One Night in Winter (7 page)

‘Tea’s ready,’ Agrippina said sweetly. Benya watched her pour the
chai
for the teachers in order of seniority while reliving the way he had undressed her, opened her long legs and stroked her with his fingers, his tongue, his cock, just twenty minutes earlier, in his one-room apartment round the corner. They had enjoyed forty-nine minutes of dizzy pleasure and she had not even had time to wipe herself before rushing back – a thought that now thrilled him.

No one knew of course. The secret particularly delighted Benya because his fellow teachers were perfect examples of the new generation of tight-arsed Soviet prigs. Agrippina was as pretty as she was pure, a Soviet virtue she liked to promote by saying ‘I don’t believe in gossiping about people’ and ‘I believe a Soviet girl must keep herself for husband and children’, sentiments she seemed to believe absolutely when she said them.

When Benya was not reading (he was a voracious reader) or talking, he was assailed by his epicurean passion for women, poetry, food, the senses. Once he had been a well-known writer who had reported on the Spanish Civil War and known Picasso and Sartre. But he had lost the two jewels of his life. He had lost contact with the daughter of his marriage when she and her mother emigrated to the West. And he had lost the only woman he’d ever truly loved, a woman whose memory caused a jolt of agony, even now. She had been an official’s wife, a mother, an Old Bolshevik. In 1939, she had fallen into the abyss of ‘Soviet justice’ – and he had fallen with her. When, or if, she returned, he would be waiting for her. It was a promise he intended to keep.

Dr Rimm left to teach Communist history. Benya looked at his watch. He was now five minutes late for his favourite class. He finished his tea and hurried out, noticing as he did so, a badly typed envelope in one of the pigeonholes. As he passed Dr Rimm’s classroom, he peeped around the door. ‘Comrade Rimm,’ he said, ‘you have a letter.’

He entered his classroom and was at once enveloped in the affection and respect of the pupils. Their vivacious chatter delighted him: Nikolasha was showing Vlad Titorenko some pages of his obsessional project in his velvet-covered notebook. Both boys sported Byronic hairdos as a tribute to their romanticism. It was surely only a matter of time, Benya decided, before Dr Rimm brought in an army barber. The new boy, Andrei Kurbsky, had turned out to know even more Pushkin than the others. And there was Serafima – listening to him with her head on one side, beautiful without believing it, drawing the eyes of the boys without being aware of it. Even now, Nikolasha was looking back at her; Andrei too. But there was another reason Benya appreciated her: she, more than anyone else, reminded him of his lost love, the woman who’d disappeared before the war.

He could not believe his own luck at landing this job, at teaching literature to children who loved it as much as he did. It was his Second Life and he’d been reborn. He could no longer write. That reed was broken yet he could teach – and how! But he was marked with the black spot: how long could it last? He wanted to share all he knew before it was over.

‘Dear friends, beloved romantics, wistful dreamers!’ He clapped his hands and opened his
Onegin
.
‘It’s the night of the fateful ball’, he said, ‘that causes the duel. Just imagine the excitement. Everyone is waiting for Lensky the fiancé to arrive. How does Tatiana feel to see Eugene Onegin?’

Golden pauses, and then cries: ‘Oh, the agony of her suffering! But who can give us some idea of what she’s going through? Andrei?’

‘I’m not sure . . . Isn’t love just a thing in novels and songs?’

‘Who agrees with Andrei? Nikolasha?’

Nikolasha sat up. ‘The absence of love means death,’ he stated, his deep voice cracking. ‘Like Romeo and Juliet. Antony and Cleopatra.’

Golden looked interested. ‘So you are saying love reaches its apotheosis in death? Doesn’t it perish when life is extinguished?’

‘On the contrary,’ replied Nikolasha. ‘Death makes love immortal. Isn’t that the lesson of Pushkin’s duel? How to be a Russian, how to be a lover, how to live and die.’

‘But love is just amorous obsession, surely?’ blurted out George.

‘Class is what matters,’ said George’s brother, Marlen. He had one of those Bolshevik names – a combination of Marx-Lenin – that were fashionable in the 1920s, thought Benya, and now mercifully assigned to the dustbin of history. ‘The rest is just bourgeois sentimentalism, a very dangerous thing.’

‘Whom do you agree with? Serafima?’ said Golden. As he had expected, everyone turned to Serafima.

‘I’m not sure I can say . . .’ said Serafima.

‘Have a go, Serafima Constantinovna,’ Golden coaxed her. ‘Illuminate our darkness.’

She put her head on one side. ‘Well . . .’ She spoke very softly so that Nikolasha and Andrei had to lean over to hear her. ‘I would say that in
Onegin
Tatiana dreams of nothing else. She can’t eat or sleep. She protects the secret in her heart. No one else has suffered or celebrated love like her. Love is
all
that matters.’ She looked around. ‘That’s what I think.’

George Satinov and Minka pulled Andrei into the doorway as Dr Rimm waddled past and down the corridor. Both were shaking with laughter. George grabbed Andrei’s cuff: ‘Come here! Watch the Hummer.’ They followed Dr Rimm towards the common room.

‘He’s looking back. Pretend to read the notices,’ whispered Minka.

Dr Rimm had stopped outside the common room where the teachers’ post was placed in pigeonholes.

‘Now – look,’ said George as Dr Rimm picked up his mail, leafing through papers, until he suddenly held up an envelope. ‘He’s got it!’

Dr Rimm peered around, up and down the corridor, and then, stuffing all the other papers back into his pigeonhole, he hurried off with the envelope to the teacher’s lavatory. When he came out, he was singing so loudly and tunelessly that he was almost dancing. As he passed them, they struggled not to giggle.

‘What was that letter?’ demanded Andrei.

‘You can keep a secret, can’t you, Andrei?’

‘Of course.’

‘He can,’ agreed Minka. ‘Let’s tell him.’

They pulled him down the corridor and outside into the little yard by the science laboratory. No one was there.

‘Read this,’ said George, handing him a piece of paper. ‘This is the next one.’ It was typed in capitals:

TUNEFUL SINGER AROUND THE SCHOOL, SWEET ‘ONEGIN’, I KNOW YOU LOVE ME, BUT YOU ARE ALSO LOVED FROM AFAR, AS ONLY TWO BOLSHEVIKS CAN LOVE.

KISS ME LIKE A TRUE COMMUNIST.

‘TATIANA’

‘Oh my God!’ said Andrei. ‘He thinks . . .’

‘That’s the fun of it,’ replied Minka. ‘Don’t you love it? “As only two Bolsheviks can love”! That was my idea.’

‘Who do you think he thinks wrote it?’

‘Director Medvedeva perhaps?’ George was laughing so much that he could barely get the name out.

Andrei was amazed. This could only happen now, after the war. George’s father was a leader, his mother was a teacher; and both Minka’s parents were important. Andrei knew that only two such privileged children would dare to contemplate a trick like this, and on the First Secretary of the School’s Communist Party Committee. That stuff about ‘loving like a Bolshevik’ was perilously disrespectful. In the thirties, people had received nine grams in the back of the neck for less . . .

‘Kurbsky?’

Oh my God! Rimm was calling him. George and Minka vanished as the teacher summoned him from the doorway. As he went back inside to face Rimm, Andrei wished he had known nothing about the spoof love letters.

‘Kurbsky,’ said Dr Rimm jocosely, ‘I hear your Pushkin is more than proficient.’

‘Thank you, Comrade Rimm.’ The title ‘Comrade’ meant Rimm was a member of the Communist Party.

‘You might have heard of my class on socialist realism?’

‘Of course.’

‘I teach literature as it should be taught,’ Rimm said, and Andrei knew he was referring to Benya Golden’s class. Rimm hesitated, and then his eyes rolled as he checked they were alone in the corridor. ‘Are you happy in Teacher Golden’s . . . group, where Pushkin is taught, I understand, without class consciousness at all, merely as the cravings of bourgeois romanticism? Would you like to switch?’

‘Thank you, Dr Rimm. I am content in whatever class the director places me.’

‘Your answer is correct,’ he said. ‘But bear in mind that it is the Party that teaches us the only way to analyse literature. The non-Party path has no future. You’re intelligent. I know your tainted file, but remember this is the school that Comrade Stalin chose for his own children. If things go well for you, there’s Komsomol, and perhaps the Institute of Foreign Languages. Do you understand me?’

Andrei had dreamed of wearing the Komsomol badge. The cleansing of his tainted past would mean that he could join the Party and follow his heart into academia or the diplomatic corps. His mother had warned him; now Dr Rimm was doing the same thing. The antics of the Fatal Romantics could ruin his rehabilitation. But as Andrei hurried towards his next lesson, he sensed it was already too late.

‘
KURBSKY! ARE YOU
Kurbsky?’

A strapping security officer in MVD blue tabs loomed up in front of Andrei outside the school at pick-up a few weeks later. He was someone’s bodyguard no doubt, but Andrei’s heart still missed a beat: he remembered the night, long ago, before the war, when the Chekists had come to arrest his father, when men in boots had tramped with ominously officious footsteps through the apartment.

‘I . . . I am,’ stammered Andrei.

‘Are you a sissy like those floppy-haired friends of George? Do you read girlish poetry? Do you pick flowers? Do you fold your britches before you fuck a woman – or do you just rip ’em off, toss ’em aside and go to it like a man?’ asked the security officer.

Andrei opened his mouth to answer, but then closed it again.

‘Just joking, boy.’ He introduced himself: ‘Colonel Losha Babanava, chief of security for Comrade Satinov,’ and Andrei’s hand was crushed in a throbbingly virile handshake. Losha’s accent was thickly Georgian, his barrel chest was covered in medals, and his red-striped britches were skin tight. Andrei noticed his ivory-handled Mauser in a kid-leather holster, and how his teeth gleamed under an extravagantly winged set of jet moustaches.

‘George is waiting in the car with his brother and sister. You, boy, have been invited to tea with the Satinovs.’

The officer guided Andrei by the shoulders towards a ZiS limousine.

‘Hello, Andrei,’ said George through the open window. ‘Get in.’

Losha opened the door and Andrei saw George, Marlen and little Mariko in the back seat, which was almost as large as his bedroom. George gave him a smile. ‘You see the door and windows? Fifteen centimetres thick. Armour-plated! Just in case anyone tries to assassinate Marlen.’

‘Why would anyone want to kill me?’ asked Marlen, looking around.

‘Because you’re so important in the school. Our enemies will certainly know you’re school Komsorg.’

‘Really?’ Marlen seemed pleased by this.

Losha slammed the door; then, whistling at the ‘tail’, the small Pobeda car filled with guards behind them, he placed his hairy hands on the car roof and swung himself into the front seat as if he was leaping into a saddle. ‘Foot down!’ he barked to the driver. The cars accelerated together, the driver spinning the white leather steering wheel and manipulating the brakes to give unnecessary screeches of burning rubber that made passersby jump out of the way as the little convoy careered past the Kremlin.

‘Your papa was up all night and he’s been in the office since dawn,’ Losha told the Satinov children, nodding at the red crenellated walls of the Kremlin and lighting up a cigarette. ‘I’ll be picking him up in a moment . . .’ Then, with a creaking of leather and a whiff of cologne, Losha swivelled around and pointed at a girl on the pavement. The chauffeur, also in uniform, craned his head to look – and almost crashed the car. ‘Hey, Merab, eyes on the road!’ Losha turned back to the children. ‘You see those Russian guys? No rudeness intended, Andrei, but most of ’em don’t know how to handle a woman. Russian girls are always looking sideways. Do you know why?’

Andrei shook his head.

‘They’re always looking for a Georgian guy, that’s why! You understand me, right?’ He slapped his palms together. ‘Kerboosh!’

The drive from Ostozhenka to Granovsky Street took only a few minutes. Soon they were turning into a small street, and guards were waving them through the checkpoints into a car park.

‘Welcome to the Fifth House of the Soviets,’ said George as a guard from the Pobeda car behind them jumped out and opened the door for them.

‘Out you get, youngsters,’ said Losha. ‘I’ve got to get to the Little Corner and pick up the big man.’ Banging his hands on the dashboard, he gestured to the chauffeur to drive on, leaving Andrei and the Satinovs standing amidst a collection of beautiful cars.

‘Whom do these all belong to?’ asked Andrei.

‘Well,’ explained George. ‘Most of the leaders live here. But these are ours – you’ve seen the big one, but then there’s the Cadillac, the Dodge, and that open-topped Mercedes came from Berlin. It belonged to Goebbels. Or was it Himmler?’

‘Do you use them all?’

‘Of course not. Papa couldn’t care about cars and stuff. But no one turns down a gift from the Central Committee.’

Andrei looked around him at the cars shimmering in the sunlight, then up at the pillared pink building above.

‘Recognize that Rolls-Royce?’ George asked. ‘Serafima lives here too. It’s the only privately owned Rolls in Moscow.’

A guard opened the back door of the apartment building, and Andrei and the Satinovs walked up a flight of wide, marble steps.