Smiley had stormed Berlin in Marshal Zhukov’s armies. ‘You wouldn’t believe the girls we had. As many as we wanted,’ he told Benya. ‘Girls and watches! See?’ He pulled up his sleeves and cackled: three Swiss watches on each wrist. ‘And I saw exactly where they burned Hitler’s body.’
They talked about girls, fights and crimes, but never Kolyma, nor the Shtrafbat. Former Zeks did not talk about such things, certainly not in a bar. And besides, Benya was wary of the two Criminals, and getting more nervous by the minute about what Jaba would want.
The clocks struck 1 a.m., 2 a.m., and they ordered more bottles. Then the guards started to take up positions again, and just after 3 a.m., a train emerged out of its own cloud of steam, the doors opening and figures stepping out from the mist.
Benya, Smiley and Little Mametka moved closer, in a crowd of others. The returnees, haggard men and ancient women with sunken faces, appeared slowly, holding their belongings in bundles of string, bags of canvas, burlap or carpet, their watery eyes searching through the crowd. Showing their papers at the gates, they received their stamps – and then fell into the arms of weary relatives.
A powerful man, blue tattoos lapping up his neck, strode up the platform, quite unlike his meagre fellow travellers, and embraced Smiley and Mametka: it was Deathless. Uneasily, Benya observed their lugubrious bonhomie, their almost incomprehensible Criminal patois, fearing what monster would rear up out of his past to ruin his present.
‘You have it?’ Smiley was asking.
‘Oh yeah, I have it!’ said Deathless.
‘Well, let’s see it then. The writer’s here!’
‘Is Jaba not coming?’ Benya asked.
‘Maybe he is,’ said Deathless. ‘Or maybe you just get me.’
‘What are you looking at us for?’ Smiley was pointing at the train. ‘Keep watching.’ Through the steam, like a cavaderous foreign army emerging out of a fog-draped battlefield, came a host of men in foreign uniforms. Benya spotted some Romanians in brown. A few Hungarians. Each nationality sticking close to their own people, bearing a capsule of their homeland around with them wherever they ended up.
‘Prisoners going home,’ explained Smiley.
‘We taught them who was master in the Zone,’ said Deathless, smoking.
Going home. Benya glanced at the brigands who were smirking beside him.
‘They’re not free yet,’ added Smiley. ‘Still being guarded. They have to cross Moscow to Kievskaya Station.’
‘And where do they change for…?’
‘Bucharest, I suppose,’ said Benya. He didn’t like this game at all.
‘No, Rome. Or maybe Venice,’ said Smiley.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look.’ Mametka was pointing. ‘Look at those uniforms, there! They’re Italians.’
Smiley gave his metallic grin, and Benya winced in pain at the very thought of his own private Italy, his Venice lost.
Some of the prisoners were close now to the gates and of course they were Italian: even the Zone couldn’t quite grind all the gloss out of them. The thought of Fabiana stung Benya with unbearable sadness. He wanted to tell these broken Italians, ‘I once knew one of you. Very well, for a short time. A nurse from Venice? Yes, that’s her! Fabiana who died back in ’42 – did you know her?’ But he would immediately be denounced as a Fascist fraternizer, a collaborator with the invaders who had almost destroyed Russia. Yet the Criminals knew something and he feared what was coming. And then it occurred to him – perhaps someone had talked? Sensing that the times were getting dangerous again, the possibilities for disaster started to eat at him.
At the gate, the Italians showed their papers for another check; and then they were surrounded by MVD troops with blue shoulderboards and guns on their arms, who started to march them slowly through the station, watched by a few morose Russians.
One older Italian, a swarthy one with a grey beard, almost tripped, and an MVD guard gave him a shove: still prisoners. Benya wanted to look into their eyes, wanted them to know that he wished them luck, that he didn’t want to join in their humiliation.
And then he noticed that one of the Italians was staring right at him, and he turned, and there under a peaked cap was a woman with brown eyes. It couldn’t be. She was dead – but there she was, and she was smiling at him, right at him, just a few feet away. She was much older, drawn and pale, but still so much herself. She had just a filigree of grey frost at her temples. She had recognized him, and her extraordinary honeyed eyes shone with such a radiant delight that he wanted to shout out, ‘Fabiana! I never forgot you – I still think of you every day, I still dream of you!’ He pushed himself forward – but Smiley and Mametka gripped him so hard that it hurt. ‘Careful, you fool!’ said one.
‘Say a word and I’ll cut your tongue out,’ said the other.
‘Can it really be her?’ Benya whispered.
But it was, and she was waving her right hand, fingers together, in the gesture that he had not seen since that last day – the bear gathering honey! Tears were running down his face, and he was mouthing the words to her, two important words, and she was mouthing them back.
She turned, reached behind her, and lifted something up. For a second he thought she had dropped her bag. Then he saw she was holding a little person, a small girl whose bright blue eyes looked right into his. She looked like a photograph of him as a baby, one that had stood in pride of place on the mantelpiece at the family home in Lvov and then in Odessa.
But the guards were pushing them on. ‘Hey, prisoner, no stopping! Hurry up!’
Fabiana stayed still, holding up the child, and she was pointing at Benya and he heard her, that unforgettable voice saying clearly and loudly in her singsong Italian, ‘Aurelia, guarda quell’uomo! Look at that man! Aurelia, mia dolce amata bambina, see that man!’
Spotting a delay, the guards were shoving them and she was passing, her face still turned towards him. He had to say something, he had to follow, but Smiley’s hands, those claws accustomed to break and hold, were clamped on him and he couldn’t move – yet he felt the wings of the angel of the past fluttering over him, taking to the sky, coming back to life.
Now they were disappearing, the little girl waving, and Fabiana still repeating those two words, over and over, ‘Somehow forever, somehow forever,’ and Benya was making their silly honey sign and she saw it and she smiled, tears pouring down her face too, half covered by her little Aurelia, who was still waving – with that smile that was entirely his.
Only once they were gone, warded into the buses waiting outside, did the Criminals release him slowly.
‘See, Deathless, he almost ruined everything,’ said Smiley.
‘Look at him now – sobbing like a girl!’
‘Lucky we had that shot of vodka!’
‘Did you see her?’ cried Benya. ‘Did you see the child?’
‘Quieter!’ Smiley ordered. ‘What do you have to say to us?’
‘Thank you! Thank you!’ He hugged them, Smiley, then Mametka, then Deathless.
‘Oy, get down, bitch,’ said Deathless, pushing him away.
Smiley waved a finger at him: ‘Don’t get queer on us now.’
Benya remembered himself and understood the danger. They had given him this gift but it was more than enough to get him the Eight Grammes or sent back to Kolyma.
‘How did you know?’
‘I was with Elmor’s partisans when we ambushed an Italian cavalry squadron chasing a Russian man and an Italian woman on horseback,’ said Smiley. ‘Comrade Elmor ordered “Fire the Dashkas!” and I fired one and Mametka here fired the other. Blew some holes out of them. And you got away.’