Simon Montefiore - One Night in Winter

‘You’re so much more cultured than me,’ he said. ‘I was expelled for Marxist activities at sixteen.’

‘I was raised in a Jewish household filled with books.’ She hesitated. ‘I feel so shaken up. As if the world has trembled and tilted so everything, even my sense of time is in a different place, everything has lost its previous meaning. I’d never have guessed that passion in our forties could be more intense than when we were young.’

‘So you’ve never…?’

‘Done this before? Never. Not once in all these years of marriage. I don’t know what’s come over me. What about you?’

‘You really need to ask that question? No, I’ve never done this before either.’

‘I thought all you leaders were womanizers.’

‘I’ve never looked at another woman – and now this.’

‘Are you in a panic, comrade general?’

‘Aren’t you, Dashka?’

‘I should be, but it feels so natural, as if we’ve known each other since we were young. You know, when I was eighteen, I studied medicine in Odessa and I had a love affair with a student of literature. We smoked opium. I almost got addicted to it – and him. Soon after, I met Genrikh and we got married. With him, I’ve always known where I belong and that I have a place. That’s love too. I need that, you know.’

Satinov looked at his watch and sighed. ‘My staff will be missing me. We’ve got to get back. It’s almost midnight.’ He dressed quickly, and looked down at her. She was still lying exactly where he’d left her. ‘What are you thinking about?’

She gave her slightly crooked smile, her eyes dark. ‘I’m thinking of tomorrow. Everyone will see me, and no one will know what I’ve been doing.’

THE NEXT MORNING, Satinov was summoned back to Stavka (which meant Headquarters) by the Supremo (which meant Stalin) to discuss the offensive. Then he was sent on a series of missions, to Bulgaria, to Romania, to see Mao Tse-tung in China… but all the time, and throughout the months that followed, he longed to see Dashka again. It was hard to discover where she was: he could not ask his staff to find her, as this would draw attention, and almost certainly someone would tell Beria or Abakumov’s minions, and they would start to gather a file against him for debauchery or corruption or something – and it would be stored away until the right moment.

‘Who was at Zhukov’s headquarters?’ he might ask his assistant Chubin.

‘Comrade Malenkov was inspecting,’ Chubin might respond. ‘Oh, and that Dr Dorova was there too…’

Then he could call her. ‘It’s me,’ he would say.

‘Hello, me,’ she always replied.

They could speak on the lines between fronts, freshly laid by the communications staff and therefore probably not yet bugged, but he didn’t say her name and she didn’t say his, so instead she created another persona, ‘Academician Almaz’, an old man who was neither one nor the other of them but both, a hermaphrodite who personified their love.

‘I was just calling to enquire about the health of old Academician Almaz?’

‘Academician Almaz is exceedingly old.’

‘I’ve so missed Academician Almaz.’

‘Almaz is always pleased to hear from you. You should call him more often. He’s so elderly, such a hermit these days…’

Just to hear her voice with that Galician-Yiddish accent, its rolling ‘r’s, was a joy to him. When he replayed, as he did constantly, their meetings, he wasn’t sure exactly what – out of her various identities – most delighted him: was it her astounding ability to improvise a hospital out of nothing, to save a life calmly, that singsong laughter or her golden thighs? Yet he never ceased loving his Tamriko, the mother of his only daughter, and the centre of his life (without whom his successes would have been impossible). He remembered too how frequently Dashka insisted that she loved Genrikh, adding, ‘Besides, if I left him, I’d lose everything’.

Once they met in ‘Stone Arse’ Molotov’s antechamber in the Kremlin. As well as running the army medical corps, she was now Health Minister. When she saw him, she jumped.

‘Oh, hello, Comrade Satinov, it’s you!’

‘Yes, comrade doctor, it’s me!’ They were alone for a few moments in that dreary room waiting for that dreary man neither wanted to see. They talked, in code of course, so closely that he could feel her breath on him. For one moment, he managed to touch her hand and she squeezed his fingers. Ah, he thought later, the madness of those moments!

‘How’s Academician Almaz? Will you tell him I miss him?’

‘Academician Almaz is working so hard, even I hardly get to see him.’

‘If you do see the esteemed Academician,’ he said, ‘will you tell the old sage that I think he has the most beautiful mind – and wrists and eyes – I’ve ever seen! For an octogenarian of course!’

‘The Academician has never been more excited to be at a meeting with Comrade Molotov,’ she replied. They could not risk a kiss, yet never, he decided, had two sets of eyes so ravished each other generating enough heat to warm even Stone Arse’s drab chambers. Then she said quietly, in that way of hers, barely opening her mouth: ‘I think we should stop talking now. Go and sit over there.’

Two generals came in. They’d separated just in time.

‘Comrade Satinov!’ Molotov – wearing a dark suit, his head as round as a cannonball, his figure as square as a brick – came out of his office. ‘Shall we take a walk around the Kremlin?’

‘Yes, let’s do that,’ agreed Satinov. As he talked to Stone Arse, he looked back at her; Dashka was gazing at him with the most loving intensity in her dark eyes – just for a moment, and then she glanced away. Satinov almost gasped with the pleasure. He ached to touch her and kiss her again. As he strolled the Kremlin’s courtyards with Molotov, he felt preposterously, dizzily happy.

He saw her and spoke to her so rarely that he had not really thought about what he expected of their fitful relationship. It had no formal future, yet he resolved to enjoy these special moments which he ascribed to the madness of war and death. Afterwards, however afterwards arrived, he would return to his real nature, his true world.

Yet one evening, when he was alone late at night in his Kremlin office waiting for the driver to take him to dinner with Stalin, he noticed that the phone in the empty neighbouring office was ringing. He’d sent home his aides so he ran down the corridor to answer it.

‘It’s Almaz.’ He recognized her distinctive voice straightaway.

‘Hello. I’m impressed with your cunning,’ he said. ‘Dear Academician!’

‘This Academician can’t talk for long,’ she said, ‘but I wanted you to know I can’t go on with this. I haven’t slept for three nights.’ He heard her crying and his heart ached for her. ‘I’ll lose my children, I’ll lose everything, and I feel so guilty! I have to give you up. Can you forgive me?’

Satinov clenched the phone, and willed himself to breathe deeply and calmly. He was not, he reminded himself, the Iron Commissar for nothing. ‘I understand,’ he said finally, putting down the phone.

Perhaps, he thought as he sat in the empty room, his own life as a revolutionary had given him the ability to bear secrets and pressures. He was born for conspiracy. Others, like Dashka, and indeed Tamriko, were not.

He returned to his own office and dialled a number: ‘Tamriko?’

‘Yes, darling Hercules.’

‘I’ll be late.’

‘Have a good dinner. Did you want anything?’

‘Are all the children well?’

‘Yes. They’re missing you, as I am. Come home soon.’

‘I shall,’ he said stiffly. But he had never called like that before and he knew it would please her.