So out they went, back into the night, Frank quoting poets that few Westerners knew: Akhmatova, Pasternak, Pushkin, Blok. They walked across the Stone Bridge opposite the Kremlin. Through the snow, they could hardly even see the towers, gates and stars under its camouflage netting.
Serafima could feel the icy flecks settling on her warm skin and then melting – it was delicious. She stopped as Frank took off his gloves and offered her a cigarette from his silver case. They blew the blue smoke into the grey light where the snowflakes glinted like jewels in the lamplight, and did not speak.
Frank seemed to be thinking hard about something; then he cleared his throat. ‘I’m not a playboy. I haven’t talked about many of these things with anyone before you. May I… m-may I… hold your hand?’
She presented her hands to him, and when he unpeeled her gloves, the night became silent and she could see his hands shaking just a little. It was, she thought, truly a moment from the distant past, from a more romantic time.
When he held her hands in his, she turned them to put her fingers through his, and when she squeezed them, he squeezed back; and both of them stood there in the snow, face to face, overcome with the excitement of finding each other. The snow had padded the city so that they could hardly hear anything, see anything. Hours had passed since they met, yet their acquaintance, only as fresh as a night’s snowfall, already seemed as if it had lasted for a long, long time. She had never kissed anyone. Never wished to. But she wanted him to kiss her now.
‘Serafima, may I…’
But she’d already lifted her face to his, and could feel his mouth on hers as the snow fell thickly around them.
SATINOV CREPT ACROSS the open space between him and the door of an outhouse. The Nazis were only thirty kilometres away, and still fighting for every village. Yet here he was, having given his bodyguards the slip, and about to enter an unknown house and do something that went against every instinct and every rule. He hesitated and then, cursing to himself and cocking his PPSh machine-gun, he opened it, ready for a burst of enemy fire, but welcoming instead the grassy warmth of the stables that reminded him of riding at home, at his dacha. The three horses tethered inside seemed glad to see him and he was even gladder to see them.
Walking quickly through the stables and crossing the yard, he tried the back door of the large house. It was not locked and he slid inside, body tensed and soaked with sweat as he found himself in the capacious kitchen of a
He saw the orange eyes first. Two, and then another two. Then pair after pair. He raised the barrel of the machine-gun: does it end here? But no, the heads of a herdsworth of moose, antelopes and bears were mounted up the high walls, reflecting the crimson flicker of a fire crackling in the fireplace. A step further; another step; the floorboards groaned but he was moving fast now.
A movement right in front of him: ‘Who is it? Hands up or I’ll shoot!’ But he knew, of course.
She was tending the fire.
‘Do you approve of the new hospital for the First Belorussian Front?’ she said, turning to him, her voice with its Galician accent so breathless that the words caught in her throat. ‘I’ve made
They sat next to each other, and she poured the tea into china cups and saucers emblazoned with some aristocratic crest. Her hands were trembling, he noticed as the china clinked and she spilled a little. She was as nervous as he was. Her scent, she told him, was L’Origan by Coty, strong and sweet and sharp, reminding him of honey melting in tea and spicy wood burning in a fire. It was getting dark in the room and so she took off her beret and her sheepskin greatcoat, and lit two kerosene lamps on the table.
‘I didn’t know if you’d come,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know if I was being presumptuous. Or, worse, deluded… But I knew I’d come anyway.’
Satinov said nothing. He imagined that two of the animal heads on the walls were talking to him.
‘Have you ever wanted a woman so much?’ asked the bison with the white glass eyes. ‘After the war, Stalin said every soldier deserves a bit of fun.’
But the voice from the lion’s head was more censorious and more urgent. ‘Think of Stalin. Of Tamriko. Of her husband, Genrikh Dorov. Leave
But it was no good. Satinov shook his head, pulled his greatcoat closer and sat down next to her.
