Simon Montefiore - Red Sky at Noon

‘I could hardly choose you when I was unconscious,’ he joked, and a lazy drowsiness overcame them. Benya, usually so alert, became careless and languid, longing to enjoy the harvest night, the dense, treacley air, the lilac blackening in the mixed palette of the wide-slashed sky. They lay together, still naked, the air was so warm, and the horses settled, swishing their tails, their chests twitching to drive off flies – and she felt new muscles jumping in newly discovered sinews and chambers of her body. She had never understood why people fussed about sex – it had seemed as awkward as it was futile, like a language she couldn’t understand. But now, when time was so short, she had learned the language instantly.

Each time they awoke, they sipped brandy and feasted on the spread of stars on the banqueting table of the sky. She could taste the liquid pleasure on her lips, like melting toffee. The lava powered through her veins, fizzed in her skin and set off the weltering again within her, and her thighs came up again, and they made love between bouts of almost deliriously deep sleep. Around them they could feel the trees and sunflowers, the very earth itself, moving and buzzing as they were – as if they were resting on the back of a giant, stirring, breathing beast.

But soon the howitzers were building up once more. She saw the black-crossed bombers flying like giant stencils across the sky heading to demolish Stalingrad. The distant roaring was perhaps columns of tanks. Suddenly, over the Don Bend in the east, the sky was ripped wide open, turning a rage of red, as if it had been skinned to reveal the flesh beneath.

It was then that she knew what the intensity of the battle meant for them. Benya was risking his own life for her happiness, sacrificing it for something that could only be horribly short-lived. She should return to her people; she knew she could persuade Malamore she was innocent, to call off his pursuit, and she would make it home to Venice. But every day Benya lingered with her, there would be fewer Russians on this side of the Don. Soon there would be none and it would be nearly impossible for Benya to get back to the Soviet side. Malamore was chasing Benya because of her and if they caught him, a Jew, they would kill him. If he was ever seen with her by his own side, she would be the death sentence of the man who had given her the kiss of life. The threads of their dilemma were unravellable except by her leaving.

‘Darling Benya,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve decided. You were right: I must go back. Don’t try to dissuade me now. It is decided.’

He did not reply for a long time; then he sighed, knowing now how sometimes men perished because they were too weary to go on.

‘It’s too dark now to do anything. I think we bandits in love must stay together. Somehow forever. And for us forever means now. No one will find us here. Let’s decide what to do in the morning.’

The Kalmyks saw the clump of poplars and within it the roof of a peasant cottage. They stilled their horses and their own bodies and listened. They thought they heard the whinny of a horse but couldn’t be sure. Altan signalled at Gushi and they slipped their Schmeissers off their shoulders and dismounted deftly with barely a sound, peering through the granular lilac of the falling night.

This place was set perfectly on the route the Russian and the nurse would take if, as they suspected, they had chosen the indirect way back to the Don and the Russian lines. When the scouts had left Malamore, they had ridden hard back over the steppe around the other side of the village in a giant half-circle, starting again at the Italian headquarters, Radzillovo. When they saw the stream they let their mounts drink and then rode them into the water and along it, searching the banks for the tracks of two horses. And, sure enough, they had found the marks of hooves entering the water and they knew what the prisoner had done.

‘Not bad for a greenhorn,’ said Altan to Gushi as they tracked the place where the two horses came out of the stream and loped up to the cottage.

They listened; then they tied up their ponies, slipped off their soft boots and, clamping a djindal between their teeth, they crept on all fours closer to the cottage until they could just make out its gate, wattle fence, white windows. They were looking for horses but nothing moved. No smoke was rising from the house.

They looked at one another and Altan shrugged, gestured backwards and they rose to their feet and returned to the ponies. By now it was pitch dark. Even with the moonlight they would be unable to see properly and there were only two of them. So much could go wrong.

‘Why are we stopping?’ asked Gushi. ‘I sense they are here.’

‘Based on what, boy?’ asked Altan.

‘On the tracks on the ground – and the pulse in my throat,’ said the younger one. ‘We can cut his throat and take his ears back to the Italians and win promotion.’

‘And what if by mistake, shooting in the darkness, we harm her? The colonel’s mare! What promotion will we get then, puppy? We will be promoted to the noose, that’s what.’ Altan drew some dried camel meat from under his saddle and offered Gushi some distilled mare’s milk from his canteen. ‘Here’s the plan,’ he said. ‘We sleep here, and before it’s dawn we will catch them like rats in a trap.’

Lying against Fabiana, Benya was dreaming with the near-drugged abandon of one who has ridden all day, made love for hours and, finally feeling safe and inflamed and slaked, has fallen asleep in the copious, floating heat. He was back in Kolyma and it was a month after the start of war, in the summer of 1941.

At dawn, the guards burst into Benya’s barracks. ‘Get your belongings, Prisoner Golden. Davay! Davay! Work brigades leaving now! Back to the gold mines with you, fucking dog’s prick!’

Panic jittered through him. He remembered Jaba’s warning. He had lost his protection – that meant losing his cushy job in the clinic, and this was his punishment: back to the mines! This was his deepest fear. In nightmares, in daydreams, he saw himself marched back to the mines on the dark side of the moon. He would die out there, he knew it. Every day he expected it and now it had come.

The truck was waiting, engine gunning, and with terrible foreboding he climbed into the back.

‘Surprise!’ cried Smiley. ‘Haha! Look at that face, Boss!’

Deathless sneered, ‘You fell for it, didn’t you?’

‘All right, boys,’ said Jaba. ‘Join us, Benya. Good news. We’re being transferred to the hospital at Magadan – and you’re with us.’

‘Oh my God, I thought—’

‘I know what you thought. But you see, life is a plate of lobio beans,’ said Jaba and, banging the top of the truck, he called to the guards: ‘All right, let’s go!’

On the way, they talked about the war with the guards, hungry for the slightest titbit. Comrade Molotov had announced the war to the Soviet people with the words: ‘Our war is just. Victory will be ours.’ Then Stalin gave a speech addressing his people as ‘brothers and sisters’ and even ‘my friends’ – he must be worried, thought Benya, to call any of us ‘friends’! The radio reported triumphant counter-attacks but the guard whispered stories of defeat and collapse…

Jaba’s new headquarters was the Magadan Hospital, where all his boys now got jobs: Benya was still a feldsher , a medical assistant, and one of his jobs was to keep the key for the medical supplies room, a key with a leather label reading: ‘Only special personnel. Magadan Hospital. KOLYMA.’