Simon Montefiore - One Night in Winter

A few hours later, and the dinner was over. Stalin had telephoned to discuss the offensive and Marshal Rokossovsky had retired. Around Satinov, the other officers and Losha were singing ‘Katyusha’ beside the fireplace. But he craved a quiet smoke and some cool air. Pulling on his fur-lined greatcoat and wolf-fur hat, he stepped through the doors at the back of the house and out into the night.

It was bitterly cold. The snow glowed on the statuary in the well-kept grounds. Where were the house’s owners now? Were they even alive? How quickly fortune could change. Satinov lit a cigarette and sipped at the cognac in his glass.

War was simply a slaughterhouse on wheels, he thought. For most men, soldiering was tragedy expressed as a profession. And yet he liked this life, the straightforward comradeship of the front, the sense of shared mission, the moral clarity of war against evil.

The orange tip of another cigarette: he wasn’t alone.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said quietly. ‘I thought you’d flown back to Moscow.’

‘I’ll be here a while yet,’ she replied. ‘The medical services on this front need reorganization and I can’t trust anyone else to do it.’ She was wearing, he noticed, that full-length sheepskin greatcoat that, out here, made her look like a wild animal.

‘I prefer to do everything myself too. I didn’t realize you were from Moscow.’

‘I’m from Lvov originally. Is it so obvious I’m from Galicia?’ She laughed with a singing sound, throwing back her head so that he caught a glimpse of her throat.

‘No, not at all. You’re at the Kremlevka?’

‘Yes, I’m its new director. But I’m a cardiologist. What’s your speciality?’

‘Not hearts,’ Satinov said tersely. ‘Hearts are the last organs that I consider.’

As they talked, the steam of their breath fused, and when they exhaled, cigarette smoke twisted from their lips and swirled around them like the folds of a grey cloak. He was conscious of her distinct spicy perfume as they walked around the gardens, and then out into the fields beyond the house. The full moon above them had dyed the snow a strange blue so that, as they walked on into the deer park, the blue grass under their feet crunched and sparkled. The snowflakes that gathered in her hair seemed to make it blacker and thicker still.

He stopped to allow Dashka to finish the cognac in his glass. Ahead was a white colonnade – and now they saw it was a small Grecian temple.

‘It’s from the Seven Years War,’ she said. ‘A folly!’

‘Let’s explore!’ Feeling like children, they entered its cold portals, chased by wisps of mist that curled down from little domes and out of alcoves. Suddenly, and without knowing quite why, Satinov was filled with an intense joy. Below them, they could see the gloomy house, surrounded by lines of jeeps, tanks, guns. Smoke from the soldiers’ fires rose from the village. In the distance: the sound of a hammer on metal; of engineers mending the tanks; engines revving; volleys of shots; young men singing a love song – was it the Georgian melody ‘Tiflis’? A boom and the orange flash of distant howitzers momentarily made the snow itself flare up as if on fire.

Leaning against the wall, he lit another cigarette and told her about his family, of his happiness with Tamara, how the death of his eldest son had fused into the deaths of tens of thousands in the battles where he served, of his pride in his second son David, his admiration for George’s genial mischief (which he envied), of Marlen’s successes, and of Mariko, apple of his eye.

‘Have you told them all these things?’ she asked.

He shook his head.

‘But you tell me here? You must tell them; you must tell Tamara.’

He smiled, turning to her, noticing the beauty of her dark eyes, her lips. ‘Now, your turn,’ he said.

She had one son in the army, a daughter, Minka, who took nothing seriously, and Demian who took everything seriously, like his father. And then there was her little afterthought: ‘My Senka, whom I love so much it makes me grind my teeth.’

‘I was like that with my mother,’ said Satinov.

‘My Senka’s quite different from you, Hercules. He’s soft and adorable but you – we all know that you’re the Iron Commissar. You like to be seen as cold as ice, as silent as the forest.’

‘I don’t seem very silent tonight.’

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘You’ve surprised me.’

‘I’ve surprised myself.’

She laughed and he glimpsed her throat again. ‘It’s my company, of course. I claim credit for your loquacity. I thought you were another silent Bolshevik disciplinarian.’

They had almost avoided the mention of her spouse up to now. It seemed to Satinov to be a significant move in their conversation. ‘He’s strict at home too?’

‘He never lets us forget. He’s the puritanical conscience of the Party. But I love him, of course. And you?’

‘Probably Tamara would agree. The Soviet man is a product of our harsh times. But I love my Tamara too, and our friends say our marriage is the happiest they know.’

‘How wonderful,’ she said. ‘It’s true. I know all the gossip but I’ve never heard a whisper about you being a flirt.’

He threw his cigarette away, a speck of red in the blue snow beyond. ‘But what about you, Dashka? Are you famous for your flirtations? You’re beautiful enough…’

‘I like to flirt but it never goes anywhere. I married at nineteen and I’ve never looked at another man in twenty-one years.’

‘And yet…?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m just enjoying this moment.’

He passed her a cigarette and watched her put it between her lips. He leaned in to light it. He closed his eyes for a moment and he could feel how close she was – by the warmth of her face, the scent of her hair and her exotic amber skin so rare amongst Russians.

He paused, waited for her to move away; then he leaned in closer and, without any decision or reason at all, they were kissing, and he could feel her light, wide lips on his.

Outside the arches and the colonnades, the snow started to fall again, making the night a few degrees warmer. The flakes whirled around them in their little temple. Once they had started to kiss, and once they knew that no one could see them, they could not stop. His hands ran over her fur coat; then he was pushing it open, and then the green tunic and her blouse, delighting in the soft caramel hues of her neck and shoulders.

She was kissing him more hungrily than he had ever been kissed by Tamara. She was biting his mouth, tearing his lips, breathing his breath. For a second, the scientific Communist, the Iron Commissar, returned and Satinov wondered if this was right, normal, and he shrank from her. But as he inhaled her quick breath, tasted the slight bitterness of her cigarettes and the sweetness of the brandy, her passion infected him. She curled herself around him so that he could feel her body, her need for him. He touched her legs above her boots, realizing that he loved their delicious sturdiness. When his hand slid up her American nylons, when it reached the silkiness of her skin, both of them groaned aloud.

Somehow they stopped, and a few minutes later, they were walking back down the hill towards the house.

‘Comrade doctor,’ he said in his restored commanding tone, ‘we’re good Bolsheviks. We both love our spouses. This can never happen again.’

‘Agreed, comrade general. Of course.’

‘You go in first,’ he ordered.

He bent down and scooped up some snow and rubbed it bracingly into his face, onto his lips that still tasted of her. You fool, Satinov, he told himself, after all these years without so much as a glance at another woman, how could you behave like this now?