Afterwards, she felt beautiful for the first time in her life. She had sloughed off her ungainliness; yes, she smiled to herself, just as a snake sheds its skin.
39
DASHKA DOROVA AND Hercules Satinov did not see each other again until the first day of term at School 801. It was May, and at the Golden Gates, he could see Dashka and she could see him and sometimes, as they passed one another, she would whisper: ‘More than yesterday. Less than tomorrow.’ Or just one word: ‘Almaz!’ But they were constantly watched by spouses, comrades, their own bodyguards and assistants, and both were wary of hurting their families or drawing the attention of the Organs.
When Satinov looked into his heart, he knew he loved Tamriko. He loved Dashka too, but it was a different species of love, and she came second to Tamriko. He saw no contradiction. There were many shades of love, he told himself. Together they made him complete. As for the secrecy, that cost him nothing: he was a Bolshevik.
They had found a way to phone each other. Sometimes the phone rang in the conference room next to his office.
‘Hello, it’s me!’ She would use his words.
‘Hello, me.’
‘I love you,’ she’d say.
‘I love you and love being loved by you: it’s the most unexpected joy for me, this secret jewel in my life.’
‘But where can this go?’ she would ask, anxious suddenly.
‘For me, it doesn’t have to go anywhere. It just is.’
She laughed. ‘Is this really you, the Iron Commissar? How has this great romantic survived all these years in the age of ice?’
‘I imagine kissing you when we’re in our sixties.’
‘One day, if we were both on our own, somehow, God forbid, then I know we would be together.’
‘What are you wearing?’ he would ask. ‘What are you doing today?’ He hated Genrikh because true possession is to share the fabric of someone else’s life, he decided; it’s about proximity; love as geography. He longed to know the soft sound of her sleeping and the sleepy smell of her hair in the morning; he wanted to be standing next to her when she brushed her teeth and at the foot of the stairs when she descended them. When she sat down to read, where did she sit?
‘It’s pure heaven when we talk,’ he said to her one evening.
‘When we talk, it’s as if no one else is in the room,’ she agreed. ‘I love our calls and I love you. More than yesterday. Less than tomorrow.’
Everything was different for Serafima that term. Before she and Frank had made love, the boys in the school had been intrigued by her squareness, but now it was as if she had been sprinkled with an invisible dust of attraction. Only long afterwards did she realize it was sex.
The boys seemed to sense it, even though they themselves were not sure what it was. They caught her eyes. They watched her, and when she turned suddenly, they looked away. They invited her to join their sports societies, literature clubs, Komsomol camps. George and Minka called her ‘the Mystery’; the new boy, Andrei Kurbsky, had a crush on her; and Nikolasha Blagov was obsessively in love with her. Even Vasily Stalin sensed the difference, that she was already a woman. In class, she was Benya Golden’s favourite. And then, out of the blue, Dr Rimm started to write her weird and cloddish love letters.
‘It’s ridiculous! I’m probably the only girl in the school who’s not a virgin. But how can they tell?’ she asked Frank.
‘There are whistles that only dogs can hear.’ He smiled at her, yet she could see the strain in his eyes. It worried him a little. ‘Like an oasis in a desert: men might not be able to see the well but they can smell water.’
The truth was that she was enjoying the attention. She wondered which would be worse in the eyes of the school, the Party – the fact that she was making love almost every day (provided she could lose her mother who always wanted to take her shopping) or that she was in love with an American arch-capitalist. Her entire being was devoted to protecting the treasure that she lived for. It was a dangerous secret, to be sure. Yet it couldn’t hurt anyone, could it?
And then came the day of the Victory Parade, and Nikolasha and Rosa’s deaths on the bridge. At the Golden Gates the next morning, Dashka managed to grab a moment with Satinov. Checking that no one could hear, and then speaking very fast, she said, ‘Hercules, call me today at the clinic conference room.’
Losha drove him through the Kremlin gates and he climbed the steps to his office in the Yellow Palace. At 10 a.m., he called her.
‘I’ve got to let you go,’ she said. ‘This terrible tragedy changes everything. I have to put my children first. I can’t do anything that could harm them. I have to make it up to my family.’
‘Of course,’ he managed to say. ‘You’re right. I understand.’
‘You’ll always be part of my life. There’s only ever been you and Genrikh and there’ll never be anyone else.’
His throat tightened and he could scarcely speak. I’m the Iron Commissar, he told himself, I can’t be feeling like this. ‘I’ve never loved like this before,’ he said, ‘and I’ll love you until I die.’
‘You can’t keep telling me that,’ she said. He could tell she was weeping. ‘We’ve got to get over these feelings. But I’ll always be here for you.’
‘And me for you. Don’t forget me then?’
‘How could I forget you? I hope you can forgive me?’
‘I will always forgive you, Dashka,’ he said. ‘Always.’ But as he put down the phone, he knew a punch in the stomach could not have hurt him more. When he had given his orders to his aides, he locked the doors and then he fell to his knees beside the lifesize Gerasimov painting of Stalin and started to sob, beating his forehead on the parquet again and again. ‘How can I live without your love?’ he heard himself saying. ‘How can I go on?’
When Frank attended the Bolshoi a few days later, and she was not there, he was struck with an awful fear. She had not arranged how to let him know where she was. And no one knew of him so no one could take the message.
He left her secret messages in the House of Books and attended the Bolshoi every day, hoping he would see her in her usual seat. But no. Night after night passed, and still no Serafima.
He couldn’t sleep; he couldn’t eat; he imagined the most diabolic things: that she was being raped, or tortured, or that she had already been shot, or despatched to the furthest camps. But while the Satinovs and Dorovs could talk about what was happening, and share the pain with their loved ones, no one in Frank’s world knew about Serafima. He hadn’t talked about their relationship with the ambassador or his fellow diplomats, and he had never met her family. He fantasized about calling her parents – he had seen so many of her mother’s movies – but it was too late for that now.
He would have preferred to see her running into school, safe and happy, even if it meant that she had forsaken him and he would never see her again. But she was not at the school gates on the days he’d stood outside, watching from a distance, desperate for a glimpse of a tall girl with long fair hair.
And then one night at the ballet, he glanced down at the stalls, and there she was. She was back!
Satinov held Tamriko in his arms as she told him about Mariko. ‘The greatest privilege of childhood’, she said, ‘is to live safely in the present. That’s why I became a teacher. I wanted that for Mariko.’
Their daughter’s arrest and the agonizing scenes at the Lubianka made him reel. For the first time in his life, he was spinning out of control. He had not wavered when his comrades were being arrested and shot, when his army group was surrounded, even when his eldest son was reported missing and then dead. But now he was struggling to dam up the raging torrent of his obsession for a woman who was not his wife.
His special vertushka telephone was ringing. He unwound Tamriko’s arms and listened to Poskrebyshev’s monotone summoning him to dinner at Stalin’s. Always a trial, a duty, now it seemed to offer relief of a kind. At least he wouldn’t wake at four and lie in sleepless torment
till another bruised dawn.
At the dinner, Stalin was boasting about his exploits in Siberian exile. ‘One day I skied twenty kilometres, shot four partridges, fought off a wolf – I shot it right through the head – and then managed to ski back through a blizzard to the village.’
Stalin’s exile stories became taller with each telling and Satinov started to think about Dashka. Suddenly she was talking to him: ‘You’ll always be part of my life, angel, how could I forget you, more than yesterday, less than tomorrow.’ Stalin was talking on, almost talking to him, maybe asking his views. But what did Stalin matter when Dashka was kissing him? Concentrate, he told himself, don’t lose the thread . . .
Stalin’s eyes flashed their yellow glint at him but still he couldn’t focus. He was in the cage of a man-eating tiger yet he didn’t care if he was eaten. Stalin was pointing at him now. Nineteen forty-five is your peak, he told himself. You saw the storming of the Reichstag, there are towns, streets and factories named after you – but this is nothing compared to losing her. For heaven’s sake, keep your mind on the job. But he couldn’t.
The greenish, blotchy faces of Beria, Khrushchev, Molotov, the wan, sweating Zhdanov were all looking at him suddenly. Stalin was waving a finger. Khrushchev, warty, snub-nosed and bald-headed, was waving his hands in the air as the noise around him became distant, and then began to fade completely.
Satinov wanted to tell Stalin that he finally understood that every movie, every popular song was about the very same dilemma in which he found himself: love lost. He wanted to tell Stalin that now he was just an ordinary man. Nothing more. He had not lost his faith in Marxism-Leninism, but he was indulging in the crassest bourgeois sentimentalism, the very romantic philistinism that had disgusted him in the Children’s Case. He remembered how he’d dismissed George, Andrei and their crush on Pushkin. When George said, ‘Love is everything,’ he had mocked him. Now the white dread of the very same hunger ate at him remorselessly day and night.
Suddenly Beria was elbowing him hard in the side. ‘What is this? You’re not listening to Josef Vissarionovich? Are you talking to yourself? Wake up, you drunken motherfucker. Comrade Stalin was asking you about Berlin.’
Stalin was looking right at him, peering into his soul.
‘Perhaps Comrade Satinov is tired? Well, we all are. What is it, boy? Drink, weariness, war or love?’
The other leaders laughed. ‘Drink!’ cried Khrushchev.
‘Or is it love?’ teased Beria.
‘Not our Hercules. Surely not,’ said Stalin. ‘He’s far too uxorious! Our Choirboy! Our straight arrow.’
‘Either way, you’ve got to drink a forfeit shot for your rudeness,’ Beria said. ‘There – now drink that! No heeltaps!’
Satinov drank the vodka in a single scourging gulp, and the next that Beria demanded, but if anything it made the images of Dashka even more vividly delicious. He fought back the urge to sob uncontrollably.
‘What is it, comrade?’ asked Stalin, sounding cross and impatient. ‘Does Comrade Satinov wish to retire and sort himself out?’
‘Absolutely not,’ replied Satinov firmly, remembering that in the thirties, Stalin often destroyed those leaders who were no longer competent and hard-working. (Yet even as he reviewed that terrifying prospect, some madness within him was saying, I don’t care if I get nine grams in the neck. Only Dashka matters. I’d die for her and if I can’t have her, let everything end.) ‘In fact, Josef Vissarionovich, I would be happy to curate more ministries if you trusted me to take on more.’
‘Like what, bicho?’
‘At the front, I learned a bit about medical supplies . . .’ Oh my God, he should retract this, but it was too late. ‘If you wished it, I’d be happy to supervise the Ministry of Health.’
Stalin narrowed his hazel-specked eyes. His peacocks cried in the gardens outside, a haunting sound. Inside all was silent. ‘Good,’ he said finally. ‘Why not? Health’s in a mess like everything else. Sort it out.’
Afterwards, Satinov stood next to Mikoyan at the urinals downstairs. ‘Careful, Hercules,’ said Mikoyan, an Armenian and the most decent of the leaders. ‘Are you mad? Only a suicide dozes off when Stalin’s talking to him.’
Satinov hoped dinner would go on all night, and that sometime in the early hours, he would stagger out into Stalin’s garden of peacocks and roses – and never wake up.
PART FOUR
Stalin’s Game
The true Bolshevik shouldn’t and can’t have a family because he should devote himself wholly to the Party.
Josef Stalin
40
DASHKA WAS STRUGGLING to live. It was as if the air filling her lungs was turning to glue, as if she was wading through setting concrete. With Minka and Senka gone, every moment was dominated by a crushing sadness. If she stopped for a moment, she knew she would collapse and she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to get up. Genrikh’s mechanical nature and his fanatical Bolshevism were also beginning to drive her to the edge. Was his obedience to Stalin and his devotion to Chekist justice more important than her, than Senka and Minka? Yet the harsh, strong Genrikh was her family; her one concern was her children and they would only return if she was with him.
Now, at the Golden Gates as she walked Demian to the door of the school, she saw Hercules Satinov, magnificent in his general’s summer uniform, but as drawn and weary as she. She knew she shouldn’t speak to him. Yet she was terrified that he would look into her eyes as she had once looked into his, and they’d remember all that had passed between them.
The very thought of her adorable Senka missing her, crying in his bed, hating the food, literally made her sick – and that was before she even considered his fear during the interrogations; and what if he suffered an asthma attack? These horrors seemed to be swarming over her, within and without. Please God, let them be kind to him and let him come home soon!
She glanced at the parents, bodyguards and teachers surrounding her. It was a typical drop-off, but their lives were ticking over while hers was now utterly still. Nothing was the same for her; everything, even the sunlight and the summer show was stained a funereal black.
Surely Hercules would know something about Senka? She had to quiz him. Fast. Yet she feared somebody might overhear their anguished conversation, notice the way they leaned towards each other. Any mistake now could cost Senka and Minka dear, and that would make her hate Hercules. When he looked at her, a pulse started on his cheek and she could sense a stormy interior of repressed emotion.
‘Good morning. I wonder if the weather will change?’ she asked him now. ‘The sunshine is . . . blinding me. I don’t think I can take much more.’
‘Don’t look at the sun,’ Satinov replied, speaking slowly and carefully. ‘It may be blinding you now, but it won’t always be so bright.’ Was he saying: let the investigation take its course and your children will be back soon? What was he saying? What is this system we’ve created that treats children in this way? She wanted to scream at Satinov: What do you know? But she mustn’t scream, she mustn’t stare at the sun, she knew she was being tested and she must reveal nothing of her fear and anger. Dissemble, she told herself, but it was almost impossible. It hit her in her belly again and a cramp twisted her insides as if someone was turning a corkscrew in her womb. For a moment, she felt as if she might fall.
‘Understood, understood,’ she said. ‘But will the weather change soon?’
‘It is changing,’ he said. What did he mean? That the investigation was coming to an end, that Senka and Minka were coming home? ‘Dashka,’ he said, leaning into her. ‘I’ve heard that there is rain coming . . .’
‘Rain?’ she asked desperately. ‘But the children won’t feel the rain because they’re inside?’
‘Precisely,’ said Satinov. ‘A few drops may fall on them but we are the ones who will get wet.’
‘We will?’
‘The future of Communism’, he said carefully, ‘depends solely on Soviet youth.’
/> Dashka blinked hard, concentrating on what this meant. Surely he was saying that they were no longer so interested in the children. Her insides relaxed and then tightened like a noose. Or did he mean they were deploying their children against them, their parents? Another cramp in her womb made her wince and she pressed her hands on her belly. The deep ache inside her meant she was bleeding. She was not surprised: everyone had an Achilles heel and this was where despair and panic always hit her. But she was wearing a cream-coloured suit, and she was quite unprepared for this. She was late for a meeting at the ministry and now she was bleeding. She had to rush home to change. But then something made her stop: she realized that she had not even asked about Satinov’s family. How was Tamara and where was Mariko? Only Marlen was with him. ‘I’ve got to run,’ she said. ‘Is Mariko here? I didn’t see her.’
Satinov’s expression softened for a telling instant. ‘She can’t come to school at the moment,’ he said haltingly.
Mariko too? She was only six, four years younger than Senka! What must he and Tamara be going through?
‘You too?’ she whispered. Sympathy for him and, yes, Tamara welled up in her. She fought the urge to touch him. Her affection for him rushed through her. If she lingered, it would devour her. But simultaneously disgust, regret, guilt galloped over those feelings and purged her. She shivered at what she had once done.
She suddenly understood that their children were being used against them. What if Senka said something foolish? What about Minka? Would any of them survive this?
41
‘THERE’S NO NEED to get rough,’ said Benya Golden to Colonel Likhachev. ‘Just ask and I’ll tell you. I’ve nothing to hide and you know my secrets better than I.’ Benya was a connoisseur of Chekist investigations and he knew how they metamorphosed from one stage to another just as he knew that while many leaders had the power to initiate and intensify cases, only Stalin could redirect, redesign and resculpt one.