‘But let’s not talk about that,’ he said suddenly.
‘But I wanted to ask about—’
‘We can’t waste time on that. You can ask me anything anytime. By letter. But here, now, every minute is golden. I had to tell you, Sveta, I’ve been thinking of you every minute since we met, since you wrote. It’s a strange and wonderful thing…’
‘Why strange?’
‘Well…’
‘Aren’t I too young?’
‘Yes, you are. You’re far too young, and yet you’re old too. You see things with an old soul and you’re so serious and so well read, I love to hear what you think of everything. And that’s why it’s the most unlikely thing and yet sometimes the most unlikely things are the best, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, yes!’ she said, longing suddenly to kiss him. She didn’t care that he was married or whatever he was. Actually she did want to ask about this too but what was the etiquette for that? She tried to remember in the nineteenth-century novels she had read: how did they discuss such things? She looked at Lev’s broad cheekbones, his thick head of hair, his wide, wide mouth – and they were still holding hands across the table.
Klimov was beginning to panic. What if his boss General Vlasik heard about this? What if Stalin heard? An angry Georgian father is a fearsome thing even when he isn’t the Man of Steel, the Father of Peoples, the Leader of the World’s Proletariat, the Supreme Commander, Chairman of the State Defence Committee, General Secretary and… but Stalin was all these things! He stood up, pacing. He had to call a halt to this right away. His dear little Svetlana deserved some love but this flashy scribbler, this Jew, was forty and married! This was a terrible mistake. He had to stop it at once.
He coughed, and then coughed again, more loudly.
‘Svetlana, I am coming in,’ he called out, ‘in a couple of minutes.’
They were running out of time. They stood up, and he leaned over and pressed his lips to Svetlana’s – just for a second; a hesitation, then all of a sudden they were kissing wildly. He seemed to devour her – like a lion of course. The feelings raced through her and she was dizzy with it. She could not make love to him – that was out of the question! Her father would never allow sex before marriage but oh my God she wanted more…
Klimov was listening outside. He had to do something, right now. He had to! If the girl lost her virginity – oh God, he would be finished, he would die in the Gulags, ground to Camp dust. He’d get the Eight Grammes!
He knocked at the door. ‘Svetlana! We must go!’
But Lev had seized her for another kiss and she was devouring him back just as fiercely. There was something so heavenly about the feelings of two people so in love, so perfectly attuned – Svetlana had never experienced such delight. Finally, staggering as if she was drunk, she stepped back.
Lev smiled at her. ‘God, I loved that! I loved kissing you!’ he whispered. Then, still whispering, he said, ‘Read every one of my articles and I will send my little Lioness special messages! I will call you and if you can’t talk, say “I’ve got too much homework”; if you’re thinking of me, say “The flowers in the Alexandrovsky are blossoming” and—’
‘And if I want to tell you I love you and want you every second, what then?’
‘Say “The little Lioness is hungry”.’
‘Oh my God,’ Svetlana whispered, steadying herself on the table. ‘The Lioness is hungry.’
IV
The Red Cross tent was empty; Il Primo was gone. For a moment, Fabiana panicked. It was too soon for him to get up. He had been delirious for much of the morning, shouting about death sentences and the shoeing of a man and shovels and sabres. He was not fit to be up. Had he wandered off? Had someone taken him? She had an idea of who or what he was, and the thought that he might have been arrested stole her breath like a punch to the stomach. She ran out of the tent, looking one way and then the other.
‘I adore this countryside,’ he had said when he had woken properly earlier in the afternoon. The patient was certainly a chatterbox. Madonna! He never stopped, but he seemed interested in every detail of her life: her parents, what books she read, what were her dreams, her first loves, why did she speak Russian, and then how she felt about her marriage… No one had ever been interested in how she felt – certainly not her husband, who had scarcely asked her about herself in their four years together. In fact Patient Number One was more like her favourite girlfriends back home, but cleverer, and he was so funny as he switched between Russian and Italian, the very antithesis of Malamore who ground out his words as if conversation was a stone pressed within a vice. When Il Primo talked about himself, it was about his taste in beauty, in books, in horses, in Italy, in writing…
‘How can you love these grasslands?’ she replied. ‘So endless! So flat! A horizon that steals your soul. There’s nothing for mile after mile… How can you love it? I think of the hills of Tuscany, the cliffs of Amalfi, the lagoon of Venice, anything but this wilderness.’
‘What I adore is the sunflowers,’ he’d replied. ‘We rode through them, frosted by dust. The sun beat down, and their faces seemed to smile at me, the only smiling faces in a land devoted to gunpowder and murder.’
She absorbed this.
‘There’s a huge field of sunflowers right outside the village.’
‘Really?’
That’s where he would be, she decided. He’d gone to see the sunflowers.
She ran out of the village, cursing her white, frilly nurse’s uniform, which being Italian was more elaborately feminine and less practical than that of any other nation, out on to the steppe, across a field of unharvested rye – and there he was: a frail figure wearing the fresh khakis she’d dressed him in, holding her bottle of Crimean wine, looking out at the sea of sunflowers.
‘Maledetto bastardo! Che il diavolo ti porti! What the hell are you doing out here? Who said you could move? How dare you?’ she shouted at him, furious that he’d put himself at risk like this. She grabbed the wine bottle out of his hand.
‘Well, you found me,’ Benya said. Awakened from his last sleep, he felt superlatively clear-headed and alive, almost reborn.
‘You frightened me,’ she said, feeling calmer.
‘Did I?’ he said. ‘And you noticed I’d gone? You cared?’
‘Haven’t you noticed, maledetto bastardo, you’re my only patient? Of course I noticed!’
‘So you can swear too?’ He beamed at her. She realized he was used to being loved, admired, and she fought the urge to admire him in her turn. He was a patient with no name. Soon he would go. But where? She handed him the peaked cap he’d been wearing when they found him.
‘It’s for the sun. You’ll get burnt. I’m used to this heat but you’re pale…’
He looked at the cap. ‘It’s Italian,’ he said.
‘It is. It’s why they didn’t shoot you.’
Benya put it back on, thinking, Dr Kapto must have put this on me, to give me a better chance of getting away. Again, as with Ganakovich, he was confounded by the actions of men.
‘Come inside. We need to go back to the tent. It’s not safe out here…’
‘I don’t know if it’s safe inside,’ he replied.
She stood beside him. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. You mean, for you?’