Simon Montefiore - Red Sky at Noon

‘Venice. Alpini. The Tridentine Division.’

‘What’s your father do?’

‘Cheesemaker. I work with him.’

Benya longs to grab the boy and run away with him to safety. ‘I was in Venice once.’

The hope rises in the boy’s lamb eyes. ‘I could make you polenta, spaghetti,’ he says. ‘I’ll cook for you. I was just cooking it up for my unit when—’ He feels Garanzha’s gaze.

‘I’ll take care of him, Garanzha,’ says Benya.

‘No,’ says Garanzha in his gentle, detached voice. ‘Ganakovich gave me my orders. I’ll escort him back to our lines.’ He gestures to the boy, who gets to his feet. They walk through the graveyard and out into fields. Benya watches them as they get smaller. He feels numb; he wants to get a grip but everything is slippery and runs through his fingers. He knows he won’t see the boy again.

There’s howling from a nearby house. Benya looks sideways and Smiley comes out through the garden, chuckling and wiping his hands on his trousers. There is more weeping as Fats Strizkaz looms in the doorway, pig-drunk and lairy, and barrerls in while just outside Little Mametka, poky-faced except for luxuriant lips, lingers like a randy schoolboy outside a cathouse.

Benya is afraid of Smiley though grateful to him for many things. ‘How could you?’ he asks now.

‘Fancy swimming in my milk?’ Smiley stands in front of Benya, who notices his maddened red eyes set in his strangely handsome face. ‘Be my guest, Jewboy.’

‘You… forced her?’

‘Are you a priest? Never.’ Smiley shakes his head. ‘A dog doesn’t harass an unwilling bitch. What about you, Mametka? Keen to lose your cherry?’

‘I’ve had women,’ pipes up Mametka.

Fats Strizkaz snorts as he slams the door of the house behind him – the weeping is now quieter – and stamps up the garden path. ‘No, you haven’t, you lying little eunuch. Your voice hasn’t even broken. You’ve never touched a woman, have you, Bette Davis!’ Strizkaz was a former Chekist interrogator – until arrested himself. A Trusty in Kolyma, he has kept his connections to the secret police so the men humour him. But no one forgets what he was.

Smiley pokes Mametka in the side. ‘You going to put up with that, Mametka?’

‘Ignore him,’ says Benya. ‘Come on, let’s go and see the horses.’

‘Horses? Riding horses is all Mametka can do with his little woodpecker; he couldn’t do a woman if he wanted, could you, Bette Davis?’ leers Strizkaz.

‘Not funny. Not funny,’ says Mametka timidly. ‘I won’t put up with it.’

‘What’s that? You’ll put up with it if I say you fucking put up with it,’ replies Strizkaz. ‘Won’t you, Bette Davis?’

‘You should apologize, Fats,’ says Smiley in what Benya thinks is a statesmanlike, League of Nations-peacekeeping manner. ‘I think you’ve gone a little far, eh?’

Strizkaz smirks but takes no notice.

‘Ignore him, Mametka,’ says Benya, concerned that Smiley and Strizkaz will come to blows. ‘Look!’

On the village street, Captain Zhurko rides in. Ganakovich, clearly in despair, rushes out to meet him. ‘Where are supply carts? Where’s the guns? Where are the communications people?’ he shouts, waving his arms.

‘I don’t know! How can I know?’ This is the sensible voice of Zhurko. ‘No one followed us.’

‘And where’s the rest of the battalion?’

‘I rode back towards our lines. There are Fritzes everywhere, tanks and guns, and none of ours.’

‘The Kalmyk said we got lucky. We found the Italians. But now we’re on our own.’ Ganakovich gulps. ‘Where’s Melishko?’

A silence.

‘We need Melishko.’

Benya feels sick. Surely these two fools can’t be right?

‘Melishko will come,’ says Zhurko decisively. ‘Melishko will know what to do.’

Afterwards Koshka joins Benya. He has been listening too.

‘Maybe this wasn’t a victory after all,’ he whispers hoarsely. ‘Maybe we’re lost!’

In Stalin’s apartment in Moscow, Svetlana was alone and miserable. She could tell by the looks the teachers gave her at school that she was an outcast, albeit a much revered, almost sacred one. Although her father was the greatest man alive, her teachers were afraid of her; many of the boys and girls avoided her and she knew their parents told them to have nothing to do with her.

Her father sometimes stayed with her in the Kremlin apartment, especially when the war was in crisis, but more often he visited her after his meetings and then drove out to his real home, the Nearby Dacha at Kuntsevo, twenty minutes outside the city. In the apartment, she lived with her devoted nanny, her cook, and Mikhail Klimov, her bodyguard from the secret police. Her father was so busy with the war that he had little time for her, but Svetlana still worried about him. The stress, she knew, was almost unbearable. No other man could take it. Her elder brother Vasya – Colonel Vasily Stalin – certainly couldn’t. He had just been cashiered for his outrageous and drunken behaviour. He had taken some of his men fishing but instead of fishing rods, Vasya had thrown grenades into the river and one of his men had been killed. Her father had been furious.

She sighed and looked at the newspapers as she always did in the evening and there it was in the Red Star . Another article by her favourite correspondent Lev Shapiro.

Sometimes even the lowest can perform like heroes. In the early hours, I caught a lift on the ferry across the Don and saw one of the new Shtrafbats go into action to defend our positions holding the Don Bend. They were outfitted on horseback with Marshal Budyonny’s Cossack mounts and I saw them gallop into battle in squadrons. As Shtrafniki, they were criminals, cowards, officers cashiered for retreating without orders, rightly sentenced for crimes, but thanks to the ingenuity of our Great Stalin in Order 227, they have been given this new chance to redeem their sins and serve our Motherland. They were a mixed crew of misfits and criminals and there was even one writer. But their spirit showed the genius of Comrade Stalin in giving them this opportunity to bleed and be rehabilitated, for they were patriots longing to serve.

In a scene that would quicken every heart, the squadrons of eight hundred horsemen recalled some of the finest moments in our great Russian history, fighting against vicious invaders – the Teutonic Knights, the Swedes, the French and now the Hitlerites. They file into position. ‘It’s always sunny in the saddle,’ says an old Cossack, a veteran of Budyonny’s Red Cavalry; and then their commander, a Colonel Melishko, says, ‘You can’t get me!’ and his men cheer. Then he shouts: ‘Draw your sabres,’ and I see the blades flash; then: ‘Forward! Charge!’ and, with their sabres held at an oblique angle, the curved steel glinting above their heads, I hear them shout, ‘For Stalin! For the Motherland!’ and, under brutal cannonfire, they charge the Nazis and fall in their droves – but some break through to terrorize the invaders… It’s a sight that brings tears to my eyes: how can any Russian reading this not weep at such courage?

Tears ran down Svetlana’s cheeks too. She had to write to this man to tell him that she adored his work. She reached for a pen and paper and wrote in a rounded girlish hand:

Dear Lev Shapiro,

Forgive me for writing to you. I know you are busy. But I just wished to express to you that for this reader at least your writing is truly a service to our Motherland and is read keenly here.

It is late afternoon as Benya walks through the village. Each house has its gated wattle fence at the front, and a back yard leading to a garden festooned with vines and cherries.