Winter of the World (72 page)

His father looked surprised.

Both men looked at Katerina, who blushed. Then she switched on the radio and turned the volume down to a low mutter. Did she suspect their apartment had concealed listening devices, Volodya
wondered?

She spoke quietly but angrily. ‘What are you going to use for money when the Germans get here?’ she said. ‘We won’t belong to the privileged elite any longer. We’ll
starve unless we can buy food on the black market. I’m too damn old to sell my body. Vodka will be better than gold.’

Volodya was shocked to hear his mother talking this way.

‘The Germans aren’t going to get here,’ his father said.

Volodya was not so sure. They were advancing again, closing the jaws of a pincer around Moscow. They had reached Kalinin in the north and Kaluga to the south, both cities only about a hundred
miles away. Soviet casualties were unimaginably high. A month ago 800,000 Red Army troops had held the line, but only 90,000 were left, according to the estimates reaching Volodya’s desk. He
said to his father: ‘Who the hell is going to stop them?’

‘Their supply lines are stretched. They’re unprepared for our winter weather. We will counter-attack when they’re weakened.’

‘So why are you moving the government out of Moscow?’

The bureaucracy was in the process of being transported two thousand miles east, to the city of Kuibyshev. The citizens of the capital had been unnerved by the sight of government clerks
carrying boxes of files out of their office buildings and packing them into trucks.

‘That’s just a precaution,’ Grigori said. ‘Stalin is still here.’

‘There is a solution,’ Volodya argued. ‘We have hundreds of thousands of men in Siberia. We need them here as reinforcements.’

Grigori shook his head. ‘We can’t leave the east undefended. Japan is still a threat.’

‘Japan is not going to attack us – we know that!’ Volodya glanced at his mother. He knew he should not talk about secret intelligence in front of her, but he did anyway.
‘The Tokyo source that warned us – correctly – that the Germans were about to invade has now told us that the Japanese will not. Surely we’re not going to disbelieve him
again!’

‘Evaluating intelligence is never easy.’

‘We don’t have a choice!’ Volodya said angrily. ‘We have twelve armies in reserve – a million men. If we deploy them, Moscow might survive. If we don’t,
we’re finished.’

Grigori looked troubled. ‘Don’t speak like that, even in private.’

‘Why not? I’ll probably be dead soon anyway.’

His mother started to cry.

His father said: ‘Now look what you’ve done.’

Volodya left the room. Putting on his boots, he asked himself why he had shouted at his father and made his mother cry. He saw that it was because he now believed that Germany would defeat the
Soviet Union. His mother’s stash of vodka to be used as currency during a Nazi occupation had forced him to confront the reality. We’re going to lose, he said to himself. The end of the
Russian revolution is in sight.

He put on his coat and hat. Then he returned to the kitchen. He kissed his mother and embraced his father.

‘What’s this for?’ said his father. ‘You’re only going to work.’

‘It’s just in case we never meet again,’ Volodya said. Then he went out.

When he crossed the bridge into the city centre he found that all public transport had stopped. The metro was closed and there were no buses or trams.

It seemed there was nothing but bad news.

This morning’s bulletin from SovInformBuro, broadcast on the radio and from black-painted loudspeaker posts on street corners, had been uncharacteristically honest. ‘During the night
of 14 to 15 October, the position on the Western Front became worse,’ it had said. ‘Large numbers of German tanks broke through our defences.’ Everyone knew that SovInformBuro
always lied, so they assumed the real situation was even worse.

The city centre was clogged with refugees. They were pouring in from the west, with their possessions in handcarts, driving herds of skinny cows and filthy pigs and wet sheep through the
streets, heading for the countryside east of Moscow, desperate to get as far away as possible from the advancing Germans.

Volodya tried to hitch a lift. There was not much civilian traffic in Moscow these days. Fuel was being saved for the endless military convoys driving around the Garden Ring orbital road. He was
picked up by a new GAZ-64 jeep.

Looking from the open vehicle, he saw a good deal of bomb damage. Diplomats returning from England said this was nothing by comparison with the London Blitz, but Muscovites thought it was bad
enough. Volodya passed several wrecked buildings and dozens of burned-out wooden houses.

Grigori, in charge of air raid defence, had mounted anti-aircraft guns on the tops of the tallest buildings, and launched barrage balloons to float below the snow clouds. His most bizarre
decision had been to order the golden onion domes of the churches to be painted in camouflage green and brown. He had admitted to Volodya that this would make no difference to the accuracy –
or otherwise – of the bombing but, he said, it gave citizens the feeling that they were being protected.

If the Germans won, and the Nazis ruled Moscow, then Volodya’s nephew and niece, the twin children of his sister, Anya, would be brought up not as patriotic Communists but as slavish
Nazis, saluting Hitler. Russia would be like France, a country in servitude, perhaps partly ruled by an obedient pro-Fascist government that would round up Jews to be sent to concentration camps.
It hardly bore thinking about. Volodya wanted a future in which the Soviet Union could free itself from the malign rule of Stalin and the brutality of the secret police and begin to build true
Communism.

When Volodya reached the headquarters building at the Khodynka airfield, he found the air full of greyish flakes that were not snow but ash. Red Army Intelligence was burning its records to
prevent them falling into enemy hands.

Shortly after he arrived, Colonel Lemitov came into his office. ‘You sent a memo to London about a German physicist called Wilhelm Frunze. That was a very smart move. It turned out to be a
great lead. Well done.’

What does it matter, Volodya thought? The Panzers were only a hundred miles away. It was too late for spies to help. But he forced himself to concentrate. ‘Frunze, yes. I was at school
with him in Berlin.’

‘London contacted him and he is willing to talk. They met at a safe house.’ As Lemitov talked, he fiddled with his wristwatch. It was unusual for him to fidget. He was clearly tense.
Everyone was tense.

Volodya said nothing. Obviously some information had come out of the meeting, otherwise Lemitov would not be talking about it.

‘London say that Frunze was wary at first, and suspected our man of belonging to the British secret police,’ Lemitov said with a smile. ‘In fact, after the initial meeting he
went to Kensington Palace Gardens and knocked on the door of our embassy and demanded confirmation that our man was genuine!’

Volodya smiled. ‘A real amateur.’

‘Exactly,’ said Lemitov. ‘A disinformation decoy wouldn’t do anything so stupid.’

The Soviet Union was not finished yet, not quite; so Volodya had to carry on as if Willi Frunze mattered. ‘What did he give us, sir?’

‘He says he and his fellow scientists are collaborating with the Americans to make a super-bomb.’

Volodya, startled, recalled what Zoya Vorotsyntsev had told him. This confirmed her worst fears.

Lemitov went on: ‘There’s a problem with the information.’

‘What?’

‘We’ve translated it, but we still can’t understand a word.’ Lemitov handed Volodya a sheaf of typewritten sheets.

Volodya read a heading aloud. ‘Isotope separation by gaseous diffusion.’

‘You see what I mean.’

‘I did languages at university, not physics.’

‘But you once mentioned a physicist you know.’ Lemitov smiled. ‘A gorgeous blonde who declined to go to a movie with you, if I remember.’

Volodya blushed. He had told Kamen about Zoya, and Kamen must have repeated the gossip. The trouble with having a spy for a boss was that he knew everything. ‘She’s a family friend.
She told me about an explosive process called fission. Do you want me to question her?’

‘Unofficially and informally. I don’t want to make a big thing of this until I understand it. Frunze may be a crackpot, and he could make us look foolish. Find out what the reports
are about, and whether Frunze is making scientific sense. If he’s genuine, can the British and Americans really make a super-bomb? And the Germans too?’

‘I haven’t seen Zoya for two or three months.’

Lemitov shrugged. It did not really matter how well Volodya knew Zoya. In the Soviet Union, answering questions put by the authorities was never optional.

‘I’ll track her down.’

Lemitov nodded. ‘Do it today.’ He went out.

Volodya frowned thoughtfully. Zoya was sure the Americans were making a super-bomb, and she had been convincing enough to persuade Grigori to mention it to Stalin, but Stalin had scorned the
idea. Now a spy in England was saying what Zoya had said. It looked as if she had been right. And Stalin had been wrong – again.

The leaders of the Soviet Union had a dangerous tendency to deny the truth of bad news. Only last week, an air reconnaissance mission had spotted German armoured vehicles just eighty miles from
Moscow. The General Staff had refused to believe it until the sighting had been confirmed twice. Then they had ordered the reporting air officer to be arrested and tortured by the NKVD for
‘provocation’.

It was difficult to think long term when the Germans were so close, but the possibility of a bomb that could flatten Moscow could not be disregarded, even at this moment of extreme peril. If the
Soviets beat the Germans, they might afterwards be attacked by Britain and America: something similar had happened after the 1914–18 war. Would the USSR find itself helpless against a
capitalist-imperialist super-bomb?

Volodya detailed his assistant, Lieutenant Belov, to find out where Zoya was.

While waiting for the address Volodya studied Frunze’s reports, in the original English and in translation, memorizing what seemed to be key phrases, as he could not take the papers out of
the building. At the end of an hour he understood enough to ask further questions.

Belov discovered that Zoya was not at the university, nor at the nearby apartment building for scientists. However, the building administrator told him that all the younger residents had been
requested to help with the construction of new inner defences for the city, and gave him the location where Zoya was working.

Volodya put on his coat and went out.

He felt excited, but he was not sure whether that was on account of Zoya or the super-bomb. Maybe both.

He was able to get an army ZIS and driver.

Passing the Kazan station – for trains to the east – he saw what looked like a full-blown riot. It seemed that people could not get into the station, let alone board the trains.
Affluent men and women were struggling to reach the entrance doors with their children and pets and suitcases and trunks. Volodya was shocked to see some of them punching and kicking one another
shamelessly. A few policemen looked on, helpless: it would have taken an army to impose order.

Military drivers were normally taciturn, but this one was moved to comment. ‘Fucking cowards,’ he said. ‘Running away, leaving us to fight the Nazis. Look at them, in their fur
fucking coats.’

Volodya was surprised. Criticism of the ruling elite was dangerous. Such remarks could cause a man to be denounced. Then he would spend a week or two in the basement of the NKVD’s
headquarters in Lubyanka Square. He might come out crippled for life.

Volodya had an unnerving sense that the rigid system of hierarchy and deference that sustained Soviet Communism was beginning to weaken and disintegrate.

They found the barricade party just where the building administrator had predicted. Volodya got out of the car, told the driver to wait, and studied the work.

A main road was strewn with anti-tank ‘hedgehogs’. A hedgehog consisted of three pieces of steel railway track, each a yard long, welded together at their centres, forming an
asterisk that stood on three feet and stuck three arms up. Apparently they wreaked havoc with caterpillar tracks.

Behind the hedgehog field an anti-tank ditch was being dug with pickaxes and shovels, and beyond that a sandbag wall was going up, with gaps for defenders to shoot through. A narrow zigzag path
had been left between the obstacles so that the road could continue to be used by Muscovites until the Germans arrived.

Almost all the workers digging and building were women.

Volodya found Zoya beside a sand mountain, filling sacks with a shovel. For a minute he watched her from a distance. She wore a dirty coat, woollen mittens and felt boots. Her blonde hair was
pulled back and covered with a colourless rag tied under her chin. Her face was smeared with mud, but she still looked sexy. She wielded the shovel in a steady rhythm, working efficiently. Then the
supervisor blew a whistle and work stopped.

Zoya sat on a stack of sandbags and took from her coat pocket a small packet wrapped in newspaper. Volodya sat beside her and said: ‘You could have got exemption from this work.’

‘It’s my city,’ she said. ‘Why wouldn’t I help to defend it?’

‘So you’re not fleeing to the east.’

‘I’m not running away from the motherfucking Nazis.’

Her vehemence surprised him. ‘Plenty of people are.’

‘I know. I thought you’d be long gone.’

‘You have a low opinion of me. You think I belong to a selfish elite.’

She shrugged. ‘Those who are able to save themselves generally do.’

‘Well, you’re wrong. All my family are still here in Moscow.’

‘Perhaps I misjudged you. Would you like a pancake?’ She opened her packet to reveal four pale-coloured patties wrapped in cabbage leaves. ‘Try one.’

He accepted and took a bite. It was not very tasty. ‘What is it?’

‘Potato peelings. You can get a bucketful free at the back door of any Party canteen or officers’ mess. You mince them small in the kitchen grinder, boil them until they’re
soft, mix them with a little flour and milk, add salt if you’ve got any, and fry them in lard.’