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,
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
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.
