Red Sky at Noon (The Moscow Trilogy)

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘You’re still in Madyak, I’m afraid. You’re in my so-called clinic. I’m visiting from the hospital at Magadan. It’s simple, just this little room in a hut … We do our best. And you were lucky I was visiting this week.’

  ‘Are you …?’

  ‘Yes, I am Dr Kapto.’

  ‘So you’re the Baby Doctor,’ murmured Benya.

  Dr Kapto was the hero of the Zone, beloved by the prisoners, the last evidence that humanity itself had not died on earth. A Zek himself of course, a veteran of many years serving a long sentence (he was surely a Political, Benya surmised), his acts of kindness were recited by the prisoners almost in nursery rhymes: how he had saved the lives of so many women who were pregnant or had been impregnated by gang-rapists or the guards; how he had delivered their babies and protected the women, refusing to let them return to work until they were strong, and how he tried to find them easy jobs thereafter. He was also rumoured to raise the children in the Zone’s own orphanage at Elgen, playing father, teacher and doctor to them. Benya thought he had never loved anyone more than this doctor at this moment. So here he was: the Baby Doctor.

  ‘You’re safe here, Golden,’ he said. ‘I am looking after you.’

  Benya looked up into his heart-shaped face and his wonderfully light eyes, and sobs of gratitude overcame him, and he reached up to Kapto to try and hold his hands.

  ‘Easy, now, easy,’ Kapto said with an all-encompassing breeziness. ‘You’re depleted. We’ve got soup for you and bread. We’re going to feed you up. Ahh … you see?’

  As if by magic, a short peasant girl with a flat face and heavy-lidded eyes wheeled in a trolley. The smell of food was dizzying. Benya gulped down the beet soup, the oatmeal with shredded whalemeat, the bread, the tea. He ate the butter on its own, rubbing it into his gums. He saved up the two sugar lumps and crunched them between his teeth, then let them melt on his tongue, the sensation making him shiver.

  Kapto stayed with him, delighted by the sight of Benya’s recovery.

  ‘Who brought me in?’

  ‘Melishko checked on you in your barracks and dragged you over here. A few more days here and you’ll be strong.’ He stood up. ‘Now I must see to the other patients …’

  Benya suddenly noticed that he was in a full ward. Other patients, some little more than living corpses of indeterminate age, were staring into the space, toothless mouths agape. As Kapto turned away, the fear returned. The nightmare was not over. They were restoring him just to kill him. He was going back to the work brigades. He could not do that. He would die out there! He leaned forward and grabbed Kapto’s coat.

  ‘But what happens when I’m better? I can’t go back to the mine … I’ll die …’

  Kapto sat on the edge of the bed, rested his hands on Benya’s hands, and Benya could not believe that someone could be so kind to him. Kapto smelled sweet, soapy, not of compacted sweat and disinfectant and death like everyone else. He smelled like a human.

  ‘Easy, easy now! You’re lucky, Benya Golden. You’re not going back,’ he whispered. ‘Everyone else has to go back to the mine. But not you. Aren’t you a medical orderly? A feldsher? Don’t you have nursing experience?’

  ‘What?’ Benya was confused.

  ‘Don’t you remember, Golden, in your Spanish Stories, when you spent a week with the medics and their ambulance at the Ebro front? You had medical training? Now you understand?’

  ‘Yes, of course! I’m a nurse!’ Benya nodded like a child.

  ‘You see, I’ve read your book – and all your short stories too. You’ll be joining the two nurses here in our little clinic. The most important thing is your kindness to the patients. Many are fading away but we must make them feel loved. We’ll train you up. For us doctors, our duties don’t end with just saving a life: those we heal we must also cherish.’

  Benya tried to speak but he was so moved that he wept instead.

  ‘Easy now,’ said Kapto. ‘You’re a lucky man, Golden. And tomorrow you’ll find out the very meaning of luck.’

  VI

  General Melishko is covered in dust; even his starched-white moustache and winged eyebrows are reddened with earth. Thank God he’s back! He hands the reins of Elephant to his adjutant and joins Zhurko and Ganakovich outside the priest’s house near the church.

  Benya listens as Zhurko and Ganakovich bombard Melishko with questions. When are reinforcements coming? Where are the supplies? Ganakovich is shrill, no longer the legendary friend of Politburo members and seducer of ballerinas.

  ‘How are we to provision the horses? We need support,’ says Zhurko, voice tight, calm, dry.

  ‘How do we rendezvous with the others?’ cries Ganakovich. ‘What do we do now? We don’t even have full maps.’

  ‘We are where we are,’ says Melishko.

  ‘And where is that?’ demands Ganakovich, gulping back a wad of saliva. ‘Where are we? Should we go back to our lines …?’

  Melishko laughs huskily, rolling his false teeth. ‘Really, Ganakovich?’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that,’ Ganakovich corrects himself. ‘Not One Step Back! We know Stalin’s order. Retreat means death.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Melishko quite jovially, poking him in the ribs. ‘You almost had to execute yourself just then.’

  ‘Forgive me! Please don’t inform the Special Section, I just meant—’

  ‘Calm down, boy.’ Melishko waves a bluff hand. ‘We don’t tell, do we, Zhurko?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Zhurko, cleaning his spectacles with his shirt tail.

  There is a strange stillness. Benya realizes the shooting has stopped.

  ‘Thank you, comrades …’

  ‘We’re not comrades, remember, Ganakovich? We’re bandits,’ replies Melishko heartily. ‘How many sabres are we here?’

  ‘Three hundred, give or take,’ reports Zhurko.

  ‘Wounded?’

  ‘Riding wounded included.’

  ‘So with our three hundred, how do we rendezvous with the rest of the battalion, the rest of the division?’ Ganakovich is almost weeping.

  ‘Ganakovich, let me spell it out. We’re alone. There are no reinforcements,’ Melishko explains. He speaks slowly and deliberately. ‘The other squadrons were wiped out when they charged the German tanks and machine guns. They redeemed themselves all right. I only just got through myself. Thanks to Elephant. That scout was right: our squadron got lucky. No one knew there were Italians in this sector. And because the Italians worry too much about their uniforms and pasta, we broke right through.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’ whispers Ganakovich.

  Melishko lights a cigarette, taking his time about it, with a lot of puffing and chewing of false teeth. He talks when he is good and ready. ‘We can only advance. And we have a mission of sorts, remember? If we break through, they said, we must hunt down and destroy all traitors. And the chief traitor in this sector is Colonel Mandryka. The Germans have given him his own little kingdom here with his own security police, the Schuma, who are working on special tasks with the SS. He’s encouraging Soviet soldiers to surrender and defect. Moscow wants him eliminated, and the unit that kills him will be redeemed. That’s what we’re going to do. Tell Panka to saddle the horses, and gather all provisions. We move out at dawn.’

  ‘But won’t the Germans know we’re here?’ whines Ganakovich.

  ‘Yes, but they’ll be expecting us to retreat towards the Don. Instead we’re going in the other direction, further into enemy territory. And we’ll be moving fast and light as only cavalrymen can.’

  ‘Forward’s the only way back,’ agrees Zhurko.

  ‘But don’t you realize?’ says Ganakovich, and the fear in his voice echoes the fear in Benya’s belly. ‘We’ll never come back.’

  Day Three

  I

  An hour out of the village, the dawn sky began to lighten into lilac and then pink, and they saw a dead horse lying on its back, its hooves sticking up towar
ds the sky. ‘Eaten itself to death,’ commented Panka wryly.

  A few minutes later, they rode past a dead Russian run over by a tank. The body was shapeless, totally flat, just green fabric and pink flesh woven like a carpet. There was a smell of burning and Benya remembered the smoke of battle the day before. As they rode on, the stench grew stronger, the men grew quieter, three hundred riders, horses’ tails swishing, the bits clonking between teeth, the creak of leather, clink of spurs.

  ‘If you’re scared, don’t do it,’ Zhurko had said as they moved off. ‘If you do it, don’t be scared!’

  And Benya found he was not as scared as he had been before. He was more afraid of capture. Death seemed easier now; it was merely the agony in between that he feared. He rode in his place between Spider Garanzha and Prishchepa, noticing that Dr Kapto had the little girl, all cleaned up now, riding on his horse in front of him. Melishko loped up and down the squadrons, a word here, encouragement there, to make sure the men understood that this was the way they would win their freedom. But the men were muttering. They had heard something back in the village, the poison spread by Mandryka’s traitors, that the war was lost, and that their fellow Cossacks had joined the Germans. ‘Join our brothers!’ a few of the soldiers were whispering.

  Panka shook his head when he heard this: ‘Careful, brothers, I saw the German promises last time. Hear me say this,’ he said emphatically. ‘I’m not going anywhere!’

  The scouts rode back: ‘Village ahead. Clear,’ they called.

  They approached, walking slowly into the village’s only street. Every house in it was a blackened shell, and the barn was still smoking.

  Suddenly a voice cried out, ‘Klop, klop!’ as an old-fashioned tarantass, a buggy pulled by an aged horse, trotted right into them. Benya and his comrades raised their guns at the old peasant holding the reins. He wore a Tsarist braided tunic with shoulderboards and a medal on it; an old hunting rifle lay across his knees. Seeing them, the old man jumped down and tried to run but Smiley shot him in the ankle and they brought him back.

  Melishko dismounted and looked inside the smoking barn. Inside were the blackened forms of men and women, roasted with their hands raised and white teeth showing through wide-open mouths, wizened as small as children.

  He looked back at Prishchepa and Benya, still on horseback in the little street.

  ‘What happened here?’ Melishko said as the peasant was brought to him. ‘What happened, Cossack?’

  Smiley gave the peasant a shove and he groaned, clutching at his ruined ankle. ‘Mandryka’s Schuma police came here,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s the rest of the village?’

  Smiley hit him with his rifle butt and the peasant whimpered, ‘Don’t hurt me again. Don’t hurt me.’

  Melishko ordered a half-burnt chair to be brought out so the peasant could sit.

  ‘Are you working with the traitor Mandryka?’ Melishko asked.

  ‘No, but we’re doing some spring cleaning for him.’

  ‘What’s that uniform?’

  ‘His Majesty’s Ataman Lifeguards Regiment. I served the Tsar in the Great War.’

  ‘And fought for the Whites against the Communists?’

  The peasant nodded.

  ‘Where’s everyone else?’

  The peasant looked side to side as if playing the fool, like a child in a play. ‘Some have joined Mandryka.’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘To check the field. To tidy the barn. To see the sights.’

  ‘What sights? What field?’

  ‘The sown field. I’m also looking after the guests in the barn.’ The rosy-cheeked old peasant grinned, opening his gaping well of a mouth. Benya noticed just the black stumps of teeth.

  Melishko looked over the man’s shoulder at Panka who made a ‘he’s insane’ gesture.

  ‘Who are the guests?’

  ‘They were the strangers amongst us. They came from the cities …’

  ‘And what do you do to them?’

  The peasant looked right into Benya’s eyes. ‘You’re one of them,’ he said, pointing at him. ‘That’s one of them! A Christ-killer. Right amongst you!’

  Benya felt the primitive impudence of evil, and shivered.

  ‘Answer me,’ insisted Melishko, still puffing on his cigarette. The smell of burning and of something infinitely more terrible was becoming unbearable and the men tied kerchiefs around their faces.

  The peasant licked his lips and opened his mouth in what passed for a smile. ‘We make them welcome,’ he said.

  To Benya this mouth was the sinkhole of death.

  ‘A devil,’ Panka murmured. ‘Possessed by the midsummer moon.’

  ‘One more thing,’ asked the general. ‘What’s the traitor Mandryka’s next task?’

  ‘It’s special work. Those strangers are running from the west, Odessa and Kishnev, and seeking sanctuary in the villages. That’s where he picks them up. So we can welcome them in our special way.’ Again the open gape.

  Melishko nodded, rubbing his moustache with his hand. ‘So this is Mandryka’s work. See this, Cossacks! Here is our mission. Here is how we win our freedom back!’ He turned and mounted Elephant. ‘We ride on.’

  Ganakovich still stood over the peasant.

  ‘Shall we …?’ said Smiley.

  Benya rode on, waiting for the shot, not flinching when it came.

  The field outside the village had been ploughed with rags but when they got closer, Benya saw a white hand first, a perfect white hand, and then a bare foot and then a collage of gabardine and linen and then more flesh, a complete face. Silver Socks reared at the sight, snorting, spooked. The rich black earth had been freshly turned but now they were close Benya could see that it scarcely covered the bodies that lay in rows, intertwined, half-naked, indecently twisted. He and the men stared; their horses champed, their ears flattened back, the whites of their eyes showing – and a host of black wings beat the air before the birds returned and hopped closer and closer.

  Melishko dismounted again, sighing with the effort, and gestured to Benya to do the same. ‘I was in Spain, like you, and we saw things there. They shot the priests and nuns in the village square. But nothing like this. You must live to witness this, you before all the others,’ he said gruffly.

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘You’re our only writer. Who are they? Can’t you see? Look more closely at these people.’ Melishko knelt down and pushed aside the soil. The field seemed to emanate a sugary miasma even though the bodies were so fresh and Benya realized that death smelled of sweet blackberries gone bad. Vultures leaned their crooked necks from the closest boughs and the crows cawed, eyes glittering sharp and yellow as citrines. Benya’s companions had dismounted and were kneeling, brushing aside the earth so they could see the bodies.

  Each person had been shot in the back of the head: here was a girl with clear eyes, here a man’s face where a leg should be, here a child as if asleep, all mixed up together with a horrible negligence. Melishko picked up a Soviet identity card, then another. ‘They’re not all from here. Look! They’re all Jews, your people.’

  Benya knelt down too, looking at the ID cards and seeing the Jewish names and their home towns: Paltrovich of Nikolaev, Greenbaum of Kherson, Jaffe of Mogilev. They were Jewish refugees, overtaken by the German advance. Frantic suddenly, he threw aside those and picked up more, tossed carelessly around the field. And then he found one – a family from Odessa …

  ‘My parents lived in Odessa after leaving Galicia,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘They could be …’

  ‘Come on, lad,’ said Melishko, hefting him up and steadying him. Benya saw Melishko’s face was exhausted, noticed the dust in the crow’s feet around his eyes. ‘I’ll wager your family are safe somewhere. But wherever they are, the best we can do is meet Mandryka with our sabres drawn.’

  Benya wanted to weep as he looked at this field, this Jewish field, sown with Jews, scarcely buried. He’d often wondered – what
was life for? For joy – and for this just war. How could he have done anything else but fight these monsters? He felt his own frailty beside these Nazi fanatics who were winning the war, but he could still do his bit. Today. That was what this mission was all about.

  He heard shrieking and turned. The little girl on Kapto’s horse was crying and pointing and the doctor was covering her eyes. Maybe this was where her parents were, whence she had escaped out of the earth – or somewhere like this. The Cossacks were crossing themselves. None of them had ever seen anything like this before.

  Panka shook his head and rubbed his whiskers. ‘The wolves have gone mad.’

  II

  When the normal order of life is shattered, thought Benya as he rode on, no one can predict where those fragments will fly, whose life will be spared, whose throat they will cut. There was only one certainty: the old world can never be put together again.

  They had been riding since 4 a.m., and Mandryka’s village was right ahead of them. The sky was a brightening lavender with white contrails, Benya noticed, and just a smudge of sun so far; this was going to be another beautiful day. The men were drawn up in two companies: orders were whispered; cigarettes put out.

  At one point in the early morning, Benya had fallen asleep in the saddle, and when he awoke he had found himself alone with Silver Socks cropping grass at the roadside. He’d turned and just behind him were two strange horsemen. For a moment, he’d panicked and reached for his PPSh. ‘You want a Daddy?’ Panka had asked, handing over the weapon just after the first charge. My ‘Pe-pe-sh’, the soldiers called it, my Papasha – Daddy! Now he levelled it at the riders, ready to shoot.

  Then he saw the fluorescent moons of the little girl’s eyes. She was riding in front of Dr Kapto, his arm around her belly, so she would not fall, his curved and symmetrical face close to her hair. Tonya rode next to him, and perhaps Benya had scared them because Kapto was pointing his Parabellum right back at him.