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
‘Chubin!’
‘Yes, comrade.’
‘Run out and get me
Poor Chubin, once again bewildered by his boss’s sudden literary whims, had done as he was told and Satinov had started to read
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.
Now, sweltering in the heat of the red-walled house in Samarkand, he replayed the course of their affair. He told himself he was lucky to have made love to such a woman. ‘You’re so blessed to love and to be loved,’ he said aloud to himself. Then he remembered how once, when he’d reassured her that her figure wasn’t too curvaceous, she had replied curtly, ‘But you would say that because you’re in love with me.’ By being so in love, he had lost his power, her respect.
