One Night in Winter (31 page)

Sensible Minka, thought Serafima, however much fun this might be. The rules had loosened in wartime but her father had warned her that the Party would reinforce them again afterwards. Bradley, spurred on by his friends, not only insisted on buying them four rounds of drinks but offered them some tickets in a box. ‘We’ve got some extra seats,’ he said.

‘Why don’t you need them?’ asked Minka in the perfect English she had learned in Tamara Satinova’s class.

‘We can’t stay for the show, so please take them,’ Bradley said. ‘The box will just be empty if you don’t.’

‘You’re just here for the drinks?’ said Minka.

‘And the dames!’ cried one of Bradley’s friends.

‘We’re going out to eat as soon as the play starts,’ said Bradley.

Filled with uniformed foreigners and Russian girls, the Bolshoi was the centre of all social life in Moscow, so it didn’t surprise Serafima that Bradley and his American friends were not remotely interested in Prokofiev. Even she, Rosa and Minka had seen it so often they could have danced it themselves.

‘Hey,’ Bradley continued, flashing his amazing American teeth, white and clean and big as icebergs. ‘Wanna join us for dinner?’

‘I’m sure you’ll find some girls who aren’t here for the ballet,’ replied Minka, now suddenly haughty and mock-serious. ‘But we are.’

SATINOV WAS STILL
in East Prussia a week later. It was evening and he was in the baronial hall of a country house that was now the headquarters of the First Belorussian Front. The first Soviet troops to break into the
schloss
had urinated and defecated on the count’s four-poster bed (once slept in by Frederick the Great, according to a gardener who showed them round) and fired at the oil paintings of bewhiskered Junkers, and although the house had since been cleaned up, Satinov could still see the bullet marks on the walls.

‘I think the full staff can join us for dinner tonight, don’t you, Hercules?’ said Marshal Rokossovsky. They were friends, even though Rokossovsky was a real soldier, and he, Satinov, was a Party man, a member of the State Defence Committee, and Stalin’s representative.

‘Why not?’ answered Satinov, who understood by ‘full staff’ that Rokossovsky meant that the generals could invite their PPZhs (it stood for
pokhodno-polevaya zhena
– a field campaign wife, a pun on the Soviet machine-gun the PPSh). ‘It’s time everyone relaxed. We’ve earned it, after all.’

He looked across at Rokossovsky and raised his eyebrows as they both acknowledged the sound of shooting and cowboy whooping outside. Losha and the bodyguards were culling dinner in the deer park from their jeeps. They too were in good spirits.

Coming down for dinner that evening, Satinov relished the delicious aroma of roasting venison, the sweet smoke of apple-tree wood in the fire, and, he thought, the scent of the women present. Rokossovsky, elegant descendant of Polish nobility, enjoyed female company but disliked any hint of debauchery in his decorous headquarters. This suited Satinov, who was happily married, hated drunkenness and disapproved of womanizers.

In the hall, Marshal Rokossovsky and his staff were at the table. Young female orderlies in khaki were serving plates of steaming venison piled with vegetables and pouring glasses of wine for the officers. Rokossovsky’s batman was fanning the fire in the great open fireplace, and Satinov’s guards were carrying up boxes of wine from the cellars.

Rokossovsky was sitting beside the young telephonist who was his PPZh. Satinov took his place at the other end of the table.

‘Comrade Satinov,’ Rokossovsky called down the table, pointing to a pale man. ‘You already know Comrade Genrikh Dorov from the Central Committee?’

‘I certainly do. Comrade Dorov, welcome!’ said Satinov. He smiled, remembering that George and his friends called Genrikh the Uncooked Chicken. How right they were, he thought, feeling an unexpected stab of longing for the company of his sons (and the one he’d lost).

‘Thank you. I’m here to inspect food supplies and root out wreckers and profiteers,’ said Dorov.

Ah, that made sense, Satinov decided, recalling how, in 1937, Genrikh Dorov had metamorphosed from an inky-fingered, hero-worshipping assistant in Stalin’s private office into a demented executioner. The more executions, the whiter his hair, the paler his skin became. In the first year of the war, his shootings (sometimes using his own pistol) and military bungles cost the lives of thousands. Finally Stalin himself (who regarded him as a talentless but devoted fanatic) had demoted him.

‘I report to the Central Committee tomorrow,’ said Genrikh, so that everyone could hear. ‘It’s a den of iniquity out here. Adultery. Booze. Corruption. We must restore Bolshevik morals.’

But Satinov was looking at the woman sitting next to Dorov. ‘My wife,’ said Genrikh, following his gaze. ‘Have you met her?’

And
there
was the female doctor in the blue-tabbed uniform of the medical corps with the red cross on her sleeve.

‘Dashka Dorova,’ she said, offering her hand. Satinov noticed her slightly plump, amber-skinned wrist. ‘Yes, we’ve met before.’

‘Of course but . . .’

‘But what?’ A crooked smile, challenging caramel-brown eyes.

What was he trying to say? That he was surprised that the unattractive pedant Dorov was married to this beautiful doctor?

She leaned towards him. ‘Did you know our children are at the same school? My daughter Minka knows your sons.’

‘School 801? I didn’t, but you know, I’ve never been there. I’ve been at the front for so long.’

‘Where did you meet?’ asked Dorov. ‘You just said you’d met. I’d like to know.’

‘At a little hospital in a village a few days ago,’ explained Dashka soothingly. ‘A whole unit was poisoned by alcohol . . .’

‘Christ! What a waste of manpower,’ Dorov said. ‘Did you shoot the suppliers for sabotage?’

‘No, dear,’ Dashka replied. ‘I was trying to save their lives.’

‘Did we lose any more?’ asked Satinov.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Oh, and thank you so much for the mattresses and supplies. I was very surprised when they arrived.’

‘You didn’t think I’d remember, did you?’

‘No,’ she said, smiling, her features softening. ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Would you have bothered with the supplies if she’d been an ugly male doctor?’ asked Dorov.

Satinov looked at him coldly. ‘How long are you with us, Comrade Dorov?’

But Dorov had turned away.

‘Excuse me, comrades, but Comrade Dorov, your plane for Moscow is waiting,’ reported one of the aides-de-camp, saluting.

‘I’ll help you pack,’ said Dashka, standing up.

After the Dorovs had gone, there was silence around the table. Genrikh Dorov was as disliked as he was feared. Then Rokossovsky winked, everyone laughed, and the conversation started again.

A few hours later, and the dinner was over. Stalin had telephoned to discuss the offensive and Marshal Rokossovsky had retired. Around Satinov, the other officers and Losha were singing ‘Katyusha’ beside the fireplace. But he craved a quiet smoke and some cool air. Pulling on his fur-lined greatcoat and wolf-fur hat, he stepped through the doors at the back of the house and out into the night.

It was bitterly cold. The snow glowed on the statuary in the well-kept grounds. Where were the house’s owners now? Were they even alive? How quickly fortune could change. Satinov lit a cigarette and sipped at the cognac in his glass.

War was simply a slaughterhouse on wheels, he thought. For most men, soldiering was tragedy expressed as a profession. And yet he liked this life, the straightforward comradeship of the front, the sense of shared mission, the moral clarity of war against evil.

The orange tip of another cigarette: he wasn’t alone.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said quietly. ‘I thought you’d flown back to Moscow.’

‘I’ll be here a while yet,’ she replied. ‘The medical services on this front need reorganization and I can’t trust anyone else to do it.’ She was wearing, he noticed, that full-length sheepskin greatcoat that, out here, made her look like a wild animal.

‘I prefer to do everything myself too. I didn’t realize you were from Moscow.’

‘I’m from Lvov originally. Is it so obvious I’m from Galicia?’ She laughed with a singing sound, throwing back her head so that he caught a glimpse of her throat.

‘No, not at all. You’re at the Kremlevka?’

‘Yes, I’m its new director. But I’m a cardiologist. What’s your speciality?’

‘Not hearts,’ Satinov said tersely. ‘Hearts are the last organs that I consider.’

As they talked, the steam of their breath fused, and when they exhaled, cigarette smoke twisted from their lips and swirled around them like the folds of a grey cloak. He was conscious of her distinct spicy perfume as they walked around the gardens, and then out into the fields beyond the house. The full moon above them had dyed the snow a strange blue so that, as they walked on into the deer park, the blue grass under their feet crunched and sparkled. The snowflakes that gathered in her hair seemed to make it blacker and thicker still.

He stopped to allow Dashka to finish the cognac in his glass. Ahead was a white colonnade – and now they saw it was a small Grecian temple.

‘It’s from the Seven Years War,’ she said. ‘A folly!’

‘Let’s explore!’ Feeling like children, they entered its cold portals, chased by wisps of mist that curled down from little domes and out of alcoves. Suddenly, and without knowing quite why, Satinov was filled with an intense joy. Below them, they could see the gloomy house, surrounded by lines of jeeps, tanks, guns. Smoke from the soldiers’ fires rose from the village. In the distance: the sound of a hammer on metal; of engineers mending the tanks; engines revving; volleys of shots; young men singing a love song – was it the Georgian melody ‘Tiflis’? A boom and the orange flash of distant howitzers momentarily made the snow itself flare up as if on fire.

Leaning against the wall, he lit another cigarette and told her about his family, of his happiness with Tamara, how the death of his eldest son had fused into the deaths of tens of thousands in the battles where he served, of his pride in his second son David, his admiration for George’s genial mischief (which he envied), of Marlen’s successes, and of Mariko, apple of his eye.

‘Have you told them all these things?’ she asked.

He shook his head.

‘But you tell me here? You must tell them; you must tell Tamara.’

He smiled, turning to her, noticing the beauty of her dark eyes, her lips. ‘Now, your turn,’ he said.

She had one son in the army, a daughter, Minka, who took nothing seriously, and Demian who took everything seriously, like his father. And then there was her little afterthought: ‘My Senka, whom I love so much it makes me grind my teeth.’

‘I was like that with my mother,’ said Satinov.

‘My Senka’s quite different from you, Hercules. He’s soft and adorable but you – we all know that you’re the Iron Commissar. You like to be seen as cold as ice, as silent as the forest.’

‘I don’t seem very silent tonight.’

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘You’ve surprised me.’

‘I’ve surprised myself.’

She laughed and he glimpsed her throat again. ‘It’s my company, of course. I claim credit for your loquacity. I thought you were another silent Bolshevik disciplinarian.’

They had almost avoided the mention of her spouse up to now. It seemed to Satinov to be a significant move in their conversation. ‘He’s strict at home too?’

‘He never lets us forget. He’s the puritanical conscience of the Party. But I love him, of course. And you?’

‘Probably Tamara would agree. The Soviet man is a product of our harsh times. But I love my Tamara too, and our friends say our marriage is the happiest they know.’

‘How wonderful,’ she said. ‘It’s true. I know all the gossip but I’ve never heard a whisper about
you
being a flirt.’

He threw his cigarette away, a speck of red in the blue snow beyond. ‘But what about you, Dashka? Are you famous for your flirtations? You’re beautiful enough . . .’

‘I like to flirt but it never goes anywhere. I married at nineteen and I’ve never looked at another man in twenty-one years.’

‘And yet . . .?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m just enjoying this moment.’

He passed her a cigarette and watched her put it between her lips. He leaned in to light it. He closed his eyes for a moment and he could feel how close she was – by the warmth of her face, the scent of her hair and her exotic amber skin so rare amongst Russians.

He paused, waited for her to move away; then he leaned in closer and, without any decision or reason at all, they were kissing, and he could feel her light, wide lips on his.

Outside the arches and the colonnades, the snow started to fall again, making the night a few degrees warmer. The flakes whirled around them in their little temple. Once they had started to kiss, and once they knew that no one could see them, they could not stop. His hands ran over her fur coat; then he was pushing it open, and then the green tunic and her blouse, delighting in the soft caramel hues of her neck and shoulders.

She was kissing him more hungrily than he had ever been kissed by Tamara. She was biting his mouth, tearing his lips, breathing his breath. For a second, the scientific Communist, the Iron Commissar, returned and Satinov wondered if this was right, normal, and he shrank from her. But as he inhaled her quick breath, tasted the slight bitterness of her cigarettes and the sweetness of the brandy, her passion infected him. She curled herself around him so that he could feel her body, her need for him. He touched her legs above her boots, realizing that he loved their delicious sturdiness. When his hand slid up her American nylons, when it reached the silkiness of her skin, both of them groaned aloud.

Somehow they stopped, and a few minutes later, they were walking back down the hill towards the house.

‘Comrade doctor,’ he said in his restored commanding tone, ‘we’re good Bolsheviks. We both love our spouses. This can
never
happen again.’

‘Agreed, comrade general. Of course.’