‘You must not lose it.
Its power is infallible,
Love gave it to you.’
Alexander Pushkin, ‘The Talisman’
30
Six months earlier
HE FIRST SAW her in January 1945 just after the Red Army broke into East Prussia. He remembers the day, the hour, the minute. They were far from Moscow on the First Belorussian Front. As the Front’s commissar, he and its commander, Marshal Rokossovsky, had fought all the way through Belorussia, and then through the wasteland of Poland to break into Germany itself. Even Germany’s humblest cottages had larders filled with sugar, bread, eggs and meat, soft beds and white pillows. Most farmers had fled from the Russians, but the few who stayed were ruddy-cheeked and well dressed. They even wore wristwatches.
The sky had been growing chalkier all day but when the snowstorm came, it took them all by surprise. Sitting in his Willy jeep, with Losha Babanava at the wheel, Colonel General Satinov watched the army pass. Howitzers pounded Nazi positions a few kilometres down the road. They were, he thought, a Mongol horde in the age of machines: the mud-streaked tanks were now covered with bright rugs on which crouched filthy infantrymen in tattered uniforms dark with machine oil, wearing rabbit hats, shaggy sheepskin coats, and often several wristwatches, brandishing guns wrapped in white rags like bandages, swigging at bottles, singing songs that were lost in the rattling screech of machinery.
Next came the gun crews, who bounced along on their caissons softened with cushions embroidered in silk, playing German accordions inlaid with jewels. Tanks, howitzers, American Willy jeeps, and Studebaker trucks: all moved past in a slow inexorable line. Then: what was this? An antique Berline carriage with swinging lanterns, pulled by horses, and a glimpse inside of an officer’s shoulderboards and a girl’s glazed kohl-smoked eyes.
A blizzard at dusk in a deserted village, dense snow quickly settling on the surrounding fields and the roofs of the cottages of Gross Meisterdorf. The soldiers sheltered nearby in whichever cottage was closest. Still in his jeep, Satinov leaned wearily forward as an NCO saluted.
‘Comrade general, the medical corps’s setting up a hospital in the church hall. They’re ready for you to inspect.’
Outside the church hall, Satinov saw soldiers carrying stretchers from a truck. Two of their soldiers were already dead. Not wounded by the Nazis, but poisoned by moonshine: alcohol made from antifreeze.
Inside a wood-panelled hall, lit with oil lamps swinging from the rafters, men were lying on the floorboards. Satinov smelled the fug of so many wartime bunkers: damp cloth and body odour, here mixed with iodine. Nurses in white smocks worked on the new arrivals. A little to his right, a female army doctor was crouched over a soldier. She was on her knees, massaging and pummelling his bare chest. ‘Come on, come back, breathe!’ she was saying. The boy spluttered and his chest lurched into movement like a rusty engine. The doctor, who wore the red cross on her arm, listened to his chest for a moment and then stood up. ‘All right, he’ll make it. Who’s next?’
Satinov watched her approach a second poisoned soldier. Again she managed to resuscitate him but afterwards, when she was standing up, she wiped her forehead and said to no one in particular: ‘Two saved; three stable; four dead.’
She saluted Satinov. ‘Welcome to the Gross Meisterdorf Hospital, comrade general. It’s not much, as you can see. They die quickly of antifreeze. Every second counts.’
She was still wearing her white sheepskin coat. A pistol rested in her belt, a stethoscope was clipped round her neck, and she wore a blue pilotka beret. She hasn’t had time to take it off, Satinov thought, noticing that her face was long and oval, and her straight high nose and cheeks lightly speckled with a few freckles. Even here, at the front, when she was putting all her energy into saving a life, he noticed that she had altered her uniform a little, and taken up her khaki skirt a few centimetres, to reveal her American nylons, which were dark and against regulations.
A nurse brought a tray of mugs of chai, very sweet, steaming. ‘Glad you’re here for these boys,’ said Satinov.
‘Are you inspecting us or just passing?’ she asked. She had a fetching accent, he realized, certainly Galician, probably from Lvov, with a Mitteleuropean touch of Yiddish.
‘Just passing. I’m on my way up to headquarters.’
‘Of course you are.’ Her eyes aglint with feisty intelligence were slightly mocking. She surely recognized him; most people did. ‘Since we have a general here, could you find us some mattresses – on your way up to headquarters?’ She gave a slightly crooked smile.
‘I’ll do my best,’ he said, feeling somehow abashed as if she was challenging him to justify his rank.
‘Thank you, comrade,’ she said, getting up and heading over towards the next wounded soldier. Her nurses followed.
Satinov opened the door. The snow had stopped. He felt the countryside was slumbering under the white blanket and that somewhere deep beneath it, nature was breathing.
Losha drove on slowly through the dark night, no headlights, the chains on their wheels clanking, their route periodically illuminated by arching tracers and explosions that dyed the sky as bright as day. Satinov looked out of the window. Sometimes the sky up ahead flashed scarlet for a moment as the howitzers fired their barrages. He thought of the doctor. Remembered her nose, its sprinkling of freckles and her brown skin. He had never asked her name.
31
JANUARY 1945 IN Moscow: long fingers of ice reached down from the eaves of the houses but Serafima felt that springtime was close.
‘Let’s go to the Bolshoi tonight,’ suggested Minka. They were walking down the corridor towards the Golden Gates for pick-up. Because it was still wartime, and all their fathers were at the front, the chauffeurs, mothers and nannies did the collecting. ‘Say you will, Serafimochka!’
‘But, Minka, we only went yesterday,’ Serafima replied. ‘Is there a new production?’
‘No, it’s Romeo and Juliet, but I love it.’
‘Never mind Prokofiev, you just like dressing up, Minkushka,’ said Serafima with one of her rare laughs. ‘But I hate it. I always loathe the way I look.’
‘You look so lovely in that green dress of yours. All the boys think so. Everyone was admiring you – even the officers in their boxes.’
‘Really?’ Serafima was sure she was too tall and too plain; she didn’t feel at all attractive compared to her beautiful mother and her generous, confident friend. ‘I know you want to go again,’ she said. ‘Those officers were looking at you, not me. You’re such a flirt.’
‘I plead guilty,’ Minka said with a giggle. ‘I loved the way they were looking at us both. But that’s all!’
‘Oh, I wasn’t saying . . .’ Serafima knew that Minka would never go beyond the prudish limits of Soviet morality. The military fronts these days resembled Babylonian bacchanalia, but for the schoolchildren anything more than a kiss and a few lines of poetry was unthinkable.
‘Besides, dressing up is such fun,’ Minka was saying. ‘Say you’ll come tonight. You always enjoy it when you’re there. I think you like the officers’ attention too. And I already have tickets.’
And so it was that at 7 p.m. that night, Serafima, Minka and their friend Rosa Shako arrived by Metro at the Bolshoi to see Romeo and Juliet for the seventh time. The sky was bleached white, the air just changing to warn snow was coming. Moscow had been battered by three years of war, the Kremlin was still draped in khaki netting, its red stars dark, and Gorky Street was marked by bombs and ruined houses. The shops were rationed and people in the streets looked diminished and shabby. But victory was close, everyone knew that. All the ministries, embassies and theatres that had been evacuated to Kuybishev on the Volga were back. The nights were no longer illuminated by Nazi air raids and flak guns but by the salvoes of victory salutes by entire parks of howitzers, ordered by Stalin.
And, as Minka had predicted, the moment they pushed their way into the theatre, they started to receive attention – and
they had not yet even taken off their furs and shapkas. Knowing that it matched her big brown eyes, Minka had borrowed her mother’s mink coat. Rosa was wearing her best winter fox fur, but typically Serafima, whose mother possessed the best collection of furs in Moscow, was wearing her cheap rabbit furs. Inside the lobby of the theatre, the heating, the one and only Soviet luxury, was blazing. Garlic, vodka and the smell of cabbage seemed to ooze out of the people squeezed together, but never had there been a happier crowd of Muscovites. Everyone, even the grumpy ticket collectors, even the elderly, even the drunken soldiers and sailors, was cheerful. Victory was imminent; good times were coming.
The girls, giggling as they were pushed and pulled this way and that, queued to leave their coats at the cloakroom, and then they could breathe again and the passing officers could admire their dresses. Minka Dorova was looking the most sophisticated. She was wearing a pink frock copied from Bazaar magazine at the couture atelier of Abram Lerner and Kleopatra Fishman where the élite wives and the leaders had their clothes made.
‘You’re outrageous!’ exclaimed Serafima, looking at Minka’s glossy, half-bared shoulders and arms. ‘No wonder you wanted to come to the ballet!’
‘Your mother’s the best!’ Rosa said enviously to Minka. ‘My mother would never take me to Lerner’s atelier.’
‘Mine’s always asking me to go,’ admitted Serafima, ‘but I can’t bear shopping with her. She’s a despot, swans around like an ageing ingénue and makes me feel awful.’
‘And yet you still look irresistible,’ Minka said, trying to work out why Serafima’s dress, done up to the neck and with cuffs to her wrists, looked so alluring.
‘Oh, nonsense.’ Serafima elbowed Minka, who tickled her while Rosa scolded them for embarrassing her at the ballet. They were not schoolgirls on an outing, she reminded them, but eighteen-year-olds on the verge of womanhood in their finest dresses.
‘Shall we have a glass of champagnski before we go in?’ suggested Minka, always the bon viveur of the three.
In the bar, they caught the attention of some American airmen. Joshing, toothsome, young, they were so smart in their uniforms, and their skin was as unblemished as a baby’s – and what teeth, Serafima noted, compared with the weathered complexions and golden fangs of Russian men. They possessed a lightness that she admired, even as she stood back a little awkwardly. She was happy for Minka and Rosa to flirt, and the men did not seem to notice her at all.
One of the Americans, an air force captain, a broad-shouldered athlete with a buzz cut, asked Minka for her telephone number but she did not give it to him, her refusal making her even more desirable. The other Americans teased him, ‘Oh, he don’t often get turned down! There’s a challenge, Bradley!’
Sensible Minka, thought Serafima, however much fun this might be. The rules had loosened in wartime but her father had warned her that the Party would reinforce them again afterwards. Bradley, spurred on by his friends, not only insisted on buying them four rounds of drinks but offered them some tickets in a box. ‘We’ve got some extra seats,’ he said.
‘Why don’t you need them?’ asked Minka in the perfect English she had learned in Tamara Satinova’s class.
‘We can’t stay for the show, so please take them,’ Bradley said. ‘The box will just be empty if you don’t.’
‘You’re just here for the drinks?’ said Minka.
‘And the dames!’ cried one of Bradley’s friends.
‘We’re going out to eat as soon as the play starts,’ said Bradley.
Filled with uniformed foreigners and Russian girls, the Bolshoi was the centre of all social life in Moscow, so it didn’t surprise Serafima that Bradley and his American friends were not remotely interested in Prokofiev. Even she, Rosa and Minka had seen it so often they could have danced it themselves.
‘Hey,’ Bradley continued, flashing his amazing American teeth, white and clean and big as icebergs. ‘Wanna join us for dinner?’
‘I’m sure you’ll find some girls who aren’t here for the ballet,’ replied Minka, now suddenly haughty and mock-serious. ‘But we are.’
32
SATINOV WAS STILL in East Prussia a week later. It was evening and he was in the baronial hall of a country house that was now the headquarters of the First Belorussian Front. The first Soviet troops to break into the schloss had urinated and defecated on the count’s four-poster bed (once slept in by Frederick the Great, according to a gardener who showed them round) and fired at the oil paintings of bewhiskered Junkers, and although the house had since been cleaned up, Satinov could still see the bullet marks on the walls.
‘I think the full staff can join us for dinner tonight, don’t you, Hercules?’ said Marshal Rokossovsky. They were friends, even though Rokossovsky was a real soldier, and he, Satinov, was a Party man, a member of the State Defence Committee, and Stalin’s representative.
‘Why not?’ answered Satinov, who understood by ‘full staff’ that Rokossovsky meant that the generals could invite their PPZhs (it stood for pokhodno-polevaya zhena – a field campaign wife, a pun on the Soviet machine-gun the PPSh). ‘It’s time everyone relaxed. We’ve earned it, after all.’
He looked across at Rokossovsky and raised his eyebrows as they both acknowledged the sound of shooting and cowboy whooping outside. Losha and the bodyguards were culling dinner in the deer park from their jeeps. They too were in good spirits.
Coming down for dinner that evening, Satinov relished the delicious aroma of roasting venison, the sweet smoke of apple-tree wood in the fire, and, he thought, the scent of the women present. Rokossovsky, elegant descendant of Polish nobility, enjoyed female company but disliked any hint of debauchery in his decorous headquarters. This suited Satinov, who was happily married, hated drunkenness and disapproved of womanizers.
In the hall, Marshal Rokossovsky and his staff were at the table. Young female orderlies in khaki were serving plates of steaming venison piled with vegetables and pouring glasses of wine for the officers. Rokossovsky’s batman was fanning the fire in the great open fireplace, and Satinov’s guards were carrying up boxes of wine from the cellars.
Rokossovsky was sitting beside the young telephonist who was his PPZh. Satinov took his place at the other end of the table.
‘Comrade Satinov,’ Rokossovsky called down the table, pointing to a pale man. ‘You already know Comrade Genrikh Dorov from the Central Committee?’
‘I certainly do. Comrade Dorov, welcome!’ said Satinov. He smiled, remembering that George and his friends called Genrikh the Uncooked Chicken. How right they were, he thought, feeling an unexpected stab of longing for the company of his sons (and the one he’d lost).
‘Thank you. I’m here to inspect food supplies and root out wreckers and profiteers,’ said Dorov.
Ah, that made sense, Satinov decided, recalling how, in 1937, Genrikh Dorov had metamorphosed from an inky-fingered, hero-worshipping assistant in Stalin’s private office into a demented executioner. The more executions, the whiter his hair, the paler his skin became. In the first year of the war, his shootings (sometimes using his own pistol) and military bungles cost the lives of thousands. Finally Stalin himself (who regarded him as a talentless but devoted fanatic) had demoted him.
‘I report to the Central Committee tomorrow,’ said Genrikh, so that everyone could hear. ‘It’s a den of iniquity out here. Adultery. Booze. Corruption. We must restore Bolshevik morals.’
But Satinov was looking at the woman sitting next to Dorov. ‘My wife,’ said Genrikh, following his gaze. ‘Have you met her?’
And there was the female doctor in the blue-tabbed uniform of the medical corps with the red cross on her sleeve.
‘Dashka Dorova,’ she said, offering her hand. Satinov noticed her slightly plump, amber-skinned wrist. ‘Yes, we’ve met before.’
‘Of course but . . .’
‘But what?’ A crooked smile, challenging caramel-brown eyes.
What was he trying to say? That he was surprised that th
e unattractive pedant Dorov was married to this beautiful doctor?
She leaned towards him. ‘Did you know our children are at the same school? My daughter Minka knows your sons.’
‘School 801? I didn’t, but you know, I’ve never been there. I’ve been at the front for so long.’
‘Where did you meet?’ asked Dorov. ‘You just said you’d met. I’d like to know.’
‘At a little hospital in a village a few days ago,’ explained Dashka soothingly. ‘A whole unit was poisoned by alcohol . . .’
‘Christ! What a waste of manpower,’ Dorov said. ‘Did you shoot the suppliers for sabotage?’
‘No, dear,’ Dashka replied. ‘I was trying to save their lives.’
‘Did we lose any more?’ asked Satinov.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Oh, and thank you so much for the mattresses and supplies. I was very surprised when they arrived.’
‘You didn’t think I’d remember, did you?’
‘No,’ she said, smiling, her features softening. ‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Would you have bothered with the supplies if she’d been an ugly male doctor?’ asked Dorov.
Satinov looked at him coldly. ‘How long are you with us, Comrade Dorov?’
But Dorov had turned away.
‘Excuse me, comrades, but Comrade Dorov, your plane for Moscow is waiting,’ reported one of the aides-de-camp, saluting.
‘I’ll help you pack,’ said Dashka, standing up.
After the Dorovs had gone, there was silence around the table. Genrikh Dorov was as disliked as he was feared. Then Rokossovsky winked, everyone laughed, and the conversation started again.
A few hours later, and the dinner was over. Stalin had telephoned to discuss the offensive and Marshal Rokossovsky had retired. Around Satinov, the other officers and Losha were singing ‘Katyusha’ beside the fireplace. But he craved a quiet smoke and some cool air. Pulling on his fur-lined greatcoat and wolf-fur hat, he stepped through the doors at the back of the house and out into the night.