Simon Montefiore - One Night in Winter

An hour later, in the back of the armoured Packard speeding through the silvery woods towards Stalin’s Nearby Dacha, he was himself again, the Iron Commissar. Almost.

‘After the war,’ Frank warned Serafima, ‘we think Stalin will crack down. America will be Russia’s enemy, so we must be very careful. As a diplomat I’m watched, and with your background you may be too. Our blessing is that we’ve found each other, but our curse is that we are in a time and place when we can’t just live as we’re doing now, in the present.’

‘I suppose you’ve thought of using codes?’ Serafima asked.

‘As a matter of fact, I have. This is how we’ll meet. I’ll leave a bookmark in the foreign literature section of the House of Books. If it’s in a Galsworthy, we’ll meet at the matinée. If it’s in Edith Wharton, evening; in Hemingway, ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for us, so come back tomorrow. There will be a ticket under a false name at the Bolshoi for that night’s performance.’

‘So I will just go to the Bolshoi again and again?’

‘You can watch an act or two but when I go out, you go out too, through the fire doors at the back. No one will follow you.’

‘And we’ll meet in the street.’

‘Darling Serafima, I have an apartment. The great thing is that it’s not registered as a diplomatic residence. It belonged to a Russian friend who was killed in the war and no one knows about it. It’s very simple, but it could be our place. It’s near the back of the Bolshoi so when you come out… would you l-l-like to meet me there?’

Serafima smiled. She knew this was right – but it amused her that, out of all the girls at school, some of whom seemed so fast, it was going to be her , Serafima, who would make love first. She loved Frank and he loved her and it seemed absolutely natural to do it with the man she wanted to spend her life with. She knew the basics, the facts of life, but how it all really worked, she had no proper idea. What if she became pregnant? The scandal would destroy her. Wasn’t it the man’s job to ensure she didn’t? But there was an even bigger problem that ate at her.

‘You seem worried,’ he said. ‘We don’t have to do anything at all. Just talk if you like.’

‘I’m not sure…’

‘You want to wait until we’re married?’

‘It’s not that.’

‘Then what?’

‘I just feel that I’m not… perfect. That you’ll be disappointed.’

‘Nothing could disappoint me about you. Nothing.’ Frank’s eyes were burning with certainty as he said this.

But it wasn’t nothing. It was the snakeskin, the burn on her body. No one except her family had seen it since she had become a teenager, but she’d never forgotten that it was there, beneath her clothes. Her dresses were higher and plainer to protect this indelible stain. She could always feel it, stiffer and rougher than the rest of her. An ugly thing of yellow corrugated skin, it made her feel ugly too. Her only hope was that Frank loved her enough to pretend it was not there.

A lingering dread now haunted her sleep, her classes, her every moment, threatening to destroy her happiness as she had always feared it would. What if Frank was disgusted by her? What if he fell out of love with her? Should she tell him about it first?

They arranged to meet and then she cancelled their date – twice. But in the end, she decided that she must just trust him. If he was the man she thought he was, the Frank she loved, wouldn’t he take her snakeskin as an indivisible part of her? She would just have to find out.

SATINOV DID NOT see Dashka Dorova again until Stalin rewarded him with a special prize: he was to be the Supremo’s representative at Marshal Zhukov’s headquarters. Three Fronts, 2.5 million Soviet soldiers, 7,500 tanks, were converging on Berlin. But Stalin had chosen Zhukov to take Berlin, and Satinov would go with him.

On 15 April, Satinov reported to Zhukov’s headquarters before the Seelow Heights. At dawn the next day, Zhukov’s howitzers opened up – the thunder of the barrage shook Satinov to his very innards – and the men went into battle. But the assault didn’t go according to plan. Storming those well-defended hills, the Russians suffered 30,000 casualties, and that night, a furious Stalin phoned Satinov.

‘Who’s responsible for this crime?’ he said. ‘Find the culprit and we’ll shorten him by a head!’

Even Zhukov was demanding new hospitals to handle so many wounded. And so it was that Dr Dorova was summoned urgently, called right from her bed in the middle of the night by Marshal Zhukov himself. Satinov did not see her; he was with Zhukov at the front line but she was nearby and he found himself constantly looking around for a glimpse of her.

On 19 April, the Seelow Heights finally fell and Zhukov advanced on Berlin, but it took ten days of brutal street-by-street fighting to take the city. It was only after the fall of the Reichstag and the suicide of Hitler that Satinov saw her amongst the Soviet generals in the white stucco hall of the Karlshorst Army Technical Training School. It was 8 May, and Zhukov and the American and British generals were waiting for Feldmarschall Keitel to end the war. Rows of klieg lights beamed a theatrical electric whiteness on to the table where the Nazis would sign the surrender. The medals of twenty nations, the oiled hair and rough-hewn skin of the hard-living generals, the powdered foreheads, glazed lips and waved hairdos of aides, typists, drivers and PPZhs were illuminated by the unforgiving zinc light.

She was in her parade uniform, the elegantly coutured (against all regulations) tunic and skirt showing off her curvaceous figure. How the vizored cap of a general of the medical corps, the gold, scarlet, the stars and braid, set off her brown skin and eyes.

Hours passed and the surrender was delayed as the Nazis tried to sue for better terms. Zhukov and Stalin’s representative at the negotiations, Vyshinsky, shouted at each other; generals rushed in and rushed out and finally the Nazi generals arrived, wearing their bitterness and Prussian rigidity as badges of dignity to conceal the squalor of their crimes.

When at last the ceremony was done, Satinov came over to her. ‘Dr Dorova.’

‘Comrade Satinov.’

‘How’ve you been?’

‘I’m fine. What a day!’

‘We can tell our grandchildren we were here.’

She looked into his eyes. ‘Are you thinking of your son Vanya?’ she asked him gently.

‘Yes, I am. Today, at last, I can really think of him.’ Only a small tic in his cheek revealed how moved he really was, but she saw it.

‘We better not talk too much…’ She glanced over at the egregious Vyshinsky.

‘Right, but it’s good to see you.’

‘And you.’

Zhukov’s banquet went on all night. Dish after dish, twenty-five toasts – to Stalin, the Red Army, Soviet women; to Churchill and Truman – but by 6 a.m., when the dinner ended, Satinov stood beside Zhukov and Vyshinsky to wave goodbye to their drunk Western friends in the blue light of dawn. The war was over. He found her again watching the Americans drive away.

‘It’s me,’ he said from behind.

‘Hello, me,’ she said.

The skin on her cheeks was pink with excitement, weariness and alcohol. It was the end of a night of toasts and four years of war.

‘May I ask… Do you ever think of…’

‘Academician Almaz? Every day.’

‘Me too,’ said Satinov, turning away from her, from his past. ‘Every day.’

THE MATINÉE AT the Bolshoi. All Moscow was already on the streets. The Red Army was in Berlin. The Nazis had signed the surrender the previous night. As soon as the lights went down, Serafima followed Frank’s plan.