Red Icon Page 10

  The man turned away into the dark and the carriage creaked when he climbed back up into his seat. The air cracked again as he whipped his horses into motion. In order to turn the carriage around, he steered it off the road and they set off across a stubble field, the carriage springs groaning over the uneven ground.

  The sound of the shelling receded into the distance as they left the line of fire. Before long, the carriage reached another path. The driver lashed the reins and his horses began to trot. The sound of their hooves clattered reassuringly upon the hard-packed ground.

  Now that they were out of danger, Briulov opened up a silver cigarette case and passed it around. The contents were quickly emptied and the carriage was soon filled with the perfumed reek of high-quality Balkan tobacco.

  ‘It couldn’t be helped,’ said Lutukin.

  ‘We did our best,’ agreed Briulov.

  ‘Listen to yourselves!’ Yagelsky barked at the politicians. ‘This is no cause for self-congratulation. Our mission was the last, best hope for peace without surrender.’ He paused to fill his lungs, then exhaled in two jets through his nostrils. The tide of grey rolled back over the window, condensing into droplets on the glass. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘we’re going to lose the last war ever fought.’

  2 February 1945

  Ahlborn, Germany

  In the crypt of the little church where they had taken refuge from the enemy, the two Red Army tank men examined the contents of the coffin, which now lay emptied out on to the floor.

  The stone-cold corpse still wore the black robes of a priest. A fine layer of ice crystals glinted on the flesh and wisps of hair hung down over the sunken, withered eyes. The hands, entwined with a crucifix on a small chain, had been crossed over the chest.

  But it was what lay beneath those hands which had caught the attention of Sergeant Ovchinikov.

  The small rectangular object was partially wrapped in dark brown oilcloth that had originally been tied with string. The string had broken when the coffin fell to the ground and the oilcloth had come unwrapped, revealing a layer of gauzy, muslin fabric, through which the men could make out splashes of colour. Greens and blues and whites seemed to radiate out of the misty fabric.

  ‘It can’t be,’ whispered the sergeant.

  ‘Can’t be what?’ demanded Captain Proskuryakov. ‘Do you mean that you know what this is?’

  ‘I think so,’ replied Ovchinikov, ‘but I still can’t see it clearly.’

  Proskuryakov nodded at the bundle. ‘Well, pick it up and take a better look.’

  Ovchinikov glanced at him. ‘And desecrate the body of a priest?’

  ‘I just put my boot through his coffin!’ said Proskuryakov. ‘I think we’re past that point. Now pick it up! That’s an order.’

  With a grunt, Ovchinikov crouched down and slipped the oilcloth from the dead priest’s grip. The sergeant’s fingers trembled as he tore away the gauze. ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘Yes, I was right!’

  By the light of a candle, Proskuryakov found himself staring at a strange little painting, the likes of which he had never seen before. ‘What a curious picture,’ he muttered.

  ‘This,’ said Ovchinikov, ‘is the icon of The Shepherd. But . . .’ his voice trailed off.

  ‘But what?’ demanded Proskuryakov. ‘Speak up, man!’

  ‘The Shepherd was destroyed long ago, burned to ashes by a demented priest. At least, that’s what I’d been told.’

  ‘Well, whoever whispered that story in your ear must have told you all the other bits of rubbish in your head as well, because there it is!’ Although he was unable to resist a sarcastic comment at the expense of Ovchinikov’s faith, Proskuryakov found he could not take his eyes off the painting. The more he looked at the icon, the more bewildering he found it. He wondered what kind of man would ever wear a robe like that; and the sheep marooned on their little islands confused him.

  Seeing the bewilderment on his captain’s face, Ovchinikov tried to explain the meaning of the icon to him. ‘This is life,’ he explained, pointing at the islands in their sea of blue.

  ‘And that is death?’ asked Proskuryakov, nodding at the top of the picture.

  ‘No,’ replied Ovchinikov. ‘That is the afterlife. There is a difference.’

  ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ Proskuryakov said, ‘you’re either alive or you’re dead, and nothing I have ever seen has led me to think otherwise.’

  ‘This icon is the proof that you are wrong,’ Ovchinikov told him.

  ‘I see no proof,’ snapped Proskuryakov.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Ovchinikov told him. ‘There are many who believed that the loss of this holy picture, while under the protection of the Tsar, is what caused him to be cast down from his throne.’

  ‘I wonder what they’d say about it now,’ muttered Proskuryakov as he tossed the painting back on to the corpse.

  ‘Show some respect, you old fool!’ barked Ovchinikov, carefully retrieving the icon.

  It occurred to Proskuryakov to remind the sergeant that he was speaking to an officer, but it seemed, in the past few seconds, as if the balance of power had shifted and it was he, Proskuryakov, who must suffer the same abuse which he had, for so long, heaped without regret upon this dirty, boiler-suited man.

  Gently, Ovchinikov began to wrap the icon back inside its cocoon of gauze and oilcloth. ‘We must be careful with it,’ he said, ‘so that our heavenly Father will reward us in the world to come.’

  ‘It’s all very well getting prizes in the afterlife,’ said Proskuryakov, ‘but as long as I’m in this one, I’d settle for a T34.’

  Carrying the picture, the two men left the church and made their way east towards the Russian lines.

  They had gone some distance beyond the village when Proskuryakov suddenly stopped. ‘My leather jacket! I left it behind.’ He turned and looked back towards Ahlborn. ‘My pass book and leave papers are in the pocket.’

  ‘It’s too late now,’ said the sergeant. ‘Besides, when we turn this icon over to Comrade Stalin, he’ll get you a new jacket, and a handful of medals as well!’

  ‘Medals, eh?’ muttered Proskuryakov.

  But Ovchinikov didn’t reply. He was already running ahead, dodging like a rabbit from one evening shadow to another.

  Maybe there’s a God, after all, Proskuryakov thought to himself, as he ran to catch up with the sergeant.

  9 February 1945

  Sokolnika District, Moscow

  In a dusty-windowed office on the fifth floor of 22 Pitnikov Street Inspector Pekkala was waiting for his supper.

  It was Friday – the one day of the week when Pekkala would eat a proper meal, and the person who would cook that meal was Major Kirov. Prior to his instatement as a commissar in the Red Army, and his subsequent appointment as Pekkala’s assistant, Kirov had trained as a chef at the prestigious Moscow Culinary Institute. If the Institute had not been closed down and its buildings taken over by the Factory Apprentice Technical Facility, Kirov’s life might have turned out very differently. But he had never lost his love of cooking, and Pekkala’s office had grown into a menagerie of earthenware pots and vases, in which grew rosemary, sage, mint, cherry tomatoes and the crooked branches of what might have been the only kumquat tree in Moscow.

  The meals Kirov cooked for him were the only decent food Pekkala ate. The rest of the time, he boiled potatoes in a battered aluminium pan, fried sausages and ate baked beans out of the can. For variety, he wandered across the street to the Café Tilsit, its dingy space so clogged with smoke that the grey clouds seemed to take on human forms, making it appear as if the customers were dining among ghosts.

  Pekkala hadn’t always been this way. Before the Revolution, he had loved the restaurants in St Petersburg – the Strelnya, the English Tavern and late-night meals at the bar of the Hotel Davidov. But his years as an inmate of the Gulag of Borodok had cancelled the pleasure of good food. As Pekkala struggled to survive in the Siberian wilderness, it had simply become the
fuel that kept him alive.

  Major Kirov had set out to change that. With the help of his new wife Elizaveta, he embarked upon this sacred weekly mission.

  Their office would fill with the smells of roast tetereva wood pigeon served with warm Smetana cream, Anton apples stewed in brandy, or tsiplyata chicken in ripe gooseberry sauce, which Kirov cooked on the temperamental stove.

  Pekkala, installed in a comfortable chair, would tend the wheezy samovar while the meal was being prepared. When at last the food was ready, and Major Kirov laid these tiny miracles before him, his senses would be overwhelmed by cognac sauce, or the barely describable complexity of truffles, or the electric sourness of Kirov’s beloved kumquats.

  ‘Almost done!’ announced Kirov. From the stove, he lifted a cast-iron pan, its handle wrapped with a red-and-white cloth to stop it from burning his palm. In the pan lay a handful of chanterelle mushrooms, their flesh the colour of ripe apricots, which he shook back and forth in a foam of sizzling butter. Then he tipped the mushrooms out on to a plate. Pinching up one of the hot chanterelles, he popped it quickly in his mouth.

  ‘Don’t eat them now!’ scolded Elizaveta. She was slight, with freckled cheeks, a round chin and dark, inquisitive eyes. The two had met at the records office of NKVD headquarters, where Elizaveta worked as a clerk for Comrade Sergeant Gatkina, a woman of legendary ferocity. They had not been married long, and had reached that stage in their relationship where they had passed beyond the dreamlike early days into the hard work of actually creating a life together.

  ‘Delicious,’ muttered Kirov, puffing steam as he devoured the chanterelle.

  Elizaveta threw a napkin at her husband, which landed neatly on his head.

  Kirov peered out from beneath the folds of napkin, and Elizaveta was reminded of a picture of an Algerian Bedouin which she had seen in a book as a child. But instead of making her smile at this unintended costume, it troubled her how unfamiliar it made him appear. In the blink of an eye, her new husband had become a stranger.

  This was not the first time since their marriage that Elizaveta had felt this way. She had been struck by the same unnerving sensation only the day before, when the two of them had travelled to a small farm north of the city to purchase the mushrooms that would soon be a part of their dinner. The farmer grew the chanterelles in earthenware pots high up on the rafters of his barn. The damp heat rising from his cows allowed the mushrooms to flourish, even in winter. Whenever a customer appeared, he would send his daughter tiptoeing across the narrow beams to gather the delicate chanterelles. As the newlyweds waited shivering in the farmyard for the young woman to emerge from her latest tightrope walk across the rafters, Elizaveta glanced at her husband and was shocked to see that he had been transformed by the dove-grey light of that February afternoon into a man she barely recognised.

  ‘But you have only been married for a month!’ exclaimed Sergeant Gatkina, under whom she served in the NKVD records office at the Lubyanka building, and to whom she had unwisely confided her fears. ‘Do you expect to know everything about him?’

  The answer, although Elizaveta did not give it, was yes. Kirov was not a man who handed out surprises, nor did he care to be surprised himself. But there was something behind the agile, bony frame, the perpetual youthfulness of those rosy cheeks and the calm honesty in his gaze which made her worry. Something cold and dangerous lurked just beneath the skin. Elizaveta did not know exactly what this thing was, and she suspected that even if she had known, there might be no name for it. But she did know where it came from. Elizaveta had sensed it at her first meeting with Pekkala, and she knew instinctively to keep her distance from it. But now it appeared to have spread, as she had always worried that it might, into the very soul of the man with whom she planned to spend her life.

  Elizaveta had warned Kirov about Pekkala. Death follows in his path, she had said, but Kirov had taken no notice.

  In spite of these misgivings, she could not help but marvel at the awkward but strangely functional way in which these two men muddled through their work. They were both brilliant, each in his own way, but the genius in them seemed to have come at the cost of things which normal people took for granted. Pekkala, for example, lived a life of such spartan self-neglect that it appeared as if someone had forgotten to inform him he was no longer a prisoner in the Gulag. And Kirov, at once so innocent and effortlessly lethal, on most days could not even pluck up enough courage to look Sergeant Gatkina in the eye.

  Elizaveta was a newcomer in this curious little world. No matter how welcome Pekkala and her husband tried to make her feel, she knew that she would never fit in. And at no time did she feel it more strongly than at these Friday afternoon meals, with the old stove wheezing in the corner and sunset pouring through the dusty windows.

  ‘Remember to save some for Zolkin,’ said Pekkala, as he fetched a handful of battered knives and forks from a tin on the mantelpiece and began to set the table, which was made from two desks pulled together for the occasion.

  Zolkin, their driver, was a loud and cheerful man with a thick neck and a wide, smooth forehead that looked strong enough to be used as a battering ram. His narrowed eyes gave him an air of hostility, which vanished as soon as he smiled. In that moment, all the harshness vanished from his face and he could be seen for what he really was: kind, ingenious and loyal.

  A recent transplant from the wilds of western Ukraine, Zolkin had settled quickly into the frantic pace of Moscow life. At that moment, he was on his way back from a junkyard in Vorobjevo, where he had spent the day scrounging up parts for their Emka saloon. After his initial dismay at learning that he would not be the driver of an American lend-lease Packard or perhaps a Mercedes newly requisitioned from the reconquered territories, but rather a battered old Emka Mark I, Zolkin had thrown himself into rebuilding the carburettor, replacing the exhaust system and changing the oil, a task which Kirov had neglected to perform for over a year and which Pekkala had not realised was necessary at all.

  ‘There’ll be enough for him too,’ Kirov told his wife. Breaking eggs two at a time and using only one hand, Kirov prepared the omelettes into which the chanterelle mushrooms would be mixed. The eggs came from a henhouse on the roof maintained by the enterprising caretaker of their building. With their windows open in the summer, they could hear the clucking of the chickens and glimpse the occasional feather carried by a breeze above the chimney pots of Moscow.

  ‘We have just enough time to eat before we head over to the Kremlin,’ said Pekkala.

  ‘Do you know what this is about?’ asked Elizaveta.

  Kirov shook his head.

  The call from Poskrebychev, Stalin’s shrill-voiced secretary, had come in a short time before. Poskrebychev seemed to take a perverse enjoyment in the abruptness of his messages. ‘You are to appear before Comrade Stalin at 6 p.m. today!’ he announced, and had hung up again before Kirov, who answered the phone, had time to ask the reason for their visit.

  Half an hour later, the meal finished and desks put back where they belonged, Pekkala, Kirov and Elizaveta descended to the street.

  Zolkin, meanwhile, had returned from Vorobjevo, the Emka weighed down by spare parts wrenched from a graveyard of vehicles. Pekkala and Kirov waited patiently on the kerb while Zolkin wolfed his omelette off a tin plate, using a spoon which he carried, with the old habit of a front-line soldier, tucked inside his boot. ‘Done!’ he announced, his mouth still full but still managing to smile. After licking the spoon clean, he slid it back into his boot. He handed the empty plate to Elizaveta. Then, overcome by a burst of enthusiasm, he grasped her by the shoulders and kissed her on both cheeks before climbing in behind the wheel.

  *

  Entering the central Kremlin complex after a short drive across town, Zolkin brought the Emka to a stop outside a small, narrow alleyway, at the end of which was an unmarked door. In front of the door stood a guard in a long greatcoat, a Mosin-Nagant rifle at his side.

  ‘Wait here,’ Kirov or
dered Zolkin. Then he reached into his pocket and tossed the driver a cardboard box of cigarettes. ‘We might be a while,’ he added.

  Zolkin nodded thanks, already reaching for his lighter.

  As Kirov and Pekkala approached the door, the guard cracked his iron-shod heels together. There was no need for them to show their papers. The guard knew both men by sight and stepped aside to let them pass.

  Inside, Pekkala and Kirov ascended a narrow, poorly lit staircase to the third floor, emerging on to a marble-floored hallway, at the end of which they could see the white double doors which led to Stalin’s office, flanked on either side by two more guards, each with a submachine gun slung across his chest.

  Arriving at the outer doors, Kirov and Pekkala stopped and, with movements so practised as to be unconscious, reached into their chest pockets and withdrew their pass books, the red canvas covers worn down along the spines to the white threads beneath the dye. Although there had been no need to show their passes at the entrance to the Kremlin building, here that task was necessary. Nobody, no matter how well known, could enter Stalin’s inner chambers without the necessary paperwork.

  The doors were opened for them and they passed through into the waiting room, which was Poskrebychev’s private domain. Only with his permission could those who had come this far continue their journey into Stalin’s office. This made him, although not a man of any high official rank, one of the most powerful people in Russia. He sat at a desk which was dominated by a large black intercom box that connected him personally with Stalin. Poskrebychev had long ago discovered that, by switching the intercom button off and then halfway back to on again, the green ‘connected’ light would not be triggered and he could still listen in on anything said in Stalin’s chambers. As a result of his eavesdropping, Poskrebychev knew almost every secret worth keeping in the country. Sometimes, he would lie awake at night, in the tiny, dingy apartment where he had lived for more than a quarter of a century without a touch of fresh paint on the walls, terrorised by the vastness and the horror of his own forbidden knowledge.