One Night in Winter by Simon Sebag Montefiore

lots of witnesses.’
    Shuba stood back, scratched his head and chewed the end of his moustaches. ‘You’ll pay for this, you little poodle! I’m reporting you and your lies to Director Medvedeva. Class dismissed!’ He marched off and Minka ran up to Senka, who, thought Andrei, had made an astonishing recovery.
    ‘Somehow,’ Minka said as she rejoined him and George after Senka had gone off to change, ‘the Little Professor always gets his way.’
    ‘Little Professor?’ asked Andrei.
    ‘That’s what we call Senka in my family,’ explained Minka. ‘My mother says it’s because he’s precociously precious.’
    George put his hand on Andrei’s shoulder. ‘Minka,’ he proposed. ‘Let’s get Andrei into the Romantics.’
    ‘Teacher Golden will approve,’ she said. ‘You know he was quite famous once.’
    ‘Golden? Never!’ said George.
    ‘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