The plains were almost flat, broken up with bowers of willows and poplars but mostly they stretched forth, a wilderness of high grass sometimes swaying and rich with yellow-headed, black-faced sunflowers, the horizon interminable, the sky fast-changing from scarlet to yellow to lilac: a hazy, dusty, grainy luminosity. The sheer beauty of this vastness gave Benya a sense of floating helplessness that allowed him to live in the present and not try to understand anything other than his intimation that he was a weary man longing to stay alive for one more bewildering day.
In the distance, squadrons of tanks like steel cockroaches ploughed up the coffee-brown dust. They were heading towards the Don, and sixty miles beyond it lay Stalingrad.
In the ripped-open sky above, planes swooped through the haze, Yaks duelling with Messerschmitts. Close to them, a German Storch, watching the Russian forces, resembled a clumsy pterodactyl, Benya thought. The Nazi advance over the last few weeks had been so fast that the steppes were now chaotic. Whole Russian armies had been captured in German encirclements; many traitors had defected to the German side, others left behind on the steppes. Out there in the cauldron of blood it was not just German vs Russian, Nazi vs Communist but also Russian vs Russian, Cossack vs Cossack, Ukrainians against everyone, and everyone against the Jews …
On the roads and the open steppe, peasants with carts stacked with their paltry belongings trekked back or tramped forward, weary and stoical, confused by the advances and retreats of the soldiers. And in villages, woods and high grass, Jews were hiding, lost people who claimed to have witnessed things that sounded incredible in their maleficence. Far from their shabby Bessarabian villages or great Russian cities of Odessa and Dnieperpetrovsk, they fled alone, just darting from haystack to barn, seeking sanctuary.
‘All right, squadron forward,’ said Captain Zhurko as if there was a full squadron, as if so many of them had not died, as if there were not just seven of them – and the eighth member wasn’t seething with flies just behind the copse. ‘Let’s lope and cover some distance before the heat. Ride on, bandits!’
They walked at first, Captain Zhurko followed by Little Mametka on his tiny pony that Benya thought was not much taller than a big dog, then Panka on Almaz followed by Spider Garanzha with the rest of them bringing up the rear.
They loped through a sunflower field, divebombed by sparrows. Prishchepa leaned over and grabbed the wide, happy heads of the flowers and shook out the seeds, pouring them into his mouth as if this was a day out with his pals. And as the flat land dipped slightly in tribute to the stream that ran before them like a trickle of mercury in the sun, they spotted the mirror flash in the village far ahead, and through the binoculars Zhurko saw horses and field-grey men and khaki metal.
They checked and rechecked their weapons. Panka rode alongside Benya now. Chewing on his whiskers, he put a huge hand, dark as teak, on his arm. ‘This is big country,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to stretch yourself just to keep up with it.’
Benya looked into Panka’s narrow eyes, not much more than glinting wrinkles in that weather-beaten, foxy face, but blessed with almost miraculously sharp sight. Panka never ceased scanning the steppes, listening for the sounds of birds, the bark of deer, the grumble of engines. ‘That’s a swallow,’ he might say. Or: ‘That’s the grunt of a buck on the rut.’ He might point ahead. ‘Watch out! A gopher’s burrow there.’ Then there were the planes: ‘It’s one of ours, a tank-killer.’ Or a gun: ‘That’s an eighty-eight millimetre.’ He always knew.
The adrenalin pumped into Benya’s throat, making his palms slimy, his belly churn and, for a moment, the heat made him dizzy. His parents were somewhere out there. Sometimes he knew they were dead and he wanted to join them, but today hope surged and he was sure he would find them. For a moment, he recalled the woman he had loved in Moscow. He smelled the skin on Sashenka’s throat, her grey eyes, the sinews in her neck straining as they made love – it was all so vivid that it made him ache. Life after her was truly an afterlife, ground down to its essentials: trial and the Camps. He had been at war for months now but somehow this simple life, this lethal struggle, the company of Cossacks and their horses in the realm of sunflowers and grass, this empire of dust and horse sweat and gun oil, made him feel more alive than he could remember. If you had asked him later if he had been afraid, he would have said, ‘Afraid? More terrified than you can ever know.’ And yet beyond fear too. ‘We are singing a song,’ wrote Maxim Gorky, the great writer who had once been so kind to Benya, ‘about the madness of the brave.’ Benya was riding to kill a man, perhaps many men, and, struck with a presentiment of catastrophe, he was unlikely to survive. But he still believed in his own luck. He had to. They all had to.
As she headed through the sunflowers, Silver Socks turned her head to the right, ears pricked, and Benya Golden felt her shorten her stride. She was telling him something. Panka and Prishchepa were already dismounting, guns cocked. Benya rested his hand on the PPSh sub-machine gun hanging over his shoulder.
If you die now, he told himself, you died long before …
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About the Author
Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of the acclaimed novels of his Moscow Trilogy – Sashenka, Red Sky at Noon and One Night in Winter, which won the Paddy Power Political Novel of the Year Prize and was longlisted for the Orwell Prize: the novels are published in 27 languages. Montefiore is also the author of prize-winning bestselling history books now in 48 languages, including Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Jerusalem: The Biography and The Romanovs.
For more information please see: www.simonsebagmontefiore.com or follow him on Twitter @simonmontefiore
Also by Simon Sebag Montefiore
FICTION
The Moscow Trilogy
One Night in Winter
Red Sky at Noon
CHILDREN’S FICTION
The Royal Rabbits of London (with Santa Montefiore)
NON-FICTION
Jerusalem: The Biography
Catherine the Great and Potemkin
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
Young Stalin
Titans of History
The Romanovs: 1613–1918
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First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Corgi edition published 2009
Copyright © Simon Sebag Montefiore 2008
Extract from Red Sky at Noon © Simon Sebag Montefiore 2017
Cover images: Sky © Jill Battaglia/Arcangel
Snow scene © Alison Shaw/Corbis
Simon Sebag Montefiore has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
The author and publishers are grateful for permission to reproduce the following copyright material: for ‘The Talisman’, from Pushkin by Henri Troyat, translated by Nancy Aphoux, © 1970 by Doubleday, a Division of Random House Inc. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House Inc.; for lines from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov, translated by Robert Chandler © Robert Chandler, 2003. Reprinted by permission of Hesperus Press; for the song of Petrograd street children, quoted with permission from The Silver Samovar: Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution, Alexander Poliakoff (Atlantida Press). Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781446486054
ISBN 9780552154574
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