One Night in Winter

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  ‘Are you going to be long?’

  It was Kozamin the bus conductor.

  Andrei gave a bovine groan, one of the repertoire of noises essential to communal living. ‘Five minutes. Aaaagh!’

  ‘Take your time,’ said Kozamin.

  We declare:

  We suffocate in a philistine world of science and planning, ruled by the cold machine of history.

  We live for love and romance.

  If we cannot live with love, we choose death. This is why we conduct our secret rites; this is why we play the Game.

  The Game! Andrei smiled to himself but he narrowed his eyes and reread it. Could this have been written with a hint of cunning to conceal its real spirit? These days, everything – from the government announcements in the newspapers to the tedious ramblings of teachers – was in a hieroglyphic code. Nothing quite meant what it said – and sometimes it meant the exact opposite. But Nikolasha’s target was obvious. Science and planning. That was the Communist Party. The cold machine of history. Communism. Love and romance. That was what Communists called ‘bourgeois sentimentalism’.

  Andrei put down the book. In the adult world, in a more oppressive time like 1937, this might have been dangerous anti-Soviet talk. But things had become much more easy-going in the war. No one could take Nikolasha’s silly writings seriously, could they? Still, he remembered the wisdom of his father and his mother’s warnings. These children were not of his world, and yet he longed to know them better.

  4

  ‘MAY I HAVE a word?’ Andrei said to George. They were in school a few days later, and the bell for lunch had just rung.

  ‘A word?’ George turned round as he followed Nikolasha and Vlad out of the classroom.

  ‘It’s private.’

  ‘Private? How can it be?’

  No grand duke of the old days, thought Andrei, could equal the sneering haughtiness of a Communist prince.

  ‘You’ve lost something and I’ve found it.’

  George frowned. ‘Something containing mysterious scribbles?’

  Andrei nodded.

  ‘I’ll be with you in a second,’ George called over to Minka and Serafima, who were waiting for him, sandwich boxes in hand. ‘Come with me.’ And he pulled Andrei through the washrooms into the room where sports equipment was stowed, and school mischief hatched.

  ‘Thank God you’ve got it,’ George said, looking a good deal less confident than he had a minute earlier. ‘Nikolasha makes such a big thing of it. He keeps asking for it back, but I keep telling him I’m still studying it with sacred passion.’

  ‘Well, here it is,’ said Andrei, drawing the book out of his satchel.

  ‘You’ve rescued me,’ said George. Andrei held out the book and George put his hands on it and turned breezily to go – but when he tried to take it, he found that Andrei was still gripping it. ‘What are you doing?’ asked George.

  ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘No, I didn’t have time – but you obviously have. Are you offering to brief me?’

  ‘It’s a romantic manifesto that could be described as bourgeois sentimentalism . . .’

  George hesitated for a moment. ‘Thanks for the warning – but Pushkin is the Party’s favourite poet. I’m just worried about Nikolasha finding out I lost it.’ He waved it away genially. ‘So let’s keep this between ourselves and I’ll find a way to say thank you. I’ll see if I can get you into the Fatal Romantics’ Club.’

  ‘I would like that,’ replied Andrei, letting go of the book as it disappeared into George’s satchel.

  ‘It won’t be easy to get you in,’ George continued. ‘Nikolasha’s a fanatic. But you really should be a member – you know your Pushkin better than any of us.’

  Andrei opened his hands, palms up, as his curiosity got the better of him. ‘One final thing. What is the Game?’

  George was already half out of the door but he turned back. ‘It’s Nikolasha’s obsession. You’ll find out. For now, we’ve got to eat lunch. Will you join us in the gym?’

  The gym was usually empty for lunch and the children ate their sandwiches perching on its chairs and soft mats. But when George and Andrei found the girls, Minka was obviously upset. ‘Look what’s happening to my little brother,’ she said.

  The Director of Physical Education, the moustachioed Apostollon Shuba, was standing with one hand on the wooden horse and a whistle in his mouth. His face was a deep shade of teak. A class of younger children in shorts and T-shirts stood to attention in a line on the other side of the horse. Alone at the far end of the gym was the frail figure of Senka Dorov, whom Andrei had last seen at that morning’s drop-off with his father. Senka looked as comfortable in sports kit as he would in a deep-sea-diving outfit. He gave his sister a beseeching ‘rescue me’ look with his big brown eyes, but it was too late.

  ‘Right, boy,’ Shuba barked. ‘Fifth attempt! No one leaves until you get over the horse!’

  ‘But I never will,’ said Senka in his high voice.

  ‘Defeatism is not Soviet!’

  ‘I’m not one of your strapping horse-vaulting heroes. Surely even you can see that,’ Senka said.

  ‘Hurry up, Senka! We’re hungry!’ cried one child.

  ‘SILENCE!’ Shuba ordered, pointing at the wooden ladders on the wall. ‘Next one to speak must touch the ceiling twenty times!’ He blew the whistle. Senka took a breath and then ran very fast towards the horse, jumped on to the springboard but then, like a racehorse refusing a jump, shied away.

  ‘Do you call yourself a Soviet man?’ Shuba yelled. ‘AGAIN!’ Another blast on the whistle.

  ‘I can’t do it, and I won’t do it,’ Senka shouted, bursting into tears.

  ‘You’ll do it if you die here!’ Shuba bellowed back, at which Senka suddenly grasped his chest, fought for breath and then fell to the floor.

  ‘He’s collapsed!’ cried a voice from the class. ‘He’s ill! He’s dying!’

  ‘He’s faking,’ replied Shuba, marching over. There was total silence in the gym.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Minka, stepping forward.

  ‘Is he OK?’ asked George, taking her hand. ‘Minka!’

  ‘GET UP, BOY!’ ordered Shuba. ‘If you’re scrimshanking’ – he used old military slang – ‘you’ll pay for this.’

  ‘What if he isn’t?’ asked one of Senka’s classmates.

  ‘All right, at ease,’ said Shuba finally. ‘Briusov, get me some water.’ He leaned over Senka and slapped his cheeks a couple of times with a leathery hand. When the water arrived, he splashed it on Senka’s face. Senka appeared to stir.

  ‘Where am I? Am I at school?’

  ‘Don’t give me that,’ Shuba growled, breathing heavily.

  Senka remained lying down.

  ‘Please don’t make me do it again.’

  ‘I knew it! You are going to do it again,’ Shuba said, straightening up. ‘And then you’re going to touch the ceiling a hundred times!’

  ‘I get dizzy up ladders, and might fall off,’ replied Senka. ‘I have blocked sinuses.’

  ‘I’ve seen Russian heroes die in battle! How do you think we won this war? By fainting in the gym? I’m training another generation of warriors to defend our Soviet paradise. The Party demands sacrifice and hardness. Can everyone hear me? NO ONE MOVES UNTIL THIS USELESS BOY GETS OVER THE HORSE!’ He blew the whistle, but Senka did not move.

  ‘We need warriors,’ Senka agreed, ‘but we also need thinkers and I’m one of those. Comrade Stalin also said that “we must value our cadres” and even if I’m not a future warrior, I am a future cadre. I must warn you that if I die of a heart attack, Teacher Shuba, it will be all your fault.’ Senka managed to raise his head and look around the class. ‘And there are lots of witnesses.’

  Shuba stood back, scratched his head and chewed the end of his moustaches. ‘You’ll pay for this, you little poodle! I’m reporting you and your lies to Director Medvedeva. Class dismissed!’ He marched off and Minka ran up to Senka, who
, thought Andrei, had made an astonishing recovery.

  ‘Somehow,’ Minka said as she rejoined him and George after Senka had gone off to change, ‘the Little Professor always gets his way.’

  ‘Little Professor?’ asked Andrei.

  ‘That’s what we call Senka in my family,’ explained Minka. ‘My mother says it’s because he’s precociously precious.’

  George put his hand on Andrei’s shoulder. ‘Minka,’ he proposed. ‘Let’s get Andrei into the Romantics.’

  ‘Teacher Golden will approve,’ she said. ‘You know he was quite famous once.’

  ‘Golden? Never!’ said George.

  ‘Benya Golden . . .’ Andrei said, remembering how his mother had reacted when he’d said the name the previous evening. It had taken him back to his childhood. Nine years earlier – another life. They lived in Moscow, in a spacious apartment, then, and his father had presented his mother with a blue book entitled Spanish Stories. ‘Inessa, you’ve got to read this book by Golden, it’s spun gold . . .’

  Two years later, his father had gone. Andrei remembered find-ing Spanish Stories, looking at its cover, embossed with a Spanish bull and red star, and going to the first page to begin reading. And Inessa taking it away quickly. ‘No one reads Golden any more,’ she had said, and Andrei had never seen the book again.

  Benya Golden was lingering in the school common room. He was late for his own Pushkin class but a man like him who had suffered so much and only returned from the darkness by a series of miracles should enjoy life, he thought. He was so lucky to be there, to be teaching Pushkin, to be breathing. No one quite knew what he had been through but he, more than anyone in the room, knew how flimsy was fortune.

  He lay full length on the leather divan peering over the Leningrad satirical magazine, Krokadil, as the young piano teacher, Agrippina Begbulatova, known (to him alone) as Blue-Eyes, brewed the chai in a Chinese teapot, laying out cups and saucers for everyone.

  Director Medvedeva, owl-shaped horn-rimmed spectacles on the bridge of her nose, groaned loudly as she marked papers at the long table – one of the signs, along with noisy chomping at meals, of a woman who has lived alone for too long. But, Benya thought, she had taken a risk by giving him this job, and he was truly grateful.

  Her deputy Dr Rimm had been trying to get Benya sacked ever since. He was ostentatiously reading a copy of Comrade Stalin’s History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course – as if anyone, even someone as slavishy drear as Rimm, could actually read that unadulterated gibberish. Rimm kept changing position with little preening sniffs and looks around the room to check everyone had noticed his virtuous reading. And Apostollon Shuba had just come into the common room, cursing wildly about the laziness, cowardice and softness of the school’s spoilt brats. Now he was studying the football scores in Pionerskaya Pravda while chewing a sprig of his magnificent moustaches.

  ‘Tea’s ready,’ Agrippina said sweetly. Benya watched her pour the chai for the teachers in order of seniority while reliving the way he had undressed her, opened her long legs and stroked her with his fingers, his tongue, his cock, just twenty minutes earlier, in his one-room apartment round the corner. They had enjoyed forty-nine minutes of dizzy pleasure and she had not even had time to wipe herself before rushing back – a thought that now thrilled him.

  No one knew of course. The secret particularly delighted Benya because his fellow teachers were perfect examples of the new generation of tight-arsed Soviet prigs. Agrippina was as pretty as she was pure, a Soviet virtue she liked to promote by saying ‘I don’t believe in gossiping about people’ and ‘I believe a Soviet girl must keep herself for husband and children’, sentiments she seemed to believe absolutely when she said them.

  When Benya was not reading (he was a voracious reader) or talking, he was assailed by his epicurean passion for women, poetry, food, the senses. Once he had been a well-known writer who had reported on the Spanish Civil War and known Picasso and Sartre. But he had lost the two jewels of his life. He had lost contact with the daughter of his marriage when she and her mother emigrated to the West. And he had lost the only woman he’d ever truly loved, a woman whose memory caused a jolt of agony, even now. She had been an official’s wife, a mother, an Old Bolshevik. In 1939, she had fallen into the abyss of ‘Soviet justice’ – and he had fallen with her. When, or if, she returned, he would be waiting for her. It was a promise he intended to keep.

  Dr Rimm left to teach Communist history. Benya looked at his watch. He was now five minutes late for his favourite class. He finished his tea and hurried out, noticing as he did so, a badly typed envelope in one of the pigeonholes. As he passed Dr Rimm’s classroom, he peeped around the door. ‘Comrade Rimm,’ he said, ‘you have a letter.’

  He entered his classroom and was at once enveloped in the affection and respect of the pupils. Their vivacious chatter delighted him: Nikolasha was showing Vlad Titorenko some pages of his obsessional project in his velvet-covered notebook. Both boys sported Byronic hairdos as a tribute to their romanticism. It was surely only a matter of time, Benya decided, before Dr Rimm brought in an army barber. The new boy, Andrei Kurbsky, had turned out to know even more Pushkin than the others. And there was Serafima – listening to him with her head on one side, beautiful without believing it, drawing the eyes of the boys without being aware of it. Even now, Nikolasha was looking back at her; Andrei too. But there was another reason Benya appreciated her: she, more than anyone else, reminded him of his lost love, the woman who’d disappeared before the war.

  He could not believe his own luck at landing this job, at teaching literature to children who loved it as much as he did. It was his Second Life and he’d been reborn. He could no longer write. That reed was broken yet he could teach – and how! But he was marked with the black spot: how long could it last? He wanted to share all he knew before it was over.

  ‘Dear friends, beloved romantics, wistful dreamers!’ He clapped his hands and opened his Onegin. ‘It’s the night of the fateful ball’, he said, ‘that causes the duel. Just imagine the excitement. Everyone is waiting for Lensky the fiancé to arrive. How does Tatiana feel to see Eugene Onegin?’

  ‘And paler than the moon at dawn,

  She cannot raise her eyes to face them

  And trembles like a hunted fawn.

  Inside her, stormy passion’s seething;

  The wretched girl is scarcely breathing . . .’

  Golden pauses, and then cries: ‘Oh, the agony of her suffering! But who can give us some idea of what she’s going through? Andrei?’

  ‘I’m not sure . . . Isn’t love just a thing in novels and songs?’

  ‘Who agrees with Andrei? Nikolasha?’

  Nikolasha sat up. ‘The absence of love means death,’ he stated, his deep voice cracking. ‘Like Romeo and Juliet. Antony and Cleopatra.’

  Golden looked interested. ‘So you are saying love reaches its apotheosis in death? Doesn’t it perish when life is extinguished?’

  ‘On the contrary,’ replied Nikolasha. ‘Death makes love immortal. Isn’t that the lesson of Pushkin’s duel? How to be a Russian, how to be a lover, how to live and die.’

  ‘But love is just amorous obsession, surely?’ blurted out George.

  ‘Class is what matters,’ said George’s brother, Marlen. He had one of those Bolshevik names – a combination of Marx-Lenin – that were fashionable in the 1920s, thought Benya, and now mercifully assigned to the dustbin of history. ‘The rest is just bourgeois sentimentalism, a very dangerous thing.’

  ‘Whom do you agree with? Serafima?’ said Golden. As he had expected, everyone turned to Serafima.

  ‘I’m not sure I can say . . .’ said Serafima.

  ‘Have a go, Serafima Constantinovna,’ Golden coaxed her. ‘Illuminate our darkness.’

  She put her head on one side. ‘Well . . .’ She spoke very softly so that Nikolasha and Andrei had to lean over to hear her. ‘I would say that in Onegin Tatiana dreams of n
othing else. She can’t eat or sleep. She protects the secret in her heart. No one else has suffered or celebrated love like her. Love is all that matters.’ She looked around. ‘That’s what I think.’

  George Satinov and Minka pulled Andrei into the doorway as Dr Rimm waddled past and down the corridor. Both were shaking with laughter. George grabbed Andrei’s cuff: ‘Come here! Watch the Hummer.’ They followed Dr Rimm towards the common room.

  ‘He’s looking back. Pretend to read the notices,’ whispered Minka.

  Dr Rimm had stopped outside the common room where the teachers’ post was placed in pigeonholes.

  ‘Now – look,’ said George as Dr Rimm picked up his mail, leafing through papers, until he suddenly held up an envelope. ‘He’s got it!’

  Dr Rimm peered around, up and down the corridor, and then, stuffing all the other papers back into his pigeonhole, he hurried off with the envelope to the teacher’s lavatory. When he came out, he was singing so loudly and tunelessly that he was almost dancing. As he passed them, they struggled not to giggle.

  ‘What was that letter?’ demanded Andrei.

  ‘You can keep a secret, can’t you, Andrei?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘He can,’ agreed Minka. ‘Let’s tell him.’

  They pulled him down the corridor and outside into the little yard by the science laboratory. No one was there.

  ‘Read this,’ said George, handing him a piece of paper. ‘This is the next one.’ It was typed in capitals:

  TUNEFUL SINGER AROUND THE SCHOOL, SWEET ‘ONEGIN’, I KNOW YOU LOVE ME, BUT YOU ARE ALSO LOVED FROM AFAR, AS ONLY TWO BOLSHEVIKS CAN LOVE.

  KISS ME LIKE A TRUE COMMUNIST.

  ‘TATIANA’

  ‘Oh my God!’ said Andrei. ‘He thinks . . .’