Red Sky at Noon

I

It was early morning, the cavalry was massing on the ridge, looking out over the endless plains. In the half-light, Benya could see the flash of hundreds of equine eyes, the gleam of stirrups, hear the stretch of girth straps, the clink of spurs, the jolt of rifle bolts being cleaned and checked, the thump of hooves – and, over it all, the drumming of his own terrified breaths. They were walking forward into squadron, so tight, Benya felt he could hear the heartbeat of the nearest rider. Right next to him, Speedy Prishchepa was drawing and redrawing his sword from its scabbard making a sound like a sharpened cymbal.

He grinned at Benya, his teeth glowing in the gloom, and leaned over to whisper: ‘Did I ever tell you I was married back in the old country? She was such a sweet one, a real apple pie, a bun with currants! The Cossack girls have such style, not like Russian peasant women – they’re mules dressed in sacks – but a Cossack girl, phew, she knows how to walk. Who knows where she is now? Maybe I’ll meet her today,’ and he started to sing under his breath.

On the other side sat Spider Garanzha, his large soft hand on his curved Cossack sword. ‘This shashka can cleave a man from neck to hip with one blow,’ he said, spitting. ‘The human body’s soft as a watermelon. With a sword like this, bones are like butter. Do you know how to do the Splitter? They don’t teach it at your Jew schools? No worries! I’ll teach you. Once when I was in the old country, I met a farrier who…’ They were packed so close, their boots were rubbing against each other, their stirrups almost entangled, but Benya was not listening. The suspense was intensifying. Garanzha went quiet but Prishchepa was talking incessantly. Smiley swivelled his steel teeth, his eyes hooded, and Little Mametka beside him, on his little horse, peeped ahead, looking, thought Benya, like a scared marmoset. It was always a relief to find someone more afraid than he was.

‘How long until…?’ stammered Benya.

‘Till what? Till Christmas?’ joked Prishchepa. ‘Till you get kissed again?’

Spider shrugged and spat out a sunflower seed.

Benya was trying frantically to remember his instructions: how would he fire his weapons? His Mosin–Nagant M38 carbine was slung over his back. Training seemed ages ago. He fingered the sabre, remembered its weight in his palm, but could he swing it? On to a man? His hands were shaking violently, the energy dripping out of him. He knew with a sudden certainty that he would die out there.

They had crossed the Don several hours previously. The majesty of the great river had astounded him. Hundreds of men and horses were wrangled on to creaking old ferries, hooves thudding, guns clanking, the men quiet and breathless once they felt the rise and fall of the water. The German guns had, for some reason, eased, and as they had pushed off, there was, for a moment, a collective intake of breath, followed by an eerie stillness, a stillness more still than any he had ever felt. Crickets chirruped and bitterns boomed and he even heard the frogs croaking and the lap of the river breathing, wide and shimmering under a red sky, its waves green and foamy, and although the near bank was high, the far one was low. It was indeed the sacred river he had read about, the one the Cossacks sang about.

‘This is home,’ said Prishchepa and he started to sing and the others joined in:

An ungodly whistling put them on edge and then his comrade’s voice vanished as German shells exploded on the water, sending fountains into the air. Benya gripped the edge of the boat, knuckles white. I am going to die!

‘Be calm, men,’ said Zhurko. ‘These aren’t targeted yet. They haven’t got any Storches over us.’

That’s all very well, thought Benya, but suppose the shells hit us even so? He was about to say this when he recalled he could be shot for panic-mongering.

They had claimed their horses off the ferries as soon as they landed. It had been utter chaos in the grey-lilac light, horses bumping into each other, their snaffles and stirrups snagged. Finally Benya found Socks and rode up the riverbank with Prishchepa and the Uzbek thief, Koshka.

‘Cigarette?’ Captain Zhurko offered a Belomorkanal to the men. Only officers got Belomorkanals. Benya took one, just to do something. ‘There’s a lot of waiting around in war. We stand here; no one moves till I say,’ he told them. ‘We just have time for a cigarette.’

When Benya took it, his hand was shaking so badly that he almost dropped it. Prishchepa lit it for him; his own hands were still. ‘You’re quite calm,’ said Benya.

‘I am too simple a soul to fear death,’ Prishchepa said. ‘Besides, I am younger. The more you know, the harder it is. I might die now. But I prefer to live.’ On the other side of Prishchepa sat Koshka, who appeared to be rigid with fear, and then Mametka, who wiped his brow over and over, eyes as big and empty as sinkholes.

‘This is going to be a beauty of a day. We might get a tan. Do you know I had a girl in that village over there?’ chattered Prishchepa.

‘Shut up, magpie,’ said Spider Garanzha.

‘Are you Cossacks? I’m writing about the battle. For the newspaper Red Star. I got on the last ferry. I know you’re Shtrafniki but I want the public to know…’ They looked down at a gentle-faced man in uniform with a shock of black hair who was walking along the line between the horses, holding his notebook and pencil. Benya could see the men liked him, even the roughest of them: he could hear him interviewing ‘Lover-boy’ Cherkashkin, the youthful Party Secretary from Belgorod who had murdered his mistress’s husband out of passionate jealousy; even ‘Cannibal’ Delibash was answering his questions; then he was questioning the swarthy Shundenko.

‘Time’s up, scribbler. Get out of here. Advance is imminent,’ Mogilchuk shouted.

Benya’s hands and legs were thrumming; sweat spread across his shirt, and a socket of fear pulsated in his belly. He stayed close to the men of his squadron but he had no idea where they were going, what they were meant to do. He recalled something about advancing under cover of the tanks, then going into a charge and, if successful, a raid behind enemy lines.

‘Right, lads, you’ll be entering a sector where many Soviet troops, some lost, some traitors and cowards, will be at large,’ Captain Ganakovich was bellowing. ‘Stavka orders all forces on southern fronts to be given this information: You will cooperate with our brave Soviet partisans. But there are bands of traitors fighting for the Hitlerites, and particularly in this sector, a special unit under the traitor and collaborator Mandryka. These you will annihilate on sight. Instant redemption awaits the man who kills Mandryka or any collaborationist leaders…’

Benya had never killed a man, making him something of a novelty in a battalion where even those who hadn’t murdered anyone, like Koshka, liked to imply that they had. He knew neither how to kill nor how to die, and he told himself now that it was the not knowing that made them both frightening.

‘When you shoot, please at least aim at something,’ said Captain Zhurko. ‘Seventy per cent of shots fired in battle are totally unaimed…’

They had all laughed then; now Benya had forgotten how to shoot, how to breathe…

Zhurko rode up and down. ‘Remember, fellows,’ he said, repeating his catchphrase to each squadron. ‘If you’re scared, don’t do it. If you do it, don’t be scared!’

Benya’s panic boiled a hot broth in his gorge. The crump of shells – for a moment flying high over them from the German side – was shaking the earth as if a giant was stomping towards them. A boom, then another, made Benya jump, his ears almost bursting, the afterblasts buffering the air. The regimental artillery, 76-mm howitzers, were positioned right behind the horsemen and now they began to fire over them; then the 122-mms…

Then came the revving of engines, and nimble BT-7 tanks – Betushkas – motored past them; Benya knew they were out of date and now he could see them rumbling, stalling, grunting and pumping out black smoke. It was starting.

Panka was riding up the ranks, ladling out their hundred grammes of vodka into the metal mugs that hung from their saddlebags. He handed one to Benya and watched him drink it: ‘It’s always sunny in the saddle,’ said the old Cossack as Benya knocked it back, still sure he was going to die.

‘Squadrons. In file formation: forward!’

Oh God, this was it! Benya thought of his mother, just his mother, and he actually said ‘Mama’, and he wished he was anywhere but here. He didn’t even believe in God, hadn’t prayed since he was a boy, but now he was reciting the Shema in Hebrew. The fear of death was so visceral that Benya looked behind him, the muscles in his thighs tensing so he could dismount and just run, run, run to safety, down to the Don. He could swim to safety. He was not made for this! But then he saw Mogilchuk standing behind the NKVD blocking squads, their machine guns set up right behind the artillery. They were ready to shoot down any cowards, the entire brigade if necessary…

‘Squadrons!’ cried Melishko, riding in front of them on his twenty-hand horse, Elephant, a steed big enough to carry a knight in full armour. ‘Prepare to advance at the walk. Wait…!’ The artillery tossed another volley over their heads. Benya saw the shells explode far ahead of them, smoke rising, debris in the air – could they be real? Melishko’s words were lost but Zhurko repeated the orders; as did the sergeants all along the line: ‘Wait for agreed signals to lope then on the order: charge!’

Benya’s skin was squeezing him like a shell, and he knew he could not fight. But Prishchepa, humming a song, was riding forward, and so was Spider and the entire line. Between the thuds of shells he could hear the Cossacks were all singing together.

‘Squadrons! Draw sabres!’ There was a flash of blue steel along the line as eight hundred blades were drawn. The sight, accompanied by the haunting Cossack harmonies, was so rousing that for an instant wild optimism overcame Benya’s fear. He thought of Borodino and Waterloo and found that he had drawn his own blade and that the shashka was heavy in his hand. Just yards ahead, Melishko thudded forward on Elephant, those plough-horse hooves tossing clods of turf into the air, gaining speed.

Zhurko was behind him, his sword raised.

‘Prepare to gallop, bandits!’ Melishko shouted and Zhurko, twisting round to face them, called out:

‘Not yet! Hold it, hold it!’

Sliver Sock’s three-beat gait was making Benya bounce around in the saddle. In vain, he tried to steady himself as he held his sabre over his head but it was too heavy. He felt himself falling, until a hand steadied him and Prishchepa was right beside him, laughing in the wind, head back. Benya just had time to think that a single German machine gun could finish them all in one minute before they overtook the Betushka tanks (two had stalled already), and he heard the cry: ‘Charge, men! To the gallop!’

‘Forward, you motherfuckers, or I’ll shoot you down! Za Rodina, za Stalina! For Stalin, for the Motherland!’ cried Ganakovich, waving his pistol unconvincingly.

‘For the fucking Prosecutors!’ shouted the Shtrafniki as one.

Keeping pace with the horses on either side of her, Silver Socks lengthened her stride and began to gallop, the surge of muscular power sending Benya bouncing around in the saddle once more. ‘Stay on, fucker, stay on!’ he grunted, holding on to the reins and Silver Socks’s mane for all he was worth.

Melishko turned in his saddle: ‘Enemy sighted!’

And Benya saw them. A compact mass of riders, maybe thirty of them, shirtsleeves rolled up, red caps, and swords flashing, riding straight at him. He could see their faces: all wore uniforms with red ties. A dark-skinned man on a limber grey, black eyes and low brows, nostrils flared, was concentrating hard on him, no one else, just him, riding at him, sword raised – Benya understood the brutal simplicity of war; this man wants to kill me – but then he galloped right past. Benya hung on to Socks. Around him was the clash of steel on steel as another rider in a red cap came at him, but he swerved past him too. A third flew at him, shouting – Benya could see the blackheads on his nose, that was how close he was, he had black eyelashes – and this time Prishchepa spun round in his saddle and brought his sword down on the man, missing the top of his head but slicing off his ear. Benya thanked God that no one had reached him yet. He tried to stay close to his Cossack friends but this time a bulky rider, smiling under a black moustache, was right in front of him, his bay horse foaming, and before Benya could pull on Socks’s reins to avoid him, he had drawn a pistol and was raising it.

There was a loud thump as Spider Garanzha rode his horse right into him, knocking him to the ground. Benya did not see what happened next, because a blow hit him so hard on the chest that he almost fell off Socks and surely he was wounded, even dead? Someone had struck him with a sabre but it must have been the flat side for he was unharmed; the sword had hit the pommel of his saddle and glanced off, grazing Silver Socks on the neck. He saw blood, and it was this that outraged him. This man had wounded his Silver Socks, his beloved Budyonny chestnut.

‘You bastard!’ Benya shouted, swinging his sword at his opponent. He was thin-faced, sunburned, perhaps Benya’s age, and now Benya saw fear in an enemy’s eyes and he feasted on it as he swung the sword just as he had been trained: parry, withdraw and strike. The sword smashed into the man’s face, slicing right through his cheekbone, tearing his face in half. There was a sound like the fracturing of an eggshell and the slurp of the yolk and Benya saw his opponent’s teeth flying up to scatter like a broken pearl necklace. By the time he realized that he had wounded him, even perhaps killed him, the man was on the ground, his riderless horse galloping into the distance, and Benya was charging on with Prishchepa, Smiley and Little Mametka, all using their quirts on their mounts.

Seconds later, he and Prishchepa faced two enemies, riding at them together; one was unhorsed and Benya brought his sword down on the man on the ground with unrealized strength, cutting deep into him. Blood sprayed up at him, red heat cooling on his face, a coppery taste in his mouth. How delicate a thing is a man, he thought, how much softness there is to spoil. He heard singing and he realized it was his own voice, joining in with the Cossacks. He was changing; a switch clicked within him, as if he was a new animal who bore little resemblance to his usual self, a crimson-sprayed Jew on a Russian Pegasus riding the hot wind.

Silver Socks pricked her ears and slowed suddenly, turning her head to the left. Once again, Benya saw the crimson on her neck but then she rallied, leaped forward, her gallop stronger than before. A squadron of four riders was heading towards him, wearing field-grey tunics – German uniforms – but they weren’t Germans. One or two had raised their sabres, the others held up their carbines like Red Indians. ‘Brother Cossacks, join us,’ one of them called over. ‘The war’s lost, brothers! It’s not our war!’

Cossacks fighting on the German side. And then, dropping their reins, they started firing at them. Benya managed to swerve behind his comrades. By hesitating for an instant, Silver Socks had saved his life.

‘Motherfuckers! Traitors!’ Prishchepa turned his mount and slid over to one side, behind his saddle, as the shots rang out; then, holding his pommel, he swung back into the saddle and raising a pistol, shot one of them right in the face.

The horses were suddenly packed against each other and Benya and the others were fighting with everything, hands, swords, everyone terrified and angry, the horses foaming in the heat. Benya drove his sword into a man until he felt it hit the spine, not so soft after all, and the man started to slip backwards off his horse, hands flailing for the reins, mane, finally tail, anything. In panic, with the man’s blood running down his sabre on to his hands, Benya spurred Silver Socks and she reared up and jumped out of the tangle with Benya just keeping his seat.

‘Onwards! We’ve surprised them!’ Captain Zhurko was still riding ahead of them, now shooting with his Papasha sub-machine gun. Cannons opened up on each side. Shells whined and landed to their left and right, and starbursts of earth, flame and turf exploded over him. Benya looked back. The Betushka tanks were burning, and men were jumping out of the turrets which vomited jet-black smoke. Benya had the impression of torn horses on their sides, legs still treading the air with men staggering around them, but his squadron galloped on, untouched somehow. They were approaching an enemy position, but the soldiers there saw them and turned and ran; so did those at the next enemy position and suddenly they were riding alongside running men.

Benya came up behind one, a man in a helmet with a cockerel-feather plume who was running like a mechanical doll, and he brought down the sabre on his head, splitting it right open like a melon. He heard singing and it was him singing again loudly, at the top of his voice. Riderless horses joined him galloping forward; they were Russian horses, Budyonnys and little Kalmyk ponies – and one dragged the body of a Shtrafnik by the boot; it was his comrade Skakun with his hands bouncing above his head. Benya passed abandoned tanks: one was a Betushka, but two belonged to the enemy – although the markings weren’t German. He saw his Uzbek comrade Koshka overtaking him, out of control, holding on to his horse’s mane, reins flying, google-eyed with panic. Silver Socks’s hoof crashed down with a crunching pop on to the head of a fallen man but Benya didn’t look back.

More men were running before him; the Cossacks were yahooing and ululating like banshees; yet more enemies appeared out of trenches and golden fields and ran for their lives. One turned to point a rifle at him but Silver Socks leaped forward and Benya brought down his sword, hitting his enemy’s neck, cutting deep; this killing had its own queer wantoness that made him thirst for more. Two boys wearing helmets with feathers raised their hands to him. As Benya was about to slash one of them, he fell to his knees and cried out: ‘Mama, Mama!’ The other boy was young, much younger than Benya, with a long nose and big teeth and sheepish eyes and he remembered thinking their voices were beautiful, their faces were tanned and dark, and their uniforms were baroque. Feathers and red ties and fezes. Fancy dress! The boy stopped crying ‘Mama!’ and was pointing a pistol at Benya until, in a swish, the arm was gone, his torso cloven from shoulder to ribs in a throb of blood. Spider Garanzha raised his dripping blade and waved it wildly at Benya as if to say: You see, the Splitter!

They were still riding forward but they were cantering now. The horses were foaming, their coats dripping sweat. They came to a stream, the horses stopped to drink and some of the men jumped into the water.

‘Get on your horses – no dismounting. Now! Keep advancing, keep moving,’ Zhurko yelled at them.

Now they loped more easily, crossing cornfields, riding through sunflowers. What time was it? They had charged in the early morning but now it seemed much later. The sun burned high. Each field they came to there was an enemy position but, at the sight of them, the men, wearing feathers in their hats, jumped up shouting and ran away. Benya and Garanzha galloped after them, Benya swinging the sabre. What damage cold steel could do, he thought. Enemies still fled, dropping helmets, mugs, boots, pans, until riven by steel they fell and didn’t rise again.

The guns were quieter behind them, Benya noticed. Still fritzing with adrenalin, he was almost jumping out of his skin with exhilaration. ‘This is how victory feels!’ said Prishchepa, whirling his shashka over his head, flicking out a spray of sweat. The sky seemed to Benya to reflect a blast of energy. It was as blue as the sea, a sea upside down.

They rode on and on, under the scorching sun, over fields full of broken young men lying amongst the ripened wheat.

The words those fleeing boys were shouting sounded so graceful. It was not German, or Hungarian; could it be Romanian? No, you idiot, realized Benya, it was Italian. They had been chasing Italians.

‘Halt!’ Zhurko pulled his reins and held up his hand. The squadron managed to stop on a slight spur, though Koshka went straight over his horse’s head on to the ground and lay there whimpering.

‘Look!’ Sergeant Panka rode up to Zhurko. ‘A church tower, captain. A village ahead.’

‘Form into two squadrons, sergeant,’ said Zhurko. ‘You take Squadron One to the east. Squadron Two, come with me. Let’s go!’

They rode down the street feeling as light as a pack of wolves on the hunt.

II

An old Cossack woman is cooking a goose for a hundred men in the house by the church, a pot meant for the Italian soldiers who had been occupying the village until hours earlier. The old man beside her sleeps in an alcove with its scarlet rugs and tassels; her children are packed together like puppies in a basket. She’s toothless with sunken cheeks and she sucks her gums as she watches the men who’ve just ridden in, her eyes as murderous as sickles. If they expected a warm welcome at this liberation, they do not find one here. Benya understands there is no welcome amongst broken people – even if their liberators are fellow Russians.

It’s early afternoon. It’s too hot to move yet everyone is moving. To Benya the village seems bright and rich. After years of a life in black and white, in prisons, Camps, military training, every moment in this village will be imprinted on Benya’s mind forever, like the first film you ever see in colour. They clop down the street, standing high in their stirrups, yahooing loudly, singing songs, brandishing swords still streaked with blood and grass. Ahead of them, a dead horse, then a man with rosy cheeks and open eyes but missing the top of his head, a dome of creamy matter still immaculate and quivering in its fragility: these are just some of the sights that overwhelm him. The village seems a land of plenty; it radiates the heat of freedom with its colourfully painted cottages, eggshell blues and fiesta reds, and some of the girls have dressed up in white blouses and skirts in red and green, woven with white hems hung with bells. The horsemen follow the swing of the girls’ hips with their eyes. They smell the food, hear the ringing water of the stream. It is a time that will live in the men’s memory in the perpetual present, a time of wonder divided into jagged but discrete scenes.

The Shtrafniki find olive oil and chocolate and even eggs. There’s wine and vodka and the men start drinking immediately. These Italians have things Benya hasn’t seen since he was in Madrid. And what uniforms they have left strewn around: helmets with feathers and peaks and bonnets. The place is fragrant from the cooking. The Italians left in a hurry when the Shtrafniki galloped right into the village, that’s for sure. There’s coffee ground in a helmet, real coffee, and plates of polenta and vermicelli that are still warm. There is a dead man in the yard and Smiley is pulling off his boots and trying them on. ‘These’ll do,’ he says.

Someone has already tossed the pockets of the dead Italian, spilling love letters in playful italic writing and sepia photographs of a beautiful woman posing with a chocolate-box-ish background in a studio in some small Italian town. The letters are spread into a fan-shaped collage that reduces the story of an entire life to its pathetic essentials: a body, an ID card, a photo of a family. Finis. We killed them without even bothering to find out who they were, thinks Benya.

After swigging some water and swallowing a piece of cheese, Benya walks his horse to a stable where the vet Lampadnik and the farrier Tufty Grishchuk are checking the horses. He hands Silver Socks to Lampadnik, worried about her neck. ‘Oh dear. Doesn’t look good. Sorry, Benya,’ Lampadnik says.

‘What do you mean?’ says Benya, suddenly worried.

‘What do you think?’ asks Lampadnik, turning to Panka.

The old Cossack touches the neck carefully, checks his finger. ‘She is still bleeding.’

‘What do we do?’ Lampadnik is cautious and shy. Doubt is sketched on his long face with horsey teeth, and Benya knows he has been tentative since he was sentenced to ten years in the Camps in 1937 for ‘Trotskyite wrecking’ after two horses died of croup.

‘Golden, be calm. Let me do this,’ says Panka, his teak-coloured face grave. ‘I have some old twine in my saddlebag and, Lampadnik, you scald some tree bark. Ask the woman for some honey.’

Benya holds Silver Socks, who is pouring sweat, and talks to her while Panka finds the twine in his saddlebags and quickly binds Socks’s upper lip to distract her and then washes the wound in water, then with the juice of scalded bark. He threads the twine through the eye of a knitting needle and sews up the gash in Socks’s neck with lightning dexterity, pulling it tight, applying more of the scalded bark and painting on the honey. ‘A poultice, you see?’ and then he releases the horse’s mouth. Socks is still shivering but her eyes are different, relieved somehow.

‘There,’ says Panka, stroking her muzzle. ‘You’re going to be fine. I’ll watch her. Golden, go and get some grub and sleep. It’s always sunny on the steppe, eh?’

Outside the Cossacks in the squadron cheer Benya and rub his shaven head with its spiky grey-blondness. ‘I saw him swing his sabre,’ they tease him.

‘I thought he could only lift a pen,’ says Spider Garanzha.

‘The Jew has it,’ says Panka.

‘That’s a compliment from Panka. He might even call you “brother”,’ jokes Fats Strizkaz, embracing him, kind suddenly and Benya loves him with the love of men who kill and die together.

Panka shrugs and spits, busy with the other horses. He is too experienced to share the exhilaration of the hopped-up Criminals but he has a shot of vodka or two and is cheerful in his level way.

Benya looks around him. His companions are scarlet-cheeked and shiny-eyed with butchery. There’s madness in the air, and they swagger giddily with the strange aura of rare men who’ve ladled out death and know the secrets of the world. Benya wonders if they are going to slip the reins and go berserk in the village. Socks is going to live though, and he has been through a battle – and he feels eerily powerful, hungry for more war, more savagery.

There’s singing from the millhouse where the rest of the squadron are swimming in the stream, stark naked. Benya looks at their tanned faces and necks with a ‘V’ down their chests; their bodies are as white as snow. He throws off his clothes, so hot suddenly that the cold seems to scald him.

Wearing damp clothes that dry fast, Benya lies on a mattress in the shade of a house behind a wattle fence. The house smells of kvass and sausage. There’s the pungent fug of closely packed, sweaty bodies, which he recognizes as one of the pervasive smells of war and prison. A peasant woman in an embroidered hat and skirts sits and stares at him. She gives Benya a glass of milk but she has a sly look. It’s hospitality – or a dagger in the back. Ruined people are cruel people.

Exhausted, Benya fights to stay awake. He hasn’t slept for twenty-four hours or more, but he is still scudding from the revelation of his newly discovered other self. His sword arm aches and burns: he can hardly lift it; his thighs are agony, and he can barely walk. Yet he is alive. More than alive. He is transfigured. Through the blade he felt the softness of his fellow humans. He has killed several men, men whose eyes he looked into, not Germans but Italians, his favourite nation on earth. He thought he was killing German Nazis. Instead they were the people of Michelangelo, Raffaello and Tiziano and, as if to make the point, someone has found an Italian gramophone. The aria of Rigoletto soars into the still afternoon air. He falls asleep, dreaming…

The music stops abruptly, and Benya sits up. It’s as if he has awoken in another dimension. The atmosphere is quite different, a swerve of mood, a darkening under the blinding sun. Perhaps it was something to do with the drink? Or just the flesh-eating instinct of born killers who have no other way of expressing themselves, or of feeling free and alive? He goes outside and sees those cutthroats he knows so well, Smiley, and Cut and Run, staggering into cottages.

The goose is ready. It’s been cooked so long the flesh melts on his tongue. Plates of eggs and pork and kasha and the meat of a dead camel are put before him. For dessert: cherries and peaches. This is a rich, black-earthed land, and Benya eats like an animal, even the chewy camel meat, virtually licking the plate clean. He hasn’t enjoyed such plenty since before his arrest, and the men trough almost silently, quaffing wine and cha-cha, getting sunburnt and soused, like lords of creation. Afterwards, Benya checks on Silver Socks, who is lying down outside in the shade, her legs folded under her. She is not feverish, she’s eaten, and her neck looks clean.

When Benya went to sleep, there had been laughter and splashing and flirting, a sense of triumph, a glaze of evervescence. They had pulled it off. They had broken the enemy, taken this village. Haven’t they earned their redemption? But now the milk is soured, the sun is so hot that Benya feels its pulse throbbing, and there’s shouting behind the stables. In the yard of the priest’s house, the Political Officer, Ganakovich, is interrogating a collaborator, a Kalmyk scout with wild sweat-pleated hair and grey German britches. The traitor is tied to a chair, bleeding from the eyes, and there are teeth scattered around like jewels. There’s a fat Italian there too, just a boy, sitting against a wicker fence, watching as if this has nothing to do with him.

When he sees Benya, he asks in Italian: ‘When will we go home? Will we ever eat spaghetti and wine again?’

‘Si, si, ragazzo, presto!’ Benya knows some Italian and he understands and is suddenly overcome with the urge to weep, to hug the boy.

Ganakovich is nervous. He looks around and sees Zhurko in the doorway. ‘Where’s the support? Where’s the artillery?’ he blurts out. ‘Where’s Melishko?’

‘They should be on their way,’ Zhurko opines. ‘But I’ll take a look,’ and he heads towards the stables.

‘What about Mogilchuk? We need the Special Unit here, don’t we?’ No one answers this and no one but Ganakovich misses those hyenas. Then he shouts at the scout, ‘Where are the rest of you traitors? Where’s Mandryka and his auxiliary police?’ He is waving his pistol around in a way that proves he has never seen battle. Ganakovich, Benya knows, is a blowhard in the Russian tradition: a tyrant to those below, a slave to his masters.

Garanzha approaches softly and then suddenly his steps are as light as a ballerina’s and the spasm of violence so quick Benya doesn’t see it; and the scout starts to talk. With his round, leathery face and almond-shaped eyes, he’s a descendant of Genghis Khan perhaps and they’re still Buddhists… the Kalmyk scout is a tough customer, but he has betrayed Russia, and knows there will be no quarter given.

‘Mandryka’s Hiwis?’ he asks. Benya doesn’t know what he’s talking about but he does know that ‘Hiwi’ is short for Hilfswilliger, ‘willing to help’, the name for all Russian traitors, such as the Schuma auxiliary police, who have thrown in their lot with the Germans. ‘Yes, they’re at that village, Shepilovka.’

‘Where’s that?’ Even Ganakovich has no idea where they are.

‘Ten miles west from here.’ The scout speaks in a toothless monotone, no effort necessary now, death imminent, in an accent that mixes Russia with the Mongol East.

‘Where are German forces massed?’ Ganakovich asks.

‘All around you. See the dust rising.’

Ganakovich peers around and sure enough, in the distance, clouds of dust roll forward like a giant wave.

‘The offensive is about to start again soon. You got lucky, Cossacks,’ the scout says.

‘Lucky? What do you mean?’

‘You’re Shtrafniki, aren’t you?’ replies the scout. ‘There’s no backup coming behind you. The Italian Colonel Malamore was here with the traitor Mandryka and some Germans. Just a few hours ago. They know you’re here… But as for you – you’re on your own.’

Ganakovich is stunned. Unsure what to do, he tells Spider to send the prisoners back to headquarters, and reels out on to the street.

Garanzha has an ominous ticking stillness about him. ‘What are you looking at?’ he asks.

‘What are you going to do?’ says Benya.

Spider looks right at Benya and, surprisingly in that sharkish face, he has the milkiest goo-goo eyes that could loll a baby to sleep – even as he draws his dagger.

‘Garanzha’s got his butcher’s grin! Like it’s a holiday and he’s about to slaughter a sheep.’ It’s Prishchepa, cheerful as a chaffinch. ‘Put it away, brother,’ he says.

Garanzha sheathes the dagger, and the Kalmyk nods gratefully but without much conviction.

‘What’s going on?’ asks Prishchepa. ‘The girls in this village are beauties. Mine’s called Aksinya, fresh as a punnet of strawberries…’ He beams carelessly at the prisoners and the Shtrafniki – as if both are equally his pals. ‘Must go. Aksinya’s waiting,’ and as he leaves, it happens so fast: Garanzha is giving his goo-goo eyes to Benya, never even looking at the scout, as his steps go all quick and balletic and somehow, in that instant, the blade has done its work. The scout twitches slightly as if falling asleep, and the blood pumps out in fast and then shorter and shorter spouts.

‘Ahh! Mama!’ It is the Italian boy, staring at the dead scout. Something clicks as he realizes that gentle routines of the Venetian slums, licking gelato in the campo with his mama, coffee with his papa at his usual table, catching the vaporetto to his grandmother’s, all the things he knew and took for granted that he would see again, are gone.

‘Ciao, ragazzo, where are you from?’ Benya distracts him in Italian.

‘Venice. Alpini. The Tridentine Division.’

‘What’s your father do?’

‘Cheesemaker. I work with him.’

Benya longs to grab the boy and run away with him to safety. ‘I was in Venice once.’

The hope rises in the boy’s lamb eyes. ‘I could make you polenta, spaghetti,’ he says. ‘I’ll cook for you. I was just cooking it up for my unit when—’ He feels Garanzha’s gaze.

‘I’ll take care of him, Garanzha,’ says Benya.

‘No,’ says Garanzha in his gentle, detached voice. ‘Ganakovich gave me my orders. I’ll escort him back to our lines.’ He gestures to the boy, who gets to his feet. They walk through the graveyard and out into fields. Benya watches them as they get smaller. He feels numb; he wants to get a grip but everything is slippery and runs through his fingers. He knows he won’t see the boy again.

There’s howling from a nearby house. Benya looks sideways and Smiley comes out through the garden, chuckling and wiping his hands on his trousers. There is more weeping as Fats Strizkaz looms in the doorway, pig-drunk and lairy, and barrerls in while just outside Little Mametka, poky-faced except for luxuriant lips, lingers like a randy schoolboy outside a cathouse.

Benya is afraid of Smiley though grateful to him for many things. ‘How could you?’ he asks now.

‘Fancy swimming in my milk?’ Smiley stands in front of Benya, who notices his maddened red eyes set in his strangely handsome face. ‘Be my guest, Jewboy.’

‘You… forced her?’

‘Are you a priest? Never.’ Smiley shakes his head. ‘A dog doesn’t harass an unwilling bitch. What about you, Mametka? Keen to lose your cherry?’

‘I’ve had women,’ pipes up Mametka.

Fats Strizkaz snorts as he slams the door of the house behind him – the weeping is now quieter – and stamps up the garden path. ‘No, you haven’t, you lying little eunuch. Your voice hasn’t even broken. You’ve never touched a woman, have you, Bette Davis!’ Strizkaz was a former Chekist interrogator – until arrested himself. A Trusty in Kolyma, he has kept his connections to the secret police so the men humour him. But no one forgets what he was.

Smiley pokes Mametka in the side. ‘You going to put up with that, Mametka?’

‘Ignore him,’ says Benya. ‘Come on, let’s go and see the horses.’

‘Horses? Riding horses is all Mametka can do with his little woodpecker; he couldn’t do a woman if he wanted, could you, Bette Davis?’ leers Strizkaz.

‘Not funny. Not funny,’ says Mametka timidly. ‘I won’t put up with it.’

‘What’s that? You’ll put up with it if I say you fucking put up with it,’ replies Strizkaz. ‘Won’t you, Bette Davis?’

‘You should apologize, Fats,’ says Smiley in what Benya thinks is a statesmanlike, League of Nations-peacekeeping manner. ‘I think you’ve gone a little far, eh?’

Strizkaz smirks but takes no notice.

‘Ignore him, Mametka,’ says Benya, concerned that Smiley and Strizkaz will come to blows. ‘Look!’

On the village street, Captain Zhurko rides in. Ganakovich, clearly in despair, rushes out to meet him. ‘Where are supply carts? Where’s the guns? Where are the communications people?’ he shouts, waving his arms.

‘I don’t know! How can I know?’ This is the sensible voice of Zhurko. ‘No one followed us.’

‘And where’s the rest of the battalion?’

‘I rode back towards our lines. There are Fritzes everywhere, tanks and guns, and none of ours.’

‘The Kalmyk said we got lucky. We found the Italians. But now we’re on our own.’ Ganakovich gulps. ‘Where’s Melishko?’

A silence.

‘We need Melishko.’

Benya feels sick. Surely these two fools can’t be right?

‘Melishko will come,’ says Zhurko decisively. ‘Melishko will know what to do.’

Afterwards Koshka joins Benya. He has been listening too.

‘Maybe this wasn’t a victory after all,’ he whispers hoarsely. ‘Maybe we’re lost!’

III

In Stalin’s apartment in Moscow, Svetlana was alone and miserable. She could tell by the looks the teachers gave her at school that she was an outcast, albeit a much revered, almost sacred one. Although her father was the greatest man alive, her teachers were afraid of her; many of the boys and girls avoided her and she knew their parents told them to have nothing to do with her.

Her father sometimes stayed with her in the Kremlin apartment, especially when the war was in crisis, but more often he visited her after his meetings and then drove out to his real home, the Nearby Dacha at Kuntsevo, twenty minutes outside the city. In the apartment, she lived with her devoted nanny, her cook, and Mikhail Klimov, her bodyguard from the secret police. Her father was so busy with the war that he had little time for her, but Svetlana still worried about him. The stress, she knew, was almost unbearable. No other man could take it. Her elder brother Vasya – Colonel Vasily Stalin – certainly couldn’t. He had just been cashiered for his outrageous and drunken behaviour. He had taken some of his men fishing but instead of fishing rods, Vasya had thrown grenades into the river and one of his men had been killed. Her father had been furious.

She sighed and looked at the newspapers as she always did in the evening and there it was in the Red Star. Another article by her favourite correspondent Lev Shapiro.

Tears ran down Svetlana’s cheeks too. She had to write to this man to tell him that she adored his work. She reached for a pen and paper and wrote in a rounded girlish hand:

IV

It is late afternoon as Benya walks through the village. Each house has its gated wattle fence at the front, and a back yard leading to a garden festooned with vines and cherries.

‘Hey, Golden, look!’ They’ve found more Italian bodies in one of the cottages. There is a dead Italian officer on the doorstep, a splendid-looking fellow, tanned and immaculately dressed – shot neatly through the heart. Everyone stares at him – before the Criminals start stripping him of accoutrements. Smiley, Cut and Run, Cannibal Delibash and Koshka are working their way through the houses, looking for food, weapons, girls. At the moment of impact: screams and smashed glass; afterwards; a light symphony of sobbing. It is not the liberation the villagers deserved.

Spider Garanzha appears suddenly, wiping his sabre on the grass, his guess-what-I-just-did smile on his gaping shark mouth, and they join the men lazing in the churchyard, which now resembles a macabre gypsy banquet with food, bottles and bits of uniform scattered amidst the gravestones. Some of the men are still drinking in the sun and a few have passed out. Lying on his back, his bell-shaped head sunburnt to a fluorescent puce, propped up on a doubled-up mattress, his belly a swollen winesack (the only man ever to emerge with a paunch from the Camps), Fats Strizkaz gives his opinions on all matters. Did you see Koshka in the charge? What a coward! How Ganakovich is scared of war – don’t you notice when his voice goes high? Fats has a bottle of Italian wine which he happily shares with Smiley and Garanzha. Then he scopes Little Mametka, who has stolen the Italian officer’s gleaming boots, holster and dagger scabbard engraved with his initials.

‘Hey, Mametka, those boots are too big for you!’

Smiley raises a warning hand but Strizkaz won’t be restrained.

‘Hey! What? We all called him Bette Davis in Kolyma! Jaba made it up.’ That was true, thought Benya, but Mametka could take anything from Jaba, his Boss; he was younger then; and besides, Jaba had an affectionate way of saying it.

‘I apologized,’ Strizkaz drawls. ‘I apologized and you accepted it, right?’

Mametka looks twitchy. He nods gingerly.

‘It’s OK,’ Strizkaz tells Smiley and Garanzha. ‘I apologized and he accepted it…’ Then his face with its patch of moustache turns vicious again. ‘Didn’t you?’

‘Yes I did,’ said Mametka.

‘Yes you did,’ he bellows. ‘Bette Davis, you little fucking girl!’

And that is it. Like watching a reel of film that suddenly trips and jumps a few frames, Benya misses the first moves, and then he sees Mametka has grabbed one of the shovels and, twisting its blade in the air, is thrusting it again and again into Strizkaz’s throat with such power that his neck is virtually obliterated. Blood spatters all over him – a trip of the reel – before Benya and everyone else can even get to their feet to stop him… or join in. Then another jump in the reel and Smiley, Garanzha and a suddenly awakened Cut and Run Ivanov are beating Strizkaz with anything to hand: a rifle butt, another shovel and a slab of rock. Everyone else just looks on. When they are finished, they lug the unrecognizable Strizkaz into one of the half-dug graves and drop a tombstone down on top of him.

‘What the hell’s going on here?’ Ganakovich is coming up through the graveyard, gawping at Mametka and drawing his Nagant, but Smiley and Garanzha take no notice of him. ‘Lads, you need to tell me.’

‘I don’t think so,’ says Spider Garanzha.

‘Leave this to us!’ adds Smiley.

Ganakovich looks them up and down, replaces his pistol and heads back down to the priest’s house. The state has officially lost control of the Shtrafbat.

Smiley’s forehead is pointed, temple veins swollen and charged, and he has come into himself with that strain of pure forthrightness he was born with, the killer’s easiness – and there are moments that Benya envies it. But now not. He is desperate to get away from the graveyard. He hurries past Mametka, who is so besmeared that the blood looks like stage make-up – even his hair is congealed – and staggers down the lane to the Italian Red Cross tent, which is pitched on the far edge of the village.

‘What’s going on?’ asks Dr Kapto, who is still patching up some of the wounded Shtrafniki. ‘Something happened in the graveyard?’

‘Nothing… it can wait till you’re finished. Can I sit here?’ Benya is just happy to be in the wholesome peace of the tent of serene healing – away from the others. He should be shaking after what he has seen – but he isn’t. He prays Melishko will return soon and tell them the plan; there has to be a plan.

He watches the nurses Tonya and Nyushka working hard, sewing up wounds and dressing them. ‘I have no doubt we’ll advance soon,’ chatters the dimpled Nyushka. ‘The Great Stalin knows what he’s doing. He’ll have a plan for us.’ She’s always been a fanatical Stalinist despite being arrested and sent to Kolyma. He notices how well she looks. Even though the doctor and nurses have ridden with the squadrons for many hours, she still has a bruised ripeness about her, her cheeks a little sunburnt, her auburn hair streaked gold. ‘Comrade Ganakovich will know,’ she says innocently. ‘He always knows Stalin’s orders.’

‘Of course, he does,’ agrees Benya, remembering that she is now Ganakovich’s girl, his ‘front wife’.

He turns to Tonya: she and Kapto seem to communicate without words. When he cuts, she is already there with the cotton wool to dab the wound, predicting his moves with smudged, half-closed eyes set in a flat, expressionless face. Does she love Kapto or isn’t it like that? Is it her destiny to attend the doctor but never have him?

They sew up the last of the wounded. Breezy and direct, Kapto pats each patient on the side when he finishes: ‘There! All done! Easy, now, easy!’ Benya spots his uniform now boasts a captain’s pips and he has a leather satchel which he always wears over his shoulder and across his chest.

‘You got promoted, doctor? I hadn’t noticed.’

‘Looking after Melishko’s piles has its rewards,’ he says.

‘And the satchel?’

‘The morphine of course. Do you need some? How was the charge, Benya?’

‘Terrifying…’

‘I saw you. You were like a devil possessed. Since you gave up writing, you might have found your new metier but…’ He sighs. ‘A sabre can do terrible damage – as you now know.’ Benya feels guilty and yet somehow pleased with this new reputation for brutality. It is so unlikely. ‘Cigarette? I have Italian ones. Africas. Shall we get out of the village?’ Kapto says, stepping outside the tent and lighting up.

‘We need to avoid the churchyard,’ says Benya, ‘but it seems quiet in the fields. They just killed Fats.’

‘Revenge for what he was in the Camps. Only Melishko can control them,’ muses the doctor. ‘Is he back? Where on earth are we going next?’

Benya takes his rifle and Kapto draws his new sidearm, a handsome German Parabellum he has found in the village, and they stroll into the countryside where the fields have been harvested. Ahead of them, there’s a combine harvester burnt out on the field. Benya looks back at the village and it might be a summer afternoon in peacetime. A magpie stutters; a skylark dances. But on the horizon, the dust broils densely, tainting the cornflower-blue sky a dirty burgundy, and the crump of the artillery is constant. To the west, there’s the crackle of shooting quickfire and then single shots.

Kapto cocks his head: ‘Doesn’t sound like fighting.’ Smoke rises, not fuel black, perhaps burning stubble.

‘Think what we’ve been through,’ says Benya. ‘We’ve seen so many people gone…’

‘Don’t look back; don’t look forward,’ Kapto replies. ‘Like in the Camps. Just live through today. Everything is out of our control, but even here a man can still save a man.’

They walk amongst the sheaves towards a haystack at the end of the field. Benya longs to throw himself into it; on impulse, he hands the doctor his rifle and runs and jumps and lies back kicking his legs in the air. The hay is sweet, prickly, bright yellow. But something twitches beside him. A rabbit maybe. Or a bird.

‘Careful,’ calls Kapto, coolly raising the rifle as Benya, spooked, jumps up.

‘What the hell? It’s something big,’ Benya says, drawing his pistol.

‘Come out!’ says Kapto. ‘We won’t hurt you!’ He pokes at the hay with his rifle. The hay slides off it and a child stands up, a little girl in a ripped floral dress, very frightened, black eyes, long auburn hair with a side parting held in a clip. She is matted in mud.

Benya kneels down and puts out his hand, coaxing her forward. ‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘We’re Russians. Where do you come from?’

She points to the west, towards the smoke and the occasional shots.

‘Where’s home?’

‘Dnieperpetrovsk.’

‘That’s a long way away.’

She nods.

‘How old are you?’

‘Five.’

‘Where are your parents?’

‘They took them.’

‘Who?’

‘Schuma and Germans. Are you—?’ She starts to shake.

‘No, no, we’re Red Army, not Schuma. Where are your parents now?’

She looks behind her and starts to cry. Benya notices that her legs are scratched, her little dress is in shreds, and her knee is bleeding. ‘They left. We were all in the hole. I waited. When it was dark I crawled out and ran away.’

Dr Kapto goes on one knee beside Benya and takes over the conversation. ‘You’ve been running all night and all day?’

She nods.

‘You haven’t eaten?’

She shakes her head.

‘You’re bleeding. May I see?’

‘He’s a doctor,’ explains Benya. She relaxes and Kapto examines her knee.

‘You ran through wire and cut yourself, quite deeply. I need to stitch you up. Will you come with us? I can carry you?’ He opens his arms to her and, slowly, she comes towards him and he hugs her and she sobs. Kapto is so tender with her that Benya fights the urge to cry too as they walk back together to the village.

In the Red Cross tent, Tonya’s smudged face lights up for an instant. She and the doctor have saved many children together. Perhaps children are the one part of her job that pleases her, Benya thinks. He watches the child eat; then Kapto stitches her leg with Tonya assisting.

Eventually, she falls asleep, and Benya and Kapto light up Africas and stroll into the village.

Outside, the orange sun has sunk so low that Benya feels he can look right into its bloodshot face and feel the red heat through his eyelids.

‘What do we do with her?’ asks Benya.

‘Well, she can’t go back and we can’t leave her here,’ says Kapto.

They hear the heavy clip of hooves down the tiny street ahead of them.

‘Melishko is back, Melishko is back!’ Benya hears his comrades shouting. He feels a surge of relief. Thank God for Melishko; thank God for Kapto.

Each man had saved his life.

In another world.

V

In the Camps, Benya was too old for Hard Labour. He was over forty, and although there were lots of other older men there, most of them died in the first weeks. The gold they were mining out of the mountain lay in the iron ore fifteen metres underground. After the earlier shift dynamited the rock, Benya’s job was to heap the loose boulders on to his wheelbarrow and, balancing precariously up and down along the twisting wooden walkways high above the mine, push it to the conveyor belt in the steamshack. It was back-breaking hard work. If the wheelbarrow tipped over, neither he nor his fellow Zeks would be fed and he would be beaten. If prisoners were too exhausted to move, the guards simply shot them. His quota was seven cubic metres of soil and rock per day.

Then suddenly, after just a week, the light dwindled and the snow came. It was winter, grinding Kolyma winter, and the snow was so deep, the wind so strong, the blizzards so blinding that even around the Camp there were ropes to hold on to to get to the dining block. Winter clothing was issued – boots, padded coats and mittens – but the clothing was too thin, and the prisoners were always freezing. At roll call each morning, shoved into lines by Fats Strizkaz and his Trusties brandishing truncheons, the prisoners beat their own bodies with their hands to stay warm, and friends spotted the whiteness that warned of icebite. That’s when Benya first met Melishko, who’d lost his teeth and fingertips to Beria’s torturers.

‘Rub your nose,’ he said to Benya one day, ‘or you’ll lose it.’

It was night-time for nine hours a day, with the temperature sinking to minus forty. Men lost noses, fingers, toes; one man who urinated outdoors lost his penis when his urine froze; those with dysentery sometimes didn’t get up again, glued to glacial faeces. Yet Benya learned to find gems and sparks of joy even in this hell – a delicious piece of bread, the chance to rest an extra few minutes – and the smile of a new friend, Shishkov, another Political who worked with him. Politicals were cautious, never talking of their cases unless they really trusted someone. ‘My name is Nothing, my surname is Nobody’ – ‘Zvat nikto, familiya nikak’ – was what they said. But Shishkov immediately knew who Benya was. ‘I was one of your readers,’ he whispered one morning. Benya came to trust Shishkov, who was one of those prisoners known as ‘Jokers’ – sentenced under Clause 159.10 for ‘counter-revolutionary agitation’, usually for telling a joke about Stalin: ‘Quite a funny one,’ said Shishkov.

‘Please don’t share it,’ retorted Benya.

‘I have another about Beria!’

They managed to laugh.

Shishkov had once been very important; he’d been Second Secretary of the Kherson Party until denounced by his brother-in-law for his one-liners on Georgian geniuses, and was one of those owlish, bespectacled, sensible people who always looked older than his years. He was kind to Benya and taught him how to work the wheelbarrow, how high to pile the rocks, how to avoid a crash, and how to inflate the quota: the entire Camp was engaged in inflating their quotas, a science of mendacity known as tufta.

‘Remember,’ said Shishkov, ‘love is life, love is what put your stars in the sky. Look at the moon. The moon shines everywhere and if you love someone, they can see the same moon! I call it Moon Magic. Loving will keep you alive.’ Benya knew that he thought constantly of his wife and his two daughters.

The prisoners rarely cried or gurned, realized Benya; the faces of those in the deepest pain were set in brittle, expressionless masks – even as the suffering tore them to pieces within.

If Benya had not been chiselling away at the rock and carrying stones he would have died of cold, yet the work itself was so punishing that even during the first day he staggered rather than walked. If the brigade’s quota of rock was not shifted each day, the prisoners received less food. Even so, the watery swill with its scraps of whale fat and herring bones daily ladled out from the Cauldron, plus the paika, the bread ration, in the dining block was not enough for any of them.

Just a week into winter, Benya noticed his Political friend, Shishkov, was deteriorating. His face was touched with death, his skin yellow, his nose jutting out; it seemed to Benya he was just gristle, bone and parchment. Benya begged his older friend to eat more, to find the will.

‘I realize that I will never see my children again,’ replied Shishkov, tears running down his face. ‘I am dying of hunger.’

That evening Benya saw Shishkov sitting in the frozen garbage heap behind the dining block sucking on a herring bone.

‘He’s a goner, a dokhodayaga,’ said Smiley, Benya’s friend who had saved his life on the voyage to Kolyma, and who now resided in the most comfortable barracks with some of his Criminal brethren. The ‘garbage-eaters’ were not long for the world of the living.

Two weeks into winter, Shishkov fainted while pushing the wheelbarrow, spilling the rocks.

‘Pick up those fucking rocks, cocksucker,’ cried one guard, a Mongolian like many of them. ‘Get working or we’ll shoot you,’ called another guard from the rim of the great hole.

Benya pulled him up, and collected his spilled rocks. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘They’ll shoot you! I’ll do your work today.’ It was snowing heavily. The rocks, the wheelbarrow: everything was frozen.

A couple of hours later, Shishkov again lost his balance and fell off the planks into the muddy hole. Benya climbed down but the guards shouted: ‘Get working! Leave the goner down there!’

He could see Shishkov was dying. ‘When you get out,’ he gasped, ‘go see my wife and children. Tell them…’

Benya had memorized their address and understood. He was just leaning over his friend to tell him this when he was struck on the shoulder: ‘Get to work or it’ll be the Isolator for you!’ shouted one of the Mongolian guards.

Benya took his wheelbarrow up to the conveyor hut but when he wheeled it back, the Zeks were down with Shishkov, stripping him of coat, hat, boots, trousers – everything, until there was nothing else to steal. ‘Man is wolf to man’ echoed in Benya’s ears. Never was this truer than in the Gulags.

Shishkov lay there with his eyes open, stark naked, angular and sunken, less like a man than an old ironing-board, already covered by a delicate sprinkling of snow. Twice he blinked.

‘He’s alive,’ cried Benya but the Zek next to him stopped him.

‘No, he’s gone,’ said Melishko. Respected by all in the Zone, Melishko was known as the General, and was one of the soldiers arrested in 1937. ‘And you mustn’t join him. How can we survive? Live just in the present, not the past, not the future, live minute by minute.’

No one picked up Shishkov. The next day, he was just a shape in the snow, frozen solid in his crusty tomb. By the following day, he’d vanished into the polar landscape. Could men just vanish like this? Benya learned the answer in the first days of spring. When the thaw came, and the streams were seething with fresh water which rushed through new tunnels under the muddy carapace of winter, the ice revealed its first flowers, the ‘snowdrops’, of spring – and amazingly while all the Zeks in the brigades looked ten years older, these corpses were the same age they had been when they fell.

Benya had survived almost the entire winter but in its last days of almost eternal darkness, just when veterans said spring was coming at any moment, he began to weaken. Melishko, who was older than him but much tougher, was now his partner on the wheelbarrow. As the days became longer, Benya ached with hunger. He felt his legs get heavier, and he knew he was sinking. He experienced a strange weightlessness, like a speck of dust in the wind. Would he last the next day? Or the next? he wondered. Then came a day he could barely move.

‘That’s enough,’ said Melishko. ‘I’ll talk to the brigadier. You need to stay in barracks for a day.’

But by the following day, Benya was too ill to get out of bed. His temperature was raging, and he was hallucinating, images darting at him. There was his father, in his three-piece suit and watch chain, seeing patients in the waiting room of the surgery that was the basement of their house.

Then he was with Sashenka again; she was right there with him, her Greek profile so noble it took his breath away every time. He saw the slant of her cheekbones, could even smell her scent, touch her skin. Tears ran down his face. ‘Darling,’ he said. ‘I knew you were alive.’

Floating back to his parents, to his childhood home in Lemberg when that city was part of Habsburg Galicia, long before the Revolution, and he was in school uniform and his father was saying, ‘Work harder at school or if you’re not careful, Benochka, you’ll turn into a true Galitzianer skirt-chaser…’

‘I think that’s enough, Zakhary.’ His mother was at the door. ‘I think Benochka’s got the message. Come on, you two, we’ve got a feast! It’s supper!’ It was always a feast in the Golden house. He longed to hug his parents before he died – which was when he knew he was dying…

When Benya awoke, he realized there was no God but there was a doctor, who had a stethoscope around his neck, a white coat, a notebook, a doctor who was smiling down at him.

‘There you are!’ said the doctor as if he had been waiting a long time. ‘You must drink. We’ll feed you very carefully. Temperature normal this morning. You’re very weak but you’ll be all right.’

Benya looked around at what he assumed to be a hospital ward. The sheets were white, and there was the smell of disinfectant but without its antidotes, sweat and faeces. The wooden floor was clean. Was this Moscow? Had he escaped the Zone?

‘Where am I?’

‘You’re still in Madyak, I’m afraid. You’re in my so-called clinic. I’m visiting from the hospital at Magadan. It’s simple, just this little room in a hut… We do our best. And you were lucky I was visiting this week.’

‘Are you…?’

‘Yes, I am Dr Kapto.’

‘So you’re the Baby Doctor,’ murmured Benya.

Dr Kapto was the hero of the Zone, beloved by the prisoners, the last evidence that humanity itself had not died on earth. A Zek himself of course, a veteran of many years serving a long sentence (he was surely a Political, Benya surmised), his acts of kindness were recited by the prisoners almost in nursery rhymes: how he had saved the lives of so many women who were pregnant or had been impregnated by gang-rapists or the guards; how he had delivered their babies and protected the women, refusing to let them return to work until they were strong, and how he tried to find them easy jobs thereafter. He was also rumoured to raise the children in the Zone’s own orphanage at Elgen, playing father, teacher and doctor to them. Benya thought he had never loved anyone more than this doctor at this moment. So here he was: the Baby Doctor.

‘You’re safe here, Golden,’ he said. ‘I am looking after you.’

Benya looked up into his heart-shaped face and his wonderfully light eyes, and sobs of gratitude overcame him, and he reached up to Kapto to try and hold his hands.

‘Easy, now, easy,’ Kapto said with an all-encompassing breeziness. ‘You’re depleted. We’ve got soup for you and bread. We’re going to feed you up. Ahh… you see?’

As if by magic, a short peasant girl with a flat face and heavy-lidded eyes wheeled in a trolley. The smell of food was dizzying. Benya gulped down the beet soup, the oatmeal with shredded whalemeat, the bread, the tea. He ate the butter on its own, rubbing it into his gums. He saved up the two sugar lumps and crunched them between his teeth, then let them melt on his tongue, the sensation making him shiver.

Kapto stayed with him, delighted by the sight of Benya’s recovery.

‘Who brought me in?’

‘Melishko checked on you in your barracks and dragged you over here. A few more days here and you’ll be strong.’ He stood up. ‘Now I must see to the other patients…’

Benya suddenly noticed that he was in a full ward. Other patients, some little more than living corpses of indeterminate age, were staring into the space, toothless mouths agape. As Kapto turned away, the fear returned. The nightmare was not over. They were restoring him just to kill him. He was going back to the work brigades. He could not do that. He would die out there! He leaned forward and grabbed Kapto’s coat.

‘But what happens when I’m better? I can’t go back to the mine… I’ll die…’

Kapto sat on the edge of the bed, rested his hands on Benya’s hands, and Benya could not believe that someone could be so kind to him. Kapto smelled sweet, soapy, not of compacted sweat and disinfectant and death like everyone else. He smelled like a human.

‘Easy, easy now! You’re lucky, Benya Golden. You’re not going back,’ he whispered. ‘Everyone else has to go back to the mine. But not you. Aren’t you a medical orderly? A feldsher? Don’t you have nursing experience?’

‘What?’ Benya was confused.

‘Don’t you remember, Golden, in your Spanish Stories, when you spent a week with the medics and their ambulance at the Ebro front? You had medical training? Now you understand?’

‘Yes, of course! I’m a nurse!’ Benya nodded like a child.

‘You see, I’ve read your book – and all your short stories too. You’ll be joining the two nurses here in our little clinic. The most important thing is your kindness to the patients. Many are fading away but we must make them feel loved. We’ll train you up. For us doctors, our duties don’t end with just saving a life: those we heal we must also cherish.’

Benya tried to speak but he was so moved that he wept instead.

‘Easy now,’ said Kapto. ‘You’re a lucky man, Golden. And tomorrow you’ll find out the very meaning of luck.’

VI

General Melishko is covered in dust; even his starched-white moustache and winged eyebrows are reddened with earth. Thank God he’s back! He hands the reins of Elephant to his adjutant and joins Zhurko and Ganakovich outside the priest’s house near the church.

Benya listens as Zhurko and Ganakovich bombard Melishko with questions. When are reinforcements coming? Where are the supplies? Ganakovich is shrill, no longer the legendary friend of Politburo members and seducer of ballerinas.

‘How are we to provision the horses? We need support,’ says Zhurko, voice tight, calm, dry.

‘How do we rendezvous with the others?’ cries Ganakovich. ‘What do we do now? We don’t even have full maps.’

‘We are where we are,’ says Melishko.

‘And where is that?’ demands Ganakovich, gulping back a wad of saliva. ‘Where are we? Should we go back to our lines…?’

Melishko laughs huskily, rolling his false teeth. ‘Really, Ganakovich?’

‘No, I didn’t mean that,’ Ganakovich corrects himself. ‘Not One Step Back! We know Stalin’s order. Retreat means death.’

‘Yes,’ says Melishko quite jovially, poking him in the ribs. ‘You almost had to execute yourself just then.’

‘Forgive me! Please don’t inform the Special Section, I just meant—’

‘Calm down, boy.’ Melishko waves a bluff hand. ‘We don’t tell, do we, Zhurko?’

‘Of course not,’ said Zhurko, cleaning his spectacles with his shirt tail.

There is a strange stillness. Benya realizes the shooting has stopped.

‘Thank you, comrades…’

‘We’re not comrades, remember, Ganakovich? We’re bandits,’ replies Melishko heartily. ‘How many sabres are we here?’

‘Three hundred, give or take,’ reports Zhurko.

‘Wounded?’

‘Riding wounded included.’

‘So with our three hundred, how do we rendezvous with the rest of the battalion, the rest of the division?’ Ganakovich is almost weeping.

‘Ganakovich, let me spell it out. We’re alone. There are no reinforcements,’ Melishko explains. He speaks slowly and deliberately. ‘The other squadrons were wiped out when they charged the German tanks and machine guns. They redeemed themselves all right. I only just got through myself. Thanks to Elephant. That scout was right: our squadron got lucky. No one knew there were Italians in this sector. And because the Italians worry too much about their uniforms and pasta, we broke right through.’

‘So what do we do now?’ whispers Ganakovich.

Melishko lights a cigarette, taking his time about it, with a lot of puffing and chewing of false teeth. He talks when he is good and ready. ‘We can only advance. And we have a mission of sorts, remember? If we break through, they said, we must hunt down and destroy all traitors. And the chief traitor in this sector is Colonel Mandryka. The Germans have given him his own little kingdom here with his own security police, the Schuma, who are working on special tasks with the SS. He’s encouraging Soviet soldiers to surrender and defect. Moscow wants him eliminated, and the unit that kills him will be redeemed. That’s what we’re going to do. Tell Panka to saddle the horses, and gather all provisions. We move out at dawn.’

‘But won’t the Germans know we’re here?’ whines Ganakovich.

‘Yes, but they’ll be expecting us to retreat towards the Don. Instead we’re going in the other direction, further into enemy territory. And we’ll be moving fast and light as only cavalrymen can.’

‘Forward’s the only way back,’ agrees Zhurko.

‘But don’t you realize?’ says Ganakovich, and the fear in his voice echoes the fear in Benya’s belly. ‘We’ll never come back.’