The Keeper of Secrets (17 page)

Chapter 31

Sochi on the Black Sea, Russia

Summer 1947

T
he early morning sun sparkled off the waters of the Black Sea. Keen sailors were out already, making the most of the first breezes of the new day. The almost deserted beach was quiet and still, as the fine white sand awaited the next invasion of bodies and buckets and spades. Halfway along the beach a path disappeared into the lush vegetation and broke out again onto a lovely, manicured lawn. Perfect lavender hedges and colorful semitropical plants competed for space around its periphery as the grass swept up to a beautiful, two-story home. Large windows and French doors, surrounded by delicate wooden fretwork, opened out onto the gardens. A wide balcony enclosed the upper story of the house, and in one corner a young woman stood gazing out at the sea. She wore a cotton nightgown and wrap, her feet were bare, and her long chestnut hair was piled up on top of her head. She heard a door open and close on the level below her, and she watched as a large man, in a blue silk robe with a towel over his shoulder, strode across the damp grass.

“Morning, Papa,” she called cheerfully.

He stopped and turned, searching the house until he saw her, then his face was split by a huge smile and he raised one hand.

“Morning, my precious! Sleep well?”

“Yes, thank you. The sea looks wonderful.”

His voice boomed in the stillness. “I’ll wait for you if you want to join me.”

“You go on, I won’t be more than a few moments.”

He acknowledged with a wave of the hand and turned back to his journey. She smiled as she watched him disappear into the undergrowth, leaving two lines of large footprints on the dewy lawn. This was their time, a time to heal the wounds of the past few years and be a family again. A summer of golden days and laughter, of being grateful, and, as a family, they had a lot to be grateful for.

Ten minutes later Yulena Valentina stood on the beach, searching the water for her father. General Vladimir Valentino was a huge, powerful man, but in the sea he looked like a little black dot, bobbing in the silver-blue water. She slipped off her wrap and ran into the cool welcome of the waves.

As the day wore on, the temperature rose and the entire Valentino household took individual measures to combat the heat. Everyone was aware of how stifling it would be back in Moscow and how lucky they were to have this seaside dacha, bestowed on the general by a grateful Motherland after his faithful service to Marshal Zhukov during the Great Patriotic War, but it was still ridiculously hot.

The general himself took refuge in the summerhouse with his pipe and his papers and a tall glass of rye kvass, a nonalcoholic malt beverage that he found quenched his thirst admirably, and a plate of beef- and cheese-filled piroshki and fried
khvorost
cookies just to see him through until supper.

Born the same year as Zhukov, Vladimir came from humble beginnings; his father worked in a St. Petersburg printing shop, and his mother was a laundress. He fought in World War I in the Imperial Army and then joined the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army in 1918. His path to major was swift, and after the Manchurian campaign of 1939, he became a much-trusted Zhukov confidant and a two-star general. He was there during the defense of Leningrad in 1941 and Stalingrad in 1942/43, the Battle of the Kursk in 1943, and the sweep through the Ukraine and Belorussia and then into Berlin in April 1945.

When Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov rode a white horse out of the Spassky Gate in the Kremlin for the Victory Parade on June 24, 1945, the now three-star general Vladimir Valentino was in his accustomed position, right behind him. Comrade Stalin seemed to like Valentino too, perhaps because of his lowly origins or more likely because of his earthy sense of humor, and he’d fit into the Red Army headquarters in Moscow quite easily. Now he had an unusually spacious apartment close to the diplomatic quarter, a car with driver, and the lovely dacha in Sochi, not far from Stalin’s own holiday residence.

A few yards away, his wife of twenty-nine years, Nada, busied herself preparing for the evening celebrations. It wasn’t official Party policy to employ servants, so she arranged for a couple of the local babushkas to come and help and gave them some food for their trouble.

Nada was Ukrainian, the daughter of two teachers from Kiev, and had gone to technical college herself. She was a quiet woman, educated and wise, and many in the Party agreed that General Valentino had been blessed in his choice of spouse. Occasionally she even wrote Party tracts, and they were generally well received.

When all was ready, she took her cross-stitch upstairs, for a rest and a nap. She was looking forward to tonight. Yulena would play for them, and they could have a good, old-fashioned sing-along. Music was Nada’s greatest passion, and the talent of her daughter was the one thing of which she was enormously proud. Nothing would have tempted her to publicly admit to a belief in God, but she still thanked “something” every day for Yulena’s safe return from her war adventure. And, of course, she was grateful that her husband and son had been spared as well. Many of her friends had lost some, if not all, of their families, and she’d come through unscathed.

She was a strong woman, mentally and physically, and she didn’t tolerate weakness easily. Her brown hair was peppered with streaks of gray and there were lines around her hazel eyes, but her skin was still exquisitely soft and translucent. Her husband thought of her as Rubenesque and womanly. She reminded him of those magnificent paintings he wasn’t supposed to look at, in the books he kept hidden in the summerhouse.

The birthday boy was their son, Koyla. He was twenty-four today, and this family gathering would celebrate, yet again, their completeness.

Koyla had finished his schooling before serving as an assistant to a
zampolit,
a political officer in the Red Army, responsible for the philosophical and political health of the soldiers as they defended the Motherland. This had brought him to the fringes, but not the heart, of combat; and his promotion to
zampolit
proper had coincided with the Great Victory. Since the war he’d worked in the Party’s central office as an information officer. He was completely committed to the “cause” and chose to believe wholeheartedly in the utterances of Comrade Stalin. He was proud of his father’s war record and enjoyed the way that people
he
was in awe of always took notice of him when they learned his father’s identity. However, he’d watched the acquisitions of the past two years with growing concern and had even considered declining the invitation for a summer holiday. It was too easy to become “corrupted” by the rewards of the State and he didn’t want to be labeled a hypocrite. But his mama had convinced him that they were still true believers.

He was tall, almost as tall as his father, but had not yet filled out. The combination of light green eyes behind glasses, pale skin, short black hair, and fine, aesthetic features made him look like an intellectual, a writer or a scientist. He saw himself as a simple workingman with a message for those comrades who doubted the direction of the Motherland.

Now Koyla went for a brisk walk along the beach until he found a shady spot to sit and read the Party documentation that had arrived by official courier just that morning. Back in the house his very pregnant wife, Ekaterina, had a long soak in a cool bath and then fell asleep on their bed, with pillows to support her ever-aching back. Koyla had spoken at a Party rally she’d attended on her second day in Moscow and she’d asked him for advice on literature. They’d married three months later and now she was on the verge of having their first child.

She seemed to be searching for something when they met, and Koyla sometimes wondered if she’d yet found it. She was an intelligent woman, fierce and outspoken, but she’d lost her entire family in the horrors of Stalingrad, and now all she appeared to want to do was forget it’d ever happened. If he saw flashes of anguish in her deep brown eyes and the occasional evidence of her hatred for anything German, he held his tongue.

With her sharp cheekbones, short black hair, and slightly almond-shaped eyes, she could look like a cold piece of sculpture; then, suddenly, she’d smile, and men of all ages became tongue-tied.

The last member of the household, Yulena, was helping her mother in the large kitchen. Then she spent the late afternoon practicing on her beloved 1729 Guarneri del Gesú violin. It was a present from her father after the Great Patriotic War ended, and she still couldn’t quite believe it was hers.

Yulena had shown musical promise at a very early age on both the violin and the piano. On her tenth birthday, she’d started in the musically endowed children’s class at the Moscow Conservatory and was playing her first violin solo, Brahms, at twelve. When she was eighteen, she’d headlined a concert in the Great Hall and her future seemed assured.

But one afternoon in early 1941, she heard a radio broadcast by Major Marina Raskova of the Soviet Air Force. Raskova had broken the international women’s distance record in 1938 when she flew from Moscow to Komsomolsk-on-Amur, in the Russian Far East. This had made her a folk hero, so she was the obvious choice to front a recruiting drive for female pilots. Yulena was just twenty-one and she didn’t hesitate for a second. Within hours she’d left the safe world of the conservatory behind and was on an air force base in the town of Engels on the Volga River.

A two-year course was packed into six months of intensive training. The women were issued men’s uniforms that were far too big and had to stuff their boots with newspaper. Sometimes the instructors could be brutal, but Yulena felt truly alive for the first time in her short life.

When she graduated, she was sent to the 586th Fighter Regiment. These were extremely brave women. They flew without parachutes and agreed that, if they were captured, they’d shoot themselves rather than surrender. Their role was to engage the Messerschmitt 109s escorting the bombers and then to drive the bombers away before the targets were reached.

Yulena had had five “victories” when she was suddenly transferred to the Seventy-Third Fighter Regiment, a squadron of men. At first the men refused to have a female pilot as a wingman, but when she proved her worth time and again in furious battles over the skies of Stalingrad, they had no choice but to accept her.

In July 1943, she transferred back to the 586th for the famous battle at Kursk. This proved to be the decisive point of the war. Between them, the two fronts had more than 1.3 million men in combat and over twenty thousand field guns. In the skies, four thousand aircraft operated in an area that measured only twelve miles by thirty miles, and at times Yulena was in the middle of three hundred planes. Below her, her father and Marshal Zhukov were winning the land battle. She survived, despite being shot down twice, and was awarded the Gold Star, Hero of the Soviet Union.

Almost as famous for her mane of deep chestnut-red hair and her long-limbed body as for her flying, she quickly became something of a legend. Through the intervention of Zhukov, she was recalled in 1944 and given a posting to her old camp in Engels, training both men and women. These months gave her time to reflect on her war experiences and come to terms with what she’d seen, so that the deepest emotion she endured was concern over the fate of the men and women she was training. It was a source of some pride that she never cried over the deaths of her fellow pilots.

When the Great Patriotic War ended, she returned to the Moscow Conservatory to resume her studies. After her first concert in four and a half years, her parents had treated her to dinner in a restaurant and then her papa had presented her with a battered black violin case. There were one or two tiny cracks in the body, nothing important, and she’d had them repaired. The oil varnish was in amazing condition and the color was a deep burnt sienna, with the merest hint of red. The sound had reduced her to tears in seconds.

Two years later it was her pride and joy, her dearest friend, and she bore the teasing of others with a good-natured smile; no one understood what this “piece of wood” meant to her. No one except her papa. He’d found it in a little violin shop, miraculously saved from the bombing, and he’d bargained with the owner to get it for a very good price. Yulena understood the realities of war only too well and had decided almost immediately that she wouldn’t question her papa too closely about just how he’d persuaded the shopkeeper to part with such a treasure. All that mattered was that he had; it was his gift to her, his way of saying she had brought much pride to the name of Valentino and he adored her for it.

I
t was still daylight when Nada finished laying out her son’s birthday feast. The long table was groaning with dishes of Beluga caviar, chicken pudding, stuffed cabbage leaves, beef stroganoff, fish rolls, stuffed carp, and bottles of fine Georgian red wine. She knew that Koyla would comment on the amount of food and the apparent extravagance but she didn’t care; Vladimir worked hard, and their ability to put good food on the table was his reward.

“Good grief!”

She looked up to see Koyla standing in the doorway and wiped her hands on her apron.

“It’s your birthday, my boy. And it will be our one holiday feast.”

“It’s wonderful, Mama. You must have cooked all day.”

She smiled with relief and straightened a chair as he walked around the table to her side and kissed her warmly on the cheek.

“And all for me? Thank you, I’m very touched.”

“It is my pleasure. How’s your darling Kati?”

“Feeling better; she slept this afternoon. Her back hurts and the heat makes her ankles swell.”

“Oh, I do remember that. It was so hot before you were born I thought the doctor would have to hose me down.”

He laughed.

“She’ll be glad when it’s all over but she’s very good, she doesn’t complain. Shall I get the others? They’re in the drawing room. Papa is telling us about Comrade Stalin’s latest favorite artist; he sounds very good.”

“Thank you, darling. Open the wine and then ask them to come.”