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CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_744bcda3-8fa6-531d-8bf1-a52d374af138)
July 11, 1938. A wondrous Sunday in Moscow with memories of winter past and prospects of winter to come melted by the sun. The golden cupolas of the Kremlin floated in a cloudless sky, crowds queued for kvas and icecream and in Gorky Park the air smelled of carnations.
In a forest behind a river beach thirty miles outside the city a blond young man who would one day be asked to take part in the most awesome conspiracy of modern times was courting a black-haired beauty named Anna Petrovna.
If anyone had hinted about his future role to Viktor Golovin he would have dismissed them as a madman. And abruptly at that because it was his nineteenth birthday and he hoped to celebrate it by making love for the first time in his life.
It was a daunting prospect. In the first place he feared his inexperience might be ridiculed; in the second, being a serious young man – his solemn demeanour made the laughter that occasionally transfigured his features into an explosion – he believed that the act of love should involve more than casual pleasure. It should, he reasoned, be a seal of permanency. But did he truly desire permanency with Anna Petrovna? And if he didn’t wasn’t he betraying his beliefs?
Standing under a silver birch where coins of light shifted restlessly on the thin grass he bent and kissed her on the lips and gazed into her eyes, seeking answers. She stared boldly back and gave none. He slipped his arm round her waist and they walked deeper into the forest.
The trouble was that although he loved her there were aspects of her character that angered him. Not only was she supremely self-confident, as any girl desired by half the male students at Moscow University was entitled to be, but she was politically assertive, and dangerously so. She believed that Joseph Stalin had made a travesty of Marxist-Leninism and she wasn’t afraid to say so. But surely love should transcend such considerations.
He glanced down at her; she was small but voluptuously shaped with full breasts that he had caressed for the first time two nights ago, and there was a trace of the gypsy in her, an impression heightened today by her red skirt and white blouse. She was three months older than him and unquestionably far more experienced.
She smiled at him and said: ‘You’re looking very serious, Viktor Golovin. Let’s sit down for a while and I’ll see if I can make you smile.’
She tickled his lips with a blade of grass as he lay back, hands behind his head, and tried not to smile. He could feel the warmth of her body and see the swell of her breasts.
Finally he grinned.
‘That smile,’ she said, ‘is your key.’
‘To what?’
‘To anything you want.’
She unbuttoned his white, open-neck shirt ‘to let the fresh air get to you’, and he wondered if her previous words were an invitation and whether he should accept in view of his misgivings about her character, but when she kissed him … such a knowing kiss … and when he felt the pressure of her thighs on his and heard her sigh his principles fled.
He lost his virginity with surprising ease. None of the fumbling and misdirected endeavour that he had feared. And, at the time, such was his need that it didn’t occur to him that his accomplishment owed not a little to her expertise.
She helped him with his clothes. She lay back, skirt hitched to her hips, legs spread, breasts free. She touched him, stroked him, guided him. And when he was inside her, marvelling that at last it had happened, wondering at the oiled ease of it all, she regulated their movements. ‘Gently … stop a moment … harder, faster … now, now …’
For a while they didn’t speak. Then, when he had taken a bottle of Narzan mineral water from his knapsack and they were sipping it from cardboard cups, she said: ‘It was the first time for you, wasn’t it?’
As though it implied retarded development. But he had refused to conform with the sexual boasting of the students obsessed with masculinity. If they were to be believed they coupled every night, fuelled on lethal quantities of vodka. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was. Should I be ashamed?’
‘Ashamed? Why should you be ashamed? You’re young.’
So was she and for a moment the obvious question about her experience hovered between them; but he knew the answer and then, in her way, she answered it: ‘At our age a girl is much older than a boy.’ She stroked his hair. ‘You’re very attractive, Viktor, you’re not … not so obvious as the others.’
‘You mean I’m insignificant?’
‘Far from it. You’re tall and you’re slim and your eyes always seem to be searching for the truth. I think you’re going to have terrible trouble with your conscience in the future.’
He grinned at her. ‘I didn’t just now.’
‘It’s a pity that politically you’re such a conformist.’
Here we go, he thought and said: ‘What’s so wrong with that? I’m only conforming to communism, the beliefs that have rescued our country from tyranny.’
‘Rescued it? Twenty years ago perhaps. But now we’ve got a tyranny far worse than anything the Tsars ever dreamed up.’
‘Watch that tongue of yours, Anna, or it will lead you to Siberia.’
Triumphantly she exclaimed: ‘You see, you’re proving my point. What sort of a country is it when you can’t say what you believe?’
‘A better country than Germany,’ Viktor said quickly, annoyed with himself for having given her ammunition. ‘At least it’s not a crime here for a Jew to observe the Sabbath.’
‘Anyone with a weak argument always resorts to comparisons.’ She stood up and smoothed her skirt. ‘You must have heard about the purges …’
Of course he’d heard the stories. But he didn’t believe them. Iconoclasm was a permanent resident of student society. He preferred to believe the evidence around him that Lenin, and now Stalin, had helped Mother Russia to rise from her knees and given her self-respect. Not that he believed that the Revolution had been quite as heroic as the historians would have you believe – that was for children and none the worse because of it; but he did believe in equality. He knew older people who had once lived on potato skins, black bread and tea.
‘They say he’s quite mad you know.’ She began to walk back towards the beach.
‘Who’s mad?’ picking up his knapsack and following her.
‘Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, better known as Stalin.’
‘They also say that genius is akin to madness.’
‘A psychopath.’
‘One of those words created to disguise our ignorance of the human condition.’
How pompous we students can be, he reflected.
Through the birch trees he could see a glint of water and, faintly, he could hear the babble from the beach and the tattoo of ping-pong balls on the tables beside the sand.
‘I wonder,’ Anna said, ‘just what it would take to convince you.’ She kicked a heap of old brown leaves and her red skirt swirled. ‘Blood?’
‘Why do you talk treason all the time? Why can’t you enjoy the benefits the system has brought us?’
‘It has certainly brought you benefits, Viktor Golovin.’
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
But he knew. For an orphan he had enjoyed a protected upbringing; and for no apparent reason his foster parents seemed to have rather more than their share of communal benefits. An apartment near the University on the crest of the Lenin Hills, a small dacha in the village of Peredelkino where the writers lived. Not bad for a librarian and his wife.
‘Your privileges are your cross.’
Would she always be like this after making love? ‘I’ve been lucky, I admit.’
‘It must be difficult to hold forth about equality when you’ve had such luck.’
‘Luck! Everyone has a share of it. The trick is knowing what to do with it when you get it.’
‘Nonsense. Not everyone has luck. It isn’t lucky to be an army officer these days.’
‘Ah, the purges again.’
‘Purges, a euphemism. Massacres is a better word.’
They emerged from the green depths of the forest into bright light. Beyond the table-tennis players and the fretted-wood restaurant where you could buy beer, kvas and fizzy cherryade, pies and cold meats, the beach was packed with Muscovites unfolding in the sun. They shed their clothes, they shed the moods of winter. Flesh burned bright pink but no one seemed to care. Rounding a curve in the river came a white steamboat nosing aside the calm water.
The doubts that had reached Viktor in the forest dissolved. Ordinary people wouldn’t have been able to enjoy themselves like this before 1917. Possessively, Viktor, lover and philosopher, took Anna’s arm.
‘But do you?’ She must have been talking while he savoured the fruits of socialism. Impatiently, she said: ‘You haven’t been listening, have you?’
‘I don’t want to hear anything more about purges.’
She pulled her arm away. ‘Of course you don’t. You don’t want anything to interfere with your beautiful, cossetted life. Least of all truth.’
‘I don’t believe it is the truth.’ Her attitude nettled him. ‘Let’s go and have a beer.’
They sat at a scrubbed wooden table and drank beer from fluted brown bottles. Around them families ate picnic lunches and guzzled; in one corner a plump mother was feeding a baby at the breast.
‘I was asking,’ she said, ‘when you weren’t listening, that is, whether you would like to see proof of what I’ve been saying.’
‘If it will please you.’
‘Please me!’ She leaned fiercely across the table. ‘It certainly won’t please me. But it will give me a certain satisfaction to see that smug expression wiped off your face.’
‘Not so long ago my eyes were always searching for the truth …’
‘In everything except politics.’
‘What you’re alleging is more than political.’
‘I can’t understand how you’re so blind. Everyone knows that Stalin is killing off all his enemies, real and imagined. They say the army is powerless now because he’s murdered all the generals.’
Some of the men and women sharing the long table were looking curiously at them. ‘Keep your voice down,’ Viktor whispered, covering her hand with his to soften the words, knowing that any moment now she would accuse him of cowardice.
‘I will for your sake,’ which was the same thing. ‘We don’t want you thrown into Lubyanka, do we?’
A man with a walrus moustache who was peeling an orange pointed his knife at them and said: ‘Cell 28. I spent three years there. Give my love to the rats.’
Viktor said: ‘You see, everyone can hear you even when you lower your voice.’ He felt faintly ashamed of his caution; but really there was no need to: if she had been speaking the truth then, yes, he would have sided with her.
‘Am I to speak in whispers all my life?’
He thought: Yes, if I’m to share my life with you. But the possibility was becoming less attractive by the minute; he seemed to have expended a lot of ideals with his sexual passion.
The man with the walrus moustache bit into his orange and, with juice dribbling down his chin, sat listening. The woman in the corner transferred the baby to her other plump breast.
Viktor said: ‘There are a lot of informers about. Even I admit that.’
‘I suppose you think they’re a necessary evil.’
He thought about it and said: ‘Frankly, yes I do,’ waiting for her voice to rise another octave.
Instead she spoke softly. ‘I meant what I said, Viktor. I will show you the proof of what I say. Or rather I will arrange for you to see it.’
The man with the walrus moustache frowned and edged closer, evidently believing that he had qualified to take part in the conversation.
Viktor tilted the bottle, drained it and wiped the froth from his lips. ‘Make the arrangements,’ he said.
‘What arrangements?’ asked the man with the walrus moustache. He spat out an orange pip. ‘I remember there was one rat who got quite tame. I called him Boris.’
‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said.
Without speaking, they made their way along the dusty path beside the river. The bushes to their right were the changing quarters and from behind them came shrieks and giggles, the smack of a hand on bare flesh.
As they neared the bus terminal she said: ‘You know Nikolai Vasilyev?’
‘Your private tutor? I know of him. Isn’t he supposed to be a great admirer of Trotsky?’
‘He believes Stalin cheated him. He also believes that one day Stalin will murder him.’
‘Another of your psychopaths by the sound of it.’
‘He’s a very fine man,’ Anna said and from the tone of her voice Viktor guessed that he was, or had been, her lover.
‘Does he teach you Trotsky’s theories?’
‘Sometimes when our sociology lesson is finished he talks about what he believes in. The dreams that peasants dreamed before Stalin made nightmares out of them.’
Exasperated, Viktor punched the palm of one hand with his fist and said: ‘This proof. Tell me about it.’
‘Nikolai’s best friend is an army officer, a captain. The captain’s father was a general.’
‘Was?’
‘He was executed by a firing squad along with thirty other officers. His crime – he questioned the disposition of Soviet troops on the eastern borders. He was proved right when the troops clashed with the Japanese at Manchukuo ten days ago. But the fact that he was right merely made his crime worse.’
‘Perhaps he was executed for treason. Or treasonable talk,’ Viktor said.
Anna ignored him. ‘Nikolai knows where the executions take place. And he will know through his friend when the next one will be. For all I know they take place every day,’ she added.
‘In the imagination of Nikolai Vasilyev and his friend.’
‘There’s only one answer: you must see for yourself. If you have the stomach for it.’
Then he couldn’t refuse.
*
In the red and white coach packed with Muscovites radiating heat from their sun-burn Viktor considered Anna’s jibes about his privileged upbringing. In fact it had bothered him long before she had mentioned it.
