Simon Montefiore - Red Sky at Noon

Benya pulled the saddle off Spider’s horse and put the shabraque under his head. Garanzha gave him his hand, squeezing it like a child. He peered up at Benya and his eyes – one minute they looked back at him and the next they didn’t. That was all it was, a slither of a second and Garanzha seemed part of the bank, of the mud, the hulk of an old wreck half sunk in the sand.

Benya took a breath, remounted Silver Socks and spurred her forwards, whipping her once with Garanzha’s quirt so that she bucked and reared right into the water, splashing his face, and then she was up to her girth again, higher, as the black water enveloped him amid the sheeting rain that was so thick it seemed as if the river itself was raining upwards into the clouds. Socks was in the river up to her point of shoulder, her withers and croup, and he was leaning forward, holding her mane, and then she was swimming, her head high, her legs pumping, pumping under the water, thick veins pulsating in her neck.

‘Go on, Silver Socks, go on, good girl…’ Benya was saying close to her ears. Something heavy touched him and he flinched. Socks was thrashing beneath him, and he was gulping water, about to flounder – was it a snake, a crocodile? Then he saw the arm and the blue face of a Russian soldier floating downriver, swollen like an overstuffed sofa. They were in the middle of the Don, the banks as far behind as ahead, and a shell flashed whining over their heads, the banks whorling and erupting and churning in yellow and orange. Machine-gun fire raked the water, and a dancing line of serpentine splashes spanged around him again and again.

‘You fools, we’re Russians!’ Benya shouted but no one could hear him; he couldn’t hear himself. Then Socks’s hooves found the solid riverbank, the water washed off them with a swish, and they were out of the water on the stones of the Don beach. Alone. Machine-gun fire chugged across the stones, so close he felt it punch him. Benya leaned forwards and hugged Silver Socks. Panka and Prishchepa were calling him up the bank. Silver Socks fell to her knees suddenly, Benya collapsing beside her.

It was pitch dark now, almost midnight, and Socks was holding her head up high, rocking back and forth, and Benya was beside her on the stones of the riverbank, stroking her neck, her mane, her satiny muzzle.

‘Silver Socks, how I love you, darling friend, darling friend,’ he sobbed. ‘Thank you for all you’ve done for me, for saving me a thousand times. No man ever had a better friend than you and I didn’t think… I just didn’t think…’ He remembered the glow of her four silver legs at the stud farm, and the starflash on her face. ‘You chose well with that one, brother,’ Panka had said. ‘Tend her like a wife. Respect her like a mother. Feed her like a daughter.’ But she’d been more than all those things to him. He remembered the charge against the Italians, the way she’d watched as he made love to Fabiana… Then her head was down, and a shudder ran through her, and Prishchepa and Panka were pulling him up the bank until all three were lying at the top, panting, their horses standing nearby.

‘Mogilchuk?’ asked Benya.

‘Down the bank somewhere. He’s OK. I saw him ride out.’

‘Silver Socks?’

‘Gone, my brother,’ replied Panka.

‘Shot?’

Panka nodded. ‘One in the neck. She was quite a horse. Not many born like that. Even on the Don.’ He handed Benya the flask. They stood up, swaying. Benya was half mad with grief, scorched and desolate, and he felt his midriff and saw the blood on his finger.

‘I’m hit,’ he said, remembering the punch.

Hands gripped him.

‘Hold it,’ said Prishchepa, his eyes utterly cold, his dagger in his other hand. ‘Mogilchuk’s coming for us now. We’ll be checked out by the Cheka. You need to vouch for us. Say that this week we were with you every minute. Or they’ll shoot us. Swear it, Zhid, or I’ll cut your throat now and we’ll say what we need to say about you. Say it right now!’

Benya shook him off. He didn’t care where they’d been for those days; he guessed they had been somewhere, guessed they had played some double game out there with the Nazis, but right now he was too tired and angry to be spoken to like this. He’d lost Fabiana; Silver Socks had died in his arms; now these goons were threatening him, and they had no idea that he was way past rock bottom. ‘I can do better than that… Drop the knife. Step back!’ he said.

‘We know where you were too,’ said Prishchepa. ‘You weren’t alone. We know things too…’

Benya sank to his knees, weakness creeping up on him in flickerings of dizziness, but a hopeless and doom-laden fury made him fearless. How dare they threaten him with Fabiana? He pointed his pistol at them, keeping them covered, feeling the power within him. Beside Prishchepa, Panka mouthed his prayers, touching his necklace, serene, always himself: ‘I’m not going anywhere ,’ he said.

Prishchepa switched on his happy-go-lucky bandit’s charm. ‘Wait a moment, dear brother Golden—’

Suddenly Benya could not tolerate any more.

‘I’m not your brother,’ he said, raising his pistol and firing twice.

Unshaven and weary but bursting with the images and phrases he wanted to use in his articles, Lev Shapiro was in the hospital train heading back to Moscow, his typewriter in its case over his shoulder. He was walking up through the wagons: some were old ones from Tsarist passenger trains with soft seats worn smooth by generations; others had old hard seats; some were from cattle cars – all were full of wounded. The walking wounded sat on the seats but every inch of the floor was crammed with broken men, some lying on bare wooden planks in the cattle cars, groaning with the lurching of the train; others were lucky enough to be on stretchers. Some smiled at him as he stepped over them; and he noticed a couple who were so still, so grey they were probably already dead. And all around him came the sound of groaning, of men crying for the doctor, or their mothers or for God. Shapiro was accustomed to such things but it was still hard to hear. Always the reporter and observer, his notebook was out.

‘What sector were you in?’ he asked a man with bandages over one eye who was well enough to sit up on a wooden seat. ‘I want to tell your story.’ To a Tartar boy from Kazan, who had lost his arm: ‘What section were you in, what happened?’ He crouched beside the men, taking notes, and they could see that he had been with the troops and suffered with them and they were happy to talk to him. They wanted their stories to be known. He walked on, thinking about the battle and then his secret, Svetlana… If they knew who his sweetheart was, would they believe it?

He looked around him at the wounded from the battle of the Don Bend which had ended so badly. First the Germans had been on the attack. Then the Russians had counter-attacked in all sectors, fighting heroically. At one point, he had even witnessed a small squadron of Shtrafniki cavalry break through an Italian sector. But Hitler had brought up reinforcements – Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Romanians – and thrown them all at the Russians. At Izbushensky, a thousand Italian cavalry had smashed through Soviet infantry who turned and ran; at Kalach, the last Russian forces of the 62 ndArmy had been broken. Now the Germans could advance – they were already crossing the Don on great pontoons and pushing on to the outskirts of Stalingrad.

Lev had been ordered to report to his editor in Moscow and had hitched a lift back on the train. He was excited because he would get the chance to see Svetlana – his little Lioness! The bleak Kremlin with its forbidding red battlements, her terrifying father who lived only for himself and the state, her mother who had preferred death to her children, her pathetic, vicious brother who was both crushed and overpromoted – this was her world. Lev was fascinated by her. As a man, he found her so fresh, so youthful; and as a writer, well, what writer would not want to know all about her? She was at the centre of history.