For Nicolay Talin the Kremlin was a joy. Not because it was the fount of an ideology, far from it, but because its epic history appealed to the Siberian in him. As he walked through its grounds this November day, with the first snow on the ground freshly crisped by frost, with ice-dust sparkling in the sunlight, he marvelled at its fragile elegance conceived in violence.
Talin knew his Kremlin as well as he knew his spacecraft. Here in the twelfth century the natives built a wooden stockade, a kreml, to protect themselves against the Mongol hordes. Thereafter it was taken, sacked, freed, by Mongols, Tartars, Turks, Poles, Swedes … Here Ivan the Great reigned – demanding the title Tzar (Caesar) – and built the cathedrals of the Annunciation and Assumption; here was born Ivan the Terrible who terrorised his own countrymen and was not above stuffing his enemies full of gunpowder and exploding them – to his credit he built St Basil’s Cathedral, with its cluster of spun-sugar baubles, in Red Square.
Here in 1613 the Romanov dynasty was born, to last three centuries until in 1917 it reached its bloody end and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin installed the Supreme Soviet in the Grand Palace.
Napoleon reached the Kremlin, Hitler failed; both were ultimately beaten by a land and its people whose spirit was crystallised here in the Kremlin, and both should have known better.
Talin and Sonya often visited the parts of the Kremlin grounds open to the public when Talin was on leave. They met beside the dumb 200-ton hulk of the Tzar Bell, which crashed from its tower during the fire of 1737, they walked the cobbled squares, they held hands watched inscrutably by a bronze and granite Lenin.
This morning Sonya wasn’t with him, she was rehearsing at the Bolshoi. But he feit she was beside him and smiled at her, and two fur-hatted militia stamping through Cathedral Square agreed that the blond, arrogant-looking man in the Western-styled topcoat and sealskin shapka was as drunk as Ivan’s Bell Tower, knocked out of alignment by Napoleon’s gunners.
They were not to know that, later that day, he intended to ask the girl they couldn’t see to marry him.
But first he had to meet Oleg Sedov in a bar off Petrovka Street, not far from the Bolshoi. He left the Kremlin and walked across Red Square, heels tapping on the cobbles. Sometimes Talin felt like grabbing a clutch of gawping tourists and telling them that its real name was Krasnaya Ploshchad, Beautiful Square, and that Red had nothing to do with politics, only its colour. Or hauling them off to see the real Russia outside the Intourist guide books. Siberia, of course; or the bar where he was meeting Sedov for that matter.
The cold crackled in his nostrils, he breathed it deep into his lungs as others inhale cigarette smoke.
On the far side of the Square he climbed into his red Moskvich, an ageing but neat little car that butted through the sparse traffic.
He was lucky to have a car, but he was a cosmonaut and therefore one of the élite, like authors (approved by the State), officers of the Party and the Services, academics, doctors, footballers … Privilege it was true, but that didn’t bother him. He was entitled to it and, in his book, Communism should be the equal distribution of wealth not poverty.
Sedov thought otherwise.
You could see it the way he dressed as he leaned against the bar peeling shrimps and small crabs and dropping their shells on the floor. His bruised shoes looked as though they were made from cardboard, his fawn suit beneath his blue parka was East German rubbish tailored to fit a coathanger.
Talin had come to tell Sedov that tonight he was going to propose to Sonya; he told him most things.
‘Beer?’
Talin nodded, pointing at the plate of crustacea, prawns on a good day but not today. ‘And some of those.’
Sedov ordered two brown bottles, fluted like barley sugar, of tepid beer, black bread and more seafood. The bar, as basic as a barn, was crowded with men, cheeks polished by the cold, talking and guzzling. Listening while Sedov ordered, Talin picked up snatches of football – Dynamo’s prospects – sex, wages … no politics.
They drank. Sedov wiped foam from his lips. ‘You’re looking remarkably cheerful,’ he said.
‘I’ve got reason to be.’
‘Good news?’
‘I think so.’
‘I have news, too. From the First Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Air Force.’
‘Really?’ Talin refused to look surprised; he was used to Sedov’s dark humour; he searched the face of his friend and mentor, eyebrows charcoal black, shadow of a cleft in the chin. ‘And what does the First Deputy Commander-in-Chief have to say?’
‘He wants you to get. married,’ Sedov said, popping a morsel of crab meat into his mouth.
Talin grinned, waiting for the rest of the joke; when it didn’t come he began to roll a pellet of black bread between his thumb and forefinger; the sparkle that had been with him all morning faded.
‘He wants me to get married?’
‘He’s a romantic,’ Sedov said. ‘But, to be fair, he’s merely conveying a message from the image makers.’
‘Married to anyone in particular?’
‘To Sonya Bragina, of course.’
‘Supposing I don’t want to marry Sonya Bragina?’
‘But you do, don’t you?’ Sedov stared at him over the rim of his glass.
‘I did.’
Sedov ordered another couple of beers from the headscarved woman behind the bar and said: ‘I don’t know why you’re being perverse. Both you and the General want you to marry Sonya.’
‘What the hell’s it got to do with him or anyone else?’
Two men in spaniel-eared fur hats pushed their way into the bar bringing a gust of cold air with them. ‘You know how it is,’ Sedov told him, ‘you and Sonya are featured in every magazine in the Soviet Union. Readers are beginning to think it’s time you made it legal. It’s quite permissible for husbands to be unfaithful to their wives but young people living in sin … that’s a different story.’
‘I thought,’ Talin said, flattening the pellet of black bread, ‘that the Cult of Personality was discouraged.’
‘Ah, if you’re a big wheel in the Kremlin, yes. If you’re a young man and a beautiful girl who personify the spirit of Soviet youth, no.’
‘Some big wheels seem to get their fair share of publicity.’
Sedov held up a warning finger.
The sunlight outside had faded. Or was it the grime on the windows? Talin said: ‘As a matter of fact I was going to ask Sonya to marry me this evening.’
He noticed a fleeting change of expression on Sedov’s face. Pleasure? Regret? It was a difficult face to read; theirs was a difficult – no, unusual – relationship; it had endured since university when Sedov, responsible for indoctrination of young cosmonaut hopefuls, had singled him out for special attention. In appointing Sedov for that job the KGB had chosen well; he hadn’t been too old – mid-thirties – and he had himself been a cosmonaut and therefore a hero. Talin who had lost his father when he was twelve had responded to his advice: Don’t kick the system, it kicks back. And Sedov whose only child had been stillborn had responded to him.
So here we are, Talin thought, father-and-son, adviser-and-pupil, fellow cosmonauts, friends, discussing my marriage. An unusual relationship.
‘She will accept, of course,’ Sedov said.
‘I said I was going to ask her. Before a bureaucratic match-maker interfered.’
A