Authors: Paul Dowswell
On the final day of the school year, after they had had their reports and results, Misha and his friends arranged to meet in the Gorky Park of Culture and Rest at 8.00 that evening. There was an open-air dance on the side of the big lake there, in a fenced-off section, with a band and a bar. It was only four kopeks to get in, but Nikolay persuaded them to follow him round to the back of the enclosure, where there was a gap in the fence. ‘We can all buy an extra bottle of beer if we get in for free,’ he pointed out.
It was one of those soft early summer evenings, and Misha had the time of his life. At first he had been distracted because Valya had turned up with a young man from the flying club who he didn’t know, and who she didn’t introduce to anyone. In fact, she kept out of the way of them all that evening and spent her time with her date and his friends. But Yelena had danced with Misha all night. She knew all the latest Latin American steps, like the tango, that were popular in Moscow that summer. And she was good at the foxtrot too. It was all right to dance that now, although Misha remembered it had been banned as a bourgeois dance when he was younger. At the end, when the band played a slow waltz, Yelena had held him close, and they had even kissed, but then Nikolay and Sergey started to whistle and the moment passed.
They all walked home, their arms linked together, all of them declaring it had been a brilliant evening. Yelena smiled so sweetly when she said goodbye, and squeezed his hand.
Valya only spoke to Misha at the very end of the evening, after they had shed their other friends one by one on the walk back to the Kremlin. ‘She’s a nice girl, Yelena,’ said Valya. ‘Very pretty too. She’s always liked you!’
Misha blushed. Valya sounded a bit tipsy.
‘Who was the fellow who came with you?’ he asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
‘Oh, that’s Vitaly. I know him from the flying club. I think he’s quite good-looking, and he can be charming, but he’s a bit too fond of talking about himself. He kept buying me drinks and I thought maybe he was trying to get me drunk. He offered to walk me home but by then I think I knew he wasn’t really interested in me. I told him I had plenty of friends here to see me home. He seemed quite relieved.’
Misha wondered if she was disappointed or annoyed about it. Then she said. ‘You know, for all this talk about women being the equal of men in our brave new Soviet world, I don’t think many young men actually like women who are ambitious, or scientists, or pilots . . .’
She sounded quite crestfallen, which wasn’t something he expected from Valya. But then she laughed and perked up. ‘It would never have worked anyway. His name is Vitaly Ustyuzhanin. What a mouthful. I wouldn’t want that name. And we’d be called Vitya and Valya – people would be forever mixing us up!’
Early June 1941
Misha’s evening mealtime conversations with his father grew more disturbing, so much so that he began to fret about Yegor’s state of mind. He even put off asking him if he could have the keys to the
dacha
in Meshkovo to stay there a few nights with friends because he didn’t want to leave his papa alone in the apartment. Sometimes he heard muffled shouting through the wall. It reminded him of when Mama and Papa used to argue and he quickly realised that Yegor was having nightmares and talking in his sleep.
One summer night, when Yegor had come home a whole two hours before sunset, he seemed particularly agitated. He could not sit down and paced around the room. As they ate, he fidgeted and could barely find the patience to chew his food. Eventually he turned on the radio and whispered, ‘I have something so important to tell you. We must go outside and walk in the street as we talk.’
Misha nodded. It was a beautiful evening. Warm, slightly damp, the kind of twilight that made you wish you were at the
dacha
rather than on the stale streets of Moscow, breathing in the chemical smells from the factories and road repairs.
They walked out of the Borovitskaya Tower and on to the bridge across the Moskva. The rush hour was long over and there were only a few people crossing the bridge with them. Misha and his father stopped and rested on the stone balustrade and stared over the river at the Kremlin.
‘Misha, what I tell you now you must never ever repeat . . .’
Misha’s exasperation spilled out. ‘Papa. I would
never
tell anyone what you tell me. I know that would be inviting my own execution, and yours.’
Yegor shushed him. Misha rarely spoke so brazenly to his father and he expected a clip around the ear at least. But this time Yegor looked at him with a mixture of tenderness and fear. ‘Misha, my son, the Nazis are coming. I am sure of it. And if they come now, they’ll be here before the winter.’
Misha gasped. ‘Papa, that’s treason. We have the greatest military forces in the world. How can this possibly happen? Haven’t you seen that film
If War Should Come
? If Hitler invaded, the working people of Germany would rise up and destroy him from within. It just won’t happen.’
‘You must know that’s complete nonsense,’ he said sadly.
Misha wasn’t sure. He realised that he really wanted to believe it. He found it comforting. But really, deep inside, he knew it wasn’t true. It was also the sort of thing Barikada would say and now he felt embarrassed. Yegor looked him in the eye. ‘Viktor and Elena have gone to the western republics. We don’t know what has happened to Mama. There is only you and me left. We have to know that we can talk to each other in confidence. You don’t have to pretend with me. Even if they take me to one of Beria’s torture chambers, I will never betray you.’
Misha let Yegor put his arm around him, like he used to when he was younger. He wanted to ask him about the envelope full of roubles, but he lost his nerve.
They carried on walking down to Ulitsa Serafimovicha, the route Misha always took on his way to school. Yegor said, ‘Let’s sit in Bolotnaya Square. There are seats by the fountain.’
Misha liked it there. Sometimes, when Valya was not with him, he would sit on his own and watch the fountain playing, watch the world go by.
Yegor looked sad. ‘These people who pass us have no idea what is coming. Every day we have reports coming in from spies in the
Luftwaffe
headquarters in Berlin, spies in the German Embassy in Japan, informers in the heart of the British government, and they all tell the same story. The Hitlerites are poised and ready to invade. Every night I think,
How can I tell Elena to get out of Odessa?
She’s so close to the German border she’ll be captured or killed in the first few days. How can I tell her, Misha, without the NKVD finding out and killing me? And Viktor in Kiev. He’ll be in danger soon enough.’
Misha didn’t know what to make of it all. ‘But if you are so certain,’ he said, ‘and all the others who come with these reports, why is Comrade Stalin doing nothing about it?’
‘Who can see into the head of the
Vozhd
? I can guess at one of twenty things he might be thinking. Maybe he thinks just the one thing. Maybe he thinks all twenty. My guess is that he thinks there are wreckers and saboteurs, trying to get the Soviet Union to declare war on Germany so the Nazis will have to fight. That’s plainly ridiculous. But I think Comrade Stalin believes Hitler is a sensible man. He thinks he must realise the Soviet Union is too big, too powerful, to conquer as easily as all those little countries in Europe. Hitler gobbled them up in days – well, a few weeks for the bigger ones like France – but he must know the Soviet Union is different.
‘But there is one thing that really worries me, Misha. You know how we attacked the Finns soon after the war began in Europe? What they never told the people was that the campaign was a catastrophe. We won a small victory in the end – some territory around Lake Ladoga – but we could not conquer that little country despite our overwhelming size. There have been so many generals taken away, never to be seen again. The army is like a headless behemoth. We have a few good generals left, but not enough. Most of them are too frightened of the
Vozhd
to do anything other than obey every instruction meekly, even if it’s completely crazy. You can’t run an army like that. You need leadership. You need initiative. And if our army defends our country as ineptly as they attacked the Finns, then the Germans will be in Moscow in a matter of weeks. They might even be here before the first frosts.’
Misha couldn’t believe his ears. His lazy summer was evaporating before his eyes. ‘Papa, what makes you so sure? About the invasion, I mean.’
‘There’s just too much intelligence to ignore. Reconnaissance flights into our airspace. Troops massing on the borders – especially dense around the River Bug. “Training exercises,” says Stalin. “They’re ready to invade,” I want to scream. There’s only one general who will speak openly with him about this – that bastard Zhukov. He’s a brute, but you have to admire his courage. Just today he was telling the
Vozhd
he was convinced the Hitlerites were coming, and Stalin said, “You want a war, don’t you, Comrade General? You want a war so you can be promoted to even higher rank, and strut around with even more medals on your chest.” Well, Zhukov was flabbergasted. I think we all were. How can you reply to that? It’s a level of debate you’d hear in a school playground.’
As his father became more frustrated, Misha could only listen, occasionally looking round to see if anyone was close enough to eavesdrop.
‘And the worst of it is he seems to be permanently drunk these days. When I give him his papers when he gets to the office around four in the afternoon, he just stinks of alcohol. It’s on his breath, coming out in his sweat. He must know something is up, but he can’t admit it to himself. And what really breaks my heart is, I look around at these people in our beautiful city, and I think of all the sacrifices we’ve made to build our Soviet state, and it’s all going to be for nothing, because our great leader will not take a blind bit of notice of what all his comrades are telling him.’
The next morning was Rest Day and Misha was looking forward to a leisurely breakfast with his father. But although it was a brilliant summer morning, and the sun was streaming into the apartment, he still felt anxious about their conversation the previous night.
There was an impatient knocking at the door. Yegor shrugged. It couldn’t be work. The telephone usually summoned him to emergency meetings.
Misha went to open the door. It was his mother’s younger sister, Aunt Mila. She had been a regular visitor before Anna Petrov had disappeared. Anna and her younger sister would huddle together and talk quietly to each other in rapid sentences. Mila was always rather cold to Yegor, but that changed once Anna disappeared. Even now, nearly a year later, she still came to visit, walking an hour from the Sparrow Hills, refusing to use the metro. The Kremlin guards usually recognised her and waved her through.
Misha liked his aunt and never minded his visits to the Sparrow Hills to help her with her little garden. He’d seen her several times walking the streets of Moscow talking to herself, though, and today she seemed more pale and confused than usual.
‘Mila, what has happened?’ said Yegor. ‘You look terrible.’
She sat down, uninvited, at the dining table and waved her hand. ‘Misha, make me some coffee, my dear,’ she said. ‘I need something to keep me awake. I barely slept last night.’
Yegor took her hand. ‘So what can we do for you, Lyudmila?’
‘Yegor, you know I dream a great deal, and in my dreams only the dead come to visit me . . .’
‘You have told us this,’ said Yegor. Misha could tell his father was trying to be kind, but he still picked up the impatience in his voice.
‘Last night I dreamed of Anna . . .’
Misha’s ears pricked up.
‘. . . We were sitting in a concert hall. She was waiting for her piano recital to begin, dressed in a cream gown. She had been practising all month and she was very nervous. But no one was there. It was just the two of us. She was on the brink of tears. “I thought Mama would come,” she said . . .’
Mila choked her words and Misha felt strangely upset with this overheard conversation. What on earth was Aunt Mila talking about? His mother played the piano, that was true. But only in a rudimentary way – enough to bash out a Pioneer marching song or ‘The Internationale’ in a school assembly. He hurried with the coffee and returned to the dining room.
‘Lyudmila, why trouble us with such a story?’ said Yegor. Misha could see that he was very angry – perhaps more angry than the story warranted. ‘Why bring poor Anna to mind? You know how sad it makes us to think about her.’
Aunt Mila gripped his arm. ‘Yegor, you know when I dream it is only the dead who come to visit me. I know without a doubt that Anna is dead.’
‘Lyudmila, you are trying my patience,’ said Yegor, his voice rising in anger. ‘I have my single Rest Day from work and I want to enjoy my relaxation and let my thoughts drift to pleasant things.’
Misha tried to calm things down. ‘Auntie, it’s only a dream. Dreams don’t mean anything.’
Aunt Mila sat tight-lipped. She had gone whiter than ever.
‘I don’t believe you are right, Lyudmila,’ said Yegor firmly. ‘We were told plainly by the NKVD that she had been placed in custody with no right of correspondence for ten years. I am sure she will be back here one day.’