Simon Montefiore - One Night in Winter

Inside a wood-panelled hall, lit with oil lamps swinging from the rafters, men were lying on the floorboards. Satinov smelled the fug of so many wartime bunkers: damp cloth and body odour, here mixed with iodine. Nurses in white smocks worked on the new arrivals. A little to his right, a female army doctor was crouched over a soldier. She was on her knees, massaging and pummelling his bare chest. ‘Come on, come back, breathe!’ she was saying. The boy spluttered and his chest lurched into movement like a rusty engine. The doctor, who wore the red cross on her arm, listened to his chest for a moment and then stood up. ‘All right, he’ll make it. Who’s next?’

Satinov watched her approach a second poisoned soldier. Again she managed to resuscitate him but afterwards, when she was standing up, she wiped her forehead and said to no one in particular: ‘Two saved; three stable; four dead.’

She saluted Satinov. ‘Welcome to the Gross Meisterdorf Hospital, comrade general. It’s not much, as you can see. They die quickly of antifreeze. Every second counts.’

She was still wearing her white sheepskin coat. A pistol rested in her belt, a stethoscope was clipped round her neck, and she wore a blue pilotka beret. She hasn’t had time to take it off, Satinov thought, noticing that her face was long and oval, and her straight high nose and cheeks lightly speckled with a few freckles. Even here, at the front, when she was putting all her energy into saving a life, he noticed that she had altered her uniform a little, and taken up her khaki skirt a few centimetres, to reveal her American nylons, which were dark and against regulations.

A nurse brought a tray of mugs of chai , very sweet, steaming. ‘Glad you’re here for these boys,’ said Satinov.

‘Are you inspecting us or just passing?’ she asked. She had a fetching accent, he realized, certainly Galician, probably from Lvov, with a Mitteleuropean touch of Yiddish.

‘Just passing. I’m on my way up to headquarters.’

‘Of course you are.’ Her eyes aglint with feisty intelligence were slightly mocking. She surely recognized him; most people did. ‘Since we have a general here, could you find us some mattresses – on your way up to headquarters?’ She gave a slightly crooked smile.

‘I’ll do my best,’ he said, feeling somehow abashed as if she was challenging him to justify his rank.

‘Thank you, comrade,’ she said, getting up and heading over towards the next wounded soldier. Her nurses followed.

Satinov opened the door. The snow had stopped. He felt the countryside was slumbering under the white blanket and that somewhere deep beneath it, nature was breathing.

Losha drove on slowly through the dark night, no headlights, the chains on their wheels clanking, their route periodically illuminated by arching tracers and explosions that dyed the sky as bright as day. Satinov looked out of the window. Sometimes the sky up ahead flashed scarlet for a moment as the howitzers fired their barrages. He thought of the doctor. Remembered her nose, its sprinkling of freckles and her brown skin. He had never asked her name.

JANUARY 1945 IN Moscow: long fingers of ice reached down from the eaves of the houses but Serafima felt that springtime was close.

‘Let’s go to the Bolshoi tonight,’ suggested Minka. They were walking down the corridor towards the Golden Gates for pick-up. Because it was still wartime, and all their fathers were at the front, the chauffeurs, mothers and nannies did the collecting. ‘Say you will, Serafimochka!’

‘But, Minka, we only went yesterday,’ Serafima replied. ‘Is there a new production?’

‘No, it’s Romeo and Juliet , but I love it.’

‘Never mind Prokofiev, you just like dressing up, Minkushka,’ said Serafima with one of her rare laughs. ‘But I hate it. I always loathe the way I look.’

‘You look so lovely in that green dress of yours. All the boys think so. Everyone was admiring you – even the officers in their boxes.’

‘Really?’ Serafima was sure she was too tall and too plain; she didn’t feel at all attractive compared to her beautiful mother and her generous, confident friend. ‘I know you want to go again,’ she said. ‘Those officers were looking at you, not me. You’re such a flirt.’

‘I plead guilty,’ Minka said with a giggle. ‘I loved the way they were looking at us both. But that’s all!’

‘Oh, I wasn’t saying…’ Serafima knew that Minka would never go beyond the prudish limits of Soviet morality. The military fronts these days resembled Babylonian bacchanalia, but for the schoolchildren anything more than a kiss and a few lines of poetry was unthinkable.

‘Besides, dressing up is such fun,’ Minka was saying. ‘Say you’ll come tonight. You always enjoy it when you’re there. I think you like the officers’ attention too. And I already have tickets.’

And so it was that at 7 p.m. that night, Serafima, Minka and their friend Rosa Shako arrived by Metro at the Bolshoi to see Romeo and Juliet for the seventh time. The sky was bleached white, the air just changing to warn snow was coming. Moscow had been battered by three years of war, the Kremlin was still draped in khaki netting, its red stars dark, and Gorky Street was marked by bombs and ruined houses. The shops were rationed and people in the streets looked diminished and shabby. But victory was close, everyone knew that. All the ministries, embassies and theatres that had been evacuated to Kuybishev on the Volga were back. The nights were no longer illuminated by Nazi air raids and flak guns but by the salvoes of victory salutes by entire parks of howitzers, ordered by Stalin.

And, as Minka had predicted, the moment they pushed their way into the theatre, they started to receive attention – and they had not yet even taken off their furs and shapkas. Knowing that it matched her big brown eyes, Minka had borrowed her mother’s mink coat. Rosa was wearing her best winter fox fur, but typically Serafima, whose mother possessed the best collection of furs in Moscow, was wearing her cheap rabbit furs. Inside the lobby of the theatre, the heating, the one and only Soviet luxury, was blazing. Garlic, vodka and the smell of cabbage seemed to ooze out of the people squeezed together, but never had there been a happier crowd of Muscovites. Everyone, even the grumpy ticket collectors, even the elderly, even the drunken soldiers and sailors, was cheerful. Victory was imminent; good times were coming.

The girls, giggling as they were pushed and pulled this way and that, queued to leave their coats at the cloakroom, and then they could breathe again and the passing officers could admire their dresses. Minka Dorova was looking the most sophisticated. She was wearing a pink frock copied from Bazaar magazine at the couture atelier of Abram Lerner and Kleopatra Fishman where the élite wives and the leaders had their clothes made.

‘You’re outrageous!’ exclaimed Serafima, looking at Minka’s glossy, half-bared shoulders and arms. ‘No wonder you wanted to come to the ballet!’

‘Your mother’s the best!’ Rosa said enviously to Minka. ‘My mother would never take me to Lerner’s atelier.’

‘Mine’s always asking me to go,’ admitted Serafima, ‘but I can’t bear shopping with her. She’s a despot, swans around like an ageing ingénue and makes me feel awful.’

‘And yet you still look irresistible,’ Minka said, trying to work out why Serafima’s dress, done up to the neck and with cuffs to her wrists, looked so alluring.

‘Oh, nonsense.’ Serafima elbowed Minka, who tickled her while Rosa scolded them for embarrassing her at the ballet. They were not schoolgirls on an outing, she reminded them, but eighteen-year-olds on the verge of womanhood in their finest dresses.