Simon Montefiore: One Night in Winter

‘Look, Mama, they’re about to open the gates,’ Andrei said as a little old Tajik in a brown janitor’s coat, wizened as a roasted nut, jingled keys on a chain. ‘What gates!’

‘They have gold tips,’ said Inessa.

Andrei examined the heroic figures carved on the two pilasters in the Stalin imperial style. Each pillar was emblazoned with a bronze plaque on which, in golden silhouettes, he recognized Marx, Lenin and Stalin.

‘The rest of Moscow’s a ruin but look at this school for the top people!’ he said. ‘They certainly know how to look after their own!’

‘Andrei! Remember, watch your tongue…’

‘Oh Mama!’ He was as guarded as she was. When your father has disappeared, and your family has lost everything, and you are hovering on the very edge of destruction, you don’t need reminding that you must be careful. His mother felt like a bag of bones in his arms. Food was rationed and they could scarcely afford to feed themselves.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘People are arriving.’ Suddenly children in the school uniform – grey trousers and white shirt for boys, grey skirt and white blouse for girls – were arriving from every direction. ‘Mama, look at that car! I wonder who’s in it?’

A Rolls-Royce glided up to the kerb. A driver with a peaked cap jumped out and ran round to open the door at the back. Andrei and Inessa stared as a full-breasted woman with scarlet lips, a strong jaw and jet-black hair emerged from the car.

‘Look, Andryusha!’ exclaimed Inessa. ‘You know who that is?’

‘Of course I do! It’s Sophia Zeitlin. I love her movies. She’s my favourite film star.’ He had even dreamed of her: those full lips, those curves. He had woken up very embarrassed. She was old – in her forties, for God’s sake!

‘Look what she’s wearing!’ Inessa marvelled, scrutinizing Sophia Zeitlin’s checked suit and high heels. After her, a tall girl with fair curly hair emerged from the Rolls. ‘Oh, that must be her daughter.’

They watched as Sophia Zeitlin straightened her own chic jacket, checked her hairdo and then cast a professional smile in three directions as if she was accustomed to posing for photographers. Her daughter, as scruffy as the mother was immaculate, rolled her eyes. Balancing a pile of books in her arms and trying to keep her satchel strap on her shoulder, she headed straight towards the school gates.

Inessa started to brush imaginary dust off Andrei’s shoulders.

‘For God’s sake, Mama,’ he whispered at her, pushing her hand away. ‘Come on! We’re going to be late.’ Suppose his classmates first sighted him having his face cleaned by his mother! It was unthinkable.

‘I just want you to look your best,’ Inessa protested but he was already crossing the road. There were not many cars and Moscow looked faded, scarred, weary after four years of war. At least two of the buildings on Ostozhenka were heaps of rubble. The Kurbskys had just reached the pavement when there was a skidding rush and a Packard limousine, black and shiny, sped towards them, followed by a squat Pobeda car. Braking with a screech, a uniformed guard with waxed moustaches leaped from the passenger seat of the Packard and opened the back door.

A man climbed out of the car. ‘I recognize him ,’ Andrei said. ‘That’s Comrade Satinov.’

Andrei remembered him in Pravda wearing an entire chest of medals (headline: ‘Stalin’s Iron Commissar’) but now he wore a plain khaki uniform with just a single Order of Lenin. Arctic stare, aquiline nose: emotionless discipline, Bolshevik harshness. How often had he seen that face on banners as big as houses, on flags aloft in parades? There was even a city in the Urals called Satinovgrad. His mother squeezed his arm.

‘It’s quite a school,’ he said. The bodyguards formed a phalanx around Comrade Satinov, who was joined by a tiny woman and three children in school uniform, two boys who were Andrei’s age, and a much younger girl.

Hercules Satinov, Politburo member, Secretary of the Party, Colonel General, approached the school gates holding his daughter’s hand as if he was leading a victory march. Andrei and his mother instinctively stepped back and they were not the only ones: there was already a queue at the gates but a path opened for the Satinovs. As Andrei and his mother followed in their wake, they found themselves right behind the Satinov boys.

Andrei had never been so close to a leader before, and glanced back anxiously at his mother.

‘Let’s step back a bit.’ Inessa gestured: retreat. ‘Best not to be too far forward.’ Rule number one: Don’t be noticed, don’t draw attention. It was a habit born of long misfortune and suffering in this flint-hearted system. Years of being invisible in crowded stations where they feared their IDs would be checked.

Torn between fearful caution and the craving to rub shoulders with his new classmates, the Golden Youth of Moscow, Andrei couldn’t take his eyes off the nape of Comrade Satinov’s neck, shaved military style. And thus it was that before many minutes had passed, they found themselves near the very front of the line, almost between the two gold-crested pillars of the school gates, under a hot Moscow sky so cloudlessly blue it seemed bleak.

Around Andrei and his mother, the crowd of parents – well-dressed women, men in golden shoulderboards (he saw a marshal up ahead) and creamy summer suits, and children in the red scarf of the Pioneers – pressed close. Beside him, Inessa was sweating, her face made ugly by worry, her skin dry as grey cardboard. Andrei knew she was only forty – not that old – yet the contrast with the glossily coiffed mothers of the school in their smart summer frocks was all too obvious. His father’s arrest and vanishing, their banishment from the capital, seven years’ exile in Central Asia, all this had ground her to dust. Andrei felt embarrassed by her, irritated by her and protective of her, all at the same time. He took her hand. Her crushed, grateful smile made him think of his father. Where are you, Papa? he wondered. Are you still alive? Was their return to Moscow the end of their nightmare or yet another cruel trick?

Comrade Satinov stepped forward and a woman in a sack-like black shift dress, which made her resemble a nun, greeted him.

‘Comrade Satinov, welcome. I’m Kapitolina Medvedeva, School Director, and I wish on behalf of the staff of the Stalin School 801 to say that it is a great honour to meet you. At last! In person!’

‘It’s good to be here, comrade director,’ replied Satinov with a strong Georgian accent. ‘I’ve been at the front and haven’t done a thing with the children since the twenty-second of June 1941’ – the day Hitler invaded Russia, as Andrei and every Russian knew – ‘but now I’ve been summoned back from Berlin to Moscow.’

‘Summoned,’ repeated the director, blushing faintly because ‘summoned’ could only mean an order from Marshal Stalin himself. ‘Summoned by…’

‘Comrade Stalin has instructed us: now the war is over, we must restore proper Russian and Soviet values. Set an example. The Soviet man is a family man too.’ Andrei noticed that Satinov’s tone was patient and masterful yet never arrogant. Here was Bolshevik modesty. ‘So you might be seeing too much of me at the school gates.’

Director Medvedeva put her hands together as if in prayer and took a deep breath. ‘What wisdom! Comrade Satinov, of course we know your family so well. Your wife is such a valued member of staff and we are accustomed to prominent parents here but, well, a member of the Politburo – we… we are overcome, and so honoured that you’ve come personally…’

The boy in front of Andrei was shaking his head as he listened to this performance. ‘Mother of God, you’d have thought Papa was the Second Coming!’ he said aloud. Andrei wasn’t sure whom he was addressing. ‘Are we going to have this bowing and scraping every time he drops us off at school?’ It was one of Satinov’s sons, who had half turned towards Andrei. ‘It’s bad enough having a mother who’s a teacher but now… oh my God. Nauseating.’