Simon Montefiore - One Night in Winter

‘There you are, Serafima! How was it in Turkestan? As you can see, they’re overworking me as usual but it’s not easy for actresses of my age. There are always ingénues coming up, willing to do anything to get the parts and every one of them has a “patron”, some boss to pull strings for them…’

‘Mama, I need to speak to you on your own.’

‘Is it something important?’

‘Yes, Mama.’

‘You can trust my ladies-in-waiting, can’t she, girls?’

‘Of course!’ the assistants trilled.

‘No, it’s really private,’ Serafima insisted. ‘And urgent. Would you mind?’

‘Oh, all right. Leave us, girls.’

When the room was empty, Serafima told Sophia that she had met an American man and they were engaged to be married.

Sophia looked shocked. ‘You don’t have to marry him, surely,’ she said.

‘We’re in love, Mama,’ Serafima said, ‘and we’re going to live in America.’

‘What?’ Sophia seemed stricken. ‘You’re going to leave me and Papa? You can’t do that.’

Serafima smiled. ‘You told me often enough to follow your heart, Mama, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.’

‘And you’re engaged? I don’t see a ring. Is there a diamond?’

‘I tried it on before I went away and it fits me perfectly. But it’s so big that I gave it back to him. I’ll put it on in America.’

‘You gave it back? I’ve never given back a jewel in my life. Oh Serafimochka! Why an American? Your papa and I will never see you.’ Sophia gave a sob and started to cry. Yet to Serafima, even her tears seemed oversized and extravagant.

Suddenly, she dabbed her eyes, the mascara smearing on her cheeks. ‘Congratulations, my darling. But… when are you planning to go? Surely we can meet him first?’

‘Soon, Mama.’

‘But you know your timing is terrible for me, darling, don’t you?’

‘I can’t delay going, Mama.’

Sophia put down the cigarette and took Serafima’s hands in her own. ‘Please delay going abroad. For my sake.’

‘I can’t. He’s waiting for me. He wants to take me to America right away. I want to be with him and when I was in prison—’

‘But you’re home now. You can go abroad with him anytime. I know an actress who married an English journalist and she went to London with him just a few weeks ago. What difference does it make if you wait just a few weeks?’

Serafima frowned. ‘But why?’

‘Because I’m up for the most important part of my life. Papa’s written a special role for me as the Tsarina in Ivan the Terrible Part Two and your relationship with a foreigner, an American, could spoil everything. How will it look to…’ Even Sophia never took Stalin’s name in vain. ‘… the Central Committee?’

Serafima cursed her mother – her selfishness, her egocentricity – but she loved her too and she wanted her to be happy. Besides, this involved her father too. Did she want her marriage to start with her mother’s unhappiness? Could she build her future on the disappointment of the ones she loved?

‘Please, do this for me,’ Sophia was saying. ‘My life’s no bed of roses. Do you think everything’s perfect with your father and me? Every day’s a Gethsemane! You’ve attracted attention with your Romantics’ Club antics, and I’m alone so much. All I’m asking you to do is wait a few more weeks before you tell people what you’re going to do.’

‘How long do you need?’ Serafima asked.

‘Three weeks and the casting will be decided. Shall we say a month?’

What could change in a month? But Serafima felt a grinding uneasiness come over her. It was true that the Children’s Case had embarrassed her mother. In fact, it could have ruined her career and she had never once complained. She shook her misgivings away, turned and hugged her.

‘Just a month, Mama,’ she said. ‘Just a month, and then Frank and I are leaving for America.’

SIX WEEKS HAD passed since the children had been sentenced, and although by now they had returned from Central Asia, Hercules Satinov was still there, with his career, his very life, on the edge of a precipice. The strange thing was that, even though his subordinates and some air force generals had been arrested, even though Genrikh Dorov had warned him that there were problems with his ministry, he had not really seen it coming. It had been building for a long time but this was Stalin’s style of management – rule by caprice and pressure – and the very fact that he had believed himself to be safe would be a reason in Stalin’s eyes to give him a shock.

Now, Satinov sat alone, unshaven – thousands of kilometres from Moscow, from Tamriko, from his family, and the Kremlin – in the primitive kitchen of a small state dacha on the outskirts of Samarkand, smoking a cigarette of rough local tobacco, sipping at a glass of Armenian cognac, and thinking about Dashka Dorova.

A man in blue-tabbed uniform with narrow Uzbek eyes looked in at him from the doorway and vanished again; Satinov ignored him. It was September, and the heat in this red-walled house, built on red soil, was oppressive and he was bare-chested. He was unwell: he was suffering jabs of pain in his chest but he did not know whether it was heartburn or angina.

Heartbreak, he thought, is an agonizing disease that you’re delighted to have. How had he lost control? Had he nearly thrown everything away for a woman who had turned his life upside down and almost made it hell? The release of the children had rekindled the passion between them, despite his own reason and her growing misgivings, and this short, last streak had blazed with a special brightness. Yet their quick phone calls and one meeting were worse than nothing at all for they stirred such pangs of unslaked thirst in him that he didn’t know how to quench them. Her last call was almost a relief.

‘Once and for all, it’s over,’ she had said. ‘No starting again. With you, I crossed the bridge to the world of passion, but I realize that I’m not cut out for that life and now I’ve crossed back. We can’t risk what is truly precious; we can’t make our happiness out of the unhappiness of those we love. These things are easy to start but ending them, that’s an art, isn’t it? Now, I’ve got to let you go, angel. I’ve got to say goodbye.’

And then, later that day, another envelope appeared in his in-tray, typed: ‘Com. Satinov. Secret.’ He opened it to find a page torn out of a cheap edition of Pushkin’s Onegin. He had never read it.

‘Chubin!’

‘Yes, comrade.’

‘Run out and get me Onegin .’

Poor Chubin, once again bewildered by his boss’s sudden literary whims, had done as he was told and Satinov had started to read Onegin until he found the page she had sent him. And suddenly there it was. Bending over his desk, he studied it intently. It is a long time after Onegin’s duel. After many years of travelling abroad, Onegin meets Tatiana again. By now she is a powerful married lady in St Petersburg – this cool princess so resplendent , and Onegin realizes he is passionately in love with her and he writes to tell her. Tatiana is heartbroken – and here was the passage marked by Dashka’s pencil:

Here it was, in the silence of his office with its lifesize portrait of Stalin, and its array of telephones, here was Dashka’s answer. He had been furious at his children living in the romantic world, and now secretly, he, Stalin’s Iron Commissar, was living it himself. Even though each line flayed him, he read and reread the passage, wondering if he could stand another moment of this emotional rollercoaster that had borne him from misery to exhilaration and back in a matter of days, a circle of joy and despair that had lasted for almost all of their months together.