One Night in Winter

40

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘We will?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

41

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

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

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

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

‘I’m not,’ Benya admitted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m not political.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Was the conspiracy led by “NV”?’

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

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

‘Then I don’t know an NV.’

‘What does NV mean in Onegin?’

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

Benya shut his eyes, taking consolation from the lines.

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

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

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

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

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

42

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

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

‘Did you sleep at all?’ asked Blancmange.

‘I slept better.’

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

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

Chat? Cheese? Senka wondered what was going on. He wondered again when the guards joked as they escorted him, one even swinging his keys like a lantern. Could they have solved the murder case? If these lumpy men were really members of the famous Cheka, Knights of the Revolution, founded by the heroic Comrade Dzerzhinsky, they should have solved it by now. Senka himself could have solved it much faster. Probably there was no ten-year-old in the world who had to consider such serious matters as he did.

He was shown into a different interrogation room where he found a new interrogator named Colonel Komarov. Where was the Lobster? Tormenting someone else or lying drunk somewhere in a fecal heap, he hoped. Even better, perhaps someone was punching him!

The curly-haired new man didn’t look like a Chekist at all. He actually smiled at him. Senka dropped his chin and raised his brown eyes in what his mama called his matinée-idol look. Surely someone in here actually thought children were worth bothering with? When the interrogator lit a cigarette, Senka noticed that he was missing half a finger on his right hand.

‘When can I see my mama?’ he asked, encouraged by Komarov’s apparent friendliness. Mama often said that she needed to cuddle him as much as possible and certainly ten times a day. Poor Mama hadn’t cuddled him for weeks. ‘Is my mama all right? I fear that she might be missing me? I’m missing her profoundly.’

‘You’ll see her soon if you’re helpful to us,’ Komarov replied, crossing his legs so that his boots creaked.

‘I’ve been helpful so far, haven’t I?’

‘You certainly have.’

Not too helpful, thought Senka. Only a simpleton would be too helpful.

‘So,’ Komarov said, leaning forward, frowning solicitously on his low furrowed brow, pretending to be very interested in Senka, ‘I went to a football match yesterday to see Spartak.’

Oh no, thought Senka, this one’s going to speak to me as if I’m like all the other little boys. Big mistake, Colonel Komarov.

‘I bet you like football, eh? I bet you’re a real footballing man.’

‘Well…’ Senka considered whether to humour him or whether to tell him the truth about his attitude to sports. If the Lobster had asked him, he might have lied, but this one seemed kinder. ‘Actually, I don’t like football.’

‘I thought all boys like football?’

‘Not all,’ replied Senka proudly.

‘So I bet you like basketball then? Are you a bit of a basketball kid?’

‘No,’ said Senka.

‘Camping?’

‘Are you joking? I hate cold and discomfort.’

‘So what do you like?’

‘Opera. Ballet. Fiction. Poetry.’

Komarov shook his head, so Senka added, ‘I’m serious. I hate all sports.’

‘You’re very grown up for your age,’ Komarov said.

Where was this going? What were they after now? Senka thought. Play along until you find out. ‘Not really, but I do prefer to wear a suit at all times.’

Komarov suddenly put out his cigarette. ‘Tell me about your papa.’

Prepare all defences, Senka told himself. Man the fortifications. Load the cannons. Sharpen your cutlasses. Something’s not right.

‘He works very hard on the Central Committee. He doesn’t laugh at my jokes like Mama does and he doesn’t cuddle me. He’s very strict, but Mama says that’s because his job is very important.’

‘Does he ever talk about politics?’

‘Never.’

‘What stories does he tell about work?’

‘None. He says his work is secret and if I asked him about it, he might smack me. Very hard.’

‘Quite right. Does he ever mention Comrade Stalin, for example?’

Senka concentrated hard in order to say the right thing. ‘No, except to say, “Today we’ll celebrate the Great Stalin’s birthday,” and, every night, before we eat at dinner, he thanks “the Great Stalin”.’

‘Do your parents like your apartment?’

‘Yes, they love the apartment.’

‘How many dachas do you have?’

‘Two. Like everyone else.’

‘Most people have no dacha at all,’ Komarov replied. ‘Is two excessive? Does your mother want more dachas?’

‘No.’ Where was this going? ‘She’s not interested in material things.’ Which is a lie, of course, Senka told himself. Mama loves dachas and luxuries from the West.

‘Your mother’s very well dressed, isn’t she?’

‘She’s the most beautiful mama in the world.’ Your love for mama is your weakness. Think carefully!

‘Does she talk about where she gets her perfumes and clothes?’

‘Mama’s very hard-working. She’s a doctor.’

‘But she likes the good things in life, doesn’t she? How many fur coats does she have?’ Komarov asked.

‘I don’t know but she looks so beautiful in them.’

‘I’d like to hear more about your mother. Will you tell me?’

How strange, Senka thought, that there were no questions about them any more, the schoolchildren.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Do your parents ever talk about politics?’ Komarov asked again.

Not in front of us, Senka thought. Only when they whisper in the bathroom (though I sometimes hear things I shouldn’t). He was about to say this, and then thought that if they were whispering, it would be because they didn’t want anyone to hear, so he decided not to.

‘They talk about what’s for dinner, what films to see, the weather.’

Komarov reached over and stroked Senka’s cheek; then he followed the line of his jaw all the way to his chin, which he tilted up a little with the stump of his finger. Senka sat very still, and tried not to shiver.

‘You must help us. If you don’t, you won’t see your mama. Ever again’

‘I will. I promise,’ Senka whispered.

‘Now,’ said Komarov, straightening up and speaking normally. ‘Did you hear your father boasting how his “Genius Boss” used to trust him, but that now he didn’t appreciate his talents?’

Senka was instantly alert, adrenalin pumping. His father worshipped Stalin, everyone knew this – but he had once, after Stalin had sacked him early in the war, criticized his master. But how did Komarov know this? It had been in the garden at the dacha. No one had been there except his parents and him. Minka was away. But he remembered now that Demian had been present. Demian had heard it.

‘These are just tiny things,’ said Komarov affably. ‘Nothing really. But you probably remember the occasion? Do you?’

‘Criticizing the Head of the Soviet Government would be very out of character for my father,’ said Senka.

‘Don’t fool with me, kid. Don’t lie. And there’s another little thing. Do you remember the time your mother said, “After all they’ve been through, our Jewish compatriots round here need some place of their own?” Presumably she meant a Jewish homeland? A Zion in the Soviet Union. She’s Jewish, isn’t she? Before she was married, wasn’t she called Dashka Moiseivna Diamant?’

They had been walking along Granovsky soon after Soviet troops had liberated Babi Yar where so many Jews had been murdered by the Nazis. Senka remembered how upset his mama had been by this. There had been no one else with them – except Demian. So now he knew that when Demian handed over the Velvet Book to the secret police, he had given them this deadly information too. Senka felt a trickle of fear run down his spine. Demian was a meanie, and Senka knew he was angry all the time because their mother loved Senka more than him. Well, Demian was an imbecile. These two stories could destroy both their parents.

‘I’m trying to think,’ he said softly.

‘Do you know how vast the Soviet Union is? Think of all its tanks, factories, steppes, guns, its people, the Party, the armies and the power of the Organs – and then think of you, Senka Dorov, aged ten. What chance do you have? We could crush you and nothing would be left of you. All we’re asking is that you recall two little comments by your parents. Not much to ask, is it?’

‘I am thinking but neither sound accurate.’

‘I could accept that your brother perhaps made up one of them,’ Komarov said reasonably. ‘But we think at least one of his stories must be true.’

‘One of them?’

‘Yes, one of them.’

One of the stories was against his father and one was against his mother. Senka knew that neither of them were ‘tiny things’. The first: criticism of Stalin himself. The other: Zionist anti-Soviet nationalism. Cut through the codes and put them in Party language and both could be presented as treason. Either could lead to instant arrest and perhaps execution. Yes, Mama, Papa: the nine grams.

Senka’s world started to spin. He breathed faster but couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. His tummy spasmed.

‘He can’t have made up both, can he?’ Komarov feigned a casual airiness – but then he chewed on the stump of his fourth finger and Senka realized this tic confirmed the question’s importance.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Senka. His asthma made his lungs feel shallow, and he began to strain for oxygen. He was nauseous; he needed sugar. He remembered the day he couldn’t jump over the horse in gym, and how his faked collapse had solved that crisis. He had to do something. How quickly this session had gone from banter to the scaffold.

‘Look, it’s simple. I’ve told you two stories, one of which must be true.’ Komarov reached out and traced Senka’s jawline again. ‘Choose one,’ he whispered.

Senka felt like a deer in a trap. If he confirmed either story, the Organs would have a case against one of his parents. His papa or mama would be taken away from him and possibly liquidated. Whichever way he took, he would destroy someone he loved. The more he pulled, the tighter the steel jaws would close on his legs. He wanted to offer himself instead of his parents but this wasn’t the choice he was being given, and he was feeling so sick that he was swaying in his chair. His mother or his father? Papa or Mama? And why was he being given this terrible choice?

‘You can’t turn down this small request from the Party,’ Komarov was saying. ‘Choose one or you’ll never get out of here.’

‘I feel so faint… I can’t breathe.’ And Senka slipped off his chair on to the floor as darkness closed over him.

43

VLAD TITORENKO MAY have been nearly eighteen but he was coping with his interrogations in Lubianka much less well than Senka. Whereas previously he had worshipped his friend Nikolasha Blagov, he now found himself looking up to his interrogators, especially Colonel Likhachev, whose visage of fury and violence he saw as the face of the Soviet State. He would, he thought, do anything for some sign of approval from Likhachev. Instead he had been beaten, but every time Likhachev hit him, Vlad hated Nikolasha a little more. That weird cretin, that traitor seemed to be mocking him from the grave with his ludicrous plans. Now he would be sent to Siberia, and disowned by his parents. Undernourished, sleep-deprived, he babbled about conspiracies, his hands fidgeting, legs jiggling, and he was so jumpy that he was startled by the least sudden movement. His condition even alarmed the warders, who put him on twenty-four-hour suicide watch.

Yes, Vlad said, Nikolasha, that snake, was planning a coup and using the Fatal Romantics’ Club as cover. He was an evil counter-revolutionary, a pervert who was in love with Serafima, and yes, sir, all his hyena-friends were in on the conspiracy. Who was the mysterious New Leader? Well, he wasn’t sure. The Chekists suggested names and he agreed. Director Medvedeva possibly, maybe Teacher Golden – or how about Marshal Shako? One time he had seen the Marshal pat Serafima on her behind at the Golden Gates. Yes, he could be the one. Or was it Dr Rimm? And so Vlad jabbered on, frantic to please the Organs. Yet nothing seemed to do so.

Until today, when he found the other interrogator, Colonel Komarov, reading the sports pages of the newspaper with his boots on the desk and a cigarette in his mouth. Vlad waited silently, standing at attention. Komarov looked up, waved him into the chair and without a word offered him a cigarette. When Komarov tried to light it for him, Vlad jumped back from his chair, expecting a punch. When he was coaxed back into his seat, his hands were shaking so much that Komarov had to light it for him and then hand it back across the table – as if he was an adult, even a friend.

‘You’ve been very honest with us, Vlad. You’ll be going home soon. To see your parents.’

‘Oh, thank you, colonel.’ Vlad’s eyes filled with tears.

‘We don’t have to talk about this bullshit any more. We can talk about anything. Sport. Or home. I’m bored of talking about school pranks.’ He paused. ‘Where will your parents be at the moment?’

‘I don’t know… They go to the dacha at weekends.’

‘Your father is a very capable man, isn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘What does he want you to do?’

‘He wants me to be an engineer like him. But I’m not doing very well at school. He’s disappointed in me.’

‘How can that be? I was just saying to Colonel Likhachev that you’ll make a perfect Soviet man. You can do anything you want, you’re a patriot.’

‘Me? Oh, thank you, colonel.’

‘So your father should appreciate you a little more. But perhaps he’s too busy with his top job.’

‘Yes, and my mother thinks he’ll soon be promoted.’

‘Really? And why hasn’t he been?’

‘Well, they think he should be. They think he’s been overlooked because everyone’s so busy.’

‘Who’s everyone?’

‘Well, the authorities.’

‘The Central Committee?’

‘Yes, Papa thinks they haven’t noticed him, or he’d have a bigger job by now. My father’s very clever and hard-working, you know, a good Communist.’

‘But he says the Central Committee is to blame? You’ve heard him say that?’

‘Yes, but only to my mother in their room when they’re talking at night.’

‘She’s proud of him?’

‘Of course. She says without his planes, we couldn’t have won the war.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘He agreed.’

‘Have you ever seen the factory at Satinovgrad?’

‘Yes, Papa once took us just before the war.’

‘Did you hear there were many planes that crashed?’

‘Yes, but those weren’t the fault of my father.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He was worried about them but he said the problem was that the designs couldn’t be changed.’

‘Why not?’

‘That wasn’t his job.’

‘He talked about it with you?’

‘Well, yes…’

Komarov leaned forward, biting his shortened finger. ‘Whose job was it?’

‘Papa said it was Marshal Shako’s and he spoke to Shako about it, but they agreed they couldn’t change the designs.’

‘Did Papa say why?’

‘No. Just that the designs were approved at the top.’

‘The top of what?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘You know Comrade Satinov, of course?’

‘Yes, he supervises my father’s ministry.’

‘Perhaps he blamed Comrade Satinov as the “top”. He’s in the Politburo and the State Defence Council.’

‘I think…’

‘Go on.’

‘I think Papa meant above Satinov.’

‘Who’s above Satinov?’

‘Well… Comrade Stalin.’

‘So your papa says it is the Head of the Soviet Government who approves planes that crash?’

‘Yes – well, no… yes… I’m not sure.’ Komarov raised his eyebrows but said nothing and sure enough Vlad filled the vacuum: ‘I think he meant that the top people don’t understand planes so they sign off designs that make planes crash.’

‘Who’re they? You mean the Head of the Soviet Government signs the plans?’

‘I think he signs everything.’

Vlad noticed that Komarov was writing fast. For a long time, he said nothing, just listened to the nib scratching paper.

‘You must sign this statement right now,’ Komarov said, pushing the paper over to him.

‘Will my parents come to collect me then?’ Vlad’s stomach clenched and cramped; he felt a burning hole in his chest and a rising fear in his gullet.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Komarov, sitting back in his chair and crossing his arms. ‘After everything you’ve shared with me, I’m just not sure.’

44

HERCULES SATINOV HAD arrived in Germany. The ZiS limousine that collected him from Tempelhof Airport raced and swerved through Berlin’s apocalyptic landscape. Lights flickered, illuminating momentary glimpses of figures eking out an existence: a woman carrying a jerrycan of water, packs of dogs, gangs of urchins running, running, a madman dancing around a fire.

Satinov peered out at the red and desperate eyes of humans and animals catching the lights of the convoy as they scurried amongst the burnt-out tank hulks, the mountains of rubble, the shattered shells of buildings. But each shadow, every ruin reminded him of Dashka, for here he’d held her, there they kissed, glimpses of beauty in a world on the other side of catastrophe.

Stalin, who had been at meetings with the American President and British Prime Minister all day, wore the new fawn uniform of a generalissimo with gold shoulderboards and just one medal. Satinov could tell the meetings of the Potsdam Conference had gone well. There was a breezy swagger about him and he had recovered some of his energy.

‘Gamajoba bicho, happy you could join us,’ said Stalin, speaking Georgian. ‘We’ve got the cook from Aragvi with us and I thought you’d enjoy a Georgian supra!’

‘Thank you, Josef Vissarionovich,’ replied Satinov, thinking that Berlin was a long way to fly for some lobio beans. He looked around him. Beria, Mikoyan and Genrikh Dorov were there too.

A new line-up, he thought, his experienced mind analysing what it conveyed. Genrikh Dorov was not a good sign: he never came to Stalin’s dinners, being more of a retainer than a leader. Stalin deployed him as an attack dog, his presence denoting a witchhunt or an investigation that would have tragic consequences. He thought of Dashka instantly – what must it be like being married to the Uncooked Chicken? He nodded at him in greeting, and Genrikh grinned back at him with menacing geniality. The Dorov children had been arrested too, Satinov thought, but that wasn’t why Genrikh was there. He was already slavishly devoted to Stalin, whether his children were in jail or not. No, he was there as a scarecrow. To frighten someone. To frighten me.

‘I hope the flight was easy. I hate flying myself. I prefer the train,’ said Stalin. ‘But I wanted to look at you in the eyes.’

Satinov’s six-year-old daughter Mariko was in prison with his eighteen-year-old son George, and Stalin wished to look him in the eyes to check that he was still loyal. It was a rite of passage, and he, Satinov, was not alone. President Kalinin’s wife was in prison; Poskrebyshev’s pretty young wife Bronka had vanished altogether, probably dead. Stalin was telling him that family was a privilege just as living was a privilege, and that both were at the mercy of the Party. And the Party was Stalin. It was an odd system but it was the Bolshevik way, and Satinov was accustomed to it.

They sat down to table, with Satinov on Stalin’s right and Beria on his left.

‘Have you seen the palace where we’re holding the conference?’ asked Stalin.

‘I have,’ replied Satinov, picturing Mariko, screaming, being prised off her mother by brutal warders.

‘It’s meagre compared with our palaces,’ mused Stalin. ‘The tsars really knew how to build.’

‘They did,’ agreed Satinov, hearing Tamriko screaming at him, ‘They’ve taken Mariko! She’s six, Hercules. Get her released!’ Satinov composed himself, knowing his face must reveal nothing but reverence and fondness for Stalin.

Yet the night seemed endless. He knew, at some point, there would be a clue for him about Mariko and George, providing Stalin was satisfied that he had learned his lesson and harboured no resentment. Soon enough too, he would find out why Genrikh Dorov was here. Such games had perhaps been necessary before the war, but, he wondered, were they necessary now?

‘So is everything well in Moscow?’ asked Stalin.

‘Nothing can be decided without you, but Comrade Molotov and the rest of us are doing our best.’

‘You’ve got to decide things without me,’ said Stalin. ‘I’m tired.’

‘But we need you, Comrade Stalin!’ cried Beria.

‘The Soviet Union needs your genius, comrade generalissimo,’ added Dorov.

Stalin waved this away, and his yellow eyes returned to Satinov. ‘So Tamriko is well?’

‘Very well,’ answered Satinov. My wife is distraught, he thought. Our little Mariko is in prison, on your orders, and you look at me knowing this. ‘Everyone at home is so proud to see you here at Potsdam, the man who won the war, who led us to Berlin.’

‘Yet Tsar Alexander made it all the way to Paris in 1814,’ said Stalin. ‘Comrade Dorov and I have been discussing you.’

‘Me?’ Satinov swallowed. This was the warning.

Stalin let the silence draw out. Satinov thought of Tamriko and his children, he thought of Dashka, and he thought: Shoot me, but free my children. Leave Tamara alone.

At last Stalin gave him his satyr’s grin. ‘Don’t worry, Hercules! The Central Committee thinks you and Beria should be promoted to marshal.’

Satinov’s first and absurd concern was whether his new rank would impress Dashka. It shouldn’t impress her – but he knew it would. He flicked a glance at her husband, who looked away.

‘It’s an honour and of course I always obey the Party. But I’m not a soldier.’

‘Nor is Beria. Far from it!’ A disdainful look at Beria. ‘But, Hercules, you’re a colonel general already,’ replied Stalin.

‘But I don’t have anything like your military knowledge—’

‘Or your strategic genius!’ interjected Beria.

‘I’ve never commanded so much as a platoon,’ insisted Satinov. ‘The generals will resent it.’

‘That’s just the point,’ answered Stalin. ‘We’ve voted on it and it’s decided.’

‘I’m honoured by the Party’s trust in me,’ said Satinov. The promotion was not reassuring. Stalin often promoted people only to arrest them the next week; Satinov remembered how Kulik had been promoted to marshal two days after his pretty young wife had vanished, never to return. The promotion was to put the generals in their place – like the recent arrest of Marshal Shako. Yet accepting it also meant that he was accepting Mariko’s arrest and conversely, by the rules of their topsy-turvy customs, this would accelerate her release.

But as he said his goodbyes at the end of the evening, Genrikh Dorov offered his moist, limp hand. ‘Congratulations, comrade marshal.’ But his eyes said: Comrade Stalin once sacked me but now he needs me again. Comrade Stalin wants me to look into you.

Satinov pushed by Dorov but when he was in his car, Beria leaned right in through the window.

‘I’ve heard Mariko is fine,’ he whispered. ‘Silk gloves. Don’t worry.’

45

‘NO, MY FATHER would never ever discuss planes with us,’ George Satinov insisted.

It was long after midnight in the Lubianka yet the lights burned as always.

‘What about your mother?’ asked Likhachev.

‘I don’t know what they discussed.’

‘You never overheard?’

‘Never. They wouldn’t talk about politics or planes. She’s not interested in military matters – she says Papa can talk about that with the generals.’

‘Which generals?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did Shako ever come to the house?’

George noticed with alarm that Likhachev did not describe Shako as ‘comrade’. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Come on, George. The Shakos lived in your building. They never came to the house?’

‘Not that I remember.’

‘Do your parents ever argue?’

‘Everyone argues.’

‘About politics?’

‘They don’t discuss politics.’

‘Is your mother a Communist?’

‘Yes, very much so.’

‘Did you know her father was a bourgeois who travelled frequently to Germany between 1918 and 1921?’

‘She never mentioned it.’

‘Is she happy with your apartment and the dacha?’

‘She never complains.’

‘What about your father?’

‘My father never complains about anything. He never says anything much at all.’

‘Andrei Kurbsky, when you were at the Satinovs’ apartment, which rooms did you see?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Did you enter the hall, for example?’

‘Yes.’

‘Describe it.’

‘Very grand. Parquet floor. I’ve never seen such a palace.’

‘Then?’

‘We went into the kitchen.’

‘Who was there?’

‘The whole family and the maid.’

‘Tell me about Comrade Satinov and his wife.’

‘There’s nothing to tell. They seemed close.’

‘The sons?’

‘They’re very respectful of him. Afraid of him.’

‘What did they talk about?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Your mother’s at home, but we can always arrest her, you know. Surely you remember something?’

‘I think the pilot brother was telling stories about dogfights and aeroplanes.’

‘To Comrade Satinov?’

‘No, to his mother and Mariko and George and me.’

‘Did he mention that the planes were crashing?’

‘No.’

‘After tea, where did you sit?’

‘Me and George went into his father’s study. We sat there for a bit, joking around.’

‘Were there papers on the desk?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘You didn’t look at them?’

‘No.’

‘But did you notice what they were?’

‘No.’

‘But they could have been Politburo protocols or aircraft designs?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on, Andrei, concentrate: didn’t you see “Top Secret” written on them?’

Andrei shivered. He was cold and tired. He thought about his mother, sitting alone in that paltry room, waiting for him to come home.

‘Maybe.’

‘Mariko Satinova, how old are you?’ asked Colonel Komarov.

‘I’m six.’

‘Did you see your mama this morning?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re soon going home but since you’re here, I thought we could have a little chat.’

‘OK,’ said Mariko uncertainly. Komarov could see she was struggling to be brave.

‘Is that a little dog?’

‘Yes. I have twenty-five little dogs and they go to my school because they’re all girl dogs and they do lessons, study things like maths and Marxism, just like everyone does at school.’

‘What a fun game, Mariko. Do your mama and papa play?’

‘Not Papa. Papa’s very busy, but Mama plays.’

‘And your brothers?’

‘Yes. A bit but George is always out, Marlen is very serious about the Komsomol, and David is always flying planes.’

‘Does he tell you about the planes?’

‘Yes. They’re dangerous.’

‘Really? Dangerous because the Germans could shoot them down?’

‘Yes, and sometimes they crash.’

‘He told this to your papa?’

‘I can’t quite remember.’

‘What did your papa say about that?’

‘Say hello to the dog!’

‘Hello, dog. What did your papa say about that? Did he blame anyone?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did your mother and father talk about it?’

‘Is Mama coming soon?’

‘You must have heard your mama talking with Papa? About planes? Crashes?’

‘I don’t know. They whisper sometimes.’

‘About what?’

‘Important things not for children.’

‘Do your dogs ever hear anything?’

Mariko hugged her dog Crumpet, and buried her face in its fur. ‘No, they’re far too busy studying Marxism in the Moscow School for Bitches.’

Senka Dorov had spent a few hours recovering from his panic attack in the warm comfort of the sanatorium.

‘Is it serious? Is he faking?’ Komarov had asked the doctors. ‘If he dies here, you’ll all pay for it! We need him fit and back here as soon as possible.’

The doctors had taken him to the sanatorium on a stretcher wearing an oxygen mask, and brought him lemonade, bread and jam, tea and sugar. The food had given his mind the fuel it needed, but the steel jaws of this vile trap were sinking deeper into his leg with every moment.

Mama or Papa? How could he destroy either? How had it come to this? It was all thanks to that moron Demian, that weasel!

He considered the choice. Papa was so stern, so humourless. This was Bolshevik justice. Wouldn’t Papa understand and say, ‘The Party is always right,’ and, ‘Better shoot a hundred innocents to catch one enemy’? Papa would say, ‘You did the right thing, Senka. If the Party decides I’m guilty then I am guilty – and I did say that!’

Did Papa even love him? He had never shown it. His mama, on the other hand, did so every day. Yet surely her Jewish comments were less serious, so if he chose her, she wouldn’t be arrested? His father’s comments criticized Stalin himself, and Papa could lose his head for that.

Choose Mama and both parents would be fine. That must be the right decision. But what if this was a mine in the hidden minefield? What if it was more serious than he realized? Then he would have destroyed his own mother, the person he adored more than anything in the whole wide world and in all human history!

Senka’s calculations became colder and sharper. A false choice had been placed before him. He knew whichever parent he chose, the Organs would destroy them both, and the family with them. There must be a way out of the labyrinth.

Now he was sitting in the interrogation room and the courtesies, such as they were, were over.

‘Senka, give your testimony,’ said Colonel Komarov.

‘My brother Demian is more wrong than right,’ said Senka. ‘The words are right, but he’s muddled up the speaker.’

‘Just testify, boy, and stop trying to be clever. You may be only ten but on your twelfth birthday you can face the nine grams, the Vishka. Don’t even think of lying or there’ll be nothing left of you for your mother to collect. Did you fake that illness?’

‘I would never do that.’

‘I hope not. Speak now, boy.’

Senka straightened his back. He had made his choice. Now he had to make sure he got it right.

‘It’s simple, colonel,’ he said, speaking confidently and lucidly. ‘You have the quotations completely the wrong way round. It was my mother who was talking about the “Genius Boss”, not my father. My father has never ever spoken of the Head of the Soviet Government. Discretion is a religion with him. Everything that the Great Stalin does is correct. Papa regards himself as no more than a servant of the Party, the Great Stalin, the working class. He never uses the word Boss – Khozian – to describe the Head of the Soviet Government.’

‘So who complained about the Genius Boss? Who is the Genius Boss?’

‘My mother complained, and the Genius Boss in our family is… me. She was moaning about how spoilt I am. She was being sarcastic.’

Komarov stopped writing and looked up. ‘But your mother was promoting Jewish-Zionist nationalism. She’s Jewish, isn’t she?’

‘Demian’s confused about that too. I remember it exactly. We were in the dacha and my father – not my mother – my father was complaining about “the Jewish compatriots round here” who need to find a place of their own. But he was talking about our neighbours.’

‘What neighbours?’

‘The Rozenblats, who are always asking to use our tennis court. In the end my father said, no, that was enough; from now on, the Rozenblats, “our Jewish compatriots round here”, needed to get their own place for next year. Papa was tired of sharing with them.’

Komarov ran his truncated fourth finger along his lips. ‘But your father’s not Jewish?’

‘No, my father was raised Russian Orthodox so he couldn’t be guilty of Zionist nationalism, could he? Actually, he was if anything being a little anti-Jewish. So I hope, Colonel Komarov, I’ve answered all your questions. If you want the truth, this is the truth and I swear it before the Party itself. My silly brother told you the right stories but he got them the wrong way round.’

Komarov looked at Senka for a long time. Senka waited, his head throbbing. Would he be hit? Would he ever see his mother again? Then Komarov threw his head back and laughed.

‘You’re cleverer than I thought. And as it happens I have something for you. It’s from your mother.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a surprise. A nice one.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Go now.’

46

FOUR A.M. THE phone rings in the Satinov apartment. Tamara is not really asleep, and wakes to find she is already standing up, phone to her ear. She has not slept since they took Mariko, and not properly since George’s arrest. Every night she skims the surface of sleep, and every morning she feels wretchedly raw. She is not alone: all the parents of the children in the Children’s Case are the same. She sees them at the Golden Gates, trying to smile, but bleeding inside, trying to get through the day with this terrible blade swinging over their heads. Who could have created such a diabolic situation, she wonders, in which they are not allowed even to discuss their anxiety, except at night in whispers, and in dreams they try not to remember?

‘Is Comrade Satinov there?’ The voice on the phone is expressionless.

‘I’m not sure. I can go and see,’ Tamara says.

‘Is that Comrade Satinov’s wife?’

‘Yes?’

‘Be at Lubianka at seven a.m.’

‘Oh my God. What are you telling me?’

‘You may collect your children.’

Tamara bursts into tears and cries out so wildly that Satinov runs into the room, afraid of an even greater catastrophe. But it’s not. It’s good news, he assures her, hugging her. They can’t go back to sleep now. They must be ready to leave for Lubianka.

It was early morning, and Senka had scarcely slept. He was sure something good was about to happen. What was the surprise Komarov had promised him? Was it his mama? Was she coming to take him home? Had he saved her?

All night his ears had whooshed with the roar of his heartbeat pumping the blood around his body with excitement and longing.

‘Wake up, boy!’ Blancmange, the warder, called. ‘Get dressed!’

‘Is there news? Am I going home?’ Senka asked.

Blancmange held up her trowel-like hands – it was forbidden to inform prisoners of their fates. ‘Put on your best, Little Professor! We’ve got a surprise for you. Now close your eyes! Ta-da!’ And there it was, hanging on a coathanger behind her. Senka’s suit, shirt and tie. And his best shoes.

‘My suit! I’ll be so happy to get out of these pyjamas.’

‘Be grateful,’ said Blancmange. ‘Not all our “guests” are that lucky, I can tell you.’

When he was dressed in his beloved suit and a grown-up shirt and tie, Senka ate his breakfast, noting the addition of an extra sugar lump and slice of black bread. Then two guards escorted him towards the interrogation rooms: Is this the way out? he wondered. Is this the way to Mama?

He imagined Dashka’s smile, her opening her arms, her sweet scent.

But the warders opened a door into another interrogation room where Colonel Likhachev, the Lobster, awaited him.

‘But I thought…’ Senka felt as though he was about to cry.

‘I know what you thought,’ said the Lobster, sucking on his cigarette. ‘But if you want to go home, you have to sign this.’ He pushed a small bundle of papers, held together with a paperclip, across the desk.

‘What is it?’ asked Senka.

‘It’s your confession.’

‘My confession? But I already confessed about the notebook.’

‘We need another confession.’

Senka forced the rising spasm of weeping back down his throat again as he wearily tried to calculate what he should do. He had heard his father tell his mother once, ‘There’s only one rule: never confess anything.’ Now he was faced with this. Dimly, he saw his mother disappear into the distance again.

‘It is a record of everything you’ve told us and all you have to do is sign it,’ the Lobster said.

Senka sat down on the hard chair and looked at the papers, suddenly doubting that his mama was there at all. They were tricking him and, for a moment, he let the despair flood through him. Then, gathering his strength once again, he started to read, beginning at the heading ‘Protocol of Interrogation of Semyon Genrikhovich Dorov’. Ahead of him lay page after page of dialogue like a stage play with his part marked ‘Dorov, SG’ on every line. He couldn’t remember it all but it sounded right so he returned to the first page that was in larger type:

‘You want to see your mama?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then sign it and be done with it.’

‘But I was never a member of the club. I was too young. I know I mustn’t sign it.’

‘You’ve already signed one confession.’

‘I did take the notebook. But I never plotted against the government. I’m only ten.’

‘At twelve you’ll be old enough to face the Highest Measure of Punishment.’

Senka flinched.

‘Yes, we’re talking about death. We could just keep you here for a few more months and then: bang. So sign it!’

‘I never plotted and I mustn’t sign. I didn’t do anything!’ Senka could not hold back the tears any more and started to sob.

Likhachev quivered, infuriated by this howling. It was, he decided, very frustrating working with children. ‘Pull yourself together, prisoner,’ he shouted. ‘Sign it!’

‘I won’t, I won’t! Whatever you do to me, I won’t! I know I mustn’t!’ After all he’d been through, he feared the confession could be used against his father and mother.

‘God’s breath. Everyone must sign it.’

‘Everyone?’ Senka looked up at Likhachev. Who else was here? Was Minka nearby? ‘Is my sister signing it?’

Likhachev twitched again, stretched in his chair and then bent his own fingers back so they clicked. ‘All right, come with me.’ He shoved Senka out of the room, down the corridor, opened another door and pushed him inside a room with a glass wall covered by a blind.

‘Senka!’ It was Minka, still in her smart red dress, looking thinner but very much herself.

‘Minka!’ They ran towards each other, hugged and kissed through their tears.

‘What a sweet pair,’ said Likhachev to Colonel Komarov, who was in the room with Minka.

Minka kept her arm around Senka’s narrow shoulders.

‘Have you signed anything?’she asked him.

‘No,’ he said, wiping his eyes with his suit’s sleeves. ‘I didn’t think I should.’

‘I haven’t either,’ said Minka.

‘But, Minka, you were a member of the Fatal Romantics,’ whispered Senka.

‘Think about Mama and Papa!’ she whispered back.

‘No whispering!’ snarled Likachev. ‘Just sign. Both of you.’

‘We won’t sign,’ said Minka.

Komarov chewed on the stump of his finger and then said to his comrade Likhachev, ‘Shall we make this easier?’

Likhachev nodded and Komarov walked over to the blind and flicked a switch. ‘Who’s this, eh?’

Over the tinny speakers, they heard a woman’s voice with a distinctively light Galician accent, saying, ‘Will they be long, Genrikh? Where are they?’ It was their mother.

‘Stop, Dashka,’ replied their father’s voice. ‘It’s out of our hands. The officials of the Organs are dealing with it according to the rules of Soviet justice. So we wait.’

Komarov flicked the switch again. ‘They’re next door. Do you want to see them or not?’

‘Sign or stay in prison!’ added Likhachev.

Minka and Senka held hands.

‘We won’t sign, will we, Minka?’ said Senka, regaining a little professorial authority.

‘I’m sorry, comrade colonels,’ she said. ‘We’re sure we mustn’t sign.’

‘We’re feeling very brave,’ added Senka stoutly. ‘We won’t do it.’

Komarov glanced at Likhachev, who left the room. Then he unclicked the blind, which flicked up on its roller to reveal a waiting room. Senka and Minka saw their parents sitting awkwardly alongside Irina Titorenka and the Satinovs. No one was saying much.

‘Have the others signed?’ asked Minka. ‘George and Vlad?’

‘Of course. Everyone must confess,’ said Komarov.

‘Then why aren’t they out there?’

‘Everyone must sign. It’s orders from the top!’

‘Look!’ said Senka, shrill and frightened. ‘He’s talking to Mama! He’s telling them we’re never coming out! Should we sign?’

Colonel Likhachev was talking to their parents and their father was rising, looking at the two-way mirror and approaching it. He pointed at them and Komarov clicked the switch on the loudspeaker.

‘Children,’ said Genrikh Dorov. ‘Are you there, Minka? Senka? I can’t see you but the colonel says you can hear me. Sign now, and you come home!’

Likhachev re-entered the room, swaggering a little. ‘There, you heard it!’ he said.

Minka and Senka looked at each other.

‘I saw Mama,’ Senka said. ‘She’s in the next room…’

Minka put her arms around him and she too was crying.

47

THE SATINOVS HAD arrived first, at 6 a.m. When Tamara saw the room, she staggered and he caught her arm. ‘Oh Hercules, this is the room where I’ve been meeting Mariko.’

‘Patience,’ he said, steadying her. This grim grey room, smelling of stale tobacco and sweat, contained four rows of wooden chairs, their seats smoothed by years of nervous waiting families. It was empty but for them. Satinov reflected on his dinner with Stalin: he had been right. Stalin had wanted to look at him before releasing Mariko. But the children were still not home. Was Mariko already looking at them from behind that big mirror on the wall in front of them? How many hundreds of thousands of people had never got this call and had never seen their children, wives, brothers again?

‘Are they ever coming?’ burst out Tamara. ‘Hercules, they’re never coming!’

‘Hush,’ said Satinov. ‘We must wait. There is nothing further we can do.’

An hour later, Vlad’s mother, Irina Titorenka, arrived, then Andrei’s mother Inessa Kurbskaya – and then the Dorovs. When Satinov saw Dashka, his heart lurched painfully, and he looked away.

Genrikh wore a dark suit and twirled his black fedora round a finger, a sign of his confidence, which declared: The Great Stalin needs me again! Satinov nodded at him. Then Tamriko rose and greeted Dashka, whose long heavy hair was pulled back in a bun. What tangled lives we lead, he thought as he watched the two women he most loved in the world hugging in Lubianka Prison as they waited for the children they so adored.

A lull; an hour passed; terrible thoughts: What if Mariko got out but Senka didn’t, or Vlad did and Andrei didn’t?

Tamriko was beside him, her face so loving, so honest. He sighed and took her delicate hand and squeezed it.

Suddenly the door opened. Every parent started – and Vlad Titorenko came in. Crop-haired, bedraggled school uniform, glazed eyes like a zombie. His mother, a jowly, over-rouged woman in a mauve hat like an upside-down chamberpot and a matching coat, exclaimed: ‘Vlad!’ and dabbed at her tears with a dirty yellow handkerchief.

Vlad cringed and looked around the room, clearly afraid of something. ‘Is Papa here?’ he asked.

But Mrs Titorenka seemed even more flustered by this question. ‘No, no… well… he’s not here. He’s gone away.’

That was how Satinov knew that they had arrested his subordinate, Titorenko. For twenty-five years now he, the Iron Commissar, had thrived in this precarious, clandestine world. His children may be coming home, he thought, but his subordinates were being arrested. Not good for him, but not terminal either.

A Chekist came in and talked to Genrikh, who spoke to the mirror, advising Minka and Senka to sign their papers. A few minutes passed. Even Satinov, who had helped storm the Winter Palace in 1917, who had waited in a hushed bunker for the launch of the Stalingrad offensive, was nervous by now, his heart drumming.

Dashka and Genrikh got to their feet. The doors opened and Senka’s sweet, high-pitched voice could be heard, talking about seeing his mother again.

‘She’s a doctor, I hear,’ said the Chekist as he held open the door.

‘Oh yes, she’s the best doctor in the world,’ cried Senka. ‘She sees all the top people.’

And then there he was. Dashka flew towards her boy and Minka; Genrikh put on his fedora and lingered behind her, his expression seeming to suggest that it was perfectly routine for his children to be arrested and then released.

‘Darling Senka!’ cried Dashka, opening her arms and bending over to greet him.

Senka threw himself into her embrace and kissed her face. For a moment, Satinov could only see the top of Senka’s tousled head as he was enveloped in Dashka’s arms. Then she hugged Minka too, and Genrikh touched Dashka’s arm: ‘Not here. Let’s not forget we’re Bolsheviks,’ he said gruffly.

‘Of course,’ said Dashka. They headed for the door, and then Dashka looked back and nodded at Tamriko. ‘Good luck!’ she mouthed. She glanced at him, and then they were gone.

‘Oh God, where’s Mariko? Where are they?’ Tamara started to panic again.

The door opened. They rose to their feet. But no, it was Andrei, pale but otherwise unharmed. He and his mother left.

Satinov and Tamriko were alone again. They held hands, so tense they couldn’t speak. A moment later, the door opened again.

‘Mamochka!’ called a shrill voice. Mariko, followed by George, ran into the room at high speed, holding one of her toy dogs. She ran round the room so fast that Tamriko and Satinov barely had time to get up before she threw herself into Tamriko’s arms. Tamriko whirled her round and round.

‘Look what I’ve got for you! Look who’s come to meet you!’ Tamriko reached into her bag and pulled out a handful of Mariko’s toy dogs. ‘Old friends and a new one too!’

Mariko squeaked with joy, grabbing the toy dogs, and threw her arms around her mother again.

‘Hello, Papa,’ said George sheepishly. He was still in his football kit.

‘You look OK, George,’ said Satinov briskly, ‘thinner perhaps. Good to see you!’ and he put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, an unprecedented act of informality. George looked grateful and Satinov realized his son was scared of his anger.

‘Come on,’ said Satinov, kissing Mariko on the top of her head. ‘It’s time to go home.’

They drove back to Granovsky in silence.

‘Papa, I’m so sorry. I had to sign,’ said George as soon as they were back in their apartment. Father and son both knew that the children’s confession could be used against the parents.

Satinov looked at George for a long moment, wishing he could reach across the dark valley of his own reticence. He wanted to tell him how much he loved him, and that he didn’t blame him for anything. But he didn’t know how to begin.

‘I know,’ he said briskly. ‘You’ve learned your lesson. The law will take its course. In the meantime you are to finish the term at school. Let’s not mention it again.’

‘Thank you, Papa,’ said George formally.

‘Look, Papa, look!’ Mariko ran into the room holding a bundle of her dogs. ‘My bitches have been in the kennel for being naughty but now they’re back at school. I’m so happy.’

‘Prisoner Golden, we know you fornicated with many women and corrupted their Soviet morality.’

‘I told you I did not.’

‘You seduced your pupils.’

‘Never.’ Benya looked back at the happiness of his Second Coming, his return from the dead, his fresh chance. Teaching the children in School 801 had made him happier than virtually anything in his life, certainly more than the undeniable joy of writing a successful book. Now it was over.

‘We know from our informer that you met the schoolgirl Serafima Romashkina at the café next to the House of Books. Did you have intercourse with the schoolgirl Serafima Romashkina?’

‘No.’ Now Benya was startled that, out of all the children, the case had focused on Serafima. He sensed that she was in grave danger.

‘What did you discuss with her?’

‘Pushkin. Poetry.’

‘Poetry? You suborned her to deviate from Marxism-Leninism with philistine-bourgeois individualism?’

Benya took a quick breath. The interrogator had stumbled on something – but he had not yet made the connections. In the 1930s, Benya had loved a woman who had vanished into the meatgrinder and the Gulags. Now, by pure chance, he had found himself teaching her cousin about literature and love. He and Serafima had met for coffee.

‘Do you know my favourite Pushkin poem?’ Benya had asked her. ‘It’s his most romantic poem, and it’s special to me. “The Talisman”.’

‘What a piece of luck,’ sighed Serafima, putting her hands together, her eyes shining. She had never looked more beautiful, he thought. ‘It’s my favourite too. It’s our – I mean it’s my poem. It’s special to me as well.’ And Benya had known immediately that she was in love too. For a moment, he turned away from her so she couldn’t see his eyes, but she was so happy that she never noticed, and he found himself blessing her in Pushkin’s verses to a young girl named Adele, the beloved child of a friend:

And she listened with her head on one side…

‘Prisoner Golden!’ The Chekist brought him back to the grim here and now. ‘What did you discuss with her? Were you involved with Serafima and her special friend in their anti-Soviet conspiracy?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We’ve worked it all out, Golden, and we know that the Children’s Case was a conspiracy inspired from abroad through Serafima, by her secret American lover – a foreign capitalist spy.’

Benya bit his lip. He had been very slow to work this out but now he understood everything: NV, the gorgeous princess, was Nikolasha’s code for Serafima. NV and Serafima were interchangeable. Serafima was an inch away from destruction. He realized what he must do. ‘You’ve got that quite wrong,’ he said.

Colonel Likhachev scowled. ‘Give me your testimony or I’ll beat you to a pulp.’

Benya closed his eyes, remembering the elegiac days of that 1930s winter when he was in love. ‘I confess that I invented the Fatal Romantics’ Club with its bourgeois anti-Leninist philistinism,’ he said slowly. ‘I dictated the idea of the anti-Soviet conspiracy to Nikolasha Blagov. You asked me earlier who NV was? I am NV. Most Muscovites met some foreigners in wartime and no doubt Serafima Romashkina did too. But let me testify before the Party, before the Great Stalin himself, that Serafima is involved in no foreign conspiracy. I’m the conspirator.’

‘You will confess to all this, Prisoner Golden?’

‘Yes. Just give me the papers.’

‘You understand that this is a terroristic crime according to Article 158, punishable with the Highest Measure of Punishment?’

Benya nodded. Then, as Colonel Likhachev drew up the confession, he just sat back. Graceful images floated into his consciousness. Kissing the woman he’d loved, long ago, outside the Metropole Hotel in a snowstorm. Catching Agrippina’s eye as she made tea in the common room. Finding a rare volume in the flea market. And this, his last decent act, protecting a girl who had so much to live for. He imagined he heard the clatter and murmur of the children settling down in the classroom before his Pushkin lessons. There was George. And Andrei. Minka. And at the back, staring out of the window at the cherry trees, no doubt dreaming of her secret love, Serafima.

He clapped his hands and heard his own voice, as if echoing very far away, long ago and in a vanished world: ‘Dear friends, beloved romantics, wistful dreamers! Open your books. I hope you’ll always remember what we’re going to read today. We are about to go on a wonderful journey of discovery.’

48

EARLY AFTERNOON. THE rays of the sun pour through the whirling motes of dust in Frank’s apartment to create a golden kaleidoscope on the far wall. Although Serafima doesn’t yet know that her friends are about to be released, she senses they will soon be home and all seems right with her world. Frank is there already and there is no need to say anything for a while. He gives her the jaunty two-finger salute that he always gives her, and she can see that he’s in high spirits.

She savours the lemony scent of his cologne, the softness of his skin, the texture of his hair (soft as a girl’s), his eyes. She kisses his cheek, and then he takes her chin in his hand and starts to kiss her. Her eyes shut and she sighs in the back of her throat.

He starts to undress her and this time she unfastens his shirt herself, her fingers suddenly so agile that they can unbutton at record speed. When he helps her pull her dress over her head, she does not fear the revelation of her snakeskin. On the contrary, she cannot wait to show him that she is still his, all of her, the delicate and the rough. When they are naked, she feels her snakeskin anticipating his touch. The craving is answered as his fingers lightly trace the burnt, parchmenty skin. ‘This means you’re mine and you’ll be mine forever,’ he whispers.

After they have made love, he holds her in his arms. ‘Serafima Constantinovna…’

‘You’re using my patronymic? Why?’

‘I have something to ask you.’ Serafima feels his body tense next to hers as he gathers himself. ‘Will you marry me?’

‘Are you joking?’

‘No. I’m not much of a jester, am I?’

‘I suppose not,’ she agrees. ‘You’re a serious young man.’ She pauses, thinks. ‘You don’t have to do this, you know. I’m not sure they’ll let me out of the country, and this could cause so much trouble for you…’

‘Darling, all I want is to spend the rest of my life with you. Look, I’ve brought you this.’

He opens a small red box lined in satin. Inside is a gold ring with three diamonds in a row, a large one in the middle. ‘I want you to wear this for the rest of your life with me. Please, please, say you will?’

Serafima is so overcome she fears she might faint. Only a few weeks ago, she was in prison. Now she might go from Communist Moscow to New York City in America, from schoolgirl to wife. Suddenly all she wants is to be married to Frank. Yet there is much to fear. Her schoolfriends are still in jail, and she senses the jeopardy in their relationship.

‘Are you all right?’ Frank asks, concerned. ‘You’ve been through so much recently. There’s no need to answer now. I just…’

‘What?’ she asks.

‘I just can’t face being separated like this again without knowing where you are and how much I love you.’

Slowly she gives him her hand. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I will marry you. I want to be with you forever too.’

He slips the ring on to her finger and it fits as though she’s always worn it.

‘What are the chances of that?’ he asks. ‘It fitted my grandmother and it fits you.’ He raises her hand, the one wearing the ring, kisses it, and then her lips. ‘Now you’re going to be Mrs Frank Belman, we must make our plans carefully.’

The next day at the Golden Gates, a holiday mood. The pollen floats like the flurries of a snowstorm. The air smells of lilac. There’s just a week left of term.

‘I’m sure I don’t need to tell you,’ said Satinov to his three children as they walked from Granovsky Street, guards in front and behind them, ‘don’t discuss anything about the case with each other.’

At the gates, they greeted their friends with three kisses, feeling almost like adults after the nightmare they had been through.

‘What’s news?’ George asked Andrei, like old times. Except after the Children’s Case, things were very different.

‘Everyone’s out of prison,’ asked Andrei. ‘Thank God.’

‘Except our teacher, Benya Golden,’ added Minka Dorova, putting her arm through Serafima’s. ‘But I’m sure he’ll be out soon.’

Satinov watched his children going through the school gates. Things may have changed but a fragile normality seemed to have been established, he was thinking as he walked back towards the street, and then stopped.

There was Dashka Dorova on her own, kissing her Senka, her darling Little Professor, as she sent him into school.

She flushed when she saw him. ‘Greetings, Comrade Satinov. It’s like the start of another term,’ she said. ‘And congratulations on your promotion!’

The day suddenly seemed dizzily sunny. He longed to explain to her that his promotion wasn’t quite what it seemed. Only she would understand, and only telling her would make the thought worth thinking.

‘We don’t have to discuss the weather today,’ he said instead, remembering what she looked like with her thick black hair, now decorously restrained in a bun, loose on her bare amber-skinned shoulders.

‘It just got sunnier for me,’ she said, smiling in her dazzling, slightly crooked way.

‘I wondered…’

‘What?’ she said, a little breathlessly.

‘I just wondered about… about dear Academician Almaz? How is his gout?’

‘He’s older and crabbier than ever. And much, much lamer!’

‘Should I call him sometime? Am I allowed, do you think?’

She paused, and then stepped towards him so that he could smell her spicy scent. ‘I think you might be,’ she said. ‘Yes, I might even go so far as to say that he is looking forward to it.’

49

IT WAS TIME for a holiday. Back in his office in the Little Corner after the Potsdam Conference, Stalin felt exhausted and ill.

He was the arbiter of the world. Could he have imagined this when his father Beso showed him how to nail a sole on to a boot in his workshop in Gori? When he donned the black surplice with the white collar at the seminary in Tiflis? When he walked across the mountains with a rifle over his shoulder and donkeys bearing the cash from his bank robberies? When he spent those years in Arctic exile fishing with the Eskimos and seducing village schoolgirls? But his mission was never complete. Still no one supported him: wives, friends, comrades – all fools, weaklings or traitors. What tribulations they put him through. Roosevelt, whom he liked and admired, was dead; Truman was a small-time haberdasher, not a statesman. Churchill had lost the election: what kind of system dismissed a man who had just won a war? It made no sense at all, especially when he saw Churchill’s replacement: Attlee looked like a provincial stationmaster. Besides, Attlee was a socialist and Stalin despised socialists as liberal saps and milksops, worse than imperialists. A dagger in the back was what they deserved.

The Americans now had their new weapon of astonishing destructive power, the Atomic Bomb, so, just when he, Stalin, was triumphant, he had to put all his energy into catching up with the United States. The oppressive tingling in the back of his neck, the pains in his arms and the weakness in his limbs were getting worse, and the specialists told him he needed to rest. He hadn’t had a holiday since 1937 so he’d decided to go down to his villas on the Black Sea. He would have to leave Molotov and Satinov in charge, and they’d screw up, of course. They were too trusting. They couldn’t see the enemies. They were like blind kittens. But no matter, his train was already packed. There were just a couple of things he had to do before he left.

He had, he considered, a special talent for movie scripts. He could have been a writer if he’d chosen that path, and remembered his excitement when his teenage poems were published. He now read every movie script and approved every movie filmed at the Mosfilm Studios. On the train home, he had decided what to do with Eisenstein’s script for Ivan the Terrible Part Two.

In the little cinema near his office, in fifteen seats covered in burgundy velveteen, the Seven leaders plus the Minister of Cinema, that cretin Bolshakov, sat in rows. They were to be joined by the screenwriter Romashkin to watch some rushes from his movie Katyusha Part Two, which was being filmed at that very moment. Stalin recalled that Romashkin’s daughter, Serafima, was somehow entangled with Vasily and the Children’s Case – but he couldn’t quite remember where the case had got to. (That was why he was seeing Abakumov afterwards.)

The film had begun, and Stalin watched the rushes and approved them until the scene where Sophia Zeitlin kissed the actor playing her husband. ‘Stop the film! That’s vulgar!’ he told them. ‘The kiss is too long. It’s un-Soviet. Look at the way he’s holding her. The kiss has to go. What possessed you, Bolshakov, to pass this obscenity?’

‘Oh Comrade Stalin, I thought it was OK, but I would never have passed it without showing it to you.’

Stalin enjoyed watching Bolshakov cringe. ‘What do you think, comrades? Shall we forgive him or shall we punish him?’ Stalin rose and, puffing at his pipe, walked up and down before the screen. ‘To forgive? Or not to forgive?’

The only sounds were his puffing and the creak of his leather boots. No one spoke. Bolshakov’s face was flushed, and his bald head glistened with sweat. ‘Forgive or not to forgive? All right, Bolshakov, we’ll forgive. But next time: curb the kissing!’

Next, he gave Romashkin instructions for a new project: he must rewrite Ivan the Terrible Part Two. Eisenstein was not to be trusted with the script again. ‘Don’t just show that Ivan was cruel,’ said Stalin. ‘Show why he needed to be cruel. Understand?’

Romashkin wrote down his instructions but at the end of the meeting he asked if he could create a part for his wife, Sophia Zeitlin.

‘Sure,’ said Stalin. Well, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, so why not?

Sophia Zeitlin was a beauty, he decided, quite a temptress by all accounts (oh yes, Marshal Shako fancied himself a chivalrous knight, but he’d had a few tales to tell after they’d given him the good beating he deserved). But her looks, those bold black eyes and heavy eyebrows were Jewish, the name Zeitlin was Yiddish and he wondered if she was Russian enough… The Jews were everywhere; they wanted to commandeer the war itself, claiming they, not the Russians, had suffered most at the hands of the Nazis. Some of them wanted their own Zionist country in the Crimea, others wanted a new Judaea in Palestine. They were never loyal to anyone. What if they really supported America? Even his darling Svetlana had married a Jew. Those Jews were worming their way into his own family.

Stalin’s head was spinning again so he had himself driven home to the Nearby Dacha where he lay on the divan in his office. Abakumov, now promoted to Minister of State Security, was already there, standing to attention. During the next half-hour, he reported on round-ups in Berlin, Ukrainian nationalists to be executed, new intelligence on the American atomic project from the MGB’s British agents, the case of a Swedish count arrested in Budapest.

Stalin tried to concentrate but his joints ached as they had ever since his Siberian exiles. Abakumov was a crude policeman, an oaf to be sure, but thank God he was competent.

Now he came to the aeroplane scandal that he called the Aviators’ Case. Marshal Shako had been broken, was blaming everyone else, even Satinov, for his faulty planes, and had denounced Marshal Zhukov for exaggerating his role in the victory (Good, thought Stalin, we’ll show Zhukov who’s boss here). The Children’s Case was solved and before their release the children had confessed to writing anti-Soviet materials.

It transpired that Serafima, Romashkin and Zeitlin’s daughter, was not behind the conspiracy, after all. Abakumov had uncovered the Enemy who had encouraged the children to embrace anti-Soviet romanticism and play at being leaders: the criminal, who had confessed, was none other than the writer Benya Golden, who had somehow inveigled his way into School 801 as a teacher.

‘I thought we’d dealt with him before the war,’ Stalin said.

Abakumov was about to explain but Stalin waved him aside. ‘Maybe this time, when we’ve finished with him, he’ll be shorter by a head. But we still need to punish the children, don’t we?’

‘Yes, Comrade Stalin. But I have one additional development to report. Instead of using French wrestling, I released Serafima early, anticipating that she would lead us to any inappropriate contacts. We knew from an informant at the school that she was meeting someone. We were told that her lover was leaving notes for her in certain foreign books at the House of Books.’

‘Which books?’ Stalin was curious. He loved books.

Abakumov consulted his notes while Stalin fidgeted impatiently. ‘Novels by Hemingway. Edith Wharton. Galsworthy.’

‘Good taste,’ said Stalin, noticing Abakumov had clearly not heard of any of them. The uncouth clod.

‘Yes, well, naturally we followed her, via the Bolshoi Theatre, and she led us to a love nest. We observed her regularly meeting a young American diplomat. We bugged the apartment. He has proposed marriage to her and she has accepted him.’

‘They fuck in this apartment?’

‘Yes, Comrade Stalin.’

‘She’s only eighteen. As a father…’ Then he remembered that his daughter Svetlana had had an affair with a forty-year-old married screenwriter at sixteen. A Jew. He had slapped her face.

‘The American is young too,’ continued Abakumov, ‘but the whole business is rotten. Since 1941, we’ve allowed over eight thousand Soviet women who’ve met allied servicemen to follow their foreign partners abroad so I presume we will allow Serafima to go to America with her fiancé, but in view of her prominent family…’

Stalin lay back on the divan, inhaled on the cigarette and closed his eyes for a second. The country was devastated, surrounded by enemies, infliltrated by agents, threatened by America. Discipline was essential. But this girl was in love. She was young. She had been in prison. Why shouldn’t young people fall in love? he thought. He remembered his wives, his many girlfriends. If only there had been more love in my life, he thought despondently, but we Bolsheviks are a military-religious order like the Knights Templar. The Revolution always came first. I was no husband and now I’m alone. He sighed. Always alone.

‘I think we should grant one month more for those wartime love affairs,’ Stalin said finally. ‘Then the gates close.’

He’d just remembered that Serafima was the daughter of a Jew. Another Jew.

It was Satinov’s birthday and before he left the office for home, he noticed that an envelope had appeared in his in-tray typed: ‘Com. Satinov. Secret.’ When he opened it, all he found was a page ripped from a book of Chekhov’s stories. There was nothing else in the envelope so he started to read.

Satinov had read very little literature, yet Stalin often told him that he must read Chekhov to improve himself – ‘I’m old but I never stop studying,’ Stalin said – but Satinov was always too busy.

Now he read this page from a story called ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. The hero and heroine, both happily married to others, meet at the Yalta resort and begin an affair. He read that they ‘loved one another as close intimates, as man and wife, as very dear friends. They thought that fate itself had intended them for each other.’ When the lover was on his way to meet her, he mused that:

This section was marked. Satinov pressed the bell on his desk. Chubin, his aide, appeared instantly, notebook, pencil and Adam’s apple poised.

‘Send out someone to the House of Books to buy Chekhov’s stories.’

‘Now, comrade?’

‘This minute, Chubin. Make sure it contains a story called “The Lady with the Little Dog”.’

And when he read the story, he felt he was reading about himself and Dashka. Truly, there was no better present than this.

On the last day of term, the parents of the Children’s Case were called in to the school a little before pick-up.

Satinov met Tamriko outside the director’s office. She was worried what was coming. ‘Suppose,’ she whispered, ‘suppose they have to go back to prison? Suppose they’re arrested again? I just couldn’t bear to lose them a second time.’

Satinov kissed her forehead. ‘Mariko won’t be affected,’ he replied. ‘Even for George, it won’t be as bad as you fear.’

Moments later, Genrikh and Dashka Dorov arrived along with the other parents. Serafima’s father, Constantin Romashkin the screenwriter, was there too; Satinov knew that Sophia was filming. Tamriko stood next to Satinov and she slipped her hand into his and he squeezed it, noticing with a sudden twinge of sadness – or irony that the Dorovs were doing exactly the same thing. Irina Titorenka and Inessa Kurbskaya were alone.

Director Medvedeva was still suspended so it was the mathematics teacher, old Comrade Noodelman, who opened the door and summoned them in.

‘Please be seated and I hand the floor to Comrade Colonel Likhachev who is here to brief you,’ said Noodelman.

Colonel Likhachev, in army uniform, greeted Comrades Satinov and Dorov, but merely nodded at the women. What a charmer he was, this torturer! Satinov pushed to the back of his mind the thought that this degenerate had had control over his little Mariko.

Likhachev blinked as if unaccustomed to the wholesome brightness of this school room with its happy posters and jolly geraniums. Unzipping his leather case, he pulled out a beige file marked ‘MGB’ – Ministry of State Security – and ‘Top Secret’. He slipped a single paper out of the folder.

‘Comrades and citizens,’ he began grandiloquently. ‘The children, all pupils at School 801…’ He read out their names: George Satinov was the first. Tamriko’s grip had tightened on Satinov’s hand and he imagined that Dashka’s must be clasping Genrikh’s fiercely too because both mothers would be thinking of their younger children, fearing prison. Mariko was mentioned. Then there was Minka Dorova. Her mother’s face froze as she waited for the next… Yes, Senka Dorov. Dashka moaned slightly. Satinov imagined he could hear all their hearts beating in unison but perhaps it was just his own for suddenly he found himself suffering not just for one woman and her children but for two.

‘All of the above have signed confessions of conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet State and therefore have been liable under Article 158 to be sentenced to between ten and twenty-five years and, for those over twelve years old – that is all of the above criminals except Mariko Satinova, six, and Senka Dorov, ten – to the Highest Measure of Punishment.’ Death!

Tamriko gasped, and her hand shook in Satinov’s; Dashka’s free hand went to her lips.

Likhachev looked up at them and then continued reading. For a moment Satinov questioned his folly in advising Genrikh Dorov to order the children to sign the confessions. Had he made a terrible mistake? Had Abakumov – and behind him Stalin – tricked them all?

‘However,’ continued Likhachev, ‘three judges have decided not to proceed on this basis but to suspend formal judgment owing to the youth of the said criminals, who are instead to suffer the following punishment.’

The room was so silent that Satinov thought he could hear the swish of sweepers’ brooms in the streets outside.

‘We sentence them to one month’s exile, if necessary accompanied by tutors or nannies, in Alma Ata, Turkestan. Parental visits allowed weekly.’

Tears ran down Tamriko’s cheeks: tears of relief. Four weeks exile with staff was a summer holiday, as good as it could possibly be – even for Mariko who could go with her beloved nanny Leka.

As they left the director’s office, under his breath, Satinov thanked Comrade Stalin for his good sense, his justice. Satinov knew that the Aviators’ Case might catch up with him, if Stalin wanted it to do so, but that seemed unlikely. The children were free and both Tamriko and Dashka were safe. That was all that mattered. He watched the two women talking a few steps ahead, admiring them and wondering how on earth he had managed to have both in his life, so he was scarcely listening when he found Genrikh Dorov keeping step with him.

‘It’s a relief that this case has ended harmlessly,’ said the Uncooked Chicken as he peered round to check that no one was listening. ‘But I’m afraid, Comrade Satinov, I must warn you, as a friend, that there are many irregularities in the management of the Air Ministry and the Satinovgrad Aeroplane Factory. It will take me a couple of weeks to finalize my report and show it to the Central Committee. When the time comes, we’ll have to meet to iron out the problems. But I promise not to keep you for too long.’

50

SERAFIMA, LIKE THE others in the Children’s Case, had spent a month’s exile in Central Asia. She had shared an apartment with Minka and Senka, with the Satinovs right next door (while Andrei, with a smaller budget, stayed in a room across town), and her parents had lent her their maid, so that, apart from the blistering heat, this community of young exiles had actually managed to enjoy the trip. Serafima and Frank had written to each other every day, and sometimes they even managed to book a call at the post office so that, over a clanging line, she could hear his voice as they planned their new life.

On the day she arrived back home in Moscow, her parents were not at home.

‘Your mama’s on set,’ said the driver as the Rolls headed up to the Mosfilm Studios in the Sparrow Hills. Once she had passed the mythically muscular statue of the Worker and Collective Farm Woman outside, she was directed to Studio One.

Every road in that mini-city of cinema seemed to lead to her mother. ‘She’s down there,’ cried a grip, directing her into the huge hanger-like studio. ‘That way,’ said a guard. ‘She’s just finishing a scene on the battlefield set,’ whispered an actor wearing Nazi uniform with blood dripping down his face. ‘See?’

Sophia Zeitlin, shooting Katyusha Part Two, stood next to a grey howitzer on a mud-coloured trench set, lit up with kreig lights that, for all their fluorescence, could not overwhelm her black eyes and crimson lips. She was wearing an unnecessarily tight green tunic and shorter-than-usual khaki skirt (or so it seemed to Serafima). She brandished a PPSh machine-gun and placed a heel on one of the ‘dead’ Nazi soldiers (some of whom were dummies and others young Russian actors in Wehrmacht uniforms) who lay splayed in suitably death-like poses.

In the script (written like the first Katyusha by her husband and approved personally by Comrade Stalin), she plays a nurse whose unit has been driven back temporarily. But she fights back, killing what seems to be an entire Nazi army, while also managing to fire a bazooka and take out a Tiger tank. (In the first film, when much the same thing happened, she had fired an entire silo of Katyusha rockets, hence the name of the movie.) Her beloved husband, an ordinary soldier, calls the Kremlin to appeal on her behalf against the bureaucrats who try to stop her, a mere nurse, taking command. And now she is learning the news that Comrade Stalin has backed her—

‘Cut!’ cried the director through a loudspeaker. ‘Bravo, beautiful work, Sophia. That’s in the can. Thanks, everyone! Enough for today.’

A boy snapped the clapper and a sweaty grip helped Sophia step over the bodies on the floor while another relieved her of her gun.

‘Your daughter’s here to see you,’ the director called on his loudspeaker.

Everyone looked at Serafima, who shrank back, and then her mother raised a hand to her eyes and peered out through the lights. ‘Are you there, Serafimochka?’

‘Yes,’ she replied.

‘Meet me in my dressing room,’ Sophia shouted, her voice echoing around the cavernous studio. She certainly didn’t need a loudspeaker, thought Serafima.

In the dressing room, which smelled of tulips, face powder and greasepaint, a flotilla of assistants seemed to be working on different parts of her mother. One was removing make-up, dabbing at Sophia’s face with a sponge; a second was pulling off her boots; a third was setting bouquets into vases while Sophia lay back in a chair smoking a cigarette in a holder.

‘There you are, Serafima! How was it in Turkestan? As you can see, they’re overworking me as usual but it’s not easy for actresses of my age. There are always ingénues coming up, willing to do anything to get the parts and every one of them has a “patron”, some boss to pull strings for them…’

‘Mama, I need to speak to you on your own.’

‘Is it something important?’

‘Yes, Mama.’

‘You can trust my ladies-in-waiting, can’t she, girls?’

‘Of course!’ the assistants trilled.

‘No, it’s really private,’ Serafima insisted. ‘And urgent. Would you mind?’

‘Oh, all right. Leave us, girls.’

When the room was empty, Serafima told Sophia that she had met an American man and they were engaged to be married.

Sophia looked shocked. ‘You don’t have to marry him, surely,’ she said.

‘We’re in love, Mama,’ Serafima said, ‘and we’re going to live in America.’

‘What?’ Sophia seemed stricken. ‘You’re going to leave me and Papa? You can’t do that.’

Serafima smiled. ‘You told me often enough to follow your heart, Mama, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.’

‘And you’re engaged? I don’t see a ring. Is there a diamond?’

‘I tried it on before I went away and it fits me perfectly. But it’s so big that I gave it back to him. I’ll put it on in America.’

‘You gave it back? I’ve never given back a jewel in my life. Oh Serafimochka! Why an American? Your papa and I will never see you.’ Sophia gave a sob and started to cry. Yet to Serafima, even her tears seemed oversized and extravagant.

Suddenly, she dabbed her eyes, the mascara smearing on her cheeks. ‘Congratulations, my darling. But… when are you planning to go? Surely we can meet him first?’

‘Soon, Mama.’

‘But you know your timing is terrible for me, darling, don’t you?’

‘I can’t delay going, Mama.’

Sophia put down the cigarette and took Serafima’s hands in her own. ‘Please delay going abroad. For my sake.’

‘I can’t. He’s waiting for me. He wants to take me to America right away. I want to be with him and when I was in prison—’

‘But you’re home now. You can go abroad with him anytime. I know an actress who married an English journalist and she went to London with him just a few weeks ago. What difference does it make if you wait just a few weeks?’

Serafima frowned. ‘But why?’

‘Because I’m up for the most important part of my life. Papa’s written a special role for me as the Tsarina in Ivan the Terrible Part Two and your relationship with a foreigner, an American, could spoil everything. How will it look to…’ Even Sophia never took Stalin’s name in vain. ‘… the Central Committee?’

Serafima cursed her mother – her selfishness, her egocentricity – but she loved her too and she wanted her to be happy. Besides, this involved her father too. Did she want her marriage to start with her mother’s unhappiness? Could she build her future on the disappointment of the ones she loved?

‘Please, do this for me,’ Sophia was saying. ‘My life’s no bed of roses. Do you think everything’s perfect with your father and me? Every day’s a Gethsemane! You’ve attracted attention with your Romantics’ Club antics, and I’m alone so much. All I’m asking you to do is wait a few more weeks before you tell people what you’re going to do.’

‘How long do you need?’ Serafima asked.

‘Three weeks and the casting will be decided. Shall we say a month?’

What could change in a month? But Serafima felt a grinding uneasiness come over her. It was true that the Children’s Case had embarrassed her mother. In fact, it could have ruined her career and she had never once complained. She shook her misgivings away, turned and hugged her.

‘Just a month, Mama,’ she said. ‘Just a month, and then Frank and I are leaving for America.’

51

SIX WEEKS HAD passed since the children had been sentenced, and although by now they had returned from Central Asia, Hercules Satinov was still there, with his career, his very life, on the edge of a precipice. The strange thing was that, even though his subordinates and some air force generals had been arrested, even though Genrikh Dorov had warned him that there were problems with his ministry, he had not really seen it coming. It had been building for a long time but this was Stalin’s style of management – rule by caprice and pressure – and the very fact that he had believed himself to be safe would be a reason in Stalin’s eyes to give him a shock.

Now, Satinov sat alone, unshaven – thousands of kilometres from Moscow, from Tamriko, from his family, and the Kremlin – in the primitive kitchen of a small state dacha on the outskirts of Samarkand, smoking a cigarette of rough local tobacco, sipping at a glass of Armenian cognac, and thinking about Dashka Dorova.

A man in blue-tabbed uniform with narrow Uzbek eyes looked in at him from the doorway and vanished again; Satinov ignored him. It was September, and the heat in this red-walled house, built on red soil, was oppressive and he was bare-chested. He was unwell: he was suffering jabs of pain in his chest but he did not know whether it was heartburn or angina.

Heartbreak, he thought, is an agonizing disease that you’re delighted to have. How had he lost control? Had he nearly thrown everything away for a woman who had turned his life upside down and almost made it hell? The release of the children had rekindled the passion between them, despite his own reason and her growing misgivings, and this short, last streak had blazed with a special brightness. Yet their quick phone calls and one meeting were worse than nothing at all for they stirred such pangs of unslaked thirst in him that he didn’t know how to quench them. Her last call was almost a relief.

‘Once and for all, it’s over,’ she had said. ‘No starting again. With you, I crossed the bridge to the world of passion, but I realize that I’m not cut out for that life and now I’ve crossed back. We can’t risk what is truly precious; we can’t make our happiness out of the unhappiness of those we love. These things are easy to start but ending them, that’s an art, isn’t it? Now, I’ve got to let you go, angel. I’ve got to say goodbye.’

And then, later that day, another envelope appeared in his in-tray, typed: ‘Com. Satinov. Secret.’ He opened it to find a page torn out of a cheap edition of Pushkin’s Onegin. He had never read it.

‘Chubin!’

‘Yes, comrade.’

‘Run out and get me Onegin.’

Poor Chubin, once again bewildered by his boss’s sudden literary whims, had done as he was told and Satinov had started to read Onegin until he found the page she had sent him. And suddenly there it was. Bending over his desk, he studied it intently. It is a long time after Onegin’s duel. After many years of travelling abroad, Onegin meets Tatiana again. By now she is a powerful married lady in St Petersburg – this cool princess so resplendent, and Onegin realizes he is passionately in love with her and he writes to tell her. Tatiana is heartbroken – and here was the passage marked by Dashka’s pencil:

Here it was, in the silence of his office with its lifesize portrait of Stalin, and its array of telephones, here was Dashka’s answer. He had been furious at his children living in the romantic world, and now secretly, he, Stalin’s Iron Commissar, was living it himself. Even though each line flayed him, he read and reread the passage, wondering if he could stand another moment of this emotional rollercoaster that had borne him from misery to exhilaration and back in a matter of days, a circle of joy and despair that had lasted for almost all of their months together.

Now, sweltering in the heat of the red-walled house in Samarkand, he replayed the course of their affair. He told himself he was lucky to have made love to such a woman. ‘You’re so blessed to love and to be loved,’ he said aloud to himself. Then he remembered how once, when he’d reassured her that her figure wasn’t too curvaceous, she had replied curtly, ‘But you would say that because you’re in love with me.’ By being so in love, he had lost his power, her respect.

Like a film in his mind, he watched again (for the thousandth time) the joyous scene in the private room in the Aragvi Restaurant. Sex fills just a few hours of our entire existence, he realized, and yet those precious minutes count more than months and years of our normal lives.

As the Central Asian heat rose around him in waves that distorted his vision, he shook his head. What a contradiction she was: controlled and cool within her own realm yet also capable of this utterly reckless, wanton giddiness that overthrew them both. Sometimes, he would amuse – and torture himself – by imagining what time it was in Moscow. What would she be doing now, he asked himself? Would she be putting Senka to bed? Undressing at the end of the day? How he hated Genrikh for his intimate proximity to the humdrum secrets of her daily life.

He hated Genrikh too for his role in Satinov’s extended exile in Samarkand even though he was only the messenger boy for Stalin. Genrikh would do whatever Stalin asked him. A wave of murderous anger passed through Satinov and he dreamed of destroying Genrikh himself – but that would bring down Dashka too and her family. No, far better that he, Satinov, should face his ordeal alone in Samarkand while the ones he loved – Dashka, his children, Tamriko – were safe far away in Moscow. Perhaps the greatest relief was that Genrikh Dorov suspected nothing of his affair with his wife. No one knew, and hopefully no one would ever know. And if the Organs despatched him with a shot to the head, it would die with him.

So here, in the Samarkand house, he awoke each day with the taste of cinders in his mouth and salt rising in his throat. For, every night, he, Marshal Hercules Satinov, wept in his bed.

52

‘PLEASE DON’T REGARD me too harshly, Serafima,’ said General Abakumov, who was talking to her mother in the sitting room at their apartment. He struggled to his feet, boots creaking, medals a-jingle, his sidearm clinking against the metal in his belt. ‘But I wanted to come myself rather than send a subordinate.’

‘What is it?’ asked Serafima. Abakumov’s knobbly forehead and dark brow terrified her, and she stepped back. He reminded her of her time in Lubianka, a time that even now gave her nightmares.

She looked at her mother, and knew something was wrong. ‘Tell me, Mama.’

Abakumov cleared his throat: ‘Your application to travel abroad with your fiancé has been refused, as has your application to marry him.’

Serafima caught her breath, feeling faint suddenly, only dimly aware of her mother’s hand on her arm. ‘But everyone gets permission. Many girls have gone abroad…’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Abakumov. ‘That’s what I wanted to tell you. This is nothing personal and nothing to do with the Children’s Case. It’s the very fact that so many girls have been marrying foreigners and going abroad that has accelerated the change in the rules.’

‘Is there any way you can help us, comrade general?’ asked Sophia, fixing her blazing eyes on him.

‘I’m afraid not. I’ve already looked into that for you. This comes from the Central Committee. Dear girl, take it from me: the road of life is a twisting path and some seeds fall on stony ground. That’s the long and short of it.’

Satinov walks into the centre of Samarkand, past the primitive Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tajiks, walking, squatting, chewing khat, taking chai on the wooden platforms of their chai-khanas, watching the world turn, far from Moscow, in their robes and embroidered skullcaps. He sits and takes tea in a chai-khana. Then he crosses the ruins of the Registan, the old square, and walks between mud-caked walls towards the tomb of Tamurlane; his ‘companions’, plain-clothed Uzbek guards, follow him.

Tamurlane, that lame, pitiless conqueror who was the Stalin of his time, lies beneath a ribbed and fluted azure dome like a giant’s blue turban. Satinov looks down at the simple jade stone that covers the emperor’s tomb and he realizes that his own works, even the world-historical deeds of Stalin himself, may one day be forgotten like this.

It seems unlikely… but what if Lenin’s state, built on the graves of millions, is one day overturned? he thinks. They might even rename the towns and streets that bear my name. What if all that truly matters is my children, my beloved wife – and her, my secret passion. What if only love will justify my ever having lived at all?

He bows his head before Tamurlane’s simple catafalque. Satinov longs for death, instant, unexpected death, and doesn’t fear it. His vision blurs as he gives thanks for this delicious sadness that makes him complete.

High on a mountain over the Black Sea, an old man in a white linen suit was smoking his pipe, his eyes slits in the bright sunlight, the irises as yellow and speckled with black as a beestripe, his high, slightly sunburnt cheekbones set with an archipelago of freckles in a range of pockmarks.

‘And down here,’ he said to his visitors, ‘your old host has been weeding the vegetable gardens. Honest labour is good for the soul.’

A gardener, a foxy old man who looked not unlike Stalin himself, was digging, and Stalin nodded at him and said a few words in Georgian. ‘He says the tomatoes are not bad,’ Stalin explained. ‘Would you like some tomatoes and figs to take back to Moscow?’

‘It’s a beautiful garden,’ agreed the American ambassador, Averell Harriman, clad in a cream suit with seams pressed as sharp as razors. ‘Generalissimo, I must congratulate you on your tomatoes as well as your other achievements.’

Frank Belman, boyish and slim in his immaculate US Army uniform, translated quickly into fluent Russian. When Stalin laughed, the creases in his face resembled the grin of a tiger, but all Frank could really think about was Serafima. When he saw her after their travel plans had been banned, he feared she would make herself ill with disappointment and heartbreak.

‘Well, thank you for coming to see me down here,’ said Stalin to the two Americans. ‘An old man must rest a little…’

The visit was over. Stalin ambled along the path with his bowlegged gait up the steps to the verandah and through the white pillars into the cool villa that smelled of orange blossom and tobacco. Frank noticed that every surface in the house was covered with books: he saw novels by Edith Wharton, Hemingway and Fadayev; biographies of Nadir Shah and the Duke of Marlborough; heaps of literary journals; an open book marked with Stalin’s marginalia in a blue crayon.

Stalin led them through the house and out the other side where the ambassadorial Buick waited alongside Stalin’s limousines. A fat boozy general, probably the chief bodyguard, saluted and tagged along after them down the steps to the driveway. Stalin’s seaside villa in Abkhazia was totalitarianism by architecture, Frank thought. The house was an impregnable eyrie atop a steep cliff overlooking the Black Sea, invisible from every angle except from the water, and could only be reached through a single-track tunnel carved into the solid rock of the mountain. Frank concentrated hard to translate every nuance of the ambassador’s words but his mind was elsewhere. With Serafima.

‘Thank you for seeing us, generalissimo,’ said Harriman. ‘I have to tell you we Americans, from the White House to the man in the street, are still amazed and grateful for the heroism and sacrifices of the Red Army under your brilliant command.’

‘Please send President Truman my regards,’ replied Stalin. ‘And I hope you liked the Georgian food and wine.’

‘Didi madlobt!’ said the ambassador in Georgian.

A friend of Frank’s father, Harriman was burly and tall, with polo-player’s shoulders and heavy eyebrows.

Stalin scanned Harriman benignly. Their conversation seemed to be going horribly slowly, Frank thought, barely able to restrain himself from intervening. He was terrified that Harriman had forgotten about him or, worse, had decided that now was not the appropriate time to make a request.

‘Generalissimo, before we leave you to this lovely place and your much-deserved rest, may I ask a personal favour?’

Frank was so nervous that he could scarcely translate this, yet these were the words that he wanted to translate more than any that had ever been uttered.

‘Ask anything. After all these years, we’re friends,’ said Stalin, looking somewhat moved. ‘We’ve shared some moments as allies.’

‘Thank you. My interpreter here, Captain Belman, who has translated at several of our meetings, is engaged to a Russian girl named Serafima Romashkina.’

‘Congratulations!’ said Stalin. His eyes flicked towards Frank and back. No hint that he knew who she was. ‘We believe in love between allies.’

‘She’s the daughter of the actress Sophia Zeitlin and the screenwriter Constantin Romashkin.’

‘You must have good taste,’ said Stalin. A grin for a moment, then the inscrutable oriental mask.

‘Yet, probably due to an oversight,’ Harriman continued, ‘this girl has been refused permission to leave the Soviet Union.’

Stalin glanced sideways at Frank, and Frank tried to look honest and modest and earnest simultaneously.

Stalin sighed. ‘Our country is full of yesmen,’ he said. ‘Lenin called it the Russian disease. Your newspapers call me a dictator, but as you see, I don’t control everything. The Politburo has a mind of its own and sometimes I have to be wary not to offend the diehards there.’ He waved at the fat general nearby: ‘Comrade Vlasik, write down the names.’

The general was already writing in a little notebook. Frank felt the unfathomable glare of Stalin’s yellow eyes: ‘Don’t worry, young man, I’ll look into it.’

53

LATE AFTERNOON. SIX p.m. The phone was ringing. Waiting in the kitchen, Satinov, sporting a prickly grey beard and stained khaki trousers, shirtless, barefoot, picked it up.

‘How are you, darling?’ Tamara said.

‘Good.’ Once he had blotted out the momentary disappointment that it was not another voice saying ‘It’s me’, he was comforted to hear her.

‘How’s the project?’ asked Tamara.

‘I’m working hard here,’ he lied.

‘Is there as much to do as you feared?’

‘More. I’m busy from dawn until… I just got in.’

‘Is the sugar harvest going to fulfil the Plan?’

‘I hope so, if we can iron out the problems.’

‘Darling, do you know when you’ll be back?’

‘No, but I think of you all the time. How are the children?’

‘Mariko’s right here. Would you like to speak to her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you OK, Hercules? You sound a little down.’

‘Just tired.’

‘Here’s Mariko.’

‘Hello, Papasha!’ A voice as beautiful to him as the nightingale’s call. He struggled not to weep.

‘Darling Mariko: how are the dogs in their school?’

‘They’re doing a singing class today.’

‘Kiss them from me.’ His voice shook. Love, he thought suddenly, is only enough if it can exist in the world one lives in.

‘Mariko, I kiss you with all my heart,’ said Satinov.

‘Bye, Papasha! Here’s Mama again.’

‘I love you, Hercules,’ said Tamriko, sending, he felt, a ray of warmth that seemed too generous to emanate from her small body. It reached him faithfully, as she had meant it to, like an arrow flying through a dense forest to find its mark.

‘I love you too, Tamriko.’

‘Until tomorrow then,’ she said, and hung up.

It hit him then that he might never see Tamriko and Mariko ever again. That he had been so dangerously obsessed with Dashka that he had scarcely cared about his true life. It was only now, as Tamriko put Mariko on the line, that he remembered the interrogation protocols of Marshal Shako. As a Politburo member he had been sent a copy; they contained the following lines:

How much torture had been required to elicit this from his brave friend? But he, Satinov, had read the words like a blind man and had gone about his life as a sleepwalker somehow navigates the familiar stairs and corridors of his life without seeing them.

The next morning, Chubin had come into the office. ‘Comrade Molotov wonders respectfully if he might have a word with you and Comrade Dorov in his office?’

Satinov had walked down the long corridors and into the antechamber, where he found Molotov and Dorov waiting with odd expressions on their faces. Before he could say anything, Colonel Osipov, the head of Molotov’s bodyguard, had stepped in between him and them.

‘Hello, Comrade Satinov.’

‘Greetings, colonel.’

‘This is for you.’ He handed him an envelope.

He looked for Molotov and Dorov but they had gone.

‘When do I go?’ Satinov had asked Osipov.

‘Have you read it?’ Osipov had asked dubiously.

‘Of course. Do I leave now?’

‘No. First the Organs have arranged a meeting. Follow me.’

And so they’d led him into Comrade Molotov’s meeting room. At the table, between two plain-clothed secret policemen, sat a broken man, so thin he barely filled the shabby suit, his shirt collar loose around his bent neck, his face scarred and blistered, his once luxuriant moustaches now meagre. Osipov told Satinov to sit facing this man, and he knew this was a so-called ‘confrontation’ to elicit a confession from him.

‘You recognize this man, Comrade Satinov?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Colonel Losha Babanava.’

‘Would you accept, Comrade Satinov, that Babanava knows everything about you?’

‘No, not everything,’ replied Satinov. Babanava did not know about Dashka. Or did he? ‘But yes, he knows a lot.’

‘Babanava resisted us a little. He’s strong man. But now you must tell what you know, Losha.’

‘I’ve told them everything. Everything. I’m sorry, boss.’ Losha raised his eyes, and Satinov looked into them searchingly. Had Losha really betrayed their friendship? He wouldn’t blame him if he had, but he had to consider what his former bodyguard knew. Could Losha know his only secret: Dashka?

‘You see?’ said Colonel Osipov. ‘So save yourself much pain, Comrade Satinov, and tell us what Losha has already confirmed. Losha?’

A lull. One of the guards tapped Losha’s arm, pointing at a typed paper before him. He seemed to awaken.

‘I heard you say often that our planes were flying coffins for our pilots and that this was Stalin’s fault.’

‘Not true. I never said that. Not once.’

Losha seemed to doze off and was again tapped. This time he had difficulty finding his place on the paper so Colonel Osipov whispered to him. He nodded.

‘You were recruited as a spy for the Americans and Zionists.’

‘Never,’ retorted Satinov. ‘I’ve been a devoted Leninist since I was sixteen.’

‘One more thing, Losha,’ said Colonel Osipov.

‘Yes,’ said Losha, ‘you corruptly…’

Satinov held his breath.

‘…at the front, when you were at Rokossovsky’s headquarters and Berlin, you corruptly sold medical supplies from the Ministry of Health for personal profit.’

Satinov gazed into Losha’s soul, aware suddenly that they were close to dismantling his entire life. Just a step from Dashka herself. Prussia. Berlin.

‘I know everything,’ said Losha, tears running down his face. ‘You didn’t think I knew of your immoral actions. But I’ve told them – kerboosh – everything!’

Afterwards, Satinov had been taken straight to the station and put in a reserved compartment with two Chekist guards. Now, two weeks later, he had not yet fallen off the precipice, but he was teetering on the edge of an abyss into which he would inevitably draw Tamriko and the children, and perhaps Dashka and hers. The children of Trotsky had all been liquidated; the lovely daughter of Tukhachevsky sent to the Arctic Circle. So far, he was in limbo, neither alive, nor in heaven, nor hell. He was still so enchanted by Dashka that he was utterly numb.

Satinov’s absorption of his own downfall, Genrikh’s role in it and Losha’s betrayals, was constantly interrupted by a replay of his last meeting with Dashka in the Aragvi private room, a memory so vivid that he could smell, feel, taste her pleasure in a rainstorm of images and sensations. Even now, he could see the flash of her white teeth as they came together, panting and laughing, their kisses that tasted of white wine, the smile on her gorgeously crooked mouth, the satin of her bare amber-skinned thighs, and her sitting on him, over him, in the vain hope that a waiter barging into the alcove would never guess that he was deep inside her, demurely covered by her pleated white skirt.

‘You know this just can’t go on,’ she had said afterwards, seemingly as amazed by their behaviour as he was, her pupils dilated with excitement. ‘But don’t look so solemn. Kiss me one more time.’

Now, as these memories fragmented and spun away, he realized that if he didn’t extricate himself from his current predicament, he was well on his way to receiving the nine grams in the back of the neck, and sooner rather than later.

54

‘THIS IS FROM me to wish you a long and happy married life,’ said Senka, handing over a book entitled Western Philosophy Since 1900.

‘Darling Senka,’ cried Serafima. ‘I’ll treasure this forever.’

She was standing on the platform of the Belorussian Station in a flowery summer dress holding a little cream leather case as jets of steam blew white and feathery out of the train. All along the grimy platform, people were saying goodbyes in a myriad of permutations. Anyone seeing Serafima and her party would have presumed that they were schoolfriends and family despatching her on a holiday – but she feared that she would never see them or Russia again. And however much she was in love with Frank (who was waiting for her at his new posting in Paris) and looking forward to a new life in the West, she realized that the cliché was true: her soul was Russian and that meant she already missed Moscow, the diamond crystals of ice on her windows, the verses on the poet’s plinth in Pushkin Square, the silver birches in the forests, the hidden rushing of water beneath the snows as the thaw came, the ochre and duck-egg blue of old palaces – and that was before she had even looked into the eyes of her friends. The Dorov and Satinov children were all there to see her go. They had shared not just school but the Children’s Case too and so far she had only started to say goodbye to Senka. She was so moved that she could scarcely speak.

‘No offence, but your make-up’s all running,’ said Senka, but he too had started to cry and she took him in her arms, tiny in his Little Professor’s suit, and hugged him.

‘I know, darling Little Professor,’ she said. ‘Do I look awful?’

‘I’m afraid you do look scary, but I don’t care. I will always miss you and think of you as long as I live because you’ve always been my favourite grown-up, Serafimochka. And I will come and see you,’ he said. ‘Please reserve me my usual presidential-imperial suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel!’

‘Do you promise?’ she asked.

‘Come on, Senka, you’re upsetting her,’ said Minka, pulling her brother away. ‘Serafimochka, good luck, my dearest friend. Promise to write soon and we’ll all have to visit you.’ She put her arms around Serafima and held her close. ‘To think it all started that day at the Bolshoi and you managed to keep it secret.’

‘The big boys always said you were a mystery,’ Senka laughed. ‘And they were right! I think it’s the biggest romance I’ve ever heard of, greater than all the romances of the medieval troubadours.’

‘Quiet, Senka, or you’ll make me cry again,’ said Serafima.

Her father climbed down from the carriage where he had been stowing her trunk. ‘God, that was heavy,’ said Romashkin, wiping his brow.

‘It’s got all her books in it,’ said Sophia Zeitlin. She was wearing a purple suit with a white mink collar and a wide-brimmed hat veiled in white chiffon. ‘Good luck, my darling.’

‘I’m missing you already,’ said her father. ‘Send us a telegram as soon as you arrive in Paris. Come back and see us soon or we’ll visit you too often!’ He wiped his eyes and Sophia hugged him as she had not done for years. ‘You’d better get in. You leave in five minutes,’ he added.

George took Serafima’s hand and helped her into her carriage where the best seat had been reserved. A uniformed steward asked if she had any cases to be put above the seat.

Senka jumped into the carriage and put his hand in hers.

‘As long as I live,’ he said, ‘I’ll always wish it had been me instead of that American. Am I really too young for you?’

‘Oh Senka,’ Serafima said, laughing through her tears, ‘out you get!’

The train groaned, doors slammed and the carriages creaked and shunted as if they were waking up. Senka and George jumped off the train. A whistle blew. Serafima heard someone calling her name, and looked through the Dorovs and Satinovs to see Andrei Kurbsky running up the platform. She leaned out of the window to say goodbye to him just as the train jerked into movement.

A puff of steam whooshed out as if the train had coughed. And then it was too late for any more farewells as the train moved away, leaving George and the Dorovs and Andrei Kurbsky waving and blowing kisses until she could no longer see them.

It was long after midnight in Samarkand, and the cockroaches in Satinov’s red-walled house were manoeuvring as confidently across the floor as tanks in a Red Square parade.

Satinov put down his pen and called the guards. The letter would be despatched at once to wherever Stalin was.

He just hoped it wasn’t too late.

55

AS THE TRAIN raced through the rolling emerald meadows and ravaged battlefields of Belorussia, Serafima sat in her luxury compartment watching birches rising slim on silvery parade, ruined villages, blackened tanks and row upon row of skeletal trucks. Sometimes, starving wild-eyed women, more like scarecrows than people, ran alongside the train, their yellow fingers outstretched for a crumb of food.

Serafima lay back in her seat, imagining Frank waiting for her on the platform at the Gare de l’Est in Paris, executing that rakish two-fingered salute that always melted her heart. Would he bring flowers? What do two people about to embark on a new life say to each other? None of it mattered because they loved each other.

She could not imagine what New York would be like. She knew that, after some months at the Foreign Ministers’ Conference in Paris, Frank would be taking her back to his townhouse in Manhattan. She closed her eyes and tried to replay images from American movies in her mind, but then she stopped. All that mattered was to see her darling Frank, to kiss him, to hold him, to be his wife. She thought back to the moment they had met at the Bolshoi, the first time they made love, the way he traced the snakeskin on her side and made her feel it was the most beautiful talisman of love the world had ever known. She remembered the shots on the bridge that she had thought marked the end of her romance; her arrest by Abakumov; the prison cell in Lubianka; her mother’s insistence that she delay her departure so she could win that part and her own unease as she agreed; the terrible moment her visa was refused; the miracle of how Stalin had looked at Frank and made it all possible.

‘Just fifteen minutes to Minsk,’ said her steward. ‘Would you like chai? Lemonade? Juice? Wine? Champagnski?’

‘Yes. Tea, please.’

The train was already braking for Minsk as he brought in the tea in a china teapot and served it with a napkin on his arm. He gave her the teacup on a saucer as if, Serafima thought, they were in an English duke’s drawing room.

She glanced out of the window. She saw the wrecked suburbs of Minsk as she drank the tea and noticed a house missing every one of its walls but still containing all the beds and tables, toys and books of its vanished family. Where is that family now? It was her last thought before the world started to whirl in giddily quickening circles, stealing the strength from her muscles. Dimly, she heard her teacup smashing into smithereens as her head dropped forward, and oblivion descended softly over her like a black velvet hood.

Satinov was sleeping when the telephone started to ring. It was a few hours after midnight, but he picked it up anyway.

‘Comrade Satinov?’

‘Yes?’

‘I have Comrade Stalin for you.’

Vibrations on the line twanged and looped along the wires that crossed steppes and deserts.

‘Bicho! Boy! Are you busy there?’ It was him.

‘Comrade Stalin, Bolshevik greetings.’

‘If I’m not interrupting your work on the sugar harvest, do you have time to talk?’

‘Yes, Comrade Stalin.’

‘Hercules, you’ve been re-elected as a Party Secretary and First Deputy Premier.’

A breath of relief. ‘Thank you, Comrade Stalin.’

‘The Party is always just, Hercules. Comrade Stalin is always fair. Come visit an old man who knows how to grow the best tomatoes in Georgia and we can sing “Suliko” on the verandah at night. Do you remember?’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’

‘No hard feelings eh?’

‘None.’

‘Too many informers in this country. Too many yesmen! But everything has to be checked out.’

‘Vigilance is our first duty.’

Satinov realized that, although Losha had been tortured, he had not betrayed him. But he had known about the affair with Dashka, which was why he had mentioned Prussia and Berlin: to let Satinov know that he knew and would die rather than tell. Satinov swallowed the sudden lump in his throat. He had never had a better friend than Losha. But he knew Losha would never come out alive.

‘So to business,’ said Stalin. ‘Molotov has displayed arrogant insubordination. Go to Moscow. Deliver a harsh reprimand. And one other thing. You curate Health?’

‘If you wish it, Comrade Stalin.’

‘We need a new minister. That woman doctor didn’t work out – they’re checking her out. And that husband of hers, what a bungler. There’s a plane on its way.’

The phone went dead and Satinov remained half sitting, half crouching on the edge of the bed, staring into the darkness, absorbing this news. ‘That woman doctor… checking her out.’ The spell cast by Stalin’s favour was disturbed by his confused anxiety for Dashka. What had he done?

Skidding tyres and slamming doors; the driveway was illuminated and men in uniforms were turning on the lights in the house. Colonel Osipov, who had informed him of his downfall a few weeks earlier, came into the bedroom.

‘Come on, Comrade Satinov,’ he said, shaking him as one might wake a child. ‘Morning comes early for the fortunate.’

The first day of the winter term at School 801.

Many children had left and Director Kapitolina Medvedeva was proud that most had passed into Moscow University and a few had won places at the élite Institute of Foreign Languages. As she stood at the Golden Gates that September morning, waiting for the parents and children to arrive, she noticed out of the corner of her eye that Innokenty Rimm had, as she had suggested, stationed himself behind her to hurry the children into the school and avoid a long queue.

‘Everything’s ready, just as you asked, comrade director,’ said Rimm.

‘Very good, Comrade Rimm.’ Now she could finally allow herself a little satisfaction that she was back in the job that she loved, while knowing that only one thing had saved her from the unspeakable fate that had befallen her colleague Golden.

After hearing the grave accusations against her at the tribunal at the Education Sector of the Central Committee, she had said: ‘Inspectors, comrades. May I speak? This concerns a message from the highest authorities that I think you will find relevant to my case.’

And she had handed them the scrap of paper with its red-crayonned scrawl: To Teacher Medvedeva. Svetlana certainly knows her history. The Party values good teachers. J. St.

Yes, Svetlana Stalina had loved history, and one snowy morning in 1938, the little girl with the freckles and the red hair had arrived at class with a note which she had delivered to her favourite teacher.

Kapitolina had told no one about the note, and shown it to no one. Yet this sacred piece of paper had saved her.

The limousines were driving up. And there was Comrade Satinov arriving with his daughter Mariko. He looked darker and leaner than before, and the lines on his face more pronounced.

‘Good morning, Comrade Satinov,’ said Kapitolina Medvedeva. ‘Welcome back for another term at School 801.’