‘Teacher Golden?’
He looked into the hazel eyes of the freckly and rather imperious redhead before him in her school uniform and Pioneers’ scarf. What a curse it was to be the child of great men, especially this one. Was she reliable? Would she betray him? He wavered, holding back the essay.
‘Is there anything else, Teacher Golden?’ she asked.
What the hell! He handed back the essay written in her curved girlish hand. ‘You write well,’ he said. ‘A plus. And, Stalina?’
‘Yes?’
‘Go somewhere on your own and look carefully at my comments.’
Svetlana went into the ladies’ room at the school and opened her essay carefully, page by page, until she found a piece of paper, folded over, and held on to the last page with a paper clip. Hungrily she seized it and opened it. It was a piece of prescription pad headed ‘Central Military Hospital’. Hospital? But when she opened it and recognized the writing she found herself breathing fast. She deciphered the scrawled words, understanding they were written in the hieroglyphics of desperation…
Beloved Lioness,
I write this in haste. ‘Our friends’ wait for me downstairs. I don’t know my fate but I do know I am going away. You will not hear from me. But know that I love you, that you have made my life beautiful, that I shall think of you every day. I shall search the horizon for a vision of you, for the playful brightness of your golden eyes in the rising sun, the thoughtful sensitivity of your soft mouth in the sunset, the kindness of your brow in the silver moon, and your infinite qualities of delight in the luminosity of the stars. Look at them and you will feel me looking back at you.
Love others, marry a decent man, have children, read great literature, choose stimulating friends, be kind. Live your life as if I will never return but not as if you never knew me. Live in my spirit at least, and that way, if I never return, our time together will have meant something very dear to me. And if I do return, you will be as worthy of our love as you are today.
One day, if the world still turns, my love, if the Fates are kind, I will come back for you.
Destroy this note. Never betray its bearer, promise me this above all else!
II
More than two years had passed. The war was won, and Hitler had killed himself in the ruins of Berlin. Benya had never found his parents. He had to presume that they had perished during the war, in the streets of Odessa or in some Ukrainian ravine. He could not forget them but he often felt them close to him as he relived the blessing of an early life with loving parents. He still loved Sashenka and believed she was alive in a Camp somewhere in the vastness of Russia. And the wounds of the war were still raw to him in both senses. At night, he dreamed of Fabiana – and Silver Socks. Fabiana was already a ghost, lost in the haze over the steppes, the distance between them ever more unbridgeable, time and circumstance burning away the memory of her as the sun does with mist. He had known her such a short time.
At the Josef Stalin Commune School 801, he’d become a respected member of the staff. In his free time, he collected books that he bought in flea markets; in the evenings and sometimes even during his lunch hour, he made love to a teaching assistant, marvelling at her beauty and youth and astonishing wantonness. But mostly he lived for his teaching, and had become the favourite of many of the children. Svetlana Stalina and her class had left the school but his classes were still filled with the children of the Politburo and the government. His days were ruled by the ups and downs of the school, frequently rewarding, mostly tedious and occasionally dramatic. Like everyone, he had presumed, or at least hoped, that the freedoms of the war would endure. The children had become confident and playful, so different from before the war – but there were signs those easy times were over; Benya prayed they would last…
Then, one morning that summer 1945, he received an envelope in his pigeonhole. Inside was just a simple note that read: ‘Tomorrow 6 p.m. to midnight. Yaroslavsky Station.’
For a second, he wondered if it was Sashenka coming back. Could it be? Yaroslavsky Station was the terminus for trains from the Kolyma Zone in the far east but surely he would have somehow known if she had been there too? He had always believed Sashenka might be in the Camps to the north but Vorkuta trains arrived at a different station. He feared this could be some kind of trick by the Organs to compromise him with a provokatsia. But then he absentmindedly turned over the scrap of paper and saw the devil’s trident, and he knew he had to be there.
I live, he thought, in the realm of stations, of leaving and returning and leaving again. Stations were surely one of the essences of Russian life.
He waited out the next day, and around 6 p.m., after school, he arrived at Yaroslavsky Station under the Russian Revival tower that looks like a bishop’s hat. It was a drowsy summer’s night. He walked along the line of platforms but it was easy to find the right one. MVD guards in their blue epaulettes were already guarding the terminus. He took his place in that very Russian gathering of those who await the return of loved ones who have fallen into the abyss. No real Russian novel, Benya thought, would be complete without a station scene – every book should have one. Looking around him, he saw people who had learned to become almost invisible during the years of their eclipse appear out of the shadows of the station: the wan wife with her young children, never seen by their father; the old woman who had waited decades for the return of the ruin of a man who would arrive on the next train.
‘If their relatives look like carcasses, imagine what the passengers are going to look like.’ Benya turned and there was Smiley, still in uniform, visored cap pulled low, and Little Mametka, still elfishly callow – but both now decorated Soviet officers tempered by war, Smiley a captain, Mametka a lieutenant. Both were wearing the new Stalin-imperial uniforms, golden buttons, chunky gilded shoulderboards, red stars.
‘Just as well you came,’ said Smiley.
‘We’ve missed you,’ added Mametka malevolently, the threat implicit though Benya had no idea what they had on him. He had wondered whom exactly he was waiting for. The devil’s trident was a signal from the underworld, one unwise to ignore: surely from Jaba the Brigand-in-Power? He was just about to ask but Smiley held up his hand: ‘Don’t ask. Duties and rewards, that’s what Jaba always said, remember?’
‘We can say we’re welcoming back a friend,’ Mametka promised.
‘Well, this is a dreary party,’ said Smiley. They leaned on the railings chain-smoking, waiting for the train. The hours passed. Smiley bought a bottle of vodka; the three of them drank shots while nibbling greasy pirozhki and tepid pelmeni, station-food.
‘I helped capture Vienna,’ said Mametka. He had neither grown nor had his voice deepened despite all the battles he said he had fought. But his face had thinned out, and now he looked more shrivelled and fiendish than before, the lips too red, fat enough to burst.