Simon Montefiore - Red Sky at Noon

When he left Kolyma, it was the only thing he took with him, to remember the luck that had saved his life. But the job had its worries too: sometimes Smiley or Fats Strizkaz demanded morphine and Benya had to give them some – but not too much. If he was discovered handing out drugs, he would be transferred back to the gold mines; if he refused the Criminals, Jaba would destroy him, and as long as Jaba was happy, he felt he would be safe.

The news from the war was dire. Minsk and Smolensk fell. By September, Belorussia lost, the Baltics, Crimea gone! Leningrad – besieged! The Zeks, patients and doctors talked of nothing else… Several dying men even regained a hollow-eyed life-fire to discuss Russia’s fate. Ukraine and Kiev had fallen, a million Russian soldiers taken prisoner. Odessa fell to the Romanians – and Benya prayed for his parents. Then suddenly the Nazis were approaching Moscow! The reverberations of panic reached even distant Kolyma.

The moment he had finished that day on the ward for the dying, Benya, still wearing his white medical coat, rushed to see Jaba in his ‘clubroom’ where he held court. A card game was in progress with the Camp Trusty, Fats Strizkaz; and Prishchepa was singing the brigand song, and the others were joining in like a crew of crooning pirates: ‘ They’ve buried the gold, the gold, the gold… ’

‘What is it?’ asked Smiley.

‘I want to ask the Boss something.’

‘All right. It’s the professor, Boss, wants to talk.’

Jaba waved him in. ‘What is it?’

Benya gathered himself: ‘Boss, you own me and I would do nothing without your blessing but Moscow is in danger and the time has come for me to ask permission to join the Shtraf battalions,’ he said.

‘I told you never to ask me this again. On pain of death! Yet still you want to fight for the Bastard?’ The Bastard was always Stalin.

Benya looked around him. Prishchepa had stopped singing; Fats put down his cards; Deathless was playing with a switchblade.

‘You know what my answer could be?’ Jaba said softly.

Benya nodded.

‘Boss, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.’ It was Prishchepa, still young somehow, glossy as the dawn.

‘And this is also to do with the war?’ Jaba did not glance at him. ‘Speak, boy.’

‘Boss, I am a Don Cossack, a free man, a fighting man.’

A vein started to beat at Jaba’s temple. ‘Anyone else?’

‘I am going too,’ said Fats Strizkaz. ‘Otherwise it’s death, inch by inch.’

Then Smiley raised his hand: ‘Me too. There’s spoils in wars. You can get rich.’

‘And I heard there’s more girls than a man can handle,’ squealed Little Mametka.

Jaba started to snigger at that. ‘Oh, Bette Davis! What do you know of girls?’

They were all laughing but when they went quiet, Deathless was flicking the dagger back and forth. No one had ever defied Jaba like this.

‘Die for the Bastard if you wish, boys’ Jaba said finally. ‘But, Golden, you have a problem. You’re a Political.’

‘I know the rules but things that were impossible a week ago are possible today. Winter will come at any minute and this is my last chance to get the boat to the mainland. Only you can do this, Boss. You’ve saved my life. Please let me live it.’

Jaba caressed his grey plumage of hair. ‘You must bless the Atamansha. Remember the information I won from her about the Commandant? I knew I’d need it one day and now is that moment. Smiley, go to the Commandant’s assistant and make an appointment for me to see General Shpigelglas today. Tell them it is to discuss the production delay at Madyak-8. Go now!’

Jaba looked at Benya. ‘You see, Golden’ – he shrugged in his debonair way – ‘isn’t life just a bowl of lobio beans?’

In the clump of poplar trees amidst the Don plains, the uproar of the planes flying low over the steppe awoke Benya abruptly. The sun was not quite up yet; it was still dark but there was the spread of turquoise on the horizon. He had slept better than he could remember; and he turned to look at Fabiana, who was stretching. Sometime during the night they had pulled on their britches but she was shirtless and he was overcome with her beauty, her honey-coloured eyes, and his luck at being brought back to life like this. But Socks was stamping the ground, her ears back and eyes rolling white, and he understood instantly something was not right. Fabiana’s palomino too was standing rigid, skittering nervously.

‘Darling,’ Fabiana said very coolly.

‘Move quickly,’ he whispered. ‘Someone’s close.’ They worked together as if they had always been a team, saddling the horses, their hands shaking as they tightened the girths, checked the stirrups, attached the saddlebags and, pulling on their shirts, mounted the horses, who needed no encouragement. As they loped out, Socks reared, almost throwing Benya, and they saw the two fresh, scrawny ponies pulling at the ropes that tied them to a tree.

‘Kalmyks,’ Fabiana said. ‘Malamore’s scouts.’

Leaning down, she cut the ponies free; a burst of gunfire rang out at almost point-blank range, spanged into the earth close to them and Benya, sensing the two shadows lying in the grass, glimpsed the black snouts of their weapons. The two ponies bucked and then bolted with Socks and Violante breaking into a terrified gallop. Pouring sweat, silver hammers beating in his temples, Benya held on to Socks’s mane and found himself riding with Fabiana and the two bolting ponies down into the long steppe grass just as the sun came up. When they slowed down, he realized how lucky they had been. The Kalmyk scouts had staked them out, sleeping almost beside them, but no Kalmyk would risk shooting their own ponies and the animals had bolted, leaving them, temporarily, mountless. Nonetheless, Malamore and his horsemen must be close.

At 7 a.m., Svetlana Stalina, wearing school uniform and her red Pioneers’ scarf, climbed into a Packard limousine outside the triangular yellow palace in the Kremlin where she lived. Klimov sat in the front with the driver as they headed out of the Troitsky Gate across town towards the Josef Stalin Commune School 801.

At the school gates, the director – as the headmistress was known – Comrade Kapitolina Medvedeva greeted her, virtually bowing.

‘Well?’ whispered Martha as they went into their tedious Communist Morality class. Martha understood what it was like to be in love, to be a member of Moscow’s ‘golden youth’, but even she couldn’t conceive how it felt to be Stalin’s daughter. There was her father’s portrait in this very class – the man she saw every evening. At assembly every morning, they sang ‘May Comrade Stalin Live Many, Many Years’; at every dinner or lunch, everyone drank a toast ‘To Comrade Stalin’. But as her father had recently explained to her, ‘You’re not “Stalin” and I’m not “Stalin”. Stalin is something bigger. Stalin is Soviet power!’

Martha poked her in the side: ‘Have you seen him?’

‘Just twice,’ whispered Svetlana as the lesson began.

‘Letters?’

‘Several!’

‘Like the one you showed me?’

Sveta nodded. ‘“I want to kiss you, I want to smell you, I want to taste you”,’ she said, quoting what Lev had written to her.

‘He actually wrote that? Oh my God! What does that mean, Sveta?’

‘I don’t know, Marthochka. But I love everything he says, every word.’

‘How was the kissing?’

‘Amazing. Heaven!’ Svetlana suppressed her giggles. ‘I’m blushing! Yesterday he sent me a book as a present. In English.’

‘What? Something naughty?’

‘Yes. The new Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls .’