Simon Montefiore - One Night in Winter

Finally, he had to use the repugnant slops bucket; afterwards exhaustion forced him to lie down and he started to cry again. The door opened and this time it was a lady with a trolley. She gave him a bowl of soup (which was really just grey water with two chunks of straggly yellow fat floating in it), a square of black bread and a tiny rectangle of butter. He was so hungry but the soup stank and the fat was horrid so he just ate the bread.

‘May I have an extra piece of bread?’

‘Against the rules. That’s your allowance.’

She gave him a cup of tea with a tiny piece of sugar; then the door was shut again and he lay on his bed, terrified by the sounds of the vastness of the Inner Prison of Lubianka. The symphony of prisons, he decided, is more percussion than strings: slamming doors, tinkling keys, grinding locks, coughing, spluttering, spasming, howling, sobbing, shouting, the clank of boots on metal landings and stairs. All was harsh and all he had known until this moment had been gentle.

Who were all these heaving, grunting, hacking strangers in the cells nearby? Was there anyone his age? Were the other children from the school close to him? Where was Minka? He closed his eyes and dreamed of his mama, of his home, of his brothers and sister. Mama, I’m here. Please come and find me. Do you know where I am?

He cried and cried but even when the tears ran out, the fear remained. How had this terrible mistake been made? Surely they didn’t know he was ten. If only he had told them that, they’d have realized they had the wrong person. He could not believe they didn’t know who his mama and papa were.

He replayed the night of the shooting on the bridge in his head: he was in the prison because of those deaths; he knew that. But had George and Andrei been arrested in their pyjamas?

Senka realized that he had nothing to cuddle and no one had kissed him tonight: how could he sleep without his toy bear, Aristotle? He had never slept without the bear. At home, he would lie on his bed with the cover pulled up to his neck, feeling like a warm prince at the very centre of the entire world. His mama would sit on his bed and tell him stories and take his face in her hands and kiss his nose and his forehead and his cheeks and sometimes even his eyes and he would look up at her and sometimes he gave his matinée-idol look, lowering his face and raising his eyes, and his mama would say: ‘Oh! Who could resist those brown eyes? One day, you’ll get married and she’ll be a lucky girl!’ And then she’d throw back her head and laugh.

This made him cry again but at least he was beginning to realize why he was there. When Minka disappeared, his mama said, ‘Two of her friends were killed so of course they have to investigate. Then she’ll come home.’ But Mama and Papa said Minka was going to come home tonight. So why was he in prison too? And why couldn’t he sleep? The eyehole kept opening, and the electric light was on. When he curled up, a voice said: ‘Hands outside the blanket!’ He was desperate to sleep. ‘You’re such a good sleeper,’ Mama always said. He closed his eyes but just when darkness was beginning to close in around him, the door was thrown open abruptly and he was shaken out of bed, marched down the corridor, up a metal stairway, down, up again through several doors.

A bright room. Two metal chairs. A man with a grotesque face dotted with thousands of little red spots, a jutting chin that resembled the muzzle of a dog and hands like lobster claws faced him.

‘I’m Colonel Likhachev,’ said the man. ‘We’ve treated you children too gently, but now we know that you are criminals and enemies, we’ll deal with you just the same way we punish adults. I don’t care if you’re ten or eighty years old: you answer my questions and you tell the truth. If you lie or withhold anything, I’ll knock your teeth in. Do you understand me?’

Senka looked at this vicious myrmidon and gave a loud sob, and the man brought his fist down on the table so hard that the lamp jumped and Senka recoiled, knocking his chair over. The man rose fast and grabbed Senka by the chin, his claws squeezing him so that his mouth was all squashed.

‘Don’t you ever fucking move a muscle without my permission. And don’t cry either.’

Senka started to pant fast and faster until he was struggling for air.

‘Answer me this one question and you can go back to your cell.’

Senka nodded.

‘Do you know Serafima Romashkina?’

‘Yes,’ he whispered, still breathing very fast.

‘Do you know her well?’

‘She’s eighteen but… well, she’s very nice to me.’ Senka felt as though he might faint but knew he must not. He took a few quick breaths. ‘She’s my sister Minka’s friend.’

‘Now think carefully. Don’t say no. Don’t protect anyone. We find out everything and if you lie, you’ll go to the camps and you’ll never see your parents again. But if you tell the truth, you’ll go home very soon. We are investigating the deaths on the Stone Bridge. You were there, were you not?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you see there?’

‘Two of my sister’s friends were dead on the ground.’

‘But you noticed something?’

‘Yes. The notebook. Nikolasha’s Velvet Book. And I picked it up.’

‘You know when you picked it up, you committed a serious crime by purloining evidence of a murder?’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Then why did you act like a traitor?’ asked the livid, pimply man who Senka now realized was really a lobster masquerading as a human. ‘Why pick it up? Why hide it?’

‘I didn’t think. Is my mama coming soon?’

‘Not until you tell us the truth. What did you do with the book?’

‘I put in my room and hid it.’

‘Why?’

‘I thought it would be interesting to read. I didn’t know it was a crime, I’m very sorry.’

‘Did you tell anyone you had it?’

‘Only my brother. Demian. Later I found him opening my desk drawers and I was so cross I told my mother, but the notebook was gone.’

‘You never read it?’

‘No. I promise I didn’t.’

‘Did you know it contained plans to form a government and assassinate our leaders?’

Senka shook his head, trying to think back to his parents’ conversations. His earliest memories were of the lifts in the House on the Embankment groaning at night as the secret police arrived to arrest another person. On one occasion his mother had glanced tensely at his father: ‘What floor?’ she had asked.

‘Eleventh.’

‘The Larins. They aren’t Enemies, Genrikh.’

‘The Party never makes mistakes, Dashka. Better to kill a hundred innocents than miss one Enemy. We’re in a life-and-death struggle to prepare for war against Fascism and there are Enemies everywhere. Let’s not discuss this in front of…’ And his father had looked at him.

‘Senka’s too little to understand,’ Mama had said. And he hadn’t understood then, but he did remember how the Larins had been taken away and never returned.

After the shooting on the bridge, Senka’s mama had taken them all for a walk in the woods near their dacha and said, ‘If you’re ever asked about this, tell them what you know. But nothing extra. Don’t gossip; stay off politics. Secrets are like a minefield: you don’t know the mine is there until you tread on it. Chatter can destroy a family.’

‘This comes from the highest authority in the Soviet Union,’ said the Lobster now. ‘Search your memory: things you’ve seen, things you’ve heard. Did Serafima have a boyfriend?’

‘Of course not. If she did have one, it would be me !’

‘Christ!’ The Lobster bent his hands back and clicked the bones. ‘A special friend then?’