One Night in Winter (46 page)

‘Feel better, darling Serafimochka?’ she asked her when they were sitting by the fire again. ‘You’ve done the right thing. Now you’ll be happier and you’ll be stronger to endure this new life of ours.’

Serafima took Dashka’s hand. ‘Thank you for all your patience.’

‘You’ll always have the scars,’ Dashka said. ‘The surgeons can never remove the fragments of shrapnel. They stay in your body forever, almost forgotten until one day, you’re jolted and then they’ll give you a pang of agony that makes you cry out. But you can live through it, I promise you that.’

Not for the first time, Serafima wondered about Dashka. She respected her as a former minister and doctor, but she was a very private person, an enigma, apparently so tough. Long blinded by Dashka’s sunniness, she saw there was shade there too.

‘You sound like you have some experience of this yourself?’

Dashka inhaled her cigarette and stared into the fire. ‘What’s important is not who
you
love but
who
loves you.’

Now, eight years later, Serafima said goodbye to Dashka on Yaroslavsky Station and watched her husband welcome her home. Like so many others, Serafima had not been able to get a message to her parents, but she eagerly sifted through the crowd of faces to see if someone had come to meet her. Some families had been notified; some did not know when their loved ones would be returning. She was just about to head out into the streets to wave down a car to drive her to her parents’ apartment when she spotted a familiar face with a diffident smile.

‘Andrei? Is that you?’ she asked, suddenly delighted to see him.

‘Yes,’ replied Andrei Kurbsky. He was still handsome in his wholesome way but much shabbier. ‘I’m so happy to see you.’

‘Who are you here to meet?’

‘You, of course.’

‘But how did you know I was on this train?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘How lucky we bumped into each other.’

‘Not quite luck. I didn’t like to think that there’d be no one here when you came home.’

‘How did you know that we were being released now?’

‘Your mother told me you were in Pechora. I asked a favour so I knew it would be sometime this month.’

‘This month? But that means—’

Andrei smiled and adjusted his heavy spectacles, blushing slightly. ‘Yes, I’ve met every train.’

‘Every night?’

‘Yes. It’s not so bad . . . I bring a book and smoke a few cigarettes and sometimes warm up with a jot of vodka. Oh, here, I have some for you.’ He gave her a small flask and she took a swig.

The vodka streaked its burning path down her throat.

‘Thank you, Andryusha!’ She took another shot. ‘I don’t have anyone else waiting for me. I don’t have anywhere to be . . .’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

It struck her then that he must have always loved her, even when it was not clear she was alive or that she would ever return. She could see too he was not sure how much of this devotion to reveal, afraid that it might frighten her off.

‘But you never wrote . . . I never knew,’ she said.

‘How could I tell you?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t know where to begin.’

She raised her fingers to her face. ‘I look truly awful. I was once a little attractive but I must seem like a sort of witch now.’

‘Not to me,’ Andrei said, speaking in a rush. ‘You were always entirely your own person, and now you’re even more so. You’ve probably forgotten that I saw you off on the train that day when you were leaving to be married in the West. I told myself then that I’d meet the train when you came back.’

‘You did see me off,’ Serafima said, remembering his face as the train pulled away. She had not thought about him once in eight years yet now she was nourished by the feeling he had been with her even then and that somehow she’d known him well a long time. ‘It’s cold here, isn’t it? I’m shivering.’

He picked up her case. ‘May I? I suppose you want to go to your parents’ place, but’ – he searched her face – ‘I have a small apartment, and it’s warm and full of books and . . .’

As he pushed his way through the crowd into the street where his car was parked, Serafima followed him with tears streaming down her face; she was crying not just out of gratitude for his kindness, but because it was only at this very second that she was really letting go of Frank Belman. This was the end of her old life and the start of a new one with Andrei Kurbsky.

As she passed through the arches of the station, she saw a tall man in the shadows. Through the blur of her tears, she glimpsed a face that reminded her of Hercules Satinov. But it couldn’t be him: he was more important than ever now, so what would he be doing here? Pulling down his black fedora, the man disappeared into the night and when Serafima blinked, he was gone.

The guards called up from the checkpoint on Granovsky: ‘The guest is on the way up, comrade marshal.’

‘Thank you,’ said Satinov. Mid-seventies but as lean as a much younger man, he looked at his watch. It was seven in the morning; Tamriko was at the dacha with Mariko, who had never married, and an American delegation was in Moscow to negotiate an arms-limitation treaty, so he, as Defence Minister, had been busy entertaining the Westerners at the Bolshoi and a banquet until the early hours. When he finally got home, the phone was ringing. Satinov had listened carefully.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Come early in the morning.’

So he was expecting this visit – but he had scarcely slept, imagining what it might mean.

Now he got up and crossed the chandeliered living room, conscious that, in this age of Nixon and Brezhnev, there was no longer a lifesize portrait of Stalin on the wall; instead there was one of himself in marshal’s uniform. He walked down the gleaming parquet corridor to the front door, hesitated for a second, opened the door – and gasped in shock.

At her book-lined apartment in the block on Patriarchy Prudy, Serafima Kurbskaya was sitting down.

‘I’ve had a phone call,’ she said to her husband, who was standing in the doorway watching her.

‘I know.’

‘It was from the American Embassy. They want me to meet someone.’

‘I thought so.’

‘How did you know?’

‘I’ve always expected that call,’ said Andrei, ‘and I happened to see his name in
Pravda.
He’s in charge of the American delegation.’

‘I didn’t say I’d go.’

‘Do you want to?’

‘I’m happy not to go. I don’t want it to worry you.’

‘But do you
want
to see him again?’

‘I think I do.’

‘Then you must. Serafima?’

‘Yes?’

‘I owe you this. And if you still have feelings . . .’

‘Oh, Andrei. You don’t owe me anything. I owe
you
a lot. Twenty happy years. We have our children, our books, poetry, theatre.’

Andrei came over, sat down beside her and took her hand. She noticed how pale he was looking. ‘We haven’t really spoken about this, but when we were at the school, I . . . I did something that I’ve always regretted. I agreed to watch people for the Organs, to protect myself and my mother – a sort of insurance policy after all we’d been through. Even then I loved you so I tried to do as little harm as I could, but . . . still . . . When I look back, as I lie beside you at night . . .’ Andrei got up, walked over to the far side of the room, cleaned his spectacles, and then came back to sit beside her again. ‘It was me who told them about you going to the House of Books every afternoon, and now I wonder if I played a part in them finding out about you and Frank Belman.’

Serafima put her head on his shoulder. ‘I knew you worked for the Organs. I worked it out in my cell in Lubianka. I had a lot of time. And when I came back from the Gulags, you knew which train I’d be on because you asked your KGB controller to tell you.’ She paused. ‘Dearest Andryusha, I’ve never held it against you. I know you, like millions of others, had no choice, especially when we were schoolchildren. You
had
to protect your mother. You’re a good person. You’re mine.’

Andrei sighed; then he put his arms around her. ‘Thank you, but I’d still like to drive you to meet him and I want you to be free to do whatever you want and go wherever you want. I’ve been so lucky to have you all these years. Now it’s my turn to make amends.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Satinov at the open door, wiping his brow. ‘For a second, you looked so like . . .’

‘My mother?’

‘Yes. Forgive me, Professor Dorov, I’m getting old.’

‘I suppose she was my age, around forty, when you knew her?’

‘Yes.’ Satinov turned round and gestured towards his sitting room. ‘Please come in.’

When they were both sitting down, Senka Dorov, who had dark eyes and a few freckles across his cheeks, thick dark hair and a full mouth with a slightly crooked grin, looked around at the grand room. The giant portrait of his distinguished host, the fire blazing and the chandelier all reminded him of his childhood when both his parents were members of the leadership. A maid brought tea.

‘What can I do for you?’ asked Satinov.

‘I’ll get straight to the point if I may,’ replied Senka. ‘My mother died two days ago.’

The news punched Satinov in the solar plexus. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘She died of cancer in Pyatogorsk, where my parents retired. She’d been ill for a while.’ Senka paused. ‘She asked me to deliver a package to you personally.’

‘Thank you. As a child you were closest to your mother.’

‘We continued to be close. Right until the end. You hadn’t actually seen her for a long time, I think?’

‘No, not really since 1945. You do look very like her, Senka, just as you did when you were a boy, the Little Professor.’

‘But you knew her well.’ It was not quite a question.

‘In a way.’ Satinov had never regretted staying with Tamriko, just as he had never considered leaving her. After his affair with Dashka, he had returned to become the man he had been before – on the surface, at least. The rigid life of the élite continued under Stalin and his successors, and everyone treated him as if he was still his reticent, cold former self. Yet all this time, Dashka had existed in his life like one of those unexploded Luftwaffe bombs they sometimes found, buried deep in someone’s garden yet still capable of destroying the entire neighbourhood. Over the years, he had realized that he had made a fool of himself with Dashka – and yet it was a folly that he would treasure all his life.

‘Well, this is what she asked me to deliver,’ said Senka awkwardly, proffering a package wrapped in brown paper and crisscrossed with string. ‘There! Duty done!’

‘Thank you again.’ Satinov was aware that his face was expression-free. After all, to hide his feelings was second nature to him.

‘Before I go, Comrade Satinov, may I ask you something? My mother’s arrest was such a blow to me as a child. But I never quite understood why she
was
arrested. You were in the leadership at the time. I wondered if you knew anything?’

‘Even we didn’t know everything. We only saw what Stalin wanted us to see.’

‘So you know she was arrested for lack of vigilance with state secrets and abetting an Enemy of the People. She was named again in the Doctors’ Plot for planning to murder some of the leaders medically and if Stalin hadn’t died . . .’

‘She’d have been shot.’

‘Yes. She thought she’d had a lucky escape. But could it have been something to do with my father?’

‘Possibly. Stalin arrested the wives of Molotov, Kalinin and Poskrebyshev.’

‘Well, my father’s been dead for twenty years now, and I sometimes wonder whether her arrest could have been connected to the Children’s Case.’

‘Also possible. She helped Benya Golden get the job at the school. Did you know they were at university together in Odessa?’

Senka tilted his head, and Satinov was struck once again by his likeness to Dashka.

‘And then there’s this,’ Senka said. ‘Something’s always bothered me. Could it have been anything to do with me?’

Satinov thought for a while. ‘Tell me,’ he said at last. ‘Did your mother ever talk about her patients at home?’

‘No. Sometimes she whispered to my father and I heard a couple of names.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, there was Zhdanov, but everyone knew about his heart disease.’

Satinov nodded. ‘You always knew quite a lot for a youngster, but then you were the Little Professor.’

Senka’s answering smile was the very image of his mother’s. ‘Why do you ask if my mother talked about her patients?’

‘Just curiosity. She was so discreet.’ Satinov offered him a cigarette and took one himself. ‘It must have been quite an experience being arrested during the Children’s Case?’

‘Your Mariko was even younger.’

‘True, but she was only there for a short time. You spent much longer in Lubianka.’

‘It was frightening but I concentrated very hard, even though I was so young, on not getting my parents into trouble.’

‘You know we executed Komarov and Likhachev with Abakumov in 1954?’

A look of distaste crossed Senka’s sensitive face. What does one expect from a liberal intellectual? thought Satinov.

‘They were thugs,’ he said. ‘After Stalin’s death, I read your interrogations in the KGB files. I have to say: they set you a terrible trap.’

‘They wanted me to incriminate my parents.’

Satinov shook his head. ‘Our Organs were full of criminal elements in Stalin’s time.’

Senka looked anxious. ‘At the time, I thought my solution had worked. But when they arrested my mother, I wasn’t so sure. I long to know if I was to blame for what happened to her next.’

Satinov got up and went to his huge chrome safe. He opened it, brought out a heap of papers, and leafed through them. ‘I was looking at these the other day. And here it is, how clever you were. You see here? After your testimony: “Accusations not to be pursued.”’ He paused. ‘I was there when you came out. Do you remember?’

‘I do, very clearly.’

‘When you saw your mother sitting there in the waiting room, you were so excited. We could hear you talking about her; you were so proud of her!’