‘We split up into two squadrons and we’ll trap them,’ barked Malamore, coughing hoarsely. ‘The scouts are right. Even if they looped back, they must come this way in the end – and we’ll be waiting.’
XI
Fabiana leaned against Benya and took his face in her hands and kissed him on the lips, once, twice, to check his eyes, but they were closed, eyelashes black against his skin. She could taste honey and the brandy they’d just been drinking, savour the strong smell of his skin, pure and unscented by soap or cologne. Then there was the hay, the horses, the leather of the saddles, and to her this blend smelled of the happiest moments in her life, the freest.
He never lifted the saddle. Instead she unbuttoned his shirt and ran her hands over his shoulders, the hair on his slight chest, then his trousers. He undressed her too and she could feel him hesitate when he found the Browning pistol in the belt of her britches. He seemed to come to a decision. She’d been armed all the time yet hadn’t tried to shoot him, hadn’t tried to return to her people. He dropped the Browning on the discarded britches and they fell on to the blankets. She felt him kissing the sweat on her neck, her forehead, then, as her legs came up, behind her knees. They were so close that the laws of sound were reversed: hers resounded out of his throat; his came out of her mouth.
She had never wanted anyone like this, nor known such wanting, nor even considered doing such a brazen thing, or having such things being done to her so boldly. She was shy for a moment, but in the Secret Kingdom of Sunflowers these things seemed natural. He talked to her, told her what he was doing, how delicious she was, and did things that made her skin fizz where he touched her. She felt herself melting with pleasure where she had been untouched, and treasured the words and the nameless feelings that now had names. This was the poetry she hoped to be able to recite in her old age, and she felt her body was the book in which these poems were written.
When the red wave came, she found herself thrilling, exulting, and it came out as ringing laughter, her head right back, her hair wild as snakes and her mouth open, teeth gleaming. Imagine myself: Fabiana Pellegrini, doing these things, feeling like this, making someone else feel this. There had only been Ippolito before Benya. But her husband, who had never looked at her in this way, who had become frustrated and angry that she didn’t excite him enough, had blamed her for his own shortcomings, slapping her hard in the face till her nose bled and she’d tasted blood. If he saw me now, what would he think? she asked herself, smiling – and then didn’t care any more as another wave overtook her.
They lay still, the sweat running down them like rivulets. The unbearable tenderness passed and soon she found herself weltering once more. This time she did not feel as shy as she had before. She was utterly at ease and she thought she would do anything he asked and still she would not feel guilty or dirty. It was something quite different she felt now. She wiped her face, using the back of her sunburnt arm, with a ravenous triumph.
Afterwards they lay naked under the tree in the moonlight, guarded by the horses and by the sunflowers, their faces closed and downcast now in the darkness. In the distance, the clatter of gunfire was closer though it now sounded as familiar as the bees that droned home to their hives, as the hooting of the owls.
‘Do you really want me to go?’ she asked quietly.
‘You must. I want you to live even more now. Go back.’
‘What if I don’t want to go back?’
‘Then you’re mad.’
‘What if I am mad?’
‘Are you?’
She considered this gravely. ‘Yes, yes, I think you’ve made me so.’
‘It will pass. And then you must return. You must do whatever you need to survive.’
She sighed. ‘I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to be Malamore’s trophy. I don’t want him to think he owns me, and I don’t want my old life.’
‘Wouldn’t that be a small price for being alive?’ Benya paused and took a breath. ‘Has it occurred to you that Malamore killed your husband?’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘To get you, of course.’
A long silence.
‘It would explain a lot,’ Fabiana said slowly. ‘Though oddly that never occurred to me.’
‘He was right there when it happened, wasn’t he?’
‘Just after,’ she said quietly. It made sense, and what she was going to do now also made sense. She was suddenly clearer about this than she had ever been. ‘I’m no longer Fabiana Bacigalupe or Fabiana Pellegrini. I’ve always wanted to be this woman, the way we are now. Isn’t this what all those poems are about, the ones I have read ever since I was a young girl? And I can’t go back to a creature like Malamore. I just want to tell you something, Benya Golden: I will not return to the Italian lines. If you ride I must ride with you.’
He nodded, seemingly relieved.
‘Can we just be bandits in love? That’s what I call us,’ she said. ‘Bandits in love. Nothing more than that. Just for once, for one last time, in our own world.’
They ate together. ‘When did you know this might happen?’ she asked him.
‘I never knew. I am always amazed. Are you studying history now?’
‘Every woman knows love is about history,’ she said. ‘Our history. So, did I choose you or you choose me?’
‘I could hardly choose you when I was unconscious,’ he joked, and a lazy drowsiness overcame them. Benya, usually so alert, became careless and languid, longing to enjoy the harvest night, the dense, treacley air, the lilac blackening in the mixed palette of the wide-slashed sky. They lay together, still naked, the air was so warm, and the horses settled, swishing their tails, their chests twitching to drive off flies – and she felt new muscles jumping in newly discovered sinews and chambers of her body. She had never understood why people fussed about sex – it had seemed as awkward as it was futile, like a language she couldn’t understand. But now, when time was so short, she had learned the language instantly.
Each time they awoke, they sipped brandy and feasted on the spread of stars on the banqueting table of the sky. She could taste the liquid pleasure on her lips, like melting toffee. The lava powered through her veins, fizzed in her skin and set off the weltering again within her, and her thighs came up again, and they made love between bouts of almost deliriously deep sleep. Around them they could feel the trees and sunflowers, the very earth itself, moving and buzzing as they were – as if they were resting on the back of a giant, stirring, breathing beast.
But soon the howitzers were building up once more. She saw the black-crossed bombers flying like giant stencils across the sky heading to demolish Stalingrad. The distant roaring was perhaps columns of tanks. Suddenly, over the Don Bend in the east, the sky was ripped wide open, turning a rage of red, as if it had been skinned to reveal the flesh beneath.
It was then that she knew what the intensity of the battle meant for them. Benya was risking his own life for her happiness, sacrificing it for something that could only be horribly short-lived. She should return to her people; she knew she could persuade Malamore she was innocent, to call off his pursuit, and she would make it home to Venice. But every day Benya lingered with her, there would be fewer Russians on this side of the Don. Soon there would be none and it would be nearly impossible for Benya to get back to the Soviet side. Malamore was chasing Benya because of her and if they caught him, a Jew, they would kill him. If he was ever seen with her by his own side, she would be the death sentence of the man who had given her the kiss of life. The threads of their dilemma were unravellable except by her leaving.