One Night in Winter

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  They drove back to Granovsky in silence.

  ‘Papa, I’m so sorry. I had to sign,’ said George as soon as they were back in their apartment. Father and son both knew that the children’s confession could be used against the parents.

  Satinov looked at George for a long moment, wishing he could reach across the dark valley of his own reticence. He wanted to tell him how much he loved him, and that he didn’t blame him for anything. But he didn’t know how to begin.

  ‘I know,’ he said briskly. ‘You’ve learned your lesson. The law will take its course. In the meantime you are to finish the term at school. Let’s not mention it again.’

  ‘Thank you, Papa,’ said George formally.

  ‘Look, Papa, look!’ Mariko ran into the room holding a bundle of her dogs. ‘My bitches have been in the kennel for being naughty but now they’re back at school. I’m so happy.’

  ‘Prisoner Golden, we know you fornicated with many women and corrupted their Soviet morality.’

  ‘I told you I did not.’

  ‘You seduced your pupils.’

  ‘Never.’ Benya looked back at the happiness of his Second Coming, his return from the dead, his fresh chance. Teaching the children in School 801 had made him happier than virtually anything in his life, certainly more than the undeniable joy of writing a successful book. Now it was over.

  ‘We know from our informer that you met the schoolgirl Serafima Romashkina at the café next to the House of Books. Did you have intercourse with the schoolgirl Serafima Romashkina?’

  ‘No.’ Now Benya was startled that, out of all the children, the case had focused on Serafima. He sensed that she was in grave danger.

  ‘What did you discuss with her?’

  ‘Pushkin. Poetry.’

  ‘Poetry? You suborned her to deviate from Marxism-Leninism with philistine-bourgeois individualism?’

  Benya took a quick breath. The interrogator had stumbled on something – but he had not yet made the connections. In the 1930s, Benya had loved a woman who had vanished into the meatgrinder and the Gulags. Now, by pure chance, he had found himself teaching her cousin about literature and love. He and Serafima had met for coffee.

  ‘Do you know my favourite Pushkin poem?’ Benya had asked her. ‘It’s his most romantic poem, and it’s special to me. “The Talisman”.’

  ‘What a piece of luck,’ sighed Serafima, putting her hands together, her eyes shining. She had never looked more beautiful, he thought. ‘It’s my favourite too. It’s our – I mean it’s my poem. It’s special to me as well.’ And Benya had known immediately that she was in love too. For a moment, he turned away from her so she couldn’t see his eyes, but she was so happy that she never noticed, and he found himself blessing her in Pushkin’s verses to a young girl named Adele, the beloved child of a friend:

  ‘Play on, Adele, and know no sadness,

  Your springtime youth is calm, clear, smooth.

  Surrender to love . . .’

  And she listened with her head on one side . . .

  ‘Prisoner Golden!’ The Chekist brought him back to the grim here and now. ‘What did you discuss with her? Were you involved with Serafima and her special friend in their anti-Soviet conspiracy?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We’ve worked it all out, Golden, and we know that the Children’s Case was a conspiracy inspired from abroad through Serafima, by her secret American lover – a foreign capitalist spy.’

  Benya bit his lip. He had been very slow to work this out but now he understood everything: NV, the gorgeous princess, was Nikolasha’s code for Serafima. NV and Serafima were interchangeable. Serafima was an inch away from destruction. He realized what he must do. ‘You’ve got that quite wrong,’ he said.

  Colonel Likhachev scowled. ‘Give me your testimony or I’ll beat you to a pulp.’

  Benya closed his eyes, remembering the elegiac days of that 1930s winter when he was in love. ‘I confess that I invented the Fatal Romantics’ Club with its bourgeois anti-Leninist philistinism,’ he said slowly. ‘I dictated the idea of the anti-Soviet conspiracy to Nikolasha Blagov. You asked me earlier who NV was? I am NV. Most Muscovites met some foreigners in wartime and no doubt Serafima Romashkina did too. But let me testify before the Party, before the Great Stalin himself, that Serafima is involved in no foreign conspiracy. I’m the conspirator.’

  ‘You will confess to all this, Prisoner Golden?’

  ‘Yes. Just give me the papers.’

  ‘You understand that this is a terroristic crime according to Article 158, punishable with the Highest Measure of Punishment?’

  Benya nodded. Then, as Colonel Likhachev drew up the confession, he just sat back. Graceful images floated into his consciousness. Kissing the woman he’d loved, long ago, outside the Metropole Hotel in a snowstorm. Catching Agrippina’s eye as she made tea in the common room. Finding a rare volume in the flea market. And this, his last decent act, protecting a girl who had so much to live for. He imagined he heard the clatter and murmur of the children settling down in the classroom before his Pushkin lessons. There was George. And Andrei. Minka. And at the back, staring out of the window at the cherry trees, no doubt dreaming of her secret love, Serafima.

  He clapped his hands and heard his own voice, as if echoing very far away, long ago and in a vanished world: ‘Dear friends, beloved romantics, wistful dreamers! Open your books. I hope you’ll always remember what we’re going to read today. We are about to go on a wonderful journey of discovery.’

  48

  EARLY AFTERNOON. THE rays of the sun pour through the whirling motes of dust in Frank’s apartment to create a golden kaleidoscope on the far wall. Although Serafima doesn’t yet know that her friends are about to be released, she senses they will soon be home and all seems right with her world. Frank is there already and there is no need to say anything for a while. He gives her the jaunty two-finger salute that he always gives her, and she can see that he’s in high spirits.

  She savours the lemony scent of his cologne, the softness of his skin, the texture of his hair (soft as a girl’s), his eyes. She kisses his cheek, and then he takes her chin in his hand and starts to kiss her. Her eyes shut and she sighs in the back of her throat.

  He starts to undress her and this time she unfastens his shirt herself, her fingers suddenly so agile that they can unbutton at record speed. When he helps her pull her dress over her head, she does not fear the revelation of her snakeskin. On the contrary, she cannot wait to show him that she is still his, all of her, the delicate and the rough. When they are naked, she feels her snakeskin anticipating his touch. The craving is answered as his fingers lightly trace the burnt, parchmenty skin. ‘This means you’re mine and you’ll be mine forever,’ he whispers.

  ‘A loving enchantress

  Gave me her talisman.’

  After they have made love, he holds her in his arms. ‘Serafima Constantinovna . . .’

  ‘You’re using my patronymic? Why?’

  ‘I have something to ask you.’ Serafima feels his body tense next to hers as he gathers himself. ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘Are you joking?’

  ‘No. I’m not much of a jester, am I?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ she agrees. ‘You’re a serious young man.’ She pauses, thinks. ‘You don’t have to do this, you know. I’m not sure they’ll let me out of the country, and this could cause so much trouble for you . . .’

  ‘Darling, all I want is to spend the rest of my life with you. Look, I’ve brought you this.’

  He opens a small red box lined in satin. Inside is a gold ring with three diamonds in a row, a large one in the middle. ‘I want you to wear this for the rest of your life with me. Please, please, say you will?’

  Serafima is so overcome she fears she might faint. Only a few weeks ago, she was in prison. Now she might go from Communist Moscow to New York City in America, from schoolgirl to wife. Suddenly all she wants is to be married to Frank. Yet there is much t
o fear. Her schoolfriends are still in jail, and she senses the jeopardy in their relationship.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Frank asks, concerned. ‘You’ve been through so much recently. There’s no need to answer now. I just . . .’

  ‘What?’ she asks.

  ‘I just can’t face being separated like this again without knowing where you are and how much I love you.’

  Slowly she gives him her hand. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I will marry you. I want to be with you forever too.’

  He slips the ring on to her finger and it fits as though she’s always worn it.

  ‘What are the chances of that?’ he asks. ‘It fitted my grandmother and it fits you.’ He raises her hand, the one wearing the ring, kisses it, and then her lips. ‘Now you’re going to be Mrs Frank Belman, we must make our plans carefully.’

  The next day at the Golden Gates, a holiday mood. The pollen floats like the flurries of a snowstorm. The air smells of lilac. There’s just a week left of term.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t need to tell you,’ said Satinov to his three children as they walked from Granovsky Street, guards in front and behind them, ‘don’t discuss anything about the case with each other.’

  At the gates, they greeted their friends with three kisses, feeling almost like adults after the nightmare they had been through.

  ‘What’s news?’ George asked Andrei, like old times. Except after the Children’s Case, things were very different.

  ‘Everyone’s out of prison,’ asked Andrei. ‘Thank God.’

  ‘Except our teacher, Benya Golden,’ added Minka Dorova, putting her arm through Serafima’s. ‘But I’m sure he’ll be out soon.’

  Satinov watched his children going through the school gates. Things may have changed but a fragile normality seemed to have been established, he was thinking as he walked back towards the street, and then stopped.

  There was Dashka Dorova on her own, kissing her Senka, her darling Little Professor, as she sent him into school.

  She flushed when she saw him. ‘Greetings, Comrade Satinov. It’s like the start of another term,’ she said. ‘And congratulations on your promotion!’

  The day suddenly seemed dizzily sunny. He longed to explain to her that his promotion wasn’t quite what it seemed. Only she would understand, and only telling her would make the thought worth thinking.

  ‘We don’t have to discuss the weather today,’ he said instead, remembering what she looked like with her thick black hair, now decorously restrained in a bun, loose on her bare amber-skinned shoulders.

  ‘It just got sunnier for me,’ she said, smiling in her dazzling, slightly crooked way.

  ‘I wondered . . .’

  ‘What?’ she said, a little breathlessly.

  ‘I just wondered about . . . about dear Academician Almaz? How is his gout?’

  ‘He’s older and crabbier than ever. And much, much lamer!’

  ‘Should I call him sometime? Am I allowed, do you think?’

  She paused, and then stepped towards him so that he could smell her spicy scent. ‘I think you might be,’ she said. ‘Yes, I might even go so far as to say that he is looking forward to it.’

  49

  IT WAS TIME for a holiday. Back in his office in the Little Corner after the Potsdam Conference, Stalin felt exhausted and ill.

  He was the arbiter of the world. Could he have imagined this when his father Beso showed him how to nail a sole on to a boot in his workshop in Gori? When he donned the black surplice with the white collar at the seminary in Tiflis? When he walked across the mountains with a rifle over his shoulder and donkeys bearing the cash from his bank robberies? When he spent those years in Arctic exile fishing with the Eskimos and seducing village schoolgirls? But his mission was never complete. Still no one supported him: wives, friends, comrades – all fools, weaklings or traitors. What tribulations they put him through. Roosevelt, whom he liked and admired, was dead; Truman was a small-time haberdasher, not a statesman. Churchill had lost the election: what kind of system dismissed a man who had just won a war? It made no sense at all, especially when he saw Churchill’s replacement: Attlee looked like a provincial stationmaster. Besides, Attlee was a socialist and Stalin despised socialists as liberal saps and milksops, worse than imperialists. A dagger in the back was what they deserved.

  The Americans now had their new weapon of astonishing destructive power, the Atomic Bomb, so, just when he, Stalin, was triumphant, he had to put all his energy into catching up with the United States. The oppressive tingling in the back of his neck, the pains in his arms and the weakness in his limbs were getting worse, and the specialists told him he needed to rest. He hadn’t had a holiday since 1937 so he’d decided to go down to his villas on the Black Sea. He would have to leave Molotov and Satinov in charge, and they’d screw up, of course. They were too trusting. They couldn’t see the enemies. They were like blind kittens. But no matter, his train was already packed. There were just a couple of things he had to do before he left.

  He had, he considered, a special talent for movie scripts. He could have been a writer if he’d chosen that path, and remembered his excitement when his teenage poems were published. He now read every movie script and approved every movie filmed at the Mosfilm Studios. On the train home, he had decided what to do with Eisenstein’s script for Ivan the Terrible Part Two.

  In the little cinema near his office, in fifteen seats covered in burgundy velveteen, the Seven leaders plus the Minister of Cinema, that cretin Bolshakov, sat in rows. They were to be joined by the screenwriter Romashkin to watch some rushes from his movie Katyusha Part Two, which was being filmed at that very moment. Stalin recalled that Romashkin’s daughter, Serafima, was somehow entangled with Vasily and the Children’s Case – but he couldn’t quite remember where the case had got to. (That was why he was seeing Abakumov afterwards.)

  The film had begun, and Stalin watched the rushes and approved them until the scene where Sophia Zeitlin kissed the actor playing her husband. ‘Stop the film! That’s vulgar!’ he told them. ‘The kiss is too long. It’s un-Soviet. Look at the way he’s holding her. The kiss has to go. What possessed you, Bolshakov, to pass this obscenity?’

  ‘Oh Comrade Stalin, I thought it was OK, but I would never have passed it without showing it to you.’

  Stalin enjoyed watching Bolshakov cringe. ‘What do you think, comrades? Shall we forgive him or shall we punish him?’ Stalin rose and, puffing at his pipe, walked up and down before the screen. ‘To forgive? Or not to forgive?’

  The only sounds were his puffing and the creak of his leather boots. No one spoke. Bolshakov’s face was flushed, and his bald head glistened with sweat. ‘Forgive or not to forgive? All right, Bolshakov, we’ll forgive. But next time: curb the kissing!’

  Next, he gave Romashkin instructions for a new project: he must rewrite Ivan the Terrible Part Two. Eisenstein was not to be trusted with the script again. ‘Don’t just show that Ivan was cruel,’ said Stalin. ‘Show why he needed to be cruel. Understand?’

  Romashkin wrote down his instructions but at the end of the meeting he asked if he could create a part for his wife, Sophia Zeitlin.

  ‘Sure,’ said Stalin. Well, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, so why not?

  Sophia Zeitlin was a beauty, he decided, quite a temptress by all accounts (oh yes, Marshal Shako fancied himself a chivalrous knight, but he’d had a few tales to tell after they’d given him the good beating he deserved). But her looks, those bold black eyes and heavy eyebrows were Jewish, the name Zeitlin was Yiddish and he wondered if she was Russian enough . . . The Jews were everywhere; they wanted to commandeer the war itself, claiming they, not the Russians, had suffered most at the hands of the Nazis. Some of them wanted their own Zionist country in the Crimea, others wanted a new Judaea in Palestine. They were never loyal to anyone. What if they really supported America? Even his darling Svetlana had married a Jew. Those Jews were worming their way into his own family.

 
Stalin’s head was spinning again so he had himself driven home to the Nearby Dacha where he lay on the divan in his office. Abakumov, now promoted to Minister of State Security, was already there, standing to attention. During the next half-hour, he reported on round-ups in Berlin, Ukrainian nationalists to be executed, new intelligence on the American atomic project from the MGB’s British agents, the case of a Swedish count arrested in Budapest.

  Stalin tried to concentrate but his joints ached as they had ever since his Siberian exiles. Abakumov was a crude policeman, an oaf to be sure, but thank God he was competent.

  Now he came to the aeroplane scandal that he called the Aviators’ Case. Marshal Shako had been broken, was blaming everyone else, even Satinov, for his faulty planes, and had denounced Marshal Zhukov for exaggerating his role in the victory (Good, thought Stalin, we’ll show Zhukov who’s boss here). The Children’s Case was solved and before their release the children had confessed to writing anti-Soviet materials.

  It transpired that Serafima, Romashkin and Zeitlin’s daughter, was not behind the conspiracy, after all. Abakumov had uncovered the Enemy who had encouraged the children to embrace anti-Soviet romanticism and play at being leaders: the criminal, who had confessed, was none other than the writer Benya Golden, who had somehow inveigled his way into School 801 as a teacher.

  ‘I thought we’d dealt with him before the war,’ Stalin said.

  Abakumov was about to explain but Stalin waved him aside. ‘Maybe this time, when we’ve finished with him, he’ll be shorter by a head. But we still need to punish the children, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes, Comrade Stalin. But I have one additional development to report. Instead of using French wrestling, I released Serafima early, anticipating that she would lead us to any inappropriate contacts. We knew from an informant at the school that she was meeting someone. We were told that her lover was leaving notes for her in certain foreign books at the House of Books.’