Red Sky at Noon

I

‘You have a patient, nurse,’ Major Scipione di Montefalcone told Fabiana Bacigalupe, who was working in the village that was now battalion headquarters. ‘We don’t know what he is; he’s wearing a mixture of uniforms. He was found by the patrol lying out on the ground, his horse standing over him. He might be one of the Schuma, I suppose. You better check if they’re missing anyone but it’s chaos over there today.’

The major was a count from Tuscany, the sort you would find only in the grandest cavalry regiments. His father had commanded the Savoy Celere and so, when the war came, Montefalcone chose the family regiment. Fabiana sometimes sensed that with every breath he took, Montefalcone was accompanied by all the cardinals and princes in his bloodline, even though his grandfather had squandered all their castles and paintings. He and his wife lived in a house not much better than a turreted cottage, but he loved to hunt with his retrievers Pushkin and Potemkin. Yes, as he sometimes discussed with Fabiana, he’d always loved Russia, always wished to visit, but not in this way.

‘You know the partisans got Mandryka yesterday?’ he asked now.

Fabiana straightened up. Wearing her white nurse’s uniform with the big Red Cross on the right side, she stood beside the major in the street outside the peasant’s house where she had been staying. ‘I heard.’

‘The man was an animal,’ said Montefalcone, making no attempt to lower his voice in front of his effete batman. ‘But it doesn’t excuse the Soviet partisans, let me make that clear. But Mandryka was worse than a beast. Now there’s a Russian woman lording it over them who’s worse than all of them – she was once a nurse, they say.’

Fabiana nodded and looked up into Montefalcone’s swarthy, oval face and the loose chins that wobbled as he wiped the sweat with a crested handkerchief.

‘Oh, look who’s here.’ A skinny mongrel, not unlike a starved fox, trotted in confidently and poked Montefalcone with its nose. ‘We’ve adopted this one,’ he said as he stroked it lovingly with his soft hands. ‘Jacopo, bring Anastasia some milk,’ he called to his batman. What a kind man he was. For a moment, Fabiana longed to be treated like the fox-red dog. Her mother had dreamed of her marrying such a man, an aristocratic connoisseur with puppy’s eyes. How different he was from her husband Ippolito – not to speak of Colonel Malamore.

Now she was on the Don steppe where the dust itself was thick with blood, not just of soldiers but of women and children. And her husband was dead. And Malamore visited each time he rode through, several times in the last couple of days. His intentions were clear, she thought, and shivered.

‘Don’t you want to go home?’ Montefalcone asked her.

‘Si, signore. But first I must bury my husband.’

‘Of course, of course. We will find him. Then you must go home. I can arrange it for you. Let me, my dear, let me. This is no place for a girl like you…’

Fabiana wondered what sort of woman he took her for. What did they all take her for? She guessed they all presumed there was some shady story, perhaps a father who was a Milanese industrialist, or a mother who was the mistress of some war profiteer. She did not realize that in her mid-thirties she had become beautiful, because in her teens she had been plain and awkward. Girls who are plain in their teens never believe they can be anything else. And there was no glamorous mystery: her father was the custodian of the Venetian State Archive just round the corner from their home, a fourth-floor apartment in Campo San Stin.

She sees herself running to the nearby Campo dei Frari to that shop with the big oil-painted signs of salami and cheese, or walking with her mother to the Rialto market. She has flashes of colours and crowds and the smell of incense while crossing the votive bridges of boats with her family during the Festa del Redentore and every Sunday her mother takes her to San Rocco church. She smiles at the thought of her mother, an elementary teacher, teaching at the school on the Vignole island. The old boatman rows them there every day.

Words form Fabiana’s world. Love for her is expressed in things of beauty and shaped in words. She always checks the bookshop Tarantola on Campo San Luca for editions of Luigi Pirandello, her passion. She is fascinated by his characters for whom there is not an objective reality but only a subjective one that crumbles when in contact with the truths of others. The eccentric owner lays out Pirandellos which she can’t afford, but she puts her hand on them, smells their paper. Her mother took her there first but now, daringly, she goes on her own everywhere, walking around the SS Giovanni e Paolo church to look at the tombs of the men who made the Republic of Venice into the Serenissima of cities, or the Palazzo Ducale where she admires the suits of armour, the cannons, the frescoes and the paintings of doges. She is proud of her Venetians: Florence has Michelangelo but Venice has Tiziano. She takes the vaporetto to the cemetery and lays flowers on the tombs of Stravinsky and Diaghilev: it was they who encouraged her to learn Russian – and to come to Russia.

‘Fabiana?’ Montefalcone asked her now.

She roused herself, remembering where she was. ‘Si, I want to go home. Soon. But while I’m here, I want to help.’

‘Good, good. We are short of medical personnel. We lost a nurse in that Russian raid and we lost a good officer too – oh, of course you know… Excuse me, I… Oh! Maremma maiala!’ He cursed his own tactlessness.

‘It’s all right, really. It is,’ Fabiana said, not minding that he was referring to her husband. A fool, but a sweet one.

‘Bene! Time to get back to work. Take your mind off everything. Are you ready?’

‘I think so,’ she said.

‘The medical tent is just beside the stables. Take a horse and ride over there. Your patient needs you. There’s no doctor here at the moment. You’ll have to organize it all yourself. You’re on your own. Can you do it?’

Fabiana stiffened her back and wiped the sweat from her eyes. ‘Yes, yes I can.’

‘I have no doubt you can. The new offensive is about to start again and I fear you’ll have too much work to do then. Listen, you can hear the guns on the Don and can you hear the engines? They’re German panzers driving east.’ Adopting the tone of one of the propaganda newsreels, he declaimed: ‘On to the Volga! On to Stalingrad! TUTTE STRONZATE! IDIOTI! All shit! Idiots!’ He waved a hand. ‘Oh, we have no business being here…’ He stood up and bowed.

Fabiana saluted but, when she looked back, Montefalcone was further down the little street talking to some of the Kalmyk scouts. Once again, she was on her own.

As she passed the camels, two of them pulled back their lips and showed their yellow teeth and started to nuzz. Hideous beasts, she thought. They unsettled the horses. She took her fine horse, a palomino named Violante, its body gold, its tail and mane white, out of the stables and rode around the village to the edge of the steppe where they had put up the khaki Red Cross tent. She tied Violante outside and looked on to the plains. Although still morning, the sun was beating down, the horizon was long and stark, so deep an azure that it was almost like cold marble.

Planes, flying in perfect formation, crossed the sky – she saw the German crosses. Across one panel of sky in the east, over the Don, rose jet-black smoke like a dark curtain pulled across a window. The factories of Stalingrad perhaps? She heard the uproar of engines, suddenly close as dust enveloped the village. A column of German tanks, self-propelled guns, and trucks, too many to count, was approaching. The tanks, wearing dark khaki, juddered and growled, black exhaust pumping out, their caterpillars crunching over the sandy road. Riding on their backs, German soldiers, sunburnt young men in Wehrmacht grey-green, some with rifles, others with anti-tank bazookas, grinned at her as they passed and blew kisses and made signs of devotion.

Fabiana stood in the sun until they had passed, closing her eyes as she felt the chaff settle on her, and when she opened them, the column had disappeared across the steppe, burnt straw and black fumes whirling above it like its own divine cloud.

She saw the horseman appearing, out of the dust, and she sighed. It could only be one man.

‘Malamore inspecting,’ he said, his sun-gouged face, almost chiselled, like rock, expressionless. ‘Inspecting his favourite medical unit. Are you resting?’

She nodded up at him, shading her eyes with her arm, feeling vulnerable in her white pinafore. ‘I have a patient,’ she said.

‘One of ours?’

‘I think so. I must get on and examine him.’

‘Right.’ He saluted. ‘I’ll be back at nightfall.’ And he rode on into the haze.

II

Inside the brown Red Cross tent made of canvas and burlap, Fabiana saw five bare camp beds with stained mattresses. Atop one of them lay a fully clothed man who had been unceremoniously placed there. He was still in his riding boots, and there was a dirty bandage round his head. His face was heavily bruised, and he bled from his nose, lip and right eye. He was very thin, and he was not young. Most of the boys Fabiana saw were between eighteen and twenty-five. This man was somewhere, she guessed, between forty-five and fifty, and he had been badly fed for some time. He seemed tiny and shrunken on the bed; his shirt was stained with blood, some of it black and crusty, and his trousers were filthy with compacted dust, sweat, gore. If he had lice she wouldn’t be surprised. She was not sure what nationality he was, so she searched his pockets, but there were no papers. He was too old for a conscript and too ill nourished for an officer so Fabiana guessed he was either one of Mandryka’s Russians or one of Dirlewanger’s German ex-convicts who were said to be killing Russians and Jews, women and children in the villages. If he was a member of either of these special units, he was a degenerate. She remembered meeting Mandryka and Dirlewanger, when they were out riding with Malamore, and they had disgusted her. But she was just a nurse, and it was not her job to judge Italy’s allies, and that, she thought, was the quiet crime of these times: if you made your conscience elastic enough, you could learn to tolerate anything and still find joy in the blossoming of flowers.

As Fabiana started to examine him, she realized with a shock that he had been shot, and that his shirt was wet. She wondered if he was going to die. Instantly she set to work, cutting his clothes off him and attending to the wound in the shoulder. She had no orderly so she had to do it all herself. She lifted his shoulder. There was no exit wound which meant the bullet was still within.

I am going to call him Patient Number One, Fabiana decided, Il Primo. ‘Whoever you are, whatever you’ve done,’ she said aloud to him, ‘you’re my new beginning, my rebirth, the first patient I have cared for on my own, and you are going to live.’

Benya was dreaming. He was in Kolyma on 22 June 1941, the day the Germans had invaded Russia. After he had finished work with Dr Kapto in the clinic, he found Deathless waiting for him.

‘The Boss wants you,’ said Deathless, who held his hands like trowels.

In Jaba’s barracks, most of the prisoners were lying exhausted in their bunks, peering down the aisle of the dormitory towards Jaba’s section where the Criminals held court, playing cards and boasting about heists and shootouts, girls and money. Benya noticed a new arrival on the bunk by the door, a dark boy smoking. Probably a transfer from a neighbouring Camp.

As usual, Jaba was shirtless, and playing cards with two females and another Criminal nicknamed ‘Poxy’ – for his scarred face. No wonder every man was almost falling off his bunk to watch this card game, thought Benya. Except for nurses, there were not meant to be women in a men’s Camp.

Opposite Jaba sat a slim woman whose skin was as dark as a gypsy. Her hair was jet black, her eyes kindled coals, and she radiated such an aura of darkness that it glowed. She was smoking a cigarette, pursing her sinewy lips as she inhaled. She examined her cards with total concentration, and she did not look up when Benya arrived.

‘Sit and watch,’ said Jaba. Benya sat on the edge of a bunk. He couldn’t take his eyes off the woman.

‘You know who that is?’ hissed Deathless in his ear. ‘The Atamansha!’

Everyone knew that the Atamansha was the Cossack boss of the neighbouring women’s Camp, which she ran just as Jaba ran this one. Ataman was the title of a Cossack general – but, as far as Benya knew, this woman was the first female chieftain. He thought her gypsyish looks were quite beautiful, and all the more so when she put down the cigarette and absent-mindedly ran her hand through the hair of the nurse Nyushka, who was sitting next to her.

‘She’s here for a card game?’ asked Benya.

‘She’s asking a favour,’ said Deathless, ‘and the Boss said he’d play for it.’

They were playing Camp poker with special rules. Twice they showed their cards and it seemed the Atamansha had won but Jaba, narrowing his eyes and ruffling his plumage of grey spiky hair, somehow raised the stakes and they played on.

‘Is that your storyteller, Jaba?’

It took Benya a moment to realize the Atamansha was suddenly looking at him.

‘He’s my teacher,’ said Jaba.

‘You’re the book-writer, the ink-shitter?’ She addressed him directly in such a strong Don accent that it sounded absurdly quaint.

‘Yes,’ said Benya.

‘Well then, storyteller, sit beside me,’ said the Atamansha. ‘Maybe your blue eyes will bring me luck.’

‘A cunning gambit, Atamansha,’ said Jaba, ‘but those belong to me.’

‘All right, throw in the peach,’ said the Atamansha. Nyushka looked down.

‘I didn’t know you liked peaches,’ said Jaba.

‘I like everything,’ replied the Atamansha.

Jaba gestured at Benya, who obediently sat next to her on the chair. Without looking at him again, she showed him her cards. It had been two years since he had been this close to a woman. His leg was close to her leg and he could smell her skin and feel the spicy warmth radiating from her. He took in her britches in their tight boots, her blue Zek shirt open at the neck, her skin dark like baked earth, and he amazed himself by imagining what it might be like to make love to her. He was certain that he could handle her. She offered him a cigarette and he took it. Deathless lit it with a smirk. When she moved, she let her hands brush him; as she smoked, she blew the blue smoke into his face; and Benya started to imagine how this very scenario in the Boss’s barracks could lead to his kissing her coarse lips, to his unclipping her britches and reaching for her thighs…

He was alive again, he realized suddenly. After his arrest and sentencing, he had no longer felt such things. He had been ground into Camp dust. I had become a eunuch, he thought, a neuter, a husk. He had lost all sexual desire. He had ceased to be Benya Golden. But now here it was again on the very day the war started.

‘Show your cards,’ said Jaba quietly. He did everything quietly and never raised his voice.

The Atamansha threw down her hand.

‘You win,’ Jaba said.

‘I collect,’ she said.

‘All right,’ replied Jaba, nodding at Deathless, who suddenly locked his arms around Poxy, who couldn’t move. Smiley grabbed his hand and, quickly, wielding a pair of wire-clippers, sliced off Poxy’s pinkie finger. Poxy howled and convulsed with the agony. Deathless released him and led him away. Smiley tossed the finger on to the table in front of the Atamansha. Benya jumped up in horror.

‘Finally,’ she said. ‘Now can I have what I came for?’

‘In return for a diamond,’ Jaba said.

‘What do you want to know?’

Jaba’s smile was dazzling when he wanted it to be. ‘Something about your friend.’

‘All right, Batono Jaba,’ and, using the Georgian for ‘Lord Jaba’, she whispered in his ear for a while.

‘Thank you Atamansha,’ said Jaba.

She got up. Jaba rose too. She turned back to Benya.

‘I have a feeling we’ll meet again,’ he said, surprising himself. The gangsters snorted at his impertinence.

‘I doubt it,’ replied the Atamansha, showing her teeth, one of them gold. ‘We break fresh ponies where I come from. Go back to your books!’

Jaba stood up and bowed, every bit the mock Georgian nobleman. Deathless led the way out, followed by Jaba. The Atamansha looked at Nyushka, held out her arm and Nyushka took it, eyes cast down like a bashful bride. Finally the Atamansha and Nyushka proceeded slowly down the aisle as if they were at a gypsy wedding.

‘You want to fuck the Atamansha?’ sneered Smiley, husky breath on Benya’s ear. ‘Careful! She wanted to play for your blue eyes but had to make do with Poxy’s finger.’

Benya swallowed hard, finally understanding what had been going on.

‘You know how she killed her lovers in Rostov?’ Smiley said. ‘She cut them while they fucked her, throat to groin, like you gut a fish.’

‘What was that she said about her friend and the diamond?’

‘She’s the mistress of Shpigelglas, the Zone Commandant, and a diamond is a priceless piece of information that can be used against someone.’

The Atamansha had reached the door – but she hesitated and then looked over at the young man on the last bunk. The new arrival.

‘Is it you, Mikhail Cherkin?’ she said.

The man looked up in surprise. ‘Yes, but I don’t think…’

‘No, we haven’t met,’ she said cheerfully. ‘But I hope you like your new home here?’ Before he could agree, she added, ‘Did you watch the game?’

‘Yes.’ He was sitting up now, nervously. ‘What were you playing for?’

She gave a piratical smile, a flash of gold. ‘You,’ she said.

Cherkin’s face was still swinging between uneasiness and bewilderment when Deathless lifted a board that was hanging on the wall by the door and in one unbroken movement of intense force smashed it on to the top of Cherkin’s head and removed it with the same gusto, hanging it back where it came from. It happened so fast that Benya had scarcely processed the popping sound, but he knew there was a long nail in the middle of the board. Cherkin, without altering his uncertain expression, raised his hands to his temples as if trying on a hat that did not quite fit, then two neat lines of blood began to run like treacle down his forehead. The men in the bunks stared for a moment and then started to look away as, very slowly, Cherkin toppled sideways on his bunk and began to twitch in his death throes.

The Atamansha guided Nyushka out of the door and into the night, which was when Benya realized she’d also won some time with the nurse.

He felt Jaba’s hand squeeze his neck. ‘In case you’re wondering, that man disobeyed an order from the Atamansha. We never forget that. Sit down.’ Benya sat. ‘I hear you volunteered for the army?’ Jaba asked this as if nothing of any significance had occurred, as if a man’s body was not being lunked out of the barracks by his men with much falsetto swearing from Little Mametka.

‘You heard?’

‘Why would you do such a crazy thing, Benya?’

‘To fight the Fascists.’

‘And you think the Red Army can’t cope without your warlike ardour?’

‘It’s something I have to do. Boss, I am a Russian, a Jew. The Nazis are my enemies.’

Jaba shook his head. ‘In our code of Brigands, we don’t work for the state and we don’t fight for the state. None of us will volunteer. Aren’t you missing something, writer-in-residence?’

Benya hesitated. Smiley, Deathless and Mametka were back now, watching their master, like guard dogs waiting for a whistle. ‘What?’

‘To survive here a man needs two things. The spirit of life; you have it. But he also needs luck, not once but many times. Golden, I am your luck. Don’t I look after you?’ A pause. He was still grinning but the almond-shaped eyes were slate-cold.

‘I apologize, Batono Jaba,’ answered Benya, who sensed this was the moment for antique Georgian courtesy. ‘I was ungrateful. I will never go to the war… Yes, you saved my life. I belong to you.’

III

‘He’s here, just back from the front,’ said her brother, Vasily Stalin. ‘Let’s find him!’ Wearing his air force uniform with a colonel’s pips, he led Svetlana through the carousers in the white stucco dacha with its Grecian pillars. ‘Zubalovo’s made for parties, isn’t it? Shame Papa never enjoyed it.’

Svetlana had almost not come. The revelation about her mother had so upset her. Why had her mother abandoned her? She had been tricked all these years only to discover the truth in a newspaper. She wanted to discuss it with Vasya but he was so frivolous and so soused that this was obviously not the moment. Instead she took a glass of champagne and downed it and felt a little better. If it hadn’t been for the possibility of meeting Shapiro, she would have missed the party, but she sensed that this opportunity might not come again.

The rooms of the villa were filled with officers in boots and tunics and tall glamorous Russian Veronica Lakes and Ingrid Bergmans with curled hair, bare shoulders and vertiginous décolletage. Svetlana was wearing her first dress, copied from Vogue magazine, and flat shoes, and she felt awkward amongst so many of Moscow’s beautiful women and dashing men, the Stiliagi – the Stylish Ones. She recognized many of them: there was the poet Simonov and his wife the film star Valentina Serova; over there, the movie director Roman Carmen with his wife Nina, another actress. Svetlana knew all the gossip: her brother Vasily was in love with Nina; Vasily had moved Nina into his house, kicking out his wife Galina. Nina’s husband was so furious that he’d written to Stalin to complain!

Vasily was pulling her by the hand, a sour-faced imp whispering horrible things to her: ‘I fucked that one with her husband in the next-door room,’ he was saying. ‘And that one…’

‘Stop telling me, or I’ll block my ears,’ said Svetlana – but he didn’t. Making love couldn’t be as ugly as he made it seem, she thought, surely it must be exquisite when you’re in love? Women danced to the gramophone. The foxtrot was the new dance, so fast, so close – and Svetlana longed to be able to do it. Sometimes a girl wrapped herself around Vasily snickering and dancing and he was lost and she was left standing apart, watching like a prim spectator.

‘Oh, wait, Sveta, I’ll be right back,’ he’d say, and she had to wait like a fool. But soon he was back, and pulling her onwards. ‘Why do you want to meet him?’

‘Just to talk about his articles.’

‘Ugh, don’t bullshit your brother. You’re in love with him!’

‘No! You’re wrong.’

‘You’re just a girl. It’s a schoolgirl crush then. But do you want to kiss him, do you want to get naked—’

‘Shut up, Vasya, don’t be disgusting. Not everything’s about that…’

‘Isn’t it? Yes it is! You want to fuck him!’

‘Stop it, Vasya, or I’ll leave. You coarsen everything! Really I should leave…’

‘Go, leave then, you little prude…’ Vasily turned nasty so quickly. His sallow face was tightening, his lips thinning. But then he changed again. ‘Then you won’t meet your fancy man!’ he said.

‘He’s not my – Oh, please, Vasya.’

‘Come on, little sister, we’ll find him. And you can fuck him later!’

‘Vasya—’

‘Wait!’ He grabbed her arm. ‘He’s right here. See! You can’t leave now.’

And finally there he was.

‘Lev!’ cried Vasya, embracing him. ‘Look who wants to meet you!’

A tall man in army uniform with a thick shock of grey-streaked black hair and intense dark eyes was talking to a group of women who were listening to him intently. Svetlana would always remember that his hand was raised in a fist with one finger pointing to make his point. He put his arm around Vasily.

‘Lev Shapiro, this is my sister Svetlana,’ Vasily said. ‘I hope she doesn’t bore you. She’s very serious!’

Shapiro looked down at her, and in that moment Svetlana felt tiny and ugly and very young. The women turned to her with their scarlet lips, curled hair and black made-up eyes, and they seemed irresistible, carefree and sophisticated. But to her amazement Shapiro left them without a further word and led her aside.

‘Your letter made my day,’ he said. ‘How daring of you to write like that! And I wrote back.’

‘I know! How did you dare to reply?’

They laughed with mouths open as if they already knew each other.

‘Aren’t we lions?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s your name.’

‘And it will be your name too. I am going to call you Lvitza. May I, Lioness?’

‘Yes, oh yes.’

He looked very closely at her: ‘You have something sad in your eyes. Do you want to tell me about it?’

It was the strangest thing, Svetlana thought later. He had just met her and he saw right into her heart. It was the greatest secret in her life and this man whom she had known for a minute seemed to know about it. So she told him about her mother and what she had learned. And he comforted her, told her it was unjust, analysed how she must be feeling, listened to her. What kindness there was in this man.

‘Now we’ve talked are you feeling better?’

‘So much better.’

‘Would you like to dance a little with me?’

‘The foxtrot?’

‘Yes, the foxtrot. Have you tried it?’

‘Yes, but only with my girlfriend Martha. She taught me.’

He took her hand and pulled her on to the dance floor and held her so close that she sensed his strength and his virility. Gradually she relaxed against him, trusting him, following his movements. Afterwards she said, ‘I was useless. Sorry! My flat shoes are hideous!’

‘What do you mean, Lioness? You were brilliant. I loved dancing with you. And that dress is so chic. Is it new?’

Then he took her hand again, just like that, without a moment’s hesitation, as if she was an ordinary girl. ‘Tell me what you think of the coverage of the war. Are we getting it right?’

She did not remember her answers, but he listened carefully and discussed her opinion as if she was a literary critic, a scholar, not just a schoolgirl. He asked her about books and movies and history and not once did he mention her father or the Kremlin. She was accustomed to flattery of a Sultanic intensity. No one ever disagreed with the Tsar’s daughter, but they always wanted something or they escaped from her fast, afraid of her name. But Shapiro did not flatter her once. He disagreed with her about an article of Ehrenburg, and treated her as an equal: ‘You only say that because you didn’t read the whole article,’ he said. ‘If you’d read the last sentence…’ When finally she looked at her watch, it was past midnight and she caught Captain Klimov’s eye and the policeman nodded.

‘Oh, I must go home,’ she said. ‘I have—’ She caught herself: she was about to say ‘school’! Disaster!

‘Must you go?’ Shapiro said. ‘I’m so enjoying our conversation.’ He paused and smiled at her. ‘Yes, you’re so refreshing. Not like these jaded actresses. You’re the only person here I can have a serious conversation with…’

‘Don’t mock me.’

‘No, I mean it. Your views are purely intellectual, quite untainted with vanity or ambition. Can we meet again?’

‘Yes, yes, of course. I have absolutely nothing to do every evening.’

‘You see? No one here would say that. They’d claim to be busy. Play games. And they’d already be flirting with ten men and…’ He looked at her very intensely. ‘You’re not like that at all, are you?’

She shook her head.

‘I’m going back to the front the day after tomorrow. So tomorrow night? It’ll be my last night in Moscow.’

On the way home in the back of her car, with Klimov and the driver in the front seats, she lay back and closed her eyes and gloried in what had happened. For the first time, she was absolutely happy, in her own right. Happy as a lioness with her lion.

IV

Stalin was alone in the Little Corner with General Vasilevsky. Even Molotov and the other leaders were away and running their commissariats, directing fronts or catching a few hours’ sleep. Only the burly Chief of Staff with the big, plain face and the curl across his forehead remained.

Stalin went to the little room behind his desk and made himself tea, in a glass with a silver base and handle, then took the bottle of Armenian cognac and poured in a teaspoon of brandy, stirred and then sipped it.

The news from the south was dire. The Germans were massing vast forces to push further into the Caucasus and they were squeezing the last Soviet forces on the Don. Soon they could cross the river and charge across the steppe towards Stalingrad. Yet he knew he must hold his nerve, and seek the chance to attack; attack whatever the cost.

‘Any more news of Melishko’s Shtrafbat?’ he asked Vasilevsky after he had heard the rest of the reports.

Vasilevsky understood that Melishko’s Shtrafbat had become something of a distraction for the Supremo, almost a talisman.

‘No news of Melishko himself,’ Vasilevsky said, ‘though one of his officers informed us that he always called the Shtrafniks “my bandits”.’

Stalin blinked and Vasilevsky continued, ‘On your orders, despatched by radio, the small Second Don Partisans Brigade under Major Elmor, made up of soldiers who had escaped from Kharkov encirclements and regrouped in the Don, successfully rendezvoused with them for a joint operation against the Schuma and Cossack elements under the traitor Mandryka.’

Stalin lit up his Herzegovina Flor and watched Vasilevsky talk through the veins of white smoke. ‘And how did Melishko’s bandits do?’

‘I am waiting for confirmation of this, Comrade Stalin. I don’t like to report until I know…’

‘Tell me anyway. I won’t hold you to it.’

‘I’ve heard that at five p.m. yesterday, they assassinated the traitor Mandryka in an ambush. The partisans lost forty men. Mandryka’s security police, now commanded by the traitor Bronislav Kaminsky, have joined forces with German Einsatzgruppe D along with special task forces under Dirlewanger. They are conducting savage reprisals against villages in the area.’

‘But Mandryka is dead.’

‘Yes.’

‘How do we know this?’

‘Our source? I assume there is an agent loyal to us, a source amongst Mandryka’s Hiwi units.’

Stalin nodded, knowing more than Vasilevsky on intelligence matters: ‘Darkness is as important in war as the daylight,’ he said. ‘So, a success for Melishko’s bandits. Please radio Stavka’s congratulations to General Melishko.’

‘If that is all, Comrade Stalin, I should return to headquarters and review the latest reports.’

‘Sit down, Alexander Mikhailovich.’

Vasilevsky did as he was told. This had never happened before.

‘You know my son Yakov is a prisoner of the Germans?’

‘If that is so, it must be hard for his father,’ said Vasilevsky. Of course he knew that Stalin’s eldest son from his first marriage, Yakov Djugashvili, whose gentle, self-deprecating nature irritated his father, had been captured. But with Stalin it was prudent to be extremely careful.

Stalin stared into the air, wilting visibly, haggard and grey-faced. ‘I am just one father amongst the millions who has lost someone. I’m not special.’

‘But they must wish to use him against you?’

‘Of course,’ replied Stalin. ‘I expect it every day. His surrender was a crime and I treated him no differently from any other soldier who let himself fall into enemy hands. His wife is under arrest.’

Vasilevsky was in no hurry to commit himself. Where was this going? he wondered.

‘He was always a spineless boy. I don’t know if he was a coward or just unlucky.’

‘I am sure he was unlucky, Comrade Stalin. We can’t be responsible for our children.’ Vasilevsky shrugged. ‘They are born with characters and we can’t always change them.’

‘Perhaps you’re right.’ Stalin blew the blueish smoke towards the ceiling where it billowed and washed back. ‘If he had betrayed us, they would have paraded him by now. Perhaps Stalin’s son is braver than we all thought.’

‘In this case, no news is good news.’

Stalin examined Vasilevsky searchingly: ‘I hear your father was a priest.’

A bombshell! Vasilevsky took a breath, aware he was sweating suddenly. ‘That is correct, though obviously such elements as clergy are class enemies. I broke off relations more than ten years ago and have had no contact since then. None at all, I promise.’

Stalin nodded. ‘I was trained as a priest.’

‘Yes, Comrade Stalin.’ Vasilevsky answered this with rigid neutrality.

‘It was a good training for politics. A training in how to judge men.’

‘I can imagine that.’

‘Alexander Mikhailovich, in a time of war, it seems a shame that a son does not contact his old father.’

‘Yes, Comrade Stalin.’

‘When you have time,’ said Stalin, ‘will you contact your father again? Don’t let days or even hours pass. Death takes the old so easily. Call him from my anteroom and let him know his son cares for him. Make sure he has the right rations. Will you do that?’

‘Yes… yes, I will do it.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Yes, tonight.’

‘Goodnight, General Vasilevsky.’ And Stalin stood up and walked out of the office towards his apartment.

He was filled with a sudden, and rather surprising, yearning to see Svetlana. But oddly, Svetlana was not home. He sat at the kitchen table for a moment. He was glad he had spoken to Vasilevsky. Beria had given him this information to use against Vasilevsky, but sometimes family was as essential as ideology. Perhaps this was something the seminary had taught him. Priests were sometimes more cunning than commissars. Yes, family had its place, he thought.

As if on cue, the door opened and Svetlana, her skin gleaming and eyes bright, burst in, wearing an evening gown with eyeshadow and lipstick and her hair curled. Stalin was momentarily shocked by how grown up she looked. His little girl was too young for this!

‘Sveta, you look so…’ He had the urge to shout at her: You’re overdressed, you look ridiculous. What do you think you look like? A whore! Who gave you permission to dress like this? But after the chat with Vasilevsky, he was enjoying the mellow thought of family and love, and he quelled his fury.

‘What do you think, Papa?’ She did a twirl for him.

‘You look so grown up, I hardly recognized you. You’re only sixteen. You surprised me, darling.’

‘But do you like it? Do I look good?’

She was radiating such glamour and joie de vivre that he did not know how to respond, something that didn’t happen very often. ‘My princess, my darling girl, has grown up,’ he said awkwardly and stiffly.

‘Oh, Papa,’ she said, smiling.

He hugged her as he used to but her perfume made him feel sick. ‘Good day at school? How’s the homework?’

Svetlana gave him such a dazzling smile that he shook his head: some people lived entirely in their own little worlds. But a Bolshevik has no time for family, he thought. The Party is his family. Sentiment and love are bourgeois indulgences, and the Revolution is everything. He remembered his first wife, Kato, who’d died young. That had been innocent first love but he had loved his second wife in a mature way: Nadya, Svetlana’s mother; Tatochka he called her. But she wasn’t strong and she listened to his enemies, and let him down. Then there were his sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law who moved in to take care of him after Nadya’s suicide. They chattered, they found out secrets, they interfered and got mixed up with enemies, and some were no longer amongst the living. He’d been forced to liquidate them. Yes, he’d sacrificed his own family too. Then there were his children. Yakov: he let me down, he told himself. Vasily too.

‘Where have you been?’ he asked Svetlana harshly.

She jumped. ‘At Zubalovo with Vasily.’

A bolt of anger struck Stalin. ‘That upstart behaves like a baron’s son. They bring me reports of his antics. The husband of Vasily’s mistress even wrote to me to complain. I don’t have time to deal with his crew of crooks and whores. When every family is bleeding – even ours, yes, even ours – he’s chasing actresses and playing the fool. Be careful, Svetlana, there’s trash out there who would like to worm their way into our family. Be vigilant. And I suppose it’s Vasya who got you all dolled up?’ Like a chorus girl, he wanted to say but he didn’t.

He looked up again at Svetlana. She was so young, all freckles and auburn hair, looking so like his mother Keke, smiling at him shyly even in the midst of this most terrible crisis. She’d been led astray by the runt Vasily, that’s what had happened.

Calm again, he kissed her forehead, something he did so rarely, and then he did it again. Even though he was the great Stalin, he was still a man, just a father. Family, he thought, as he left the kitchen, having bid her goodnight. Family!