One Night in Winter полностью

‘Comrade Satinov!’ Molotov – wearing a dark suit, his head as round as a cannonball, his figure as square as a brick – came out of his office. ‘Shall we take a walk around the Kremlin?’

‘Yes, let’s do that,’ agreed Satinov. As he talked to Stone Arse, he looked back at her; Dashka was gazing at him with the most loving intensity in her dark eyes – just for a moment, and then she glanced away. Satinov almost gasped with the pleasure. He ached to touch her and kiss her again. As he strolled the Kremlin’s courtyards with Molotov, he felt preposterously, dizzily happy.

He saw her and spoke to her so rarely that he had not really thought about what he expected of their fitful relationship. It had no formal future, yet he resolved to enjoy these special moments which he ascribed to the madness of war and death. Afterwards, however afterwards arrived, he would return to his real nature, his true world.

Yet one evening, when he was alone late at night in his Kremlin office waiting for the driver to take him to dinner with Stalin, he noticed that the phone in the empty neighbouring office was ringing. He’d sent home his aides so he ran down the corridor to answer it.

‘It’s Almaz.’ He recognized her distinctive voice straightaway.

‘Hello. I’m impressed with your cunning,’ he said. ‘Dear Academician!’

‘This Academician can’t talk for long,’ she said, ‘but I wanted you to know I can’t go on with this. I haven’t slept for three nights.’ He heard her crying and his heart ached for her. ‘I’ll lose my children, I’ll lose everything, and I feel so guilty! I have to give you up. Can you forgive me?’

Satinov clenched the phone, and willed himself to breathe deeply and calmly. He was not, he reminded himself, the Iron Commissar for nothing. ‘I understand,’ he said finally, putting down the phone.

Perhaps, he thought as he sat in the empty room, his own life as a revolutionary had given him the ability to bear secrets and pressures. He was born for conspiracy. Others, like Dashka, and indeed Tamriko, were not.

He returned to his own office and dialled a number: ‘Tamriko?’

‘Yes, darling Hercules.’

‘I’ll be late.’

‘Have a good dinner. Did you want anything?’

‘Are all the children well?’

‘Yes. They’re missing you, as I am. Come home soon.’

‘I shall,’ he said stiffly. But he had never called like that before and he knew it would please her.

An hour later, in the back of the armoured Packard speeding through the silvery woods towards Stalin’s Nearby Dacha, he was himself again, the Iron Commissar. Almost.

‘After the war,’ Frank warned Serafima, ‘we think Stalin will crack down. America will be Russia’s enemy, so we must be very careful. As a diplomat I’m watched, and with your background you may be too. Our blessing is that we’ve found each other, but our curse is that we are in a time and place when we can’t just live as we’re doing now, in the present.’

‘I suppose you’ve thought of using codes?’ Serafima asked.

‘As a matter of fact, I have. This is how we’ll meet. I’ll leave a bookmark in the foreign literature section of the House of Books. If it’s in a Galsworthy, we’ll meet at the matinée. If it’s in Edith Wharton, evening; in Hemingway, ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for us, so come back tomorrow. There will be a ticket under a false name at the Bolshoi for that night’s performance.’

‘So I will just go to the Bolshoi again and again?’

‘You can watch an act or two but when I go out, you go out too, through the fire doors at the back. No one will follow you.’

‘And we’ll meet in the street.’

‘Darling Serafima, I have an apartment. The great thing is that it’s not registered as a diplomatic residence. It belonged to a Russian friend who was killed in the war and no one knows about it. It’s very simple, but it could be our place. It’s near the back of the Bolshoi so when you come out… would you l-l-like to meet me there?’

Serafima smiled. She knew this was right – but it amused her that, out of all the girls at school, some of whom seemed so fast, it was going to be her, Serafima, who would make love first. She loved Frank and he loved her and it seemed absolutely natural to do it with the man she wanted to spend her life with. She knew the basics, the facts of life, but how it all really worked, she had no proper idea. What if she became pregnant? The scandal would destroy her. Wasn’t it the man’s job to ensure she didn’t? But there was an even bigger problem that ate at her.

‘You seem worried,’ he said. ‘We don’t have to do anything at all. Just talk if you like.’

‘I’m not sure…’

‘You want to wait until we’re married?’

‘It’s not that.’

‘Then what?’

‘I just feel that I’m not… perfect. That you’ll be disappointed.’

‘Nothing could disappoint me about you. Nothing.’ Frank’s eyes were burning with certainty as he said this.