Winter of the World

Carla thought fast. Frau Schmidt was likely to investigate the noise. The three girls might not reach the shrubbery before she opened the door. They had to hide. ‘This way!’ Carla hissed, and she ran around the corner of the building. The others followed.

They flattened themselves against the wall. Carla heard the door open. She held her breath.

There was a long pause. Then Frau Schmidt muttered something unintelligible, and the door banged again.

Carla peeped around the corner. Frau Schmidt had gone.

The three girls ran across the lawn and retrieved their bicycles.

They pushed the bikes along the forest path and emerged on to the road. They switched on their lights, mounted up, and pedalled away. Carla felt euphoric. They had got away with it!

As they approached the town, triumph gave way to more practical considerations. What had they achieved, exactly? What would they do next?

They must tell someone what they had seen. She was not sure who. In any event, they had to convince someone. Would they be believed? The more she thought about it, the less sure she was.

When they reached the hostel and dismounted, Ilse said: ‘Thank goodness that’s over. I’ve never been so scared in all my life.’

‘It’s not over,’ said Carla.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It won’t be over until we’ve closed that hospital, and any others like it.’

‘How can you do that?’

‘We need you,’ Carla said to her. ‘You’re the proof.’

‘I was afraid you were going to say that.’

‘Will you come with us, tomorrow, when we go back to Berlin?’

There was a long pause, then Ilse said: ‘Yes, I will.’

(x)

Volodya Peshkov was glad to be home. Moscow was at its summery best, sunny and warm. On Monday 30 June he returned to Red Army Intelligence headquarters beside the Khodynka airfield.

Both Werner Franck and the Tokyo spy had been right: Germany had invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June. Volodya and all the personnel at the Soviet Embassy in Berlin had returned to Moscow, by ship and train. Volodya had been prioritized, and made it back faster than most: some were still travelling.

Volodya now realized how much Berlin had been getting him down. The Nazis were tedious in their self-righteousness and triumphalism. They were like a winning soccer team at the after-match party, getting drunker and more boring and refusing to go home. He was sick of them.

Some people might say that the USSR was similar, with its secret police, its rigid orthodoxy, and its puritan attitudes to such pleasures as abstract painting and fashion. They were wrong. Communism was a work in progress, with mistakes being made on the road to a fair society. The NKVD with its torture chambers was an aberration, a cancer in the body of Communism. One day it would be surgically removed. But probably not in wartime.

Anticipating the outbreak of war, Volodya had long ago equipped his Berlin spies with clandestine radios and code books. Now it was more vital than ever that the handful of brave anti-Nazis should continue to pass information to the Soviets. Before leaving he had destroyed all records of their names and addresses, which now existed only in his head.

He had found both his parents fit and well, although his father looked harassed: it was his responsibility to prepare Moscow for air raids. Volodya had gone to see his sister, Anya, her husband, Ilya Dvorkin, and the twins, now eighteen months old: Dmitriy, called Dimka, and Tatiana, called Tania. Unfortunately their father struck Volodya as being just as rat-like and contemptible as ever.

After a pleasant day at home, and a good night’s sleep in his old room, he was ready to start work again.

He passed through the metal detector at the entrance to the Intelligence building. The familiar corridors and staircases touched a nostalgic chord, even if they were drab and utilitarian. Walking through the building he half expected people to come up and congratulate him: many of them must know he had been the one to confirm Barbarossa. But no one did: perhaps they were being discreet.

He entered a large open area of typists and file clerks and spoke to the middle-aged woman receptionist. ‘Hello, Nika – are you still here?’

‘Good morning, Captain Peshkov,’ she said, not as warmly as he might have hoped. ‘Colonel Lemitov would like to see you right away.’

Like Volodya’s father, Lemitov had not been important enough to suffer in the great purge of the late thirties, and now he had been promoted to fill the place of an unlucky former superior. Volodya did not know much about the purge, but he found it hard to believe that so many senior men had been disloyal enough to merit such punishment. Not that Volodya knew exactly what the punishment was. They could be in exile in Siberia, or in prison somewhere, or dead. All he knew was that they had vanished.

Nika added: ‘He has the big office at the end of the main corridor now.’