Simon Montefiore: One Night in Winter

MOVE CLOSER OR you won’t see. Move too close and they will see you.

The half-lit Yaroslavsky Station: a freezing hall of flickering lights amidst the darkness of a Muscovite winter through which flit hooded silhouettes and half-faces concealed by the hats, scarves and greatcoats of those who wait. Some of them have been waiting for a very long time for this moment.

The train appears: two needle points of light as it curls and twists its way into the station.

The crowd surges forward. Some people move to the edge of the platform, establishing themselves as official welcomers. Others – who know what to expect or who expect to be disappointed, or those who don’t want to be recognized – hang back. No one dares speak louder than a whisper so that the station with its high baroque roof hisses like a cathedral of spirits. Only their frozen clouds of breath, and the blue-grey of their cigarette smoke, confirms they are speaking at all. All are united by a sense of constricted emotion; all are joyous yet fearful so that you can sense the muffled heartbeats and quick breaths deep within their fur coats and scarves.

For those who hang back, it is now hard to see anything at all amidst plumes of steam. Now they must strain forward so as not to miss their friends and family who are returning from the infamous Gulag camps of Pechora and Norilsk, in that faraway Arctic Circle of Hades.

Look – here they are! Figures are stepping out of the train, carrying their carpet bags and bundles and battered leather cases. Their faces are yellow and drawn yet they too seem as eager and as afraid as those who have come to meet them. Some embrace; some weep; others search for loved ones who have not survived the long wait, and are not there.

Look, there! There’s a familiar face. Is it she? No, it could have been, but… Or there?

Two women step down from the train, helping each other: one is older, one younger. Both have aged and yet are preserved as parchment is preserved in the infernal world of the Gulags. Is it she? Yes, unmistakably, there are her dark eyes and crooked mouth, even though her lips seem so much thinner. She is wearing a much-darned, shapeless gabardine coat and a threadbare rabbit-fur hat, and is helping her friend, who is much taller and even more dishevelled, with her little cream suitcase, held together by wispy pieces of rope. And when they turn to peer down the platform to see who might be meeting them… yes, it’s them. It is Dashka Dorova and Serafima Romashkina come back to live in a world in which so much has changed; in which Stalin is dead and Beria executed; in which some camps are being closed and many prisoners liberated.

Slowly they head down the platform, their faces illuminating and then darkening in the occasional lamps, sometimes vanishing into the steam and re-emerging, wisps of vapour wrapped around them like cloaks, born and reborn again and again. Now they are walking faster, their faces raised, their lips slightly parted, Dashka and Serafima, holding hands for strength.

He moves closer to see who meets them; watches as they approach a huddled crescent of waiting families, noticing how they slow down, hoping and fearing. Her face is painfully meagre and fallow, its spirit almost extinguished, she who was once so peachy and sumptuous. Her hair is probably grey, he thinks with a stab of pain, remembering its heavy, thick darkness.

She is hugging Serafima – how close they seem – and then Serafima goes one way, Dashka the other.

He follows Dashka. And now she is pointing and dropping her case and opening her arms and her face is losing years and she is smiling, and it is as though dawn has come early and the ochre rays of a rising sun are illuminating and warming the gloom of this frozen station. Without thought, the muscles in his legs bunch for the sprint to reach her first so she will know that she is still loved and has been loved all along. Has she known that? Has she thought of him? All he wants suddenly is to kiss her face, her eyes, her lips, to tell her so many things, to chatter as if no one else was in the room, to hear her stories of the camps, to discover if Academician Almaz is alive, to tell her that he has always loved her.

Do not move a single step closer, he tells himself. Lower your fedora. Step back into the shadows. For now, he can see whom she is greeting: the light has caught Genrikh Dorov, but it is a new, scarcely recognizable Genrikh Dorov. He seems fuller in the face, his skin rosy, even his white hair seems thicker. He divorced Dashka when she was arrested in 1945. In the hierarchy of their regimented world, it was the done thing. The alternative was probably death.

Genrikh, banned from visiting Moscow, has come to meet her. He could be arrested just for being here and yet, for the first time in his life, he has broken a Party rule to make her feel loved after all she has been through. Tears gather in his eyes as he watches this. He is grateful that she is being met and cherished as she deserves. That is why he’s here, isn’t it? But in truth, he is bitterly disappointed; he feels somehow rejected.

Genrikh is holding Dashka in his arms and he can see they are talking. Now she will learn how, on the day of Stalin’s death, the leaders had dismissed Genrikh for his ‘excesses’ and exiled him to the provinces. Power had poisoned him, yet his downfall seems to have rejuvenated him.

What is she saying? ‘Where’s Senka?’ And Genrikh is replying, ‘Senka’s waiting with the others. He’s a young man now. He can’t wait to see you. There hasn’t been a day when we haven’t talked about you…’

The crowd pushes forward. Pull your hat down. Melt into the shadows as if you were never here. Go out into the streets and gather yourself; discarding this vision of ghosts, denying this act of quixotic indulgence, return again to Tamriko and the contented, settled home you have made together.

IT WAS DASHKA who had saved her life. Eight years previously, when she’d boarded the train that would take her to Paris, and to her new life, her future with Frank had seemed like a dream come true.

And then she had woken up to find herself back in the Lubianka as the drugs wore off. Her train journey, her departure, her permission to leave the country – all had been promised to the Americans. Now her sudden sickness meant she could not travel until she was in better health. Later she realized that her personal tragedy was a symptom of Stalin’s deteriorating relationship with the Americans, and there would never again be an opportunity to ask for such a favour nor the goodwill to grant it.

Ten years under Article 158 for spying for a foreign power (in other words, consorting with an American, though not for conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet State, for which she would have received a death sentence or twenty-five years): it was only then that she finally began to understand what her interrogation had really been about. Colonel Komarov explained that she was no longer under suspicion for masterminding the Fatal Romantics’ conspiracy because her teacher, Benya Golden, had dictated this wicked Jewish-Trotskyite-American conspiracy to the weak-minded Nikolasha Blagov, because he had been in love with her.

‘But that’s not true,’ Serafima had protested.

‘You want another ten years for lying to us?’ Komarov replied. ‘Just confirm his testimony and that’s the end of the Children’s Case.’

‘What will happen to him?’

Komarov drew a line across his neck, and Serafima grasped that Benya Golden had sacrificed himself, not just for her sake, but to liberate all the children he had taught in School 801.