Simon Montefiore: One Night in Winter

Long before 10 a.m., she, her parents and their friends are in their places in the stand next to the mausoleum. The vast crowds and bristling regiments go absolutely silent as one old man, bowlegged and duck-gaited in his marshal’s uniform, climbs the steps up to the mausoleum, followed by his comrades-in-arms: Molotov, Beria and, yes, her neighbour, Satinov. Even though Serafima is close enough to see the rain pouring down Marshal Stalin’s visor on to his face and to observe Satinov conversing with him, she doesn’t care what they might be saying. She can scarcely remember a thing about the parade. She dreams of seeing her lover later in the day, of kissing him. She knows he’s nearby and that makes her ache with joy.

The parade is over. It’s time for the Game. Escaping her parents, Serafima pushes through the packed throng of dancing soldiers and ambling civilians to meet her friends on the Great Stone Bridge by the Kremlin. She searches for her friends – and there they are. Some are already in costume. For some of them, the Game is more than just a game; it’s an obsession – more real than reality.

The rain stops suddenly; the air is packed with suffocating pollen, and Serafima loses sight of her friends as she is buffeted by the carousing crowds. The smell of vodka and blossom, the thunderous boom and the drifting smoke of a cannonade, a hundred impromptu street choirs singing wartime romances amidst the salvoes of that fifty-gun salute, surround and confuse her. Then two staccato gunshots, very close.

Serafima knows something’s happened to her friends even before the sound has finished ricocheting off the Kremlin walls. As the crowd shrinks back, she walks and then runs towards the noise, bumping into people, pushing them aside. She sees Minka Dorova pulling her little brother into the protective warmth of her coat and staring at the ground as if transfixed. Around her stand a gaggle of her schoolfriends in an oddly formal half-moon formation. All are staring down at something; all are very still and silent.

Minka raises her hand to her face. ‘Don’t look, Senka,’ she says to her brother. ‘Don’t look!’

Serafima is momentarily petrified by the unspeakable horror of what she sees. The girl is closest to her. She lies still, yet her entire chest, covered by the folds of her costume gown, glistens with scarlet blood that flows like a stream over a rock. She is dead, Serafima knows, but dead only seconds ago and her blood is still spreading across her, settling, soaking, clotting as Serafima watches. But her gaze stays there for only a second before it flits on to the boy beside her. One side of his face is pristine, but the other, shattered by the bullet that ripped into it, is gashed open to the elements. She registers shards of skull, flaps of pink flesh and white matter that gleams like moist new dough. One of the boy’s eyes rests on his cheek.

She sees him twitch. ‘Oh God! Oh Christ!’ she cries. ‘Look – he’s alive!’ She runs forward to kneel beside him, to take his hand, aware that the blood is soaking her knees, her dress; it’s between her fingers. His chest… the cravat and velvet of his fancy-dress frock coat are still immaculate because they are burgundy, she notes absurdly. He pants very fast, groans, and then, most unforgettably, sighs – a long bubbling sigh that seems to come straight from the throat which, on one side, has become the front of his face. He quivers all over and then his chest is still. He is no longer a boy, scarcely a person, never the friend she knew so well, and in his present state, it seems incredible that he ever was.

Minka vomits. Someone is sobbing loudly now; another has fainted and lies on the ground. Strangers rush forward and retreat just as fast, horrified. And Serafima hears a loud and shrill scream very close to her. It is her scream. She stands up, backing away, but finds something sharp like a thorn under her foot and when she lifts it up, she holds two bloody teeth.

Some soldiers and a sailor see what has happened and take the schoolchildren in their arms with the rough-hewn kindness of peasants who have been to war. They move them back, shield them. One of them gives Serafima a swig of his vodka and she grabs it back and takes another and gulps until she is almost sick. But the burn in the belly steadies her. Then the police – the militsia – are there. Red-faced, interrupted amidst their toasting and singing, they seem bleary and lairy but at least they take control of the crowd and move Serafima away from the bodies that she can’t stop looking at.

She goes over to her friends, who cling to each other. But Serafima is smeared with blood and they draw back.

‘Oh my God, Serafima, it’s on you! It’s all over you!’

Serafima raises her hands and they are caked with it.

Silver sparks whirl behind her eyes as she looks back at the bodies and then up towards the red-sapphired stars glowing atop the Kremlin towers. Somewhere in the Kremlin, very soon, she knows that Stalin will be told that two schoolchildren from School 801 have died violently – and that restless, wily, ferocious force will seek meaning in these deaths, a meaning that will suit his own high and mysterious purposes.

As the pink-fractured sky darkens, she is struck by the most unbearable certainty: that this is the last night of their childhoods. These shots will blast their lives and uncover secrets that would never otherwise have been found – hers most of all.

THE BEST SCHOOL in Moscow, thought Andrei Kurbsky on his first day at School 801 on Ostozhenka, and, by some miraculous blessing, I’ve just made it here.

He and his mother were far too early and now they hovered in a doorway opposite the school gates like a pair of gawping villagers. He cursed his mother’s anxiety as he saw she was holding a checklist and running through his paraphernalia under her breath: satchel – yes; white shirt – yes; blue jacket – yes; grey trousers – yes; one volume Pushkin; two notebooks; four pencils; packed lunch of sandwiches… And now she was peering into his face with a maddening frown.

‘Oh Andryusha, there’s something on your face!’ Drawing out a crumpled hankie from her handbag, she licked it and started trying to scrub away at his cheek.

This was his first memory of the school. They were all there, the threads that led to the killings, if you knew which to follow. And they began with his mother scrubbing him while he tried to wave her away as if she was a fly buzz-bombing him on a summer’s day.

‘Stop it, Mama!’ He pushed her hand away and proudly rearranged his spectacles. Her pinched, dry face behind metal spectacles infuriated him but he managed to suppress it, knowing that the satchel, blazer, shoes had been provided by begging from neighbours, appealing to cousins (who had naturally dropped them when his father disappeared), trawling through flea markets.

Four days earlier, 9 May 1945, his mother had joined him in the streets to celebrate the fall of Berlin and the surrender of Nazi Germany. Yet even on that day of wonders, the most amazing thing was that, somehow during the laxer days of wartime, they had been allowed to return to Moscow. And even that did not approach the true miracle: he had applied to all the schools in central Moscow expecting to get into none but, out of all of them, he had been accepted by the best: the Josef Stalin Commune School 801, where Stalin’s own children had been educated. But this astonishing good news immediately sent his mother, Inessa, into a new spiral of worry: how to pay the school fees with her librarian’s salary?