Simon Montefiore - Red Sky at Noon

Then he heard the soft voice: ‘Benya, it’s me. Are you there?’

‘Here!’

Fabiana rode towards him on her palomino. ‘You took no weapons. I forgot to give you these.’ She handed over a Parabellum, a couple of grenades, a Papasha with the ammunition, and she had a rifle in her scabbard on the horse’s flank. ‘I didn’t know which to take.’

‘Thank you, but you stole too many. They’ll notice. Take the rest of these back, and hurry!’

‘OK,’ she said but she did not move.

‘I must ride on. I meant to say – I’ll never forget you, or what you’ve done for me, everything—’

‘Va bene ,’ she whispered. ‘Somehow forever.’ And she made the extravagant gesture he was familiar with. Briskly he put the Parabellum in his belt, the PPSh over his shoulder, and the ‘zincs’ that held the ammunition for its drum-like magazine in his saddlebags, passing the rifle back to her. She slipped the rifle into her scabbard. He mounted Silver Socks and looked back at her.

Fabiana hadn’t moved. He turned Socks around. She was still there.

‘Right! Thank you. I must go, Fabiana, and you must go back right now. Vai subito! Arrivederci. ’

She turned the palomino but in a circle and ended up closer to him. ‘You know, Il Primo, I can’t go back. Not now. You have your horse and your guns and you are gone. They will know and they will shoot me for treason.’

Benya absorbed this in a second: the Italians would presume he was taking a hostage; they would hunt them down; and probably they would die together. It was not what he had planned, but he knew she was right. In bringing him the weapons, she’d put herself in supreme danger. ‘So we ride together. But we must go now!’

The horses were nervous; Socks stamped; there were shouts from the village; lights were going on; and then the first shot rang out.

Benya leaned over and smacked the rump of her horse with his quirt. Violante reared up and almost bucked Fabiana off but she stayed on and then they were galloping. A volley of machine-gun fire thwanged over them and Benya could see muzzle flashes from the village and the pirts of dust on the ground rising from the impacts. A bullet chinged right off his stirrup. A searchlight cast a beam into the dark, seeking them. At this rate, they would shoot him like a dog. He seized her horse’s bridle and pulled Fabiana closer: ‘Stay next to me.’ The searchlight found them and suddenly Benya could see her clearly in boots and britches and khaki, the bustina on her tied-up hair – he thanked God she wasn’t wearing her snow-white nurse’s outfit – and he levelled the Papasha right at her, knowing the Italians could see her too, and sure enough, the voices cried out, ‘Fabiana!’ and then to him: ‘Let Fabiana go!’ But the shooting had stopped. They wouldn’t kill her, he knew this, when it was he they wanted.

Using Fabiana as a shield, he kicked both horses on until they were out of range and the moon was high on that silvery summer night, lighting up the high grasses and the sunflowers and the rye. And, all the time, there she was beside him, concentrating on the riding, spurring her palomino, dressed for this, and he realized that sometime that evening she had made a reckless decision and now they would both live with the consequences. There was a glint of something he hadn’t seen in her before, and sometimes, when he looked back at her, she smiled as she rode, her white teeth bright in the moonlight.

It was morning in the Kremlin, and Svetlana was wide awake, and thinking about Lev Shapiro. Waking up early was a symptom of being in love, she decided, but love is the only illness everyone wants to catch.

In a few days, she had gone from the ideal Soviet schoolgirl, the diligent student, to a lover, a dreamer, and now she did not care about her homework at all. She kept looking at the phone. She had given Shapiro the number of her private line to her apartment, the one used by herself, Klimov and the housekeeper. She waited, then waited some more; then it started to ring. She was about to answer on the first ring but would that seem desperate, too keen. She held her breath, counting four rings, five, six, and then she picked it up.

‘ Ya sluzhoo, ’ she said. ‘I’m listening.’

The phone line echoed and pranged, a sonar echo fathoms away, and she imagined telegraph poles and wires across steppes, rivers, farms stretching away, a fragile line of communication between herself and her lover.

‘It’s me, Sveta,’ he said at last. ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Yes, yes. Wait a moment.’ She jumped up and closed the door so the housekeeper and her nanny would not hear. ‘Now I’m here. The flowers are blossoming in the Alexandrovsky Gardens! How are you?’

‘I’m at the front in the headquarters bunker.’

‘And where is that?’

The throatiness of his virile voice echoed down the rough, reverberating line. ‘My location is top secret except I can tell you it’s a town with your name.’

She laughed too. ‘You’re talking in such deep code that no one could possibly break it.’

‘I know.’ There was a pause. ‘Are you on your own?’

‘Yes.’

‘I just have to tell you, darling Sveta, that I want to kiss you again, passionately, deeply.’

‘Oh my God,’ she answered, her heart syncopating, almost melting into the mouthpiece.

‘No, really, I can still smell your skin. Taste your lips.’

Svetlana took a deep breath. ‘I want to kiss you too. I wish you were here. I can’t work. I am bored by my studies.’

Shapiro groaned. ‘If we’d only been alone…’

‘If we had been?’

‘If your detective hadn’t been waiting for you.’

‘Oh, he was listening to everything, but we managed to kiss,’ she crowed. ‘And what a kiss!’

‘Was it your first kiss?’

She nodded. ‘Is it bad if it was my first? Am I too much of a novice for you? Will you be bored of me?’

‘No, it’s charming, it’s delightful. It makes it so special for me. And we had so much to talk about as well. I want to know what you’re reading, what you’re thinking – but we don’t have time now. Now I must tell you the essential things, which are that I am thinking of you in the bunker in the city with the famous name on the Volga, and that I want to kiss you again now. Immediately.’

‘I burn for you too,’ she whispered.

There was a gap in the conversation. She heard voices like ghosts ricocheting down the line. And then Shapiro was back again, his voice sounding more urgent. ‘I have to go. All the correspondents have to use this phone. Grossman is waiting and he’s getting impatient. He wants to know who my girlfriend is…’

‘Will you tell him?’

‘God no. You’re a secret. For so many reasons.’

‘Will you be safe?’

‘For you, sweetheart, yes. The fighting is desperate here. But this city won’t fall. Sveta, we will win.’

‘Kisses, Lev, darling Lion. Call me again. Soon.’

‘I’ll call you every spare hour I have, I promise, darling Lioness. I’m sending you a kiss down the phone. Here! Can you feel it? It’s travelling from this bunker on the Volga all the way to you. It’s a sacred vibration. Love sends it. Can you feel it?’

‘Yes, I can feel it. Here’s one from the Kremlin. Across great rivers and steppes and bridges.’

A pause: ‘I’ve got it. Till tomorrow. I kiss you, darling.’

Svetlana put the phone down. The blush ran up her body, emanating from her middle, her thighs, to her feet and up to her neck and lips, to every spot of her body. She closed her eyes. In a few days she had changed completely. She was no longer merely Stalin’s daughter. A beautiful brave man in a bunker faraway in Stalingrad was thinking of her, and she – she was someone’s darling, someone’s secret.