of womanizers.

In the hall, Marshal Rokossovsky and his staff were at the table. Young female orderlies in khaki were serving plates of steaming venison piled with vegetables and pouring glasses of wine for the officers. Rokossovsky’s batman was fanning the fire in the great open fireplace, and Satinov’s guards were carrying up boxes of wine from the cellars.

Rokossovsky was sitting beside the young telephonist who was his PPZh. Satinov took his place at the other end of the table.

‘Comrade Satinov,’ Rokossovsky called down the table, pointing to a pale man. ‘You already know Comrade Genrikh Dorov from the Central Committee?’

‘I certainly do. Comrade Dorov, welcome!’ said Satinov. He smiled, remembering that George and his friends called Genrikh the Uncooked Chicken. How right they were, he thought, feeling an unexpected stab of longing for the company of his sons (and the one he’d lost).

‘Thank you. I’m here to inspect food supplies and root out wreckers and profiteers,’ said Dorov.

Ah, that made sense, Satinov decided, recalling how, in 1937, Genrikh Dorov had metamorphosed from an inky-fingered, hero-worshipping assistant in Stalin’s private office into a demented executioner. The more executions, the whiter his hair, the paler his skin became. In the first year of the war, his shootings (sometimes using his own pistol) and military bungles cost the lives of thousands. Finally Stalin himself (who regarded him as a talentless but devoted fanatic) had demoted him.

‘I report to the Central Committee tomorrow,’ said Genrikh, so that everyone could hear. ‘It’s a den of iniquity out here. Adultery. Booze. Corruption. We must restore Bolshevik morals.’

But Satinov was looking at the woman sitting next to Dorov. ‘My wife,’ said Genrikh, following his gaze. ‘Have you met her?’

And there was the female doctor in the blue-tabbed uniform of the medical corps with the red cross on her sleeve.

‘Dashka Dorova,’ she said, offering her hand. Satinov noticed her slightly plump, amber-skinned wrist. ‘Yes, we’ve met before.’

‘Of course but…’

‘But what?’ A crooked smile, challenging caramel-brown eyes.

What was he trying to say? That he was surprised that the unattractive pedant Dorov was married to this beautiful doctor?

She leaned towards him. ‘Did you know our children are at the same school? My daughter Minka knows your sons.’

‘School 801? I didn’t, but you know, I’ve never been there. I’ve been at the front for so long.’

‘Where did you meet?’ asked Dorov. ‘You just said you’d met. I’d like to know.’

‘At a little hospital in a village a few days ago,’ explained Dashka soothingly. ‘A whole unit was poisoned by alcohol…’

‘Christ! What a waste of manpower,’ Dorov said. ‘Did you shoot the suppliers for sabotage?’

‘No, dear,’ Dashka replied. ‘I was trying to save their lives.’

‘Did we lose any more?’ asked Satinov.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Oh, and thank you so much for the mattresses and supplies. I was very surprised when they arrived.’

‘You didn’t think I’d remember, did you?’

‘No,’ she said, smiling, her features softening. ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Would you have bothered with the supplies if she’d been an ugly male doctor?’ asked Dorov.

Satinov looked at him coldly. ‘How long are you with us, Comrade Dorov?’

But Dorov had turned away.

‘Excuse me, comrades, but Comrade Dorov, your plane for Moscow is waiting,’ reported one of the aides-de-camp, saluting.

‘I’ll help you pack,’ said Dashka, standing up.

After the Dorovs had gone, there was silence around the table. Genrikh Dorov was as disliked as he was feared. Then Rokossovsky winked, everyone laughed, and the conversation started again.

A few hours later, and the dinner was over. Stalin had telephoned to discuss the offensive and Marshal Rokossovsky had retired. Around Satinov, the other officers and Losha were singing ‘Katyusha’ beside the fireplace. But he craved a quiet smoke and some cool air. Pulling on his fur-lined greatcoat and wolf-fur hat, he stepped through the doors at the back of the house and out into the night.

It was bitterly cold. The snow glowed on the statuary in the well-kept grounds. Where were the house’s owners now? Were they even alive? How quickly fortune could change. Satinov lit a cigarette and sipped at the cognac in his glass.

War was simply a slaughterhouse on wheels, he thought. For most men, soldiering was tragedy expressed as a profession. And yet he liked this life, the straightforward comradeship of the front, the sense of shared mission, the moral clarity of war against evil.

The orange tip of another cigarette: he wasn’t alone.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said quietly. ‘I thought you’d flown back to Moscow.’

‘I’ll be here a while yet,’ she replied. ‘The medical services on this front need reorganization and I can’t trust anyone else to do it.’ She was wearing, he noticed, that full-length sheepskin greatcoat that, out here, made her look like a wild animal.

‘I prefer to do everything myself too. I didn’t realize you were from Moscow.’

‘I’m from Lvov originally. Is it so obvious I’m from Galicia?’ She laughed with a singing sound, throwing back her head so that he caught a glimpse of her throat.

‘No, not at all. You’re at the Kremlevka?’

‘Yes, I’m its new director. But I’m a cardiologist. What’s your speciality?’

‘Not hearts,’ Satinov said tersely. ‘Hearts are the last organs that I consider.’

As they talked, the steam of their breath fused, and when they exhaled, cigarette smoke twisted from their lips and swirled around them like the folds of a grey cloak. He was conscious of her distinct spicy perfume as they walked around the gardens, and then out into the fields beyond the house. The full moon above them had dyed the snow a strange blue so that, as they walked on into the deer park, the blue grass under their feet crunched and sparkled. The snowflakes that gathered in her hair seemed to make it blacker and thicker still.

He stopped to allow Dashka to finish the cognac in his glass. Ahead was a white colonnade – and now they saw it was a small Grecian temple.

‘It’s from the Seven Years War,’ she said. ‘A folly!’

‘Let’s explore!’ Feeling like children, they entered its cold portals, chased by wisps of mist that curled down from little domes and out of alcoves. Suddenly, and without knowing quite why, Satinov was filled with an intense joy. Below them, they could see the gloomy house, surrounded by lines of jeeps, tanks, guns. Smoke from the soldiers’ fires rose from the village. In the distance: the sound of a hammer on metal; of engineers mending the tanks; engines revving; volleys of shots; young men singing a love song – was it the Georgian melody ‘Tiflis’? A boom and the orange flash of distant howitzers momentarily made the snow itself flare up as if on fire.

Leaning against the wall, he lit another cigarette and told her about his family, of his happiness with Tamara, how the death of his eldest son had fused into the deaths of tens of thousands in the battles where he served, of his pride in his second son David, his admiration for George’s genial mischief (which he envied), of Marlen’s successes, and of Mariko, apple of his eye.

‘Have you told them all these things?’ she asked.

He shook his head.

‘But you tell me here? You must tell them; you must tell Tamara.’

He smiled, turning to her, noticing the beauty of her dark eyes, her lips. ‘Now, your turn,’ he said.

She had one son in the army, a daughter, Minka, who took nothing seriously, and Demian who took everything seriously, like his father. And then there was her little afterthought: ‘My Senka, whom I love so much it makes me grind my teeth.’

‘I was like that with my mother,’ said Satinov.

‘My Senka’s quite different from you, Hercules. He’s soft and adorable but you – we all know that you’re the Iron Commissar. You like to be seen as cold as ice, as silent as the forest.’

‘I don’t seem very silent tonight.’

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘You’ve surprised me.’

‘I’ve surprised myself.’

She laughed and he glimpsed her throat again. ‘It’s my company, of course. I claim credit for your loquacity. I thought you were another silent Bolshevik disciplinarian.’

They had almost avoided the mention of her spouse up to now. It seemed to Satinov to be a significant move in their conversation. ‘He’s strict at home too?’

‘He never lets us forget. He’s the puritanical conscience of the Party. But I love him, of course. And you?’

‘Probably Tamara would agree. The Soviet man is a product of our harsh times. But I love my Tamara too, and our friends say our marriage is the happiest they know.’

‘How wonderful,’ she said. ‘It’s true. I know all the gossip but I’ve never heard a whisper about you being a flirt.’

He threw his cigarette away, a speck of red in the blue snow beyond. ‘But what about you, Dashka? Are you famous for your flirtations? You’re beautiful enough…’

‘I like to flirt but it never goes anywhere. I married at nineteen and I’ve never looked at another man in twenty-one years.’

‘And yet…?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m just enjoying this moment.’

He passed her a cigarette and watched her put it between her lips. He leaned in to light it. He closed his eyes for a moment and he could feel how close she was – by the warmth of her face, the scent of her hair and her exotic amber skin so rare amongst Russians.

He paused, waited for her to move away; then he leaned in closer and, without any decision or reason at all, they were kissing, and he could feel her light, wide lips on his.

Outside the arches and the colonnades, the snow started to fall again, making the night a few degrees warmer. The flakes whirled around them in their little temple. Once they had started to kiss, and once they knew that no one could see them, they could not stop. His hands ran over her fur coat; then he was pushing it open, and then the green tunic and her blouse, delighting in the soft caramel hues of her neck and shoulders.

She was kissing him more hungrily than he had ever been kissed by Tamara. She was biting his mouth, tearing his lips, breathing his breath. For a second, the scientific Communist, the Iron Commissar, returned and Satinov wondered if this was right, normal, and he shrank from her. But as he inhaled her quick breath, tasted the slight bitterness of her cigarettes and the sweetness of the brandy, her passion infected him. She curled herself around him so that he could feel her body, her need for him. He touched her legs above her boots, realizing that he loved their delicious sturdiness. When his hand slid up her American nylons, when it reached the silkiness of her skin, both of them groaned aloud.

Somehow they stopped, and a few minutes later, they were walking back down the hill towards the house.

‘Comrade doctor,’ he said in his restored commanding tone, ‘we’re good Bolsheviks. We both love our spouses. This can never happen again.’

‘Agreed, comrade general. Of course.’

‘You go in first,’ he ordered.

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

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

33

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Does it matter when it’s timeless?’

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

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

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

‘Yes, I’d like that,’ she said.

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

She told him.

‘Romashkin? Like the writer?’

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

‘And yours?’ she asked.

‘I’m Frank Belman.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Agreed,’ said Rokossovsky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

34

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But just enough?’

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

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

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

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

They both laughed.

‘How old are you?’

‘I’m twenty-two,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘What do you mean?’

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

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

‘How do I know you’re not?’

‘Do I seem like the others?’

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

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

She smiled uncertainly. She had not thought of this.

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

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

‘You’re from a rich family?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you live in a mansion?’

‘My parents do.’

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

‘No gloves, but our butler is black.’

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

‘Yes.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, most do – but not all.’

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

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

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

Serafima could feel the icy flecks settling on her warm skin and then melting – it was delicious. She stopped as Frank took off his gloves and offered her a cigarette from his silver case. They blew the blue smoke into the grey light where the snowflakes glinted like jewels in the lamplight, and did not speak.

Frank seemed to be thinking hard about something; then he cleared his throat. ‘I’m not a playboy. I haven’t talked about many of these things with anyone before you. May I… m-may I… hold your hand?’

She presented her hands to him, and when he unpeeled her gloves, the night became silent and she could see his hands shaking just a little. It was, she thought, truly a moment from the distant past, from a more romantic time.

When he held her hands in his, she turned them to put her fingers through his, and when she squeezed them, he squeezed back; and both of them stood there in the snow, face to face, overcome with the excitement of finding each other. The snow had padded the city so that they could hardly hear anything, see anything. Hours had passed since they met, yet their acquaintance, only as fresh as a night’s snowfall, already seemed as if it had lasted for a long, long time. She had never kissed anyone. Never wished to. But she wanted him to kiss her now.

‘Serafima, may I…’

But she’d already lifted her face to his, and could feel his mouth on hers as the snow fell thickly around them.

35

SATINOV CREPT ACROSS the open space between him and the door of an outhouse. The Nazis were only thirty kilometres away, and still fighting for every village. Yet here he was, having given his bodyguards the slip, and about to enter an unknown house and do something that went against every instinct and every rule. He hesitated and then, cursing to himself and cocking his PPSh machine-gun, he opened it, ready for a burst of enemy fire, but welcoming instead the grassy warmth of the stables that reminded him of riding at home, at his dacha. The three horses tethered inside seemed glad to see him and he was even gladder to see them.

Walking quickly through the stables and crossing the yard, he tried the back door of the large house. It was not locked and he slid inside, body tensed and soaked with sweat as he found himself in the capacious kitchen of a schloss designed to accommodate legions of servants. Bells were marked with the names of rooms. Holding his PPSh with its round magazine over his forearm, he walked lightly through a green baize door into a corridor that opened into a hall.

He saw the orange eyes first. Two, and then another two. Then pair after pair. He raised the barrel of the machine-gun: does it end here? But no, the heads of a herdsworth of moose, antelopes and bears were mounted up the high walls, reflecting the crimson flicker of a fire crackling in the fireplace. A step further; another step; the floorboards groaned but he was moving fast now.

A movement right in front of him: ‘Who is it? Hands up or I’ll shoot!’ But he knew, of course.

She was tending the fire.

‘Do you approve of the new hospital for the First Belorussian Front?’ she said, turning to him, her voice with its Galician accent so breathless that the words caught in her throat. ‘I’ve made chai. Would you like a cup?’

They sat next to each other, and she poured the tea into china cups and saucers emblazoned with some aristocratic crest. Her hands were trembling, he noticed as the china clinked and she spilled a little. She was as nervous as he was. Her scent, she told him, was L’Origan by Coty, strong and sweet and sharp, reminding him of honey melting in tea and spicy wood burning in a fire. It was getting dark in the room and so she took off her beret and her sheepskin greatcoat, and lit two kerosene lamps on the table.

‘I didn’t know if you’d come,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know if I was being presumptuous. Or, worse, deluded… But I knew I’d come anyway.’

Satinov said nothing. He imagined that two of the animal heads on the walls were talking to him.

‘Have you ever wanted a woman so much?’ asked the bison with the white glass eyes. ‘After the war, Stalin said every soldier deserves a bit of fun.’

But the voice from the lion’s head was more censorious and more urgent. ‘Think of Stalin. Of Tamriko. Of her husband, Genrikh Dorov. Leave now! This is against Bolshevik ethics. Walk out of there right now! You have too much to lose if you stay.’

But it was no good. Satinov shook his head, pulled his greatcoat closer and sat down next to her.

‘Well, here we are,’ said Dashka, leaning against him for a moment, partly, he guessed, out of nerves, partly out of shyness. She produced a bottle of vodka and two little glasses. ‘You should have brought the drinks,’ she said, ‘but I knew you wouldn’t think of it. So here.’ And she put the glass in his hand.

‘I think I need it.’

‘God, so do I. Here’s to an unlikely and very secret friendship.’

They drank three little toasts and then he kissed her again; he had never kissed anyone who kissed like her.

‘Not here!’ She took his hand and a kerosene lamp and he followed her up a wide wooden staircase, hung with a gazelle and a zebra. Satinov felt each glassy eye swivel as the two of them passed. They reminded him of his colleagues in the Kremlin.

At the top of the stairs, she led him along the gloomy wood-panelled corridor and opened the door at the end; Satinov was more nervous than he had been on his first wedding night in Georgia in the twenties.

He was so well known for his clean living that Stalin, who gave everyone nicknames, sometimes called him the Choirboy. He could govern the Caucasus, and build a new industrial town in the middle of Siberia; he could dance and shoot wolves and ski; but this… what if he was no good at it? What if he failed completely?

‘Aren’t you going to kiss me?’ said Dashka. They were in a bedroom with another giant moose’s head over the bed, a fire already lit. The door shut behind him. They were kissing again and Satinov’s doubts vanished in that instant. This, he decided, was a neighbourhood of paradise. He pushed her against the door. He pulled the pin out of her hair and her tresses fell around her face. He held a handful, thick and heavy and black, although it turned a lighter chestnut and slightly curled at the ends. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘I like having my hair pulled.’

He reached up her skirt, scuffing the thick khaki until he reached the tops of those nylon stockings. ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ she was saying. She embraced him, kissing him frantically. Like a schoolboy making love for the first time, Satinov had to keep checking that this was really happening.

They hopped and limped across the floor, his trousers around his ankles, her booted legs and full, bare, brown thighs around his waist, her arms around his neck, her lips on his lips, her hair around him like a web, linked together, and tipped on to the bed.

‘I so wanted to feel you. Since last night, I haven’t thought of anything else,’ she said. ‘I didn’t sleep and I could hardly eat today. Will you undress me slowly?’

He fumbled with the buttons of her blouse and she helped him, all the time watching him, eyelids heavy, almost closing, the dark edges of her irises seeming to melt. He was astonished by her wantonness.

He hadn’t met anyone like this since his boyhood in Tiflis. The boys at the seminary (yes, he had studied for the priesthood at the same Tiflis Seminary as Stalin – but much later) had visited a woman of pleasure, a jet-haired gypsy. ‘That one’s far too prissy for this,’ the woman had said, nodding at Satinov. ‘That one really will become a priest.’ And she had been right because a Bolshevik was a sort of armed priest.

‘What are we going to do about him?’ Dashka said, pointing up at the moosehead above them.

‘How about this?’ He tossed her blouse up so that it covered the moose’s eyes, leaving just his nose peeking out. Then he returned to unbuttoning her skirt.

‘Do you think army skirts are designed to be impregnable fortresses for a reason?’ she asked. He rolled down her stockings until they were like long socks just below her knees and he started to kiss her knees and up her legs, wrapped as they were in the velvet of her caramel skin. ‘It’s years since anyone has undressed me like this.’

Satinov started to throw off his clothes too, but: ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I want to undress you too.’ He looked down on her; her body was streaked like a tigress by the orange flickers of the fire and dyed a deeper amber by the lamp. But he could scarcely bear to look for more than a moment before he had to kiss her again, on the lips, on the neck, everywhere; she bit her fingers. They made love again and as they finished, she laughed in a high singsong voice with her head thrown back.

Satinov opened his eyes and saw the dreary room, the plain wooden bed, the heavy Germanic furniture, dimly lit by the fire and the lantern, as if he was seeing everything for the first time – including her.

‘Do you know Ovid’s poems on love?’ she said. ‘He wrote that the bedroom is the only place where you can do exactly what you please, and truly be yourself.’

‘You’re so much more cultured than me,’ he said. ‘I was expelled for Marxist activities at sixteen.’

‘I was raised in a Jewish household filled with books.’ She hesitated. ‘I feel so shaken up. As if the world has trembled and tilted so everything, even my sense of time is in a different place, everything has lost its previous meaning. I’d never have guessed that passion in our forties could be more intense than when we were young.’

‘So you’ve never…?’

‘Done this before? Never. Not once in all these years of marriage. I don’t know what’s come over me. What about you?’

‘You really need to ask that question? No, I’ve never done this before either.’

‘I thought all you leaders were womanizers.’

‘I’ve never looked at another woman – and now this.’

‘Are you in a panic, comrade general?’

‘Aren’t you, Dashka?’

‘I should be, but it feels so natural, as if we’ve known each other since we were young. You know, when I was eighteen, I studied medicine in Odessa and I had a love affair with a student of literature. We smoked opium. I almost got addicted to it – and him. Soon after, I met Genrikh and we got married. With him, I’ve always known where I belong and that I have a place. That’s love too. I need that, you know.’

Satinov looked at his watch and sighed. ‘My staff will be missing me. We’ve got to get back. It’s almost midnight.’ He dressed quickly, and looked down at her. She was still lying exactly where he’d left her. ‘What are you thinking about?’

She gave her slightly crooked smile, her eyes dark. ‘I’m thinking of tomorrow. Everyone will see me, and no one will know what I’ve been doing.’

36

THE NEXT MORNING, Satinov was summoned back to Stavka (which meant Headquarters) by the Supremo (which meant Stalin) to discuss the offensive. Then he was sent on a series of missions, to Bulgaria, to Romania, to see Mao Tse-tung in China… but all the time, and throughout the months that followed, he longed to see Dashka again. It was hard to discover where she was: he could not ask his staff to find her, as this would draw attention, and almost certainly someone would tell Beria or Abakumov’s minions, and they would start to gather a file against him for debauchery or corruption or something – and it would be stored away until the right moment.

‘Who was at Zhukov’s headquarters?’ he might ask his assistant Chubin.

‘Comrade Malenkov was inspecting,’ Chubin might respond. ‘Oh, and that Dr Dorova was there too…’

Then he could call her. ‘It’s me,’ he would say.

‘Hello, me,’ she always replied.

They could speak on the lines between fronts, freshly laid by the communications staff and therefore probably not yet bugged, but he didn’t say her name and she didn’t say his, so instead she created another persona, ‘Academician Almaz’, an old man who was neither one nor the other of them but both, a hermaphrodite who personified their love.

‘I was just calling to enquire about the health of old Academician Almaz?’

‘Academician Almaz is exceedingly old.’

‘I’ve so missed Academician Almaz.’

‘Almaz is always pleased to hear from you. You should call him more often. He’s so elderly, such a hermit these days…’

Just to hear her voice with that Galician-Yiddish accent, its rolling ‘r’s, was a joy to him. When he replayed, as he did constantly, their meetings, he wasn’t sure exactly what – out of her various identities – most delighted him: was it her astounding ability to improvise a hospital out of nothing, to save a life calmly, that singsong laughter or her golden thighs? Yet he never ceased loving his Tamriko, the mother of his only daughter, and the centre of his life (without whom his successes would have been impossible). He remembered too how frequently Dashka insisted that she loved Genrikh, adding, ‘Besides, if I left him, I’d lose everything’.

Once they met in ‘Stone Arse’ Molotov’s antechamber in the Kremlin. As well as running the army medical corps, she was now Health Minister. When she saw him, she jumped.

‘Oh, hello, Comrade Satinov, it’s you!’

‘Yes, comrade doctor, it’s me!’ They were alone for a few moments in that dreary room waiting for that dreary man neither wanted to see. They talked, in code of course, so closely that he could feel her breath on him. For one moment, he managed to touch her hand and she squeezed his fingers. Ah, he thought later, the madness of those moments!

‘How’s Academician Almaz? Will you tell him I miss him?’

‘Academician Almaz is working so hard, even I hardly get to see him.’

‘If you do see the esteemed Academician,’ he said, ‘will you tell the old sage that I think he has the most beautiful mind – and wrists and eyes – I’ve ever seen! For an octogenarian of course!’

‘The Academician has never been more excited to be at a meeting with Comrade Molotov,’ she replied. They could not risk a kiss, yet never, he decided, had two sets of eyes so ravished each other generating enough heat to warm even Stone Arse’s drab chambers. Then she said quietly, in that way of hers, barely opening her mouth: ‘I think we should stop talking now. Go and sit over there.’

Two generals came in. They’d separated just in time.

‘Comrade Satinov!’ Molotov – wearing a dark suit, his head as round as a cannonball, his figure as square as a brick – came out of his office. ‘Shall we take a walk around the Kremlin?’

‘Yes, let’s do that,’ agreed Satinov. As he talked to Stone Arse, he looked back at her; Dashka was gazing at him with the most loving intensity in her dark eyes – just for a moment, and then she glanced away. Satinov almost gasped with the pleasure. He ached to touch her and kiss her again. As he strolled the Kremlin’s courtyards with Molotov, he felt preposterously, dizzily happy.

He saw her and spoke to her so rarely that he had not really thought about what he expected of their fitful relationship. It had no formal future, yet he resolved to enjoy these special moments which he ascribed to the madness of war and death. Afterwards, however afterwards arrived, he would return to his real nature, his true world.

Yet one evening, when he was alone late at night in his Kremlin office waiting for the driver to take him to dinner with Stalin, he noticed that the phone in the empty neighbouring office was ringing. He’d sent home his aides so he ran down the corridor to answer it.

‘It’s Almaz.’ He recognized her distinctive voice straightaway.

‘Hello. I’m impressed with your cunning,’ he said. ‘Dear Academician!’

‘This Academician can’t talk for long,’ she said, ‘but I wanted you to know I can’t go on with this. I haven’t slept for three nights.’ He heard her crying and his heart ached for her. ‘I’ll lose my children, I’ll lose everything, and I feel so guilty! I have to give you up. Can you forgive me?’

Satinov clenched the phone, and willed himself to breathe deeply and calmly. He was not, he reminded himself, the Iron Commissar for nothing. ‘I understand,’ he said finally, putting down the phone.

Perhaps, he thought as he sat in the empty room, his own life as a revolutionary had given him the ability to bear secrets and pressures. He was born for conspiracy. Others, like Dashka, and indeed Tamriko, were not.

He returned to his own office and dialled a number: ‘Tamriko?’

‘Yes, darling Hercules.’

‘I’ll be late.’

‘Have a good dinner. Did you want anything?’

‘Are all the children well?’

‘Yes. They’re missing you, as I am. Come home soon.’

‘I shall,’ he said stiffly. But he had never called like that before and he knew it would please her.

An hour later, in the back of the armoured Packard speeding through the silvery woods towards Stalin’s Nearby Dacha, he was himself again, the Iron Commissar. Almost.

‘After the war,’ Frank warned Serafima, ‘we think Stalin will crack down. America will be Russia’s enemy, so we must be very careful. As a diplomat I’m watched, and with your background you may be too. Our blessing is that we’ve found each other, but our curse is that we are in a time and place when we can’t just live as we’re doing now, in the present.’

‘I suppose you’ve thought of using codes?’ Serafima asked.

‘As a matter of fact, I have. This is how we’ll meet. I’ll leave a bookmark in the foreign literature section of the House of Books. If it’s in a Galsworthy, we’ll meet at the matinée. If it’s in Edith Wharton, evening; in Hemingway, ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for us, so come back tomorrow. There will be a ticket under a false name at the Bolshoi for that night’s performance.’

‘So I will just go to the Bolshoi again and again?’

‘You can watch an act or two but when I go out, you go out too, through the fire doors at the back. No one will follow you.’

‘And we’ll meet in the street.’

‘Darling Serafima, I have an apartment. The great thing is that it’s not registered as a diplomatic residence. It belonged to a Russian friend who was killed in the war and no one knows about it. It’s very simple, but it could be our place. It’s near the back of the Bolshoi so when you come out… would you l-l-like to meet me there?’

Serafima smiled. She knew this was right – but it amused her that, out of all the girls at school, some of whom seemed so fast, it was going to be her, Serafima, who would make love first. She loved Frank and he loved her and it seemed absolutely natural to do it with the man she wanted to spend her life with. She knew the basics, the facts of life, but how it all really worked, she had no proper idea. What if she became pregnant? The scandal would destroy her. Wasn’t it the man’s job to ensure she didn’t? But there was an even bigger problem that ate at her.

‘You seem worried,’ he said. ‘We don’t have to do anything at all. Just talk if you like.’

‘I’m not sure…’

‘You want to wait until we’re married?’

‘It’s not that.’

‘Then what?’

‘I just feel that I’m not… perfect. That you’ll be disappointed.’

‘Nothing could disappoint me about you. Nothing.’ Frank’s eyes were burning with certainty as he said this.

But it wasn’t nothing. It was the snakeskin, the burn on her body. No one except her family had seen it since she had become a teenager, but she’d never forgotten that it was there, beneath her clothes. Her dresses were higher and plainer to protect this indelible stain. She could always feel it, stiffer and rougher than the rest of her. An ugly thing of yellow corrugated skin, it made her feel ugly too. Her only hope was that Frank loved her enough to pretend it was not there.

A lingering dread now haunted her sleep, her classes, her every moment, threatening to destroy her happiness as she had always feared it would. What if Frank was disgusted by her? What if he fell out of love with her? Should she tell him about it first?

They arranged to meet and then she cancelled their date – twice. But in the end, she decided that she must just trust him. If he was the man she thought he was, the Frank she loved, wouldn’t he take her snakeskin as an indivisible part of her? She would just have to find out.

37

SATINOV DID NOT see Dashka Dorova again until Stalin rewarded him with a special prize: he was to be the Supremo’s representative at Marshal Zhukov’s headquarters. Three Fronts, 2.5 million Soviet soldiers, 7,500 tanks, were converging on Berlin. But Stalin had chosen Zhukov to take Berlin, and Satinov would go with him.

On 15 April, Satinov reported to Zhukov’s headquarters before the Seelow Heights. At dawn the next day, Zhukov’s howitzers opened up – the thunder of the barrage shook Satinov to his very innards – and the men went into battle. But the assault didn’t go according to plan. Storming those well-defended hills, the Russians suffered 30,000 casualties, and that night, a furious Stalin phoned Satinov.

‘Who’s responsible for this crime?’ he said. ‘Find the culprit and we’ll shorten him by a head!’

Even Zhukov was demanding new hospitals to handle so many wounded. And so it was that Dr Dorova was summoned urgently, called right from her bed in the middle of the night by Marshal Zhukov himself. Satinov did not see her; he was with Zhukov at the front line but she was nearby and he found himself constantly looking around for a glimpse of her.

On 19 April, the Seelow Heights finally fell and Zhukov advanced on Berlin, but it took ten days of brutal street-by-street fighting to take the city. It was only after the fall of the Reichstag and the suicide of Hitler that Satinov saw her amongst the Soviet generals in the white stucco hall of the Karlshorst Army Technical Training School. It was 8 May, and Zhukov and the American and British generals were waiting for Feldmarschall Keitel to end the war. Rows of klieg lights beamed a theatrical electric whiteness on to the table where the Nazis would sign the surrender. The medals of twenty nations, the oiled hair and rough-hewn skin of the hard-living generals, the powdered foreheads, glazed lips and waved hairdos of aides, typists, drivers and PPZhs were illuminated by the unforgiving zinc light.

She was in her parade uniform, the elegantly coutured (against all regulations) tunic and skirt showing off her curvaceous figure. How the vizored cap of a general of the medical corps, the gold, scarlet, the stars and braid, set off her brown skin and eyes.

Hours passed and the surrender was delayed as the Nazis tried to sue for better terms. Zhukov and Stalin’s representative at the negotiations, Vyshinsky, shouted at each other; generals rushed in and rushed out and finally the Nazi generals arrived, wearing their bitterness and Prussian rigidity as badges of dignity to conceal the squalor of their crimes.

When at last the ceremony was done, Satinov came over to her. ‘Dr Dorova.’

‘Comrade Satinov.’

‘How’ve you been?’

‘I’m fine. What a day!’

‘We can tell our grandchildren we were here.’

She looked into his eyes. ‘Are you thinking of your son Vanya?’ she asked him gently.

‘Yes, I am. Today, at last, I can really think of him.’ Only a small tic in his cheek revealed how moved he really was, but she saw it.

‘We better not talk too much…’ She glanced over at the egregious Vyshinsky.

‘Right, but it’s good to see you.’

‘And you.’

Zhukov’s banquet went on all night. Dish after dish, twenty-five toasts – to Stalin, the Red Army, Soviet women; to Churchill and Truman – but by 6 a.m., when the dinner ended, Satinov stood beside Zhukov and Vyshinsky to wave goodbye to their drunk Western friends in the blue light of dawn. The war was over. He found her again watching the Americans drive away.

‘It’s me,’ he said from behind.

‘Hello, me,’ she said.

The skin on her cheeks was pink with excitement, weariness and alcohol. It was the end of a night of toasts and four years of war.

‘May I ask… Do you ever think of…’

‘Academician Almaz? Every day.’

‘Me too,’ said Satinov, turning away from her, from his past. ‘Every day.’

38

THE MATINÉE AT the Bolshoi. All Moscow was already on the streets. The Red Army was in Berlin. The Nazis had signed the surrender the previous night. As soon as the lights went down, Serafima followed Frank’s plan.

She came out of the fire exit and then crossed the road. Afterwards she could not quite remember how she found herself in the one-room apartment, with its single chair, white stuffing pouring out of several gashes, and the double bed. There was nothing – no pictures – on the damp, stained walls, except one cheap, water-stained print of Pushkin above the chair.

Frank was waiting. As nervous as her. When he gave her a cigarette, he was shaking so much he could barely light it and they laughed, which broke the ice a little.

‘I think we should have a little drink,’ he said, holding a bottle of wine: Telavi 2 from Georgia. ‘Your leader’s favourite.’

She was so grateful for the wine that she downed the entire glass, and felt a little giddy when he started to kiss her and led her to the bed. She was so aware of her snakeskin that she felt she was wearing it outside her clothes. So far he didn’t know it even existed and yet it was all she could think about.

Then he left her for a moment, drew the curtains, turned off the light and lit two candles that stood on the mantelpiece. She barely dared make a sound; she wanted to whisper something but her heart was beating in her neck like a kettledrum. When he returned, he kissed her mouth and he softly pushed down her dress, planting kisses on her neck. Serafima was flooded with a sensation she did not recognize: a shiver started in her thighs and then crept into her belly, making her lurch with its burning power. For a second she even forgot her snakeskin but then his hand rested on it outside her dress.

‘Stop!’ she said.

‘What is it?’

‘You… you haven’t done anything wrong, but I’ve got to tell you something…’

‘I know you haven’t done this before,’ he said, searching her face. Something else occurred to him. ‘Or if you have, it doesn’t matter. Either way it doesn’t matter.’

‘No, no, it’s not that. Can we… just stop, while I tell you something?’

They awoke in each other’s arms. In her room on the top floor of the Tempelhof Geriatic Women’s Hospital, which was now full of Soviet wounded. Without powder and lipstick, just her thick hair around her shoulders, her mascara running, she was more lovely than before. This time was so precious that he tried to imprint on his mind every detail of her beauty.

‘I dream of walking the streets with you,’ she said.

The streets of Berlin were deserted except for Soviet soldiers, tanks, jeeps. All the houses, all the streets were ruined. The lunar landscape of this obliterated city seemed as unreal as the generals under the klieg lights during the surrender. The tarmac and pavements were cracked, muddy and ingrained with fragments of shrapnel, scraps of material, rotting newspapers, children’s shoes, even sometimes a whole man (whose son, whose father?) flattened into cloth and cardboard, crushed into the earth by brutal tank treads.

Yet that morning their feet seemed to sing as they walked and the air sparkled as if it was set with crystals. They were both wearing plain tunics without insignia, and were noticed by no one as they visited the Chancellery, where Hitler had committed suicide, and the Reichstag. Mostly though, they just wandered through the city. Sometimes when they were alone for a moment he kissed her and she kissed him back, so passionately. She pulled him into a blasted alleyway. ‘Take me here,’ she whispered.

Her need, her desire, her reckless courage enthralled him. Satinov had never done anything so heedlessly carefree. He could have been recognized by any soldier; he could have been reported by any of the thousands of Chekists nosing around Berlin. But after twenty years of disciplined diligence, he could hardly believe how wonderful it felt to be with the woman he suddenly loved in this landscape of destruction.

Slowly, reluctantly, they walked back to headquarters before lunchtime, only to find he had been summoned to Moscow. Their idyll had been far too short.

‘Be careful, angel. It will be hard to see each other in Moscow. Almost impossible.’

‘I’ll think of something,’ he said.

‘You know how I love Genrikh and my children.’

‘And you know I’d never leave Tamriko, whom I love too.’

‘It’s impossible. Unthinkable,’ she agreed. Stalin had never allowed any of his leaders to divorce. To do so would not only destroy his career, it could destroy his entire family. Dashka had been right about that.

‘Yet I love you too,’ he said. ‘Is that possible?’

She hesitated and, when they formally said goodbye as he climbed into his car, she saluted and then embraced him à la russe. When her lips were closest to his ear, she whispered so quickly, ‘I love you, angel,’ that he barely caught it. ‘More than yesterday. Less than tomorrow.’

‘And I you, Dashka,’ he whispered it too. ‘More than yesterday, less than tomorrow.’

‘When I was a little girl, a maid spilled a pan of boiling water and I was burnt. I have a scar on my side that… that no one’s seen before and… I call it my snakeskin. I wanted to tell you so you know what to expect.’

Frank turned to her. They were lying together in Frank’s narrow bed, his flank against hers.

‘That’s why you’ve been so anxious?’

She nodded.

‘Oh darling, I thought you’d gone off me.’ He kissed her gently on the lips. ‘Sladkaya, my sweet,’ he whispered. ‘I won’t care. It’s only you who’s worried and soon you won’t be either, I promise.’

‘Shall I show you?’

‘No need, darling, I’ll see you in all your beauty soon enough…’

‘But I’d prefer to show you so you know. So I can get it over with.’

‘If that would make you happier, then show me.’ They sat up.

The candles did their dances, and even though she was anxious, she was still trembling with the excitement. She looked at him. His sweet brown eyes shone with sympathy and love for her; the moisture in them caught the candlelight. He unhooked her dress. Then she faced him again and pulled down the dress slowly, as far as her breasts. She hesitated there and considered running away – out of the door and into the streets. But he shook his head as one does when one admires something beautiful. She reached behind and unhooked her brassiere, faltering there too. She pulled her dress down a little further, covering her breasts with her hands. She closed her eyes in case there was disgust on his face and then gradually she raised her arms and said: ‘There!’

‘Can I touch you?’ he asked and she could tell from his voice that he was smiling and she was so relieved. She jumped a little as his hand traced her snakeskin. His fingertips ran over the smooth skin and then across the borderline on to the roughness that extended up from her hip to her breast. ‘I think you’re so incredibly lovely, and I can’t wait much longer.’ His fingers retraced the snakeskin lightly, and she shivered.

‘Are you sure?’

‘More sure than I’ve been about anything. It can be our shared secret. Let this be the covenant of our love. Always.’

‘Our talisman.’

‘Yes, our talisman. Do you know the poem?’ He recited:

Serafima interrupted him to finish the verse:

She could not believe that she had been so blessed by this kind man who had transformed her fear into a talisman of love. He kissed away the tears on her cheeks.

‘Now may I undress you myself. Please?’

The undressing, with all its tension and anxiety, followed by success and relief, had deeply moved her. Now there were red stars before her eyes – was it the wine? – and waves of heat surfed up her body. Now she longed for him to touch her in the places where her body was vibrating with an unknown pleasure that she could neither bear, nor satisfy, nor end. She didn’t want to stop even when he reached for a package that she saw was marked ‘Trojan’. He covered her eyes, smiling.

‘This is much more awkward than…’ he said, and they laughed out of nerves and she realized he meant her snakeskin, and that both were to be celebrated.

Afterwards, she felt beautiful for the first time in her life. She had sloughed off her ungainliness; yes, she smiled to herself, just as a snake sheds its skin.

39

DASHKA DOROVA AND Hercules Satinov did not see each other again until the first day of term at School 801. It was May, and at the Golden Gates, he could see Dashka and she could see him and sometimes, as they passed one another, she would whisper: ‘More than yesterday. Less than tomorrow.’ Or just one word: ‘Almaz!’ But they were constantly watched by spouses, comrades, their own bodyguards and assistants, and both were wary of hurting their families or drawing the attention of the Organs.

When Satinov looked into his heart, he knew he loved Tamriko. He loved Dashka too, but it was a different species of love, and she came second to Tamriko. He saw no contradiction. There were many shades of love, he told himself. Together they made him complete. As for the secrecy, that cost him nothing: he was a Bolshevik.

They had found a way to phone each other. Sometimes the phone rang in the conference room next to his office.

‘Hello, it’s me!’ She would use his words.

‘Hello, me.’

‘I love you,’ she’d say.

‘I love you and love being loved by you: it’s the most unexpected joy for me, this secret jewel in my life.’

‘But where can this go?’ she would ask, anxious suddenly.

‘For me, it doesn’t have to go anywhere. It just is.’

She laughed. ‘Is this really you, the Iron Commissar? How has this great romantic survived all these years in the age of ice?’

‘I imagine kissing you when we’re in our sixties.’

‘One day, if we were both on our own, somehow, God forbid, then I know we would be together.’

‘What are you wearing?’ he would ask. ‘What are you doing today?’ He hated Genrikh because true possession is to share the fabric of someone else’s life, he decided; it’s about proximity; love as geography. He longed to know the soft sound of her sleeping and the sleepy smell of her hair in the morning; he wanted to be standing next to her when she brushed her teeth and at the foot of the stairs when she descended them. When she sat down to read, where did she sit?

‘It’s pure heaven when we talk,’ he said to her one evening.

‘When we talk, it’s as if no one else is in the room,’ she agreed. ‘I love our calls and I love you. More than yesterday. Less than tomorrow.’

Everything was different for Serafima that term. Before she and Frank had made love, the boys in the school had been intrigued by her squareness, but now it was as if she had been sprinkled with an invisible dust of attraction. Only long afterwards did she realize it was sex.

The boys seemed to sense it, even though they themselves were not sure what it was. They caught her eyes. They watched her, and when she turned suddenly, they looked away. They invited her to join their sports societies, literature clubs, Komsomol camps. George and Minka called her ‘the Mystery’; the new boy, Andrei Kurbsky, had a crush on her; and Nikolasha Blagov was obsessively in love with her. Even Vasily Stalin sensed the difference, that she was already a woman. In class, she was Benya Golden’s favourite. And then, out of the blue, Dr Rimm started to write her weird and cloddish love letters.

‘It’s ridiculous! I’m probably the only girl in the school who’s not a virgin. But how can they tell?’ she asked Frank.

‘There are whistles that only dogs can hear.’ He smiled at her, yet she could see the strain in his eyes. It worried him a little. ‘Like an oasis in a desert: men might not be able to see the well but they can smell water.’

The truth was that she was enjoying the attention. She wondered which would be worse in the eyes of the school, the Party – the fact that she was making love almost every day (provided she could lose her mother who always wanted to take her shopping) or that she was in love with an American arch-capitalist. Her entire being was devoted to protecting the treasure that she lived for. It was a dangerous secret, to be sure. Yet it couldn’t hurt anyone, could it?

And then came the day of the Victory Parade, and Nikolasha and Rosa’s deaths on the bridge. At the Golden Gates the next morning, Dashka managed to grab a moment with Satinov. Checking that no one could hear, and then speaking very fast, she said, ‘Hercules, call me today at the clinic conference room.’

Losha drove him through the Kremlin gates and he climbed the steps to his office in the Yellow Palace. At 10 a.m., he called her.

‘I’ve got to let you go,’ she said. ‘This terrible tragedy changes everything. I have to put my children first. I can’t do anything that could harm them. I have to make it up to my family.’

‘Of course,’ he managed to say. ‘You’re right. I understand.’

‘You’ll always be part of my life. There’s only ever been you and Genrikh and there’ll never be anyone else.’

His throat tightened and he could scarcely speak. I’m the Iron Commissar, he told himself, I can’t be feeling like this. ‘I’ve never loved like this before,’ he said, ‘and I’ll love you until I die.’

‘You can’t keep telling me that,’ she said. He could tell she was weeping. ‘We’ve got to get over these feelings. But I’ll always be here for you.’

‘And me for you. Don’t forget me then?’

‘How could I forget you? I hope you can forgive me?’

‘I will always forgive you, Dashka,’ he said. ‘Always.’ But as he put down the phone, he knew a punch in the stomach could not have hurt him more. When he had given his orders to his aides, he locked the doors and then he fell to his knees beside the lifesize Gerasimov painting of Stalin and started to sob, beating his forehead on the parquet again and again. ‘How can I live without your love?’ he heard himself saying. ‘How can I go on?’

When Frank attended the Bolshoi a few days later, and she was not there, he was struck with an awful fear. She had not arranged how to let him know where she was. And no one knew of him so no one could take the message.

He left her secret messages in the House of Books and attended the Bolshoi every day, hoping he would see her in her usual seat. But no. Night after night passed, and still no Serafima.

He couldn’t sleep; he couldn’t eat; he imagined the most diabolic things: that she was being raped, or tortured, or that she had already been shot, or despatched to the furthest camps. But while the Satinovs and Dorovs could talk about what was happening, and share the pain with their loved ones, no one in Frank’s world knew about Serafima. He hadn’t talked about their relationship with the ambassador or his fellow diplomats, and he had never met her family. He fantasized about calling her parents – he had seen so many of her mother’s movies – but it was too late for that now.

He would have preferred to see her running into school, safe and happy, even if it meant that she had forsaken him and he would never see her again. But she was not at the school gates on the days he’d stood outside, watching from a distance, desperate for a glimpse of a tall girl with long fair hair.

And then one night at the ballet, he glanced down at the stalls, and there she was. She was back!

Satinov held Tamriko in his arms as she told him about Mariko. ‘The greatest privilege of childhood’, she said, ‘is to live safely in the present. That’s why I became a teacher. I wanted that for Mariko.’

Their daughter’s arrest and the agonizing scenes at the Lubianka made him reel. For the first time in his life, he was spinning out of control. He had not wavered when his comrades were being arrested and shot, when his army group was surrounded, even when his eldest son was reported missing and then dead. But now he was struggling to dam up the raging torrent of his obsession for a woman who was not his wife.

His special vertushka telephone was ringing. He unwound Tamriko’s arms and listened to Poskrebyshev’s monotone summoning him to dinner at Stalin’s. Always a trial, a duty, now it seemed to offer relief of a kind. At least he wouldn’t wake at four and lie in sleepless torment till another bruised dawn.

At the dinner, Stalin was boasting about his exploits in Siberian exile. ‘One day I skied twenty kilometres, shot four partridges, fought off a wolf – I shot it right through the head – and then managed to ski back through a blizzard to the village.’

Stalin’s exile stories became taller with each telling and Satinov started to think about Dashka. Suddenly she was talking to him: ‘You’ll always be part of my life, angel, how could I forget you, more than yesterday, less than tomorrow.’ Stalin was talking on, almost talking to him, maybe asking his views. But what did Stalin matter when Dashka was kissing him? Concentrate, he told himself, don’t lose the thread…

Stalin’s eyes flashed their yellow glint at him but still he couldn’t focus. He was in the cage of a man-eating tiger yet he didn’t care if he was eaten. Stalin was pointing at him now. Nineteen forty-five is your peak, he told himself. You saw the storming of the Reichstag, there are towns, streets and factories named after you – but this is nothing compared to losing her. For heaven’s sake, keep your mind on the job. But he couldn’t.

The greenish, blotchy faces of Beria, Khrushchev, Molotov, the wan, sweating Zhdanov were all looking at him suddenly. Stalin was waving a finger. Khrushchev, warty, snub-nosed and bald-headed, was waving his hands in the air as the noise around him became distant, and then began to fade completely.

Satinov wanted to tell Stalin that he finally understood that every movie, every popular song was about the very same dilemma in which he found himself: love lost. He wanted to tell Stalin that now he was just an ordinary man. Nothing more. He had not lost his faith in Marxism-Leninism, but he was indulging in the crassest bourgeois sentimentalism, the very romantic philistinism that had disgusted him in the Children’s Case. He remembered how he’d dismissed George, Andrei and their crush on Pushkin. When George said, ‘Love is everything,’ he had mocked him. Now the white dread of the very same hunger ate at him remorselessly day and night.

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

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

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

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

‘Or is it love?’ teased Beria.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Like what, bicho?’

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

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

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

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