He turns to the men beside him. He always speaks softly in a tone that commands obedience. ‘Fire all four Dashkas now. And mortars. Quickly or we’ll be too late!’
‘Done, Comrade Elmor!’ says Smiley as the heavy Degtiarev–Shpagin machine guns, known as Dashkas, open up with their metallic chug-chug to pump lead into the squadron of Italian horsemen.
V
Fabiana saw the church tower and onion dome of a little Cossack village of colourfully painted cottages, yards and stables. A signpost read: Shebinkino. A foaming riderless horse caught up with them, dragging its German rider, his shirt forming a bundle over his head. She could still hear the machine guns and the whistle of mortars close behind them. Such was their panic that she and Benya had galloped headlong into the main lane of the village without checking what was ahead.
It was noon but the village seemed deserted. A dead dog lay in the road; cats shrieked somewhere. It was sweltering, and Fabiana could smell rotting hops, sweet vines, wormword and dank water. She looked up and now she could see the shells exploding over the Don Bend where the battle raged just a few miles away. She was still out of breath and when she glanced at Benya, he was white, almost slipping off his horse, his hands shivering uncontrollably.
The horses suddenly balked and tried to turn. A mangy wolf stood in the middle of the street. Fabiana looked into its hungry and astonishingly white eyes. Once the wolf had been a symbol of wild ferocity; now it was just another hunted creature in a world where man had outdone the wolf in savagery. ‘Ciao, bello,’ she said to it, remembering how Natasha had seen the wolf in War and Peace. It trotted away – and the horses, sweating yellow foam, staggered to a halt.
Fabiana scissored off Violante in time to catch Benya as he slipped off Socks into her arms, relieving him of the sub-machine gun – she hung it on her shoulder – and leading the horses away. She heard the rattle of traces and the clip of hooves. Benya was lying on the ground in the space between two cottages while she looked around.
A waxy old woman dressed in bright red was approaching them. Halting her tarantass and getting down off its box, she hobbled into a nearby cottage without tying up the horse.
Glancing at Benya, who nodded at her, Fabiana tied up their horses and followed the woman through the open front door. How fast we brigands learn, she thought, unhooking her gun, we bandits in love.
In the main room, the crone was putting dried cherries into a bowl and Fabiana also spotted some salo and buckwheat gruel.
‘You steal from Afonka and you’ll die in agony,’ said the crone without looking up. Fabiana peered at the shelves around the room, packed with jars of seeds and bottles of cloudy liquids. ‘A Jew and a foreigner come into the home of a woman abandoned by all and steal from her at gunpoint. You’ll bring the curse of the water spirit of the Don on yourselves. Who’s this now?’
Fabiana looked round and Benya was behind her, shakily levelling his pistol. Fabiana wanted to get out quickly but Benya did not look good and the woman had the food.
‘The Jew thinks of killing me. But the Immaculate Virgin will decide when I go. You’ll be struck down by lightning or steel or poison.’ She sucked her bare gums.
‘Tell us then, Matushka, what should we do?’ asked Benya, lowering his Parabellum.
‘Let me cleanse you unbelievers with holy Don water, and I shall give you something.’
‘We have no Don water.’
‘I have it in the bucket. Bring it.’
Benya brought the bucket and the crone glared right at him. Fabiana could see that her eyes were a veined blue-whiteness with no irises.
‘I see well for a blind one?’ the crone said, making the Cross with a yellowed nail on his forehead. ‘The enemy of Christ is forgiven by the Immaculate Virgin, who drives out the beast in the heart. Amen!’ Then she repeated it on Fabiana. ‘I see a field of sunflowers, faces raised to the sun and in the middle of them a couple are kissing, oblivious to the world. I see a kind doctor and a happy little girl, a Jew child who walks away into the distance. Eat your food – here – and water.’
‘Thank you, Matushka,’ said Benya, gulping down some bread and gruel with his fingers. Fabiana poured water for both of them.
‘Leave me something. I don’t need much,’ the woman said as Fabiana gathered the food, longing to get away.
‘Go out the back,’ the crone continued. ‘That way’ – she pushed them through the back door – ‘and you’ll learn how I never threaten lightly. Go!’
Holding the food, Fabiana stepped into the back yard and recoiled. The body of a soldier, a German, lay on the sandy ground, his mouth wide open, with greenish vomit streaked down his cheek and flies buzzing out of his agape mouth.
VI
‘How many dead do we have?’ Malamore asked, holding a lit Africa cigarette, goggles on his forehead, patting a sweat-soaked Borgia on the withers. Under heavy fire, they had made their escape over the hill and into a Cossack village but not all his men were with him.
‘Six dead,’ replied Montefalcone.
‘And seven wounded,’ added Malamore’s young adjutant, Brambilla. ‘Two missing.’
‘Figli di puttana! Motherfuckers!’ said Malamore.
The Kalmyks rode up. ‘Village is empty,’ they said. ‘And there’s food.’
Malamore noticed Dirlewanger was fritzing and twitching, like the drug addict he was. Malamore himself had survived many ambushes and he showed no nerves even now. ‘All right, place careful pickets all around. The partisans aren’t far away. Collect grapes and apples from those orchards. Bury the dead and dress the wounded.’
Wiping his brow, he led his squadron down into the village, riding slowly, even majestically, hunched craggily in his saddle. When he reached the priest’s house, he dismounted and sat on the verandah in an old basket chair brooding while Dirlewanger popped another Pervitin tablet, then paced up and down, his temples pulsating, and Montefalcone watched him, sipping from a flask – both awaiting further orders as the windows shook from the big guns.
Malamore was chain-smoking and took a swig of cognac. The partisans had ambushed them from their flank on the adjacent hill, and he knew it was his fault. Fabiana had distracted him and he had watched her carefully when they were close to them. She had looked as if she was waiting for an opportunity to escape. The Russian had the weapons. Still it nagged at him. Could she be collaborating with the Russian Jew? Could they even be … no, that was impossible.
Dirlewanger started fiddling with his necklace of trophies, his eyes glittering like red-rimmed pins. ‘Let us shoot every Russian we can find.’
‘It’s lucky these villages are already deserted,’ answered Montefalcone. ‘Perhaps they knew you were coming.’
‘Consul, sir,’ said Brambilla from the doorway. ‘A Wehrmacht captain is here to see you.’
VII
Fabiana chose a house far from the crone’s, in the midst of the village, hoping this would make them less easy to find. They took the horses into the barn with them and closed the door. It was full of hay – and a single old nag, probably a family favourite, abandoned there, looked very pleased to see them. Benya lay on the ground.
‘You must eat more,’ Fabiana told him, and she fed him the crone’s bread and gruel, cherries and the last of the honeycomb. After they had both eaten, they felt better but they were exhausted. It was late afternoon but they agreed not to light a lantern or a cooking fire lest it be the only light in the village, visible from miles away. Benya felt they were a whisper from sudden death, and nothing could be postponed any more.
For a long time they said nothing, both aware they had been run to earth. The hunters were close, yet the horses could go no further, and they themselves were too tired even to put their boots in their stirrups yet alone ride. They might have this night together, or Malamore and his men could burst in at any moment. Benya listened for the whinny of a horse, the creaking of a gate, the clacket of spurs. A wolf started to howl somewhere on the steppe. What had
alarmed it? He half expected to hear the voices calling: ‘Send out the nurse. She at least can live!’
Finally he sighed and said, ‘We both know what must happen now.’ He knew that if he survived, he could never admit to ever having known her. She was one of the Fascist invaders fighting on the Nazi side and their very acquaintance, yet alone a physical relationship, would be regarded by the Russian side as treason: both would be shot instantly. To her own side, she had abetted and slept with a Jew, a Russian, a Communist. If they remained together, they would die together. It was not the love that was doomed but the fatal lovers themselves. Their only hope was to part and for him to wipe every relic of her existence out of his life.
She nodded. ‘How long have the bandits in love known each other?’ she asked.
‘Studying history again?’ He smiled sadly. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know, Il Primo? It’s exactly eighty-six hours. Is that need to measure love in every way, the difference between a man and a woman? I think so.’
Night was falling and it was dark in the barn. ‘Mia adorata,’ he said, ‘don’t you think sometimes you can live for years and they can count for nothing and then there are special times when every second is so rich, so priceless, so deep that we live with such intensity that every minute counts fivefold, tenfold, a thousandfold. And we call that time “Love”. Sometimes one night is a lifetime.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. That’s what this is.’
A dog barked in the village, and Benya caught his breath. Were the Fascists already surrounding the house? He could just see the glaze of her eyes, dark now, catching the very last light. The air changed between them and suddenly he was overcome and he knew she was too. They had been linked from the moment they had first seen each other after she had removed the bullet. Now the space between them seemed to be crisscrossed with golden threads – like the dew on spiderwebs at dawn. How often does this happen in a lifetime?
Benya reached out for her in the darkness and her hand was there, waiting for him, and he put her fingers against his mouth and kissed them. As she followed the paths of the tears on his face, she started to cry out loud like a child. For a moment he wanted to quieten her – their pursuers would find them – but then he didn’t care any more. Her cries were, he thought, the sound of a life lived intensely and sensitively amidst the cruellest times. Then she was on her knees, holding his face, kissing him with those wide lips with their twist, their lovemaking like the final spasm of a dying body, flotsam on a wave, dust lost in dust.
‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you,’ she said when they were both still, on the edge of a spiky, fluttering mockery of sleep. ‘Something about my past.’
Was she already Malamore’s mistress? Benya wondered.
‘It’s about my husband.’
‘Malamore killed him during that skirmish. I know.’
He could feel her tension in the darkness.
‘You think too well of me,’ she whispered.
‘What are you saying, mia cara?’
‘Don’t you see?’
‘It was you?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘During the fighting in the village, Ippolito was panicking; and somehow I annoyed him and he slapped me, knocked me down. When I fell, his holster was right in front of me and I grabbed his Beretta, and I shot him right there. In the heart. He said nothing, just stared at me with such surprise and a sort of awe, and then … and then he died in front of me. The shooting was getting closer and I sprinted behind the cottages through the gardens and made it to where our troops were.’ She took a deep breath, shivering as she remembered. ‘I had to tell you. So you knew who I was.’
A pause.
‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ she said. ‘Che stupida.’
Benya’s mind was thrumming. What did this mean? Had she lied to him? What else was she hiding? Was she a murderess? He saw beneath her mantle of civilized velvet, a seam of the fiercest animal spirit. She had loved him and saved his life; and her impulsive deeds of kindness and courage filled him with wonder at her, and that was all that mattered to him. ‘It changes nothing,’ he said after a moment.
He felt her relax.
‘There’s one more thing, Benya,’ she said. ‘I would like you to give me something, a keepsake, that will always remind me of you. So I know you were real, and this really happened.’
He hesitated; then he reached into his pocket and handed her the only thing he had – a small key with a leather label that read ‘Only special personnel. Magadan Hospital. KOLYMA.’
She took it and he thought he heard her kiss it.
‘Somehow forever,’ he said.
‘Somehow forever,’ she replied.
VIII
Malamore walked out of the house and there, tying up their horses, were a German captain and a burly lieutenant. When the captain saluted, Malamore saw he was missing his other arm and that he had an Iron Cross at his throat.
‘Colonel Malamore, may I present myself. Von Manteuffel, Gerhard.’ He saluted with a click of the heels. ‘Captain. Intelligence Corps. Sixth Army. Lieutenant Kreutzer will remain outside.’
‘Come in,’ replied Malamore in perfect German. ‘We were waiting for you. I’ll get Dirlewanger.’
‘Actually, if I may be so bold, Herr Colonel,’ replied von Manteuffel. ‘I have orders from General Paulus himself to talk to you alone. Without Dirlewanger.’
Malamore was not surprised. This Captain von Manteuffel, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-seven, was one of those Prussian aristocrats who still filled the higher echelons of the Wehrmacht, and his answers were given in a cut-glass accent. He would, Malamore surmised, have a military pedigree; his forefathers had probably fought for Frederick the Great.
‘Cigarette, captain?’ asked Malamore when they were seated inside on the rough chairs of the peasant cottage. ‘An Africa?’
‘Grateful, Herr Colonel,’ said Manteuffel. ‘I’ve come to take possession of the Soviet defector Kapto and his intelligence materials. Colonel von Schwerin is in the field but will be here tomorrow to collect him and his maps. He’s ordered me to interview Kapto and take a preliminary look at the materials.’
‘I’ll get Kapto now.’
Kapto came in a few minutes later and saluted with theatrical confidence as if he had been auditioning all his life to play this part.
Manteuffel nodded back, and then said in perfect Russian: ‘You are now my responsibility. Colonel von Schwerin has asked me to make an initial evaluation. Are you ready to depart?’
The four men walked two houses down where Kapto’s horse was tied up.
‘Good,’ said Manteuffel. ‘The lieutenant will help you saddle the horse. Is there anything else?’
‘Yes,’ replied the doctor. ‘I must wake the child who’s sleeping inside this house.’
‘The child?’ Manteuffel sounded startled.
Peeping through the doorway, he saw a little girl sleeping on a couch and exchanged looks with Malamore. ‘Who is this girl? Is she your daughter, doctor?’
‘No, but she’s under my protection. She travels with me.’
‘I don’t understand—’ started Manteuffel.
‘She’s a patient.’ Kapto smiled, his lips turning up at the ends like a dogbone.
‘A patient?’
‘I found her wounded and, as a paediatrician, I say: Those we heal we must also cherish.’ He knelt beside the couch and shook her gently on the shoulder and she sat up, very pale, and looked around at them with her moon eyes.
‘Herr Captain,’ said Malamore, ‘I am glad Kapto is safely in your care. I have many matters to attend to … and I need to sleep. Goodbye, captain.’
They walked outside, and Malamore watched them ride away, the Germans on either side of the defector Kapto with the child on his knee.
Montefalcone and Dirlewanger were waiting for him in the house that they had made their headquarters.
‘We still haven’t found them,’
said Montefalcone. ‘We’ve lost many dead and more are wounded – all for the sake of a nurse. I propose we let them go and return to our duties.’
‘I’m here to annihilate the partisans. That was why the Reichsführer-SS brought me from Belorussia. I’ve sent for reinforcements,’ slurred Dirlewanger, swigging from a flask. ‘Meanwhile let’s hunt the Jew.’
‘This is not a task for us,’ said Montefalcone to Malamore. ‘They’ve shown some courage. The girl yes – and the Russian too.’
‘Courage?’ chided Dirlewanger. ‘It’s the courageous Jews we have to kill before the others. Christus! Oberarschloch! Super arsehole!’
‘The hunt goes on,’ Malamore ordered, standing on the verandah, looking up at the stars and listening to the battle. ‘Search every house, and every barn. I think they might be closer than we think.’
Day Nine
I
Benya awoke with a start. A safety catch had been clicked off, and the pistol was now so close to his forehead that he could feel the cold metal and smell the oil and the presence of strangers. He had expected this all along, seen it in his mind, and now here it was. But he was so weary that he did not care any more. Let them shoot me, he thought; a man can only run for so long. He feared to open his eyes, expecting to see Malamore’s scaly face. He waited for the impact, flinching. But nothing happened and then he heard another sound. God, it was laughter.
‘Morning, dedushka! It’s me, Granpa, wake up!’
Benya sat up and looked into the bright blue eyes of Prishchepa, who was beaming at him, fresh as a chaffinch, his blond hair standing up like a haystack.