‘Am I a danger to you too?’ she asked, understanding suddenly what was bothering him.
He sighed. ‘If they have you back, no one will bother to chase a Russian prisoner. It’s you they want. I’m unlikely to make it but I have a better chance alone. And you don’t need to die too … Please, Fabiana. You must live.’
‘That’s a generous offer,’ she said, looking at him deeply. ‘Traditionally only the gods could make such an offer but you, a fugitive, a convict on the run, make it too … That’s magnificent.’
‘We have a word for that. Chutzpah.’
She knew he was right. ‘OK, I’ll go.’ She pulled on her boots and stood up, rolling up the blanket, carrying her saddlebags towards her palomino.
Their two saddles sat side by side, between the two hobbled horses, the leather warmed by the sun. He came to help her with the saddle and, without a thought, she dropped the blankets and bags.
‘Arrivederci. Somehow forever,’ she said, turning towards him. ‘No, maybe just goodbye. Forever.’
X
‘Alt!’ Malamore held up his hand and raised his binoculars in the gathering dusk. ‘The scouts are coming back.’
Dirlewanger rode on one side of him, Montefalcone on the other. Behind them followed a circus of men in uniforms: a band of Dirlewanger’s ‘poachers’ wearing German army grey with SS runes and those gruesome trophy necklaces, a few Italian Savoy Celere with their feathered caps, some Blackshirts, Hiwi Cossacks and Schuma militiamen. The Baby Doctor brought up the rear, his satchel of papers around his neck. The girl sat on his saddle in front of him, his hand on her belly. Wearing tank commander’s goggles against the dust, Malamore was scouring the long horizon.
Night was falling but the steppes – so empty in the early morning – were buzzing with activity. They encountered lines of German tanks, hatches open with their drivers wearing goggles. Wehrmacht soldiers were riding on them, dusty boys waving through the haze. Montefalcone noticed that they smirked at the motley exoticism of their squadron and seemed unimpressed by these apparent freaks conducting ‘anti-partisan aktions’. Occasionally they saw Soviet tanks; a T-34 with a broken track now on the back of a truck was being repaired by some of Kaminsky’s engineers, and a burnt-out heavy KV was surrounded by charred wizened figurines the size of children. And everywhere there were dazed families riding in horse-drawn carts piled high with mattresses and pans and household icons, or heaving wheelbarrows, or just walking, walking and pleading for water: ‘Water for the children …’
In the distance, Malamore saw the Kalmyk scouts, wiry men with Mongol faces, drooping moustaches and scarlet blouses, curved swords on their backs, riding on quick, scrawny ponies. They were approaching fast.
The Kalmyk scouts, Altan and Gushi, saw Malamore’s squadron awaiting them and looked at each other. They had only joined the Italians a month earlier. As the German panzers had raced across the steppes towards their villages in Kalmykia, the elders had gathered in the open teahouse in the middle of the village to discuss what to do. The elders warned against acting too quickly, but all agreed that if the Germans reached Kalmykia, they would at last be liberated from the evil Bolsheviks who had destroyed their farms, forced collectivization upon them and banned their Buddhist rites that had endured since Mongol times. But Altan, who was a superb rider and the father of two children, had decided not to wait but to ride across the lines to join the Fascists. Gushi, who was just sixteen and as slim as a reed, joined him as did his cousin Ubashi. Instead of working on the collective farm, drying the grain in the dryer, they could go back to riding their horses, the proper pursuit of a Kalmyk man since the days of Genghis and before. But Ubashi had been wounded in the fight against the Shtrafbat and captured by Communists, and they knew he was dead.
‘Not just Italians,’ said Altan, the older one, spotting the different uniforms in Malamore’s posse.
‘Germans, Cossacks and Schuma,’ Gushi said, clicking his tongue.
They didn’t have the information Malamore wanted. ‘He won’t be happy,’ Altan said, spurring on his pony.
‘Well?’ asked Malamore as they pulled to a halt in front of him.
‘We don’t think they’ve come this way,’ said Altan.
Malamore shook his head and ground his teeth in frustration.
‘We rode almost as far as the front. Close to the Don.’
‘Is it possible they got through?’
‘Possible,’ said Altan. ‘But not likely. They’re not experienced riders.’
‘So where are they?’
The scouts conferred in their own language then Gushi suggested, ‘If they were clever, they wouldn’t have come this way at all but ridden around the village, waited out in some barn during the daylight hours, then they will come this way from the other direction.’
Malamore wiped the dust from his eyes and opened his map. The Kalmyks leaned forward and pointed to the route, nodding and chatting in their impenetrable tongue.
‘We split up into two squadrons and we’ll trap them,’ barked Malamore, coughing hoarsely. ‘The scouts are right. Even if they looped back, they must come this way in the end – and we’ll be waiting.’
XI
Fabiana leaned against Benya and took his face in her hands and kissed him on the lips, once, twice, to check his eyes, but they were closed, eyelashes black against his skin. She could taste honey and the brandy they’d just been drinking, savour the strong smell of his skin, pure and unscented by soap or cologne. Then there was the hay, the horses, the leather of the saddles, and to her this blend smelled of the happiest moments in her life, the freest.
He never lifted the saddle. Instead she unbuttoned his shirt and ran her hands over his shoulders, the hair on his slight chest, then his trousers. He undressed her too and she could feel him hesitate when he found the Browning pistol in the belt of her britches. He seemed to come to a decision. She’d been armed all the time yet hadn’t tried to shoot him, hadn’t tried to return to her people. He dropped the Browning on the discarded britches and they fell on to the blankets. She felt him kissing the sweat on her neck, her forehead, then, as her legs came up, behind her knees. They were so close that the laws of sound were reversed: hers resounded out of his throat; his came out of her mouth.
She had never wanted anyone like this, nor known such wanting, nor even considered doing such a brazen thing, or having such things being done to her so boldly. She was shy for a moment, but in the Secret Kingdom of Sunflowers these things seemed natural. He talked to her, told her what he was doing, how delicious she was, and did things that made her skin fizz where he touched her. She felt herself melting with pleasure where she had been untouched, and treasured the words and the nameless feelings that now had names. This was the poetry she hoped to be able to recite in her old age, and she felt her body was the book in which these poems were written.
When the red wave came, she found herself thrilling, exulting, and it came out as ringing laughter, her head right back, her hair wild as snakes and her mouth open, teeth gleaming. Imagine myself: Fabiana Pellegrini, doing these things, feeling like this, making someone else feel this. There had only been Ippolito before Benya. But her husband, who had never looked at her in this way, who had become frustrated and angry that she didn’t excite him enough, had blamed her for his own shortcomings, slapping her hard in the face till her nose bled and she’d tasted blood. If he saw me now, what would he think? she asked herself, smiling – and then didn’t care any more as another wave overtook her.
They lay still, the sweat running down them like rivulets. The unbearable tenderness passed and soon she found herself weltering once more. This time she did not feel as shy as she had before. She was utterly at ease and she thought she would do anything he asked and still she would not feel guilty or dirty. It was something quite different she felt now. She wiped her face, using the back of her sunburnt arm, with a ravenous triumph.
Afterwards they lay naked under the tree in the moonlight,
guarded by the horses and by the sunflowers, their faces closed and downcast now in the darkness. In the distance, the clatter of gunfire was closer though it now sounded as familiar as the bees that droned home to their hives, as the hooting of the owls.
‘Do you really want me to go?’ she asked quietly.
‘You must. I want you to live even more now. Go back.’
‘What if I don’t want to go back?’
‘Then you’re mad.’
‘What if I am mad?’
‘Are you?’
She considered this gravely. ‘Yes, yes, I think you’ve made me so.’
‘It will pass. And then you must return. You must do whatever you need to survive.’
She sighed. ‘I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to be Malamore’s trophy. I don’t want him to think he owns me, and I don’t want my old life.’
‘Wouldn’t that be a small price for being alive?’ Benya paused and took a breath. ‘Has it occurred to you that Malamore killed your husband?’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘To get you, of course.’
A long silence.
‘It would explain a lot,’ Fabiana said slowly. ‘Though oddly that never occurred to me.’
‘He was right there when it happened, wasn’t he?’
‘Just after,’ she said quietly. It made sense, and what she was going to do now also made sense. She was suddenly clearer about this than she had ever been. ‘I’m no longer Fabiana Bacigalupe or Fabiana Pellegrini. I’ve always wanted to be this woman, the way we are now. Isn’t this what all those poems are about, the ones I have read ever since I was a young girl? And I can’t go back to a creature like Malamore. I just want to tell you something, Benya Golden: I will not return to the Italian lines. If you ride I must ride with you.’
He nodded, seemingly relieved.
‘Can we just be bandits in love? That’s what I call us,’ she said. ‘Bandits in love. Nothing more than that. Just for once, for one last time, in our own world.’
They ate together. ‘When did you know this might happen?’ she asked him.
‘I never knew. I am always amazed. Are you studying history now?’
‘Every woman knows love is about history,’ she said. ‘Our history. So, did I choose you or you choose me?’
‘I could hardly choose you when I was unconscious,’ he joked, and a lazy drowsiness overcame them. Benya, usually so alert, became careless and languid, longing to enjoy the harvest night, the dense, treacley air, the lilac blackening in the mixed palette of the wide-slashed sky. They lay together, still naked, the air was so warm, and the horses settled, swishing their tails, their chests twitching to drive off flies – and she felt new muscles jumping in newly discovered sinews and chambers of her body. She had never understood why people fussed about sex – it had seemed as awkward as it was futile, like a language she couldn’t understand. But now, when time was so short, she had learned the language instantly.
Each time they awoke, they sipped brandy and feasted on the spread of stars on the banqueting table of the sky. She could taste the liquid pleasure on her lips, like melting toffee. The lava powered through her veins, fizzed in her skin and set off the weltering again within her, and her thighs came up again, and they made love between bouts of almost deliriously deep sleep. Around them they could feel the trees and sunflowers, the very earth itself, moving and buzzing as they were – as if they were resting on the back of a giant, stirring, breathing beast.
But soon the howitzers were building up once more. She saw the black-crossed bombers flying like giant stencils across the sky heading to demolish Stalingrad. The distant roaring was perhaps columns of tanks. Suddenly, over the Don Bend in the east, the sky was ripped wide open, turning a rage of red, as if it had been skinned to reveal the flesh beneath.
It was then that she knew what the intensity of the battle meant for them. Benya was risking his own life for her happiness, sacrificing it for something that could only be horribly short-lived. She should return to her people; she knew she could persuade Malamore she was innocent, to call off his pursuit, and she would make it home to Venice. But every day Benya lingered with her, there would be fewer Russians on this side of the Don. Soon there would be none and it would be nearly impossible for Benya to get back to the Soviet side. Malamore was chasing Benya because of her and if they caught him, a Jew, they would kill him. If he was ever seen with her by his own side, she would be the death sentence of the man who had given her the kiss of life. The threads of their dilemma were unravellable except by her leaving.
‘Darling Benya,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve decided. You were right: I must go back. Don’t try to dissuade me now. It is decided.’
He did not reply for a long time; then he sighed, knowing now how sometimes men perished because they were too weary to go on.
‘It’s too dark now to do anything. I think we bandits in love must stay together. Somehow forever. And for us forever means now. No one will find us here. Let’s decide what to do in the morning.’
XII
The Kalmyks saw the clump of poplars and within it the roof of a peasant cottage. They stilled their horses and their own bodies and listened. They thought they heard the whinny of a horse but couldn’t be sure. Altan signalled at Gushi and they slipped their Schmeissers off their shoulders and dismounted deftly with barely a sound, peering through the granular lilac of the falling night.
This place was set perfectly on the route the Russian and the nurse would take if, as they suspected, they had chosen the indirect way back to the Don and the Russian lines. When the scouts had left Malamore, they had ridden hard back over the steppe around the other side of the village in a giant half-circle, starting again at the Italian headquarters, Radzillovo. When they saw the stream they let their mounts drink and then rode them into the water and along it, searching the banks for the tracks of two horses. And, sure enough, they had found the marks of hooves entering the water and they knew what the prisoner had done.
‘Not bad for a greenhorn,’ said Altan to Gushi as they tracked the place where the two horses came out of the stream and loped up to the cottage.
They listened; then they tied up their ponies, slipped off their soft boots and, clamping a djindal between their teeth, they crept on all fours closer to the cottage until they could just make out its gate, wattle fence, white windows. They were looking for horses but nothing moved. No smoke was rising from the house.
They looked at one another and Altan shrugged, gestured backwards and they rose to their feet and returned to the ponies. By now it was pitch dark. Even with the moonlight they would be unable to see properly and there were only two of them. So much could go wrong.
‘Why are we stopping?’ asked Gushi. ‘I sense they are here.’
‘Based on what, boy?’ asked Altan.
‘On the tracks on the ground – and the pulse in my throat,’ said the younger one. ‘We can cut his throat and take his ears back to the Italians and win promotion.’
‘And what if by mistake, shooting in the darkness, we harm her? The colonel’s mare! What promotion will we get then, puppy? We will be promoted to the noose, that’s what.’ Altan drew some dried camel meat from under his saddle and offered Gushi some distilled mare’s milk from his canteen. ‘Here’s the plan,’ he said. ‘We sleep here, and before it’s dawn we will catch them like rats in a trap.’
Day Eight
I
Lying against Fabiana, Benya was dreaming with the near-drugged abandon of one who has ridden all day, made love for hours and, finally feeling safe and inflamed and slaked, has fallen asleep in the copious, floating heat. He was back in Kolyma and it was a month after the start of war, in the summer of 1941.
At dawn, the guards burst into Benya’s barracks. ‘Get your belongings, Prisoner Golden. Davay! Davay! Work brigades leaving now! Back to the gold mines with you, fucking dog’s prick!’
Panic jittered through him. He remembered Jaba’s war
ning. He had lost his protection – that meant losing his cushy job in the clinic, and this was his punishment: back to the mines! This was his deepest fear. In nightmares, in daydreams, he saw himself marched back to the mines on the dark side of the moon. He would die out there, he knew it. Every day he expected it and now it had come.
The truck was waiting, engine gunning, and with terrible foreboding he climbed into the back.
‘Surprise!’ cried Smiley. ‘Haha! Look at that face, Boss!’
Deathless sneered, ‘You fell for it, didn’t you?’
‘All right, boys,’ said Jaba. ‘Join us, Benya. Good news. We’re being transferred to the hospital at Magadan – and you’re with us.’
‘Oh my God, I thought—’
‘I know what you thought. But you see, life is a plate of lobio beans,’ said Jaba and, banging the top of the truck, he called to the guards: ‘All right, let’s go!’
On the way, they talked about the war with the guards, hungry for the slightest titbit. Comrade Molotov had announced the war to the Soviet people with the words: ‘Our war is just. Victory will be ours.’ Then Stalin gave a speech addressing his people as ‘brothers and sisters’ and even ‘my friends’ – he must be worried, thought Benya, to call any of us ‘friends’! The radio reported triumphant counter-attacks but the guard whispered stories of defeat and collapse …
Jaba’s new headquarters was the Magadan Hospital, where all his boys now got jobs: Benya was still a feldsher, a medical assistant, and one of his jobs was to keep the key for the medical supplies room, a key with a leather label reading: ‘Only special personnel. Magadan Hospital. KOLYMA.’
When he left Kolyma, it was the only thing he took with him, to remember the luck that had saved his life. But the job had its worries too: sometimes Smiley or Fats Strizkaz demanded morphine and Benya had to give them some – but not too much. If he was discovered handing out drugs, he would be transferred back to the gold mines; if he refused the Criminals, Jaba would destroy him, and as long as Jaba was happy, he felt he would be safe.