One Night in Winter

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  ‘That’s a very Russian idea,’ he answered. ‘But let me tell you I’m an attaché, a diplomat in uniform, at the American Embassy. I interpret for the ambassador. But I guess you’d say I’m a real damned capitalist.’

  ‘You’re from a rich family?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you live in a mansion?’

  ‘My parents do.’

  ‘Do you have repressed Negro servants in white gloves?’

  ‘No gloves, but our butler is black.’

  ‘Does he wear a white coat like in the movies?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, as a good Communist, I declare you the enemy. I suppose you must be what we call a bloodsucker of the working class?’

  He was, he told her, one of those Americans who were as at home in the country houses of England as he was in the mansions of Long Island. His father was Honorius Belman, president of the Southern-Eastern Union Railway Corporation, a Texan born in a log cabin, but he, his son, had been educated at Groton and Harvard where he’d studied Russian. Frank told her how he played polo with plutocrats like the Rockefellers, that his father was a donor to FDR’s campaigns and that he had spent a holiday working in the White House. All of which explained why he had not been impressed by her own famous parents, Serafima realized.

  After walking for hours, they were back where they had started. They reached the Metropole Hotel across the square from the Bolshoi. A hotel? He did not seem that sort of man. But perhaps all men were that sort of man, Serafima thought as the doorman in his green braided uniform bowed and the revolving doors spun them into the scarlet lobby.

  Frank bought her two shots of vodka at the Metropole bar but, to Serafima’s relief, he didn’t mention anything about taking a room. There was a jazz band playing and, on the dance floor, the uniforms of a dozen nations danced the foxtrot. Men’s shoulderboards and shiny boots, the bare shoulders and permed tresses of scarlet-lipped girls shimmered around them. They stood watching for a moment as the vodka restored her. She was dreading him asking her to dance. She hated foxtrotting. She had no natural rhythm, and her clumsiness would ruin everything.

  ‘Do you . . . like to d-dance?’ Frank asked over the sound of the band. When she came to know him better, she would realize that he stammered slightly when he was nervous.

  ‘If you want to,’ she answered, frowning.

  ‘You look cross,’ he said. ‘You’ve looked cross ever since we came in here. When you’re cross, you lower your eyebrows so you look like an angry swan. More beautiful than ever but quite frightening!’

  ‘Well, the angry swan says sorry. It’s because . . . I’m not sure I like being here.’

  ‘But I thought all girls loved to dance,’ he said, looking anxious.

  ‘Yes, most do – but not all.’

  He cleared his throat a little. ‘I have a confession to make. Although I’m told that every man must be able to foxtrot, I can’t dance at all. I hate dancing . . . I’m sorry. I’m not much of a date, am I?’

  ‘Oh Frank, I hate dancing too. And I can’t foxtrot or anything else. I can only talk and walk.’

  So out they went, back into the night, Frank quoting poets that few Westerners knew: Akhmatova, Pasternak, Pushkin, Blok. They walked across the Stone Bridge opposite the Kremlin. Through the snow, they could hardly even see the towers, gates and stars under its camouflage netting.

  Serafima could feel the icy flecks settling on her warm skin and then melting – it was delicious. She stopped as Frank took off his gloves and offered her a cigarette from his silver case. They blew the blue smoke into the grey light where the snowflakes glinted like jewels in the lamplight, and did not speak.

  Frank seemed to be thinking hard about something; then he cleared his throat. ‘I’m not a playboy. I haven’t talked about many of these things with anyone before you. May I . . . m-may I . . . hold your hand?’

  She presented her hands to him, and when he unpeeled her gloves, the night became silent and she could see his hands shaking just a little. It was, she thought, truly a moment from the distant past, from a more romantic time.

  When he held her hands in his, she turned them to put her fingers through his, and when she squeezed them, he squeezed back; and both of them stood there in the snow, face to face, overcome with the excitement of finding each other. The snow had padded the city so that they could hardly hear anything, see anything. Hours had passed since they met, yet their acquaintance, only as fresh as a night’s snowfall, already seemed as if it had lasted for a long, long time. She had never kissed anyone. Never wished to. But she wanted him to kiss her now.

  ‘Serafima, may I . . .’

  But she’d already lifted her face to his, and could feel his mouth on hers as the snow fell thickly around them.

  35

  SATINOV CREPT ACROSS the open space between him and the door of an outhouse. The Nazis were only thirty kilometres away, and still fighting for every village. Yet here he was, having given his bodyguards the slip, and about to enter an unknown house and do something that went against every instinct and every rule. He hesitated and then, cursing to himself and cocking his PPSh machine-gun, he opened it, ready for a burst of enemy fire, but welcoming instead the grassy warmth of the stables that reminded him of riding at home, at his dacha. The three horses tethered inside seemed glad to see him and he was even gladder to see them.

  Walking quickly through the stables and crossing the yard, he tried the back door of the large house. It was not locked and he slid inside, body tensed and soaked with sweat as he found himself in the capacious kitchen of a schloss designed to accommodate legions of servants. Bells were marked with the names of rooms. Holding his PPSh with its round magazine over his forearm, he walked lightly through a green baize door into a corridor that opened into a hall.

  He saw the orange eyes first. Two, and then another two. Then pair after pair. He raised the barrel of the machine-gun: does it end here? But no, the heads of a herdsworth of moose, antelopes and bears were mounted up the high walls, reflecting the crimson flicker of a fire crackling in the fireplace. A step further; another step; the floorboards groaned but he was moving fast now.

  A movement right in front of him: ‘Who is it? Hands up or I’ll shoot!’ But he knew, of course.

  She was tending the fire.

  ‘Do you approve of the new hospital for the First Belorussian Front?’ she said, turning to him, her voice with its Galician accent so breathless that the words caught in her throat. ‘I’ve made chai. Would you like a cup?’

  They sat next to each other, and she poured the tea into china cups and saucers emblazoned with some aristocratic crest. Her hands were trembling, he noticed as the china clinked and she spilled a little. She was as nervous as he was. Her scent, she told him, was L’Origan by Coty, strong and sweet and sharp, reminding him of honey melting in tea and spicy wood burning in a fire. It was getting dark in the room and so she took off her beret and her sheepskin greatcoat, and lit two kerosene lamps on the table.

  ‘I didn’t know if you’d come,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know if I was being presumptuous. Or, worse, deluded . . . But I knew I’d come anyway.’

  Satinov said nothing. He imagined that two of the animal heads on the walls were talking to him.

  ‘Have you ever wanted a woman so much?’ asked the bison with the white glass eyes. ‘After the war, Stalin said every soldier deserves a bit of fun.’

  But the voice from the lion’s head was more censorious and more urgent. ‘Think of Stalin. Of Tamriko. Of her husband, Genrikh Dorov. Leave now! This is against Bolshevik ethics. Walk out of there right now! You have too much to lose if you stay.’

  But it was no good. Satinov shook his head, pulled his greatcoat closer and sat down next to her.

  ‘Well, here we are,’ said Dashka, leaning against him for a moment, partly, he guessed, out of nerves, partly out of shyness. She produced a bottle of vodka and two little glasses. ‘You should have brought the drinks,’ s
he said, ‘but I knew you wouldn’t think of it. So here.’ And she put the glass in his hand.

  ‘I think I need it.’

  ‘God, so do I. Here’s to an unlikely and very secret friendship.’

  They drank three little toasts and then he kissed her again; he had never kissed anyone who kissed like her.

  ‘Not here!’ She took his hand and a kerosene lamp and he followed her up a wide wooden staircase, hung with a gazelle and a zebra. Satinov felt each glassy eye swivel as the two of them passed. They reminded him of his colleagues in the Kremlin.

  At the top of the stairs, she led him along the gloomy wood-panelled corridor and opened the door at the end; Satinov was more nervous than he had been on his first wedding night in Georgia in the twenties.

  He was so well known for his clean living that Stalin, who gave everyone nicknames, sometimes called him the Choirboy. He could govern the Caucasus, and build a new industrial town in the middle of Siberia; he could dance and shoot wolves and ski; but this . . . what if he was no good at it? What if he failed completely?

  ‘Aren’t you going to kiss me?’ said Dashka. They were in a bedroom with another giant moose’s head over the bed, a fire already lit. The door shut behind him. They were kissing again and Satinov’s doubts vanished in that instant. This, he decided, was a neighbourhood of paradise. He pushed her against the door. He pulled the pin out of her hair and her tresses fell around her face. He held a handful, thick and heavy and black, although it turned a lighter chestnut and slightly curled at the ends. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘I like having my hair pulled.’

  He reached up her skirt, scuffing the thick khaki until he reached the tops of those nylon stockings. ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ she was saying. She embraced him, kissing him frantically. Like a schoolboy making love for the first time, Satinov had to keep checking that this was really happening.

  They hopped and limped across the floor, his trousers around his ankles, her booted legs and full, bare, brown thighs around his waist, her arms around his neck, her lips on his lips, her hair around him like a web, linked together, and tipped on to the bed.

  ‘I so wanted to feel you. Since last night, I haven’t thought of anything else,’ she said. ‘I didn’t sleep and I could hardly eat today. Will you undress me slowly?’

  He fumbled with the buttons of her blouse and she helped him, all the time watching him, eyelids heavy, almost closing, the dark edges of her irises seeming to melt. He was astonished by her wantonness.

  He hadn’t met anyone like this since his boyhood in Tiflis. The boys at the seminary (yes, he had studied for the priesthood at the same Tiflis Seminary as Stalin – but much later) had visited a woman of pleasure, a jet-haired gypsy. ‘That one’s far too prissy for this,’ the woman had said, nodding at Satinov. ‘That one really will become a priest.’ And she had been right because a Bolshevik was a sort of armed priest.

  ‘What are we going to do about him?’ Dashka said, pointing up at the moosehead above them.

  ‘How about this?’ He tossed her blouse up so that it covered the moose’s eyes, leaving just his nose peeking out. Then he returned to unbuttoning her skirt.

  ‘Do you think army skirts are designed to be impregnable fortresses for a reason?’ she asked. He rolled down her stockings until they were like long socks just below her knees and he started to kiss her knees and up her legs, wrapped as they were in the velvet of her caramel skin. ‘It’s years since anyone has undressed me like this.’

  Satinov started to throw off his clothes too, but: ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I want to undress you too.’ He looked down on her; her body was streaked like a tigress by the orange flickers of the fire and dyed a deeper amber by the lamp. But he could scarcely bear to look for more than a moment before he had to kiss her again, on the lips, on the neck, everywhere; she bit her fingers. They made love again and as they finished, she laughed in a high singsong voice with her head thrown back.

  Satinov opened his eyes and saw the dreary room, the plain wooden bed, the heavy Germanic furniture, dimly lit by the fire and the lantern, as if he was seeing everything for the first time – including her.

  ‘Do you know Ovid’s poems on love?’ she said. ‘He wrote that the bedroom is the only place where you can do exactly what you please, and truly be yourself.’

  ‘You’re so much more cultured than me,’ he said. ‘I was expelled for Marxist activities at sixteen.’

  ‘I was raised in a Jewish household filled with books.’ She hesitated. ‘I feel so shaken up. As if the world has trembled and tilted so everything, even my sense of time is in a different place, everything has lost its previous meaning. I’d never have guessed that passion in our forties could be more intense than when we were young.’

  ‘So you’ve never . . .?’

  ‘Done this before? Never. Not once in all these years of marriage. I don’t know what’s come over me. What about you?’

  ‘You really need to ask that question? No, I’ve never done this before either.’

  ‘I thought all you leaders were womanizers.’

  ‘I’ve never looked at another woman – and now this.’

  ‘Are you in a panic, comrade general?’

  ‘Aren’t you, Dashka?’

  ‘I should be, but it feels so natural, as if we’ve known each other since we were young. You know, when I was eighteen, I studied medicine in Odessa and I had a love affair with a student of literature. We smoked opium. I almost got addicted to it – and him. Soon after, I met Genrikh and we got married. With him, I’ve always known where I belong and that I have a place. That’s love too. I need that, you know.’

  Satinov looked at his watch and sighed. ‘My staff will be missing me. We’ve got to get back. It’s almost midnight.’ He dressed quickly, and looked down at her. She was still lying exactly where he’d left her. ‘What are you thinking about?’

  She gave her slightly crooked smile, her eyes dark. ‘I’m thinking of tomorrow. Everyone will see me, and no one will know what I’ve been doing.’

  36

  THE NEXT MORNING, Satinov was summoned back to Stavka (which meant Headquarters) by the Supremo (which meant Stalin) to discuss the offensive. Then he was sent on a series of missions, to Bulgaria, to Romania, to see Mao Tse-tung in China . . . but all the time, and throughout the months that followed, he longed to see Dashka again. It was hard to discover where she was: he could not ask his staff to find her, as this would draw attention, and almost certainly someone would tell Beria or Abakumov’s minions, and they would start to gather a file against him for debauchery or corruption or something – and it would be stored away until the right moment.

  ‘Who was at Zhukov’s headquarters?’ he might ask his assistant Chubin.

  ‘Comrade Malenkov was inspecting,’ Chubin might respond. ‘Oh, and that Dr Dorova was there too . . .’

  Then he could call her. ‘It’s me,’ he would say.

  ‘Hello, me,’ she always replied.

  They could speak on the lines between fronts, freshly laid by the communications staff and therefore probably not yet bugged, but he didn’t say her name and she didn’t say his, so instead she created another persona, ‘Academician Almaz’, an old man who was neither one nor the other of them but both, a hermaphrodite who personified their love.

  ‘I was just calling to enquire about the health of old Academician Almaz?’

  ‘Academician Almaz is exceedingly old.’

  ‘I’ve so missed Academician Almaz.’

  ‘Almaz is always pleased to hear from you. You should call him more often. He’s so elderly, such a hermit these days . . .’

  Just to hear her voice with that Galician-Yiddish accent, its rolling ‘r’s, was a joy to him. When he replayed, as he did constantly, their meetings, he wasn’t sure exactly what – out of her various identities – most delighted him: was it her astounding ability to improvise a hospital out of nothing, to save a life calmly, that singsong laughter or her golden thighs
? Yet he never ceased loving his Tamriko, the mother of his only daughter, and the centre of his life (without whom his successes would have been impossible). He remembered too how frequently Dashka insisted that she loved Genrikh, adding, ‘Besides, if I left him, I’d lose everything’.

  Once they met in ‘Stone Arse’ Molotov’s antechamber in the Kremlin. As well as running the army medical corps, she was now Health Minister. When she saw him, she jumped.

  ‘Oh, hello, Comrade Satinov, it’s you!’

  ‘Yes, comrade doctor, it’s me!’ They were alone for a few moments in that dreary room waiting for that dreary man neither wanted to see. They talked, in code of course, so closely that he could feel her breath on him. For one moment, he managed to touch her hand and she squeezed his fingers. Ah, he thought later, the madness of those moments!

  ‘How’s Academician Almaz? Will you tell him I miss him?’

  ‘Academician Almaz is working so hard, even I hardly get to see him.’

  ‘If you do see the esteemed Academician,’ he said, ‘will you tell the old sage that I think he has the most beautiful mind – and wrists and eyes – I’ve ever seen! For an octogenarian of course!’

  ‘The Academician has never been more excited to be at a meeting with Comrade Molotov,’ she replied. They could not risk a kiss, yet never, he decided, had two sets of eyes so ravished each other generating enough heat to warm even Stone Arse’s drab chambers. Then she said quietly, in that way of hers, barely opening her mouth: ‘I think we should stop talking now. Go and sit over there.’

  Two generals came in. They’d separated just in time.

  ‘Comrade Satinov!’ Molotov – wearing a dark suit, his head as round as a cannonball, his figure as square as a brick – came out of his office. ‘Shall we take a walk around the Kremlin?’

  ‘Yes, let’s do that,’ agreed Satinov. As he talked to Stone Arse, he looked back at her; Dashka was gazing at him with the most loving intensity in her dark eyes – just for a moment, and then she glanced away. Satinov almost gasped with the pleasure. He ached to touch her and kiss her again. As he strolled the Kremlin’s courtyards with Molotov, he felt preposterously, dizzily happy.