Simon Montefiore - One Night in Winter

After they have made love, he holds her in his arms. ‘Serafima Constantinovna…’

‘You’re using my patronymic? Why?’

‘I have something to ask you.’ Serafima feels his body tense next to hers as he gathers himself. ‘Will you marry me?’

‘Are you joking?’

‘No. I’m not much of a jester, am I?’

‘I suppose not,’ she agrees. ‘You’re a serious young man.’ She pauses, thinks. ‘You don’t have to do this, you know. I’m not sure they’ll let me out of the country, and this could cause so much trouble for you…’

‘Darling, all I want is to spend the rest of my life with you. Look, I’ve brought you this.’

He opens a small red box lined in satin. Inside is a gold ring with three diamonds in a row, a large one in the middle. ‘I want you to wear this for the rest of your life with me. Please, please, say you will?’

Serafima is so overcome she fears she might faint. Only a few weeks ago, she was in prison. Now she might go from Communist Moscow to New York City in America, from schoolgirl to wife. Suddenly all she wants is to be married to Frank. Yet there is much to fear. Her schoolfriends are still in jail, and she senses the jeopardy in their relationship.

‘Are you all right?’ Frank asks, concerned. ‘You’ve been through so much recently. There’s no need to answer now. I just…’

‘What?’ she asks.

‘I just can’t face being separated like this again without knowing where you are and how much I love you.’

Slowly she gives him her hand. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I will marry you. I want to be with you forever too.’

He slips the ring on to her finger and it fits as though she’s always worn it.

‘What are the chances of that?’ he asks. ‘It fitted my grandmother and it fits you.’ He raises her hand, the one wearing the ring, kisses it, and then her lips. ‘Now you’re going to be Mrs Frank Belman, we must make our plans carefully.’

The next day at the Golden Gates, a holiday mood. The pollen floats like the flurries of a snowstorm. The air smells of lilac. There’s just a week left of term.

‘I’m sure I don’t need to tell you,’ said Satinov to his three children as they walked from Granovsky Street, guards in front and behind them, ‘don’t discuss anything about the case with each other.’

At the gates, they greeted their friends with three kisses, feeling almost like adults after the nightmare they had been through.

‘What’s news?’ George asked Andrei, like old times. Except after the Children’s Case, things were very different.

‘Everyone’s out of prison,’ asked Andrei. ‘Thank God.’

‘Except our teacher, Benya Golden,’ added Minka Dorova, putting her arm through Serafima’s. ‘But I’m sure he’ll be out soon.’

Satinov watched his children going through the school gates. Things may have changed but a fragile normality seemed to have been established, he was thinking as he walked back towards the street, and then stopped.

There was Dashka Dorova on her own, kissing her Senka, her darling Little Professor, as she sent him into school.

She flushed when she saw him. ‘Greetings, Comrade Satinov. It’s like the start of another term,’ she said. ‘And congratulations on your promotion!’

The day suddenly seemed dizzily sunny. He longed to explain to her that his promotion wasn’t quite what it seemed. Only she would understand, and only telling her would make the thought worth thinking.

‘We don’t have to discuss the weather today,’ he said instead, remembering what she looked like with her thick black hair, now decorously restrained in a bun, loose on her bare amber-skinned shoulders.

‘It just got sunnier for me,’ she said, smiling in her dazzling, slightly crooked way.

‘I wondered…’

‘What?’ she said, a little breathlessly.

‘I just wondered about… about dear Academician Almaz? How is his gout?’

‘He’s older and crabbier than ever. And much, much lamer!’

‘Should I call him sometime? Am I allowed, do you think?’

She paused, and then stepped towards him so that he could smell her spicy scent. ‘I think you might be,’ she said. ‘Yes, I might even go so far as to say that he is looking forward to it.’

IT WAS TIME for a holiday. Back in his office in the Little Corner after the Potsdam Conference, Stalin felt exhausted and ill.

He was the arbiter of the world. Could he have imagined this when his father Beso showed him how to nail a sole on to a boot in his workshop in Gori? When he donned the black surplice with the white collar at the seminary in Tiflis? When he walked across the mountains with a rifle over his shoulder and donkeys bearing the cash from his bank robberies? When he spent those years in Arctic exile fishing with the Eskimos and seducing village schoolgirls? But his mission was never complete. Still no one supported him: wives, friends, comrades – all fools, weaklings or traitors. What tribulations they put him through. Roosevelt, whom he liked and admired, was dead; Truman was a small-time haberdasher, not a statesman. Churchill had lost the election: what kind of system dismissed a man who had just won a war? It made no sense at all, especially when he saw Churchill’s replacement: Attlee looked like a provincial stationmaster. Besides, Attlee was a socialist and Stalin despised socialists as liberal saps and milksops, worse than imperialists. A dagger in the back was what they deserved.

The Americans now had their new weapon of astonishing destructive power, the Atomic Bomb, so, just when he, Stalin, was triumphant, he had to put all his energy into catching up with the United States. The oppressive tingling in the back of his neck, the pains in his arms and the weakness in his limbs were getting worse, and the specialists told him he needed to rest. He hadn’t had a holiday since 1937 so he’d decided to go down to his villas on the Black Sea. He would have to leave Molotov and Satinov in charge, and they’d screw up, of course. They were too trusting. They couldn’t see the enemies. They were like blind kittens. But no matter, his train was already packed. There were just a couple of things he had to do before he left.

He had, he considered, a special talent for movie scripts. He could have been a writer if he’d chosen that path, and remembered his excitement when his teenage poems were published. He now read every movie script and approved every movie filmed at the Mosfilm Studios. On the train home, he had decided what to do with Eisenstein’s script for Ivan the Terrible Part Two.

In the little cinema near his office, in fifteen seats covered in burgundy velveteen, the Seven leaders plus the Minister of Cinema, that cretin Bolshakov, sat in rows. They were to be joined by the screenwriter Romashkin to watch some rushes from his movie Katyusha Part Two , which was being filmed at that very moment. Stalin recalled that Romashkin’s daughter, Serafima, was somehow entangled with Vasily and the Children’s Case – but he couldn’t quite remember where the case had got to. (That was why he was seeing Abakumov afterwards.)

The film had begun, and Stalin watched the rushes and approved them until the scene where Sophia Zeitlin kissed the actor playing her husband. ‘Stop the film! That’s vulgar!’ he told them. ‘The kiss is too long. It’s un-Soviet. Look at the way he’s holding her. The kiss has to go. What possessed you, Bolshakov, to pass this obscenity?’

‘Oh Comrade Stalin, I thought it was OK, but I would never have passed it without showing it to you.’

Stalin enjoyed watching Bolshakov cringe. ‘What do you think, comrades? Shall we forgive him or shall we punish him?’ Stalin rose and, puffing at his pipe, walked up and down before the screen. ‘To forgive? Or not to forgive?’