She did not remember her answers, but he listened carefully and discussed her opinion as if she was a literary critic, a scholar, not just a schoolgirl. He asked her about books and movies and history and not once did he mention her father or the Kremlin. She was accustomed to flattery of a Sultanic intensity. No one ever disagreed with the Tsar’s daughter, but they always wanted something or they escaped from her fast, afraid of her name. But Shapiro did not flatter her once. He disagreed with her about an article of Ehrenburg, and treated her as an equal: ‘You only say that because you didn’t read the whole article,’ he said. ‘If you’d read the last sentence …’ When finally she looked at her watch, it was past midnight and she caught Captain Klimov’s eye and the policeman nodded.
‘Oh, I must go home,’ she said. ‘I have—’ She caught herself: she was about to say ‘school’! Disaster!
‘Must you go?’ Shapiro said. ‘I’m so enjoying our conversation.’ He paused and smiled at her. ‘Yes, you’re so refreshing. Not like these jaded actresses. You’re the only person here I can have a serious conversation with …’
‘Don’t mock me.’
‘No, I mean it. Your views are purely intellectual, quite untainted with vanity or ambition. Can we meet again?’
‘Yes, yes, of course. I have absolutely nothing to do every evening.’
‘You see? No one here would say that. They’d claim to be busy. Play games. And they’d already be flirting with ten men and …’ He looked at her very intensely. ‘You’re not like that at all, are you?’
She shook her head.
‘I’m going back to the front the day after tomorrow. So tomorrow night? It’ll be my last night in Moscow.’
On the way home in the back of her car, with Klimov and the driver in the front seats, she lay back and closed her eyes and gloried in what had happened. For the first time, she was absolutely happy, in her own right. Happy as a lioness with her lion.
IV
Stalin was alone in the Little Corner with General Vasilevsky. Even Molotov and the other leaders were away and running their commissariats, directing fronts or catching a few hours’ sleep. Only the burly Chief of Staff with the big, plain face and the curl across his forehead remained.
Stalin went to the little room behind his desk and made himself tea, in a glass with a silver base and handle, then took the bottle of Armenian cognac and poured in a teaspoon of brandy, stirred and then sipped it.
The news from the south was dire. The Germans were massing vast forces to push further into the Caucasus and they were squeezing the last Soviet forces on the Don. Soon they could cross the river and charge across the steppe towards Stalingrad. Yet he knew he must hold his nerve, and seek the chance to attack; attack whatever the cost.
‘Any more news of Melishko’s Shtrafbat?’ he asked Vasilevsky after he had heard the rest of the reports.
Vasilevsky understood that Melishko’s Shtrafbat had become something of a distraction for the Supremo, almost a talisman.
‘No news of Melishko himself,’ Vasilevsky said, ‘though one of his officers informed us that he always called the Shtrafniks “my bandits”.’
Stalin blinked and Vasilevsky continued, ‘On your orders, despatched by radio, the small Second Don Partisans Brigade under Major Elmor, made up of soldiers who had escaped from Kharkov encirclements and regrouped in the Don, successfully rendezvoused with them for a joint operation against the Schuma and Cossack elements under the traitor Mandryka.’
Stalin lit up his Herzegovina Flor and watched Vasilevsky talk through the veins of white smoke. ‘And how did Melishko’s bandits do?’
‘I am waiting for confirmation of this, Comrade Stalin. I don’t like to report until I know …’
‘Tell me anyway. I won’t hold you to it.’
‘I’ve heard that at five p.m. yesterday, they assassinated the traitor Mandryka in an ambush. The partisans lost forty men. Mandryka’s security police, now commanded by the traitor Bronislav Kaminsky, have joined forces with German Einsatzgruppe D along with special task forces under Dirlewanger. They are conducting savage reprisals against villages in the area.’
‘But Mandryka is dead.’
‘Yes.’
‘How do we know this?’
‘Our source? I assume there is an agent loyal to us, a source amongst Mandryka’s Hiwi units.’
Stalin nodded, knowing more than Vasilevsky on intelligence matters: ‘Darkness is as important in war as the daylight,’ he said. ‘So, a success for Melishko’s bandits. Please radio Stavka’s congratulations to General Melishko.’
‘If that is all, Comrade Stalin, I should return to headquarters and review the latest reports.’
‘Sit down, Alexander Mikhailovich.’
Vasilevsky did as he was told. This had never happened before.
‘You know my son Yakov is a prisoner of the Germans?’
‘If that is so, it must be hard for his father,’ said Vasilevsky. Of course he knew that Stalin’s eldest son from his first marriage, Yakov Djugashvili, whose gentle, self-deprecating nature irritated his father, had been captured. But with Stalin it was prudent to be extremely careful.
Stalin stared into the air, wilting visibly, haggard and grey-faced. ‘I am just one father amongst the millions who has lost someone. I’m not special.’
‘But they must wish to use him against you?’
‘Of course,’ replied Stalin. ‘I expect it every day. His surrender was a crime and I treated him no differently from any other soldier who let himself fall into enemy hands. His wife is under arrest.’
Vasilevsky was in no hurry to commit himself. Where was this going? he wondered.
‘He was always a spineless boy. I don’t know if he was a coward or just unlucky.’
‘I am sure he was unlucky, Comrade Stalin. We can’t be responsible for our children.’ Vasilevsky shrugged. ‘They are born with characters and we can’t always change them.’
‘Perhaps you’re right.’ Stalin blew the blueish smoke towards the ceiling where it billowed and washed back. ‘If he had betrayed us, they would have paraded him by now. Perhaps Stalin’s son is braver than we all thought.’
‘In this case, no news is good news.’
Stalin examined Vasilevsky searchingly: ‘I hear your father was a priest.’
A bombshell! Vasilevsky took a breath, aware he was sweating suddenly. ‘That is correct, though obviously such elements as clergy are class enemies. I broke off relations more than ten years ago and have had no contact since then. None at all, I promise.’
Stalin nodded. ‘I was trained as a priest.’
‘Yes, Comrade Stalin.’ Vasilevsky answered this with rigid neutrality.
‘It was a good training for politics. A training in how to judge men.’
‘I can imagine that.’
‘Alexander Mikhailovich, in a time of war, it seems a shame that a son does not contact his old father.’
‘Yes, Comrade Stalin.’
‘When you have time,’ said Stalin, ‘will you contact your father again? Don’t let days or even hours pass. Death takes the old so easily. Call him from my anteroom and let him know his son cares for him. Make sure he has the right rations. Will you do that?’
‘Yes … yes, I will do it.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Yes, tonight.’
‘Goodnight, General Vasilevsky.’ And Stalin stood up and walked out of the office towards his apartment.
He was filled with a sudden, and rather surprising, yearning to see Svetlana. But oddly, Svetlana was not home. He sat at the kitchen table for a moment. He was glad he had spoken to Vasilevsky. Beria had given him this information to use against Vasilevsky, but sometimes family was as essential as ideology. Perhaps this was something the seminary had taught him. Priests were sometimes more cunning than commissars. Yes, family had its place, he thought.
As if on cue, the door opened and Svetlana, her skin gleaming and eyes bright, burst in, wearing an e
vening gown with eyeshadow and lipstick and her hair curled. Stalin was momentarily shocked by how grown up she looked. His little girl was too young for this!
‘Sveta, you look so …’ He had the urge to shout at her: You’re overdressed, you look ridiculous. What do you think you look like? A whore! Who gave you permission to dress like this? But after the chat with Vasilevsky, he was enjoying the mellow thought of family and love, and he quelled his fury.
‘What do you think, Papa?’ She did a twirl for him.
‘You look so grown up, I hardly recognized you. You’re only sixteen. You surprised me, darling.’
‘But do you like it? Do I look good?’
She was radiating such glamour and joie de vivre that he did not know how to respond, something that didn’t happen very often. ‘My princess, my darling girl, has grown up,’ he said awkwardly and stiffly.
‘Oh, Papa,’ she said, smiling.
He hugged her as he used to but her perfume made him feel sick. ‘Good day at school? How’s the homework?’
Svetlana gave him such a dazzling smile that he shook his head: some people lived entirely in their own little worlds. But a Bolshevik has no time for family, he thought. The Party is his family. Sentiment and love are bourgeois indulgences, and the Revolution is everything. He remembered his first wife, Kato, who’d died young. That had been innocent first love but he had loved his second wife in a mature way: Nadya, Svetlana’s mother; Tatochka he called her. But she wasn’t strong and she listened to his enemies, and let him down. Then there were his sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law who moved in to take care of him after Nadya’s suicide. They chattered, they found out secrets, they interfered and got mixed up with enemies, and some were no longer amongst the living. He’d been forced to liquidate them. Yes, he’d sacrificed his own family too. Then there were his children. Yakov: he let me down, he told himself. Vasily too.
‘Where have you been?’ he asked Svetlana harshly.
She jumped. ‘At Zubalovo with Vasily.’
A bolt of anger struck Stalin. ‘That upstart behaves like a baron’s son. They bring me reports of his antics. The husband of Vasily’s mistress even wrote to me to complain. I don’t have time to deal with his crew of crooks and whores. When every family is bleeding – even ours, yes, even ours – he’s chasing actresses and playing the fool. Be careful, Svetlana, there’s trash out there who would like to worm their way into our family. Be vigilant. And I suppose it’s Vasya who got you all dolled up?’ Like a chorus girl, he wanted to say but he didn’t.
He looked up again at Svetlana. She was so young, all freckles and auburn hair, looking so like his mother Keke, smiling at him shyly even in the midst of this most terrible crisis. She’d been led astray by the runt Vasily, that’s what had happened.
Calm again, he kissed her forehead, something he did so rarely, and then he did it again. Even though he was the great Stalin, he was still a man, just a father. Family, he thought, as he left the kitchen, having bid her goodnight. Family!
Day Six
I
Fabiana was in her hospital tent, reading a book of Foscolo’s poetry while she waited for Patient Number One to wake up. It was early morning, and she had worked on her patient much of the night. After administering a light anaesthetic, she had removed the bullet from his shoulder that now lay on a tray, crumpled like a metallic bug. She had cleansed the wound and sewn it up again. Then she had undressed the man and washed him with a sponge. Now she sat watching him. She had worked alone, lifting him and turning him, and she was weary. Her patient would probably sleep for a while more.
She shook herself awake. The operation on her patient made her realize that she was herself, quite herself, in the way she had always been before she married. Sitting in the tent, she thought about her life: she remembered her school, run by the Nevers nuns, near her home in Venice, a school for rich girls and aristocrats. She had got a scholarship there, and a teacher had changed her life, a nun who’d been born in Russia and taught her history and Russian. After that, she’d trained as a nurse at the Hospital of SS Giovanni e Paolo with its monumental façade and shabby, poorly lit wards. Everything before Russia took place in that small part of Venice and yet it had all led here, to this moment in this war.
I am a widow, Fabiana thought, and if I go home, I will return to my parents’ apartment with nothing. I’m not a young widow either; I’m in my thirties. I entered the marriage with nothing and I came out with nothing, and I am precisely the same. Ippolito did not change me an iota. I just have his name, the memory of his punches on my skin – and Russia. It’s the things I have seen out here that have changed me.
She sighed, and had turned back to her poetry book, reading Foscolo’s ‘I Sepolcri’ – on the subtle line beween life and death, and how out of this desolation can burst a hymn to life and love, and the sweetness of illusions – when Il Primo stirred. Rewarding herself with a handful of cherries and a slice of black Borodino bread, she reviewed her work. The operation had not been difficult. She was good at the suturing. She was strong too, and unembarrassed by his naked body. When a man was so ill, it was like caring for a child or a pet. The cut on his forehead was a scratch on which a native doctor had spread a sticky poultice that may have helped it seal itself. Perhaps Il Primo was a Cossack, yet the ankles and thighs were chafed from riding, suggesting he was new to life in the saddle. His face and body were black and blue with bruising, and he had been struck with whips and blunt objects. Perhaps he wasn’t one of Mandryka’s torturers but one of their prisoners? Either way he was lucky. His head wound had not fractured his skull; the bullet in his shoulder had missed all his major organs and muscle groups. He had been beaten but he had escaped, and he’d been just strong enough to ride away. Plus his horse had waited with him, instead of bolting and dragging him across the countryside, something that killed more men during cavalry engagements than the slash of sabres.
‘Chiunque tu sia, sei fortunato,’ she said aloud. ‘Whoever you are, you are lucky.’
The man opened his eyes and looked right into her face. His eyes were an unusually bright blue with yellow speckles in the middle.
‘No one … who knows me … would call me … lucky,’ he said in a whistling wheeze in hesitant Italian.
‘Don’t try to talk,’ she said strictly in Russian. ‘Please rest. I don’t want you to spoil my hard work.’
‘Strict!’ he said, falling asleep again. Italian words, he thought, Italy – what memories of happiness he had, of Maxim Gorky’s villa in Sorrento. It had overlooked the Bay of Naples. He recalled one particular night when he and Gorky had sat out in the heat and talked past midnight. Plates of pasta were brought out and consumed, and more bottles of wine. They talked of politics, books and revolution, and love of course, making toasts. The old writer told him stories of his life on the road as a penniless tramp, of his first fame as a writer, of the fighting in Moscow in 1905, his respect and friendship for Lenin, and how he had been disappointed in his dictatorship and gone into exile. They had spoken of Russia as the cicadas chirped, and jazz played on the gramophone. Benya was still young then, in his twenties, learning his craft as a writer, and had been dazzled to know Gorky, to sit with Babel and others. He had learned Italian, drank espresso every morning, made love to Gorky’s Sicilian maid every afternoon, and in the evenings joined the little commune of Russian writers and their mistresses. My God, the food, the mountains, and the beauty of the women! Then Stalin had persuaded Gorky to return to Moscow, tempting him with flattery, with a mansion and an endless allowance. Benya visited the house and there was Gorky, his mistress and his son, living in an art deco palace that had become a magnificent prison full of secret police spies. But Gorky still read Benya’s stories, correcting them himself, and published them in his journals, and he had introduced him to the Party grandees in the Union of Writers. ‘Write about war if you get the chance; war is all life distilled to its essentials,’ Gorky had told him before he died. ‘It’s the g
rit in all of us.’
When the Spanish Civil War started, Benya, hungry for ‘the grit in all of us’, every writer’s ideal material, rushed to Madrid. His despatches to Pravda recounted his adventures at the front, and the irony of being a frail Jewish writer amongst fanatical killers. Once, on the Madrid front, he had even seized a rifle and fired at the Fascists, just for the thrill of being alive and so close to death. During the fighting on the Ebro, he had learned to ride and galloped out with the soldiers, afraid and yet so thrilled that he was where it mattered, at the hot stope of war and life, where every man who cared about the struggle wanted to be.
And then the Terror started in Russia. There were show trials and famous Bolsheviks were being executed but Benya never seriously considered staying in the West; he was Russian and he was sure his soul would wither abroad. Besides, back in Moscow, the secret police would surely never touch him. But when he got home, he found they were arresting many of his friends: writers, officials, actors, and their wives and families, and they never came back. Eight Grammes in the head or the Camps, that’s what they got. Benya wrote a few articles in praise of Stalin, just to be safe, but then, so sterile was the atmosphere, he dried up altogether, and couldn’t write a word.
The Head of the Writers’ Union called him into his office one morning and sat him at the T-shaped desk under the obligatory portrait of Stalin.
‘So, Writer Golden, how is the book coming along?’
‘I haven’t started yet—’
‘Listen carefully, Writer Golden. Last week Comrade Stalin said, “Why doesn’t this Golden write anything on Spain? On our fighters there? Where’s the book?”’
‘Comrade Stalin said that? He knows I exist?’ Benya didn’t know whether to be flattered or terrified.
‘Comrade Stalin reads everything, and that includes your articles. Comrade Stalin understands literature and, now Gorky is dead, he takes an interest in you. I don’t need to tell you this is an honour, but that wasn’t all Comrade Stalin said. “Is Golden on strike?” he asked. “Is he holding out on us?” When Comrade Stalin makes such a joke, he does so for a reason. Well, the Party demands that you produce some work now. So I’m sending you to the writers’ resort at Sukhumi for three months. Don’t come back without a book!’