One Night in Winter Read Free Page A

whirl behind her eyes as she looks back at the bodies and then up towards the red-sapphired stars glowing atop the Kremlin towers. Somewhere in the Kremlin, very soon, she knows that Stalin will be told that two schoolchildren from School 801 have died violently – and that restless, wily, ferocious force will seek meaning in these deaths, a meaning that will suit his own high and mysterious purposes.
    As the pink-fractured sky darkens, she is struck by the most unbearable certainty: that this is the last night of their childhoods. These shots will blast their lives and uncover secrets that would never otherwise have been found – hers most of all.

PART ONE
     

The Fatal Romantics’ Club
     
    Unbelievably happy have become
    Every hour, study, and play,
    Because our Great Stalin
    Is the best friend of us kids.
     
    Of the happy childhood we are given,
    Ring forth, joyful song!
    Thanks to the Great Stalin
    For our happy days!
     
    ‘Thank You, Comrade Stalin, For Our Happy Childhood’, popular Soviet song

1
     
Several weeks earlier
     
    THE BEST SCHOOL in Moscow, thought Andrei Kurbsky on his first day at School 801 on Ostozhenka, and, by some miraculous blessing, I’ve just made it here.
    He and his mother were far too early and now they hovered in a doorway opposite the school gates like a pair of gawping villagers. He cursed his mother’s anxiety as he saw she was holding a checklist and running through his paraphernalia under her breath: satchel – yes; white shirt – yes; blue jacket – yes; grey trousers – yes; one volume Pushkin; two notebooks; four pencils; packed lunch of sandwiches . . . And now she was peering into his face with a maddening frown.
    ‘Oh Andryusha, there’s something on your face!’ Drawing out a crumpled hankie from her handbag, she licked it and started trying to scrub away at his cheek.
    This was his first memory of the school. They were all there, the threads that led to the killings, if you knew which to follow. And they began with his mother scrubbing him while he tried to wave her away as if she was a fly buzz-bombing him on a summer’s day.
    ‘Stop it, Mama!’ He pushed her hand away and proudly rearranged his spectacles. Her pinched, dry face behind metal spectacles infuriated him but he managed to suppress it, knowing that the satchel, blazer, shoes had been provided by begging from neighbours, appealing to cousins (who had naturally dropped them when his father disappeared), trawling through flea markets.
    Four days earlier, 9 May 1945, his mother had joined him in the streets to celebrate the fall of Berlin and the surrender of Nazi Germany. Yet even on that day of wonders, the most amazing thing was that, somehow during the laxer days of wartime, they had been allowed to return to Moscow. And even
that
did not approach the true miracle: he had applied to all the schools in central Moscow expecting to get into none but, out of all of them, he had been accepted by the best: the Josef Stalin Commune School 801, where Stalin’s own children had been educated. But this astonishing good news immediately sent his mother, Inessa, into a new spiral of worry: how to pay the school fees with her librarian’s salary?
    ‘Look, Mama, they’re about to open the gates,’ Andrei said as a little old Tajik in a brown janitor’s coat, wizened as a roasted nut, jingled keys on a chain. ‘What gates!’
    ‘They have gold tips,’ said Inessa.
    Andrei examined the heroic figures carved on the two pilasters in the Stalin imperial style. Each pillar was emblazoned with a bronze plaque on which, in golden silhouettes, he recognized Marx, Lenin and Stalin.
    ‘The rest of Moscow’s a ruin but look at this school for the top people!’ he said. ‘They certainly know how to look after their own!’
    ‘Andrei! Remember, watch your tongue . . .’
    ‘Oh Mama!’ He was as guarded as she was. When your father has disappeared, and your family has lost everything, and you are hovering