One Night in Winter

‘Benya Golden…’ Andrei said, remembering how his mother had reacted when he’d said the name the previous evening. It had taken him back to his childhood. Nine years earlier – another life. They lived in Moscow, in a spacious apartment, then, and his father had presented his mother with a blue book entitled Spanish Stories. ‘Inessa, you’ve got to read this book by Golden, it’s spun gold…’

Two years later, his father had gone. Andrei remembered find-ing Spanish Stories, looking at its cover, embossed with a Spanish bull and red star, and going to the first page to begin reading. And Inessa taking it away quickly. ‘No one reads Golden any more,’ she had said, and Andrei had never seen the book again.

Benya Golden was lingering in the school common room. He was late for his own Pushkin class but a man like him who had suffered so much and only returned from the darkness by a series of miracles should enjoy life, he thought. He was so lucky to be there, to be teaching Pushkin, to be breathing. No one quite knew what he had been through but he, more than anyone in the room, knew how flimsy was fortune.

He lay full length on the leather divan peering over the Leningrad satirical magazine, Krokadil, as the young piano teacher, Agrippina Begbulatova, known (to him alone) as Blue-Eyes, brewed the chai in a Chinese teapot, laying out cups and saucers for everyone.

Director Medvedeva, owl-shaped horn-rimmed spectacles on the bridge of her nose, groaned loudly as she marked papers at the long table – one of the signs, along with noisy chomping at meals, of a woman who has lived alone for too long. But, Benya thought, she had taken a risk by giving him this job, and he was truly grateful.

Her deputy Dr Rimm had been trying to get Benya sacked ever since. He was ostentatiously reading a copy of Comrade Stalin’s History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course – as if anyone, even someone as slavishy drear as Rimm, could actually read that unadulterated gibberish. Rimm kept changing position with little preening sniffs and looks around the room to check everyone had noticed his virtuous reading. And Apostollon Shuba had just come into the common room, cursing wildly about the laziness, cowardice and softness of the school’s spoilt brats. Now he was studying the football scores in Pionerskaya Pravda while chewing a sprig of his magnificent moustaches.

‘Tea’s ready,’ Agrippina said sweetly. Benya watched her pour the chai for the teachers in order of seniority while reliving the way he had undressed her, opened her long legs and stroked her with his fingers, his tongue, his cock, just twenty minutes earlier, in his one-room apartment round the corner. They had enjoyed forty-nine minutes of dizzy pleasure and she had not even had time to wipe herself before rushing back – a thought that now thrilled him.

No one knew of course. The secret particularly delighted Benya because his fellow teachers were perfect examples of the new generation of tight-arsed Soviet prigs. Agrippina was as pretty as she was pure, a Soviet virtue she liked to promote by saying ‘I don’t believe in gossiping about people’ and ‘I believe a Soviet girl must keep herself for husband and children’, sentiments she seemed to believe absolutely when she said them.

When Benya was not reading (he was a voracious reader) or talking, he was assailed by his epicurean passion for women, poetry, food, the senses. Once he had been a well-known writer who had reported on the Spanish Civil War and known Picasso and Sartre. But he had lost the two jewels of his life. He had lost contact with the daughter of his marriage when she and her mother emigrated to the West. And he had lost the only woman he’d ever truly loved, a woman whose memory caused a jolt of agony, even now. She had been an official’s wife, a mother, an Old Bolshevik. In 1939, she had fallen into the abyss of ‘Soviet justice’ – and he had fallen with her. When, or if, she returned, he would be waiting for her. It was a promise he intended to keep.

Dr Rimm left to teach Communist history. Benya looked at his watch. He was now five minutes late for his favourite class. He finished his tea and hurried out, noticing as he did so, a badly typed envelope in one of the pigeonholes. As he passed Dr Rimm’s classroom, he peeped around the door. ‘Comrade Rimm,’ he said, ‘you have a letter.’