‘Well, here we are,’ said Dashka, leaning against him for a moment, partly, he guessed, out of nerves, partly out of shyness. She produced a bottle of vodka and two little glasses. ‘You should have brought the drinks,’ she said, ‘but I knew you wouldn’t think of it. So here.’ And she put the glass in his hand.
‘I think I need it.’
‘God, so do I. Here’s to an unlikely and very secret friendship.’
They drank three little toasts and then he kissed her again; he had never kissed anyone who kissed like her.
‘Not here!’ She took his hand and a kerosene lamp and he followed her up a wide wooden staircase, hung with a gazelle and a zebra. Satinov felt each glassy eye swivel as the two of them passed. They reminded him of his colleagues in the Kremlin.
At the top of the stairs, she led him along the gloomy wood-panelled corridor and opened the door at the end; Satinov was more nervous than he had been on his first wedding night in Georgia in the twenties.
He was so well known for his clean living that Stalin, who gave everyone nicknames, sometimes called him the Choirboy. He could govern the Caucasus, and build a new industrial town in the middle of Siberia; he could dance and shoot wolves and ski; but this… what if he was no good at it? What if he failed completely?
‘Aren’t you going to kiss me?’ said Dashka. They were in a bedroom with another giant moose’s head over the bed, a fire already lit. The door shut behind him. They were kissing again and Satinov’s doubts vanished in that instant.
He reached up her skirt, scuffing the thick khaki until he reached the tops of those nylon stockings. ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ she was saying. She embraced him, kissing him frantically. Like a schoolboy making love for the first time, Satinov had to keep checking that this was really happening.
They hopped and limped across the floor, his trousers around his ankles, her booted legs and full, bare, brown thighs around his waist, her arms around his neck, her lips on his lips, her hair around him like a web, linked together, and tipped on to the bed.
‘I so wanted to feel you. Since last night, I haven’t thought of anything else,’ she said. ‘I didn’t sleep and I could hardly eat today. Will you undress me slowly?’
He fumbled with the buttons of her blouse and she helped him, all the time watching him, eyelids heavy, almost closing, the dark edges of her irises seeming to melt. He was astonished by her wantonness.
He hadn’t met anyone like this since his boyhood in Tiflis. The boys at the seminary (yes, he had studied for the priesthood at the same Tiflis Seminary as Stalin – but much later) had visited a woman of pleasure, a jet-haired gypsy. ‘That one’s far too prissy for this,’ the woman had said, nodding at Satinov. ‘That one really will become a priest.’ And she had been right because a Bolshevik was a sort of armed priest.
‘What are we going to do about him?’ Dashka said, pointing up at the moosehead above them.
‘How about this?’ He tossed her blouse up so that it covered the moose’s eyes, leaving just his nose peeking out. Then he returned to unbuttoning her skirt.
‘Do you think army skirts are designed to be impregnable fortresses for a reason?’ she asked. He rolled down her stockings until they were like long socks just below her knees and he started to kiss her knees and up her legs, wrapped as they were in the velvet of her caramel skin. ‘It’s years since anyone has undressed me like this.’
Satinov started to throw off his clothes too, but: ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I want to undress you too.’ He looked down on her; her body was streaked like a tigress by the orange flickers of the fire and dyed a deeper amber by the lamp. But he could scarcely bear to look for more than a moment before he had to kiss her again, on the lips, on the neck, everywhere; she bit her fingers. They made love again and as they finished, she laughed in a high singsong voice with her head thrown back.
Satinov opened his eyes and saw the dreary room, the plain wooden bed, the heavy Germanic furniture, dimly lit by the fire and the lantern, as if he was seeing everything for the first time – including her.
‘Do you know Ovid’s poems on love?’ she said. ‘He wrote that the bedroom is the only place where you can do exactly what you please, and truly be yourself.’
‘You’re so much more cultured than me,’ he said. ‘I was expelled for Marxist activities at sixteen.’
