Authors: Vanora Bennett
The Red Russians
Skoblin was smiling sympathetically as he drove through the summer night in the Cadillac and listened to his wife in the passenger seat complaining about the lack of audience at that evening’s restaurant show.
Things were going so well, suddenly, with his own career that, for once, he was able to feel genuinely sorry for his poor Nightingale.
In two days’ time, if everything went according to plan, he’d be the head of ROVS.
As he cruised forward, feeling the restrained power of the engine, enjoying the polished walnut and the comforting smell of soft, expensive leather and car fumes, he felt, expansively, that he wanted his wife to have something to be happy about, too.
‘I think you’ll be surprised by someone in your audience tomorrow,’ he said.
She eyed him. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘Who?’
‘The American girl who’s moved in upstairs,’ he said, and even if he couldn’t make his quiet voice ring out it still vibrated with the pleasure of a conjuror pulling a rabbit from a hat. ‘Constance Sabline’s grand-daughter. She came
into the office today. We had a chat. I sang your praises. She promised she’d come and hear you, either tonight or tomorrow.’
He could sense Nadya’s interest. That made him feel so unexpectedly tender towards her that, when he spoke again, he further softened her formal first name, Nadezhda, into a still more affectionate diminutive.
‘She was very friendly, you know, Nadyen’ka. It seems she’s taking the business of winding up Constance’s affairs very seriously. She’s not leaving Paris yet. She said she’d asked the servants to stay on till Christmas. Well, all Americans love Paris. So, if we get a proper chance to talk to her, I think we should explain about the recording Constance was doing for you, and see if she would want to finish it off in her grandmother’s place? It would be a shame to let all your work go to waste.’
‘Oh!’ he heard, and in her voice was the sound of hope returning. ‘Ask her home,’ he said. ‘If you can. Light the samovar, give her
zakuski
, sing her sad songs. Do what you have to do. Persuade her.’
It was an entirely selfless impulse, his wish to get the American girl to take her grandmother’s place in paying to promote Nadya’s career, he told himself as he negotiated the turning towards Ozoir-la-Ferrière, and their little house with the Russian birch trees his wife had planted in the yard. He was feeling rather proud of his altruism.
He no longer had any personal reason to need recording equipment and engineers in the apartment above ROVS. Just one week of listening in to what went on in that office had proved to the visitors from Moscow that it was he, Skoblin, who really organized everything down there.
They’d soon seen that he’d been right all along to say that Miller was a useless, lazy old buffoon, always sneaking off for lunches or shutting himself away for long, long solitary strategy sessions – which everyone knew were just naps, really. Even the secretaries laughed at their boss, behind his back. The men from Moscow had heard all they wanted even before Constance Sabline had so unexpectedly keeled over, forcing the sudden withdrawal of the editing equipment from her flat.
All the same, he genuinely hoped the girl would now step in and pay up. If she did, he could surely find a way to get the recording machinery back and have some other engineers edit it, in the weeks to come. Nadya deserved a bit of hope.
His wife had been good about agreeing to help him with this career plan. Even though she hadn’t looked shocked, she must have been scared when he’d first explained as she packed for her New York trip. But she hadn’t backed out, even when the thing got closer and the men from Moscow, once here, had (after listening to what went on inside the ROVS office for themselves) definitely decided to back him. In fact, she’d gone out of her way to help his cause and charm them. She’d even managed to look and sound convincingly enthusiastic about the crazy job the Muscovites were now assigning to her – the job of providing him, Skoblin, with the kind of far-fetched, truth-is-stranger-than-fiction alibi that those proletarian-intellectual spooks from Moscow were so keen on. Privately he’d thought the whole idea quite crazy, and it had showed. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Nadya’s acting ability, he might have slipped up and lost their favour. Yes, she was actually putting herself out for
him, for once, his Nightingale. And he was feeling kindly disposed towards her, and wanted to reciprocate, so would help her carry on with her singing.
His wish to be head of ROVS had been growing inside him for many, many years. It was an emotion, more than anything else: the remnants of his long-ago, boyish hero-worship of General Vrangel’, that long, straight, utterly noble man, who, before he’d had to cut his losses and organize what they still called Vrangel”s Fleet to get the last hundred thousand White soldiers away from the Bolsheviks, had raised him, Skoblin, to be the White Army’s youngest general. He had wanted to inherit that mantle ever since. He wanted to become the incarnation of that charisma. He wanted to be the man who conferred blessings, to stand in the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in front of the massed ranks of men in uniform and take their salutes. He wanted to wear, not Miller’s absurd opera-general uniform – which was for the cavalry snobs of the Preobrazhensky Regiment only – but the sombre Circassian coat the first, nobler, ROVS leader had preferred. It consumed him, that longing.
He should have got the job seven years ago, when Kutyopov had disappeared. As Nadya had always loyally said, it was only cruel fate – in the shape of that whispering campaign in the Paris Russian press – that had robbed him of it, and made that pompous, stodgy fool Miller seem a safer candidate. Skoblin had insisted on the rumours being put before a ROVS court of honour, which had eventually exonerated him, because the case against him was, when it came down to it, only hearsay; but what comfort was that when the damn-fool judgement had come too late? The job
had been Miller’s by then, even if the old buffoon had given him the number-two post and, magnanimously, allowed him to do all the real work. To this day, Skoblin couldn’t bear to pick up the
Posledniye novosti
newspaper, which had accused him, so stridently and repeatedly, of being a Soviet agent.
But he didn’t rage any more. He just smiled, and kept his thoughts to himself. They’d accused him of being a Red; well, then, they only had themselves to blame if he’d secretly become one. Now he was about to have the last laugh.
Skoblin’s chance of revenge had come right in the middle of his despair. No one – not even Nadya – knew that, a few years back, when the storm was still raging around him, a quiet, polite man called Kovalsky had visited Paris from Moscow. He’d invited Skoblin out to an expensive restaurant and, over cigars and brandy, had listened sympathetically. With an uncharacteristic frankness born of misery and one too many liqueurs, Skoblin had explained the wrong direction ROVS had taken by appointing Miller, and the man had nodded with understanding. He’d been understanding, too, when Skoblin had complained about his wife’s decreasing earnings and reckless spending. And he’d sympathetically shaken his head and ordered more brandy when Skoblin had told him about the little farm he’d brought outside town in the hope of becoming a winegrower if all else failed, though this was losing money, too.
And then he’d given Skoblin a letter, and sat, gently smiling, while Skoblin read it.
Everything about that letter had been astonishing. For one thing, Skoblin had had no idea that his mop-headed
little brother, Petya, who’d stayed at school in Moscow years ago, had later gone into the Communist secret service. In fact, he’d had no idea that Petya, or anyone else in his family, was even still alive. And, for another, there was a salary attached to the offer Petya, or rather Moscow, was making: a lump sum of five thousand francs, and a monthly stipend big enough for him to stop worrying – almost – about Nadya’s spending.
And so, for the past few years, Skoblin had done two jobs. As ROVS security chief, he’d sought out secret contacts within the Deuxième Bureau, the Wehrmacht, the Gestapo, and the Sicherheitsdienst. And, in his other role, he’d used those contacts to provide dossiers needed by the Soviet NKVD.
Sometimes, too, he’d passed Moscow information about the rare acts of sabotage Miller got round to organizing. Miller himself barely seemed to notice that none of these acts worked, or that the agents he sent out were – always – arrested.
And Skoblin hardened his heart. He’d earned his car, all right (no one had ever even asked how he afforded his beloved banana-lemon Cadillac; he supposed they thought the Nightingale’s concerts paid for everything.) Lovingly, he patted the wheel. But now there was more in store.
Play your cards right, the gentle Kovalsky had said, all those years ago, and, who knows? One day, Miller might go the same way his predecessor did …
And now, finally, it was about to happen.
Moscow’s men were primed and ready. Their arrival was his reward for the last damning ‘red dossier’ he’d managed to get the Germans to put together, on Tukhachevsky, just
before the Soviet Marshal’s high-profile trial and execution in Moscow in June. Or, maybe, the reason for their arrival was that the new big man in the Lubyanka, Yezhov, was preparing for war in Europe, and wanted to be sure there would be no surprises from the little White Russian organization in the West.
Skoblin frankly didn’t care why. He was just happy they were here, and in such numbers. Even so, they were keeping things simple. The Muscovites called him Farmer. He called them Duplus (the crab salesman), Finn and Swede (the pair organizing transport in and out of Paris, and surveillance) and Alexander and Veletsky. These were the men who would be waiting behind the green door, in two days’ time, with the chloroform pad and the ropes …
Duplus had selected the anonymous-looking house attached to the green door, which was owned by the Soviet embassy, and which was located as far as possible from anywhere the White Russians ever went to in Paris. He’d told Skoblin to get Miller there, the plan being that they would first meet on foot, a good hour’s walk away, at a very different sort of rendezvous in the lovely, leafy, shop-free, traffic-free, café-free calm of Passy.
For the Muscovites couldn’t do their job alone. Miller was too canny – or lazy – ever to leave the ROVS chancellery without his taciturn son or some other guard. The Muscovites needed Skoblin to winkle their target out.
Of course, Miller trusted Skoblin, and would probably have gone with him willingly enough if he had simply asked him out for a walk. That, in fact, was what Duplus was expecting. But Skoblin had already had enough questions asked about his loyalty to last him a lifetime. This second
disappearance would cause more fuss than even the kidnapping of Kutyopov. If he were to take over Miller’s job, this time he’d have to be seen to be above reproach.
So he’d taken the trouble to dream up the idea of a phony letter from the Abwehr – a nice touch, that; Miller’s dream come true – and got Duplus (who he knew was in reality State Security Major Semyon Spiegel-Glazer, of Jewish–German extraction, who was pretty good at German, since it was his first language) to write the letter.
He’d told Miller to destroy the letter, but he knew Miller wouldn’t. The man was a sentimentalist with no tradecraft, and the smug way he kept patting the right-hand pocket of his jacket showed he’d kept the letter on him ever since he’d first received it. Skoblin would make sure, when the time was right, that that letter got dropped. And, when the police found it, the trail would lead everywhere but to Skoblin or the Muscovites.
When Miller stepped out with him on Wednesday morning to meet the Abwehr men, he’d be worriedly running over his best German phrases in his mind. And then, ba-boom! Skoblin nearly laughed at the shock the boss he so resented would get.
Skoblin knew, in some buried place inside himself, that these thoughts would have shocked Vrangel’, had his hero the general come back from the dead and learned of them. But, he told himself, truculently, times change.
These days, when he looked at the careworn reflection he saw in the mirror, Skoblin found he didn’t much care whether the price of running the White Russian army was betraying it, in private, to the Reds he was supposed to be fighting.
All he wanted was to stand at the front of his men, in the cathedral, wearing Vrangef’s uniform, bowing as he received the archpriest’s blessing on the White Army’s behalf and leading the bass voices in praising God. He just wanted to drive, in a proper car (already paid for using his second salary) to a proper apartment (which would be the next bonus he would offer himself, once he was boss) and know that everything depended on him – the same set of banal, normal desires that, he now knew, also motivated most of the supposed Jewish–Bolshevik enemies in Moscow, including his own brother Petya.
He just wanted to see admiration in the eyes of his wife.
Nadya Plevitskaya looked anxiously at her husband.
He was mumbling to himself, as he did increasingly often these days. Any minute now, he’d start wagging his finger reprovingly at the dashboard of his car. She’d caught him at that several times in the past few days.
He’d always been quiet, but she’d liked it better before he’d started this odd, wordless, grunty
swelling
he did now, all the time – as if all the pent-up things he’d never quite said, but spent years thinking, were about to come pouring out. It made him look a bit mad, she thought.
Partly just to stop him, she touched his hand. He jumped, and then he turned and smiled at her. A great, big, absentminded smile, as if he had more important things in mind.
‘On Wednesday,’ she said, and she couldn’t stop the slight shake in her voice.
‘Do you remember it all?’ he asked. He sounded sharp, like a schoolteacher talking to a lazy pupil. ‘It’s very important.’
She gave him a devil-may-care grin, hoping to reassure him. ‘Ach, all that: of course I remember. I create your alibi, by acting. He’s right – it will be easy for a woman like me.’
‘Tell me again,’ he insisted. ‘Just in case.’
She knew every step, of course. But she humoured him and ticked them off anyway.
‘Early morning: pick up the nasty little Peugeot – less conspicuous than the Cadillac – in case something goes wrong and we need to make a getaway. Then drive to the corner café on rue du Colisée.
‘At nine o’clock, have breakfast together, for an hour, and talk noisily, in the most visible place we can find on the
terrasse
, greeting anyone we know and saying we are having a day off together.
‘Soon after ten o’clock, drive on to Monsieur Epstein’s boutique. We both say hello to him. You have a newspaper in your hand. You look a little impatient, and say you’re going to sit outside in the car and read the paper while I try on some new stage clothes. “Men!” I say, and roll my eyes. Monsieur Epstein laughs. We get going. No one sees that you aren’t really sitting outside reading the paper. You’ve driven away …’
She didn’t mention where her husband would have gone, or what he would be doing by then. She didn’t want to think about that part. She was happier concentrating on her role.
‘Meanwhile, I’m still at Monsieur Epstein’s, trying on every expensive dress in the shop. Sometimes I walk outside, and say I want to show one to you. I talk, loudly, out there, so they can hear me through the window. “Darling,” I say, “do you like me in gold?” or, “
Chéri
, do you think this one is too
décolleté
?” and then, “Oh, really? I’ll ask Monsieur Epstein what
he
thinks then.” Of course Monsieur Epstein thinks you’re still there. And I spend the rest of the morning there, going in and out, “talking” to you.
‘Then, not before one o’clock, I finally choose two dresses, for a combined value not exceeding three thousand francs, and sign for them myself and ask for them to be delivered to me at Ozoir. The cost will be reimbursed, on production of an appropriate receipt, by …’
She paused, suddenly imagining herself buying a gold Epstein dress on a Soviet expense account, then wearing it on stage while her admirers cheered.
‘Kolya … Kolyen’ka, I will actually get to wear those dresses, won’t I?’ she asked wheedlingly. ‘Afterwards?’
Skoblin nodded. As if that mattered, she could see him thinking. But then, he never had understood anything about performing.
‘And then you come and pick me up, at quarter past one, and we go together to the railway station to join the rest of the delegation seeing off General Kutyopov’s daughter to Brussels,’ she finished quickly. ‘As far as anyone knows, we’ve been together all day.’
He nodded. He looked reassured, for now, but she knew it wouldn’t last. He’d ask her to go through it all again several more times before bed.
‘That wasn’t what I was going to ask, actually,’ she said, pouting. The house was coming into view now – over the fence, a graceful tracery of birch twigs and small fluttering leaves. (He kept talking about leaving it and moving into a flat in town, once he was boss. He never asked whether
she
wanted to leave her little courtyard behind.)
He raised an eyebrow. ‘What, then?’
‘I wanted to know, what happens if it all goes wrong?’ she asked as the car slowed. ‘No one talks about that.’
He glided to a halt. Without emotion, he answered, ‘We
go to the Soviet embassy. We ask for the crab salesman. They take us back to Moscow.’
Plevitskaya hadn’t expected the idea of Moscow to surge into her mind with so much nostalgic force. The fresh smell of cucumbers and snow filled her nostrils, and her head swam with visions of little lopsided yellow-stucco houses piled up around churches with golden cupolas up and down the seven hills; of bright snow under a blue sky; of the faint cries of children skating on the Clean Ponds or squabbling happily over creamy round
vatrushka
cheesecakes or climbing on the Pushkin statue, and the jingle of harness, and the bells ringing …
‘God forbid,’ he continued, just as calmly.
He would say that, Plevitskaya thought, without rancour. He hadn’t been interested in anything but Paris for a long time.
But she wouldn’t be sorry to see Moscow again.
Sometimes, still, all these years later, she dreamed of Russia. Not of Moscow, as it happens, and not of any of the sleigh-bells-in-the-snow, storks-on-the-rooftops daydreams she filled her music with, either. This was a real dream – always in the same place, in the same forest, in that first war, the one against the Germans, in that somewhere on the south-western front that was tattooed into her brain, where the leaves were just beginning to drop from the trees overhead and there was a rumble of death somewhere up ahead. Milling back and forward from the front line were people going off or on duty, or to hospital, and trucks and carts grinding back and forth. Her husband – the long-ago husband of those days, whose face these days, after years of her later marriage to Skoblin, she barely recalled – was
up there, in the fighting. He came back, once every couple of days, exhausted, stinking, sunken-eyed, to sleep. She’d cancelled her singing engagements – for she had singing engagements, even with a young child, in wartime – to be with that man. She wasn’t going anywhere unless it was with him. Why would she? They were a family. She didn’t think it was foolhardy staying near the front, whatever anyone said. She knew enough about life to know you clung to the happiness that came your way, and stayed near your man. There was food, for the moment. And she was sure that she and the child were safe here in the rear, anxious though everything might always be …
Until the moment the dream starts, that is. Until the day they’re not safe. Until the morning the greenish twilight of the woods explodes into strange, streaming, roaring, red-white hellfire, and everywhere she turns there are crackles and hisses and branches breaking off and fire. She can hear Yevdokia the housekeeper whimpering somewhere behind, with men shouting and jeering in foreign tongues. There’s only one thing on her own mind – getting herself and the little one away. So she’s running across the yard, panting – how is her breath so loud? – to snatch the child. The child’s in the outhouse. Or he was. But now there’s no outhouse any more, just a roiling midden where the log cabin used to be, and broken logs scattered everywhere, and, much later, a noise to break your head apart. And then she’s just running, running, running, in and out of trees and over roots, and there’s nothing else except that blood-rhythm, going on forever, and the tree-trunks: not her, not the child, just the thud of her feet on the pine-needly forest floor, heels, toes, heels,
toes, and her breath. She doesn’t know where the child has gone. Even when they creep back, much later, there’s just a burning house, beyond saving. Yevdokia’s mauled body. The splinters of the outhouse. The thickset stink of the uncovered shit pit, buzzing with flies. But no little boy. No trace.
All these years later, she’d still wake up whimpering from that dream, feeling for his little lost body, as bereft each subsequent time as she had been in that first naked moment as, in one awful dawn after another, she reunderstood her child’s absence.
It was brutal, this pain: always had been, always would be; although over time she’d managed to banish it, mostly, to the realm of sleep. It was an entirely different order of feeling from the soft, fuzzy, faint nostalgia she still sometimes also experienced, remembering the husband of those faraway days, who’d had soft blue eyes (or had they been grey?) and who’d been sent off to a different camp by his commanding officer with no time to grieve, then killed in the war soon afterwards. Once both son and husband had gone, her rage against the monstrous lack of feeling of the commanding officers, mixed up with her grief, had pushed her, in the war that came immediately after the one against the Germans, to go defiantly out singing for the rebellious Reds. The Reds all had their grudges against the power that had abused them, those righteously angry men, just as she did. Why not go out and cheer them along with her voice? She’d been so wild with fury and loss, back then, and had nothing to lose. She was alone. Sometimes she’d almost hoped an enemy bullet would carry her off.
But there’d been no merciful oblivion. She’d been
captured, not killed. And, in the White camp where she’d been held, she’d been astonished to find herself fêted as the exotic darling of the camp, adored by the very type of officer she’d blamed for her tragedy, because, as it turned out, for them, she and her voice and her fame added up to a symbol of the old glory days they were vainly fighting for. And slowly, agonizingly slowly, she’d finally wept for her loss in the arms of her White jailor, Skoblin, who’d become her last husband and life companion. Fate had ended up carrying them both, with their separate griefs for all that had gone, along with all the other survivors – each of them mourning one private lost thing or another that no one could either share or escape – away to this place of exile in Paris.
But time and happenstance hadn’t stopped her remembering her real home in Russia.
If she could only go back to Russia, she sometimes thought, she could follow the trails that had been impossible in wartime, scour the orphanages, trawl the schools, interrogate the priests; and somehow, miraculously, she might find herself running towards him, her child turned handsome young man, a man whom she’d recognize at once, with her arms out, rapturously smiling, racing into that embrace she held perpetually in mind.
Just being back in Russia – and Moscow, even if it hadn’t ever been quite home, was the jumping-off point of Russia, the place where power now was and where her friends in high places would be found – might be the start of making it all come true. Even now, all these years later, when she was fifty-three. Her husband beside her was consumed by his ambition; she understood this. She understood it not because she wanted her singing career back, though that
would be nice, but because of her own secret but consuming ambition to do the impossible: turn back time, go home, and find her lost son.