Simon Montefiore - One Night in Winter

‘What a character you are, Senka,’ said Lulu’s mother.

The book was very heavy but Senka was carrying it upstairs again when he saw four men, two in suits and two in uniform with blue tabs.

‘You’re Senka Dorov, aren’t you?’ said one of the men, who had a bald head the shape of an onion dome.

‘Yes. Who are you?’

‘That book looks most interesting. Can we have a look at it downstairs?’

‘I’ve got to get back for supper. Mama’s waiting.’

But the man had taken the book and was perusing it in a very puzzled way. ‘Opera, eh?’

‘Which is your favourite Tchaikovsky?’ asked Senka. ‘Don’t answer Swan Lake . That’s too predictable.’

‘You’re a funny lad,’ said the man as he steered Senka into the lift.

‘Hey! Hang on,’ cried Senka, but at that moment, his arms were held behind his back and one of the other men put a cloth over his face and he went to sleep. And when he woke up (he didn’t know how long afterwards), he was between the same two men in a Pobeda car approaching Dzerzhinsky Square.

‘Where are you taking me? Who are you?’ he asked sleepily.

And the domed one said: ‘We’re taking you to play Reds versus Whites with your friends. There’s nothing to worry about!’

‘You must think I’m very stupid or was born yesterday,’ said Senka fearlessly – though as the drug wore off, he was beginning to feel fear rising up his tummy and into his throat where he could taste its bitterness, a sensation he had only experienced once before, when one of Demian’s horrid friends had held his nose at school and he thought he was suffocating until he remembered that he could breathe through his mouth.

He found he was still holding Discussing Music, Choreography and Libretto in Tchaikovsky’s Opera and Ballet on his knee. He looked out of the windows: I know this building, he thought as they drove into the grey, granite mountain of Lubianka. He had heard his parents mention it as they passed, and he had not missed the awe, even the dread, in their voices. Before he could say another word, the steel gates swung open and the car accelerated into a courtyard, the doors were opened and he was being frogmarched down some steps and up to a filthy counter which he could not see over.

‘Where is he?’ barked an old woman in a brown coat. ‘I can’t even see him. Little blighter, isn’t he?’

‘Are you taking me to see my sister?’

‘Surname, name, patronymic.’

‘Ring my mama. She’ll come and get me. She doesn’t know where I am.’ Then he remembered something important and reassuring. ‘Is my sister Minka here? Maybe I’m here to collect her?’

‘No talking, prisoner,’ snarled the woman. ‘Answer the questions!’ But Senka was so relieved that he had remembered this and so accustomed, at home and even at school, to being treated with indulgent love, that he ignored her.

‘Because Mama says Minka’s going home soon. Now I understand why I’m here.’

‘Another word out of you,’ shouted a man in uniform, ‘and you’ll get a thick ear, if not a beating! Do you understand me?’

‘Yes,’ said Senka, now shocked and deeply worried. ‘Please can I ring my daddy. He works on the Central Committee.’ He thought mentioning his father might frighten them, but they did not seem to care. They took away his book and gave him a receipt that he didn’t know what to do with. Then a fat warder in a brown coat led him through a door: ‘Body search. Medical,’ she said. ‘Take all your clothes off and hurry up about it.’

Senka felt shy. ‘Even my pyjama bottoms?’

‘Move it! You collect your clothes after.’ She pushed him through another door.

‘But I’ve got a terrible tummy ache. Mama makes me lie down when I have it and then it goes. And I have asthma.’

‘Come here,’ said a man with a wen on his nose and a stethoscope and a white coat. He was sitting in an old metal chair beside a plain hospital trolley, its mattress stained a faded brown. Senka could tell he was a doctor but he was not a doctor like his mother. ‘Stand!’

Senka sensed danger: ‘No!’ He bolted for the door. But the doctor had pressed a button on the wall and the door flew open and in came three warders, a man and two women. Senka was crying now, sobbing: ‘I want my mama. I want to go home, my tummy is really hurting!’ But they held his pale naked body and carried him to the trolley where they dumped him roughly.

‘Let me check you, or they’ll hold you down,’ said the doctor, who was wheezing heavily. ‘And it’ll be worse than a stomach ache, I can tell you.’

Senka stopped struggling but he found he was shaking with fear and foreboding. The doctor told him to open his mouth. Then the wen-nozzled medic pushed in his fingers, which tasted of metal and rubbish simultaneously, and felt Senka’s teeth and his tongue. ‘Turn over,’ he said. ‘Take a breath!’

Senka felt something in his bottom and he started to fight again and cry out, but it was over quickly, and soon he was back in the first room and in his pyjamas and dressing gown again. Another room: a greasy-haired old man beside a camera told him to sit in the chair but he was too small so the photographer placed a cushion on it, before disappearing under a black blanket: ‘Look at the camera’ and boom: there was a flash and a fizzing sound. ‘Well done, son.’ The photographer ruffled his hair.

Senka saw an opportunity.

‘Please can I call my mama? I so miss my mama!’

‘You’re young to be in here,’ the photographer whispered quickly. ‘You’ll get out, son, unlike me. But my advice is to let the current take you. Don’t fight it.’ Then he cleared his throat and called out: ‘Prisoner for transfer.’

Senka was given back to the warders in their brown coats, who handed him over to two uniformed guards. Each held one of his arms. Keyrings holding many keys jingled from belts next to their pistols. ‘No talking. Eyes forward. Let’s go.’ Steel stairways, down, up again, through locked doors. Senka felt tiny in this enormous hidden world. Every time one door closed and another opened he was in yet another towering hall filled with metal landings, each of which held row upon row of enforced steel doors.

The place stank of wee, poo, sweat, detergent, dampness. Repulsive. Repellent. Revolting. Rebarbative. Nauseating. Egregious. Emetic. The thesaurus of words comforted him but his heart was beating like a train travelling at speed.

When he heard some more footsteps getting closer, his heart raced. ‘Is it Minka?’ he said, his voice quivering. But they pushed him into a box like an upright coffin, and locked the door. Senka thought he might suffocate and his tummy cramp returned but he heard the steps go past and then they took him out and finally they opened a cell number 235 and pushed him inside.

‘Someone’s weed in my bed,’ Senka called when he saw the thin mattress on the metal bed: it bore a yellow stain in the shape of the Crimea. He wanted to go himself but there was no lavatory. He did not know what to do. Then the Judas port opened and closed, the locks turned and a warder looked in.

‘I’m hungry and I need to go to the lavatory,’ he said.

‘You’ve missed that time,’ said the warder. ‘Use that slops bucket.’

‘I don’t think I can use a bucket.’

‘Save it up till morning then, your majesty. Rations soon.’

‘Please call my mama,’ said Senka, bursting into tears. Soon he was crying in spasms, the tears running down into his mouth and even down his neck. ‘Please!’

The door slammed again, and the eyehole was opened and closed repeatedly, but no one came, so Senka spread the blanket over the mattress. The pillow had a red-brown mark the shape of Africa, he noticed.