One Night in Winter by Simon Sebag Montefiore Page A

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.’
    He entered his classroom and was at once enveloped in the affection and respect of the pupils. Their vivacious chatter delighted him: Nikolasha was showing Vlad Titorenko some pages of his obsessional project in his velvet-covered notebook. Both boys sported Byronic hairdos as a tribute to their romanticism. It was surely only a matter of time, Benya decided, before Dr Rimm brought in an army barber. The new boy, Andrei Kurbsky, had turned out to know even more Pushkin than the others. And there was Serafima – listening to him with her head on one side, beautiful without believing it, drawing the eyes of the boys without being aware of it. Even now, Nikolasha was looking back at her; Andrei too. But there was another reason Benya appreciated her: she, more than anyone else, reminded him of his lost love, the woman who’d disappeared before the war.
    He could not believe his own luck at landing this job, at teaching literature to children who loved it as much as he did. It was his Second Life and he’d been reborn. He could no longer write. That reed was broken yet he could teach – and how! But he was marked with the black spot: how long could it last? He wanted to share all he knew before it was over.
    ‘Dear friends, beloved romantics, wistful dreamers!’ He clapped his hands and opened his
Onegin
.
‘It’s the night of the fateful ball’, he said, ‘that causes the duel. Just imagine the excitement. Everyone is waiting for Lensky the fiancé to arrive. How does Tatiana feel to see Eugene Onegin?’
     
    ‘And paler than the moon at dawn,
    She cannot raise her eyes to face them
    And trembles like a hunted fawn.
    Inside her, stormy passion’s seething;
    The wretched girl is scarcely breathing . . .’
     
    Golden pauses, and then cries: ‘Oh, the agony of her suffering! But who can give us some idea of what she’s going through? Andrei?’
    ‘I’m not sure . . . Isn’t love just a thing in novels and songs?’
    ‘Who agrees with Andrei? Nikolasha?’
    Nikolasha sat up. ‘The absence of love means death,’ he stated, his deep voice cracking. ‘Like Romeo and Juliet. Antony and Cleopatra.’
    Golden looked interested. ‘So you are saying love reaches its apotheosis in death? Doesn’t it perish when life is extinguished?’
    ‘On the contrary,’ replied Nikolasha. ‘Death makes love immortal. Isn’t that the lesson of Pushkin’s duel? How to be a Russian, how to be a lover, how to live and die.’
    ‘But love is just amorous obsession, surely?’ blurted out George.
    ‘Class is what matters,’ said George’s brother, Marlen. He had one of those Bolshevik names