One Night in Winter

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  He saw her and spoke to her so rarely that he had not really thought about what he expected of their fitful relationship. It had no formal future, yet he resolved to enjoy these special moments which he ascribed to the madness of war and death. Afterwards, however afterwards arrived, he would return to his real nature, his true world.

  Yet one evening, when he was alone late at night in his Kremlin office waiting for the driver to take him to dinner with Stalin, he noticed that the phone in the empty neighbouring office was ringing. He’d sent home his aides so he ran down the corridor to answer it.

  ‘It’s Almaz.’ He recognized her distinctive voice straightaway.

  ‘Hello. I’m impressed with your cunning,’ he said. ‘Dear Academician!’

  ‘This Academician can’t talk for long,’ she said, ‘but I wanted you to know I can’t go on with this. I haven’t slept for three nights.’ He heard her crying and his heart ached for her. ‘I’ll lose my children, I’ll lose everything, and I feel so guilty! I have to give you up. Can you forgive me?’

  Satinov clenched the phone, and willed himself to breathe deeply and calmly. He was not, he reminded himself, the Iron Commissar for nothing. ‘I understand,’ he said finally, putting down the phone.

  Perhaps, he thought as he sat in the empty room, his own life as a revolutionary had given him the ability to bear secrets and pressures. He was born for conspiracy. Others, like Dashka, and indeed Tamriko, were not.

  He returned to his own office and dialled a number: ‘Tamriko?’

  ‘Yes, darling Hercules.’

  ‘I’ll be late.’

  ‘Have a good dinner. Did you want anything?’

  ‘Are all the children well?’

  ‘Yes. They’re missing you, as I am. Come home soon.’

  ‘I shall,’ he said stiffly. But he had never called like that before and he knew it would please her.

  An hour later, in the back of the armoured Packard speeding through the silvery woods towards Stalin’s Nearby Dacha, he was himself again, the Iron Commissar. Almost.

  ‘After the war,’ Frank warned Serafima, ‘we think Stalin will crack down. America will be Russia’s enemy, so we must be very careful. As a diplomat I’m watched, and with your background you may be too. Our blessing is that we’ve found each other, but our curse is that we are in a time and place when we can’t just live as we’re doing now, in the present.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve thought of using codes?’ Serafima asked.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I have. This is how we’ll meet. I’ll leave a bookmark in the foreign literature section of the House of Books. If it’s in a Galsworthy, we’ll meet at the matinée. If it’s in Edith Wharton, evening; in Hemingway, ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for us, so come back tomorrow. There will be a ticket under a false name at the Bolshoi for that night’s performance.’

  ‘So I will just go to the Bolshoi again and again?’

  ‘You can watch an act or two but when I go out, you go out too, through the fire doors at the back. No one will follow you.’

  ‘And we’ll meet in the street.’

  ‘Darling Serafima, I have an apartment. The great thing is that it’s not registered as a diplomatic residence. It belonged to a Russian friend who was killed in the war and no one knows about it. It’s very simple, but it could be our place. It’s near the back of the Bolshoi so when you come out . . . would you l-l-like to meet me there?’

  Serafima smiled. She knew this was right – but it amused her that, out of all the girls at school, some of whom seemed so fast, it was going to be her, Serafima, who would make love first. She loved Frank and he loved her and it seemed absolutely natural to do it with the man she wanted to spend her life with. She knew the basics, the facts of life, but how it all really worked, she had no proper idea. What if she became pregnant? The scandal would destroy her. Wasn’t it the man’s job to ensure she didn’t? But there was an even bigger problem that ate at her.

  ‘You seem worried,’ he said. ‘We don’t have to do anything at all. Just talk if you like.’

  ‘I’m not sure . . .’

  ‘You want to wait until we’re married?’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I just feel that I’m not . . . perfect. That you’ll be disappointed.’

  ‘Nothing could disappoint me about you. Nothing.’ Frank’s eyes were burning with certainty as he said this.

  But it wasn’t nothing. It was the snakeskin, the burn on her body. No one except her family had seen it since she had become a teenager, but she’d never forgotten that it was there, beneath her clothes. Her dresses were higher and plainer to protect this indelible stain. She could always feel it, stiffer and rougher than the rest of her. An ugly thing of yellow corrugated skin, it made her feel ugly too. Her only hope was that Frank loved her enough to pretend it was not there.

  A lingering dread now haunted her sleep, her classes, her every moment, threatening to destroy her happiness as she had always feared it would. What if Frank was disgusted by her? What if he fell out of love with her? Should she tell him about it first?

  They arranged to meet and then she cancelled their date – twice. But in the end, she decided that she must just trust him. If he was the man she thought he was, the Frank she loved, wouldn’t he take her snakeskin as an indivisible part of her? She would just have to find out.

  37

  SATINOV DID NOT see Dashka Dorova again until Stalin rewarded him with a special prize: he was to be the Supremo’s representative at Marshal Zhukov’s headquarters. Three Fronts, 2.5 million Soviet soldiers, 7,500 tanks, were converging on Berlin. But Stalin had chosen Zhukov to take Berlin, and Satinov would go with him.

  On 15 April, Satinov reported to Zhukov’s headquarters before the Seelow Heights. At dawn the next day, Zhukov’s howitzers opened up – the thunder of the barrage shook Satinov to his very innards – and the men went into battle. But the assault didn’t go according to plan. Storming those well-defended hills, the Russians suffered 30,000 casualties, and that night, a furious Stalin phoned Satinov.

  ‘Who’s responsible for this crime?’ he said. ‘Find the culprit and we’ll shorten him by a head!’

  Even Zhukov was demanding new hospitals to handle so many wounded. And so it was that Dr Dorova was summoned urgently, called right from her bed in the middle of the night by Marshal Zhukov himself. Satinov did not see her; he was with Zhukov at the front line but she was nearby and he found himself constantly looking around for a glimpse of her.

  On 19 April, the Seelow Heights finally fell and Zhukov advanced on Berlin, but it took ten days of brutal street-by-street fighting to take the city. It was only after the fall of the Reichstag and the suicide of Hitler that Satinov saw her amongst the Soviet generals in the white stucco hall of the Karlshorst Army Technical Training School. It was 8 May, and Zhukov and the American and British generals were waiting for Feldmarschall Keitel to end the war. Rows of klieg lights beamed a theatrical electric whiteness on to the table where the Nazis would sign the surrender. The medals of twenty nations, the oiled hair and rough-hewn skin of the hard-living generals, the powdered foreheads, glazed lips and waved hairdos of aides, typists, drivers and PPZhs were illuminated by the unforgiving zinc light.

  She was in her parade uniform, the elegantly coutured (against all regulations) tunic and skirt showing off her curvaceous figure. How the vizored cap of a general of the medical corps, the gold, scarlet, the stars and braid, set off her brown skin and eyes.

  Hours passed and the surrender was delayed as the Nazis tried to sue for better terms. Zhukov and Stalin’s representative at the negotiations, Vyshinsky, shouted at each other; generals rushed in and rushed out and finally the Nazi generals arrived, wearing their bitterness and Prussian rigidity as badges of dignity to conceal the squalor of their crimes.

  When at last the ceremony was done, Satinov came over to her. ‘Dr Dorova.’

  ‘Comrade Sati
nov.’

  ‘How’ve you been?’

  ‘I’m fine. What a day!’

  ‘We can tell our grandchildren we were here.’

  She looked into his eyes. ‘Are you thinking of your son Vanya?’ she asked him gently.

  ‘Yes, I am. Today, at last, I can really think of him.’ Only a small tic in his cheek revealed how moved he really was, but she saw it.

  ‘We better not talk too much . . .’ She glanced over at the egregious Vyshinsky.

  ‘Right, but it’s good to see you.’

  ‘And you.’

  Zhukov’s banquet went on all night. Dish after dish, twenty-five toasts – to Stalin, the Red Army, Soviet women; to Churchill and Truman – but by 6 a.m., when the dinner ended, Satinov stood beside Zhukov and Vyshinsky to wave goodbye to their drunk Western friends in the blue light of dawn. The war was over. He found her again watching the Americans drive away.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said from behind.

  ‘Hello, me,’ she said.

  The skin on her cheeks was pink with excitement, weariness and alcohol. It was the end of a night of toasts and four years of war.

  ‘May I ask . . . Do you ever think of . . .’

  ‘Academician Almaz? Every day.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Satinov, turning away from her, from his past. ‘Every day.’

  38

  THE MATINÉE AT the Bolshoi. All Moscow was already on the streets. The Red Army was in Berlin. The Nazis had signed the surrender the previous night. As soon as the lights went down, Serafima followed Frank’s plan.

  She came out of the fire exit and then crossed the road. Afterwards she could not quite remember how she found herself in the one-room apartment, with its single chair, white stuffing pouring out of several gashes, and the double bed. There was nothing – no pictures – on the damp, stained walls, except one cheap, water-stained print of Pushkin above the chair.

  Frank was waiting. As nervous as her. When he gave her a cigarette, he was shaking so much he could barely light it and they laughed, which broke the ice a little.

  ‘I think we should have a little drink,’ he said, holding a bottle of wine: Telavi 2 from Georgia. ‘Your leader’s favourite.’

  She was so grateful for the wine that she downed the entire glass, and felt a little giddy when he started to kiss her and led her to the bed. She was so aware of her snakeskin that she felt she was wearing it outside her clothes. So far he didn’t know it even existed and yet it was all she could think about.

  Then he left her for a moment, drew the curtains, turned off the light and lit two candles that stood on the mantelpiece. She barely dared make a sound; she wanted to whisper something but her heart was beating in her neck like a kettledrum. When he returned, he kissed her mouth and he softly pushed down her dress, planting kisses on her neck. Serafima was flooded with a sensation she did not recognize: a shiver started in her thighs and then crept into her belly, making her lurch with its burning power. For a second she even forgot her snakeskin but then his hand rested on it outside her dress.

  ‘Stop!’ she said.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You . . . you haven’t done anything wrong, but I’ve got to tell you something . . .’

  ‘I know you haven’t done this before,’ he said, searching her face. Something else occurred to him. ‘Or if you have, it doesn’t matter. Either way it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘No, no, it’s not that. Can we . . . just stop, while I tell you something?’

  They awoke in each other’s arms. In her room on the top floor of the Tempelhof Geriatic Women’s Hospital, which was now full of Soviet wounded. Without powder and lipstick, just her thick hair around her shoulders, her mascara running, she was more lovely than before. This time was so precious that he tried to imprint on his mind every detail of her beauty.

  ‘I dream of walking the streets with you,’ she said.

  The streets of Berlin were deserted except for Soviet soldiers, tanks, jeeps. All the houses, all the streets were ruined. The lunar landscape of this obliterated city seemed as unreal as the generals under the klieg lights during the surrender. The tarmac and pavements were cracked, muddy and ingrained with fragments of shrapnel, scraps of material, rotting newspapers, children’s shoes, even sometimes a whole man (whose son, whose father?) flattened into cloth and cardboard, crushed into the earth by brutal tank treads.

  Yet that morning their feet seemed to sing as they walked and the air sparkled as if it was set with crystals. They were both wearing plain tunics without insignia, and were noticed by no one as they visited the Chancellery, where Hitler had committed suicide, and the Reichstag. Mostly though, they just wandered through the city. Sometimes when they were alone for a moment he kissed her and she kissed him back, so passionately. She pulled him into a blasted alleyway. ‘Take me here,’ she whispered.

  Her need, her desire, her reckless courage enthralled him. Satinov had never done anything so heedlessly carefree. He could have been recognized by any soldier; he could have been reported by any of the thousands of Chekists nosing around Berlin. But after twenty years of disciplined diligence, he could hardly believe how wonderful it felt to be with the woman he suddenly loved in this landscape of destruction.

  Slowly, reluctantly, they walked back to headquarters before lunchtime, only to find he had been summoned to Moscow. Their idyll had been far too short.

  ‘Be careful, angel. It will be hard to see each other in Moscow. Almost impossible.’

  ‘I’ll think of something,’ he said.

  ‘You know how I love Genrikh and my children.’

  ‘And you know I’d never leave Tamriko, whom I love too.’

  ‘It’s impossible. Unthinkable,’ she agreed. Stalin had never allowed any of his leaders to divorce. To do so would not only destroy his career, it could destroy his entire family. Dashka had been right about that.

  ‘Yet I love you too,’ he said. ‘Is that possible?’

  She hesitated and, when they formally said goodbye as he climbed into his car, she saluted and then embraced him à la russe. When her lips were closest to his ear, she whispered so quickly, ‘I love you, angel,’ that he barely caught it. ‘More than yesterday. Less than tomorrow.’

  ‘And I you, Dashka,’ he whispered it too. ‘More than yesterday, less than tomorrow.’

  ‘When I was a little girl, a maid spilled a pan of boiling water and I was burnt. I have a scar on my side that . . . that no one’s seen before and . . . I call it my snakeskin. I wanted to tell you so you know what to expect.’

  Frank turned to her. They were lying together in Frank’s narrow bed, his flank against hers.

  ‘That’s why you’ve been so anxious?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Oh darling, I thought you’d gone off me.’ He kissed her gently on the lips. ‘Sladkaya, my sweet,’ he whispered. ‘I won’t care. It’s only you who’s worried and soon you won’t be either, I promise.’

  ‘Shall I show you?’

  ‘No need, darling, I’ll see you in all your beauty soon enough . . .’

  ‘But I’d prefer to show you so you know. So I can get it over with.’

  ‘If that would make you happier, then show me.’ They sat up.

  The candles did their dances, and even though she was anxious, she was still trembling with the excitement. She looked at him. His sweet brown eyes shone with sympathy and love for her; the moisture in them caught the candlelight. He unhooked her dress. Then she faced him again and pulled down the dress slowly, as far as her breasts. She hesitated there and considered running away – out of the door and into the streets. But he shook his head as one does when one admires something beautiful. She reached behind and unhooked her brassiere, faltering there too. She pulled her dress down a little further, covering her breasts with her hands. She closed her eyes in case there was disgust on his face and then gradually she raised her arms and said: ‘There!’

  ‘Can I touch you?’ he asked and she could t
ell from his voice that he was smiling and she was so relieved. She jumped a little as his hand traced her snakeskin. His fingertips ran over the smooth skin and then across the borderline on to the roughness that extended up from her hip to her breast. ‘I think you’re so incredibly lovely, and I can’t wait much longer.’ His fingers retraced the snakeskin lightly, and she shivered.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘More sure than I’ve been about anything. It can be our shared secret. Let this be the covenant of our love. Always.’

  ‘Our talisman.’

  ‘Yes, our talisman. Do you know the poem?’ He recited:

  ‘A loving enchantress

  Gave me her talisman.

  She told me with tenderness:

  You must not lose it—’

  Serafima interrupted him to finish the verse:

  ‘Its power is infallible,

  Love gave it to you.’

  She could not believe that she had been so blessed by this kind man who had transformed her fear into a talisman of love. He kissed away the tears on her cheeks.

  ‘Now may I undress you myself. Please?’

  The undressing, with all its tension and anxiety, followed by success and relief, had deeply moved her. Now there were red stars before her eyes – was it the wine? – and waves of heat surfed up her body. Now she longed for him to touch her in the places where her body was vibrating with an unknown pleasure that she could neither bear, nor satisfy, nor end. She didn’t want to stop even when he reached for a package that she saw was marked ‘Trojan’. He covered her eyes, smiling.

  ‘This is much more awkward than . . .’ he said, and they laughed out of nerves and she realized he meant her snakeskin, and that both were to be celebrated.