Red Sky at Noon

I

‘Dear friends, beloved romantics, wistful dreamers!’ said the new teacher of literature, Benya Golden, to his class at the Josef Stalin Commune School 801. Limping into the classroom with the help of his flamboyant walking-stick, he jumped on to the wooden platform at the front.

He had their attention immediately.

After the arrogant bombast of Dr Rimm, the senile babblings of Dr Noodelman, the droning sincerity of Director Medvedeva, they could see this one was a different species altogether. There were rumours about his past, his sins, his war – but no one knew anything and they never would. And conversely, Benya was enjoying a new life, teaching Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gorky, the classics.

It was winter in Moscow, December ’42, and at Stalingrad in the south, now clad in snow, fettered in ice, Stalin had sprung his giant trap and the Russians were strangling the German Sixth Army. Benya had found a little apartment so he could walk to work, and although on his first day in the school common room he had experienced the hostility of Dr Rimm, who smelled his flawed past, he had the support of Director Medvedeva, who was proud to recruit such a distinguished teacher of literature. Of course she had made enquiries with the Central Committee, Education Department, which was curated by Comrade Satinov, and with the Organs, and all had signed off on her appointment of Benya Golden.

He looked out over his class. ‘Open your books. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin. I hope you will always remember what we’re going to read today. We are about to go on a wonderful journey of discovery.’

On that first day, Benya noticed that there was a girl named Stalina who sat next to one called Peshkova at the back of his class. He could only wonder at the vagaries of this world where a man could travel from a death sentence for planning to assassinate Stalin one day to teaching his daughter about Onegin the next. He paid no attention to her but when he handed back their first essays, he saw each child in turn for a tutoring session after class. After all, he had nothing better to do. He was living quietly, and had no wish to become the flâneur of the 1930s – that had cost him dear. He was just happy to breathe the free air.

When he talked to Peshkova, he told her that he had known her grandfather Gorky, who had corrected his first articles. ‘I was a writer once,’ he said.

Then it was the turn of Stalina. He saw no resemblance to her father. Perhaps she was more like her mother? Her essay showed her intelligence, her culture. He talked to her frankly, as if she was anyone else. And he wondered about her. He agonized. Just when he was free again, he faced this dilemma that could entangle him in her family. But also he knew about Love, its agony and its necessity for living, and tried to keep the memories of his own loves – of which there were really only two – fresh in his mind. There had been his first mature love, the fatal liaison with Sashenka; and those hurried days, hours really, with Fabiana. He saw their ride across the Don, and the moment she died. What an exceptional person she had been, how I let her down by failing to protect her, he thought. Whether my home is a small apartment or a prison cell, loving is what keeps the stars in my sky. You give up one truth after another, you compromise every day, but you always hold something back – you keep the jewels in the secret casket locked with the golden key in the final alcove within the unbreakable strongroom of the last tower of the fortress of your self – and that you never give up.

‘Teacher Golden?’

He looked into the hazel eyes of the freckly and rather imperious redhead before him in her school uniform and Pioneers’ scarf. What a curse it was to be the child of great men, especially this one. Was she reliable? Would she betray him? He wavered, holding back the essay.

‘Is there anything else, Teacher Golden?’ she asked.

What the hell! He handed back the essay written in her curved girlish hand. ‘You write well,’ he said. ‘A plus. And, Stalina?’

‘Yes?’

‘Go somewhere on your own and look carefully at my comments.’

Svetlana went into the ladies’ room at the school and opened her essay carefully, page by page, until she found a piece of paper, folded over, and held on to the last page with a paper clip. Hungrily she seized it and opened it. It was a piece of prescription pad headed ‘Central Military Hospital’. Hospital? But when she opened it and recognized the writing she found herself breathing fast. She deciphered the scrawled words, understanding they were written in the hieroglyphics of desperation…

II

More than two years had passed. The war was won, and Hitler had killed himself in the ruins of Berlin. Benya had never found his parents. He had to presume that they had perished during the war, in the streets of Odessa or in some Ukrainian ravine. He could not forget them but he often felt them close to him as he relived the blessing of an early life with loving parents. He still loved Sashenka and believed she was alive in a Camp somewhere in the vastness of Russia. And the wounds of the war were still raw to him in both senses. At night, he dreamed of Fabiana – and Silver Socks. Fabiana was already a ghost, lost in the haze over the steppes, the distance between them ever more unbridgeable, time and circumstance burning away the memory of her as the sun does with mist. He had known her such a short time.

At the Josef Stalin Commune School 801, he’d become a respected member of the staff. In his free time, he collected books that he bought in flea markets; in the evenings and sometimes even during his lunch hour, he made love to a teaching assistant, marvelling at her beauty and youth and astonishing wantonness. But mostly he lived for his teaching, and had become the favourite of many of the children. Svetlana Stalina and her class had left the school but his classes were still filled with the children of the Politburo and the government. His days were ruled by the ups and downs of the school, frequently rewarding, mostly tedious and occasionally dramatic. Like everyone, he had presumed, or at least hoped, that the freedoms of the war would endure. The children had become confident and playful, so different from before the war – but there were signs those easy times were over; Benya prayed they would last…

Then, one morning that summer 1945, he received an envelope in his pigeonhole. Inside was just a simple note that read: ‘Tomorrow 6 p.m. to midnight. Yaroslavsky Station.’

For a second, he wondered if it was Sashenka coming back. Could it be? Yaroslavsky Station was the terminus for trains from the Kolyma Zone in the far east but surely he would have somehow known if she had been there too? He had always believed Sashenka might be in the Camps to the north but Vorkuta trains arrived at a different station. He feared this could be some kind of trick by the Organs to compromise him with a provokatsia. But then he absentmindedly turned over the scrap of paper and saw the devil’s trident, and he knew he had to be there.

I live, he thought, in the realm of stations, of leaving and returning and leaving again. Stations were surely one of the essences of Russian life.

He waited out the next day, and around 6 p.m., after school, he arrived at Yaroslavsky Station under the Russian Revival tower that looks like a bishop’s hat. It was a drowsy summer’s night. He walked along the line of platforms but it was easy to find the right one. MVD guards in their blue epaulettes were already guarding the terminus. He took his place in that very Russian gathering of those who await the return of loved ones who have fallen into the abyss. No real Russian novel, Benya thought, would be complete without a station scene – every book should have one. Looking around him, he saw people who had learned to become almost invisible during the years of their eclipse appear out of the shadows of the station: the wan wife with her young children, never seen by their father; the old woman who had waited decades for the return of the ruin of a man who would arrive on the next train.

‘If their relatives look like carcasses, imagine what the passengers are going to look like.’ Benya turned and there was Smiley, still in uniform, visored cap pulled low, and Little Mametka, still elfishly callow – but both now decorated Soviet officers tempered by war, Smiley a captain, Mametka a lieutenant. Both were wearing the new Stalin-imperial uniforms, golden buttons, chunky gilded shoulderboards, red stars.

‘Just as well you came,’ said Smiley.

‘We’ve missed you,’ added Mametka malevolently, the threat implicit though Benya had no idea what they had on him. He had wondered whom exactly he was waiting for. The devil’s trident was a signal from the underworld, one unwise to ignore: surely from Jaba the Brigand-in-Power? He was just about to ask but Smiley held up his hand: ‘Don’t ask. Duties and rewards, that’s what Jaba always said, remember?’

‘We can say we’re welcoming back a friend,’ Mametka promised.

‘Well, this is a dreary party,’ said Smiley. They leaned on the railings chain-smoking, waiting for the train. The hours passed. Smiley bought a bottle of vodka; the three of them drank shots while nibbling greasy pirozhki and tepid pelmeni, station-food.

‘I helped capture Vienna,’ said Mametka. He had neither grown nor had his voice deepened despite all the battles he said he had fought. But his face had thinned out, and now he looked more shrivelled and fiendish than before, the lips too red, fat enough to burst.

Smiley had stormed Berlin in Marshal Zhukov’s armies. ‘You wouldn’t believe the girls we had. As many as we wanted,’ he told Benya. ‘Girls and watches! See?’ He pulled up his sleeves and cackled: three Swiss watches on each wrist. ‘And I saw exactly where they burned Hitler’s body.’

They talked about girls, fights and crimes, but never Kolyma, nor the Shtrafbat. Former Zeks did not talk about such things, certainly not in a bar. And besides, Benya was wary of the two Criminals, and getting more nervous by the minute about what Jaba would want.

The clocks struck 1 a.m., 2 a.m., and they ordered more bottles. Then the guards started to take up positions again, and just after 3 a.m., a train emerged out of its own cloud of steam, the doors opening and figures stepping out from the mist.

Benya, Smiley and Little Mametka moved closer, in a crowd of others. The returnees, haggard men and ancient women with sunken faces, appeared slowly, holding their belongings in bundles of string, bags of canvas, burlap or carpet, their watery eyes searching through the crowd. Showing their papers at the gates, they received their stamps – and then fell into the arms of weary relatives.

A powerful man, blue tattoos lapping up his neck, strode up the platform, quite unlike his meagre fellow travellers, and embraced Smiley and Mametka: it was Deathless. Uneasily, Benya observed their lugubrious bonhomie, their almost incomprehensible Criminal patois, fearing what monster would rear up out of his past to ruin his present.

‘You have it?’ Smiley was asking.

‘Oh yeah, I have it!’ said Deathless.

‘Well, let’s see it then. The writer’s here!’

‘Is Jaba not coming?’ Benya asked.

‘Maybe he is,’ said Deathless. ‘Or maybe you just get me.’

‘What are you looking at us for?’ Smiley was pointing at the train. ‘Keep watching.’ Through the steam, like a cavaderous foreign army emerging out of a fog-draped battlefield, came a host of men in foreign uniforms. Benya spotted some Romanians in brown. A few Hungarians. Each nationality sticking close to their own people, bearing a capsule of their homeland around with them wherever they ended up.

‘Prisoners going home,’ explained Smiley.

‘We taught them who was master in the Zone,’ said Deathless, smoking.

Going home. Benya glanced at the brigands who were smirking beside him.

‘They’re not free yet,’ added Smiley. ‘Still being guarded. They have to cross Moscow to Kievskaya Station.’

‘And where do they change for…?’

‘Bucharest, I suppose,’ said Benya. He didn’t like this game at all.

‘No, Rome. Or maybe Venice,’ said Smiley.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look.’ Mametka was pointing. ‘Look at those uniforms, there! They’re Italians.’

Smiley gave his metallic grin, and Benya winced in pain at the very thought of his own private Italy, his Venice lost.

Some of the prisoners were close now to the gates and of course they were Italian: even the Zone couldn’t quite grind all the gloss out of them. The thought of Fabiana stung Benya with unbearable sadness. He wanted to tell these broken Italians, ‘I once knew one of you. Very well, for a short time. A nurse from Venice? Yes, that’s her! Fabiana who died back in ’42 – did you know her?’ But he would immediately be denounced as a Fascist fraternizer, a collaborator with the invaders who had almost destroyed Russia. Yet the Criminals knew something and he feared what was coming. And then it occurred to him – perhaps someone had talked? Sensing that the times were getting dangerous again, the possibilities for disaster started to eat at him.

At the gate, the Italians showed their papers for another check; and then they were surrounded by MVD troops with blue shoulderboards and guns on their arms, who started to march them slowly through the station, watched by a few morose Russians.

One older Italian, a swarthy one with a grey beard, almost tripped, and an MVD guard gave him a shove: still prisoners. Benya wanted to look into their eyes, wanted them to know that he wished them luck, that he didn’t want to join in their humiliation.

And then he noticed that one of the Italians was staring right at him, and he turned, and there under a peaked cap was a woman with brown eyes. It couldn’t be. She was dead – but there she was, and she was smiling at him, right at him, just a few feet away. She was much older, drawn and pale, but still so much herself. She had just a filigree of grey frost at her temples. She had recognized him, and her extraordinary honeyed eyes shone with such a radiant delight that he wanted to shout out, ‘Fabiana! I never forgot you – I still think of you every day, I still dream of you!’ He pushed himself forward – but Smiley and Mametka gripped him so hard that it hurt. ‘Careful, you fool!’ said one.

‘Say a word and I’ll cut your tongue out,’ said the other.

‘Can it really be her?’ Benya whispered.

But it was, and she was waving her right hand, fingers together, in the gesture that he had not seen since that last day – the bear gathering honey! Tears were running down his face, and he was mouthing the words to her, two important words, and she was mouthing them back.

She turned, reached behind her, and lifted something up. For a second he thought she had dropped her bag. Then he saw she was holding a little person, a small girl whose bright blue eyes looked right into his. She looked like a photograph of him as a baby, one that had stood in pride of place on the mantelpiece at the family home in Lvov and then in Odessa.

But the guards were pushing them on. ‘Hey, prisoner, no stopping! Hurry up!’

Fabiana stayed still, holding up the child, and she was pointing at Benya and he heard her, that unforgettable voice saying clearly and loudly in her singsong Italian, ‘Aurelia, guarda quell’uomo! Look at that man! Aurelia, mia dolce amata bambina, see that man!’

Spotting a delay, the guards were shoving them and she was passing, her face still turned towards him. He had to say something, he had to follow, but Smiley’s hands, those claws accustomed to break and hold, were clamped on him and he couldn’t move – yet he felt the wings of the angel of the past fluttering over him, taking to the sky, coming back to life.

Now they were disappearing, the little girl waving, and Fabiana still repeating those two words, over and over, ‘Somehow forever, somehow forever,’ and Benya was making their silly honey sign and she saw it and she smiled, tears pouring down her face too, half covered by her little Aurelia, who was still waving – with that smile that was entirely his.

Only once they were gone, warded into the buses waiting outside, did the Criminals release him slowly.

‘See, Deathless, he almost ruined everything,’ said Smiley.

‘Look at him now – sobbing like a girl!’

‘Lucky we had that shot of vodka!’

‘Did you see her?’ cried Benya. ‘Did you see the child?’

‘Quieter!’ Smiley ordered. ‘What do you have to say to us?’

‘Thank you! Thank you!’ He hugged them, Smiley, then Mametka, then Deathless.

‘Oy, get down, bitch,’ said Deathless, pushing him away.

Smiley waved a finger at him: ‘Don’t get queer on us now.’

Benya remembered himself and understood the danger. They had given him this gift but it was more than enough to get him the Eight Grammes or sent back to Kolyma.

‘How did you know?’

‘I was with Elmor’s partisans when we ambushed an Italian cavalry squadron chasing a Russian man and an Italian woman on horseback,’ said Smiley. ‘Comrade Elmor ordered “Fire the Dashkas!” and I fired one and Mametka here fired the other. Blew some holes out of them. And you got away.’

‘But how did you discover she was alive?’

‘I was the one that captured her,’ said Little Mametka. ‘The Italian officers received a direct hit. Blown to pieces most of them but she was right there – scratched and cut up, but nothing serious. We would have finished her off like we did with the Germans – she was beyond having any fun with – but Elmor said she might have useful intelligence. So we sent her back, and off she went to Magadan for two years. She was a nurse, so guess where she ended up? The hospital. That’s where she had the baby. It was Jaba who put it all together.’

‘Jaba has an old-fashioned idea of right and wrong, of loyalty,’ said Deathless.

‘The devil’s trident?’

‘We’re all his,’ said Smiley. ‘Sworn for life. If you obeyed the summons, you’d get this reward.’

‘So what does Jaba want in return?’

‘Here.’ Deathless reached into his canvas bag and pulled out the file. Benya opened it and there was the manuscript, typed by the secretaries in the Commandant’s office. ‘It’s draft seven of Jaba’s play. He wants your comments, says he’s been waiting for them for years and he’s got a bit stuck. He says he’s got something called writer’s block and that you were always the best teacher.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it. For now. Goodbye, Golden. We’ve got an apartment of watches and jewels from mansions and museums across Europe. In other words, we’ve got work to do,’ said Smiley.

‘But how do I give my comments to Jaba?’

‘Send a letter,’ replied Deathless. ‘He gets his mail. Goodbye, writer-in-residence.’

As the three Criminals walked away, Benya remembered something else. As Fabiana had passed, he’d heard a metallic ching, the sound of a small object dropped in a crowded station. He got down on his haunches, groaning a bit from his old wound, and then on all fours and searched the filthy floor. And he saw it: a key with a label. He stood up and turned it over in his hands. The label was light leather now much aged and worn but the words were still visible: ‘Only special personnel. Magadan Hospital. KOLYMA.’

Smiling that he had just seen the most ‘special personnel’ on earth, Benya staggered through the archways of the station out into the deserted streets of Moscow, dazzled and drunk with happiness and yearning. So this was the meaning of the crone’s prophecy – this was the child she foresaw, saved by the kind doctors of Magadan.

Would it be better if he had never known that Fabiana was alive and that his daughter Aurelia was in the world? He would never be able to kiss her, and that pain scorched him. And yet he was grateful that he did know. In a distant city, in Venice perhaps, Aurelia would look at the same sky as him, the same stars. Moon magic.

As he walked, he stopped with a horrible thought. Would Fabiana give Aurelia her husband’s name? He realized that this would be the best idea because she would not have the stigma of being illegitimate. Then it suddenly occurred to him that Fabiana, who thought of everything, had thought of this too: Aurelia did have his name. ‘Aurelia’ meant ‘Golden’ – and this touched him to the depths of his heart.

‘Oy, you walked right into me, you fucking dog’s prick,’ said Deathless. ‘Are you disrespecting me?’

‘Leave him alone,’ said Smiley. ‘He’s talking to himself like a madman and sobbing like a bitch.’

Benya had bumped into the three of them outside the station.

‘He’s lost his mind, the motherfucker!’ said Little Mametka.

Smiley poked Benya in the side. ‘Pull yourself together, cocksucker! Bye then!’ As they walked off, he heard Mametka asking what was wrong with him.

‘It’s the Italian girl, you idiot, and he’s found out he’s got a brat.’

‘What of it?’ said Mametka. ‘I’ve got brats all over the place.’

Smiley smacked him on the back. ‘Of course you have.’ He turned back and called out: ‘What was the brat’s name?’

‘Nothing,’ said Benya.

‘Did you catch your daughter’s name?’

‘Yes. It was Nobody.’

‘That’s the way to survive! Anything is possible but everything is a secret. You’ll read Jaba’s play?’

‘Yes, I will,’ said Benya, smiling through his tears. And he found he was fiddling with the key and its label. Under a streetlamp, he saw that on the raw leather of the disintegrating little label were some words that he could barely decipher. The ink had smudged on the soft leather but he turned it back and forth in the light until he could read what Fabiana had written: