Simon Montefiore - Red Sky at Noon

‘Jaba has an old-fashioned idea of right and wrong, of loyalty,’ said Deathless.

‘The devil’s trident?’

‘We’re all his,’ said Smiley. ‘Sworn for life. If you obeyed the summons, you’d get this reward.’

‘So what does Jaba want in return?’

‘Here.’ Deathless reached into his canvas bag and pulled out the file. Benya opened it and there was the manuscript, typed by the secretaries in the Commandant’s office. ‘It’s draft seven of Jaba’s play. He wants your comments, says he’s been waiting for them for years and he’s got a bit stuck. He says he’s got something called writer’s block and that you were always the best teacher.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it. For now. Goodbye, Golden. We’ve got an apartment of watches and jewels from mansions and museums across Europe. In other words, we’ve got work to do,’ said Smiley.

‘But how do I give my comments to Jaba?’

‘Send a letter,’ replied Deathless. ‘He gets his mail. Goodbye, writer-in-residence.’

As the three Criminals walked away, Benya remembered something else. As Fabiana had passed, he’d heard a metallic ching, the sound of a small object dropped in a crowded station. He got down on his haunches, groaning a bit from his old wound, and then on all fours and searched the filthy floor. And he saw it: a key with a label. He stood up and turned it over in his hands. The label was light leather now much aged and worn but the words were still visible: ‘Only special personnel. Magadan Hospital. KOLYMA.’

Smiling that he had just seen the most ‘special personnel’ on earth, Benya staggered through the archways of the station out into the deserted streets of Moscow, dazzled and drunk with happiness and yearning. So this was the meaning of the crone’s prophecy – this was the child she foresaw, saved by the kind doctors of Magadan.

Would it be better if he had never known that Fabiana was alive and that his daughter Aurelia was in the world? He would never be able to kiss her, and that pain scorched him. And yet he was grateful that he did know. In a distant city, in Venice perhaps, Aurelia would look at the same sky as him, the same stars. Moon magic.

As he walked, he stopped with a horrible thought. Would Fabiana give Aurelia her husband’s name? He realized that this would be the best idea because she would not have the stigma of being illegitimate. Then it suddenly occurred to him that Fabiana, who thought of everything, had thought of this too: Aurelia did have his name. ‘Aurelia’ meant ‘Golden’ – and this touched him to the depths of his heart.

‘Oy, you walked right into me, you fucking dog’s prick,’ said Deathless. ‘Are you disrespecting me?’

‘Leave him alone,’ said Smiley. ‘He’s talking to himself like a madman and sobbing like a bitch.’

Benya had bumped into the three of them outside the station.

‘He’s lost his mind, the motherfucker!’ said Little Mametka.

Smiley poked Benya in the side. ‘Pull yourself together, cocksucker! Bye then!’ As they walked off, he heard Mametka asking what was wrong with him.

‘It’s the Italian girl, you idiot, and he’s found out he’s got a brat.’

‘What of it?’ said Mametka. ‘I’ve got brats all over the place.’

Smiley smacked him on the back. ‘Of course you have.’ He turned back and called out: ‘What was the brat’s name?’

‘Nothing,’ said Benya.

‘Did you catch your daughter’s name?’

‘Yes. It was Nobody.’

‘That’s the way to survive! Anything is possible but everything is a secret. You’ll read Jaba’s play?’

‘Yes, I will,’ said Benya, smiling through his tears. And he found he was fiddling with the key and its label. Under a streetlamp, he saw that on the raw leather of the disintegrating little label were some words that he could barely decipher. The ink had smudged on the soft leather but he turned it back and forth in the light until he could read what Fabiana had written:

You gave me this key to remember you.

Now I give it back because you gave me something better.

This is to help you remember us.

Somehow forever.

This is a work of fiction. The main characters, Benya, Fabiana, Jaba, Panka, Melishko, Kapto and many others, are entirely imagined and so is the story and the plot – and it should be enjoyed as a novel, no more no less.

Some of these characters, especially Benya and Satinov, appear in the other two novels in my series, Sashenka and One Night in Winter. This now completes my Moscow Trilogy, but this novel – like the others – stands alone. There is a special pleasure in writing about characters and families that one has come to know well – like old friends. This is a novel about love, survival, courage, life and death at a time and place of astonishing horror in what was perhaps the most atrocious moment in the human experience. It is also about a short, desperate relationship between a soldier and a nurse; all these novels are really about the agony and the magic of love – in any circumstances. And of course it is a novel of action, of horsemen on the steppes of Russia – and one of my favourite characters is not a human at all but a horse, Silver Socks.

Anyone interested in the novel’s plot, in my inspirations and in great books on these subjects should read on. The background of the penal battalions, Cossacks, Italians and Russian defectors are lesser-known parts of World War II history but many of the characters are instantly recognizable: Stalin, his daughter Svetlana and son Vasily, his henchmen Beria and Molotov, and his marshals Vasilevsky and Zhukov are accurate portraits, as is Budyonny, Cossack and breeder of the Budyonny horses. Many of the things Stalin says are based on his own words: for example sometimes he did telephone quite junior officers to encourage and threaten them in the heat of battle. The bizarre but fearsome idiosyncrasies of Stalin’s system of terror and favour are accurate too. As is the case with my character Melishko, some of Russia’s greatest generals were prisoners in Camps or prisons, having been arrested and tortured by Beria, but when the Nazis invaded on 22 June 1941 they were suddenly restored to their rank and welcomed by Stalin as if nothing had happened.

My Cossacks, their lore and songs and behaviour, are based on three masterpieces, first Red Cavalry and 1920 Diary by Isaac Babel, which tell how a Jewish writer rode with the Red Cossacks during the Civil War, and then Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel And Quiet Flows the Don, set amongst Don Cossacks during World War I. I have used these as sources for my Soviet horsemen. For the Italians in Russia, I have used as my source The Sergeant in the Snow by Mario Rigoni Stern, a novel/memoir that deserves to be read more.

Svetlana did have a love affair with an older Jewish screenwriter but actually it took place a year later than it does in the novel and his name was Alexei Kapler, not Lev Shapiro. He really did have the chutzpah to address her in a newspaper article and some of the story is based on Svetlana’s memoirs Twenty Letters to a Friend . As research for my histories I interviewed Martha Peshkova Beria, who appears in the novel: she was the granddaughter of the novelist Maxim Gorky and she married Beria’s son Sergo, who also features. When I interviewed her she was still a beautiful woman. To learn more on Stalin and these other characters, see my Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar .

In the novel, Hitler appears at his Ukrainian headquarters at Vinnitsa (code name: Werwolf). On 28 June 1942, he launched his southern offensive, Case Blue, to knock the Soviet Union out of the war. During the fighting on the plains, the villages are invented and so is the entire plot that takes place there but the battles of the Don Bend are real; the crisis was dire. Stalin, faced with this relentless German advance, created the penal battalions in his Not One Step Back decree 227 – and Benya’s experiences reflect how they worked, based on Penalty Strike: The Memoirs of a Red Army Penal Company Commander by A. V. Pulcyn. I have also used the classic books – Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad and Absolute War by Chris Bellamy. To create a realistic Soviet war journalist in Lev Shapiro I read A Writer at War by Vasily Grossman (edited by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova).