Simon Montefiore - One Night in Winter

‘You know, I still often find myself saying aloud: “Missing you, loving you, wanting you,”’ he said.

‘So do I,’ she whispered. ‘I thought of you… I thought of you every day in the camps. When I looked at the sun at midday and the northern star at midnight.’

‘Not a day passes when I haven’t remembered you, Serafimochka.’

‘And I you, Frank,’ she said. ‘But we’re both married, and we both have families we love.’

‘You’re right,’ he said, reaching into his pocket as if he was looking for something. ‘But shouldn’t we keep in contact?’

She thought for a minute, and then shook her head. ‘We can’t go back, you and I. But you should know: I shall always love you, and nothing will ever change this.’

‘I feel the same way,’ he said. ‘But oh, how I wish it was 1945 again, and we could plan our lives together.’

They walked on through the afternoon sunshine.

‘How long were you in the camps?’ he asked.

‘Eight years.’

‘So long. How terrible. How did you survive?’

‘I was saved by a dear friend, a doctor – though thinking about you, remembering the time we spent together, helped me survive too.’

Frank closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Are your parents alive?’

‘Yes. My mother.’

He shook his head. ‘If it wasn’t for her, we’d be together. Did she get that damned part in the movie?’

‘That’s the silly thing,’ replied Serafima. ‘In the end, she didn’t get any big parts any more. Stalin decided she was too Jewish.’

‘Your mother felt guilty about you, I guess?’

‘For this and for the burn when I was little, but she desperately tried to make up for it and get me freed.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I would never tell anyone this, but you. But she bargained with all she had, first with Beria and then with Abakumov, to win my freedom.’

‘You mean…? Jesus. Poor woman.’

‘Beria just forced himself on her and then it turned out that he no longer ran the Organs, while Abakumov courted her like an old-fashioned knight but she succumbed too late – just before he was himself sacked and arrested.’

‘So she gave herself for nothing? But at the same time she redeemed herself?’

‘She didn’t need to in my eyes, but yes, I suppose she did.’

‘I think we should turn back now,’ he said.

‘Yes, we must.’

He started to say something, stopped, and then tried again: ‘Before we go back, may I do one thing? I’ve thought about it all these years.’

Serafima took a quick breath as he moved towards her. She nodded. Was he going to kiss her?

He placed his hand on her blouse right over the snakeskin.

He recited it in his perfect Russian and Serafima replied:

‘You never did lose it,’ she said quietly, feeling a passionate lightness, exactly like she had as a young girl when he first traced the snakeskin and made love to her. She felt her skin answer his touch.

‘No,’ he answered. ‘Because an enchantress gave it to me.’

They walked back holding hands. When they saw the house, he kissed her on the lips and she kissed him back.

‘Kissing you is exactly the way it always was,’ she said.

She saw he was weeping, so to let him recover, she walked the last few metres on her own. Up the steps, through the house and out to her car on the other side.

‘Where would like me to take you?’ asked Andrei when she got into the car. His hands were, she noticed, tapping quickly on the steering wheel.

‘Home, of course,’ she answered. ‘Where else?’

Later that day, after many hours of negotiation, Marshal Hercules Satinov and Ambassador Frank Belman walked through the woods together with the camaraderie and satisfaction that comes with the completion of a project after meticulous and diligent effort. Both were tired; Belman was much younger and noticed that Satinov walked stiffly. After they had talked about the weather, Satinov said, ‘I hope, ambassador, you found what you wanted this morning.’

‘Yes, marshal. I found all I wanted to find.’

A silence except for the birds and their light steps on a carpet of pine needles.

‘You can’t wish for more than that,’ said Satinov. ‘To heal the wounds of the past.’

Another pause.

‘And you?’ Frank asked. ‘You said you had received a visit from your past.’

‘Yes,’ said Satinov, looking out at the woods. His tone was measured. ‘It proved satisfactory.’

‘You can’t wish for more than that,’ said Frank – and he reached into his pocket to touch the diamond ring that he had never given to anyone else, that he had kept all these years, that he had brought for her today.

‘When I consider everything,’ Satinov said, ‘I think we’re both lucky men.’

‘You’re right,’ Frank said, holding the ring as if for luck. ‘We are the luckiest of all. But I hope you too managed to heal the wounds of the past.’

‘There was nothing to heal on my side,’ Satinov said gruffly and he walked on ahead, playing with something in his hand. Frank thought it might be worry beads but as he caught up, he saw it was a flimsy medical badge.

A keepsake from the war.

The chief characters in this novel – Satinov, Dashka, Serafima, Benya and Belman – are entirely invented by me. This is not a novel about power but about private life – above all, love. But it is set amidst the Stalinist Kremlin élite and that means that the familiar dilemmas of family life, the prizes and perils of children, adultery and career, have higher stakes than if the story was set in Hampstead. This novel stands alone but some of the characters and the families appear in my earlier novel, Sashenka.

Obviously some of the Soviet leaders, generals and secret policemen are based on real people and the details of their personalities, sometimes even their words, are accurate. My aim is make the atmosphere as authentic as I can but the joy of this is that it is fiction.

For anyone interested in the plausibility of the plot or its inspirations, the novel is very roughly inspired by several true stories.

In 1943, two schoolchildren, both the offspring of high-ranking Soviet officials, died in a shooting on Kammeny Most. In their notebooks, the secret police found joke plans for a government. Their friends, who included many children of the élite, including the sons of Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan, were arrested on suspicion of being members of an anti-Soviet conspiracy. The full story appears in my book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar , and also in the memoirs of Anastas Mikoyan, Tak Bylo , and of his son, Stepan Anastasovich Mikoyan: An Autobiography: Memoirs of Military Test-flying and Life with the Kremlin’s Élite . I myself interviewed some of the children in question, including Stepan and Sergo Mikoyan and Stalin’s own nephew, Stan Redens. The children were in prison for six months and were only released after signing confessions. Their punishment was six months’ exile in Central Asia. The Fatal Romantics and The Game are totally invented by me.

In 1944–5, Major Hugh Lunghi of the British Embassy met and fell in love with a Russian girl whom he wished to marry. Lunghi translated for Churchill during meetings with Stalin at the Big Three conferences. When his fiancée tried to leave Russia, she was poisoned on the train and brought back to Moscow. At a personal meeting with Stalin, the British Ambassador asked him to allow the girl to leave. He promised to look into it. However, his fiancée was never released. Instead she was arrested for treason and sentenced to the Gulags. Lunghi was not able to make contact with her again until the sixties when both were happily married to other people.