Simon Montefiore - Red Sky at Noon

‘Nurse Bacigalupe,’ she said cooly. ‘Are you thirsty?’ She gave him water. ‘Hungry?’

‘Very. What do we have? Carciofi alla romana ? Fiori di zucca fritti ? Spaghetti all’arrabbiata ?’

‘You know some Italian? Maybe you’ve even been there?’

He nodded.

‘Stop showing off now. You need to rest or I’ll have to leave.’

‘What? And send back that crocodile to finish me off? What about the food? Is that ever coming?’

Smiling and shaking her head, she brought him bread, cheese and tomatoes, cutting them up for him. She watched him eat: he so enjoyed it, he sighed and almost mewed aloud.

‘This is as good a meal as I’ve ever had in my entire life,’ he said when he finished.

‘You’ve had a hard time.’

‘You too,’ he said, quoting: ‘“I’m a widow. I entered the marriage with nothing and I came out with nothing.”’

‘ Cosa? How did you…’

‘You may not have been aware of it, but you’ve been talking to yourself. I heard it. I was awake.’

He had that high after surgery, before the anaesthetic wears off and the pain kicks in.

‘You were beaten,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘What happened?’

But he’d fallen back into unconsciousness, swooping through a confusion of images, all terrible, all overwhelmingly immediate, everything that he had forgotten, or had tried to. How he’d been sentenced to death, then the gold mines, the Splitter in the cavalry charge, the hands he’d seen reaching out of the earth, Melishko trapped under Elephant, Tonya and the shod man, the child and Dr Kapto. He was talking wildly in Russian and Fabiana understood phrases of it, and she went to him and stroked his forehead, calming, speaking softly to him, wiping the sweat that poured from him. Suddenly he started to weep, and she sat and held his hand until, as the sun rose higher in the sky and the heat became intense, he fell asleep.

She leaned over him. ‘Are you actually asleep now?’ she whispered tenderly. There was no reply. ‘I thought so.’

It was early evening and Klimov, Svetlana’s bodyguard, sat nervously in the hall of the apartment in the House on the Embankment just across the Moskva from the Kremlin. He was nervous because he could not see his charge. He smoked and listened; he was so fond of Svetlana. Her life was hard; she had lost her mother, and as for her father, well, he had other duties – so he, Klimov, did not want to spoil her fun. Surely a girl could go on a date? But she was his responsibility and he had to answer to Stalin who was not just the Tsar but also a Georgian father. He looked at his watch and became even more uneasy. She had been in the apartment for almost an hour. What was he to do?

Svetlana was in the kitchen with Lev Shapiro. The table was between them but they stared at each other across the spread of zakuski , salted fish and little vodka glasses. At first they said little. He was in uniform; she wore a floral dress. It was a hot summer’s evening in Moscow and she was so anxious that her palms were wet and she worried about the sweat under her arms: God forbid if it showed!

Lev Shapiro leaned across to her and took both of her hands in his big ones. ‘I’m so glad we could see each other,’ he said.

‘It wasn’t easy,’ she said.

‘Nothing priceless is easy,’ he replied. ‘And nothing easy is priceless.’

‘You leave tomorrow?’

‘Yes. To Stalingrad – before dawn. I have to be there…’ and he started to talk in a stream about ideas and projects, articles, journeys, scripts, impressions, which Svetlana found quite intoxicating. Wait, she wanted to ask about the script – was that a film or a play, and which newspaper was that article for, and what did Ehrenburg say to Grossman about whom?

‘But let’s not talk about that,’ he said suddenly.

‘But I wanted to ask about—’

‘We can’t waste time on that. You can ask me anything anytime. By letter. But here, now, every minute is golden. I had to tell you, Sveta, I’ve been thinking of you every minute since we met, since you wrote. It’s a strange and wonderful thing…’

‘Why strange?’

‘Well…’

‘Aren’t I too young?’

‘Yes, you are. You’re far too young, and yet you’re old too. You see things with an old soul and you’re so serious and so well read, I love to hear what you think of everything. And that’s why it’s the most unlikely thing and yet sometimes the most unlikely things are the best, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, yes!’ she said, longing suddenly to kiss him. She didn’t care that he was married or whatever he was. Actually she did want to ask about this too but what was the etiquette for that? She tried to remember in the nineteenth-century novels she had read: how did they discuss such things? She looked at Lev’s broad cheekbones, his thick head of hair, his wide, wide mouth – and they were still holding hands across the table.

Klimov was beginning to panic. What if his boss General Vlasik heard about this? What if Stalin heard? An angry Georgian father is a fearsome thing even when he isn’t the Man of Steel, the Father of Peoples, the Leader of the World’s Proletariat, the Supreme Commander, Chairman of the State Defence Committee, General Secretary and… but Stalin was all these things! He stood up, pacing. He had to call a halt to this right away. His dear little Svetlana deserved some love but this flashy scribbler, this Jew, was forty and married! This was a terrible mistake. He had to stop it at once.

He coughed, and then coughed again, more loudly.

‘Svetlana, I am coming in,’ he called out, ‘in a couple of minutes.’

They were running out of time. They stood up, and he leaned over and pressed his lips to Svetlana’s – just for a second; a hesitation, then all of a sudden they were kissing wildly. He seemed to devour her – like a lion of course. The feelings raced through her and she was dizzy with it. She could not make love to him – that was out of the question! Her father would never allow sex before marriage but oh my God she wanted more…

Klimov was listening outside. He had to do something, right now. He had to! If the girl lost her virginity – oh God, he would be finished, he would die in the Gulags, ground to Camp dust. He’d get the Eight Grammes!

He knocked at the door. ‘Svetlana! We must go!’

But Lev had seized her for another kiss and she was devouring him back just as fiercely. There was something so heavenly about the feelings of two people so in love, so perfectly attuned – Svetlana had never experienced such delight. Finally, staggering as if she was drunk, she stepped back.

Lev smiled at her. ‘God, I loved that! I loved kissing you!’ he whispered. Then, still whispering, he said, ‘Read every one of my articles and I will send my little Lioness special messages! I will call you and if you can’t talk, say “I’ve got too much homework”; if you’re thinking of me, say “The flowers in the Alexandrovsky are blossoming” and—’

‘And if I want to tell you I love you and want you every second, what then?’

‘Say “The little Lioness is hungry”.’

‘Oh my God,’ Svetlana whispered, steadying herself on the table. ‘The Lioness is hungry.’

The Red Cross tent was empty; Il Primo was gone. For a moment, Fabiana panicked. It was too soon for him to get up. He had been delirious for much of the morning, shouting about death sentences and the shoeing of a man and shovels and sabres. He was not fit to be up. Had he wandered off? Had someone taken him? She had an idea of who or what he was, and the thought that he might have been arrested stole her breath like a punch to the stomach. She ran out of the tent, looking one way and then the other.