Red Sky at Noon

I

‘Where’s Koshka?’ asked Zhurko the next morning, but they all knew the answer.

It was dawn. The night had been sweltering. The men were sweating even though the sun was not up. Garanzha and Little Mametka stood near the horses, smoking Italian cigarettes. Beyond them, down the slope a little, lay Koshka, curled up like a child, hands stiffening already. The men followed Zhurko and stood around Koshka, looking down at him. Blackened blood ridged across his neck. Just saying, thought Benya, just saying.

Garanzha was calm, calmer than any of them. ‘I like to know who I ride with,’ was all he said, and he walked back to the campfire, now little more than ashes.

Benya wondered if Zhurko would say something, but he was arranging Koshka’s belongings: PPSh, dagger, mess-tin, spurs, boots and quirt were all laid out in a neat row. ‘Choose a gift,’ said Little Mametka, and Benya got a second Papasha.

The fear was gathering like a bundle of wire in Benya’s belly. He had slept deeply under the stars, without a thought, utterly exhausted, but when he awoke, he was sickened by what they had to do this day, and he felt the flickering of terror in every joint, as if his very bones were resetting and tightening inside him.

Sergeant Panka boiled the coffee and shared out the dried meats from the village and the ration of biscuit. No one mentioned Koshka again. Ten minutes later the seven rode out, guinea fowls and partridges scattering before them. The woodpecker tapped; skylarks swooped; howitzers boomed on the Don.

They moved cross-country towards the village of Novi Petroshevo, keeping to the fields of sunflower and maize, riding to the lane that led from Shepilovka, Mandryka’s headquarters. As they loped, they could hear music and shouting. The Schuma were celebrating, Zhurko told them, and Mandryka was unlikely to wake up early so the plan was to be in position when he headed out. If they missed him, they would catch him on the way back. Benya had started the day on edge, shaking with nerves, but as they rode through the heat, he began to daydream, to let Silver Socks find her way behind the others.

Just as they were riding through a defile of poplar trees, Socks’s ears went forward and she tensed. Benya was suddenly awake and he put his hand on the round drumlike magazine of his Papasha just as the Cossack voice said: ‘Who’s that? Stop right there!’ Around Benya, the men were reaching for their guns.

‘Too late! Don’t move! Keep your hands up or we’ll kill you all!’

Zhurko turned to his unit: ‘He’s right.’

In front of them, men emerged out of the maize. Behind them, the black snouts of guns were raised.

‘Who are you?’ said a man, wearing Russian fatigues but holding a German Schmeisser. Benya guessed he was the commander but were these Mandryka’s thugs? The seven Shtrafniki froze but kept their guns levelled.

‘We’re Red Army,’ said Zhurko.

‘What unit?’

‘Second Cavalry Shtrafbat.’

‘I see your pips,’ said the man. ‘Identify yourself.’

‘Leonid Zhurko. Captain, penal rank.’

Just then a lanky young man pushed forward. ‘Major Elmor, it’s them,’ he said. ‘I can vouch for them.’

It was ‘Grasshopper’ Geft, a youngster who had vanished a day earlier from the Shtrafbat along with the vet Lampadnik and a couple of others Benya recognized.

‘You’re sure?’ said the man they called Elmor.

‘Sure.’

‘All right. Dismount, Zhurko. Slowly!’

Zhurko stayed put, and gestured to his unit to do the same. ‘I need to know who you are.’

‘Partisans, Second Don Brigade.’

‘I didn’t know there was a First Brigade.’

‘There isn’t. We’re the remnants of the Kharkov encirclement a month ago. We have orders to intercept you; Stavka sends regards to Melishko with reference to your last order concerning Operation Pluto.’

Benya felt Zhurko’s relief. They were who they said they were: Soviet partisans in contact with Stavka in Moscow.

‘Is Melishko with you?’

Zhurko just shook his head and Elmor understood.

‘Where’s the rest of your battalion?’

‘We’re it, but we’re alive.’ Zhurko dismounted and shook Elmor’s hand. The partisan officer was built like a low-slung cooking pot, Benya thought, with a bald head topped with tousled strands of blonde-grey hair that flapped like the earmuffs of a shapka hat. He and the others dismounted and they hugged the skinny Geft with real joy.

Elmor crouched down on his haunches like a Kazakh and Zhurko sat cross-legged. Benya noticed Elmor wore five grenades around his belt.

‘What are your orders concerning my unit?’ Zhurko asked.

‘Moscow radioed us. Stavka informed us you were alive and needed support, and we had a message for Melishko, restoring him to his rank of general but… Well, anyway, we’ve been looking for you.’

‘If I’m honest,’ replied Zhurko, ‘there are just seven of us and we’re all that’s left of an offensive close to the Don.’

‘We would invite you for pirozhki, shchi and vodka; take you sightseeing; introduce you to the local girls,’ said Elmor without smiling, ‘but this area is crawling with hostile forces of every stripe. You had a mission here?’

‘To eliminate Mandryka.’

‘Us too. Headquarters has ordered his assassination, whatever the cost. I have men watching him and his people.’ Elmor paused. ‘You hear that shooting? That’s a German unit engaged in what they call “anti-partisan aktions”.’

‘They’re hunting you?’

‘No. Their “anti-partisan measures” usually involve killing Jewish women and children or innocent peasants. And they are assisted by Romanian forces in the area. They’re across this field and right beside the lane Mandryka will take, so we can’t attack Mandryka with them in our rear, or shoot it out with them. A firefight would attract Mandryka and the Germans.’ He looked around at Zhurko and his Cossacks. ‘How are you with cold steel?’

Spider Garanzha drew his sabre. So did the others.

‘Keen,’ said Elmor. ‘I’m impressed.’

II

Svetlana Stalina found the letter waiting for her when she got back from school. Even her nanny was excited.

‘Could it be from him?’ her nanny said, flush-cheeked with anticipation.

Svetlana opened it in the sitting room.

Svetlana screamed with joy. Lev Shapiro had responded in such a warm fashion. He’d confided in her, shared his feelings and emotions with her, welcomed her letter.

‘What do you think?’ asked her nanny – but Svetlana was already writing back.

III

Five miles away from the grasslands where Benya and his comrades had met up with the Soviet partisans was the hamlet of Radzillovo, which had become a safe little corner of Italy, complete with its tastes and clothes and even its songs, right in the midst of the Russian steppe.

Sitting in the shade of a fruit-laden cherry tree behind a Russian cottage painted in the bright colours of these Cossack homesteads, Nurse Fabiana Bacigalupe closed her eyes and imagined she was home in Venice and had not just suffered a terrible loss.

The heat was soothing and out of the kitchen came the delicious aroma of garlic and coffee and the voice of the lieutenant singing his favourite Piedmontese song, ‘In the shadow of a bush slept a pretty shepherdess’, as he and others in the unit cooked up their polenta, chatting in their different Italian dialects about girls, love, pasta, wine and war. On pasta, it was simple: food was their first solace for being sent to fight in this war and the lieutenant’s rye-grinding contraption allowed them to make perfect penne and sometimes polenta. Fabiana had shown them how to grind real coffee beans in a steel helmet – ‘Perfetto!’ they cried – and this had made her even more alluring in their eyes – if that was possible. On war, she could hear them loudly grumbling why were they in Russia at all? Mussolini had sent 235,000 Italians to fight in Hitler’s war and only the most fanatical Fascists, like their commander Colonel Malamore and his élite legions of Blackshirts, believed this crazy war was a good idea or embraced the Nazis’ racial ideas. They had been inserted into Hitler’s Army Group B for this summer offensive, and the Russians had collapsed so fast it had been a bit of a holiday. Fabiana’s units had not lost a man until two days ago when a squadron of wild Russian Cossacks had suddenly fallen on them and driven them out of their village with the loss of several men including Ippolito Bacigalupe, Fabiana’s husband.

‘Do you think the principessa is OK? She seems quiet!’

Fabiana smiled as the men’s voices dropped to stage whispers as they discussed her.

‘Of course she’s quiet! She lost her husband—’

‘But he treated her badly. I heard him slap her once and she had a black eye next day.’

‘Now she’s sad; I saw her crying; she’s a widow and we have to look after her.’

‘Don’t worry about her. Colonel Malamore will marry her if he can… but what would you give for a kiss from her?’

‘A hundred lashes!’ said one voice.

‘Demotion. One rank for a kiss but for a full night, a long night, I’d happily go to the blockhouse for a year!’

‘Ottimo! Delizioso!’ She listened to them laughing, somewhat shocked by this, unsure if she was amused or not.

‘Tell me what the principessa is going to do now? Shall we take her a taste of something? The polenta? Let’s see!’

Fabiana was no princess – she was the daughter of a teacher – but she also wondered what on earth she was going to do now. Until two days ago, the war had been somewhat boring and everything had seemed simpler. She had married her husband, Major Ippolito Bacigalupe, back in Venice, and when he was sent to Russia, she had rashly volunteered to serve as a nurse at the front. She could have stayed in Venice and worked at the hospital but she had come to be with him and to see Russia – this was the sort of woman she was.

She soon became the favourite of her husband’s entire unit. They were respectful to her – she was after all their major’s wife – but they discussed (in those loud whispers) what on earth she was doing with this dapper but short-tempered popinjay (whom they nicknamed ‘Il Duce’ after Mussolini – not a compliment) and how to rescue her from his tempers.

The village they stayed in had been charming: blue and red cottages set in a sea of golden corn, black-faced sunflowers and high steppe grass. Then came the day of the charge. They had been cooking polenta and roast goose in the priest’s house and they had seen the dust rising in the rosy dawn and had heard of a suicidal charge by a Russian penal battalion against their own Savoy Celere cavalry, but Fabiana’s husband had been certain that the Germans had wiped them out – until they heard the drumming of charging cavalry, then the clatter of hooves on stone and the thwang of bullets. One of the Kalmyk scouts had ridden fast into the village and reined in his little horse so hard it fell to its knees, shouting that the Cossacks were coming. A pig had run squealing down the street; a camel had broken loose, nuzzing loudly; ‘Pronti a fare fuoco! Prepare to fire!’ her husband had ordered the men, who pointed the Breda heavy machine guns out of the windows, trying to keep the Cossacks at bay just long enough to allow them to retreat. ‘Madonna santa,’ he shouted. ‘Muovetevi, ragazzi! Move it, boys!’ Fabiana had seen an officer of the Bersagalieri shot down in front of her, and two Savoy cavalrymen had been dragged through the village behind their horses. Then spikes of sunlight had glimmered through the cloud of dust, their swords just streaks of bedazzlement, and a horde of riders emerged out of the haze performing crazy acts of horsemanship – she had even observed some Cossacks slipping to their horses’ side to fire; others had halted and then stood up, one boot in their stirrup and another on the saddle to shoot. And somehow in the chaos, as they were waiting in a doorway to jump into the Fiat and Bianchi trucks, one neat bullet in the chest had killed her husband… and they had had to leave his body in the village.

Much later, Benya Golden would ask Fabiana what she thought when she saw those Cossacks standing in their stirrups, sabres glinting above their heads, mouths open, yelling to hell, and she threw her head back and laughed: ‘What did I think? Prepare to die! Santissima madre di Dio!’

Now she sat in the garden here and tried to collect herself. She loved to read and she had her books, Leopardi and Petrarca, and Fogazzaro. She was listening to the men in the house when she heard the brisk clip-clop of horses. She stood up and looked out down the lane: it was her commander, Malamore, with a thin German officer, his uniform bearing the lightning runes, and an escort of Cossack and Kalmyk collaborators, all in German uniforms.

Malamore dismounted stiffly from his magnificent sorrel stallion with a ching of spurs and, straightening up, he saluted her. She saluted back. He was their colonel, and he had always made it obvious that he was her admirer, even when her husband had been standing, seething with indignation, right beside her.

He came through the gate and stood looking at her, in no hurry to talk. Malamore was not afraid of silences and he was accustomed to death, and she was a little frightened of him.

‘How are you feeling, Nurse Bacigalupe?’ he asked, removing his fez.

‘Still shocked, consul,’ she replied with a salute and a twist in her ghost of a smile. The way she said ‘console’ – using his Blackshirt rank, designed by Mussolini to evoke the Roman Empire – made her hauteur obvious.

‘I am sorry for your loss,’ he said, bowing. ‘This is the message I bring from the Blackshirts.’

She showed him to the other chair in the garden. When he sat, his britches, his high boots, his very bones seemed to creak. In the light, his skin was scaly and rough, and she thought it was like magma that had dried centuries ago. The heat was suffocating and he ran his hand over his grey buzzcut; he offered her a cigarette and took one himself. He lit hers and then his. Butchery and the African sun had hardened him into a sort of fossil.

‘We’ll get him back, nurse,’ he said. ‘I saw him just after he went down, hit right in the chest.’

‘You were there, consul?’ she asked.

He nodded. Her husband’s death seemed surreal; she expected Ippolito to stride into this garden at any moment, with his Clark Gable moustache, and gleaming boots, dyed black hair, utterly immaculate as ever. She had loved him, she supposed, even with his faults – and what would become of her now? She blinked back her tears, priding herself on her control. She had cried before and she would again, but not now.

‘You said, consul, that the Russians had been defeated and yet they drove us out of that village in a few minutes.’

She knew that Malamore blamed her husband for the incompetent Italian response but instead he replied, ‘That’s war. But that Bolshevik cavalry was annihilated yesterday.’

‘That’s reassuring,’ she said, looking into those features gouged into a mask by the glare after years of fighting in Abyssinia, Spain, Greece and this second summer in Russia. There were, she thought, not many Italians like Malamore. Even though he wore Blackshirt uniform – the black fez with tassel, the black blouse with scarlet flames and fasces, the symbols of the Fascist Party – it was impossible to embellish this harsh man who, she thought, belonged to another time, a condottiere of the Renaissance perhaps, and whose eyes were like the slits of a castle in the sun. ‘Then victory will be ours?’

‘Our German allies are just finishing off Ivan’s last bridgeheads on the Don. Then we push for the Volga and Stalingrad. Ivan will collapse. Victory.’

‘E poi… console? Then what?’

There was a long silence punctuated by the hiss of the cigarette and the gravelling of his breathing. Between the cottages she could see his Kalmyk scouts holding his stallion Borgia and their horses. Then Malamore’s hand was on her bare arm: ‘Malamore is here for you.’ Using the third person, she noted.

‘Thank you, consul.’

‘Not consul. Call me Cesare.’

As Malamore stood with his hand on her amber-skinned arm, the boys in the house (unaware that the dread consul was present) started singing again, achieving an operatic crescendo of Italian passion that made Fabiana want to have hysterics.

‘What is this unit, an opera?’ he muttered. He took her hand, kissed it abruptly, and replaced his fez; and she watched him mount Borgia and ride out with the SS officer and the Kalmyk scouts.

Looking back, he raised a hand to his fez, and was gone.

IV

Every few minutes, Benya heard another crackle of gunshots. Then quiet. Then a few more gunshots. He knew by now what story this morbid rhythm told.

He and his fellow partisans had taken up positions on either side of the lane that led between Mandryka’s headquarters in Shepilovka and the scene of his latest murderous aktion. First, they had dealt with the Romanians. It had been easy; they were drunk. Now they were closer to Novi Petroshevo where Mandryka and his men were.

Benya and the others left the horses behind, hobbled and waiting, then crawled through the grass until they could see some of what was happening through their binoculars. Large pits had been dug amongst the trees. Under the orange sun, naked civilians stood together, guarded by Mandryka’s Schuma, who were wearing German tunics marked with the nationalist insignia of the cross of St George. Benya noticed that the naked adults assumed that wincing pose of shyness, hands covering themselves, assumed by people in ordinary life when they were in a changing room at the swimming pool or waiting for a doctor – but now, amidst this barbarity, its gentility broke his heart.

‘Recognize any of your former friends?’ asked Elmor, who was lying next to Benya.

‘At least five defectors from the Shtrafbat,’ whispered Benya, amazed to see the traitors Delibash, Ogloblin and Tufty Grishchuk in German uniforms. And there were Germans there too, some with SD on the sleeves, some in police uniforms. As Benya and the partisans watched, Mandryka’s men selected another ten people – including women and children – walked them to the edge of the pits and then the shots rang out.

Three officers in German uniforms rode over on horseback to watch.

‘That’s Dirlewanger,’ said Elmor, pointing at a stick-thin German officer with lightning runes on his tunic. ‘In the 1920s he was convicted of murder and rape, but when the Nazis came to power, he put together his own gang of cutthroats, the Poachers’ Battalion. These Germans are soldiers in his Sonderkommando. He’s said to burn people in barns.’

‘Who’s beside him? With the knout?’ asked Zhurko.

‘That’s Mandryka himself,’ said Elmor. Benya saw a small, red-faced man in German-style uniform, swishing a thick leather whip in his hand.

Dr Kapto rode right beside Mandryka. Wearing a German tunic with Russian markings, he was carrying on his saddle the girl, just like before. Benya remembered her wide moonlike eyes, but this time she seemed to be almost lost in a trance in a desolate land beyond hysteria.

‘He was our doctor till two nights ago,’ Benya said.

‘Lyovka,’ Elmor asked the man on his right, a spy who had managed to spend some time amongst Mandryka’s men. ‘Why is Kapto trusted by Mandryka?’

‘His arrival was a big surprise,’ Lyovka reported. ‘He was greeted with honour and some amazement. Mandryka calls him his “best friend”!’

‘And the child?’

‘He rides everywhere with that little girl, even eats with her next to him.’

‘He arrived with a nurse?’ asked Zhurko.

‘Tonya. She’s taken to life with Mandryka’s men. She carries a gun and she uses it.’

Another group of civilians lay down in the pit. The shots rang out. Can there be so much sadness in this world? he thought. Isn’t there a measure to decree that this is enough?

‘Can we stop this?’ asked Benya.

‘Not yet,’ Elmor replied.

‘We can’t just do nothing!’

‘Go back to the horses,’ ordered Zhurko. ‘If we fight and die now, we don’t help anyone. Obey your orders, Golden.’

Benya felt Elmor’s wintery glance, sensing he wouldn’t hesitate to execute an insubordinate Shtrafnik.

Benya crawled back to the horses and he stroked Silver Socks and wept for what he had seen and heard. Over and over again, he could hear the volley of shots, then silence, then the scattered shots again. He covered his ears, longing for this to be over but inside he was raging. He longed to kill Mandryka himself – and Kapto.

His mind was whirring. Kapto had been a special case even in Kolyma. He had not been shaven like the rest of the prisoners – hence his head of kinky-curled hair – and he received the best rations; no doubt the ‘Baby Doctor’ looked after the Commandant’s family as well as the illegitimate children of the guards. Benya remembered their final evening before they were thrown into the fighting, when Kapto had been called to see Melishko. ‘Bunions and piles,’ the men had joked but if it was just about the colonel’s ailments, why was there a general there as well? And why did Kapto return with a new uniform? Benya recalled the Willys jeep parked outside the headquarters, and also that Melishko was receiving orders at the time. If the telegraph was faulty, he thought, the jeep might have brought the orders. All coincidence? Benya sighed. The Baby Doctor had deceived everyone, winning trust in the Camps so that he managed to get to the front. But what were the chances of him getting to a sector where Mandryka was serving? Such things could happen, he supposed. War was a river in flood that washed everything downstream in the foam of its unpredictable rapids, throwing together unthinkable events and implausible people.

When the officers returned, Elmor placed the men on both sides of the road. Benya lay in the grass with Prishchepa and Little Mametka. A skylark dived and flipped over him; higher still, the vultures circled. He prayed the horses wouldn’t whinny, but as Panka liked to say: ‘You can train horses to do anything except sing or be silent’. After a while, Lyovka, the scout, rode down to them fast – ‘They’re moving,’ he hissed – and leaped the ditch, leaving his horse in a bower of poplars just back from the road. Mandryka was coming. Benya pulled the wooden butt of the Papasha into his shoulder and against his cheek and waited, heart scudding.

And there they were: the Schuma on horseback loping down the track and in the middle of them all Mandryka. Dirlewanger was not with them, neither was Kapto or the little girl. When they were just about level, Elmor opened fire with his Degtiarev, aiming right at Mandryka. Benya saw him jerk bolt upright and knew he had been hit even before he opened fire on Mandryka himself, but it was hard to get a clear shot after that. He hit two of the guards for sure but then they had closed in around their leader and they were galloping for the safety of the village, and just at that moment Lyovka went down; heavy machine guns scythed down a couple of others, including Geft. Benya tried to lie flat, panicking.

Where was the gunfire coming from? Then down the lane Benya saw German soldiers and Schuma jumping out of trucks and fanning out, their fire raking the partisans, ambushing the ambushers; and he knew he had to run back or they would trap him. He sprinted towards the horses, spluttering for air.

A punch in the shoulder threw him to the ground. He felt an intense burning feeling, and black water closed above him, and around him.

V

Kolyma on a hot summer’s morning in June, a day Benya would never forget. Nor would Russia. Jaba’s barracks was suffocatingly hot, buzzing with mosquitoes, gnats and obese bluebottles that drove the men to distraction. Benya, who by now had covered Macbeth, Eugene Onegin, The Count of Monte Cristo and much else, was reciting a sonnet of Shakespeare to his pupil, Jaba, the Boss, sitting in just a pair of khaki shorts. Smiley (who officially worked in the dining block, hence the supply of food) stirred the pot of beet soup; Deathless was getting out the dumb-bells (Jaba did his calisthenics after his literary lesson); and Prishchepa, the boyish Cossack, was carving a wooden horse, all of them just in their underwear.

‘Beautiful lines,’ Jaba said. ‘Isn’t Shakespeare really just saying “Life is like a plate of lobio beans”?’ He stood up as a staccato twang rang from the loudspeakers and the rails started to sound. This was highly unusual. These were only used for reveille, or prisoner escapes, and were almost never rung in the middle of the day.

‘What the fuck, Boss!’ said Smiley.

The loudspeakers zonked tinnily and then out buzzed a familiar nasal voice: ‘This is the Commandant. I have a news announcement. The traitorous Hitlerite Germans have betrayed Russia and invaded. Never has there been a more wicked infamy and we shall repay it. Under the command of Comrade Stalin, the Soviet forces have counter-attacked and are repelling the Hitlerite invaders on all fronts. Long live our brave Red Army! Long live our great Socialist Motherland! Long live our Great Stalin!’

‘What does this mean, Boss?’ asked Deathless.

The men glanced sulkily at each other. War would change things. Less food. More gold. Every Zek knew things would only get worse.

‘Quiet,’ said Jaba. ‘Are we so uncultivated that we interrupt a sonnet for this shit? Say the last two lines again!’

But Benya couldn’t concentrate.

Now the war was here: Hitler had attacked his Soviet ally, ending Stalin’s diabolic compact with the Nazis. He was almost feverish with excitement. Everything at last was clear. This was his war, his moment…

‘Hey, Golden!’ said Jaba, squeezing his cheek till it hurt. ‘Are you daydreaming? This is not our war. Governments fight wars; we don’t recognize any state! Life is just a plate of lobio beans!’

But Benya had walked straight from the barracks to the Commandant’s office escorted by a cloud of gnats, hovering in a column just above his head. Beyond the wire, the bleak mountains gleamed like jagged silver and, in the distance, a herd of reindeer grazed on a steep hillside. Outside the office, a prisoner was already repainting the slogans:

Outside the Commandant’s office, a Mongolian guard shoved him so hard that he fell. But he persevered, and because the guard knew that Benya was protected by Jaba, he let him in to see the Commandant’s assistant, a man whose eyes bulged so gloopily behind his bottle-thick spectacles that they resembled hard-boiled eggs.

‘What can I do for you, Prisoner Golden?’ asked Lieutenant Bobkin in a neutral drone. Now in a blue Chekist uniform, he was an ex-prisoner who had made the crossover from Zek to officer of the NKVD. ‘What’s your request?’

‘I want to volunteer to fight the Nazis,’ said Benya.

‘State your code!’

‘KRTD 58.8. Ten.’ Every prisoner had a code; KRTD meant Benya was guilty of counter-revolutionary Trotskyite activity; 58.8 denoted the clause of the criminal code reserved for those guilty of terrorism; ten the years of his sentence.

‘Ten?’ said Bobkin. ‘You’ve been misinformed. Your sentence is ten years for each indictment plus five for counter-revolutionary agitation, to be served consecutively.’

Benya staggered, so great was his shock. ‘Wait, so how many is that?’

‘Twenty-five in total.’ Bobkin sighed. ‘Put your request in writing, Prisoner Golden, and I will pass it on to the authorities. But I have to warn you, you’ll die here in Kolyma.’

VI

The night was drenchingly hot in the village of Shepilovka and, when he awoke, Benya found himself a prisoner in one of the village stables that had been converted into makeshift cells. The bars to his cell were nailed crooked and he thought of escape, but he was afraid to move, too broken. His terrified mind jerked from thought to thought: his shoulder was hurting, his shirt sopping wet with blood, and it had been hours since he had eaten or drunk a thing.

He could see through the bars that the flags in the village were at half-mast and the bodies swayed on the makeshift gallows in the courtyard. He couldn’t tell who they were. Death just wiped their personality as a rag wipes letters off a blackboard. Perhaps they were the lucky ones, thought Benya.

But Mandryka was dead. They had got him! He had heard the music, a discordant village band, out-of-tune trumpets and balalaikas, playing a death march. This had been followed by volley after volley of gunfire as Mandryka’s men let off their guns in salute for their fallen chieftain, and the beginnings of a drunken wake, accompanied by the breathy notes of an accordion. Benya listened to the songs – he knew some of them: ‘Black Crow’, ‘Volga-Volga’. As speeches were made, and more volleys fired, he sensed a spasm of a grotesque and truly terrifying spirit abroad, made up of military ritual and peasant drunkenness and the lairy cruelty of this black-hearted time. He waited for what would happen next. He was bleeding from his shoulder; the pain made him sweat, the shivers came in gusts, and he guessed he would die. If it happens, at least be calm, he told himself, don’t beg, don’t shriek, don’t wet yourself, but then he knew he would do all those things, and anything, anything, to survive, and the hysteria made him shudder. We killed Mandryka, he told himself, at least we achieved something – and he remembered Melishko saying, ‘Maybe we’ll do something to make our families proud – even if they never know it.’

But Melishko also had said, ‘You can’t get me,’ and they had got him.

The party is over, and the shouting suddenly gets nearer. Mandryka’s men are pouring into the courtyard and taking out the prisoners. They are now so close, Benya can hear their breath, the chink of keys, locks grinding, and the breathless panting of excited, drunk men. Benya waits his turn. Then the door is opening and they seize him under the arms and toss him out into the courtyard, Russians, Cossacks and Ukrainians, all babbling at once, hard men, peasants and farm-boys, villagers and flotsam. They are kicking him and beating him with whips. There’s just a roil of bodies and Benya can’t focus. The band has started up again, somewhere else in the village, and some of the men are dancing, weaving in and out, singing to themselves, and a shirtless old Cossack is playing an accordion. One group are trying to hang a man from the gallows but the rope keeps breaking and the man swings back and forth like a macabre pendulum. Some of Mandryka’s men – yes, he can see his former comrade Ogloblin amongst them – have a man on the ground and others – there are Bap and Delibash – are less focused, and are staggering from one scene to another, coming in for a kick. The orders are being barked out in a hoarse feminine voice that he recognizes and then he sees her: it is Tonya, in a German grey tunic with a Schmeisser on her shoulder, the long flat face with its smudged gaze, her almost invisible eyebrows and reddish eyelashes, and her fat legs are clad in fancy stockings and riding boots. Everyone is sweating alcohol, he can smell it, and garlic and peppers.

Tonya wipes her forehead on her cuff. ‘Cut the nettles!’ she says to the men. ‘Make them feel it.’ They enjoy following her orders, these hard, angry men. They are joking about her: ‘Smertina’ – the Death Woman – ‘cooks spicy dishes, the bitch!’ they say, but they obey.

‘Yes, nurse, if you say so, nurse!’ cackles one, swinging his whip.

‘We can’t deny you, Mama,’ gasps the shirtless Cossack, who drops the accordion, which gives out a few breathy notes, and bends over a man who’s lying on the sand.

‘Are the horses well shod?’ she says.

‘I’m seeing to that, Mama!’ It is the voice of Tufty Grishchuk, the farrier who’s shod Silver Socks so many times. Drunk and husky, he wears his leather apron over a grey tunic.

Tonya sees Benya suddenly, and she darts at him, her quirt striking him across the face. The sting brings tears, but he stares right into her eyes, her sleepy eyes, always so bored. But now they shake him to his bones. Now her eyes are greedy with that freak lust he himself recognizes. Tonya has been recast and then unleashed.

She smiles as she never did all the months he knew her, a smile stained in the brightest pink lipstick, and before he knows it, she’s struck him again with the butt of her gun, so hard that he falls through the grip of his handlers and finds himself on the ground. From this boot-level vantage, he sees across the yard to where a crowd has gathered.

He can’t fathom it at first. They’re holding one of the Shtrafniki, young fair-haired Geft, who’s lightly wounded, and Grishchuk, the farrier in his leather apron, is laying out his tools, asking his assistant, Delibash, for them one by one: ‘Clinchers!’ ‘Hoof knife!’ ‘Nippers!’ ‘Shoe!’ ‘Nails!’ and finally with relish: ‘Hammer!’

The group leans over to see more, jostling each other but, at the same time, straining to hold someone still.

‘He’s not saying a word!’

‘Now we’ll hear him!’ Benya has a sudden view of Grishchuk as he hammers in the nails. ‘Giddy up, horsey!’ he shouts. Inhuman shrieks of pain and intoxicated guffaws. And there is Geft on all fours, the horseshoes nailed to his hands and feet.

Benya is shaking his head over and over: such things can scarcely be absorbed.

He crawls away, the whip falling on his back, and finds Captain Zhurko right there, in his underwear, and he is bleeding from the face. Benya sees he has no eyelids. This is fine work for the nurse with the balletic fingers, and he knows instantly that it is Tonya’s special gift to the captain who had never noticed her. Benya and Zhurko look at each other but can Zhurko see him without his spectacles? ‘It’s me, Golden,’ says Benya.

‘Golden, my wife, my son…’ he starts. He wants Benya to tell his son something but his voice trails away.

‘Yes, of course I will,’ says Benya, thinking: Neither of us will get out of this. Then Zhurko is pulled out of his reach. The men are seizing the others, dragging them all up and standing them against the wall.

‘I’ll cut the nettles,’ Tonya says, and Benya sees the sub-machine gun on her shoulder.

‘Let’s see how Mama cuts the nettles,’ cries Delibash.

‘Line ’em up,’ she says. They pick up Benya. ‘Not him. But him and him. Line them up!’

‘Can nurses shoot? I’ll wager not…’ says one of the men, daring her.

This ‘cutting of nettles’ is the mantra of the night, it seems. Tonya lets rip with the gun. It’s deafening. Burst after burst.

And then he sees they have Nyushka, Jaba’s Bunny, the other nurse. Tonya’s distracted by this girl whom she knew so well. ‘Take the slut, she wants it, she’s yours!’ she calls to the men. Nyushka, whom Benya himself admired, the sweet-hearted one who slept with Jaba, who believed so strongly in the Great Stalin and that the Party was always right – how Tonya must have hated her in their shared room. He hears the ripping of cloth, Nyushka’s shrieks, the grunts of men, and Nyushka lets it happen, and afterwards she lies as they leave her, exhausted, her limbs awry.

‘Look, it’s the writer!’ Benya is kicked again, hard. The boot catches his shoulder where he’s already wounded and the pain is so overwhelming, he blacks out. Back in his stable, he hears the volleys of machine-gun fire. The presentiment of death is clear – and he welcomes it. Now let me die, he prays. He has done all he can. Mandryka is dead but Kapto…

He swears to himself that if he ever gets the chance, he will kill the doctor.

By the time the bolts screeched open, Benya could scarcely move. He recognized the voice speaking to him through the open door. It was Kapto, the Baby Doctor in a tunic of German field grey.

‘How are you feeling?’ It was Kapto’s habitual question but he was whispering.

Benya opened his mouth but found he could not speak.

‘Did you want to kill me today?’

Benya nodded. Oh yes! He was too desperate, too gone, to lie.

‘I had to bring the child home for her rest. She’s always falling asleep, little angel, poor mite. I’ve always despised the Bolsheviks, but what can I say? I believe in our nation. Nothing is achieved without force. Stalin taught us that if nothing else… I haven’t come to talk, Golden…’

But Benya knew he had come to talk, and that he wanted to explain the reasons for his betrayal.

‘Mandryka was my friend,’ Kapto continued. ‘To be sure, the lads went a bit crazed last night – it’s partly the Pervitin tablets they insist on taking. But because you people have killed him, we will kill every local in the villages round here. In any case, the war is nearly won. Stalingrad will fall as will the Maikop oil fields.’ He smiled suddenly, that open guileless smile, the smile Benya used to love so well. ‘You were my friend too; the only civilized person in Kolyma. I brought you back to life. In that way, you’re like a baby I’ve brought into the world and you know I can’t destroy something I’ve created – or saved. They don’t know you’re a Jew, of course. Tonya knows, but she forgot… Here, let me help you up.’

Benya could scarcely stand. He tottered in the heat, red sparks rained like meteors behind his eyes, silver hammers beat in his temples and he held on to the doorpost of the stable. It was dark outside, and Benya could only sense the splayed shapes on the ground, the creaking of the gallows.

‘Benya? Do you hear me?’ Kapto shook him. ‘Wake up! Listen!’

‘Don’t torment me now,’ said Benya.

‘No, listen, I mean it, friend. Ride away.’

‘You’re letting me go?’ A glimpse of life, a rising sun, a tunnel with light.

‘We’ve been through such things. Go down that road. The Italians are that way, and they’re kinder than us, and yes… I want you to know that I’m a decent man.’

Benya raised his eyes to the bright eyes of the doctor, to his lineless heart-shaped face with the pointed chin and his tight-curled hair. ‘What about the little girl?’

‘A doctor must care for his patients, first heal and then cherish,’ Kapto said and, for the first time, Benya saw there was something terribly wrong in his open smile and unblinking eyes. ‘I have to keep her close every second. The others are monsters: you’ve seen them. If I let her out of my sight, they might take her—’

‘What were you in the Gulags for? You weren’t a Political, were you?’

‘Easy, now, easy. Don’t say another word, Golden.’

By now they were at the horse lines, and Benya saw Silver Socks waiting for him. He whispered her name and she turned her velvet neck towards him, and her soft muzzle explored his face and he loved that horse: darling Socks. He tried to mount her but he couldn’t raise his leg. Kapto helped him put one foot in the stirrup and hefted him up into the saddle, where Benya stayed precariously swaying, hand on the pommel.

‘Ride away now, just ride,’ said Kapto. ‘Don’t look back. Are you trying to make me hang you in the morning?’

He gave the horse a smack, and Socks loped down the ghostly road.

VII

Late at night in the Kremlin, Svetlana was leafing through the magazines from the West, sent by Comrade Maisky of the London embassy. She was imagining what dresses she would wear when she met Shapiro. Her dresses were made by the special atelier run by the Service Bureau of the NKVD where all the Kremlin wives had their gowns copied from the magazines.

Recently she, Martha Peshkova and Molotov’s daughter had gone there for the first time. All they had to do was rip out a page from the magazine and take it to the atelier in Kitaigorod, up the small staircase to the door marked: ‘Service Bureau’. Abram Lerner was the last old-fashioned tailor in Moscow; he made all those tunics for Stalin himself, each one the same, in grey, sand, green and white. To Svetlana’s delight, Lerner, a dapper Jewish man, balding and slight, had welcomed her, kissed her hand as though she was an emperor’s daughter and introduced her to Cleopatra Fishman, a plump grey-haired Jewish lady, who had measured her for her dress.

A new consignment of magazines had just arrived. Vogue and Bazaar were the best for the dresses but Svetlana also enjoyed the Illustrated London News with its photographs of British aristocrats and even the royal family. She leafed through it and suddenly something caught her eye. It was a photograph that she knew intimately. She raised her eyes from the magazine to the photograph that stood in a frame on the table across the room. It was the same picture: her mother Nadya Alliluyeva Stalina.

Her mother had died almost ten years earlier and Svetlana missed her every day. Svetlana’s English was perfect (she had read Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the original and she had heard that the latter had written a new masterpiece, For Whom the Bell Tolls) so she started the article, and what she read made her heart palpitate.

‘In November 1932, Nadya, Stalin’s wife, committed suicide in the Soviet leader’s apartment in the Kremlin…’

No! This was not possible. Capitalist lies! Her mother had died of kidney failure; everyone knew that. Her own father had told her this himself.

‘It is said that Nadya shot herself in the heart with a pistol after a raucous dinner in the apartment of the People’s Commissar for War Kliment Voroshilov to celebrate the anniversary of the Revolution…’ the article stated, and Svetlana instinctively knew this was the truth. She had sensed her father’s ambivalence towards her mother but could not understand it. But why had Nadya killed herself? Naturally her father was a difficult man; quite likely he was an impossible husband. He was certainly not attentive. He could be very harsh, and he sucked the oxygen out of every room, leaving no air for anyone else, anyone weaker – but he was also so affectionate to Svetlana. So why had Nadya ended it all? Wasn’t her love for her daughter enough for her?

The door opened and her father came in.

He kissed her forehead. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Papa, there’s something I’ve got to ask you,’ Svetlana said, feeling sick with nerves suddenly.

‘Ask.’

‘Papa, did Mama…?’

His hazel eyes looked right into her. ‘Go on.’

‘Did Mama… How did Mama die, Papa? Really. Please tell me.’

There was a long silence.

‘Who’s been talking to you?’ said Stalin finally. ‘Who’s been blabbing? Tell me who!’

‘I… read in an English magazine that… she… committed… Please tell me…’

But Stalin, standing before Svetlana in his military tunic and baggy trousers tucked into his boots, just looked at her.

‘I loved her,’ he said. ‘But she was fragile. Yes, she killed herself with a little pistol she got from your stupid aunt who bought it in Berlin and gave it to your mother. Yes, I loved her and she let me down, let me down and you and your brother too. I had to bring you up on my own. She left me when I needed her most.’ He hesitated; then he turned away from Svetlana: ‘I’m driving out to Kuntsevo. Goodnight.’

And he was gone.