One Night in Winter by Simon Sebag Montefiore Page B

– a combination of Marx-Lenin – that were fashionable in the 1920s, thought Benya, and now mercifully assigned to the dustbin of history. ‘The rest is just bourgeois sentimentalism, a very dangerous thing.’
    ‘Whom do you agree with? Serafima?’ said Golden. As he had expected, everyone turned to Serafima.
    ‘I’m not sure I can say . . .’ said Serafima.
    ‘Have a go, Serafima Constantinovna,’ Golden coaxed her. ‘Illuminate our darkness.’
    She put her head on one side. ‘Well . . .’ She spoke very softly so that Nikolasha and Andrei had to lean over to hear her. ‘I would say that in
Onegin
Tatiana dreams of nothing else. She can’t eat or sleep. She protects the secret in her heart. No one else has suffered or celebrated love like her. Love is
all
that matters.’ She looked around. ‘That’s what I think.’
     
    George Satinov and Minka pulled Andrei into the doorway as Dr Rimm waddled past and down the corridor. Both were shaking with laughter. George grabbed Andrei’s cuff: ‘Come here! Watch the Hummer.’ They followed Dr Rimm towards the common room.
    ‘He’s looking back. Pretend to read the notices,’ whispered Minka.
    Dr Rimm had stopped outside the common room where the teachers’ post was placed in pigeonholes.
    ‘Now – look,’ said George as Dr Rimm picked up his mail, leafing through papers, until he suddenly held up an envelope. ‘He’s got it!’
    Dr Rimm peered around, up and down the corridor, and then, stuffing all the other papers back into his pigeonhole, he hurried off with the envelope to the teacher’s lavatory. When he came out, he was singing so loudly and tunelessly that he was almost dancing. As he passed them, they struggled not to giggle.
    ‘What was that letter?’ demanded Andrei.
    ‘You can keep a secret, can’t you, Andrei?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘He can,’ agreed Minka. ‘Let’s tell him.’
    They pulled him down the corridor and outside into the little yard by the science laboratory. No one was there.
    ‘Read this,’ said George, handing him a piece of paper. ‘This is the next one.’ It was typed in capitals:
     
TUNEFUL SINGER AROUND THE SCHOOL, SWEET ‘ONEGIN’, I KNOW YOU LOVE ME, BUT YOU ARE ALSO LOVED FROM AFAR, AS ONLY TWO BOLSHEVIKS CAN LOVE.
KISS ME LIKE A TRUE COMMUNIST.
‘TATIANA’
     
    ‘Oh my God!’ said Andrei. ‘He thinks . . .’
    ‘That’s the fun of it,’ replied Minka. ‘Don’t you love it? “As only two Bolsheviks can love”! That was my idea.’
    ‘Who do you think he thinks wrote it?’
    ‘Director Medvedeva perhaps?’ George was laughing so much that he could barely get the name out.
    Andrei was amazed. This could only happen now, after the war. George’s father was a leader, his mother was a teacher; and both Minka’s parents were important. Andrei knew that only two such privileged children would dare to contemplate a trick like this, and on the First Secretary of the School’s Communist Party Committee. That stuff about ‘loving like a Bolshevik’ was perilously disrespectful. In the thirties, people had received nine grams in the back of the neck for less . . .
    ‘Kurbsky?’
    Oh my God! Rimm was calling him. George and Minka vanished as the teacher summoned him from the doorway. As he went back inside to face Rimm, Andrei wished he had known nothing about the spoof love letters.
    ‘Kurbsky,’ said Dr Rimm jocosely, ‘I hear your Pushkin is more than proficient.’
    ‘Thank you, Comrade Rimm.’ The title ‘Comrade’ meant Rimm was a member of the Communist Party.
    ‘You might have heard of my class on socialist realism?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘I teach literature as it should be taught,’ Rimm said, and Andrei knew he was referring to Benya Golden’s class. Rimm hesitated, and then his eyes rolled as he checked they were alone in the corridor. ‘Are you happy in Teacher Golden’s . . . group, where Pushkin is taught, I understand, without class consciousness at all,