Red Sky at Noon

I

Fabiana was in her hospital tent, reading a book of Foscolo’s poetry while she waited for Patient Number One to wake up. It was early morning, and she had worked on her patient much of the night. After administering a light anaesthetic, she had removed the bullet from his shoulder that now lay on a tray, crumpled like a metallic bug. She had cleansed the wound and sewn it up again. Then she had undressed the man and washed him with a sponge. Now she sat watching him. She had worked alone, lifting him and turning him, and she was weary. Her patient would probably sleep for a while more.

She shook herself awake. The operation on her patient made her realize that she was herself, quite herself, in the way she had always been before she married. Sitting in the tent, she thought about her life: she remembered her school, run by the Nevers nuns, near her home in Venice, a school for rich girls and aristocrats. She had got a scholarship there, and a teacher had changed her life, a nun who’d been born in Russia and taught her history and Russian. After that, she’d trained as a nurse at the Hospital of SS Giovanni e Paolo with its monumental façade and shabby, poorly lit wards. Everything before Russia took place in that small part of Venice and yet it had all led here, to this moment in this war.

I am a widow, Fabiana thought, and if I go home, I will return to my parents’ apartment with nothing. I’m not a young widow either; I’m in my thirties. I entered the marriage with nothing and I came out with nothing, and I am precisely the same. Ippolito did not change me an iota. I just have his name, the memory of his punches on my skin – and Russia. It’s the things I have seen out here that have changed me.

She sighed, and had turned back to her poetry book, reading Foscolo’s ‘I Sepolcri’ – on the subtle line beween life and death, and how out of this desolation can burst a hymn to life and love, and the sweetness of illusions – when Il Primo stirred. Rewarding herself with a handful of cherries and a slice of black Borodino bread, she reviewed her work. The operation had not been difficult. She was good at the suturing. She was strong too, and unembarrassed by his naked body. When a man was so ill, it was like caring for a child or a pet. The cut on his forehead was a scratch on which a native doctor had spread a sticky poultice that may have helped it seal itself. Perhaps Il Primo was a Cossack, yet the ankles and thighs were chafed from riding, suggesting he was new to life in the saddle. His face and body were black and blue with bruising, and he had been struck with whips and blunt objects. Perhaps he wasn’t one of Mandryka’s torturers but one of their prisoners? Either way he was lucky. His head wound had not fractured his skull; the bullet in his shoulder had missed all his major organs and muscle groups. He had been beaten but he had escaped, and he’d been just strong enough to ride away. Plus his horse had waited with him, instead of bolting and dragging him across the countryside, something that killed more men during cavalry engagements than the slash of sabres.

‘Chiunque tu sia, sei fortunato,’ she said aloud. ‘Whoever you are, you are lucky.’

The man opened his eyes and looked right into her face. His eyes were an unusually bright blue with yellow speckles in the middle.

‘No one… who knows me… would call me… lucky,’ he said in a whistling wheeze in hesitant Italian.

‘Don’t try to talk,’ she said strictly in Russian. ‘Please rest. I don’t want you to spoil my hard work.’

‘Strict!’ he said, falling asleep again. Italian words, he thought, Italy – what memories of happiness he had, of Maxim Gorky’s villa in Sorrento. It had overlooked the Bay of Naples. He recalled one particular night when he and Gorky had sat out in the heat and talked past midnight. Plates of pasta were brought out and consumed, and more bottles of wine. They talked of politics, books and revolution, and love of course, making toasts. The old writer told him stories of his life on the road as a penniless tramp, of his first fame as a writer, of the fighting in Moscow in 1905, his respect and friendship for Lenin, and how he had been disappointed in his dictatorship and gone into exile. They had spoken of Russia as the cicadas chirped, and jazz played on the gramophone. Benya was still young then, in his twenties, learning his craft as a writer, and had been dazzled to know Gorky, to sit with Babel and others. He had learned Italian, drank espresso every morning, made love to Gorky’s Sicilian maid every afternoon, and in the evenings joined the little commune of Russian writers and their mistresses. My God, the food, the mountains, and the beauty of the women! Then Stalin had persuaded Gorky to return to Moscow, tempting him with flattery, with a mansion and an endless allowance. Benya visited the house and there was Gorky, his mistress and his son, living in an art deco palace that had become a magnificent prison full of secret police spies. But Gorky still read Benya’s stories, correcting them himself, and published them in his journals, and he had introduced him to the Party grandees in the Union of Writers. ‘Write about war if you get the chance; war is all life distilled to its essentials,’ Gorky had told him before he died. ‘It’s the grit in all of us.’

When the Spanish Civil War started, Benya, hungry for ‘the grit in all of us’, every writer’s ideal material, rushed to Madrid. His despatches to Pravda recounted his adventures at the front, and the irony of being a frail Jewish writer amongst fanatical killers. Once, on the Madrid front, he had even seized a rifle and fired at the Fascists, just for the thrill of being alive and so close to death. During the fighting on the Ebro, he had learned to ride and galloped out with the soldiers, afraid and yet so thrilled that he was where it mattered, at the hot stope of war and life, where every man who cared about the struggle wanted to be.

And then the Terror started in Russia. There were show trials and famous Bolsheviks were being executed but Benya never seriously considered staying in the West; he was Russian and he was sure his soul would wither abroad. Besides, back in Moscow, the secret police would surely never touch him. But when he got home, he found they were arresting many of his friends: writers, officials, actors, and their wives and families, and they never came back. Eight Grammes in the head or the Camps, that’s what they got. Benya wrote a few articles in praise of Stalin, just to be safe, but then, so sterile was the atmosphere, he dried up altogether, and couldn’t write a word.

The Head of the Writers’ Union called him into his office one morning and sat him at the T-shaped desk under the obligatory portrait of Stalin.

‘So, Writer Golden, how is the book coming along?’

‘I haven’t started yet—’

‘Listen carefully, Writer Golden. Last week Comrade Stalin said, “Why doesn’t this Golden write anything on Spain? On our fighters there? Where’s the book?”’

‘Comrade Stalin said that? He knows I exist?’ Benya didn’t know whether to be flattered or terrified.

‘Comrade Stalin reads everything, and that includes your articles. Comrade Stalin understands literature and, now Gorky is dead, he takes an interest in you. I don’t need to tell you this is an honour, but that wasn’t all Comrade Stalin said. “Is Golden on strike?” he asked. “Is he holding out on us?” When Comrade Stalin makes such a joke, he does so for a reason. Well, the Party demands that you produce some work now. So I’m sending you to the writers’ resort at Sukhumi for three months. Don’t come back without a book!’

Hailed by critics as ‘vivid, grotesque and sensual’, Benya’s Spanish Stories had been a bestseller in Russia and beyond. The Head of the Writers’ Union called him back: ‘Comrade Stalin enjoyed the book but he noted it was more emotional than political.’ He checked his notebook. ‘He grinned and said: “This scribbling Casanova cares more for skirt than war…”’

Benya was confused: ‘Is that praise or isn’t it?’

The Head of the Writers’ Union smiled lugubriously, relishing the power Stalin had delegated to him. ‘Take Comrade Stalin’s comments to heart, Citizen Writer.’

II

Benya awoke. He didn’t know where he was. It was so humid that the drugs and heat anaesthetized him into a trance that was deeply pleasurable and he felt he could sleep forever. He saw a chair and a nurse sitting there, not looking at him but facing away, reading a book. It was a scene of exquisite langour. And then she reached up and took off her white nurse’s cap and started to pull the clips out of her hair. It was copiously thick and when her dark brown locks fell around her ears and down her neck, he could almost smell its sleek sweetness.

He watched how her hands reached down and took a strand of hair and plaited it, and then reached for another… Hands, fingers stretching, gathering the thick tresses, holding them, weaving them through and starting again, time and again. He watched for a very long time and he thought it was the most beautiful thing. It was almost hypnotic, the rhythm of it, the delicacy, the repetition, the concentration, the thickness of the nurse’s hair and yet its exquisite fineness, and the scent of skin and sweat; he was observing a delicious ritual that soothed and delighted him. He plunged in and out of sleep; sometimes he heard his own voice speaking and realized that he was delirious but always rapturous, and each time he opened his eyes, the nurse was still there, sometimes reading, other times combing through her hair, and each time it transfigured him into someone else in another, kinder place.

He heard the whispering shift of the canvas flap, and his eyes opened a slit. An ominous figure was standing in the doorway, one moment in uniform, the next in a carapace of armoured, ridged skin like a dinosaur. Benya gasped in fright, but the nurse had turned. She evidently knew the man in the black shirt.

‘Buonasera, Console Malamore.’

Malamore circled the bed, looking at Benya, inspecting the dressings on his wounds. Benya lay still.

‘You did this yourself?’ said Malamore, boots creaking.

‘Si, signore.’

‘Impressive.’

‘For a woman, you mean?’ she said, raising her chin in a defiant way.

‘Killing things is easier, that’s all.’

‘That I can see,’ she replied. ‘No one finds that a problem out here.’

He took out a cigarette and struck a match.

‘Not in here, consul’ – and she blew it out. Benya almost laughed out loud with surprise and approval.

‘Strict, eh?’

‘You’re not the first to say that. This is a medical facility.’

‘It’s a tent in a damned Russian village, that’s what it is,’ Malamore rasped.

‘Well, in here, I do as I wish,’ she said.

‘Some men wouldn’t take kindly to that…’ Malamore said.

If this was his attempt at flirting, thought Benya, the old crocodile needs some lessons.

‘How do you put a woman in her place, consul? Ippolito’s way?’

Benya wondered who Ippolito was – her husband? It sounded as if he was violent. He felt protective suddenly of this nurse with the braided hair.

‘God bless his memory,’ Malamore said, ‘but I guess his way didn’t get him anywhere, did it?’

The nurse crossed herself. He is dead, thought Benya. Thank goodness!

‘He didn’t suffer. You know I saw him. It was a single shot. Just plain bad luck.’ Malamore coughed. ‘I must go,’ he said but at the flap he turned back. ‘This is for you.’ He put a bottle of wine on the table. ‘It’s Russian stuff from the Crimea. Massandra. I’m not good with words… but only a strong woman… can do this.’ He gestured towards Benya. ‘Well, my mother was an able woman. She could do something like this. She and you.’

The canvas flapped shut.

Fabiana dropped into her chair with a sigh.

‘Sti cazzi!’ exclaimed Benya. His temperature was still dangerously high, and it came out louder than he’d intended.

‘What did you say?’ said the nurse, sounding shocked.

‘Sti cazzi! Porca puttana!’

‘That’s vile language.’ She looked at him very strictly, her black eyebrows lowered, but Benya found he was smiling a little, and then so was she. It was the first time Benya had laughed for ages.

‘You can swear in Italian too? Not bad but how do you even know that? Don’t use Roman swear words with me: I am a Venetian. How long have you been awake?’

‘A while,’ said Benya. He was shivering again but quite lucid.

‘So you heard all that?’

He nodded weakly. ‘It was painful.’

‘Your wounds, you mean?’

‘No, hearing that old crocodile flirt with you… Are you tempted?’

‘How about you mind your own problems?’

‘Am I an impertinent patient?’

‘The worst so far.’

‘I’m just a curioso,’ he said. He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know your name?’

‘Nurse Bacigalupe,’ she said cooly. ‘Are you thirsty?’ She gave him water. ‘Hungry?’

‘Very. What do we have? Carciofi alla romana? Fiori di zucca fritti? Spaghetti all’arrabbiata?’

‘You know some Italian? Maybe you’ve even been there?’

He nodded.

‘Stop showing off now. You need to rest or I’ll have to leave.’

‘What? And send back that crocodile to finish me off? What about the food? Is that ever coming?’

Smiling and shaking her head, she brought him bread, cheese and tomatoes, cutting them up for him. She watched him eat: he so enjoyed it, he sighed and almost mewed aloud.

‘This is as good a meal as I’ve ever had in my entire life,’ he said when he finished.

‘You’ve had a hard time.’

‘You too,’ he said, quoting: ‘“I’m a widow. I entered the marriage with nothing and I came out with nothing.”’

‘Cosa? How did you…’

‘You may not have been aware of it, but you’ve been talking to yourself. I heard it. I was awake.’

He had that high after surgery, before the anaesthetic wears off and the pain kicks in.

‘You were beaten,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘What happened?’

But he’d fallen back into unconsciousness, swooping through a confusion of images, all terrible, all overwhelmingly immediate, everything that he had forgotten, or had tried to. How he’d been sentenced to death, then the gold mines, the Splitter in the cavalry charge, the hands he’d seen reaching out of the earth, Melishko trapped under Elephant, Tonya and the shod man, the child and Dr Kapto. He was talking wildly in Russian and Fabiana understood phrases of it, and she went to him and stroked his forehead, calming, speaking softly to him, wiping the sweat that poured from him. Suddenly he started to weep, and she sat and held his hand until, as the sun rose higher in the sky and the heat became intense, he fell asleep.

She leaned over him. ‘Are you actually asleep now?’ she whispered tenderly. There was no reply. ‘I thought so.’

III

It was early evening and Klimov, Svetlana’s bodyguard, sat nervously in the hall of the apartment in the House on the Embankment just across the Moskva from the Kremlin. He was nervous because he could not see his charge. He smoked and listened; he was so fond of Svetlana. Her life was hard; she had lost her mother, and as for her father, well, he had other duties – so he, Klimov, did not want to spoil her fun. Surely a girl could go on a date? But she was his responsibility and he had to answer to Stalin who was not just the Tsar but also a Georgian father. He looked at his watch and became even more uneasy. She had been in the apartment for almost an hour. What was he to do?

Svetlana was in the kitchen with Lev Shapiro. The table was between them but they stared at each other across the spread of zakuski, salted fish and little vodka glasses. At first they said little. He was in uniform; she wore a floral dress. It was a hot summer’s evening in Moscow and she was so anxious that her palms were wet and she worried about the sweat under her arms: God forbid if it showed!

Lev Shapiro leaned across to her and took both of her hands in his big ones. ‘I’m so glad we could see each other,’ he said.

‘It wasn’t easy,’ she said.

‘Nothing priceless is easy,’ he replied. ‘And nothing easy is priceless.’

‘You leave tomorrow?’

‘Yes. To Stalingrad – before dawn. I have to be there…’ and he started to talk in a stream about ideas and projects, articles, journeys, scripts, impressions, which Svetlana found quite intoxicating. Wait, she wanted to ask about the script – was that a film or a play, and which newspaper was that article for, and what did Ehrenburg say to Grossman about whom?

‘But let’s not talk about that,’ he said suddenly.

‘But I wanted to ask about—’

‘We can’t waste time on that. You can ask me anything anytime. By letter. But here, now, every minute is golden. I had to tell you, Sveta, I’ve been thinking of you every minute since we met, since you wrote. It’s a strange and wonderful thing…’

‘Why strange?’

‘Well…’

‘Aren’t I too young?’

‘Yes, you are. You’re far too young, and yet you’re old too. You see things with an old soul and you’re so serious and so well read, I love to hear what you think of everything. And that’s why it’s the most unlikely thing and yet sometimes the most unlikely things are the best, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, yes!’ she said, longing suddenly to kiss him. She didn’t care that he was married or whatever he was. Actually she did want to ask about this too but what was the etiquette for that? She tried to remember in the nineteenth-century novels she had read: how did they discuss such things? She looked at Lev’s broad cheekbones, his thick head of hair, his wide, wide mouth – and they were still holding hands across the table.

Klimov was beginning to panic. What if his boss General Vlasik heard about this? What if Stalin heard? An angry Georgian father is a fearsome thing even when he isn’t the Man of Steel, the Father of Peoples, the Leader of the World’s Proletariat, the Supreme Commander, Chairman of the State Defence Committee, General Secretary and… but Stalin was all these things! He stood up, pacing. He had to call a halt to this right away. His dear little Svetlana deserved some love but this flashy scribbler, this Jew, was forty and married! This was a terrible mistake. He had to stop it at once.

He coughed, and then coughed again, more loudly.

‘Svetlana, I am coming in,’ he called out, ‘in a couple of minutes.’

They were running out of time. They stood up, and he leaned over and pressed his lips to Svetlana’s – just for a second; a hesitation, then all of a sudden they were kissing wildly. He seemed to devour her – like a lion of course. The feelings raced through her and she was dizzy with it. She could not make love to him – that was out of the question! Her father would never allow sex before marriage but oh my God she wanted more…

Klimov was listening outside. He had to do something, right now. He had to! If the girl lost her virginity – oh God, he would be finished, he would die in the Gulags, ground to Camp dust. He’d get the Eight Grammes!

He knocked at the door. ‘Svetlana! We must go!’

But Lev had seized her for another kiss and she was devouring him back just as fiercely. There was something so heavenly about the feelings of two people so in love, so perfectly attuned – Svetlana had never experienced such delight. Finally, staggering as if she was drunk, she stepped back.

Lev smiled at her. ‘God, I loved that! I loved kissing you!’ he whispered. Then, still whispering, he said, ‘Read every one of my articles and I will send my little Lioness special messages! I will call you and if you can’t talk, say “I’ve got too much homework”; if you’re thinking of me, say “The flowers in the Alexandrovsky are blossoming” and—’

‘And if I want to tell you I love you and want you every second, what then?’

‘Say “The little Lioness is hungry”.’

‘Oh my God,’ Svetlana whispered, steadying herself on the table. ‘The Lioness is hungry.’

IV

The Red Cross tent was empty; Il Primo was gone. For a moment, Fabiana panicked. It was too soon for him to get up. He had been delirious for much of the morning, shouting about death sentences and the shoeing of a man and shovels and sabres. He was not fit to be up. Had he wandered off? Had someone taken him? She had an idea of who or what he was, and the thought that he might have been arrested stole her breath like a punch to the stomach. She ran out of the tent, looking one way and then the other.

‘I adore this countryside,’ he had said when he had woken properly earlier in the afternoon. The patient was certainly a chatterbox. Madonna! He never stopped, but he seemed interested in every detail of her life: her parents, what books she read, what were her dreams, her first loves, why did she speak Russian, and then how she felt about her marriage… No one had ever been interested in how she felt – certainly not her husband, who had scarcely asked her about herself in their four years together. In fact Patient Number One was more like her favourite girlfriends back home, but cleverer, and he was so funny as he switched between Russian and Italian, the very antithesis of Malamore who ground out his words as if conversation was a stone pressed within a vice. When Il Primo talked about himself, it was about his taste in beauty, in books, in horses, in Italy, in writing…

‘How can you love these grasslands?’ she replied. ‘So endless! So flat! A horizon that steals your soul. There’s nothing for mile after mile… How can you love it? I think of the hills of Tuscany, the cliffs of Amalfi, the lagoon of Venice, anything but this wilderness.’

‘What I adore is the sunflowers,’ he’d replied. ‘We rode through them, frosted by dust. The sun beat down, and their faces seemed to smile at me, the only smiling faces in a land devoted to gunpowder and murder.’

She absorbed this.

‘There’s a huge field of sunflowers right outside the village.’

‘Really?’

That’s where he would be, she decided. He’d gone to see the sunflowers.

She ran out of the village, cursing her white, frilly nurse’s uniform, which being Italian was more elaborately feminine and less practical than that of any other nation, out on to the steppe, across a field of unharvested rye – and there he was: a frail figure wearing the fresh khakis she’d dressed him in, holding her bottle of Crimean wine, looking out at the sea of sunflowers.

‘Maledetto bastardo! Che il diavolo ti porti! What the hell are you doing out here? Who said you could move? How dare you?’ she shouted at him, furious that he’d put himself at risk like this. She grabbed the wine bottle out of his hand.

‘Well, you found me,’ Benya said. Awakened from his last sleep, he felt superlatively clear-headed and alive, almost reborn.

‘You frightened me,’ she said, feeling calmer.

‘Did I?’ he said. ‘And you noticed I’d gone? You cared?’

‘Haven’t you noticed, maledetto bastardo, you’re my only patient? Of course I noticed!’

‘So you can swear too?’ He beamed at her. She realized he was used to being loved, admired, and she fought the urge to admire him in her turn. He was a patient with no name. Soon he would go. But where? She handed him the peaked cap he’d been wearing when they found him.

‘It’s for the sun. You’ll get burnt. I’m used to this heat but you’re pale…’

He looked at the cap. ‘It’s Italian,’ he said.

‘It is. It’s why they didn’t shoot you.’

Benya put it back on, thinking, Dr Kapto must have put this on me, to give me a better chance of getting away. Again, as with Ganakovich, he was confounded by the actions of men.

‘Come inside. We need to go back to the tent. It’s not safe out here…’

‘I don’t know if it’s safe inside,’ he replied.

She stood beside him. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. You mean, for you?’

‘Yes, for me.’

She thought of Malamore and his Blackshirted friends, of Dirlewanger and the SS. ‘That depends on who you are.’

Benya sighed. ‘I’ve got to go. Now. Today.’

‘You’re not better. You might haemorrhage. The fever could return. Your shoulder could open up again.’

‘I doubt that. Not after your beautiful work.’

‘Who are you? I know you’re a Russian and you speak some Italian. Are you…?’

Benya caught his breath. This was it, the moment when she could turn him in, end his life. ‘Are you asking as a woman, a nurse – or as an Italian soldier?’

She blinked, and he could see her thinking this through. ‘Can’t you tell?’

‘The crocodile Malamore is a Fascist, isn’t he, a real believer?’

‘Do I seem like one myself?’

‘I just don’t know.’ Benya thought of Kapto and Tonya. He didn’t know anything any more. Human nature never ceased to surprise him in its whiplash cruelties and haphazard kindnesses.

He stared at Fabiana, into her eyes – they were a dark brown, and then the sunbeam fell on her face and the brownness turned to the lightness of honey, and he suddenly realized what he already knew, that he was going to trust her. Even amidst these quicksands. In reality, he had no choice.

‘My name is Benya Golden.’

‘Benya Golden.’ Fabiana savoured the name, said it twice.

‘Oh Dio, it sounds lovely in Italian,’ he said. ‘But then everything sounds better in Italian.’

‘So you are Red Army lost behind our lines? Madonna santa!’

She looked back into the village. Soon someone would notice they were out here talking or Malamore might ride up with his SS comrades.

‘Can we walk a little into the field of sunflowers? Please accompany me.’

She shook her head but she walked beside him.

‘Tell me about your childhood in Venice… Fabiana, if may?’

She started to answer but then she stopped. ‘I haven’t asked you a thing about yourself. I’ve been wondering, trying to guess, what you did in peacetime.’

‘I want a sip of wine before I get into that,’ he said, and he took back the bottle from her and pulled out the cork.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘You can’t drink. The anaesthetic, the painkillers.’

‘Really?’ He looked anxious, and for a moment this made her beam.

‘I bet in real life you’re a hypochondriac,’ she teased him.

‘Of course I am, but not today. I am unlikely to make it anyway. Allow me this,’ and he took a swig from the bottle. ‘I love Massandra wine and one day I’ll tell you about the Crimea. Now your turn.’

She looked around. Nothing. Just the sky of eggshell blue, the sun, and the tall sunflowers with their golden faces and black fringes, dusted by chaff, on every side of them. ‘I can’t. I’m on duty…’

‘Are you? I think you’re in the Secret Kingdom of Sunflowers where you can do anything. We’re in a dimension outside the real world, and here we’re free for the first and only time in this war. You’re free of the army and your dead husband and Malamore, and I’m not a soldier, a prisoner, or even a patient. I have no past in the Secret Kingdom of Sunflowers. There are only two inhabitants of the kingdom, and one is often angry, and sticks out her chin, and waves her finger – and one is just grateful to see her angry as often as possible because it makes her look magnificent. Besides, Fabiana, if you don’t drink, I won’t tell you anything. Deal?’

‘An Italian regards it as sacrilege to drink from a bottle…’

‘Like cutting pasta?’

‘Exactly. Or eating it with a spoon.’

‘Dammit,’ said Benya, ‘we’re lucky to be alive. I think Bacchus will forgive you. Go on, sit down.’

‘This stupid white uniform, I’ll get grass stains on it and—’

‘Just drink then.’

She took the wine and drank from the bottle. Benya sank down, his strength ebbing, sapping his sight, which had started to blur; he sighed and recovered, the wine recharging him.

‘I was arrested, sentenced to death, reprieved and sent to the Gulags. But I got this fresh chance of life.’

‘And this torture and getting shot is your wonderful new start?’ Fabiana asked, kneeling down beside him.

‘They let me join the penal battalions so I might live again, and I’m not sure I’ll get another opportunity.’

Fabiana smiled at him, her face very close to his. ‘Well, wasn’t it luck that your horse stood over you on the ground, waiting for you to be picked up? And then finding me to sew you up?’

‘And give me wine. But then that horse is my dearest friend, and perhaps you are the only other friend I have in the world at this moment. So I want to enjoy this. It’s as simple as that. I have no plan beyond this field of sunflowers, this stale wine, and my conversation with my Venetian nurse.’

‘What were you sentenced to death for?’

‘Do I seem like a murderer? Or a bank robber?’ He paused. ‘No, I was a writer. I fell out of favour – and I still don’t know exactly why. But I ended up as a Political prisoner working in – have you heard of Kolyma?’

She shook her head.

‘Well, the prison gold mines of the far east.’

‘I didn’t think of you as a miner.’

‘It wasn’t my chosen vocation.’

‘I know that – but of course you’re a writer. It’s obvious.’ Above them in the shimmering sky with a few white contrails, a flight of German planes flew in formation towards Stalingrad. She got up. ‘We have to go back,’ she said, staggering a little, and as she did so, the atoms between them rearranged themselves: she saw that clearly. Something altered inside them too. But that can mean nothing, she told herself quickly. A beautiful view did that too – one remembered it but the moment passed quickly.

She brushed herself down and glared at him: ‘After all you’ve been through, you have the energy to waste on trying to flirt with a nurse, stupido?’

‘If it was the last iota of life I possessed,’ he replied. ‘How could I use it better?’ He took a breath and his voice changed tone. ‘You know, Fabiana, I’ll remember this, somehow forever.’

‘Me too,’ she said. ‘Somehow forever.’ And as she said this, she held up her right hand, fingers open towards the sky, and he laughed, imitating her.

‘You’re laughing at me again?’ she said gravely.

‘No, celebrating you. Somehow forever!’ and they both made the gesture.

Then he turned and started to walk back.

‘Benya,’ she said.

He looked back. He wanted to kiss her, but he felt suddenly depleted, suddenly hopeless, and red sparks whirlpooled behind his eyes. He almost fell, and she put her arms around him, and held him up.

‘You must go to your bed. I’ll say I don’t know who you are.’

‘Better to say…’

‘…that you wore Italian uniform, because you’re one of our Russian auxiliaries?’

‘If you could say that, it would win me time.’

‘Benya Golden, it’s a Jewish name, isn’t it?’

Benya nodded, leaning on her strong shoulders. ‘I have nothing left to tell you. My life is yours now.’

When he awoke, night had fallen. He was back in the tent, and Fabiana sat beside the bed. ‘I was dreaming of our conversation in…’ he whispered.

‘…the Secret Kingdom of Sunflowers.’

‘It did happen, didn’t it?’

She nodded, gazing at him, her finger touching her lips. He wondered what she was thinking about.

‘I doubt we’ll see each other again,’ he said. ‘Probably not. But I just wanted to say that for me those were truly the happiest hours of this war – no, of the last few years of my life.’

Oh, these words, she thought, she who had learned poetry. She wanted to hear them again, and ran them around her mouth greedily, savouring them, devouring them.

‘For me too,’ she said, raising one hand, fingers open. ‘Somehow forever!’

He nodded; yes, she did remember.

‘Listen, I don’t want you to take any risks on my behalf,’ he said. ‘Promise me you won’t.’

‘I promise. But I want to help you… if I can.’

‘Just tell me. Where are the horses?’

‘The stables are right beside this tent. But watch out for the camels.’

‘Is my horse still here? She’s a chestnut Budyonny mare with a white blaze on her forehead and white socks.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are they guarded?’

‘Not at night.’

‘I need a weapon before I can go.’

‘A gun?’ She looked worried. ‘Montefalcone keeps all captured weapons in our arsenal, in the cottage next to the stables, but…’

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. Forget about the guns, please… But I must go in a few hours’ time.’

‘Can’t you stay one more day?’

‘I can’t risk that. I go tonight.’ He put his hand in hers. ‘Somehow forever.’

V