The news from the war was dire. Minsk and Smolensk fell. By September, Belorussia lost, the Baltics, Crimea gone! Leningrad – besieged! The Zeks, patients and doctors talked of nothing else … Several dying men even regained a hollow-eyed life-fire to discuss Russia’s fate. Ukraine and Kiev had fallen, a million Russian soldiers taken prisoner. Odessa fell to the Romanians – and Benya prayed for his parents. Then suddenly the Nazis were approaching Moscow! The reverberations of panic reached even distant Kolyma.
The moment he had finished that day on the ward for the dying, Benya, still wearing his white medical coat, rushed to see Jaba in his ‘clubroom’ where he held court. A card game was in progress with the Camp Trusty, Fats Strizkaz; and Prishchepa was singing the brigand song, and the others were joining in like a crew of crooning pirates: ‘They’ve buried the gold, the gold, the gold …’
‘What is it?’ asked Smiley.
‘I want to ask the Boss something.’
‘All right. It’s the professor, Boss, wants to talk.’
Jaba waved him in. ‘What is it?’
Benya gathered himself: ‘Boss, you own me and I would do nothing without your blessing but Moscow is in danger and the time has come for me to ask permission to join the Shtraf battalions,’ he said.
‘I told you never to ask me this again. On pain of death! Yet still you want to fight for the Bastard?’ The Bastard was always Stalin.
Benya looked around him. Prishchepa had stopped singing; Fats put down his cards; Deathless was playing with a switchblade.
‘You know what my answer could be?’ Jaba said softly.
Benya nodded.
‘Boss, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.’ It was Prishchepa, still young somehow, glossy as the dawn.
‘And this is also to do with the war?’ Jaba did not glance at him. ‘Speak, boy.’
‘Boss, I am a Don Cossack, a free man, a fighting man.’
A vein started to beat at Jaba’s temple. ‘Anyone else?’
‘I am going too,’ said Fats Strizkaz. ‘Otherwise it’s death, inch by inch.’
Then Smiley raised his hand: ‘Me too. There’s spoils in wars. You can get rich.’
‘And I heard there’s more girls than a man can handle,’ squealed Little Mametka.
Jaba started to snigger at that. ‘Oh, Bette Davis! What do you know of girls?’
They were all laughing but when they went quiet, Deathless was flicking the dagger back and forth. No one had ever defied Jaba like this.
‘Die for the Bastard if you wish, boys’ Jaba said finally. ‘But, Golden, you have a problem. You’re a Political.’
‘I know the rules but things that were impossible a week ago are possible today. Winter will come at any minute and this is my last chance to get the boat to the mainland. Only you can do this, Boss. You’ve saved my life. Please let me live it.’
Jaba caressed his grey plumage of hair. ‘You must bless the Atamansha. Remember the information I won from her about the Commandant? I knew I’d need it one day and now is that moment. Smiley, go to the Commandant’s assistant and make an appointment for me to see General Shpigelglas today. Tell them it is to discuss the production delay at Madyak-8. Go now!’
Jaba looked at Benya. ‘You see, Golden’ – he shrugged in his debonair way – ‘isn’t life just a bowl of lobio beans?’
In the clump of poplar trees amidst the Don plains, the uproar of the planes flying low over the steppe awoke Benya abruptly. The sun was not quite up yet; it was still dark but there was the spread of turquoise on the horizon. He had slept better than he could remember; and he turned to look at Fabiana, who was stretching. Sometime during the night they had pulled on their britches but she was shirtless and he was overcome with her beauty, her honey-coloured eyes, and his luck at being brought back to life like this. But Socks was stamping the ground, her ears back and eyes rolling white, and he understood instantly something was not right. Fabiana’s palomino too was standing rigid, skittering nervously.
‘Darling,’ Fabiana said very coolly.
‘Move quickly,’ he whispered. ‘Someone’s close.’ They worked together as if they had always been a team, saddling the horses, their hands shaking as they tightened the girths, checked the stirrups, attached the saddlebags and, pulling on their shirts, mounted the horses, who needed no encouragement. As they loped out, Socks reared, almost throwing Benya, and they saw the two fresh, scrawny ponies pulling at the ropes that tied them to a tree.
‘Kalmyks,’ Fabiana said. ‘Malamore’s scouts.’
Leaning down, she cut the ponies free; a burst of gunfire rang out at almost point-blank range, spanged into the earth close to them and Benya, sensing the two shadows lying in the grass, glimpsed the black snouts of their weapons. The two ponies bucked and then bolted with Socks and Violante breaking into a terrified gallop. Pouring sweat, silver hammers beating in his temples, Benya held on to Socks’s mane and found himself riding with Fabiana and the two bolting ponies down into the long steppe grass just as the sun came up. When they slowed down, he realized how lucky they had been. The Kalmyk scouts had staked them out, sleeping almost beside them, but no Kalmyk would risk shooting their own ponies and the animals had bolted, leaving them, temporarily, mountless. Nonetheless, Malamore and his horsemen must be close.
II
At 7 a.m., Svetlana Stalina, wearing school uniform and her red Pioneers’ scarf, climbed into a Packard limousine outside the triangular yellow palace in the Kremlin where she lived. Klimov sat in the front with the driver as they headed out of the Troitsky Gate across town towards the Josef Stalin Commune School 801.
At the school gates, the director – as the headmistress was known – Comrade Kapitolina Medvedeva greeted her, virtually bowing.
‘Well?’ whispered Martha as they went into their tedious Communist Morality class. Martha understood what it was like to be in love, to be a member of Moscow’s ‘golden youth’, but even she couldn’t conceive how it felt to be Stalin’s daughter. There was her father’s portrait in this very class – the man she saw every evening. At assembly every morning, they sang ‘May Comrade Stalin Live Many, Many Years’; at every dinner or lunch, everyone drank a toast ‘To Comrade Stalin’. But as her father had recently explained to her, ‘You’re not “Stalin” and I’m not “Stalin”. Stalin is something bigger. Stalin is Soviet power!’
Martha poked her in the side: ‘Have you seen him?’
‘Just twice,’ whispered Svetlana as the lesson began.
‘Letters?’
‘Several!’
‘Like the one you showed me?’
Sveta nodded. ‘“I want to kiss you, I want to smell you, I want to taste you”,’ she said, quoting what Lev had written to her.
‘He actually wrote that? Oh my God! What does that mean, Sveta?’
‘I don’t know, Marthochka. But I love everything he says, every word.’
‘How was the kissing?’
‘Amazing. Heaven!’ Svetlana suppressed her giggles. ‘I’m blushing! Yesterday he sent me a book as a present. In English.’
‘What? Something naughty?’
‘Yes. The new Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls.’
‘Oh my God. Have you started it? I can’t wait to read it.’
‘I’ve been reading it all night. My father came in and I had it hidden in his Short Course and he didn’t notice. It’s so romantic, brilliant. The American Communist, named Jordan, fights in Spain and falls in love with this Spanish girl who’s much younger than him, and damaged by her tragic and difficult life. She’s called Maria.’
‘Sounds familiar!’
‘Yes of course, Lev is Jordan and I’m Maria. Oh, Lev’s so clever, so interested in everything …’
‘Is there anything in the newspaper?’
Sveta had Red Star in her satchel; she slipped it out and scanned the front page and there was Lev’s article, telling of a terrible battle on the Don Bend to stop the German advance, and then she f
elt herself almost gasping for air. She read:
Is the sun shining in Moscow, on the roses in the Alexandrovsky Gardens? Standing here as the cannons fire, as your heroic Red Army struggles against the Nazi hydra, I think of our capital and I believe the flowers there are blossoming. You can see the Kremlin’s crenellated battlements from your window …
The flush swept up Svetlana’s body like a scarlet tide and she fanned herself so energetically with the Short Course that several of the other pupils looked around. She passed the paper under the desk to Martha who read it avidly.
‘Mother of God, Sveta! He’s crazy! What would your father say? He might read it!’
But Svetlana was exhilarated. ‘He LOVES me! Anyway, it could be anyone looking at the flowers in the gardens. Only we know it’s addressed to someone inside the Kremlin.’
‘True. But your father wouldn’t believe that, would he?’
‘No, but I don’t care! I can’t wait to kiss my Lion again.’
The entire class was now looking at the two girls, who always sat at the back. The teacher, the loathsome and pedantic time-server, Dr Innokenty Rimm, hesitated. He was afraid of Svetlana and she enjoyed that. He couldn’t tell Stalina to be quiet. He wouldn’t dare. Instead he picked on Martha.
‘Peshkova! Are you with us today?’
‘Yes, sorry, Dr Rimm, I am listening.’
‘Good! So tell us about Marx’s view of the class struggle and the role of the bourgeois during the 1848 Revolution?’
Martha gave her gorgeous smile. ‘Well, that’s easy …’
III
‘Where the hell have the scouts got to?’ murmured Consul Malamore. The scouts would have bivouacked somewhere but the sun was up now. He and his posse had spent the night in a village and risen before dawn. Malamore lit a cigarette and he rode ahead with a silhouette like a statue of equine bronze. He had no wish to talk obscenities with Dirlewanger or listen to the whinings of Montefalcone; and no one wished to ride with Kapto and the little girl.
Over the Don the teal-coloured sky was stained jet with burning fuel dumps and illuminated with orange flashes of big guns; Malamore could almost feel the blasts now. The Germans were destroying the last Russian bridgeheads on the bend of the river. When that was done, the Germans would charge across the steppe from the Don to Stalingrad – and perhaps put the last nail in the coffin of Russia. But Malamore knew that the closer to the battle, the more likely that Fabiana and the Russian prisoner would be killed in the crossfire – or, perhaps worse, make it to the Russian lines, and be lost forever. What would Fabiana’s life be in Soviet hands? And he would never know what had become of her.
They passed reinforcements of Romanian and Hungarian troops and then a column of panzers, waiting for their fuel tankers. ‘To Stalingrad!’ was painted on to one tank. ‘From the Don to the Volga!’ read another. ‘Stalin kaput!’ the third. The boys sat smoking on the turrets, shirts off, shoulders sunburnt, writing letters: the roar of the fighting at the Don Bend focused their minds on home, sweethearts, the tranquil past.
Dirlewanger asked a sergeant where the Sixth Army staff headquarters was, pointing his whip at Kapto. ‘This man needs to deliver something important to Colonel von Schwerin, Intelligence, Sixth Army.’
‘That way,’ said the sergeant, who had a Bavarian accent. ‘Towards the Don.’ He paused and looked at Dirlewanger and Kapto properly. ‘What unit are you?’
‘Commander, Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, attached to Einsatzgruppe D. Anti-partisan Aktion.’
The sergeant raised his eyebrows. ‘Anti-partisan, eh? Who’s the girl? She’s just a kid.’ His boys laughed rudely at Kapto and the child. ‘Is she your daughter or just a friend?’
Dirlewanger swished his quirt and rode on, ears red.
‘You make us a laughing stock,’ he hissed at Kapto. ‘Pull yourself together.’ The little girl was fast asleep in the saddle, her head lolling against Kapto’s shoulder, held there by his arm.
‘Come on,’ called Malamore, spurring Borgia out into the grasslands. Soon they were almost alone again on the steppes. ‘They have to come this way. Stop wasting time.’
‘You’re the one who’s let a Jew run off with his lady friend,’ said Dirlewanger.
‘Don’t mention her again, Dirlewanger.’ He glanced back at Kapto. ‘When can we hand our doctor friend over to the Sixth Army?’
‘We should be meeting outlying units of the Sixth Army any time now,’ said Kapto, catching up with them. ‘She sleeps as we ride,’ he said breezily, gesturing to the child.
There was a pause.
‘I’m no prude,’ said Dirlewanger, and Malamore noticed he was swaying as he rode, half-cut as usual, ‘but do you think noble Prussian officers such as General Paulus or Colonel von Schwerin of the Sixth Army will be impressed with a man that rides around with a child of the Untermenschen on his saddle?’
‘I am taking care of the child,’ said Kapto. ‘Those we heal we must also cherish.’
‘The Kalmyks are back,’ called out one of the Hiwis, Bap.
Altan and Gushi rode up and saluted.
Malamore pushed up his tank goggles, his eyes just slits in that sun-gorged face. ‘You’re hours late,’ he snarled. ‘Well, where are they?’
The Kalmyks were excited, pointing, their ponies caracoling.
‘Very close. We should be able to see them,’ said Altan.
‘We’ve tracked them.’ Gushi indicated ahead. ‘See that dust?’
Malamore pulled up his horse and raised his binoculars. Yes, there was something out there. Across the naked steppe, in the high grass in blurred golden light, he could make out the little pirts of dust: two riders. ‘It’s them,’ was all he said. ‘Montefalcone, take the second squadron and come at them from the rear. The rest of you follow me. No one is to shoot or charge without my orders. Obersturmführer, ride with me.’ He wanted Dirlewanger close to him so that no harm would come to Fabiana.
Dirlewanger did not protest. His men would deal with the Jew as they saw fit, collect his earlobes on a necklace if they wished it (and sometimes they did just that) – but the old Italian owned the girl; this was his show.
Throwing up dust, Malamore and his horsemen galloped across the fields, hoping to steal up on the riders before they realized how close they were.
IV
The bandits in love were riding with a giddy recklessness towards the Don. Fabiana had even let her hair down, and was galloping so fast that Benya feared she might be thrown. He sensed she was enjoying their last time together, and relished the sheer stun of his good fortune – that somehow he knew must end, and end soon.
‘There!’ He pointed ahead. Right before them rose the Donside hills with their woods, and beyond them and down in its valley swept the majestic river. Benya knew he was almost home and his heart was racing – but the closer he came to the Donside hills, the nearer the battle of the Don Bend – and the sooner he must part with Fabiana. And she knew it too. She smiled when he saw the rise in the terrain but then her face fell and he could tell she was brooding. They rode on, almost dizzy with a last-chance joy in a headlong panic of happiness.
The shot spanged into the grass right beside him, sending up a pirt of dust. Benya looked back. A dark swarm of horsemen was gathering in the corrugated, wavy heat of the late morning. He recognized the hunched figure of Malamore at the front, his sabre drawn. Fabiana turned Violante and stared at them, breathless, cursing ‘Stronzo!’ – until Benya, who cocked his Papasha, seized her bridle: ‘Come on!’
Volleys of bullets ripped into the ground around them, and Silver Socks reared to one side but Benya managed to steady her. Ahead Fabiana was riding Violante up the hill towards the trees. ‘Pronti a fare fuoco! Prepare to fire!’ Benya could hear Malamore (he guessed it was he) yelling at his men to wait a moment, not to shoot until his order, what if they hit the girl – but on they came anyway, twenty, thirty horsemen, hooves clopping on the dry grassland. As he reached the cool of the trees, Benya
saw more horses and men ahead of them, another Italian squadron coming around the back of the woods … Now they had no hope.
Screwing his eyes closed in a moment of freefalling panic, Benya gripped Silver Socks with his knees, but he couldn’t decide what to do – to dismount, to fire, just to give up and die. He was shuddering, already wincing at the agony to come.
He checked the grenades at his belt. If he had to, he would finish this himself.
Two circles of a pair of binoculars range over the Donside hills. The observer stops and focuses the lenses.
He watches two riders galloping across the open steppe, a man and woman. The man is in khaki fatigues with an Italian forage cap, a Papasha on his arm and grenades on his belt. He is riding a Budyonny with white feet. She is in Italian green with Red Cross markings on an armband, her dark hair not tied up, flowing behind her, and she is spurring on her palomino. There is something desperate about them. The man – who’s older and not a great rider – keeps looking back, jerkily. There’s a sense of fear in the way the woman is lurching in her saddle, shaking and unsure. They are both losing speed.
The observer, who is lying in the grass close to the local collective farm office a little further, and higher, up the same ridge, scans back over the high grass. Behind the fugitives ride two Kalmyks on their scratchy ponies; and then a posse of riders, twenty, thirty, forty horsemen in some disorder: an Italian Blackshirt colonel on a black stallion, Germans with SS runes on their tunics, Russian traitors in Wehrmacht field grey. Amidst them a man carries a female child on his saddle: a refugee rescued? A rare kindness in these flint-hearted times? Amongst these barbarians? Well, that would be a surprise.
He sees the shots spanging into the grass around the two riders. The pursuers are closing in and now he spots a second squadron of Italians appearing around the copse at the top of the hill, firing down at them. This odd couple have his full attention. They are being attacked by the enemy, and his Stavka orders from Comrade Ponomarenko, Chief of Partisan Operations in Moscow, are clear: ‘Harass and destroy all enemy forces, communications and weapons in rear of the Sixth Army.’
Red Sky at Noon (The Moscow Trilogy) Page 22