‘Which books?’ Stalin was curious. He loved books.
Abakumov consulted his notes while Stalin fidgeted impatiently. ‘Novels by Hemingway. Edith Wharton. Galsworthy.’
‘Good taste,’ said Stalin, noticing Abakumov had clearly not heard of any of them. The uncouth clod.
‘Yes, well, naturally we followed her, via the Bolshoi Theatre, and she led us to a love nest. We observed her regularly meeting a young American diplomat. We bugged the apartment. He has proposed marriage to her and she has accepted him.’
‘They fuck in this apartment?’
‘Yes, Comrade Stalin.’
‘She’s only eighteen. As a father . . .’ Then he remembered that his daughter Svetlana had had an affair with a forty-year-old married screenwriter at sixteen. A Jew. He had slapped her face.
‘The American is young too,’ continued Abakumov, ‘but the whole business is rotten. Since 1941, we’ve allowed over eight thousand Soviet women who’ve met allied servicemen to follow their foreign partners abroad so I presume we will allow Serafima to go to America with her fiancé, but in view of her prominent family . . .’
Stalin lay back on the divan, inhaled on the cigarette and closed his eyes for a second. The country was devastated, surrounded by enemies, infliltrated by agents, threatened by America. Discipline was essential. But this girl was in love. She was young. She had been in prison. Why shouldn’t young people fall in love? he thought. He remembered his wives, his many girlfriends. If only there had been more love in my life, he thought despondently, but we Bolsheviks are a military-religious order like the Knights Templar. The Revolution always came first. I was no husband and now I’m alone. He sighed. Always alone.
‘I think we should grant one month more for those wartime love affairs,’ Stalin said finally. ‘Then the gates close.’
He’d just remembered that Serafima was the daughter of a Jew. Another Jew.
It was Satinov’s birthday and before he left the office for home, he noticed that an envelope had appeared in his in-tray typed: ‘Com. Satinov. Secret.’ When he opened it, all he found was a page ripped from a book of Chekhov’s stories. There was nothing else in the envelope so he started to read.
Satinov had read very little literature, yet Stalin often told him that he must read Chekhov to improve himself – ‘I’m old but I never stop studying,’ Stalin said – but Satinov was always too busy.
Now he read this page from a story called ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. The hero and heroine, both happily married to others, meet at the Yalta resort and begin an affair. He read that they ‘loved one another as close intimates, as man and wife, as very dear friends. They thought that fate itself had intended them for each other.’ When the lover was on his way to meet her, he mused that:
. . . not a soul knew about it and . . . probably no one would ever know. He was leading a double life: one was undisguised, plain for all to see and known to everyone who needed to know, full of conventional truths and conventional deception, identical to the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another which went on in secret. And by some strange, possibly fortuitous chain of circumstances, everything that was important, interesting and necessary for him, where he behaved sincerely and did not deceive himself and which was the very essence of his life – that was conducted in complete secrecy.
This section was marked. Satinov pressed the bell on his desk. Chubin, his aide, appeared instantly, notebook, pencil and Adam’s apple poised.
‘Send out someone to the House of Books to buy Chekhov’s stories.’
‘Now, comrade?’
‘This minute, Chubin. Make sure it contains a story called “The Lady with the Little Dog”.’
And when he read the story, he felt he was reading about himself and Dashka. Truly, there was no better present than this.
On the last day of term, the parents of the Children’s Case were called in to the school a little before pick-up.
Satinov met Tamriko outside the director’s office. She was worried what was coming. ‘Suppose,’ she whispered, ‘suppose they have to go back to prison? Suppose they’re arrested again? I just couldn’t bear to lose them a second time.’
Satinov kissed her forehead. ‘Mariko won’t be affected,’ he replied. ‘Even for George, it won’t be as bad as you fear.’
Moments later, Genrikh and Dashka Dorov arrived along with the other parents. Serafima’s father, Constantin Romashkin the screenwriter, was there too; Satinov knew that Sophia was filming. Tamriko stood next to Satinov and she slipped her hand into his and he squeezed it, noticing with a sudden twinge of sadness – or irony that the Dorovs were doing exactly the same thing. Irina Titorenka and Inessa Kurbskaya were alone.
Director Medvedeva was still suspended so it was the mathematics teacher, old Comrade Noodelman, who opened the door and summoned them in.
‘Please be seated and I hand the floor to Comrade Colonel Likhachev who is here to brief you,’ said Noodelman.
Colonel Likhachev, in army uniform, greeted Comrades Satinov and Dorov, but merely nodded at the women. What a charmer he was, this torturer! Satinov pushed to the back of his mind the thought that this degenerate had had control over his little Mariko.
Likhachev blinked as if unaccustomed to the wholesome brightness of this school room with its happy posters and jolly geraniums. Unzipping his leather case, he pulled out a beige file marked ‘MGB’ – Ministry of State Security – and ‘Top Secret’. He slipped a single paper out of the folder.
‘Comrades and citizens,’ he began grandiloquently. ‘The children, all pupils at School 801 . . .’ He read out their names: George Satinov was the first. Tamriko’s grip had tightened on Satinov’s hand and he imagined that Dashka’s must be clasping Genrikh’s fiercely too because both mothers would be thinking of their younger children, fearing prison. Mariko was mentioned. Then there was Minka Dorova. Her mother’s face froze as she waited for the next . . . Yes, Senka Dorov. Dashka moaned slightly. Satinov imagined he could hear all their hearts beating in unison but perhaps it was just his own for suddenly he found himself suffering not just for one woman and her children but for two.
‘All of the above have signed confessions of conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet State and therefore have been liable under Article 158 to be sentenced to between ten and twenty-five years and, for those over twelve years old – that is all of the above criminals except Mariko Satinova, six, and Senka Dorov, ten – to the Highest Measure of Punishment.’ Death!
Tamriko gasped, and her hand shook in Satinov’s; Dashka’s free hand went to her lips.
Likhachev looked up at them and then continued reading. For a moment Satinov questioned his folly in advising Genrikh Dorov to order the children to sign the confessions. Had he made a terrible mistake? Had Abakumov – and behind him Stalin – tricked them all?
‘However,’ continued Likhachev, ‘three judges have decided not to proceed on this basis but to suspend formal judgment owing to the youth of the said criminals, who are instead to suffer the following punishment.’
The room was so silent that Satinov thought he could hear the swish of sweepers’ brooms in the streets outside.
‘We sentence them to one month’s exile, if necessary accompanied by tutors or nannies, in Alma Ata, Turkestan. Parental visits allowed weekly.’
Tears ran down Tamriko’s cheeks: tears of relief. Four weeks exile with staff was a summer holiday, as good as it could possibly be – even for Mariko who could go with her beloved nanny Leka.
As they left the director’s office, under his breath, Satinov thanked Comrade Stalin for his good sense, his justice. Satinov knew that the Aviators’ Case might catch up with him, if Stalin wanted it to do so, but that seemed unlikely. The children were free and both Tamriko and Dashka were safe. That was all that mattered. He watched the two women talking a few steps ahead, admiring them and wondering how on earth he had managed to have both in his life, so he was scarcely listening when he found Genri
kh Dorov keeping step with him.
‘It’s a relief that this case has ended harmlessly,’ said the Uncooked Chicken as he peered round to check that no one was listening. ‘But I’m afraid, Comrade Satinov, I must warn you, as a friend, that there are many irregularities in the management of the Air Ministry and the Satinovgrad Aeroplane Factory. It will take me a couple of weeks to finalize my report and show it to the Central Committee. When the time comes, we’ll have to meet to iron out the problems. But I promise not to keep you for too long.’
50
SERAFIMA, LIKE THE others in the Children’s Case, had spent a month’s exile in Central Asia. She had shared an apartment with Minka and Senka, with the Satinovs right next door (while Andrei, with a smaller budget, stayed in a room across town), and her parents had lent her their maid, so that, apart from the blistering heat, this community of young exiles had actually managed to enjoy the trip. Serafima and Frank had written to each other every day, and sometimes they even managed to book a call at the post office so that, over a clanging line, she could hear his voice as they planned their new life.
On the day she arrived back home in Moscow, her parents were not at home.
‘Your mama’s on set,’ said the driver as the Rolls headed up to the Mosfilm Studios in the Sparrow Hills. Once she had passed the mythically muscular statue of the Worker and Collective Farm Woman outside, she was directed to Studio One.
Every road in that mini-city of cinema seemed to lead to her mother. ‘She’s down there,’ cried a grip, directing her into the huge hanger-like studio. ‘That way,’ said a guard. ‘She’s just finishing a scene on the battlefield set,’ whispered an actor wearing Nazi uniform with blood dripping down his face. ‘See?’
Sophia Zeitlin, shooting Katyusha Part Two, stood next to a grey howitzer on a mud-coloured trench set, lit up with kreig lights that, for all their fluorescence, could not overwhelm her black eyes and crimson lips. She was wearing an unnecessarily tight green tunic and shorter-than-usual khaki skirt (or so it seemed to Serafima). She brandished a PPSh machine-gun and placed a heel on one of the ‘dead’ Nazi soldiers (some of whom were dummies and others young Russian actors in Wehrmacht uniforms) who lay splayed in suitably death-like poses.
In the script (written like the first Katyusha by her husband and approved personally by Comrade Stalin), she plays a nurse whose unit has been driven back temporarily. But she fights back, killing what seems to be an entire Nazi army, while also managing to fire a bazooka and take out a Tiger tank. (In the first film, when much the same thing happened, she had fired an entire silo of Katyusha rockets, hence the name of the movie.) Her beloved husband, an ordinary soldier, calls the Kremlin to appeal on her behalf against the bureaucrats who try to stop her, a mere nurse, taking command. And now she is learning the news that Comrade Stalin has backed her—
‘Cut!’ cried the director through a loudspeaker. ‘Bravo, beautiful work, Sophia. That’s in the can. Thanks, everyone! Enough for today.’
A boy snapped the clapper and a sweaty grip helped Sophia step over the bodies on the floor while another relieved her of her gun.
‘Your daughter’s here to see you,’ the director called on his loudspeaker.
Everyone looked at Serafima, who shrank back, and then her mother raised a hand to her eyes and peered out through the lights. ‘Are you there, Serafimochka?’
‘Yes,’ she replied.
‘Meet me in my dressing room,’ Sophia shouted, her voice echoing around the cavernous studio. She certainly didn’t need a loudspeaker, thought Serafima.
In the dressing room, which smelled of tulips, face powder and greasepaint, a flotilla of assistants seemed to be working on different parts of her mother. One was removing make-up, dabbing at Sophia’s face with a sponge; a second was pulling off her boots; a third was setting bouquets into vases while Sophia lay back in a chair smoking a cigarette in a holder.
‘There you are, Serafima! How was it in Turkestan? As you can see, they’re overworking me as usual but it’s not easy for actresses of my age. There are always ingénues coming up, willing to do anything to get the parts and every one of them has a “patron”, some boss to pull strings for them . . .’
‘Mama, I need to speak to you on your own.’
‘Is it something important?’
‘Yes, Mama.’
‘You can trust my ladies-in-waiting, can’t she, girls?’
‘Of course!’ the assistants trilled.
‘No, it’s really private,’ Serafima insisted. ‘And urgent. Would you mind?’
‘Oh, all right. Leave us, girls.’
When the room was empty, Serafima told Sophia that she had met an American man and they were engaged to be married.
Sophia looked shocked. ‘You don’t have to marry him, surely,’ she said.
‘We’re in love, Mama,’ Serafima said, ‘and we’re going to live in America.’
‘What?’ Sophia seemed stricken. ‘You’re going to leave me and Papa? You can’t do that.’
Serafima smiled. ‘You told me often enough to follow your heart, Mama, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.’
‘And you’re engaged? I don’t see a ring. Is there a diamond?’
‘I tried it on before I went away and it fits me perfectly. But it’s so big that I gave it back to him. I’ll put it on in America.’
‘You gave it back? I’ve never given back a jewel in my life. Oh Serafimochka! Why an American? Your papa and I will never see you.’ Sophia gave a sob and started to cry. Yet to Serafima, even her tears seemed oversized and extravagant.
Suddenly, she dabbed her eyes, the mascara smearing on her cheeks. ‘Congratulations, my darling. But . . . when are you planning to go? Surely we can meet him first?’
‘Soon, Mama.’
‘But you know your timing is terrible for me, darling, don’t you?’
‘I can’t delay going, Mama.’
Sophia put down the cigarette and took Serafima’s hands in her own. ‘Please delay going abroad. For my sake.’
‘I can’t. He’s waiting for me. He wants to take me to America right away. I want to be with him and when I was in prison—’
‘But you’re home now. You can go abroad with him anytime. I know an actress who married an English journalist and she went to London with him just a few weeks ago. What difference does it make if you wait just a few weeks?’
Serafima frowned. ‘But why?’
‘Because I’m up for the most important part of my life. Papa’s written a special role for me as the Tsarina in Ivan the Terrible Part Two and your relationship with a foreigner, an American, could spoil everything. How will it look to . . .’ Even Sophia never took Stalin’s name in vain. ‘. . . the Central Committee?’
Serafima cursed her mother – her selfishness, her egocentricity – but she loved her too and she wanted her to be happy. Besides, this involved her father too. Did she want her marriage to start with her mother’s unhappiness? Could she build her future on the disappointment of the ones she loved?
‘Please, do this for me,’ Sophia was saying. ‘My life’s no bed of roses. Do you think everything’s perfect with your father and me? Every day’s a Gethsemane! You’ve attracted attention with your Romantics’ Club antics, and I’m alone so much. All I’m asking you to do is wait a few more weeks before you tell people what you’re going to do.’
‘How long do you need?’ Serafima asked.
‘Three weeks and the casting will be decided. Shall we say a month?’
What could change in a month? But Serafima felt a grinding uneasiness come over her. It was true that the Children’s Case had embarrassed her mother. In fact, it could have ruined her career and she had never once complained. She shook her misgivings away, turned and hugged her.
‘Just a month, Mama,’ she said. ‘Just a month, and then Frank and I are leaving for America.’
51
SIX WEEKS HAD passed since the children had been sentenced, and althoug
h by now they had returned from Central Asia, Hercules Satinov was still there, with his career, his very life, on the edge of a precipice. The strange thing was that, even though his subordinates and some air force generals had been arrested, even though Genrikh Dorov had warned him that there were problems with his ministry, he had not really seen it coming. It had been building for a long time but this was Stalin’s style of management – rule by caprice and pressure – and the very fact that he had believed himself to be safe would be a reason in Stalin’s eyes to give him a shock.
Now, Satinov sat alone, unshaven – thousands of kilometres from Moscow, from Tamriko, from his family, and the Kremlin – in the primitive kitchen of a small state dacha on the outskirts of Samarkand, smoking a cigarette of rough local tobacco, sipping at a glass of Armenian cognac, and thinking about Dashka Dorova.
A man in blue-tabbed uniform with narrow Uzbek eyes looked in at him from the doorway and vanished again; Satinov ignored him. It was September, and the heat in this red-walled house, built on red soil, was oppressive and he was bare-chested. He was unwell: he was suffering jabs of pain in his chest but he did not know whether it was heartburn or angina.
Heartbreak, he thought, is an agonizing disease that you’re delighted to have. How had he lost control? Had he nearly thrown everything away for a woman who had turned his life upside down and almost made it hell? The release of the children had rekindled the passion between them, despite his own reason and her growing misgivings, and this short, last streak had blazed with a special brightness. Yet their quick phone calls and one meeting were worse than nothing at all for they stirred such pangs of unslaked thirst in him that he didn’t know how to quench them. Her last call was almost a relief.
‘Once and for all, it’s over,’ she had said. ‘No starting again. With you, I crossed the bridge to the world of passion, but I realize that I’m not cut out for that life and now I’ve crossed back. We can’t risk what is truly precious; we can’t make our happiness out of the unhappiness of those we love. These things are easy to start but ending them, that’s an art, isn’t it? Now, I’ve got to let you go, angel. I’ve got to say goodbye.’
One Night in Winter Page 33
