Red Sky at Noon

I

Lying against Fabiana, Benya was dreaming with the near-drugged abandon of one who has ridden all day, made love for hours and, finally feeling safe and inflamed and slaked, has fallen asleep in the copious, floating heat. He was back in Kolyma and it was a month after the start of war, in the summer of 1941.

At dawn, the guards burst into Benya’s barracks. ‘Get your belongings, Prisoner Golden. Davay! Davay! Work brigades leaving now! Back to the gold mines with you, fucking dog’s prick!’

Panic jittered through him. He remembered Jaba’s warning. He had lost his protection – that meant losing his cushy job in the clinic, and this was his punishment: back to the mines! This was his deepest fear. In nightmares, in daydreams, he saw himself marched back to the mines on the dark side of the moon. He would die out there, he knew it. Every day he expected it and now it had come.

The truck was waiting, engine gunning, and with terrible foreboding he climbed into the back.

‘Surprise!’ cried Smiley. ‘Haha! Look at that face, Boss!’

Deathless sneered, ‘You fell for it, didn’t you?’

‘All right, boys,’ said Jaba. ‘Join us, Benya. Good news. We’re being transferred to the hospital at Magadan – and you’re with us.’

‘Oh my God, I thought—’

‘I know what you thought. But you see, life is a plate of lobio beans,’ said Jaba and, banging the top of the truck, he called to the guards: ‘All right, let’s go!’

On the way, they talked about the war with the guards, hungry for the slightest titbit. Comrade Molotov had announced the war to the Soviet people with the words: ‘Our war is just. Victory will be ours.’ Then Stalin gave a speech addressing his people as ‘brothers and sisters’ and even ‘my friends’ – he must be worried, thought Benya, to call any of us ‘friends’! The radio reported triumphant counter-attacks but the guard whispered stories of defeat and collapse…

Jaba’s new headquarters was the Magadan Hospital, where all his boys now got jobs: Benya was still a feldsher, a medical assistant, and one of his jobs was to keep the key for the medical supplies room, a key with a leather label reading: ‘Only special personnel. Magadan Hospital. KOLYMA.’

When he left Kolyma, it was the only thing he took with him, to remember the luck that had saved his life. But the job had its worries too: sometimes Smiley or Fats Strizkaz demanded morphine and Benya had to give them some – but not too much. If he was discovered handing out drugs, he would be transferred back to the gold mines; if he refused the Criminals, Jaba would destroy him, and as long as Jaba was happy, he felt he would be safe.

The news from the war was dire. Minsk and Smolensk fell. By September, Belorussia lost, the Baltics, Crimea gone! Leningrad – besieged! The Zeks, patients and doctors talked of nothing else… Several dying men even regained a hollow-eyed life-fire to discuss Russia’s fate. Ukraine and Kiev had fallen, a million Russian soldiers taken prisoner. Odessa fell to the Romanians – and Benya prayed for his parents. Then suddenly the Nazis were approaching Moscow! The reverberations of panic reached even distant Kolyma.

The moment he had finished that day on the ward for the dying, Benya, still wearing his white medical coat, rushed to see Jaba in his ‘clubroom’ where he held court. A card game was in progress with the Camp Trusty, Fats Strizkaz; and Prishchepa was singing the brigand song, and the others were joining in like a crew of crooning pirates: ‘They’ve buried the gold, the gold, the gold…’

‘What is it?’ asked Smiley.

‘I want to ask the Boss something.’

‘All right. It’s the professor, Boss, wants to talk.’

Jaba waved him in. ‘What is it?’

Benya gathered himself: ‘Boss, you own me and I would do nothing without your blessing but Moscow is in danger and the time has come for me to ask permission to join the Shtraf battalions,’ he said.

‘I told you never to ask me this again. On pain of death! Yet still you want to fight for the Bastard?’ The Bastard was always Stalin.

Benya looked around him. Prishchepa had stopped singing; Fats put down his cards; Deathless was playing with a switchblade.

‘You know what my answer could be?’ Jaba said softly.

Benya nodded.

‘Boss, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.’ It was Prishchepa, still young somehow, glossy as the dawn.

‘And this is also to do with the war?’ Jaba did not glance at him. ‘Speak, boy.’

‘Boss, I am a Don Cossack, a free man, a fighting man.’

A vein started to beat at Jaba’s temple. ‘Anyone else?’

‘I am going too,’ said Fats Strizkaz. ‘Otherwise it’s death, inch by inch.’

Then Smiley raised his hand: ‘Me too. There’s spoils in wars. You can get rich.’

‘And I heard there’s more girls than a man can handle,’ squealed Little Mametka.

Jaba started to snigger at that. ‘Oh, Bette Davis! What do you know of girls?’

They were all laughing but when they went quiet, Deathless was flicking the dagger back and forth. No one had ever defied Jaba like this.

‘Die for the Bastard if you wish, boys’ Jaba said finally. ‘But, Golden, you have a problem. You’re a Political.’

‘I know the rules but things that were impossible a week ago are possible today. Winter will come at any minute and this is my last chance to get the boat to the mainland. Only you can do this, Boss. You’ve saved my life. Please let me live it.’

Jaba caressed his grey plumage of hair. ‘You must bless the Atamansha. Remember the information I won from her about the Commandant? I knew I’d need it one day and now is that moment. Smiley, go to the Commandant’s assistant and make an appointment for me to see General Shpigelglas today. Tell them it is to discuss the production delay at Madyak-8. Go now!’

Jaba looked at Benya. ‘You see, Golden’ – he shrugged in his debonair way – ‘isn’t life just a bowl of lobio beans?’

In the clump of poplar trees amidst the Don plains, the uproar of the planes flying low over the steppe awoke Benya abruptly. The sun was not quite up yet; it was still dark but there was the spread of turquoise on the horizon. He had slept better than he could remember; and he turned to look at Fabiana, who was stretching. Sometime during the night they had pulled on their britches but she was shirtless and he was overcome with her beauty, her honey-coloured eyes, and his luck at being brought back to life like this. But Socks was stamping the ground, her ears back and eyes rolling white, and he understood instantly something was not right. Fabiana’s palomino too was standing rigid, skittering nervously.

‘Darling,’ Fabiana said very coolly.

‘Move quickly,’ he whispered. ‘Someone’s close.’ They worked together as if they had always been a team, saddling the horses, their hands shaking as they tightened the girths, checked the stirrups, attached the saddlebags and, pulling on their shirts, mounted the horses, who needed no encouragement. As they loped out, Socks reared, almost throwing Benya, and they saw the two fresh, scrawny ponies pulling at the ropes that tied them to a tree.

‘Kalmyks,’ Fabiana said. ‘Malamore’s scouts.’

Leaning down, she cut the ponies free; a burst of gunfire rang out at almost point-blank range, spanged into the earth close to them and Benya, sensing the two shadows lying in the grass, glimpsed the black snouts of their weapons. The two ponies bucked and then bolted with Socks and Violante breaking into a terrified gallop. Pouring sweat, silver hammers beating in his temples, Benya held on to Socks’s mane and found himself riding with Fabiana and the two bolting ponies down into the long steppe grass just as the sun came up. When they slowed down, he realized how lucky they had been. The Kalmyk scouts had staked them out, sleeping almost beside them, but no Kalmyk would risk shooting their own ponies and the animals had bolted, leaving them, temporarily, mountless. Nonetheless, Malamore and his horsemen must be close.

II

At 7 a.m., Svetlana Stalina, wearing school uniform and her red Pioneers’ scarf, climbed into a Packard limousine outside the triangular yellow palace in the Kremlin where she lived. Klimov sat in the front with the driver as they headed out of the Troitsky Gate across town towards the Josef Stalin Commune School 801.

At the school gates, the director – as the headmistress was known – Comrade Kapitolina Medvedeva greeted her, virtually bowing.

‘Well?’ whispered Martha as they went into their tedious Communist Morality class. Martha understood what it was like to be in love, to be a member of Moscow’s ‘golden youth’, but even she couldn’t conceive how it felt to be Stalin’s daughter. There was her father’s portrait in this very class – the man she saw every evening. At assembly every morning, they sang ‘May Comrade Stalin Live Many, Many Years’; at every dinner or lunch, everyone drank a toast ‘To Comrade Stalin’. But as her father had recently explained to her, ‘You’re not “Stalin” and I’m not “Stalin”. Stalin is something bigger. Stalin is Soviet power!’

Martha poked her in the side: ‘Have you seen him?’

‘Just twice,’ whispered Svetlana as the lesson began.

‘Letters?’

‘Several!’

‘Like the one you showed me?’

Sveta nodded. ‘“I want to kiss you, I want to smell you, I want to taste you”,’ she said, quoting what Lev had written to her.

‘He actually wrote that? Oh my God! What does that mean, Sveta?’

‘I don’t know, Marthochka. But I love everything he says, every word.’

‘How was the kissing?’

‘Amazing. Heaven!’ Svetlana suppressed her giggles. ‘I’m blushing! Yesterday he sent me a book as a present. In English.’

‘What? Something naughty?’

‘Yes. The new Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls.’

‘Oh my God. Have you started it? I can’t wait to read it.’

‘I’ve been reading it all night. My father came in and I had it hidden in his Short Course and he didn’t notice. It’s so romantic, brilliant. The American Communist, named Jordan, fights in Spain and falls in love with this Spanish girl who’s much younger than him, and damaged by her tragic and difficult life. She’s called Maria.’

‘Sounds familiar!’

‘Yes of course, Lev is Jordan and I’m Maria. Oh, Lev’s so clever, so interested in everything…’

‘Is there anything in the newspaper?’

Sveta had Red Star in her satchel; she slipped it out and scanned the front page and there was Lev’s article, telling of a terrible battle on the Don Bend to stop the German advance, and then she felt herself almost gasping for air. She read:

The flush swept up Svetlana’s body like a scarlet tide and she fanned herself so energetically with the Short Course that several of the other pupils looked around. She passed the paper under the desk to Martha who read it avidly.

‘Mother of God, Sveta! He’s crazy! What would your father say? He might read it!’

But Svetlana was exhilarated. ‘He LOVES me! Anyway, it could be anyone looking at the flowers in the gardens. Only we know it’s addressed to someone inside the Kremlin.’

‘True. But your father wouldn’t believe that, would he?’

‘No, but I don’t care! I can’t wait to kiss my Lion again.’

The entire class was now looking at the two girls, who always sat at the back. The teacher, the loathsome and pedantic time-server, Dr Innokenty Rimm, hesitated. He was afraid of Svetlana and she enjoyed that. He couldn’t tell Stalina to be quiet. He wouldn’t dare. Instead he picked on Martha.

‘Peshkova! Are you with us today?’

‘Yes, sorry, Dr Rimm, I am listening.’

‘Good! So tell us about Marx’s view of the class struggle and the role of the bourgeois during the 1848 Revolution?’

Martha gave her gorgeous smile. ‘Well, that’s easy…’

III

‘Where the hell have the scouts got to?’ murmured Consul Malamore. The scouts would have bivouacked somewhere but the sun was up now. He and his posse had spent the night in a village and risen before dawn. Malamore lit a cigarette and he rode ahead with a silhouette like a statue of equine bronze. He had no wish to talk obscenities with Dirlewanger or listen to the whinings of Montefalcone; and no one wished to ride with Kapto and the little girl.

Over the Don the teal-coloured sky was stained jet with burning fuel dumps and illuminated with orange flashes of big guns; Malamore could almost feel the blasts now. The Germans were destroying the last Russian bridgeheads on the bend of the river. When that was done, the Germans would charge across the steppe from the Don to Stalingrad – and perhaps put the last nail in the coffin of Russia. But Malamore knew that the closer to the battle, the more likely that Fabiana and the Russian prisoner would be killed in the crossfire – or, perhaps worse, make it to the Russian lines, and be lost forever. What would Fabiana’s life be in Soviet hands? And he would never know what had become of her.

They passed reinforcements of Romanian and Hungarian troops and then a column of panzers, waiting for their fuel tankers. ‘To Stalingrad!’ was painted on to one tank. ‘From the Don to the Volga!’ read another. ‘Stalin kaput!’ the third. The boys sat smoking on the turrets, shirts off, shoulders sunburnt, writing letters: the roar of the fighting at the Don Bend focused their minds on home, sweethearts, the tranquil past.

Dirlewanger asked a sergeant where the Sixth Army staff headquarters was, pointing his whip at Kapto. ‘This man needs to deliver something important to Colonel von Schwerin, Intelligence, Sixth Army.’

‘That way,’ said the sergeant, who had a Bavarian accent. ‘Towards the Don.’ He paused and looked at Dirlewanger and Kapto properly. ‘What unit are you?’

‘Commander, Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, attached to Einsatzgruppe D. Anti-partisan Aktion.’

The sergeant raised his eyebrows. ‘Anti-partisan, eh? Who’s the girl? She’s just a kid.’ His boys laughed rudely at Kapto and the child. ‘Is she your daughter or just a friend?’

Dirlewanger swished his quirt and rode on, ears red.

‘You make us a laughing stock,’ he hissed at Kapto. ‘Pull yourself together.’ The little girl was fast asleep in the saddle, her head lolling against Kapto’s shoulder, held there by his arm.

‘Come on,’ called Malamore, spurring Borgia out into the grasslands. Soon they were almost alone again on the steppes. ‘They have to come this way. Stop wasting time.’

‘You’re the one who’s let a Jew run off with his lady friend,’ said Dirlewanger.

‘Don’t mention her again, Dirlewanger.’ He glanced back at Kapto. ‘When can we hand our doctor friend over to the Sixth Army?’

‘We should be meeting outlying units of the Sixth Army any time now,’ said Kapto, catching up with them. ‘She sleeps as we ride,’ he said breezily, gesturing to the child.

There was a pause.

‘I’m no prude,’ said Dirlewanger, and Malamore noticed he was swaying as he rode, half-cut as usual, ‘but do you think noble Prussian officers such as General Paulus or Colonel von Schwerin of the Sixth Army will be impressed with a man that rides around with a child of the Untermenschen on his saddle?’

‘I am taking care of the child,’ said Kapto. ‘Those we heal we must also cherish.’

‘The Kalmyks are back,’ called out one of the Hiwis, Bap.

Altan and Gushi rode up and saluted.

Malamore pushed up his tank goggles, his eyes just slits in that sun-gorged face. ‘You’re hours late,’ he snarled. ‘Well, where are they?’

The Kalmyks were excited, pointing, their ponies caracoling.

‘Very close. We should be able to see them,’ said Altan.

‘We’ve tracked them.’ Gushi indicated ahead. ‘See that dust?’

Malamore pulled up his horse and raised his binoculars. Yes, there was something out there. Across the naked steppe, in the high grass in blurred golden light, he could make out the little pirts of dust: two riders. ‘It’s them,’ was all he said. ‘Montefalcone, take the second squadron and come at them from the rear. The rest of you follow me. No one is to shoot or charge without my orders. Obersturmführer, ride with me.’ He wanted Dirlewanger close to him so that no harm would come to Fabiana.

Dirlewanger did not protest. His men would deal with the Jew as they saw fit, collect his earlobes on a necklace if they wished it (and sometimes they did just that) – but the old Italian owned the girl; this was his show.

Throwing up dust, Malamore and his horsemen galloped across the fields, hoping to steal up on the riders before they realized how close they were.

IV

The bandits in love were riding with a giddy recklessness towards the Don. Fabiana had even let her hair down, and was galloping so fast that Benya feared she might be thrown. He sensed she was enjoying their last time together, and relished the sheer stun of his good fortune – that somehow he knew must end, and end soon.

‘There!’ He pointed ahead. Right before them rose the Donside hills with their woods, and beyond them and down in its valley swept the majestic river. Benya knew he was almost home and his heart was racing – but the closer he came to the Donside hills, the nearer the battle of the Don Bend – and the sooner he must part with Fabiana. And she knew it too. She smiled when he saw the rise in the terrain but then her face fell and he could tell she was brooding. They rode on, almost dizzy with a last-chance joy in a headlong panic of happiness.

The shot spanged into the grass right beside him, sending up a pirt of dust. Benya looked back. A dark swarm of horsemen was gathering in the corrugated, wavy heat of the late morning. He recognized the hunched figure of Malamore at the front, his sabre drawn. Fabiana turned Violante and stared at them, breathless, cursing ‘Stronzo!’ – until Benya, who cocked his Papasha, seized her bridle: ‘Come on!’

Volleys of bullets ripped into the ground around them, and Silver Socks reared to one side but Benya managed to steady her. Ahead Fabiana was riding Violante up the hill towards the trees. ‘Pronti a fare fuoco! Prepare to fire!’ Benya could hear Malamore (he guessed it was he) yelling at his men to wait a moment, not to shoot until his order, what if they hit the girl – but on they came anyway, twenty, thirty horsemen, hooves clopping on the dry grassland. As he reached the cool of the trees, Benya saw more horses and men ahead of them, another Italian squadron coming around the back of the woods… Now they had no hope.

Screwing his eyes closed in a moment of freefalling panic, Benya gripped Silver Socks with his knees, but he couldn’t decide what to do – to dismount, to fire, just to give up and die. He was shuddering, already wincing at the agony to come.

He checked the grenades at his belt. If he had to, he would finish this himself.

Two circles of a pair of binoculars range over the Donside hills. The observer stops and focuses the lenses.

He watches two riders galloping across the open steppe, a man and woman. The man is in khaki fatigues with an Italian forage cap, a Papasha on his arm and grenades on his belt. He is riding a Budyonny with white feet. She is in Italian green with Red Cross markings on an armband, her dark hair not tied up, flowing behind her, and she is spurring on her palomino. There is something desperate about them. The man – who’s older and not a great rider – keeps looking back, jerkily. There’s a sense of fear in the way the woman is lurching in her saddle, shaking and unsure. They are both losing speed.

The observer, who is lying in the grass close to the local collective farm office a little further, and higher, up the same ridge, scans back over the high grass. Behind the fugitives ride two Kalmyks on their scratchy ponies; and then a posse of riders, twenty, thirty, forty horsemen in some disorder: an Italian Blackshirt colonel on a black stallion, Germans with SS runes on their tunics, Russian traitors in Wehrmacht field grey. Amidst them a man carries a female child on his saddle: a refugee rescued? A rare kindness in these flint-hearted times? Amongst these barbarians? Well, that would be a surprise.

He sees the shots spanging into the grass around the two riders. The pursuers are closing in and now he spots a second squadron of Italians appearing around the copse at the top of the hill, firing down at them. This odd couple have his full attention. They are being attacked by the enemy, and his Stavka orders from Comrade Ponomarenko, Chief of Partisan Operations in Moscow, are clear: ‘Harass and destroy all enemy forces, communications and weapons in rear of the Sixth Army.’

He turns to the men beside him. He always speaks softly in a tone that commands obedience. ‘Fire all four Dashkas now. And mortars. Quickly or we’ll be too late!’

‘Done, Comrade Elmor!’ says Smiley as the heavy Degtiarev–Shpagin machine guns, known as Dashkas, open up with their metallic chug-chug to pump lead into the squadron of Italian horsemen.

V

Fabiana saw the church tower and onion dome of a little Cossack village of colourfully painted cottages, yards and stables. A signpost read: Shebinkino. A foaming riderless horse caught up with them, dragging its German rider, his shirt forming a bundle over his head. She could still hear the machine guns and the whistle of mortars close behind them. Such was their panic that she and Benya had galloped headlong into the main lane of the village without checking what was ahead.

It was noon but the village seemed deserted. A dead dog lay in the road; cats shrieked somewhere. It was sweltering, and Fabiana could smell rotting hops, sweet vines, wormword and dank water. She looked up and now she could see the shells exploding over the Don Bend where the battle raged just a few miles away. She was still out of breath and when she glanced at Benya, he was white, almost slipping off his horse, his hands shivering uncontrollably.

The horses suddenly balked and tried to turn. A mangy wolf stood in the middle of the street. Fabiana looked into its hungry and astonishingly white eyes. Once the wolf had been a symbol of wild ferocity; now it was just another hunted creature in a world where man had outdone the wolf in savagery. ‘Ciao, bello,’ she said to it, remembering how Natasha had seen the wolf in War and Peace. It trotted away – and the horses, sweating yellow foam, staggered to a halt.

Fabiana scissored off Violante in time to catch Benya as he slipped off Socks into her arms, relieving him of the sub-machine gun – she hung it on her shoulder – and leading the horses away. She heard the rattle of traces and the clip of hooves. Benya was lying on the ground in the space between two cottages while she looked around.

A waxy old woman dressed in bright red was approaching them. Halting her tarantass and getting down off its box, she hobbled into a nearby cottage without tying up the horse.

Glancing at Benya, who nodded at her, Fabiana tied up their horses and followed the woman through the open front door. How fast we brigands learn, she thought, unhooking her gun, we bandits in love.

In the main room, the crone was putting dried cherries into a bowl and Fabiana also spotted some salo and buckwheat gruel.

‘You steal from Afonka and you’ll die in agony,’ said the crone without looking up. Fabiana peered at the shelves around the room, packed with jars of seeds and bottles of cloudy liquids. ‘A Jew and a foreigner come into the home of a woman abandoned by all and steal from her at gunpoint. You’ll bring the curse of the water spirit of the Don on yourselves. Who’s this now?’

Fabiana looked round and Benya was behind her, shakily levelling his pistol. Fabiana wanted to get out quickly but Benya did not look good and the woman had the food.

‘The Jew thinks of killing me. But the Immaculate Virgin will decide when I go. You’ll be struck down by lightning or steel or poison.’ She sucked her bare gums.

‘Tell us then, Matushka, what should we do?’ asked Benya, lowering his Parabellum.

‘Let me cleanse you unbelievers with holy Don water, and I shall give you something.’

‘We have no Don water.’

‘I have it in the bucket. Bring it.’

Benya brought the bucket and the crone glared right at him. Fabiana could see that her eyes were a veined blue-whiteness with no irises.

‘I see well for a blind one?’ the crone said, making the Cross with a yellowed nail on his forehead. ‘The enemy of Christ is forgiven by the Immaculate Virgin, who drives out the beast in the heart. Amen!’ Then she repeated it on Fabiana. ‘I see a field of sunflowers, faces raised to the sun and in the middle of them a couple are kissing, oblivious to the world. I see a kind doctor and a happy little girl, a Jew child who walks away into the distance. Eat your food – here – and water.’

‘Thank you, Matushka,’ said Benya, gulping down some bread and gruel with his fingers. Fabiana poured water for both of them.

‘Leave me something. I don’t need much,’ the woman said as Fabiana gathered the food, longing to get away.

‘Go out the back,’ the crone continued. ‘That way’ – she pushed them through the back door – ‘and you’ll learn how I never threaten lightly. Go!’

Holding the food, Fabiana stepped into the back yard and recoiled. The body of a soldier, a German, lay on the sandy ground, his mouth wide open, with greenish vomit streaked down his cheek and flies buzzing out of his agape mouth.

VI

‘How many dead do we have?’ Malamore asked, holding a lit Africa cigarette, goggles on his forehead, patting a sweat-soaked Borgia on the withers. Under heavy fire, they had made their escape over the hill and into a Cossack village but not all his men were with him.

‘Six dead,’ replied Montefalcone.

‘And seven wounded,’ added Malamore’s young adjutant, Brambilla. ‘Two missing.’

‘Figli di puttana! Motherfuckers!’ said Malamore.

The Kalmyks rode up. ‘Village is empty,’ they said. ‘And there’s food.’

Malamore noticed Dirlewanger was fritzing and twitching, like the drug addict he was. Malamore himself had survived many ambushes and he showed no nerves even now. ‘All right, place careful pickets all around. The partisans aren’t far away. Collect grapes and apples from those orchards. Bury the dead and dress the wounded.’

Wiping his brow, he led his squadron down into the village, riding slowly, even majestically, hunched craggily in his saddle. When he reached the priest’s house, he dismounted and sat on the verandah in an old basket chair brooding while Dirlewanger popped another Pervitin tablet, then paced up and down, his temples pulsating, and Montefalcone watched him, sipping from a flask – both awaiting further orders as the windows shook from the big guns.

Malamore was chain-smoking and took a swig of cognac. The partisans had ambushed them from their flank on the adjacent hill, and he knew it was his fault. Fabiana had distracted him and he had watched her carefully when they were close to them. She had looked as if she was waiting for an opportunity to escape. The Russian had the weapons. Still it nagged at him. Could she be collaborating with the Russian Jew? Could they even be… no, that was impossible.

Dirlewanger started fiddling with his necklace of trophies, his eyes glittering like red-rimmed pins. ‘Let us shoot every Russian we can find.’

‘It’s lucky these villages are already deserted,’ answered Montefalcone. ‘Perhaps they knew you were coming.’

‘Consul, sir,’ said Brambilla from the doorway. ‘A Wehrmacht captain is here to see you.’

VII

Fabiana chose a house far from the crone’s, in the midst of the village, hoping this would make them less easy to find. They took the horses into the barn with them and closed the door. It was full of hay – and a single old nag, probably a family favourite, abandoned there, looked very pleased to see them. Benya lay on the ground.

‘You must eat more,’ Fabiana told him, and she fed him the crone’s bread and gruel, cherries and the last of the honeycomb. After they had both eaten, they felt better but they were exhausted. It was late afternoon but they agreed not to light a lantern or a cooking fire lest it be the only light in the village, visible from miles away. Benya felt they were a whisper from sudden death, and nothing could be postponed any more.

For a long time they said nothing, both aware they had been run to earth. The hunters were close, yet the horses could go no further, and they themselves were too tired even to put their boots in their stirrups yet alone ride. They might have this night together, or Malamore and his men could burst in at any moment. Benya listened for the whinny of a horse, the creaking of a gate, the clacket of spurs. A wolf started to howl somewhere on the steppe. What had alarmed it? He half expected to hear the voices calling: ‘Send out the nurse. She at least can live!’

Finally he sighed and said, ‘We both know what must happen now.’ He knew that if he survived, he could never admit to ever having known her. She was one of the Fascist invaders fighting on the Nazi side and their very acquaintance, yet alone a physical relationship, would be regarded by the Russian side as treason: both would be shot instantly. To her own side, she had abetted and slept with a Jew, a Russian, a Communist. If they remained together, they would die together. It was not the love that was doomed but the fatal lovers themselves. Their only hope was to part and for him to wipe every relic of her existence out of his life.

She nodded. ‘How long have the bandits in love known each other?’ she asked.

‘Studying history again?’ He smiled sadly. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know, Il Primo? It’s exactly eighty-six hours. Is that need to measure love in every way, the difference between a man and a woman? I think so.’

Night was falling and it was dark in the barn. ‘Mia adorata,’ he said, ‘don’t you think sometimes you can live for years and they can count for nothing and then there are special times when every second is so rich, so priceless, so deep that we live with such intensity that every minute counts fivefold, tenfold, a thousandfold. And we call that time “Love”. Sometimes one night is a lifetime.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. That’s what this is.’

A dog barked in the village, and Benya caught his breath. Were the Fascists already surrounding the house? He could just see the glaze of her eyes, dark now, catching the very last light. The air changed between them and suddenly he was overcome and he knew she was too. They had been linked from the moment they had first seen each other after she had removed the bullet. Now the space between them seemed to be crisscrossed with golden threads – like the dew on spiderwebs at dawn. How often does this happen in a lifetime?

Benya reached out for her in the darkness and her hand was there, waiting for him, and he put her fingers against his mouth and kissed them. As she followed the paths of the tears on his face, she started to cry out loud like a child. For a moment he wanted to quieten her – their pursuers would find them – but then he didn’t care any more. Her cries were, he thought, the sound of a life lived intensely and sensitively amidst the cruellest times. Then she was on her knees, holding his face, kissing him with those wide lips with their twist, their lovemaking like the final spasm of a dying body, flotsam on a wave, dust lost in dust.

‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you,’ she said when they were both still, on the edge of a spiky, fluttering mockery of sleep. ‘Something about my past.’

Was she already Malamore’s mistress? Benya wondered.

‘It’s about my husband.’

‘Malamore killed him during that skirmish. I know.’

He could feel her tension in the darkness.

‘You think too well of me,’ she whispered.

‘What are you saying, mia cara?’

‘Don’t you see?’

‘It was you?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘During the fighting in the village, Ippolito was panicking; and somehow I annoyed him and he slapped me, knocked me down. When I fell, his holster was right in front of me and I grabbed his Beretta, and I shot him right there. In the heart. He said nothing, just stared at me with such surprise and a sort of awe, and then… and then he died in front of me. The shooting was getting closer and I sprinted behind the cottages through the gardens and made it to where our troops were.’ She took a deep breath, shivering as she remembered. ‘I had to tell you. So you knew who I was.’

A pause.

‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ she said. ‘Che stupida.’

Benya’s mind was thrumming. What did this mean? Had she lied to him? What else was she hiding? Was she a murderess? He saw beneath her mantle of civilized velvet, a seam of the fiercest animal spirit. She had loved him and saved his life; and her impulsive deeds of kindness and courage filled him with wonder at her, and that was all that mattered to him. ‘It changes nothing,’ he said after a moment.

He felt her relax.

‘There’s one more thing, Benya,’ she said. ‘I would like you to give me something, a keepsake, that will always remind me of you. So I know you were real, and this really happened.’

He hesitated; then he reached into his pocket and handed her the only thing he had – a small key with a leather label that read ‘Only special personnel. Magadan Hospital. KOLYMA.’

She took it and he thought he heard her kiss it.

‘Somehow forever,’ he said.

‘Somehow forever,’ she replied.

VIII

Malamore walked out of the house and there, tying up their horses, were a German captain and a burly lieutenant. When the captain saluted, Malamore saw he was missing his other arm and that he had an Iron Cross at his throat.

‘Colonel Malamore, may I present myself. Von Manteuffel, Gerhard.’ He saluted with a click of the heels. ‘Captain. Intelligence Corps. Sixth Army. Lieutenant Kreutzer will remain outside.’

‘Come in,’ replied Malamore in perfect German. ‘We were waiting for you. I’ll get Dirlewanger.’

‘Actually, if I may be so bold, Herr Colonel,’ replied von Manteuffel. ‘I have orders from General Paulus himself to talk to you alone. Without Dirlewanger.’

Malamore was not surprised. This Captain von Manteuffel, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-seven, was one of those Prussian aristocrats who still filled the higher echelons of the Wehrmacht, and his answers were given in a cut-glass accent. He would, Malamore surmised, have a military pedigree; his forefathers had probably fought for Frederick the Great.

‘Cigarette, captain?’ asked Malamore when they were seated inside on the rough chairs of the peasant cottage. ‘An Africa?’

‘Grateful, Herr Colonel,’ said Manteuffel. ‘I’ve come to take possession of the Soviet defector Kapto and his intelligence materials. Colonel von Schwerin is in the field but will be here tomorrow to collect him and his maps. He’s ordered me to interview Kapto and take a preliminary look at the materials.’

‘I’ll get Kapto now.’

Kapto came in a few minutes later and saluted with theatrical confidence as if he had been auditioning all his life to play this part.

Manteuffel nodded back, and then said in perfect Russian: ‘You are now my responsibility. Colonel von Schwerin has asked me to make an initial evaluation. Are you ready to depart?’

The four men walked two houses down where Kapto’s horse was tied up.

‘Good,’ said Manteuffel. ‘The lieutenant will help you saddle the horse. Is there anything else?’

‘Yes,’ replied the doctor. ‘I must wake the child who’s sleeping inside this house.’

‘The child?’ Manteuffel sounded startled.

Peeping through the doorway, he saw a little girl sleeping on a couch and exchanged looks with Malamore. ‘Who is this girl? Is she your daughter, doctor?’

‘No, but she’s under my protection. She travels with me.’

‘I don’t understand—’ started Manteuffel.

‘She’s a patient.’ Kapto smiled, his lips turning up at the ends like a dogbone.

‘A patient?’

‘I found her wounded and, as a paediatrician, I say: Those we heal we must also cherish.’ He knelt beside the couch and shook her gently on the shoulder and she sat up, very pale, and looked around at them with her moon eyes.

‘Herr Captain,’ said Malamore, ‘I am glad Kapto is safely in your care. I have many matters to attend to… and I need to sleep. Goodbye, captain.’

They walked outside, and Malamore watched them ride away, the Germans on either side of the defector Kapto with the child on his knee.

Montefalcone and Dirlewanger were waiting for him in the house that they had made their headquarters.

‘We still haven’t found them,’ said Montefalcone. ‘We’ve lost many dead and more are wounded – all for the sake of a nurse. I propose we let them go and return to our duties.’

‘I’m here to annihilate the partisans. That was why the Reichsführer-SS brought me from Belorussia. I’ve sent for reinforcements,’ slurred Dirlewanger, swigging from a flask. ‘Meanwhile let’s hunt the Jew.’

‘This is not a task for us,’ said Montefalcone to Malamore. ‘They’ve shown some courage. The girl yes – and the Russian too.’

‘Courage?’ chided Dirlewanger. ‘It’s the courageous Jews we have to kill before the others. Christus! Oberarschloch! Super arsehole!’

‘The hunt goes on,’ Malamore ordered, standing on the verandah, looking up at the stars and listening to the battle. ‘Search every house, and every barn. I think they might be closer than we think.’