Simon Montefiore - One Night in Winter

A roar. ‘That’s Stalin arriving!’ said the woman next to Andrei. As the orchestra of fifteen hundred musicians played Glinka’s ‘Glory’ , blasted out of giant but tinny loudspeakers mounted on the backs of trucks, Andrei and Inessa could just make out Marshal Zhukov, on a white horse, riding out of one of the Kremlin gates to meet Marshal Rokossovsky in the middle and take the salute. Tanks, howitzers and horsemen passed; flanks of steel and muscle glistened in the rain. They saw soldiers bearing Nazi banners, scarlet and black, like a Roman triumph, and heard their passionate ‘ URRAH ’ as they tossed them at the feet of their leader, the Great Stalin.

Afterwards, the roads were clogged with tanks and jeeps, crowds of soldiers and civilians.

‘What a shame it rained,’ Andrei said to his mother. But he was not really thinking about the rain. ‘Mama’ – he turned to her and put his arms around her – ‘do you think—’

‘Do I think Papa will come home now?’ she finished his thought perfectly. ‘Hush.’ She looked around, even though no one could hear in that din of singing and shouting, footsteps and rain. ‘Lower your voice.’

‘I’m sure they will all come back now, won’t they? I feel it,’ Andrei whispered. ‘I so want him back.’ It was something they had never said to each other, because it was so raw even after all these years.

‘Darling Andryusha, don’t wish for anything too much. They say you can’t live without hope but I think hope’s the cruellest trick of all. I survive by not expecting much.’

‘But, Mama, there are so many out here today who must be like us. And I know they’re all thinking like me. Surely there’ll be an amnesty, and everyone will come back?’

Inessa closed her eyes for a moment to collect herself and when he looked at her bone-weary face, he realized that she was steeling herself for him. ‘Don’t forget him. Never forget him. But go forward now, darling. Just look forward.’

Andrei felt a lurch of disappointment. He sighed and dropped his arms, stepping away from her. ‘I’m meeting my friends on the Stone Bridge at five.’

‘To read Pushkin? Are you dressing up?’

‘Oh Mama, do you think I’d look good in a top hat and velvet coat? No, I’m too late to find a costume.’ They laughed as he pushed his way into the crowds – and afterwards, when he had so many long nights to replay everything, he wished he had said goodbye properly, and told her that he loved her.

‘Be careful, you’re all I’ve got. Off you go then!’ she called after him as she let him step into his new world.

Andrei fought his way up the steps. Soldiers, in cloaks and mantles and greatcoats, caps over their eyes, visors running with droplets, were singing on the bridge. Strangers hugged one another and swigged from vodka bottles handed through the crowd. It was hard to see far through the rain and the mist – he kept having to wipe his glasses – but as the crowd closed around Andrei, so closely packed that it took the weight off his feet, he looked back at the red walls of the Kremlin, the stars atop the towers, the gold of the Great Palace, the onion domes, streaked with light in the sheets of rain, and he thought that somewhere in there was Stalin himself, and with Stalin were Comrades Satinov and Dorov, and probably Sophia Zeitlin, famous people whom he now knew. He’d even dined with them at Aragvi. What were they doing at this moment? He knew Satinov, and Satinov knew Stalin, so he, Andrei, was just a few steps from the greatest man in the world.

‘Andryusha!’ It was Minka and she was holding the hand of Senka, who was wearing a new suit under a yellow raincoat – just like a grown-up.

‘Hello, Little Professor,’ said Andrei. ‘I see your mama let you out?’

‘You’re not wearing fancy dress either?’ said Senka. ‘I don’t blame you. Minka isn’t dressed up. Is it only those credulous imbeciles who take the Game seriously?’ He pointed along the bridge, over the massed heads and bobbing caps, and there was Nikolasha, towering above everyone else in the crowd, at the other end where the road was barricaded to create a wide pedestrian walkway. He was resplendent in an olive-green frock coat and boots, his strawberry-red hair coarsened and rusted by the rain. Shoving through the crowd to get across the bridge, Andrei greeted George and Marlen Satinov, who had their little sister Mariko with them, and nodded at Vlad, who was also in costume. But where was Serafima?

‘She’ll come, don’t you worry,’ said Nikolasha. ‘See?’ He smiled triumphantly.

And there she was, in a blue dress and Peter Pan collar, soaked by the rain which had frizzed her hair into uncontrollable curls. Andrei couldn’t stop looking at her. He scarcely paid attention as Nikolasha clapped his hands and Vlad handed him the Velvet Book.

‘Comrade Romantics,’ Nikolasha declared formally, ‘I am recording the first attendance of Andrei Kurbsky as a full member qualified to play the Game.’ The crowd was so noisy that Andrei could barely hear him and it was hard to stay with the others, such was the shoving of the crowds. But everyone was in a good mood that day and when George and Minka began to pour out shots of vodka and hand round the glasses, a spotty sailor grabbed one and quaffed it and soon it seemed as if they were providing drinks for the entire Baltic Fleet.

‘Are you a theatre troupe?’ asked one of them, pulling on Nikolasha’s frock coat.

Rosa, in a purple cloak over a red dress with golden appliqué, fought her way through the mass of passersby. ‘Sorry, Nikolasha, I couldn’t get through. Here they are!’ She handed him the pistols in their little green case. She bowed before Nikolasha who nodded back.

‘Comrade Romantics…’ he started in his solemn high priest’s voice. ‘We’re here as always to celebrate poetry over prose, passion over science. What is our choice?’

‘LOVE OR DEATH,’ replied Vlad and Rosa. ‘WITHOUT LOVE, LET US DIE YOUNG!’

‘Let the Game begin!’ said Nikolasha, but his incantation was drowned out by the sailors singing ‘The Blue Shawl’, and then ‘Katyusha’ – for Katyusha was a song as well as a movie.

‘Get on with it or we’ll lose each other!’ George shouted, swigging the vodka.

‘What? I can’t even hear myself!’ shouted Nikolasha, nodding at Vlad, who held up the case and showed them the two duelling pistols. As he chose his pistol, Nikolasha stowed the Velvet Book in the pistol case – out of the rain.

‘Who dies today? Let’s play…’ said Rosa but her little cooing voice was lost in the roar of the crowd.

No one saw what happened next. They were separated by the currents of the crowd that carried Andrei so far from the others that he lost Serafima altogether and could only just see Nikolasha’s head in the distance when the two shots rang out. Amidst the sudden hush that followed, the rain stopped and with it time itself. Slow steam arose from the sweating, damp crowds, the sticky air congested with white poplar pollen instantly, mysteriously unleashed, and that red head was nowhere to be seen.

When he found them again, standing startled and horrified around the bodies, Andrei looked at his friends, at the other Fatal Romantics – and, across the bodies, his eyes met Serafima’s in a kind of horrified complicity. And then time speeded up again.

In front of him two army medics were working on the bodies, and a clearing had opened up in the dense pack of people. Policemen were running from both directions. And he saw the duelling pistols on the ground, one shattered into pieces, and the Velvet Book, splayed open on the wet ground, its covers all muddy. The police were holding people back, placing bollards around the scene and asking questions.