One Night in Winter

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  ‘Don’t you like Marshak’s stories? Terem-Teremok? Or Timur and his Team?’

  ‘Those are for babies!’ he said indignantly.

  ‘What a character you are, Senka,’ said Lulu’s mother.

  The book was very heavy but Senka was carrying it upstairs again when he saw four men, two in suits and two in uniform with blue tabs.

  ‘You’re Senka Dorov, aren’t you?’ said one of the men, who had a bald head the shape of an onion dome.

  ‘Yes. Who are you?’

  ‘That book looks most interesting. Can we have a look at it downstairs?’

  ‘I’ve got to get back for supper. Mama’s waiting.’

  But the man had taken the book and was perusing it in a very puzzled way. ‘Opera, eh?’

  ‘Which is your favourite Tchaikovsky?’ asked Senka. ‘Don’t answer Swan Lake. That’s too predictable.’

  ‘You’re a funny lad,’ said the man as he steered Senka into the lift.

  ‘Hey! Hang on,’ cried Senka, but at that moment, his arms were held behind his back and one of the other men put a cloth over his face and he went to sleep. And when he woke up (he didn’t know how long afterwards), he was between the same two men in a Pobeda car approaching Dzerzhinsky Square.

  ‘Where are you taking me? Who are you?’ he asked sleepily.

  And the domed one said: ‘We’re taking you to play Reds versus Whites with your friends. There’s nothing to worry about!’

  ‘You must think I’m very stupid or was born yesterday,’ said Senka fearlessly – though as the drug wore off, he was beginning to feel fear rising up his tummy and into his throat where he could taste its bitterness, a sensation he had only experienced once before, when one of Demian’s horrid friends had held his nose at school and he thought he was suffocating until he remembered that he could breathe through his mouth.

  He found he was still holding Discussing Music, Choreography and Libretto in Tchaikovsky’s Opera and Ballet on his knee. He looked out of the windows: I know this building, he thought as they drove into the grey, granite mountain of Lubianka. He had heard his parents mention it as they passed, and he had not missed the awe, even the dread, in their voices. Before he could say another word, the steel gates swung open and the car accelerated into a courtyard, the doors were opened and he was being frogmarched down some steps and up to a filthy counter which he could not see over.

  ‘Where is he?’ barked an old woman in a brown coat. ‘I can’t even see him. Little blighter, isn’t he?’

  ‘Are you taking me to see my sister?’

  ‘Surname, name, patronymic.’

  ‘Ring my mama. She’ll come and get me. She doesn’t know where I am.’ Then he remembered something important and reassuring. ‘Is my sister Minka here? Maybe I’m here to collect her?’

  ‘No talking, prisoner,’ snarled the woman. ‘Answer the questions!’ But Senka was so relieved that he had remembered this and so accustomed, at home and even at school, to being treated with indulgent love, that he ignored her.

  ‘Because Mama says Minka’s going home soon. Now I understand why I’m here.’

  ‘Another word out of you,’ shouted a man in uniform, ‘and you’ll get a thick ear, if not a beating! Do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Senka, now shocked and deeply worried. ‘Please can I ring my daddy. He works on the Central Committee.’ He thought mentioning his father might frighten them, but they did not seem to care. They took away his book and gave him a receipt that he didn’t know what to do with. Then a fat warder in a brown coat led him through a door: ‘Body search. Medical,’ she said. ‘Take all your clothes off and hurry up about it.’

  Senka felt shy. ‘Even my pyjama bottoms?’

  ‘Move it! You collect your clothes after.’ She pushed him through another door.

  ‘But I’ve got a terrible tummy ache. Mama makes me lie down when I have it and then it goes. And I have asthma.’

  ‘Come here,’ said a man with a wen on his nose and a stethoscope and a white coat. He was sitting in an old metal chair beside a plain hospital trolley, its mattress stained a faded brown. Senka could tell he was a doctor but he was not a doctor like his mother. ‘Stand!’

  Senka sensed danger: ‘No!’ He bolted for the door. But the doctor had pressed a button on the wall and the door flew open and in came three warders, a man and two women. Senka was crying now, sobbing: ‘I want my mama. I want to go home, my tummy is really hurting!’ But they held his pale naked body and carried him to the trolley where they dumped him roughly.

  ‘Let me check you, or they’ll hold you down,’ said the doctor, who was wheezing heavily. ‘And it’ll be worse than a stomach ache, I can tell you.’

  Senka stopped struggling but he found he was shaking with fear and foreboding. The doctor told him to open his mouth. Then the wen-nozzled medic pushed in his fingers, which tasted of metal and rubbish simultaneously, and felt Senka’s teeth and his tongue. ‘Turn over,’ he said. ‘Take a breath!’

  Senka felt something in his bottom and he started to fight again and cry out, but it was over quickly, and soon he was back in the first room and in his pyjamas and dressing gown again. Another room: a greasy-haired old man beside a camera told him to sit in the chair but he was too small so the photographer placed a cushion on it, before disappearing under a black blanket: ‘Look at the camera’ and boom: there was a flash and a fizzing sound. ‘Well done, son.’ The photographer ruffled his hair.

  Senka saw an opportunity.

  ‘Please can I call my mama? I so miss my mama!’

  ‘You’re young to be in here,’ the photographer whispered quickly. ‘You’ll get out, son, unlike me. But my advice is to let the current take you. Don’t fight it.’ Then he cleared his throat and called out: ‘Prisoner for transfer.’

  Senka was given back to the warders in their brown coats, who handed him over to two uniformed guards. Each held one of his arms. Keyrings holding many keys jingled from belts next to their pistols. ‘No talking. Eyes forward. Let’s go.’ Steel stairways, down, up again, through locked doors. Senka felt tiny in this enormous hidden world. Every time one door closed and another opened he was in yet another towering hall filled with metal landings, each of which held row upon row of enforced steel doors.

  The place stank of wee, poo, sweat, detergent, dampness. Repulsive. Repellent. Revolting. Rebarbative. Nauseating. Egregious. Emetic. The thesaurus of words comforted him but his heart was beating like a train travelling at speed.

  When he heard some more footsteps getting closer, his heart raced. ‘Is it Minka?’ he said, his voice quivering. But they pushed him into a box like an upright coffin, and locked the door. Senka thought he might suffocate and his tummy cramp returned but he heard the steps go past and then they took him out and finally they opened a cell number 235 and pushed him inside.

  ‘Someone’s weed in my bed,’ Senka called when he saw the thin mattress on the metal bed: it bore a yellow stain in the shape of the Crimea. He wanted to go himself but there was no lavatory. He did not know what to do. Then the Judas port opened and closed, the locks turned and a warder looked in.

  ‘I’m hungry and I need to go to the lavatory,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve missed that time,’ said the warder. ‘Use that slops bucket.’

  ‘I don’t think I can use a bucket.’

  ‘Save it up till morning then, your majesty. Rations soon.’

  ‘Please call my mama,’ said Senka, bursting into tears. Soon he was crying in spasms, the tears running down into his mouth and even down his neck. ‘Please!’

  The door slammed again, and the eyehole was opened and closed repeatedly, but no one came, so Senka spread the blanket over the mattress. The pillow had a red-brown mark the shape of Africa, he noticed.

  Finally, he had to use the repugnant slops bucket; afterwards exhaustion forced him to lie down and he started to cry again. The door opened and this time it was a lady with a trolley. She gave him a bowl of s
oup (which was really just grey water with two chunks of straggly yellow fat floating in it), a square of black bread and a tiny rectangle of butter. He was so hungry but the soup stank and the fat was horrid so he just ate the bread.

  ‘May I have an extra piece of bread?’

  ‘Against the rules. That’s your allowance.’

  She gave him a cup of tea with a tiny piece of sugar; then the door was shut again and he lay on his bed, terrified by the sounds of the vastness of the Inner Prison of Lubianka. The symphony of prisons, he decided, is more percussion than strings: slamming doors, tinkling keys, grinding locks, coughing, spluttering, spasming, howling, sobbing, shouting, the clank of boots on metal landings and stairs. All was harsh and all he had known until this moment had been gentle.

  Who were all these heaving, grunting, hacking strangers in the cells nearby? Was there anyone his age? Were the other children from the school close to him? Where was Minka? He closed his eyes and dreamed of his mama, of his home, of his brothers and sister. Mama, I’m here. Please come and find me. Do you know where I am?

  He cried and cried but even when the tears ran out, the fear remained. How had this terrible mistake been made? Surely they didn’t know he was ten. If only he had told them that, they’d have realized they had the wrong person. He could not believe they didn’t know who his mama and papa were.

  He replayed the night of the shooting on the bridge in his head: he was in the prison because of those deaths; he knew that. But had George and Andrei been arrested in their pyjamas?

  Senka realized that he had nothing to cuddle and no one had kissed him tonight: how could he sleep without his toy bear, Aristotle? He had never slept without the bear. At home, he would lie on his bed with the cover pulled up to his neck, feeling like a warm prince at the very centre of the entire world. His mama would sit on his bed and tell him stories and take his face in her hands and kiss his nose and his forehead and his cheeks and sometimes even his eyes and he would look up at her and sometimes he gave his matinée-idol look, lowering his face and raising his eyes, and his mama would say: ‘Oh! Who could resist those brown eyes? One day, you’ll get married and she’ll be a lucky girl!’ And then she’d throw back her head and laugh.

  This made him cry again but at least he was beginning to realize why he was there. When Minka disappeared, his mama said, ‘Two of her friends were killed so of course they have to investigate. Then she’ll come home.’ But Mama and Papa said Minka was going to come home tonight. So why was he in prison too? And why couldn’t he sleep? The eyehole kept opening, and the electric light was on. When he curled up, a voice said: ‘Hands outside the blanket!’ He was desperate to sleep. ‘You’re such a good sleeper,’ Mama always said. He closed his eyes but just when darkness was beginning to close in around him, the door was thrown open abruptly and he was shaken out of bed, marched down the corridor, up a metal stairway, down, up again through several doors.

  A bright room. Two metal chairs. A man with a grotesque face dotted with thousands of little red spots, a jutting chin that resembled the muzzle of a dog and hands like lobster claws faced him.

  ‘I’m Colonel Likhachev,’ said the man. ‘We’ve treated you children too gently, but now we know that you are criminals and enemies, we’ll deal with you just the same way we punish adults. I don’t care if you’re ten or eighty years old: you answer my questions and you tell the truth. If you lie or withhold anything, I’ll knock your teeth in. Do you understand me?’

  Senka looked at this vicious myrmidon and gave a loud sob, and the man brought his fist down on the table so hard that the lamp jumped and Senka recoiled, knocking his chair over. The man rose fast and grabbed Senka by the chin, his claws squeezing him so that his mouth was all squashed.

  ‘Don’t you ever fucking move a muscle without my permission. And don’t cry either.’

  Senka started to pant fast and faster until he was struggling for air.

  ‘Answer me this one question and you can go back to your cell.’

  Senka nodded.

  ‘Do you know Serafima Romashkina?’

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered, still breathing very fast.

  ‘Do you know her well?’

  ‘She’s eighteen but . . . well, she’s very nice to me.’ Senka felt as though he might faint but knew he must not. He took a few quick breaths. ‘She’s my sister Minka’s friend.’

  ‘Now think carefully. Don’t say no. Don’t protect anyone. We find out everything and if you lie, you’ll go to the camps and you’ll never see your parents again. But if you tell the truth, you’ll go home very soon. We are investigating the deaths on the Stone Bridge. You were there, were you not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you see there?’

  ‘Two of my sister’s friends were dead on the ground.’

  ‘But you noticed something?’

  ‘Yes. The notebook. Nikolasha’s Velvet Book. And I picked it up.’

  ‘You know when you picked it up, you committed a serious crime by purloining evidence of a murder?’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Then why did you act like a traitor?’ asked the livid, pimply man who Senka now realized was really a lobster masquerading as a human. ‘Why pick it up? Why hide it?’

  ‘I didn’t think. Is my mama coming soon?’

  ‘Not until you tell us the truth. What did you do with the book?’

  ‘I put in my room and hid it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I thought it would be interesting to read. I didn’t know it was a crime, I’m very sorry.’

  ‘Did you tell anyone you had it?’

  ‘Only my brother. Demian. Later I found him opening my desk drawers and I was so cross I told my mother, but the notebook was gone.’

  ‘You never read it?’

  ‘No. I promise I didn’t.’

  ‘Did you know it contained plans to form a government and assassinate our leaders?’

  Senka shook his head, trying to think back to his parents’ conversations. His earliest memories were of the lifts in the House on the Embankment groaning at night as the secret police arrived to arrest another person. On one occasion his mother had glanced tensely at his father: ‘What floor?’ she had asked.

  ‘Eleventh.’

  ‘The Larins. They aren’t Enemies, Genrikh.’

  ‘The Party never makes mistakes, Dashka. Better to kill a hundred innocents than miss one Enemy. We’re in a life-and-death struggle to prepare for war against Fascism and there are Enemies everywhere. Let’s not discuss this in front of . . .’ And his father had looked at him.

  ‘Senka’s too little to understand,’ Mama had said. And he hadn’t understood then, but he did remember how the Larins had been taken away and never returned.

  After the shooting on the bridge, Senka’s mama had taken them all for a walk in the woods near their dacha and said, ‘If you’re ever asked about this, tell them what you know. But nothing extra. Don’t gossip; stay off politics. Secrets are like a minefield: you don’t know the mine is there until you tread on it. Chatter can destroy a family.’

  ‘This comes from the highest authority in the Soviet Union,’ said the Lobster now. ‘Search your memory: things you’ve seen, things you’ve heard. Did Serafima have a boyfriend?’

  ‘Of course not. If she did have one, it would be me!’

  ‘Christ!’ The Lobster bent his hands back and clicked the bones. ‘A special friend then?’

  ‘But Serafima was always on her own.’

  ‘Did anyone pay her special attention?’

  Senka hesitated. He sensed danger, knew somehow that his words could hurt people. But where could the danger lie here? Was it a crime for a boy to admire a girl? He wasn’t at all sure.

  ‘All boys liked Serafima,’ he said. ‘Me most of all.’

  The Lobster was writing on a piece of paper. Now he pushed it across the table. ‘Do you confess to stealing this evidence of conspiracy from the crime scene?’
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  ‘I don’t understand,’ Senka said.

  ‘You can’t deny you took the notebook and hid it. Your brother Demian found it.’

  ‘Oh!’ Not only had Demian found the notebook, but he’d also given it to the secret police. That’s why he was free. And he was jealous of Senka and obsessed with rising up the Pioneers and Komsomol and becoming as important as their father. Demian was a snitch and a weasel.

  ‘If you ever want to see your mother again, sign this now,’ the Lobster said, pushing it to Senka, who signed it quickly.

  ‘If you were twelve, this piece of paper could sentence you to the Highest Measure of Punishment: death by shooting to the back of the head. But as you’re only ten, you face ten years in the camps under Article 158,’ the Lobster said.

  Senka’s head spun and he held on to the edge of the table.

  ‘But if you help us about Serafima . . .’

  ‘Minka said she had . . . admirers . . . suitors . . . chevaliers.’

  ‘Name them now before I punch you.’

  Senka loved Serafima and would do anything rather than get her into trouble but how would this harm her? How would it harm anyone? Beware the mines! He racked his brains for something about Serafima’s admirers. Hadn’t he heard Minka and Serafima laughing about the Crown Prince? They thought he didn’t understand this code name – how stupid did they think he was? But he knew not to mention Vasily Stalin. Anything to do with Stalin was perilous. He had to find something that wasn’t dangerous but it was hard because Senka did not know what the Lobster wanted. The mines were invisible. Senka’s stomach started to churn and his breathing became laboured again.

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ he said.

  The Lobster stood up, his chair grinding against the floor, and he started to count: ‘At three, I’ll beat the answers out of you.’ He pulled out a thick rubber bullystick, and banged it on to the table. ‘I’ve smashed in a man’s skull with this little friend,’ and Senka could see that the club rested happily in the Lobster’s claws as if he was accustomed to using it. ‘One, two . . .’

  ‘Well, yes, yes, there was a time . . .’ Don’t get Serafima into trouble, Senka told himself. Don’t mention Vasily Stalin. Don’t involve Mama or Papa. Don’t harm Minka. There was so much to consider. He ran through the possibilities: this is nothing, that’s secret; this won’t satisfy him, that’s dangerous. His mind was overheating with responsibilities, ambuscades, minefields, unspeakables, unmentionables, all of which were balanced against his own confession of taking the notebook and the ten years awaiting him in the Gulags: the train journeys, the snowy tundra, the threat of never seeing his parents again.