Simon Montefiore - Red Sky at Noon

‘I adore this countryside,’ he had said when he had woken properly earlier in the afternoon. The patient was certainly a chatterbox. Madonna! He never stopped, but he seemed interested in every detail of her life: her parents, what books she read, what were her dreams, her first loves, why did she speak Russian, and then how she felt about her marriage… No one had ever been interested in how she felt – certainly not her husband, who had scarcely asked her about herself in their four years together. In fact Patient Number One was more like her favourite girlfriends back home, but cleverer, and he was so funny as he switched between Russian and Italian, the very antithesis of Malamore who ground out his words as if conversation was a stone pressed within a vice. When Il Primo talked about himself, it was about his taste in beauty, in books, in horses, in Italy, in writing…

‘How can you love these grasslands?’ she replied. ‘So endless! So flat! A horizon that steals your soul. There’s nothing for mile after mile… How can you love it? I think of the hills of Tuscany, the cliffs of Amalfi, the lagoon of Venice, anything but this wilderness.’

‘What I adore is the sunflowers,’ he’d replied. ‘We rode through them, frosted by dust. The sun beat down, and their faces seemed to smile at me, the only smiling faces in a land devoted to gunpowder and murder.’

She absorbed this.

‘There’s a huge field of sunflowers right outside the village.’

‘Really?’

That’s where he would be, she decided. He’d gone to see the sunflowers.

She ran out of the village, cursing her white, frilly nurse’s uniform, which being Italian was more elaborately feminine and less practical than that of any other nation, out on to the steppe, across a field of unharvested rye – and there he was: a frail figure wearing the fresh khakis she’d dressed him in, holding her bottle of Crimean wine, looking out at the sea of sunflowers.

‘ Maledetto bastardo! Che il diavolo ti porti! What the hell are you doing out here? Who said you could move? How dare you?’ she shouted at him, furious that he’d put himself at risk like this. She grabbed the wine bottle out of his hand.

‘Well, you found me,’ Benya said. Awakened from his last sleep, he felt superlatively clear-headed and alive, almost reborn.

‘You frightened me,’ she said, feeling calmer.

‘Did I?’ he said. ‘And you noticed I’d gone? You cared?’

‘Haven’t you noticed, maledetto bastardo , you’re my only patient? Of course I noticed!’

‘So you can swear too?’ He beamed at her. She realized he was used to being loved, admired, and she fought the urge to admire him in her turn. He was a patient with no name. Soon he would go. But where? She handed him the peaked cap he’d been wearing when they found him.

‘It’s for the sun. You’ll get burnt. I’m used to this heat but you’re pale…’

He looked at the cap. ‘It’s Italian,’ he said.

‘It is. It’s why they didn’t shoot you.’

Benya put it back on, thinking, Dr Kapto must have put this on me, to give me a better chance of getting away. Again, as with Ganakovich, he was confounded by the actions of men.

‘Come inside. We need to go back to the tent. It’s not safe out here…’

‘I don’t know if it’s safe inside,’ he replied.

She stood beside him. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. You mean, for you?’

‘Yes, for me.’

She thought of Malamore and his Blackshirted friends, of Dirlewanger and the SS. ‘That depends on who you are.’

Benya sighed. ‘I’ve got to go. Now. Today.’

‘You’re not better. You might haemorrhage. The fever could return. Your shoulder could open up again.’

‘I doubt that. Not after your beautiful work.’

‘Who are you? I know you’re a Russian and you speak some Italian. Are you…?’

Benya caught his breath. This was it, the moment when she could turn him in, end his life. ‘Are you asking as a woman, a nurse – or as an Italian soldier?’

She blinked, and he could see her thinking this through. ‘Can’t you tell?’

‘The crocodile Malamore is a Fascist, isn’t he, a real believer?’

‘Do I seem like one myself?’

‘I just don’t know.’ Benya thought of Kapto and Tonya. He didn’t know anything any more. Human nature never ceased to surprise him in its whiplash cruelties and haphazard kindnesses.

He stared at Fabiana, into her eyes – they were a dark brown, and then the sunbeam fell on her face and the brownness turned to the lightness of honey, and he suddenly realized what he already knew, that he was going to trust her. Even amidst these quicksands. In reality, he had no choice.

‘My name is Benya Golden.’

‘Benya Golden.’ Fabiana savoured the name, said it twice.

‘ Oh Dio , it sounds lovely in Italian,’ he said. ‘But then everything sounds better in Italian.’

‘So you are Red Army lost behind our lines? Madonna santa! ’

She looked back into the village. Soon someone would notice they were out here talking or Malamore might ride up with his SS comrades.

‘Can we walk a little into the field of sunflowers? Please accompany me.’

She shook her head but she walked beside him.

‘Tell me about your childhood in Venice… Fabiana, if may?’

She started to answer but then she stopped. ‘I haven’t asked you a thing about yourself. I’ve been wondering, trying to guess, what you did in peacetime.’

‘I want a sip of wine before I get into that,’ he said, and he took back the bottle from her and pulled out the cork.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘You can’t drink. The anaesthetic, the painkillers.’

‘Really?’ He looked anxious, and for a moment this made her beam.

‘I bet in real life you’re a hypochondriac,’ she teased him.

‘Of course I am, but not today. I am unlikely to make it anyway. Allow me this,’ and he took a swig from the bottle. ‘I love Massandra wine and one day I’ll tell you about the Crimea. Now your turn.’

She looked around. Nothing. Just the sky of eggshell blue, the sun, and the tall sunflowers with their golden faces and black fringes, dusted by chaff, on every side of them. ‘I can’t. I’m on duty…’

‘Are you? I think you’re in the Secret Kingdom of Sunflowers where you can do anything. We’re in a dimension outside the real world, and here we’re free for the first and only time in this war. You’re free of the army and your dead husband and Malamore, and I’m not a soldier, a prisoner, or even a patient. I have no past in the Secret Kingdom of Sunflowers. There are only two inhabitants of the kingdom, and one is often angry, and sticks out her chin, and waves her finger – and one is just grateful to see her angry as often as possible because it makes her look magnificent. Besides, Fabiana, if you don’t drink, I won’t tell you anything. Deal?’

‘An Italian regards it as sacrilege to drink from a bottle…’

‘Like cutting pasta?’

‘Exactly. Or eating it with a spoon.’

‘Dammit,’ said Benya, ‘we’re lucky to be alive. I think Bacchus will forgive you. Go on, sit down.’

‘This stupid white uniform, I’ll get grass stains on it and—’

‘Just drink then.’

She took the wine and drank from the bottle. Benya sank down, his strength ebbing, sapping his sight, which had started to blur; he sighed and recovered, the wine recharging him.

‘I was arrested, sentenced to death, reprieved and sent to the Gulags. But I got this fresh chance of life.’

‘And this torture and getting shot is your wonderful new start?’ Fabiana asked, kneeling down beside him.