Simon Montefiore: One Night in Winter

‘Have you read it?’

‘No, I didn’t have time – but you obviously have. Are you offering to brief me?’

‘It’s a romantic manifesto that could be described as bourgeois sentimentalism…’

George hesitated for a moment. ‘Thanks for the warning – but Pushkin is the Party’s favourite poet. I’m just worried about Nikolasha finding out I lost it.’ He waved it away genially. ‘So let’s keep this between ourselves and I’ll find a way to say thank you. I’ll see if I can get you into the Fatal Romantics’ Club.’

‘I would like that,’ replied Andrei, letting go of the book as it disappeared into George’s satchel.

‘It won’t be easy to get you in,’ George continued. ‘Nikolasha’s a fanatic. But you really should be a member – you know your Pushkin better than any of us.’

Andrei opened his hands, palms up, as his curiosity got the better of him. ‘One final thing. What is the Game?’

George was already half out of the door but he turned back. ‘It’s Nikolasha’s obsession. You’ll find out. For now, we’ve got to eat lunch. Will you join us in the gym?’

The gym was usually empty for lunch and the children ate their sandwiches perching on its chairs and soft mats. But when George and Andrei found the girls, Minka was obviously upset. ‘Look what’s happening to my little brother,’ she said.

The Director of Physical Education, the moustachioed Apostollon Shuba, was standing with one hand on the wooden horse and a whistle in his mouth. His face was a deep shade of teak. A class of younger children in shorts and T-shirts stood to attention in a line on the other side of the horse. Alone at the far end of the gym was the frail figure of Senka Dorov, whom Andrei had last seen at that morning’s drop-off with his father. Senka looked as comfortable in sports kit as he would in a deep-sea-diving outfit. He gave his sister a beseeching ‘rescue me’ look with his big brown eyes, but it was too late.

‘Right, boy,’ Shuba barked. ‘Fifth attempt! No one leaves until you get over the horse!’

‘But I never will,’ said Senka in his high voice.

‘Defeatism is not Soviet!’

‘I’m not one of your strapping horse-vaulting heroes. Surely even you can see that,’ Senka said.

‘Hurry up, Senka! We’re hungry!’ cried one child.

‘SILENCE!’ Shuba ordered, pointing at the wooden ladders on the wall. ‘Next one to speak must touch the ceiling twenty times!’ He blew the whistle. Senka took a breath and then ran very fast towards the horse, jumped on to the springboard but then, like a racehorse refusing a jump, shied away.

‘Do you call yourself a Soviet man?’ Shuba yelled. ‘AGAIN!’ Another blast on the whistle.

‘I can’t do it, and I won’t do it,’ Senka shouted, bursting into tears.

‘You’ll do it if you die here!’ Shuba bellowed back, at which Senka suddenly grasped his chest, fought for breath and then fell to the floor.

‘He’s collapsed!’ cried a voice from the class. ‘He’s ill! He’s dying!’

‘He’s faking,’ replied Shuba, marching over. There was total silence in the gym.

‘Oh my God,’ said Minka, stepping forward.

‘Is he OK?’ asked George, taking her hand. ‘Minka!’

‘GET UP, BOY!’ ordered Shuba. ‘If you’re scrimshanking’ – he used old military slang – ‘you’ll pay for this.’

‘What if he isn’t?’ asked one of Senka’s classmates.

‘All right, at ease,’ said Shuba finally. ‘Briusov, get me some water.’ He leaned over Senka and slapped his cheeks a couple of times with a leathery hand. When the water arrived, he splashed it on Senka’s face. Senka appeared to stir.

‘Where am I? Am I at school?’

‘Don’t give me that,’ Shuba growled, breathing heavily.

Senka remained lying down.

‘Please don’t make me do it again.’

‘I knew it! You are going to do it again,’ Shuba said, straightening up. ‘And then you’re going to touch the ceiling a hundred times!’

‘I get dizzy up ladders, and might fall off,’ replied Senka. ‘I have blocked sinuses.’

‘I’ve seen Russian heroes die in battle! How do you think we won this war? By fainting in the gym? I’m training another generation of warriors to defend our Soviet paradise. The Party demands sacrifice and hardness. Can everyone hear me? NO ONE MOVES UNTIL THIS USELESS BOY GETS OVER THE HORSE!’ He blew the whistle, but Senka did not move.

‘We need warriors,’ Senka agreed, ‘but we also need thinkers and I’m one of those. Comrade Stalin also said that “we must value our cadres” and even if I’m not a future warrior, I am a future cadre. I must warn you that if I die of a heart attack, Teacher Shuba, it will be all your fault.’ Senka managed to raise his head and look around the class. ‘And there are lots of witnesses.’

Shuba stood back, scratched his head and chewed the end of his moustaches. ‘You’ll pay for this, you little poodle! I’m reporting you and your lies to Director Medvedeva. Class dismissed!’ He marched off and Minka ran up to Senka, who, thought Andrei, had made an astonishing recovery.

‘Somehow,’ Minka said as she rejoined him and George after Senka had gone off to change, ‘the Little Professor always gets his way.’

‘Little Professor?’ asked Andrei.

‘That’s what we call Senka in my family,’ explained Minka. ‘My mother says it’s because he’s precociously precious.’

George put his hand on Andrei’s shoulder. ‘Minka,’ he proposed. ‘Let’s get Andrei into the Romantics.’

‘Teacher Golden will approve,’ she said. ‘You know he was quite famous once.’

‘Golden? Never!’ said George.

‘Benya Golden…’ Andrei said, remembering how his mother had reacted when he’d said the name the previous evening. It had taken him back to his childhood. Nine years earlier – another life. They lived in Moscow, in a spacious apartment, then, and his father had presented his mother with a blue book entitled Spanish Stories . ‘Inessa, you’ve got to read this book by Golden, it’s spun gold…’

Two years later, his father had gone. Andrei remembered find-ing Spanish Stories , looking at its cover, embossed with a Spanish bull and red star, and going to the first page to begin reading. And Inessa taking it away quickly. ‘No one reads Golden any more,’ she had said, and Andrei had never seen the book again.

Benya Golden was lingering in the school common room. He was late for his own Pushkin class but a man like him who had suffered so much and only returned from the darkness by a series of miracles should enjoy life, he thought. He was so lucky to be there, to be teaching Pushkin, to be breathing. No one quite knew what he had been through but he, more than anyone in the room, knew how flimsy was fortune.

He lay full length on the leather divan peering over the Leningrad satirical magazine, Krokadil , as the young piano teacher, Agrippina Begbulatova, known (to him alone) as Blue-Eyes, brewed the chai in a Chinese teapot, laying out cups and saucers for everyone.

Director Medvedeva, owl-shaped horn-rimmed spectacles on the bridge of her nose, groaned loudly as she marked papers at the long table – one of the signs, along with noisy chomping at meals, of a woman who has lived alone for too long. But, Benya thought, she had taken a risk by giving him this job, and he was truly grateful.

Her deputy Dr Rimm had been trying to get Benya sacked ever since. He was ostentatiously reading a copy of Comrade Stalin’s History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course – as if anyone, even someone as slavishy drear as Rimm, could actually read that unadulterated gibberish. Rimm kept changing position with little preening sniffs and looks around the room to check everyone had noticed his virtuous reading. And Apostollon Shuba had just come into the common room, cursing wildly about the laziness, cowardice and softness of the school’s spoilt brats. Now he was studying the football scores in Pionerskaya Pravda while chewing a sprig of his magnificent moustaches.