One Night in Winter

  It was bitterly cold. The snow glowed on the statuary in the well-kept grounds. Where were the house’s owners now? Were they even alive? How quickly fortune could change. Satinov lit a cigarette and sipped at the cognac in his glass.

  War was simply a slaughterhouse on wheels, he thought. For most men, soldiering was tragedy expressed as a profession. And yet he liked this life, the straightforward comradeship of the front, the sense of shared mission, the moral clarity of war against evil.

  The orange tip of another cigarette: he wasn’t alone.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said quietly. ‘I thought you’d flown back to Moscow.’

  ‘I’ll be here a while yet,’ she replied. ‘The medical services on this front need reorganization and I can’t trust anyone else to do it.’ She was wearing, he noticed, that full-length sheepskin greatcoat that, out here, made her look like a wild animal.

  ‘I prefer to do everything myself too. I didn’t realize you were from Moscow.’

  ‘I’m from Lvov originally. Is it so obvious I’m from Galicia?’ She laughed with a singing sound, throwing back her head so that he caught a glimpse of her throat.

  ‘No, not at all. You’re at the Kremlevka?’

  ‘Yes, I’m its new director. But I’m a cardiologist. What’s your speciality?’

  ‘Not hearts,’ Satinov said tersely. ‘Hearts are the last organs that I consider.’

  As they talked, the steam of their breath fused, and when they exhaled, cigarette smoke twisted from their lips and swirled around them like the folds of a grey cloak. He was conscious of her distinct spicy perfume as they walked around the gardens, and then out into the fields beyond the house. The full moon above them had dyed the snow a strange blue so that, as they walked on into the deer park, the blue grass under their feet crunched and sparkled. The snowflakes that gathered in her hair seemed to make it blacker and thicker still.

  He stopped to allow Dashka to finish the cognac in his glass. Ahead was a white colonnade – and now they saw it was a small Grecian temple.

  ‘It’s from the Seven Years War,’ she said. ‘A folly!’

  ‘Let’s explore!’ Feeling like children, they entered its cold portals, chased by wisps of mist that curled down from little domes and out of alcoves. Suddenly, and without knowing quite why, Satinov was filled with an intense joy. Below them, they could see the gloomy house, surrounded by lines of jeeps, tanks, guns. Smoke from the soldiers’ fires rose from the village. In the distance: the sound of a hammer on metal; of engineers mending the tanks; engines revving; volleys of shots; young men singing a love song – was it the Georgian melody ‘Tiflis’? A boom and the orange flash of distant howitzers momentarily made the snow itself flare up as if on fire.

  Leaning against the wall, he lit another cigarette and told her about his family, of his happiness with Tamara, how the death of his eldest son had fused into the deaths of tens of thousands in the battles where he served, of his pride in his second son David, his admiration for George’s genial mischief (which he envied), of Marlen’s successes, and of Mariko, apple of his eye.

  ‘Have you told them all these things?’ she asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘But you tell me here? You must tell them; you must tell Tamara.’

  He smiled, turning to her, noticing the beauty of her dark eyes, her lips. ‘Now, your turn,’ he said.

  She had one son in the army, a daughter, Minka, who took nothing seriously, and Demian who took everything seriously, like his father. And then there was her little afterthought: ‘My Senka, whom I love so much it makes me grind my teeth.’

  ‘I was like that with my mother,’ said Satinov.

  ‘My Senka’s quite different from you, Hercules. He’s soft and adorable but you – we all know that you’re the Iron Commissar. You like to be seen as cold as ice, as silent as the forest.’

  ‘I don’t seem very silent tonight.’

  ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘You’ve surprised me.’

  ‘I’ve surprised myself.’

  She laughed and he glimpsed her throat again. ‘It’s my company, of course. I claim credit for your loquacity. I thought you were another silent Bolshevik disciplinarian.’

  They had almost avoided the mention of her spouse up to now. It seemed to Satinov to be a significant move in their conversation. ‘He’s strict at home too?’

  ‘He never lets us forget. He’s the puritanical conscience of the Party. But I love him, of course. And you?’

  ‘Probably Tamara would agree. The Soviet man is a product of our harsh times. But I love my Tamara too, and our friends say our marriage is the happiest they know.’

  ‘How wonderful,’ she said. ‘It’s true. I know all the gossip but I’ve never heard a whisper about you being a flirt.’

  He threw his cigarette away, a speck of red in the blue snow beyond. ‘But what about you, Dashka? Are you famous for your flirtations? You’re beautiful enough . . .’

  ‘I like to flirt but it never goes anywhere. I married at nineteen and I’ve never looked at another man in twenty-one years.’

  ‘And yet . . .?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m just enjoying this moment.’

  He passed her a cigarette and watched her put it between her lips. He leaned in to light it. He closed his eyes for a moment and he could feel how close she was – by the warmth of her face, the scent of her hair and her exotic amber skin so rare amongst Russians.

  He paused, waited for her to move away; then he leaned in closer and, without any decision or reason at all, they were kissing, and he could feel her light, wide lips on his.

  Outside the arches and the colonnades, the snow started to fall again, making the night a few degrees warmer. The flakes whirled around them in their little temple. Once they had started to kiss, and once they knew that no one could see them, they could not stop. His hands ran over her fur coat; then he was pushing it open, and then the green tunic and her blouse, delighting in the soft caramel hues of her neck and shoulders.

  She was kissing him more hungrily than he had ever been kissed by Tamara. She was biting his mouth, tearing his lips, breathing his breath. For a second, the scientific Communist, the Iron Commissar, returned and Satinov wondered if this was right, normal, and he shrank from her. But as he inhaled her quick breath, tasted the slight bitterness of her cigarettes and the sweetness of the brandy, her passion infected him. She curled herself around him so that he could feel her body, her need for him. He touched her legs above her boots, realizing that he loved their delicious sturdiness. When his hand slid up her American nylons, when it reached the silkiness of her skin, both of them groaned aloud.

  Somehow they stopped, and a few minutes later, they were walking back down the hill towards the house.

  ‘Comrade doctor,’ he said in his restored commanding tone, ‘we’re good Bolsheviks. We both love our spouses. This can never happen again.’

  ‘Agreed, comrade general. Of course.’

  ‘You go in first,’ he ordered.

  He bent down and scooped up some snow and rubbed it bracingly into his face, onto his lips that still tasted of her. You fool, Satinov, he told himself, after all these years without so much as a glance at another woman, how could you behave like this now?

  Yet he felt as if some metaphysical change had taken place inside him. Could one moment like that so change a man? He shook his head. Not Hercules Satinov, surely.

  33

  THE THREE SCHOOLGIRLS sat in the Bolshoi box, buzzing with Crimean champagne and excitement because they had never had such a good view of the stage. But Rosa was a little drunk: she was so slight that the bubbles had gone straight to her head. No sooner had they sat down than she closed her eyes and put her hands to her temples. ‘Oh my God, I feel dizzy, I feel sick!’

  ‘She can’t be sick here!’ hissed Minka.

  ‘Imagine if she was sick over the edge onto the orchestra!’ replied Serafima. ‘I’ll take her home.’

&nbs
p; ‘No,’ said Minka. ‘I’ll go. I’ve shown off my dress, been admired, drunk champagne. I really don’t need to see the ballet yet again.’

  ‘Oddly, I’m in the mood now,’ Serafima said, waving goodbye as her two friends left.

  Alone in her splendid box, she looked out on to the stage, glorying in her isolation until, well into Act Two, a young man in an American uniform joined her. He seemed surprised to find her there, and did not sit next to her but left two seats between them. He placed his cap on one of them.

  Serafima looked over at him covertly. He seemed very different from his compatriots she’d met earlier, who were boorish and strapping. In contrast, he was tall and slim, and obviously cultured too for he was watching the ballet intently, his delicate lips smiling as the dancers performed their most challenging steps, sometimes just nodding thoughtfully at the music with which he seemed familiar, a finger marking the tunes.

  When the interval came, he got up and left without glancing at her. She remained in her seat, wondering what to do. She was far too bashful to go to the bar on her own without Minka and Rosa’s support, but she felt a bit lonely, sitting in her box as the audience poured out to drink and smoke. So, after a minute, she ventured into the scarlet-carpeted corridor to stretch her legs, and there he was: the slim American, smoking a cigarette. Everyone else must have already bolted for the bar because they were alone.

  ‘A truly wonderful production,’ he said in perfect Russian. ‘Lepeshinskaya’s the best dancer in the world at the moment.’

  ‘Do you go to the ballet . . . in America?’ she asked, speaking English.

  He smiled sweetly at her. ‘Your English is better than my Russian.’ He offered her a cigarette from a silver box and she took it.

  ‘I think Lepeshinskaya’s still developing as a dancer,’ Serafima said.

  ‘I don’t agree,’ he said, lighting her cigarette. ‘I think she’s already reached perfection. My question is: how long can perfection last?’

  ‘Does it matter when it’s timeless?’

  He seemed delighted with this question and, glancing at the stairs (she guessed he was calculating how long before the crowds would be returning; seconds, she thought), he started to ask tentatively, ‘I don’t usually ask but . . . I was thinking . . . Would you think me—?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ she interrupted him, amazed at her own brash certainty – and suddenly blushing (how she hated this ridiculous tendency to blush); she had ruined the moment before it had even begun.

  ‘Will you come for a walk afterwards?’ he asked shyly and she was delighted he was not asking her for a drink, after all.

  ‘Yes, I’d like that,’ she said.

  ‘Meet me fifteen minutes after the ballet in the street behind the theatre.’ He stopped, looking uncertain; almost, Serafima thought, as though he was blushing too. ‘May I ask you your name?’

  She told him.

  ‘Romashkin? Like the writer?’

  ‘My father,’ she said, expecting him to say, like everyone else, ‘Ahh, you’re the film-star’s daughter,’ but he did not say anything more and she appreciated his tact.

  ‘And yours?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m Frank Belman.’

  The following afternoon, Satinov was heading out of the Front’s staff conference in the library when he bumped into Dr Dorova. They looked at each other, unsure of the right thing to do or say.

  ‘You’re still here?’ he said curtly. Too curtly, he thought afterwards.

  ‘I’m working,’ she said. ‘I’ve been out in the field with our medics since dawn and there’s a lot more to do. I’m reporting to the comrade marshal,’ and she carried on towards the conference in the library.

  Smoke was billowing in the light of low green lamps when Satinov joined them later, and a crowd of officers and adjutants was leaning over the map on the billiard table.

  ‘Comrade Doctor Dorova,’ said Marshal Rokossovsky, ‘what do you need?’

  ‘A new field hospital needs to be established before the offensive,’ replied Dashka.

  ‘Agreed,’ said Rokossovsky.

  ‘I therefore need a site easily reachable from the front with the appropriate facilities, space for five hundred beds, and mattresses, and transport.’

  ‘Women are so much more efficient than men,’ Rokossovsky said to a chorus of male laughter.

  ‘And that’s not all they’re good for,’ croaked one of the generals. Satinov felt a sudden rush of irritation that he swallowed with some difficulty.

  ‘What more do you need, comrade doctor?’ he asked.

  ‘I need to look at the site. I must drive out there tonight and check it, so that we can begin setting up at dawn. It’s already getting dark.’

  Rokossovsky, a cigarette between his teeth, ran one hand through his cropped grey-blond hair and peered at the map again. ‘Who can see an appropriate site?’

  ‘I can,’ said Satinov, stretching over. ‘Here. A shooting lodge. On the main roads. Close to the railway. Just a few kilometres behind the front.’

  ‘Approved!’ said Rokossovsky. ‘Thank you, Comrade Dorova. Let’s move on. Quartermaster, please report!’

  Dashka came round to Satinov’s side. He had a map pin in his hand. ‘Comrade doctor,’ he said, ‘here’s your site. There! I’ll mark it for you.’ He pushed the pin into the map.

  ‘I see,’ she said, leaning over to put her finger on the spot so that he could smell her spicy scent and see her dimpled wrists.

  34

  FRANK BELMAN. CAPTAIN Frank Belman of the US Army. He looked too young to be a captain. As Serafima waited for him in the small street behind the Bolshoi, close to the dressing rooms, she was impressed by his discretion: he had not said a word to her in front of anyone else; he ignored her in the box after their short chat just as he had before; and she saw that, while the street had been crowded by theatregoers for ten minutes after the ballet had ended, it was now completely deserted. Unlike the boisterous Americans in the bar, he seemed to have an understanding of the Soviet system. Even though it was wartime and so many girls were keen to bag an American, Serafima knew from the comments of her parents’ friends in the leadership that already there were signs that this would not be acceptable for much longer.

  She looked up, and there he was: a solitary figure, no longer in uniform, but wearing a flat cap and dark blue greatcoat, a cigarette between his lips. He was even taller than her but with his smooth pink cheeks and wide eyes he resembled a provincial poetry student. He smiled and gave a jaunty two-fingered salute as if to say: Here I am and, boy, isn’t this a blast!

  Soon she was at his side. He took her arm and they walked away from the theatre, as if they had done so many times before. First they discussed the ballet rather earnestly until he said, ‘I’m being a bit of a phony. I really love the ballet but I’m no expert. I only started to attend here in Moscow. You know much more about it than me.’

  ‘I come all the time,’ she said. ‘But not so much for the ballet. For us, it’s a . . .’

  ‘A breath of the old world?’ he suggested.

  ‘Yes. The thirties were so hard and the war’s been terrible but now we’re winning, it’s brought some glamour back to Moscow. Not much . . .’

  ‘But just enough?’

  ‘Well, everything’s relative, but for a Muscovite—’

  ‘The Bolshoi’s like the aristocratic ball in War and Peace?’

  ‘Frank, it seems you’re finishing my sentences.’

  ‘Or you’re stealing my thoughts, Serafima.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘I’m twenty-two,’ he said.

  ‘I’m still at school,’ she said. ‘But it’s my last year.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, looking at her openly for the first time. ‘I can tell.’

  They were still walking when the blizzard struck, and soon the snow was so dense that they could not see ten metres in front of themselves.

  Seraf
ima knew that wartime had intensified life: people lived, loved, died faster than before. But the affinity between her and Frank made her uneasy and suspicious. She had never been in such a situation before, never met a man like this, yet alone talked in this manner. She had to wonder: was Frank Belman the sort of man who regularly asked out Russian girls after only two minutes of conversation? How did he know to change out of his American uniform? He may look like a sincere intellectual, she thought, but was he actually a cynical seducer come to drab Moscow to turn the heads of girls eager for the slightest glint of faraway cities? An American spy? Was this a set-up? How could she know? And yet somehow she thought she did.

  ‘How did this happen?’ she asked, stopping suddenly and turning to him.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, that I’m here with you now. Did you choose me specifically or was it by chance?’

  Frank laughed, and Serafima noticed the way the thick snowflakes were settling on his dark lashes, even longer than hers, she noticed jealously. ‘You chose me. First, you were alone in the box, my box; second, you watched the ballet and never me; third, you didn’t run to the bar like every other girl but just waited for the next act. So I knew you weren’t like the others.’

  ‘How do I know you’re not?’

  ‘Do I seem like the others?’

  ‘No. But I don’t really know many other men.’

  He put a hand on her arm. ‘Look, I know what you’re getting at because I asked you out so quickly. But I saw that I had just one minute before you left and I’d never see you again. You’re wondering if I’m an agent of the capitalist-imperial powers and I do admit I wondered how a beautiful girl happened to be in my box, alone, on the very evening I decided to come to the ballet.’

  She smiled uncertainly. She had not thought of this.

  ‘So you were wondering whether I am a spy?’ She paused. ‘I don’t think I am – unless it’s possible to be a spy without knowing it.’