One Night in Winter (12 page)

‘I’m sure they will all come back now, won’t they? I feel it,’ Andrei whispered. ‘I so want him back.’ It was something they had never said to each other, because it was so raw even after all these years.

‘Darling Andryusha, don’t wish for anything too much. They say you can’t live without hope but I think hope’s the cruellest trick of all. I survive by not expecting much.’

‘But, Mama, there are so many out here today who must be like us. And I know they’re all thinking like me. Surely there’ll be an amnesty, and everyone will come back?’

Inessa closed her eyes for a moment to collect herself and when he looked at her bone-weary face, he realized that she was steeling herself for him. ‘Don’t forget him. Never forget him. But go forward now, darling. Just look forward.’

Andrei felt a lurch of disappointment. He sighed and dropped his arms, stepping away from her. ‘I’m meeting my friends on the Stone Bridge at five.’

‘To read Pushkin? Are you dressing up?’

‘Oh Mama, do you think I’d look good in a top hat and velvet coat? No, I’m too late to find a costume.’ They laughed as he pushed his way into the crowds – and afterwards, when he had so many long nights to replay everything, he wished he had said goodbye properly, and told her that he loved her.

‘Be careful, you’re all I’ve got. Off you go then!’ she called after him as she let him step into his new world.

Andrei fought his way up the steps. Soldiers, in cloaks and mantles and greatcoats, caps over their eyes, visors running with droplets, were singing on the bridge. Strangers hugged one another and swigged from vodka bottles handed through the crowd. It was hard to see far through the rain and the mist – he kept having to wipe his glasses – but as the crowd closed around Andrei, so closely packed that it took the weight off his feet, he looked back at the red walls of the Kremlin, the stars atop the towers, the gold of the Great Palace, the onion domes, streaked with light in the sheets of rain, and he thought that somewhere in there was Stalin himself, and with Stalin were Comrades Satinov and Dorov, and probably Sophia Zeitlin, famous people whom he now knew. He’d even dined with them at Aragvi. What were they doing at this moment? He knew Satinov, and Satinov knew Stalin, so he, Andrei, was just a few steps from the greatest man in the world.

‘Andryusha!’ It was Minka and she was holding the hand of Senka, who was wearing a new suit under a yellow raincoat – just like a grown-up.

‘Hello, Little Professor,’ said Andrei. ‘I see your mama let you out?’

‘You’re not wearing fancy dress either?’ said Senka. ‘I don’t blame you. Minka isn’t dressed up. Is it only those credulous imbeciles who take the Game seriously?’ He pointed along the bridge, over the massed heads and bobbing caps, and there was Nikolasha, towering above everyone else in the crowd, at the other end where the road was barricaded to create a wide pedestrian walkway. He was resplendent in an olive-green frock coat and boots, his strawberry-red hair coarsened and rusted by the rain. Shoving through the crowd to get across the bridge, Andrei greeted George and Marlen Satinov, who had their little sister Mariko with them, and nodded at Vlad, who was also in costume. But where was Serafima?

‘She’ll come, don’t you worry,’ said Nikolasha. ‘See?’ He smiled triumphantly.

And there she was, in a blue dress and Peter Pan collar, soaked by the rain which had frizzed her hair into uncontrollable curls. Andrei couldn’t stop looking at her. He scarcely paid attention as Nikolasha clapped his hands and Vlad handed him the Velvet Book.

‘Comrade Romantics,’ Nikolasha declared formally, ‘I am recording the first attendance of Andrei Kurbsky as a full member qualified to play the Game.’ The crowd was so noisy that Andrei could barely hear him and it was hard to stay with the others, such was the shoving of the crowds. But everyone was in a good mood that day and when George and Minka began to pour out shots of vodka and hand round the glasses, a spotty sailor grabbed one and quaffed it and soon it seemed as if they were providing drinks for the entire Baltic Fleet.

‘Are you a theatre troupe?’ asked one of them, pulling on Nikolasha’s frock coat.

Rosa, in a purple cloak over a red dress with golden appliqué, fought her way through the mass of passersby. ‘Sorry, Nikolasha, I couldn’t get through. Here they are!’ She handed him the pistols in their little green case. She bowed before Nikolasha who nodded back.

‘Comrade Romantics . . .’ he started in his solemn high priest’s voice. ‘We’re here as always to celebrate poetry over prose, passion over science. What is our choice?’

‘LOVE OR DEATH,’ replied Vlad and Rosa. ‘WITHOUT LOVE, LET US DIE YOUNG!’

‘Let the Game begin!’ said Nikolasha, but his incantation was drowned out by the sailors singing ‘The Blue Shawl’, and
then ‘Katyusha’
–
for
Katyusha
was a song as well as a movie.

‘Get on with it or we’ll lose each other!’ George shouted, swigging the vodka.

‘What? I can’t even hear myself!’ shouted Nikolasha, nodding at Vlad, who held up the case and showed them the two duelling pistols. As he chose his pistol, Nikolasha stowed the Velvet Book in the pistol case – out of the rain.

‘Who dies today? Let’s play . . .’ said Rosa but her little cooing voice was lost in the roar of the crowd.

No one saw what happened next. They were separated by the currents of the crowd that carried Andrei so far from the others that he lost Serafima altogether and could only just see Nikolasha’s head in the distance when the two shots rang out. Amidst the sudden hush that followed, the rain stopped and with it time itself. Slow steam arose from the sweating, damp crowds, the sticky air congested with white poplar pollen instantly, mysteriously unleashed, and that red head was nowhere to be seen.

When he found them again, standing startled and horrified around the bodies, Andrei looked at his friends, at the other Fatal Romantics – and, across the bodies, his eyes met Serafima’s in a kind of horrified complicity. And then time speeded up again.

In front of him two army medics were working on the bodies, and a clearing had opened up in the dense pack of people. Policemen were running from both directions. And he saw the duelling pistols on the ground, one shattered into pieces, and the Velvet Book, splayed open on the wet ground, its covers all muddy. The police
were holding people back, placing bollards around the scene and asking questions.

‘Are you friends of these two?’ a police officer asked, a burly fellow with a Stavropol accent and a paunch. ‘Pull yourselves together. Say something!’

‘Yes we are.’ Andrei stepped forward, conscious that Vlad beside him was shaking in his bedraggled frock coat.

‘Are you actors or something? Do you dress up like this all the time?’

‘We’re not actors,’ Vlad said and began to cry.

‘Christ! What about you, girl?’ said the policeman, pointing at Minka, who was hugging her little brother, Senka.

‘Come away, Senka, I’m taking you home.’

‘But look at that pistol – it’s in pieces – and the Velvet Book’s all torn,’ said Senka, crouching down to look.

‘Leave all that; the police will need them,’ said Minka.

‘No one’s going anywhere yet,’ ordered the policeman, turning to Serafima. ‘You there! What’s your name?’

‘I’m Serafima Romashkina.’ Andrei could tell she was struggling to hold her nerve by being icily calm and formal. Yet she had blood on her hands – she must have got to her friends first.

‘Like the writer?’

‘He’s my father.’

‘You’re kidding. So your mother’s Sophia Zeitlin?’

‘Yes,’ said Serafima.

‘I’m a fan. I loved
Katyusha
. What a movie! But you don’t look like her at all.’

‘Look, our friends are lying there and you’re just—’

‘So what were you doing here, Serafima Romashkina?’ The policeman was now brandishing a little notebook and pencil that seemed too small for his thick fingers.

‘We were all meeting here. After the parade. Just for fun.’

‘M-e-e-ting,’ said the policeman, trying to write this down. Andrei realized he was drunk. Most of Moscow was drunk and several of the policemen at the scene were struggling to stand up at all. ‘Why the hell are you in fancy dress?’

‘We’re in a dramatic club,’ said Serafima.

‘What the fuck is that?’

‘They’re playing the Game,’ blurted out little Mariko Satinova from the back of the group. Andrei noticed Marlen was standing in front of her so she could not see the bodies or the blood.

‘Give me your name and address and you can take the little ones home.’

‘Satinov,’ said Marlen.

‘Satinov? Like the Politburo member?’

‘Yes, I’m Marlen Satinov.’

‘And I’m Mariko, his sister,’ added the little girl.

‘Mary mother of Christ!’ said the policeman, pushing back his cap and wiping his forehead. ‘GRISHA, GET THE FUCK OVER HERE!’ he yelled, turning around.

A pimply policeman who did not look any older than the schoolchildren ran over, looking anxious. ‘Yes, captain?’

‘Run fast as you can over to the guardhouse at Spassky Gate’ – he pointed towards the Kremlin tower – ‘and ring Lubianka Square. Tell them we have a double killing with special characteristics. It’s for the Organs. Tell them to send someone down here fast. Go!’

Andrei watched the young policeman running; just as he reached the sentry box with its telephone link to the MGB, the Ministry of State Security, he jumped as the sky boomed and a galaxy of fireworks exploded above the Kremlin.

The roar of the crowd spread from the bridge along the packed embankments and bridges of the River Moskva, but Andrei only had eyes for the policeman gesticulating as he told the guards to ring their superiors. He imagined phones ringing from guardhouses up the vertical hierarchy – captains to colonels, generals to ministers – all the way to Lubianka Square and thence to the Kremlin itself.

Around him, the fireworks made the night into a daylight that turned the two bodies on the bridge red and white and green as those supernovas flashed above them in crescents and stars and wheels.

Serafima stood beside him. In the dazzling, bleaching light he saw her tears, and, for a moment, it felt as if they were quite alone. Then he took her in his arms as a stab of sheer dread pierced his innards.

‘It’s begun,’ she kept saying. ‘It’s begun.’

It was only much later that he’d understand that she was not just crying for their dead friends and the pasts they shared, but for their futures. And for the secret that she cherished more than life itself.

‘We Have No Borders’, popular Soviet song

A FEW HUNDRED
metres away, in the room behind the Lenin Mausoleum, an old man smiled, honey-coloured eyes glinting, his face creasing like that of a grizzled tiger.

‘You’re looking like a Tsarist station manager in your uniform,’ Stalin teased Andrei Vyshinsky, his Deputy Foreign Minister, a pink-cheeked, white-haired man who stood before him in a grey, gold-braided diplomatic uniform with a ceremonial dagger at its belt. ‘Who designed this foolish rig? Is that a dagger or a carving knife?’

‘It’s the new diplomatic uniform, Comrade Stalin,’ replied Vyshinsky, almost at attention, chest out.

‘You look like a head waiter,’ said Stalin, his eyes scanning the leaders who formed a semi-circle around him. Golden shoulderboards and gleaming braid, Kremlin tans and bulging bellies. ‘What a collection,’ he said. ‘Some of you are so fat, you hardly look human. Set an example. Eat less.’

Hercules Satinov, who stood to Stalin’s right in a colonel general’s uniform, was proud to stand beside the greatest man in the world to celebrate Russia’s victory. Stalin had promoted him, trusted him with challenging tasks in peace and war and he had never disappointed the Master. Stalin’s restless scrutiny of his comrades-in-arms was sometimes mocking, sometimes chilling – even Satinov had experienced it – but it was just one of the many methods Stalin had used to build Soviet Russia and defeat Hitler. Virtually the entire leadership was in this room. Every single man was pretending to talk – but actually they never took their eyes off
him
, and Satinov knew that Stalin was always aware of this. Now he felt Stalin’s gaze upon him.

‘Now look at Satinov here. Smart! That’s the ticket!’

‘He’s no more a soldier than me,’ Lavrenti Beria objected.

‘True, but at least Satinov has the figure for it, eh,
bicho
?’
Stalin gave everyone nicknames and he often called Satinov
bicho – ‘
boy’ in their native Georgian. ‘He looks like a Soviet man should look. Not like you, Vyshinsky.’ Stalin beamed at the sweating courtier, enjoying his discomfort – especially when Alexander Poskrebyshev, his chef-de-cabinet, a bald little fellow in a general’s uniform, crept up behind Vyshinsky, slipped the dagger out of its scabbard and replaced it with a small, green gherkin.

‘I think Vyshinsky needs to drink a forfeit, don’t you, comrades?’ asked Beria, the secret-police chief. Satinov did not like this bullying of Vyshinsky even though he was a craven reptile: sycophantic to superiors, fearsome to inferiors. He observed how Beria played up to Stalin, however. Beria’s glossy, braided Commissar-General of Security uniform ill suited his glinting pince-nez, grey-green cheeks and double chins.

‘But I have to be careful, I have a heart condition,’ pleaded Vyshinsky.

‘Comrade Vyshinsky, might you deign to join us in a toast to the Soviet soldier?’ said Stalin, as flunkies in dark blue uniforms filled all the glasses.

Stalin had drunk several vodkas earlier and Satinov could tell that he was slightly drunk – and why not? Today was his supreme moment. But the stress of the war – four years of sixteen-hour days – had visibly aged him. Satinov noticed that his hands shook, his skin was waxy with red spots on his cheeks; the grey hair resembled a spiked ice sculpture. He wondered if Stalin was ill but put that thought out of his mind. It was unthinkable; Stalin’s health was a secret; and the Master distrusted doctors even more than he distrusted women, Jews, capitalists and social democrats.