Simon Montefiore - Red Sky at Noon

‘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!

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 grit in all of us.’