Authors: Paul Dowswell
Sure enough, it was her.
‘Guess what! I’ve received my call-up papers. I must report to Central Aerodrome at the start of December, and in the meantime I have to carry on teaching and stay fit and healthy.’
Misha hadn’t seen her looking so happy for months – not since before the war. ‘I think they will train me to fly the transport planes. Big ones like the Lisunov Li-2. That’s the one they build under licence from the United States. I’ll feel safe flying that. Unless I have to fly into battle with parachute troops. But that will be exciting. A story for my grandchildren . . . It’s a marvellous aeroplane. Two Shvetsov nine-cylinder, air-cooled, radial engines, three hundred kilometres an hour, two thousand kilometre range . . . Misha! Pay attention!’ She hit him on the shoulder. ‘These things can fly from Moscow to London without stopping. Imagine that! And after the war I’ll be all ready to be a civilian pilot.’
She could tell he was trying to stifle a yawn. ‘I’ll tell you a secret,’ she continued. ‘You know the hydroelectric dam on the Dnieper? The one that was the largest in Europe . . . the one that took ten years to build?’
Misha nodded. Every Soviet child had been told it was the greatest engineering achievement of the Soviet era. ‘Well, they blew it up.
We
did it, to stop the Nazis getting it. Papa almost cried when he told me.’
Misha gasped. ‘All the effort that went into building it, all that sacrifice, for nothing.’
She sat at the dining table and Misha made her a cup of tea. He got out the best bone china, the set they had been given when they first arrived at the Kremlin, which they’d been told had once belonged to Tsar Nicholas’s cousin. Suddenly she seemed more serious.
‘Misha, I also have bad news,’ she said as she took her first sip of tea. ‘The Germans are at Kiev. Isn’t that where your brother works?’
Misha nodded. ‘Papa thinks Viktor will join the partisans.’
‘But if they’re at Kiev they are heading down to Stalingrad. And the oilfields beyond. Leningrad is yet to fall. I keep hoping they have bitten off more than they can chew, but they keep pressing forward. And the weather is still mild. Maybe it’ll be several weeks before the rain and the mud of the
Rasputitsa
. Who knows where they’ll be by then? They already have the territory between Leningrad and Moscow – you can’t get the train up there any more.’
‘But what will happen if the Nazis get here?’ asked Misha. ‘Won’t Comrade Stalin have to take the government cadres with him to the east?’
‘I suppose. But it will be chaos, Misha. Everyone fleeing just as the winter starts to bite. It will be a catastrophe. They say the cruelty of the Hitlerites is breathtaking. In the conquered territories there are reports of mass shootings. Murder on a colossal scale. You know what they call us, don’t you?’
Misha didn’t.
‘“
Untermensch
.” That’s a German word. It means subhuman.’
Misha laughed at that. It was almost too ridiculous.
‘Do you think we will stop them?’ he said. ‘I always believed we had the greatest army in the world.’
‘I used to think that too. But I don’t think it matters how good your soldiers are, if your generals are making the awful mess of it . . .’
There was a loud knock at the door. This was not the sort of knock a visiting neighbour would make. They both sat bolt upright and waited in silence. ‘Don’t answer. They might go away,’ said Valya. ‘Do you think your place is bugged? We’ve been saying things we shouldn’t have.’
Misha picked up on her fear and began to feel very frightened himself. He realised they had not taken his papa’s usual precaution of turning on the radio.
There was more knocking – louder and more persistent.
‘I’ll go. They know we are in, and the lights are on. They might take this as an admission of guilt.’
He went to open the door. Zhiglov was standing there, smoking a cigarette. His eyes lacked their usual focus and Misha could tell at once he was drunk. He reeked of alcohol.
‘Young Comrade Petrov,’ he said with mock familiarity, ‘may I come in?’
Misha stood to the side and gestured for him to enter. He went to sit at the dining table where he stared for a moment at Valentina Golovkin. ‘So this is why you took so long to answer the door,’ he said with a sly grin.
He seemed confused. He opened his mouth to speak and then stopped. Misha had never seen anyone in the NKVD behave like this. It made him immensely uneasy.
Then Zhiglov stood up, swaying slightly, and said, ‘Petrov, I would like you to come to my apartment later tonight.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Around ten thirty? There is a matter I wish to discuss with you.’
With that, he turned on his heels and slammed the door behind him.
‘What on earth was that about?’ said Valya.
‘I don’t know,’ Misha said. ‘Will you come with me?’
She looked at him directly. ‘Misha, you saw the way he looked at me. He’s been cold with me since I saw him driving Beria’s car. He quite transparently didn’t ask me to come. I think you have to go alone. I could wait here until you get back, if you like? When do you think your papa will get home?’
‘Sometime after midnight most likely,’ Misha answered without looking at her.
‘Don’t be angry with me, Misha,’ she said firmly. ‘You know I can’t come.’
‘I’m not angry, Valya,’ he lied. ‘I’m just frightened.’
Valya went back home to leave a note for her father telling him where she was and returned to Misha’s apartment just after ten. They sat at the dining table again, wondering what Zhiglov was going to say.
‘Maybe he wants to recruit you to the NKVD?’ said Valya.
‘But my mother is an enemy of the people.’
‘Foreign Secretary Molotov’s wife is an enemy of the people. Chief Secretary Poskrebyshev’s wife is an enemy of the people. Comrade Stalin’s own son and his family are enemies of the people. There are so many enemies of the people it doesn’t matter.’
When the Kremlin’s Spasskaya Tower clock chimed the half-hour after ten, Misha took a deep breath and stood up. ‘I will see you very soon, I hope,’ he said.
She put a hand on his arm and squeezed. ‘I’ll wait until you get back.’
Misha took the short walk down the corridor to Zhiglov’s apartment. He knocked quietly on the door, aware of the late hour. It was flung open. ‘You are late,’ said Zhiglov. He was nursing a cup of black coffee and his hair was wet from a bath or shower. Misha was amazed at the transformation from drunk to the seemingly sober figure that stood before him.
‘Come and sit down,’ said the Kapitan and beckoned Misha into a plush sitting room, with armchairs and a bright red leather sofa. Neither he nor Valya had ever been invited into the apartment when they used to collect Galina and Misha was surprised to see how bourgeois it was. Oil paintings adorned the walls. A beautiful marquetry cabinet stood in the space between two large windows. An intricate Persian carpet lay on the floor. It looked like a wealthy merchant’s house from a painting in the pre-Revolutionary rooms at the State Tretyakov Gallery. Clearly, Kapitan Zhiglov knew some very well connected people.
Without asking, Zhiglov poured them both a large measure of vodka. ‘To our health and happiness!’ he said with a sardonic grin, knocking back his drink in a single mouthful. Misha shifted uncomfortably on the sofa, the fabric making an embarrassing squeak as he moved.
Misha took a sip of his vodka. He was no expert but even he could tell it was of the highest quality.
‘Come on, knock it back,’ scoffed Zhiglov. Misha did as he was told and coughed as the fiery liquid settled on his stomach. He placed his glass on the table and Zhiglov immediately filled it again.
‘How is Galina getting on in Kuybyshev?’ Misha asked.
Zhiglov ignored him. ‘You know, my family come from the Ukraine,’ he said.
Misha had guessed as much. Valya’s father came from the Ukraine and spoke in a similar accent. It was how they pronounced their ‘r’s that told you.
‘I have heard terrible stories from my comrades in Kiev.’
Misha shuddered and wondered if Zhiglov had news of his brother.
‘Tales of base treachery. The people greet the Nazis with salt and bread. They dress in their peasant finery and throw flowers at them. I’ve seen the photographs in the foreign magazines. I’m sure they aren’t fakes.’ He paused to light a cigarette. ‘But I suppose we deserve it.’
Misha sat there flabbergasted and wondering what to say. Was this some kind of test? But Zhiglov obviously wasn’t expecting a response.
‘I was in Kiev during the worst of the famine,’ he continued. ‘You know about the famine?’
Misha shook his head.
Zhiglov wasn’t convinced. ‘Come on, Mikhail. Tonight we can be honest with each other.’
‘I remember seeing a boy and girl at school when I was younger,’ said Misha carefully, ‘who had come from the west, probably from the Ukraine. They were very thin, sickly. They disappeared. We wondered if they had been too weak to live.’
‘The ones who came to Moscow were lucky,’ said Zhiglov. ‘Millions of them died. Those paintings you see in the galleries, photos in magazines of happy peasants on the collective farms celebrating the harvest . . . It’s all just propaganda. In Kiev I saw bodies in the street every day, scores of them, flies buzzing around their eyes. People who had just dropped down dead from hunger. There was one time we were called out . . . Some peasant
muzhik
with his grimy beard and filthy grey overcoat and a tattered rope for a belt, there he was on the street, selling dismembered little children for meat, from a market stall.’
Misha felt sick.
Zhiglov filled his glass again.
‘It was all deliberate of course – the famine, I mean,’ he said. ‘To punish the peasantry for their devotion to their god, and for their petty greed, and for their failure to support the Revolution. “Extermination by hunger”, Beria called it. No wonder they welcomed the Nazis with open arms. And I would have done too, if I’d been one of them.’
Misha knew the Soviet leaders had made terrible mistakes, but he had never imagined they might be capable of such calculated wickedness.
‘But it’s got worse for them now. They’ve found out the Nazis are even crueller than we were. I heard this morning they’ve been rounding up the Jews, and there are a lot of Jews in Kiev. They’ve been killing them all – tens of thousands shot in a couple of days in a ravine outside the city. And if they are doing that in the Ukraine, then I am sure they will be doing it everywhere else in Soviet territory they have captured. Galina’s mother was Jewish. Does that make Galina a Jew? I think the Nazis would say so. Personally, although I know the
Vozhd
is wary of the Jewish people,
I
don’t care. Some of our greatest revolutionaries were Jewish.’
Zhiglov poured another shot of vodka and downed it. ‘But here’s the thing. I thought the Nazis were better than that. I used to liaise with the German border forces in 1939, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. We used to dine together sometimes, us officers. They were good hearty fellows, those men. Decent in their own way. I thought I could work with them if they came – and we all knew they would one day. So I started to do some little things for them, passing on the odd titbit from Moscow. I let them know how unprepared we were. How easy it would be to overrun us. I dare say I wasn’t the only one.’
Misha listened with growing horror. He went to sip his vodka and realised his glass was empty. Zhiglov filled it up. He looked at Misha with a steady eye. ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he said. Misha didn’t know whether he meant the vodka, the life he was leading or talking to him there that evening. An uneasy silence fell over the room.
‘They’ll put two and two together soon. I’ll probably know the people who interrogate me. I’ve done it enough myself – beaten someone I used to have round for dinner. I hated that expression of relief they had when they saw it was me who had come to question them. No one lasts longer than a couple of weeks. We can get anyone to say anything. We can get them to admit their own mother is a German spy who’s been sending state secrets to the Nazis for the last ten years, and dines out with Hitler and Göring every New Year’s Eve. Everyone cracks because everything is permitted to us. And we have all the time in the world and they have nothing. Perhaps I should just tell them everything and save them the bother.’
Misha was struck dumb. Was this a trick to get him to say something he shouldn’t? He just stared at the Kapitan, wondering what he would come out with next.
‘I know what happened to your mother,’ Zhiglov said out of the blue.
Misha sat bolt upright. A terrible fear squirmed in the pit of his stomach. ‘Is she still alive?’ he asked.
‘I think she is,’ Zhiglov replied with a small smile. ‘They sent her to a camp called Noyabrsk. It’s beyond the Ural Mountains. Way out in west Siberia. It’s not too bad. Well, let me put it like this. There are plenty worse. She’s working on a collective farm, if she’s still alive. But I have every reason to think she is. It’s not a harsh regime. The political prisoners live in barracks outside the town.’
‘Do you know why they arrested her?’
‘Not my case, Mikhail.’