Red Sky at Noon (The Moscow Trilogy)

  The group leans over to see more, jostling each other but, at the same time, straining to hold someone still.

  ‘He’s not saying a word!’

  ‘Now we’ll hear him!’ Benya has a sudden view of Grishchuk as he hammers in the nails. ‘Giddy up, horsey!’ he shouts. Inhuman shrieks of pain and intoxicated guffaws. And there is Geft on all fours, the horseshoes nailed to his hands and feet.

  Benya is shaking his head over and over: such things can scarcely be absorbed.

  He crawls away, the whip falling on his back, and finds Captain Zhurko right there, in his underwear, and he is bleeding from the face. Benya sees he has no eyelids. This is fine work for the nurse with the balletic fingers, and he knows instantly that it is Tonya’s special gift to the captain who had never noticed her. Benya and Zhurko look at each other but can Zhurko see him without his spectacles? ‘It’s me, Golden,’ says Benya.

  ‘Golden, my wife, my son …’ he starts. He wants Benya to tell his son something but his voice trails away.

  ‘Yes, of course I will,’ says Benya, thinking: Neither of us will get out of this. Then Zhurko is pulled out of his reach. The men are seizing the others, dragging them all up and standing them against the wall.

  ‘I’ll cut the nettles,’ Tonya says, and Benya sees the sub-machine gun on her shoulder.

  ‘Let’s see how Mama cuts the nettles,’ cries Delibash.

  ‘Line ’em up,’ she says. They pick up Benya. ‘Not him. But him and him. Line them up!’

  ‘Can nurses shoot? I’ll wager not …’ says one of the men, daring her.

  This ‘cutting of nettles’ is the mantra of the night, it seems. Tonya lets rip with the gun. It’s deafening. Burst after burst.

  And then he sees they have Nyushka, Jaba’s Bunny, the other nurse. Tonya’s distracted by this girl whom she knew so well. ‘Take the slut, she wants it, she’s yours!’ she calls to the men. Nyushka, whom Benya himself admired, the sweet-hearted one who slept with Jaba, who believed so strongly in the Great Stalin and that the Party was always right – how Tonya must have hated her in their shared room. He hears the ripping of cloth, Nyushka’s shrieks, the grunts of men, and Nyushka lets it happen, and afterwards she lies as they leave her, exhausted, her limbs awry.

  ‘Look, it’s the writer!’ Benya is kicked again, hard. The boot catches his shoulder where he’s already wounded and the pain is so overwhelming, he blacks out. Back in his stable, he hears the volleys of machine-gun fire. The presentiment of death is clear – and he welcomes it. Now let me die, he prays. He has done all he can. Mandryka is dead but Kapto …

  He swears to himself that if he ever gets the chance, he will kill the doctor.

  By the time the bolts screeched open, Benya could scarcely move. He recognized the voice speaking to him through the open door. It was Kapto, the Baby Doctor in a tunic of German field grey.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ It was Kapto’s habitual question but he was whispering.

  Benya opened his mouth but found he could not speak.

  ‘Did you want to kill me today?’

  Benya nodded. Oh yes! He was too desperate, too gone, to lie.

  ‘I had to bring the child home for her rest. She’s always falling asleep, little angel, poor mite. I’ve always despised the Bolsheviks, but what can I say? I believe in our nation. Nothing is achieved without force. Stalin taught us that if nothing else … I haven’t come to talk, Golden …’

  But Benya knew he had come to talk, and that he wanted to explain the reasons for his betrayal.

  ‘Mandryka was my friend,’ Kapto continued. ‘To be sure, the lads went a bit crazed last night – it’s partly the Pervitin tablets they insist on taking. But because you people have killed him, we will kill every local in the villages round here. In any case, the war is nearly won. Stalingrad will fall as will the Maikop oil fields.’ He smiled suddenly, that open guileless smile, the smile Benya used to love so well. ‘You were my friend too; the only civilized person in Kolyma. I brought you back to life. In that way, you’re like a baby I’ve brought into the world and you know I can’t destroy something I’ve created – or saved. They don’t know you’re a Jew, of course. Tonya knows, but she forgot … Here, let me help you up.’

  Benya could scarcely stand. He tottered in the heat, red sparks rained like meteors behind his eyes, silver hammers beat in his temples and he held on to the doorpost of the stable. It was dark outside, and Benya could only sense the splayed shapes on the ground, the creaking of the gallows.

  ‘Benya? Do you hear me?’ Kapto shook him. ‘Wake up! Listen!’

  ‘Don’t torment me now,’ said Benya.

  ‘No, listen, I mean it, friend. Ride away.’

  ‘You’re letting me go?’ A glimpse of life, a rising sun, a tunnel with light.

  ‘We’ve been through such things. Go down that road. The Italians are that way, and they’re kinder than us, and yes … I want you to know that I’m a decent man.’

  Benya raised his eyes to the bright eyes of the doctor, to his lineless heart-shaped face with the pointed chin and his tight-curled hair. ‘What about the little girl?’

  ‘A doctor must care for his patients, first heal and then cherish,’ Kapto said and, for the first time, Benya saw there was something terribly wrong in his open smile and unblinking eyes. ‘I have to keep her close every second. The others are monsters: you’ve seen them. If I let her out of my sight, they might take her—’

  ‘What were you in the Gulags for? You weren’t a Political, were you?’

  ‘Easy, now, easy. Don’t say another word, Golden.’

  By now they were at the horse lines, and Benya saw Silver Socks waiting for him. He whispered her name and she turned her velvet neck towards him, and her soft muzzle explored his face and he loved that horse: darling Socks. He tried to mount her but he couldn’t raise his leg. Kapto helped him put one foot in the stirrup and hefted him up into the saddle, where Benya stayed precariously swaying, hand on the pommel.

  ‘Ride away now, just ride,’ said Kapto. ‘Don’t look back. Are you trying to make me hang you in the morning?’

  He gave the horse a smack, and Socks loped down the ghostly road.

  VII

  Late at night in the Kremlin, Svetlana was leafing through the magazines from the West, sent by Comrade Maisky of the London embassy. She was imagining what dresses she would wear when she met Shapiro. Her dresses were made by the special atelier run by the Service Bureau of the NKVD where all the Kremlin wives had their gowns copied from the magazines.

  Recently she, Martha Peshkova and Molotov’s daughter had gone there for the first time. All they had to do was rip out a page from the magazine and take it to the atelier in Kitaigorod, up the small staircase to the door marked: ‘Service Bureau’. Abram Lerner was the last old-fashioned tailor in Moscow; he made all those tunics for Stalin himself, each one the same, in grey, sand, green and white. To Svetlana’s delight, Lerner, a dapper Jewish man, balding and slight, had welcomed her, kissed her hand as though she was an emperor’s daughter and introduced her to Cleopatra Fishman, a plump grey-haired Jewish lady, who had measured her for her dress.

  A new consignment of magazines had just arrived. Vogue and Bazaar were the best for the dresses but Svetlana also enjoyed the Illustrated London News with its photographs of British aristocrats and even the royal family. She leafed through it and suddenly something caught her eye. It was a photograph that she knew intimately. She raised her eyes from the magazine to the photograph that stood in a frame on the table across the room. It was the same picture: her mother Nadya Alliluyeva Stalina.

  Her mother had died almost ten years earlier and Svetlana missed her every day. Svetlana’s English was perfect (she had read Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the original and she had heard that the latter had written a new masterpiece, For Whom the Bell Tolls) so she started the article, and what she read made her heart palpitate.

  ‘In November 1932, Nadya, Stalin’s wife, comm
itted suicide in the Soviet leader’s apartment in the Kremlin …’

  No! This was not possible. Capitalist lies! Her mother had died of kidney failure; everyone knew that. Her own father had told her this himself.

  ‘It is said that Nadya shot herself in the heart with a pistol after a raucous dinner in the apartment of the People’s Commissar for War Kliment Voroshilov to celebrate the anniversary of the Revolution …’ the article stated, and Svetlana instinctively knew this was the truth. She had sensed her father’s ambivalence towards her mother but could not understand it. But why had Nadya killed herself? Naturally her father was a difficult man; quite likely he was an impossible husband. He was certainly not attentive. He could be very harsh, and he sucked the oxygen out of every room, leaving no air for anyone else, anyone weaker – but he was also so affectionate to Svetlana. So why had Nadya ended it all? Wasn’t her love for her daughter enough for her?

  The door opened and her father came in.

  He kissed her forehead. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Papa, there’s something I’ve got to ask you,’ Svetlana said, feeling sick with nerves suddenly.

  ‘Ask.’

  ‘Papa, did Mama …?’

  His hazel eyes looked right into her. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Did Mama … How did Mama die, Papa? Really. Please tell me.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Who’s been talking to you?’ said Stalin finally. ‘Who’s been blabbing? Tell me who!’

  ‘I … read in an English magazine that … she … committed … Please tell me …’

  But Stalin, standing before Svetlana in his military tunic and baggy trousers tucked into his boots, just looked at her.

  ‘I loved her,’ he said. ‘But she was fragile. Yes, she killed herself with a little pistol she got from your stupid aunt who bought it in Berlin and gave it to your mother. Yes, I loved her and she let me down, let me down and you and your brother too. I had to bring you up on my own. She left me when I needed her most.’ He hesitated; then he turned away from Svetlana: ‘I’m driving out to Kuntsevo. Goodnight.’

  And he was gone.

  Day Five

  I

  ‘You have a patient, nurse,’ Major Scipione di Montefalcone told Fabiana Bacigalupe, who was working in the village that was now battalion headquarters. ‘We don’t know what he is; he’s wearing a mixture of uniforms. He was found by the patrol lying out on the ground, his horse standing over him. He might be one of the Schuma, I suppose. You better check if they’re missing anyone but it’s chaos over there today.’

  The major was a count from Tuscany, the sort you would find only in the grandest cavalry regiments. His father had commanded the Savoy Celere and so, when the war came, Montefalcone chose the family regiment. Fabiana sometimes sensed that with every breath he took, Montefalcone was accompanied by all the cardinals and princes in his bloodline, even though his grandfather had squandered all their castles and paintings. He and his wife lived in a house not much better than a turreted cottage, but he loved to hunt with his retrievers Pushkin and Potemkin. Yes, as he sometimes discussed with Fabiana, he’d always loved Russia, always wished to visit, but not in this way.

  ‘You know the partisans got Mandryka yesterday?’ he asked now.

  Fabiana straightened up. Wearing her white nurse’s uniform with the big Red Cross on the right side, she stood beside the major in the street outside the peasant’s house where she had been staying. ‘I heard.’

  ‘The man was an animal,’ said Montefalcone, making no attempt to lower his voice in front of his effete batman. ‘But it doesn’t excuse the Soviet partisans, let me make that clear. But Mandryka was worse than a beast. Now there’s a Russian woman lording it over them who’s worse than all of them – she was once a nurse, they say.’

  Fabiana nodded and looked up into Montefalcone’s swarthy, oval face and the loose chins that wobbled as he wiped the sweat with a crested handkerchief.

  ‘Oh, look who’s here.’ A skinny mongrel, not unlike a starved fox, trotted in confidently and poked Montefalcone with its nose. ‘We’ve adopted this one,’ he said as he stroked it lovingly with his soft hands. ‘Jacopo, bring Anastasia some milk,’ he called to his batman. What a kind man he was. For a moment, Fabiana longed to be treated like the fox-red dog. Her mother had dreamed of her marrying such a man, an aristocratic connoisseur with puppy’s eyes. How different he was from her husband Ippolito – not to speak of Colonel Malamore.

  Now she was on the Don steppe where the dust itself was thick with blood, not just of soldiers but of women and children. And her husband was dead. And Malamore visited each time he rode through, several times in the last couple of days. His intentions were clear, she thought, and shivered.

  ‘Don’t you want to go home?’ Montefalcone asked her.

  ‘Si, signore. But first I must bury my husband.’

  ‘Of course, of course. We will find him. Then you must go home. I can arrange it for you. Let me, my dear, let me. This is no place for a girl like you …’

  Fabiana wondered what sort of woman he took her for. What did they all take her for? She guessed they all presumed there was some shady story, perhaps a father who was a Milanese industrialist, or a mother who was the mistress of some war profiteer. She did not realize that in her mid-thirties she had become beautiful, because in her teens she had been plain and awkward. Girls who are plain in their teens never believe they can be anything else. And there was no glamorous mystery: her father was the custodian of the Venetian State Archive just round the corner from their home, a fourth-floor apartment in Campo San Stin.

  She sees herself running to the nearby Campo dei Frari to that shop with the big oil-painted signs of salami and cheese, or walking with her mother to the Rialto market. She has flashes of colours and crowds and the smell of incense while crossing the votive bridges of boats with her family during the Festa del Redentore and every Sunday her mother takes her to San Rocco church. She smiles at the thought of her mother, an elementary teacher, teaching at the school on the Vignole island. The old boatman rows them there every day.

  Words form Fabiana’s world. Love for her is expressed in things of beauty and shaped in words. She always checks the bookshop Tarantola on Campo San Luca for editions of Luigi Pirandello, her passion. She is fascinated by his characters for whom there is not an objective reality but only a subjective one that crumbles when in contact with the truths of others. The eccentric owner lays out Pirandellos which she can’t afford, but she puts her hand on them, smells their paper. Her mother took her there first but now, daringly, she goes on her own everywhere, walking around the SS Giovanni e Paolo church to look at the tombs of the men who made the Republic of Venice into the Serenissima of cities, or the Palazzo Ducale where she admires the suits of armour, the cannons, the frescoes and the paintings of doges. She is proud of her Venetians: Florence has Michelangelo but Venice has Tiziano. She takes the vaporetto to the cemetery and lays flowers on the tombs of Stravinsky and Diaghilev: it was they who encouraged her to learn Russian – and to come to Russia.

  ‘Fabiana?’ Montefalcone asked her now.

  She roused herself, remembering where she was. ‘Si, I want to go home. Soon. But while I’m here, I want to help.’

  ‘Good, good. We are short of medical personnel. We lost a nurse in that Russian raid and we lost a good officer too – oh, of course you know … Excuse me, I … Oh! Maremma maiala!’ He cursed his own tactlessness.

  ‘It’s all right, really. It is,’ Fabiana said, not minding that he was referring to her husband. A fool, but a sweet one.

  ‘Bene! Time to get back to work. Take your mind off everything. Are you ready?’

  ‘I think so,’ she said.

  ‘The medical tent is just beside the stables. Take a horse and ride over there. Your patient needs you. There’s no doctor here at the moment. You’ll have to organize it all yourself. You’re on your own. Can you do it?’

  Fabiana stiffe
ned her back and wiped the sweat from her eyes. ‘Yes, yes I can.’

  ‘I have no doubt you can. The new offensive is about to start again and I fear you’ll have too much work to do then. Listen, you can hear the guns on the Don and can you hear the engines? They’re German panzers driving east.’ Adopting the tone of one of the propaganda newsreels, he declaimed: ‘On to the Volga! On to Stalingrad! TUTTE STRONZATE! IDIOTI! All shit! Idiots!’ He waved a hand. ‘Oh, we have no business being here …’ He stood up and bowed.

  Fabiana saluted but, when she looked back, Montefalcone was further down the little street talking to some of the Kalmyk scouts. Once again, she was on her own.

  As she passed the camels, two of them pulled back their lips and showed their yellow teeth and started to nuzz. Hideous beasts, she thought. They unsettled the horses. She took her fine horse, a palomino named Violante, its body gold, its tail and mane white, out of the stables and rode around the village to the edge of the steppe where they had put up the khaki Red Cross tent. She tied Violante outside and looked on to the plains. Although still morning, the sun was beating down, the horizon was long and stark, so deep an azure that it was almost like cold marble.

  Planes, flying in perfect formation, crossed the sky – she saw the German crosses. Across one panel of sky in the east, over the Don, rose jet-black smoke like a dark curtain pulled across a window. The factories of Stalingrad perhaps? She heard the uproar of engines, suddenly close as dust enveloped the village. A column of German tanks, self-propelled guns, and trucks, too many to count, was approaching. The tanks, wearing dark khaki, juddered and growled, black exhaust pumping out, their caterpillars crunching over the sandy road. Riding on their backs, German soldiers, sunburnt young men in Wehrmacht grey-green, some with rifles, others with anti-tank bazookas, grinned at her as they passed and blew kisses and made signs of devotion.

  Fabiana stood in the sun until they had passed, closing her eyes as she felt the chaff settle on her, and when she opened them, the column had disappeared across the steppe, burnt straw and black fumes whirling above it like its own divine cloud.