Simon Montefiore - One Night in Winter

Prisoner! The word hits Tamara hard and a fit of sobs well up again. Stop! You mustn’t cry!

But Mariko, trying to hold on to her toy dogs, throws her arms around her mother. ‘Mama, don’t go!’

‘I have to,’ Tamara whispers. ‘But I’ll be back tonight with all your favourite things, and more dogs.’

‘You can’t go. I won’t let you go,’ cries Mariko. She drops the dogs and Tamara puts them in her bag which she gives to one of the warders.

‘It’s time,’ says the warder. She and another guard approach them, and as they come nearer, Tamriko feels their shadows, smells the cheap Red Square perfume and detergent, sweat, perhaps vodka.

She hugs Mariko and then she, herself, starts to pull back. ‘Now I have to go. Be good. Don’t worry. I love you so much and soon you’ll be home. I’ll see you very soon. What would you like me to bring?’

But Mariko throws herself against her mama, as if trying to burrow into her, and Tamara clutches her.

‘Mariko!’ Tamara is fighting for control, but she is not sure she can manage it. Her entire body is telling her to hold on to her little girl.

‘Mariko, you must let go of your mother,’ the warder says, sternly.

‘I won’t!’

‘You must or we’ll separate you.’

Tamara loosens her grip on her child, but Mariko holds on. Feeling as if she is in the midst of a whirling tornado of debris and dust that darkens the world, Tamara buries her nose in Mariko’s vanilla-milk-and-hay hair and inhales as if it is oxygen.

‘Mariko, let go or they’ll force you and it will be horrid. I’ll… I’ll be back so soon!’

‘I won’t let go. Don’t go, Mama!’ Mariko is sobbing, shaking, struggling to breathe, winded by her own desperation. Tamara closes her eyes as the guards prise open the child’s fingers and lift her and take her away. She hears the door close and Mariko’s screams as they carry her down the corridors. Tamara finds herself on the floor of the empty room, on her hands and knees like an animal, howling with anger and heartbreak. She thinks for a moment that she might just die right here. The walls of her heart feel paper-thin, her lungs shallow, her stomach is lined with gravel and she wants to die.

There is something beside her. One of the dogs has fallen out of the bag, and she picks it up. It smells of Mariko. She hugs the toy, and rocks herself, amazed that she, wife of a leader, respected teacher, proud mother, is lying on a floor, holding a toy, weeping.

She lies there for a long time. Finally, holding the dog to her like a baby, she staggers out, so broken that she isn’t sure she will ever be able to put herself back together again.

The rays of a sinking sun – gold and purple and white – soothe Serafima. How gorgeous the light is after her prison cell. She raises her face like a flower following the sun, noticing as if for the first time the blizzard of gossamer seeds that dance in the beams. She is free, she has preserved her secret, and now she is overwhelmed by the beauty of this evening.

Up Gorky Street to the House of Books she goes. Upstairs to the Foreign Literature section. Hemingway? Galsworthy? There it is. Edith Wharton. She opens the book hungrily, reads what is inside; then she runs downstairs and out into the streets again.

It is 7 p.m. and crowds of smartly dressed Muscovites and some foreigners are waiting to go into the Bolshoi to see Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Serafima goes inside to the ticket office. There’s a queue. When she reaches the front, her ticket is there in an envelope.

Serafima is one of the last to take her seat in the stalls and when she’s sitting, with an old grey man on one side of her and a young girl like her on the other, she feels her face is flushing. She is happier than she’s ever been in her life – but it is more than this. His eyes are on her and she can sense the love in them. She looks up at his box and there he is. Waiting for her, loving her, as he has been since the days before the shooting and her imprisonment in Lubianka.

Later that night, Satinov is in his study at his apartment, which, with just one child at home, is much quieter than it should be. Tamara is in his arms as she tells him about Mariko.

Satinov closes his eyes. His little Mariko with her brown eyes and braided hair, hay-sweet. A spasm flutters from his stomach to his throat and spreads to his eyes and mouth, to his whole being for, in spite of his being the Iron Commissar, in spite of his being Comrade Satinov, he is out of control.

He blinks. In the mirror on the far wall, he sees himself, holding Tamara, her hair in a bun, her long neck, her jerking shoulders. And he looks deep into his own eyes and sees they are full of a terrible betrayal. Shocked, he looks away, at the photographs lined up on the desk. But instead of his children and Tamara, he sees only one woman’s face.

Yes, he is weeping for Mariko, for George, for Tamriko, but he is also weeping selfishly. For himself. And for the woman with whom he has fallen desperately in love.

HE FIRST SAW her in January 1945 just after the Red Army broke into East Prussia. He remembers the day, the hour, the minute. They were far from Moscow on the First Belorussian Front. As the Front’s commissar, he and its commander, Marshal Rokossovsky, had fought all the way through Belorussia, and then through the wasteland of Poland to break into Germany itself. Even Germany’s humblest cottages had larders filled with sugar, bread, eggs and meat, soft beds and white pillows. Most farmers had fled from the Russians, but the few who stayed were ruddy-cheeked and well dressed. They even wore wristwatches.

The sky had been growing chalkier all day but when the snowstorm came, it took them all by surprise. Sitting in his Willy jeep, with Losha Babanava at the wheel, Colonel General Satinov watched the army pass. Howitzers pounded Nazi positions a few kilometres down the road. They were, he thought, a Mongol horde in the age of machines: the mud-streaked tanks were now covered with bright rugs on which crouched filthy infantrymen in tattered uniforms dark with machine oil, wearing rabbit hats, shaggy sheepskin coats, and often several wristwatches, brandishing guns wrapped in white rags like bandages, swigging at bottles, singing songs that were lost in the rattling screech of machinery.

Next came the gun crews, who bounced along on their caissons softened with cushions embroidered in silk, playing German accordions inlaid with jewels. Tanks, howitzers, American Willy jeeps, and Studebaker trucks: all moved past in a slow inexorable line. Then: what was this? An antique Berline carriage with swinging lanterns, pulled by horses, and a glimpse inside of an officer’s shoulderboards and a girl’s glazed kohl-smoked eyes.

A blizzard at dusk in a deserted village, dense snow quickly settling on the surrounding fields and the roofs of the cottages of Gross Meisterdorf. The soldiers sheltered nearby in whichever cottage was closest. Still in his jeep, Satinov leaned wearily forward as an NCO saluted.

‘Comrade general, the medical corps’s setting up a hospital in the church hall. They’re ready for you to inspect.’

Outside the church hall, Satinov saw soldiers carrying stretchers from a truck. Two of their soldiers were already dead. Not wounded by the Nazis, but poisoned by moonshine: alcohol made from antifreeze.