Simon Montefiore - One Night in Winter

SATINOV CREPT ACROSS the open space between him and the door of an outhouse. The Nazis were only thirty kilometres away, and still fighting for every village. Yet here he was, having given his bodyguards the slip, and about to enter an unknown house and do something that went against every instinct and every rule. He hesitated and then, cursing to himself and cocking his PPSh machine-gun, he opened it, ready for a burst of enemy fire, but welcoming instead the grassy warmth of the stables that reminded him of riding at home, at his dacha. The three horses tethered inside seemed glad to see him and he was even gladder to see them.

Walking quickly through the stables and crossing the yard, he tried the back door of the large house. It was not locked and he slid inside, body tensed and soaked with sweat as he found himself in the capacious kitchen of a schloss designed to accommodate legions of servants. Bells were marked with the names of rooms. Holding his PPSh with its round magazine over his forearm, he walked lightly through a green baize door into a corridor that opened into a hall.

He saw the orange eyes first. Two, and then another two. Then pair after pair. He raised the barrel of the machine-gun: does it end here? But no, the heads of a herdsworth of moose, antelopes and bears were mounted up the high walls, reflecting the crimson flicker of a fire crackling in the fireplace. A step further; another step; the floorboards groaned but he was moving fast now.

A movement right in front of him: ‘Who is it? Hands up or I’ll shoot!’ But he knew, of course.

She was tending the fire.

‘Do you approve of the new hospital for the First Belorussian Front?’ she said, turning to him, her voice with its Galician accent so breathless that the words caught in her throat. ‘I’ve made chai . Would you like a cup?’

They sat next to each other, and she poured the tea into china cups and saucers emblazoned with some aristocratic crest. Her hands were trembling, he noticed as the china clinked and she spilled a little. She was as nervous as he was. Her scent, she told him, was L’Origan by Coty, strong and sweet and sharp, reminding him of honey melting in tea and spicy wood burning in a fire. It was getting dark in the room and so she took off her beret and her sheepskin greatcoat, and lit two kerosene lamps on the table.

‘I didn’t know if you’d come,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know if I was being presumptuous. Or, worse, deluded… But I knew I’d come anyway.’

Satinov said nothing. He imagined that two of the animal heads on the walls were talking to him.

‘Have you ever wanted a woman so much?’ asked the bison with the white glass eyes. ‘After the war, Stalin said every soldier deserves a bit of fun.’

But the voice from the lion’s head was more censorious and more urgent. ‘Think of Stalin. Of Tamriko. Of her husband, Genrikh Dorov. Leave now ! This is against Bolshevik ethics. Walk out of there right now! You have too much to lose if you stay.’

But it was no good. Satinov shook his head, pulled his greatcoat closer and sat down next to her.

‘Well, here we are,’ said Dashka, leaning against him for a moment, partly, he guessed, out of nerves, partly out of shyness. She produced a bottle of vodka and two little glasses. ‘You should have brought the drinks,’ she said, ‘but I knew you wouldn’t think of it. So here.’ And she put the glass in his hand.

‘I think I need it.’

‘God, so do I. Here’s to an unlikely and very secret friendship.’

They drank three little toasts and then he kissed her again; he had never kissed anyone who kissed like her.

‘Not here!’ She took his hand and a kerosene lamp and he followed her up a wide wooden staircase, hung with a gazelle and a zebra. Satinov felt each glassy eye swivel as the two of them passed. They reminded him of his colleagues in the Kremlin.

At the top of the stairs, she led him along the gloomy wood-panelled corridor and opened the door at the end; Satinov was more nervous than he had been on his first wedding night in Georgia in the twenties.

He was so well known for his clean living that Stalin, who gave everyone nicknames, sometimes called him the Choirboy. He could govern the Caucasus, and build a new industrial town in the middle of Siberia; he could dance and shoot wolves and ski; but this… what if he was no good at it? What if he failed completely?

‘Aren’t you going to kiss me?’ said Dashka. They were in a bedroom with another giant moose’s head over the bed, a fire already lit. The door shut behind him. They were kissing again and Satinov’s doubts vanished in that instant. This , he decided, was a neighbourhood of paradise. He pushed her against the door. He pulled the pin out of her hair and her tresses fell around her face. He held a handful, thick and heavy and black, although it turned a lighter chestnut and slightly curled at the ends. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘I like having my hair pulled.’

He reached up her skirt, scuffing the thick khaki until he reached the tops of those nylon stockings. ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ she was saying. She embraced him, kissing him frantically. Like a schoolboy making love for the first time, Satinov had to keep checking that this was really happening.

They hopped and limped across the floor, his trousers around his ankles, her booted legs and full, bare, brown thighs around his waist, her arms around his neck, her lips on his lips, her hair around him like a web, linked together, and tipped on to the bed.

‘I so wanted to feel you. Since last night, I haven’t thought of anything else,’ she said. ‘I didn’t sleep and I could hardly eat today. Will you undress me slowly?’

He fumbled with the buttons of her blouse and she helped him, all the time watching him, eyelids heavy, almost closing, the dark edges of her irises seeming to melt. He was astonished by her wantonness.

He hadn’t met anyone like this since his boyhood in Tiflis. The boys at the seminary (yes, he had studied for the priesthood at the same Tiflis Seminary as Stalin – but much later) had visited a woman of pleasure, a jet-haired gypsy. ‘That one’s far too prissy for this,’ the woman had said, nodding at Satinov. ‘That one really will become a priest.’ And she had been right because a Bolshevik was a sort of armed priest.

‘What are we going to do about him?’ Dashka said, pointing up at the moosehead above them.

‘How about this?’ He tossed her blouse up so that it covered the moose’s eyes, leaving just his nose peeking out. Then he returned to unbuttoning her skirt.

‘Do you think army skirts are designed to be impregnable fortresses for a reason?’ she asked. He rolled down her stockings until they were like long socks just below her knees and he started to kiss her knees and up her legs, wrapped as they were in the velvet of her caramel skin. ‘It’s years since anyone has undressed me like this.’

Satinov started to throw off his clothes too, but: ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I want to undress you too.’ He looked down on her; her body was streaked like a tigress by the orange flickers of the fire and dyed a deeper amber by the lamp. But he could scarcely bear to look for more than a moment before he had to kiss her again, on the lips, on the neck, everywhere; she bit her fingers. They made love again and as they finished, she laughed in a high singsong voice with her head thrown back.

Satinov opened his eyes and saw the dreary room, the plain wooden bed, the heavy Germanic furniture, dimly lit by the fire and the lantern, as if he was seeing everything for the first time – including her.

‘Do you know Ovid’s poems on love?’ she said. ‘He wrote that the bedroom is the only place where you can do exactly what you please, and truly be yourself.’