‘Yes, for me.’
She thought of Malamore and his Blackshirted friends, of Dirlewanger and the SS. ‘That depends on who you are.’
Benya sighed. ‘I’ve got to go. Now. Today.’
‘You’re not better. You might haemorrhage. The fever could return. Your shoulder could open up again.’
‘I doubt that. Not after your beautiful work.’
‘Who are you? I know you’re a Russian and you speak some Italian. Are you…?’
Benya caught his breath. This was it, the moment when she could turn him in, end his life. ‘Are you asking as a woman, a nurse – or as an Italian soldier?’
She blinked, and he could see her thinking this through. ‘Can’t you tell?’
‘The crocodile Malamore is a Fascist, isn’t he, a real believer?’
‘Do I seem like one myself?’
‘I just don’t know.’ Benya thought of Kapto and Tonya. He didn’t know anything any more. Human nature never ceased to surprise him in its whiplash cruelties and haphazard kindnesses.
He stared at Fabiana, into her eyes – they were a dark brown, and then the sunbeam fell on her face and the brownness turned to the lightness of honey, and he suddenly realized what he already knew, that he was going to trust her. Even amidst these quicksands. In reality, he had no choice.
‘My name is Benya Golden.’
‘Benya Golden.’ Fabiana savoured the name, said it twice.
‘Oh Dio, it sounds lovely in Italian,’ he said. ‘But then everything sounds better in Italian.’
‘So you are Red Army lost behind our lines? Madonna santa!’
She looked back into the village. Soon someone would notice they were out here talking or Malamore might ride up with his SS comrades.
‘Can we walk a little into the field of sunflowers? Please accompany me.’
She shook her head but she walked beside him.
‘Tell me about your childhood in Venice… Fabiana, if may?’
She started to answer but then she stopped. ‘I haven’t asked you a thing about yourself. I’ve been wondering, trying to guess, what you did in peacetime.’
‘I want a sip of wine before I get into that,’ he said, and he took back the bottle from her and pulled out the cork.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘You can’t drink. The anaesthetic, the painkillers.’
‘Really?’ He looked anxious, and for a moment this made her beam.
‘I bet in real life you’re a hypochondriac,’ she teased him.
‘Of course I am, but not today. I am unlikely to make it anyway. Allow me this,’ and he took a swig from the bottle. ‘I love Massandra wine and one day I’ll tell you about the Crimea. Now your turn.’
She looked around. Nothing. Just the sky of eggshell blue, the sun, and the tall sunflowers with their golden faces and black fringes, dusted by chaff, on every side of them. ‘I can’t. I’m on duty…’
‘Are you? I think you’re in the Secret Kingdom of Sunflowers where you can do anything. We’re in a dimension outside the real world, and here we’re free for the first and only time in this war. You’re free of the army and your dead husband and Malamore, and I’m not a soldier, a prisoner, or even a patient. I have no past in the Secret Kingdom of Sunflowers. There are only two inhabitants of the kingdom, and one is often angry, and sticks out her chin, and waves her finger – and one is just grateful to see her angry as often as possible because it makes her look magnificent. Besides, Fabiana, if you don’t drink, I won’t tell you anything. Deal?’
‘An Italian regards it as sacrilege to drink from a bottle…’
‘Like cutting pasta?’
‘Exactly. Or eating it with a spoon.’
‘Dammit,’ said Benya, ‘we’re lucky to be alive. I think Bacchus will forgive you. Go on, sit down.’
‘This stupid white uniform, I’ll get grass stains on it and—’
‘Just drink then.’
She took the wine and drank from the bottle. Benya sank down, his strength ebbing, sapping his sight, which had started to blur; he sighed and recovered, the wine recharging him.
‘I was arrested, sentenced to death, reprieved and sent to the Gulags. But I got this fresh chance of life.’
‘And this torture and getting shot is your wonderful new start?’ Fabiana asked, kneeling down beside him.
‘They let me join the penal battalions so I might live again, and I’m not sure I’ll get another opportunity.’
Fabiana smiled at him, her face very close to his. ‘Well, wasn’t it luck that your horse stood over you on the ground, waiting for you to be picked up? And then finding me to sew you up?’
‘And give me wine. But then that horse is my dearest friend, and perhaps you are the only other friend I have in the world at this moment. So I want to enjoy this. It’s as simple as that. I have no plan beyond this field of sunflowers, this stale wine, and my conversation with my Venetian nurse.’
‘What were you sentenced to death for?’
‘Do I seem like a murderer? Or a bank robber?’ He paused. ‘No, I was a writer. I fell out of favour – and I still don’t know exactly why. But I ended up as a Political prisoner working in – have you heard of Kolyma?’
She shook her head.
‘Well, the prison gold mines of the far east.’
‘I didn’t think of you as a miner.’
‘It wasn’t my chosen vocation.’
‘I know that – but of course you’re a writer. It’s obvious.’ Above them in the shimmering sky with a few white contrails, a flight of German planes flew in formation towards Stalingrad. She got up. ‘We have to go back,’ she said, staggering a little, and as she did so, the atoms between them rearranged themselves: she saw that clearly. Something altered inside them too. But that can mean nothing, she told herself quickly. A beautiful view did that too – one remembered it but the moment passed quickly.
She brushed herself down and glared at him: ‘After all you’ve been through, you have the energy to waste on trying to flirt with a nurse, stupido?’
‘If it was the last iota of life I possessed,’ he replied. ‘How could I use it better?’ He took a breath and his voice changed tone. ‘You know, Fabiana, I’ll remember this, somehow forever.’
‘Me too,’ she said. ‘Somehow forever.’ And as she said this, she held up her right hand, fingers open towards the sky, and he laughed, imitating her.
‘You’re laughing at me again?’ she said gravely.
‘No, celebrating you. Somehow forever!’ and they both made the gesture.
Then he turned and started to walk back.
‘Benya,’ she said.
He looked back. He wanted to kiss her, but he felt suddenly depleted, suddenly hopeless, and red sparks whirlpooled behind his eyes. He almost fell, and she put her arms around him, and held him up.
‘You must go to your bed. I’ll say I don’t know who you are.’
‘Better to say…’
‘…that you wore Italian uniform, because you’re one of our Russian auxiliaries?’
‘If you could say that, it would win me time.’
‘Benya Golden, it’s a Jewish name, isn’t it?’
Benya nodded, leaning on her strong shoulders. ‘I have nothing left to tell you. My life is yours now.’
When he awoke, night had fallen. He was back in the tent, and Fabiana sat beside the bed. ‘I was dreaming of our conversation in…’ he whispered.
‘…the Secret Kingdom of Sunflowers.’
‘It did happen, didn’t it?’
She nodded, gazing at him, her finger touching her lips. He wondered what she was thinking about.
‘I doubt we’ll see each other again,’ he said. ‘Probably not. But I just wanted to say that for me those were truly the happiest hours of this war – no, of the last few years of my life.’