Simon Montefiore - One Night in Winter

‘Oh God, where’s Mariko? Where are they?’ Tamara started to panic again.

The door opened. They rose to their feet. But no, it was Andrei, pale but otherwise unharmed. He and his mother left.

Satinov and Tamriko were alone again. They held hands, so tense they couldn’t speak. A moment later, the door opened again.

‘Mamochka!’ called a shrill voice. Mariko, followed by George, ran into the room at high speed, holding one of her toy dogs. She ran round the room so fast that Tamriko and Satinov barely had time to get up before she threw herself into Tamriko’s arms. Tamriko whirled her round and round.

‘Look what I’ve got for you! Look who’s come to meet you!’ Tamriko reached into her bag and pulled out a handful of Mariko’s toy dogs. ‘Old friends and a new one too!’

Mariko squeaked with joy, grabbing the toy dogs, and threw her arms around her mother again.

‘Hello, Papa,’ said George sheepishly. He was still in his football kit.

‘You look OK, George,’ said Satinov briskly, ‘thinner perhaps. Good to see you!’ and he put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, an unprecedented act of informality. George looked grateful and Satinov realized his son was scared of his anger.

‘Come on,’ said Satinov, kissing Mariko on the top of her head. ‘It’s time to go home.’

They drove back to Granovsky in silence.

‘Papa, I’m so sorry. I had to sign,’ said George as soon as they were back in their apartment. Father and son both knew that the children’s confession could be used against the parents.

Satinov looked at George for a long moment, wishing he could reach across the dark valley of his own reticence. He wanted to tell him how much he loved him, and that he didn’t blame him for anything. But he didn’t know how to begin.

‘I know,’ he said briskly. ‘You’ve learned your lesson. The law will take its course. In the meantime you are to finish the term at school. Let’s not mention it again.’

‘Thank you, Papa,’ said George formally.

‘Look, Papa, look!’ Mariko ran into the room holding a bundle of her dogs. ‘My bitches have been in the kennel for being naughty but now they’re back at school. I’m so happy.’

‘Prisoner Golden, we know you fornicated with many women and corrupted their Soviet morality.’

‘I told you I did not.’

‘You seduced your pupils.’

‘Never.’ Benya looked back at the happiness of his Second Coming, his return from the dead, his fresh chance. Teaching the children in School 801 had made him happier than virtually anything in his life, certainly more than the undeniable joy of writing a successful book. Now it was over.

‘We know from our informer that you met the schoolgirl Serafima Romashkina at the café next to the House of Books. Did you have intercourse with the schoolgirl Serafima Romashkina?’

‘No.’ Now Benya was startled that, out of all the children, the case had focused on Serafima. He sensed that she was in grave danger.

‘What did you discuss with her?’

‘Pushkin. Poetry.’

‘Poetry? You suborned her to deviate from Marxism-Leninism with philistine-bourgeois individualism?’

Benya took a quick breath. The interrogator had stumbled on something – but he had not yet made the connections. In the 1930s, Benya had loved a woman who had vanished into the meatgrinder and the Gulags. Now, by pure chance, he had found himself teaching her cousin about literature and love. He and Serafima had met for coffee.

‘Do you know my favourite Pushkin poem?’ Benya had asked her. ‘It’s his most romantic poem, and it’s special to me. “The Talisman” . ’

‘What a piece of luck,’ sighed Serafima, putting her hands together, her eyes shining. She had never looked more beautiful, he thought. ‘It’s my favourite too. It’s our – I mean it’s my poem. It’s special to me as well.’ And Benya had known immediately that she was in love too. For a moment, he turned away from her so she couldn’t see his eyes, but she was so happy that she never noticed, and he found himself blessing her in Pushkin’s verses to a young girl named Adele, the beloved child of a friend:

And she listened with her head on one side…

‘Prisoner Golden!’ The Chekist brought him back to the grim here and now. ‘What did you discuss with her? Were you involved with Serafima and her special friend in their anti-Soviet conspiracy?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We’ve worked it all out, Golden, and we know that the Children’s Case was a conspiracy inspired from abroad through Serafima, by her secret American lover – a foreign capitalist spy.’

Benya bit his lip. He had been very slow to work this out but now he understood everything: NV, the gorgeous princess, was Nikolasha’s code for Serafima. NV and Serafima were interchangeable. Serafima was an inch away from destruction. He realized what he must do. ‘You’ve got that quite wrong,’ he said.

Colonel Likhachev scowled. ‘Give me your testimony or I’ll beat you to a pulp.’

Benya closed his eyes, remembering the elegiac days of that 1930s winter when he was in love. ‘I confess that I invented the Fatal Romantics’ Club with its bourgeois anti-Leninist philistinism,’ he said slowly. ‘I dictated the idea of the anti-Soviet conspiracy to Nikolasha Blagov. You asked me earlier who NV was? I am NV . Most Muscovites met some foreigners in wartime and no doubt Serafima Romashkina did too. But let me testify before the Party, before the Great Stalin himself, that Serafima is involved in no foreign conspiracy. I’m the conspirator.’

‘You will confess to all this, Prisoner Golden?’

‘Yes. Just give me the papers.’

‘You understand that this is a terroristic crime according to Article 158, punishable with the Highest Measure of Punishment?’

Benya nodded. Then, as Colonel Likhachev drew up the confession, he just sat back. Graceful images floated into his consciousness. Kissing the woman he’d loved, long ago, outside the Metropole Hotel in a snowstorm. Catching Agrippina’s eye as she made tea in the common room. Finding a rare volume in the flea market. And this, his last decent act, protecting a girl who had so much to live for. He imagined he heard the clatter and murmur of the children settling down in the classroom before his Pushkin lessons. There was George. And Andrei. Minka. And at the back, staring out of the window at the cherry trees, no doubt dreaming of her secret love, Serafima.

He clapped his hands and heard his own voice, as if echoing very far away, long ago and in a vanished world: ‘Dear friends, beloved romantics, wistful dreamers! Open your books. I hope you’ll always remember what we’re going to read today. We are about to go on a wonderful journey of discovery.’

EARLY AFTERNOON. THE rays of the sun pour through the whirling motes of dust in Frank’s apartment to create a golden kaleidoscope on the far wall. Although Serafima doesn’t yet know that her friends are about to be released, she senses they will soon be home and all seems right with her world. Frank is there already and there is no need to say anything for a while. He gives her the jaunty two-finger salute that he always gives her, and she can see that he’s in high spirits.

She savours the lemony scent of his cologne, the softness of his skin, the texture of his hair (soft as a girl’s), his eyes. She kisses his cheek, and then he takes her chin in his hand and starts to kiss her. Her eyes shut and she sighs in the back of her throat.

He starts to undress her and this time she unfastens his shirt herself, her fingers suddenly so agile that they can unbutton at record speed. When he helps her pull her dress over her head, she does not fear the revelation of her snakeskin. On the contrary, she cannot wait to show him that she is still his, all of her, the delicate and the rough. When they are naked, she feels her snakeskin anticipating his touch. The craving is answered as his fingers lightly trace the burnt, parchmenty skin. ‘This means you’re mine and you’ll be mine forever,’ he whispers.