One Night in Winter

56

MOVE CLOSER OR you won’t see. Move too close and they will see you.

The half-lit Yaroslavsky Station: a freezing hall of flickering lights amidst the darkness of a Muscovite winter through which flit hooded silhouettes and half-faces concealed by the hats, scarves and greatcoats of those who wait. Some of them have been waiting for a very long time for this moment.

The train appears: two needle points of light as it curls and twists its way into the station.

The crowd surges forward. Some people move to the edge of the platform, establishing themselves as official welcomers. Others – who know what to expect or who expect to be disappointed, or those who don’t want to be recognized – hang back. No one dares speak louder than a whisper so that the station with its high baroque roof hisses like a cathedral of spirits. Only their frozen clouds of breath, and the blue-grey of their cigarette smoke, confirms they are speaking at all. All are united by a sense of constricted emotion; all are joyous yet fearful so that you can sense the muffled heartbeats and quick breaths deep within their fur coats and scarves.

For those who hang back, it is now hard to see anything at all amidst plumes of steam. Now they must strain forward so as not to miss their friends and family who are returning from the infamous Gulag camps of Pechora and Norilsk, in that faraway Arctic Circle of Hades.

Look – here they are! Figures are stepping out of the train, carrying their carpet bags and bundles and battered leather cases. Their faces are yellow and drawn yet they too seem as eager and as afraid as those who have come to meet them. Some embrace; some weep; others search for loved ones who have not survived the long wait, and are not there.

Look, there! There’s a familiar face. Is it she? No, it could have been, but… Or there?

Two women step down from the train, helping each other: one is older, one younger. Both have aged and yet are preserved as parchment is preserved in the infernal world of the Gulags. Is it she? Yes, unmistakably, there are her dark eyes and crooked mouth, even though her lips seem so much thinner. She is wearing a much-darned, shapeless gabardine coat and a threadbare rabbit-fur hat, and is helping her friend, who is much taller and even more dishevelled, with her little cream suitcase, held together by wispy pieces of rope. And when they turn to peer down the platform to see who might be meeting them… yes, it’s them. It is Dashka Dorova and Serafima Romashkina come back to live in a world in which so much has changed; in which Stalin is dead and Beria executed; in which some camps are being closed and many prisoners liberated.

Slowly they head down the platform, their faces illuminating and then darkening in the occasional lamps, sometimes vanishing into the steam and re-emerging, wisps of vapour wrapped around them like cloaks, born and reborn again and again. Now they are walking faster, their faces raised, their lips slightly parted, Dashka and Serafima, holding hands for strength.

He moves closer to see who meets them; watches as they approach a huddled crescent of waiting families, noticing how they slow down, hoping and fearing. Her face is painfully meagre and fallow, its spirit almost extinguished, she who was once so peachy and sumptuous. Her hair is probably grey, he thinks with a stab of pain, remembering its heavy, thick darkness.

She is hugging Serafima – how close they seem – and then Serafima goes one way, Dashka the other.

He follows Dashka. And now she is pointing and dropping her case and opening her arms and her face is losing years and she is smiling, and it is as though dawn has come early and the ochre rays of a rising sun are illuminating and warming the gloom of this frozen station. Without thought, the muscles in his legs bunch for the sprint to reach her first so she will know that she is still loved and has been loved all along. Has she known that? Has she thought of him? All he wants suddenly is to kiss her face, her eyes, her lips, to tell her so many things, to chatter as if no one else was in the room, to hear her stories of the camps, to discover if Academician Almaz is alive, to tell her that he has always loved her.

Do not move a single step closer, he tells himself. Lower your fedora. Step back into the shadows. For now, he can see whom she is greeting: the light has caught Genrikh Dorov, but it is a new, scarcely recognizable Genrikh Dorov. He seems fuller in the face, his skin rosy, even his white hair seems thicker. He divorced Dashka when she was arrested in 1945. In the hierarchy of their regimented world, it was the done thing. The alternative was probably death.

Genrikh, banned from visiting Moscow, has come to meet her. He could be arrested just for being here and yet, for the first time in his life, he has broken a Party rule to make her feel loved after all she has been through. Tears gather in his eyes as he watches this. He is grateful that she is being met and cherished as she deserves. That is why he’s here, isn’t it? But in truth, he is bitterly disappointed; he feels somehow rejected.

Genrikh is holding Dashka in his arms and he can see they are talking. Now she will learn how, on the day of Stalin’s death, the leaders had dismissed Genrikh for his ‘excesses’ and exiled him to the provinces. Power had poisoned him, yet his downfall seems to have rejuvenated him.

What is she saying? ‘Where’s Senka?’ And Genrikh is replying, ‘Senka’s waiting with the others. He’s a young man now. He can’t wait to see you. There hasn’t been a day when we haven’t talked about you…’

The crowd pushes forward. Pull your hat down. Melt into the shadows as if you were never here. Go out into the streets and gather yourself; discarding this vision of ghosts, denying this act of quixotic indulgence, return again to Tamriko and the contented, settled home you have made together.

57

IT WAS DASHKA who had saved her life. Eight years previously, when she’d boarded the train that would take her to Paris, and to her new life, her future with Frank had seemed like a dream come true.

And then she had woken up to find herself back in the Lubianka as the drugs wore off. Her train journey, her departure, her permission to leave the country – all had been promised to the Americans. Now her sudden sickness meant she could not travel until she was in better health. Later she realized that her personal tragedy was a symptom of Stalin’s deteriorating relationship with the Americans, and there would never again be an opportunity to ask for such a favour nor the goodwill to grant it.

Ten years under Article 158 for spying for a foreign power (in other words, consorting with an American, though not for conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet State, for which she would have received a death sentence or twenty-five years): it was only then that she finally began to understand what her interrogation had really been about. Colonel Komarov explained that she was no longer under suspicion for masterminding the Fatal Romantics’ conspiracy because her teacher, Benya Golden, had dictated this wicked Jewish-Trotskyite-American conspiracy to the weak-minded Nikolasha Blagov, because he had been in love with her.

‘But that’s not true,’ Serafima had protested.

‘You want another ten years for lying to us?’ Komarov replied. ‘Just confirm his testimony and that’s the end of the Children’s Case.’

‘What will happen to him?’

Komarov drew a line across his neck, and Serafima grasped that Benya Golden had sacrificed himself, not just for her sake, but to liberate all the children he had taught in School 801.

It was a miracle that she survived the train journey to Pechora and Norilsk, unlike the people who died and whose bodies she saw tossed out of the moving carriages, not unlike the slaves she would soon see toiling on timber-felling and railway-building in all weathers, dying in the snows, left frozen stiff in their snowy tombs until they emerged, perfectly preserved, in the spring.

When she arrived in Pechora, she was assigned to the daily logging gangs but within a few days, the sleepless nights in the barracks, the starvation rations, the exhausting physical strain, prompted a fever so severe it brought her close to death. She lay in her dormitory considering the offers of leering camp guards and tattooed gangster bosses to become their mistress. How else could she survive? But the truth was she didn’t want to: she hoped to perish of heartbreak if not malnutrition or fever. What was there to live for? Her death would be her wedding gift to Frank, no less romantic and sacred for his never knowing of it.

Somehow she made it to the sanatorium, a hut with a few bloodstained mattresses and no medicines; there was a corpse lying next to her, a jagged mouth open in a final silent scream. There were no doctors. She passed in and out of consciousness – and then, one day, she opened her eyes.

‘You’re going to live, Serafimochka,’ said a familiar voice. And there was Dashka Dorova smiling down at her, and Serafima wondered if she was in heaven and looking down at the Golden Gates outside School 801 with George and Minka and Senka.

‘Dr Dorova, what are you doing here? Were you denounced for something?’

‘That’s the one thing we zeks never discuss up here. But in truth, I simply don’t know. Listen, dear, they’ve asked me to set up a camp hospital – for the guards as well, of course – and’ – she leaned over Serafima and whispered – ‘I’ve told them about your nursing training. Understood, angel? I need you.’

And so it was that, over the next few years, Dashka Dorova lobbied the MVD authorities tirelessly to get a few basic medicines and beds, and for any doctors or nurses in the camp to be assigned to her, thus saving her, Serafima, and the lives of many others in the process.

Gradually the two women came to trust each other. Smoking cigarettes, they often talked late into the evenings about the Children’s Case; and what it had all meant; and Serafima’s own contribution in encouraging the Fatal Romantics’ play-acting, in the hope that their make-believe world of poetry and romance would divert her classmates’ attention from herself and her secret.

At first, Serafima consoled herself by reciting ‘The Talisman’, by looking up at the blue of the sky every day and telling herself she would never stop loving Frank, and that they would be together one day, whatever happened. Over the many hours, years even, that she and Dashka smoked and drank Armenian arak – in the summer, tormented by clouds of mosquitoes on the stope of their hut, in winter around the fire, enshrouded by the perpetual night of the Arctic, days which were dominated by the petty triumphs, vicious feuds and fatal perils of camp life – Dashka talked about her children, and above all of her Senka, whose letters she read and reread and almost memorized. Patiently Dashka listened to Serafima’s speeches of love and regret, without telling her what she should do. But she guided her inch by inch to a new realization, a new Serafima. ‘Every love story’s a requiem,’ she told her. One night, Serafima looked at her, her eyes wild.

‘He’s never coming back,’ she said. ‘I’m never going to find him again. It was all just a dream that could never have come true. And all these years I’ve been living this lie.’

She got up, threw open the door of the hut and ran out into the snow. ‘Wherever you are, Frank, I release you. Be free!’ she shouted up at the rounded blue vault of stars. ‘Goodbye, my love!’

‘Get back inside, girl,’ ordered Dashka from the wooden doorway.

‘Does he hear me in America? Do you hear me, Frank? I’m a ghost to you now, and I don’t expect an answer. But I want you to live your life, and be happy.’

‘Hush! You’ll attract the guards and wake up the patients and you’re not even wearing a coat, you little fool. Come in!’ Dashka ventured out on to the snow in her fur slippers to grab Serafima and pull her back inside.

‘Feel better, darling Serafimochka?’ she asked her when they were sitting by the fire again. ‘You’ve done the right thing. Now you’ll be happier and you’ll be stronger to endure this new life of ours.’

Serafima took Dashka’s hand. ‘Thank you for all your patience.’

‘You’ll always have the scars,’ Dashka said. ‘The surgeons can never remove the fragments of shrapnel. They stay in your body forever, almost forgotten until one day, you’re jolted and then they’ll give you a pang of agony that makes you cry out. But you can live through it, I promise you that.’

Not for the first time, Serafima wondered about Dashka. She respected her as a former minister and doctor, but she was a very private person, an enigma, apparently so tough. Long blinded by Dashka’s sunniness, she saw there was shade there too.

‘You sound like you have some experience of this yourself?’

Dashka inhaled her cigarette and stared into the fire. ‘What’s important is not who you love but who loves you.’

Now, eight years later, Serafima said goodbye to Dashka on Yaroslavsky Station and watched her husband welcome her home. Like so many others, Serafima had not been able to get a message to her parents, but she eagerly sifted through the crowd of faces to see if someone had come to meet her. Some families had been notified; some did not know when their loved ones would be returning. She was just about to head out into the streets to wave down a car to drive her to her parents’ apartment when she spotted a familiar face with a diffident smile.

‘Andrei? Is that you?’ she asked, suddenly delighted to see him.

‘Yes,’ replied Andrei Kurbsky. He was still handsome in his wholesome way but much shabbier. ‘I’m so happy to see you.’

‘Who are you here to meet?’

‘You, of course.’

‘But how did you know I was on this train?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘How lucky we bumped into each other.’

‘Not quite luck. I didn’t like to think that there’d be no one here when you came home.’

‘How did you know that we were being released now?’

‘Your mother told me you were in Pechora. I asked a favour so I knew it would be sometime this month.’

‘This month? But that means—’

Andrei smiled and adjusted his heavy spectacles, blushing slightly. ‘Yes, I’ve met every train.’

‘Every night?’

‘Yes. It’s not so bad… I bring a book and smoke a few cigarettes and sometimes warm up with a jot of vodka. Oh, here, I have some for you.’ He gave her a small flask and she took a swig.

The vodka streaked its burning path down her throat.

‘Thank you, Andryusha!’ She took another shot. ‘I don’t have anyone else waiting for me. I don’t have anywhere to be…’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

It struck her then that he must have always loved her, even when it was not clear she was alive or that she would ever return. She could see too he was not sure how much of this devotion to reveal, afraid that it might frighten her off.

‘But you never wrote… I never knew,’ she said.

‘How could I tell you?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t know where to begin.’

She raised her fingers to her face. ‘I look truly awful. I was once a little attractive but I must seem like a sort of witch now.’

‘Not to me,’ Andrei said, speaking in a rush. ‘You were always entirely your own person, and now you’re even more so. You’ve probably forgotten that I saw you off on the train that day when you were leaving to be married in the West. I told myself then that I’d meet the train when you came back.’

‘You did see me off,’ Serafima said, remembering his face as the train pulled away. She had not thought about him once in eight years yet now she was nourished by the feeling he had been with her even then and that somehow she’d known him well a long time. ‘It’s cold here, isn’t it? I’m shivering.’

He picked up her case. ‘May I? I suppose you want to go to your parents’ place, but’ – he searched her face – ‘I have a small apartment, and it’s warm and full of books and…’

As he pushed his way through the crowd into the street where his car was parked, Serafima followed him with tears streaming down her face; she was crying not just out of gratitude for his kindness, but because it was only at this very second that she was really letting go of Frank Belman. This was the end of her old life and the start of a new one with Andrei Kurbsky.

As she passed through the arches of the station, she saw a tall man in the shadows. Through the blur of her tears, she glimpsed a face that reminded her of Hercules Satinov. But it couldn’t be him: he was more important than ever now, so what would he be doing here? Pulling down his black fedora, the man disappeared into the night and when Serafima blinked, he was gone.