Free One Night in Winter by Simon Sebag Montefiore Page B

had ever known. Besides, how could any headmistress pass up the chance to employ the author of
Spanish Stories
?
    She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. When she put them on again, she noticed that she could see herself in the reflection on her polished inkwell. Was it the distortion of the reflection or did she really look that frayed? What a sight she was! She had grey streaks in her hair, and her nose was more like a beak! There’s not much one can do with a face like mine, she thought.
    She was a spinster, living alone in one room in a
kommunalka
on the outskirts, her only luxury being a little set of antique Tolstoys in brown leather bindings. A woman had more important tasks in life than lipstick and dresses, she told herself. The school was her mission in life, and she had to be as hard and modest as a Bolshevik should be.
    She had taken two risks in her professional life but both were consistent with her mission: to educate and enlighten – even in an age of ice.
    She looked at her watch. It was after seven, and she had nowhere else to be. She sighed, admitting to herself that she now groaned aloud when she got out of bed or the bath – or when she sipped at a particularly delicious soup. She was fifty-two. Getting older.
    She closed her eyes, thinking about Benya Golden. She enjoyed having him around the school, and when he fixed her with his playful blue eyes, she actually blushed. Sometimes she dreamed of him at night. She knew he would be wonderful to kiss and she felt that the touch of his hands would transform her. Her hair would grow thicker; her skin would become as rich and tanned as that of Minka’s mother, Dashka Dorova. With him, she could become the woman she had always wanted to be.
    She shook her head. Golden was a real gamble, not just because Dr Rimm had denounced his teaching style as ‘a bourgeois circus act of philistine anti-Party hucksterism’. She didn’t know the details of his case, of course; only the Organs, the secret police, knew that, but she knew that no one had expected Golden to return from prison or exile or wherever he’d been. The Organs hadn’t stopped her hiring him so they must have checked him out and cleared him, but however charming and exuberant Golden was, he still had the power to destroy her.
    ‘Don’t you know what Golden is? He bears the mark of Cain on his forehead. He’s like a leper!’ Rimm had whispered to her. ‘He’s a “lucky stiff”. He’s come back from the dead.’
    ‘He’s alive now,’ she’d replied. ‘And that’s what matters.’
    She perused the report again, but thoughts of Golden and Andrei still filled her mind. Andrei was a safer bet than Golden, but he too was a liability who could harm her. Because what no one else knew – least of all Andrei himself – was that she had accepted him into the school not in spite of his tainted background but because of it. And she was paying his fees out of her own salary.
    Yes, she thought now, I may be on my own and getting older, but I believe that everyone’s capable of redemption, no matter who they are.

6
     
    ANDREI EMERGED FROM the Granovsky building into the blinding sunlight. On Gorky Street, Moscow’s main thoroughfare, he passed soldiers, not much older than him, in uniforms, laughing with their sweethearts. Their careless happiness was infectious. He was convinced that his life had changed, and couldn’t wait to tell his mother about how the Satinovs lived, about the glacial grandeur of Comrade Satinov, about George’s hints concerning the Fatal Romantics’ Club and their esoteric rituals. Then he saw her. A tall girl with blond hair crossing Gorky Street without looking in either direction so that cars braked around her. She wore her school blouse buttoned right up to the neck and long sleeves, even though it was a glorious summer evening. She turned purposefully into the House of Books, Moscow’s best bookshop.
    Andrei had no money to spend and he was already late