The Red Dove. Derek Lambert

let’s not believe everything Comrade Orwell had to say about that year – you and I will be flying together in space again in Dove II. May I suggest that before the flight, in December perhaps, you take a couple of weeks off training and go to the Black Sea for your honeymoon?’

      ‘I wish,’ said Talin tightly, ‘that you and the Comrade General would stop trying to market my life. Perhaps Orwell wasn’t so wrong …’

      ‘Our lives have always been arranged, you know that. And let me assure you that it’s not so different in the West. Lives are regulated just as methodically there but the people don’t realise it: they believe they are masters of their own destiny. But they still set their alarms for seven, catch the eight-twenty train, leave the office at five-thirty, switch on television at seven-forty-five and go on vacation every August. Life is a timetable, Shakespeare knew that. All we can do is enjoy the ride in between the stops.’

      ‘I’ve never heard you talk so much,’ Talin remarked. ‘You must be nervous.’

      ‘I’m just telling you not to let our version of the timetable interfere with your feelings for Sonya.’ Sedov zipped up his parka. ‘Personally I think I instilled a little humour into the situation. Imagine a general acting as a go-between.’ He stuck out his hand. ‘Well, I must be off.’

      ‘To report on the success of the mission to the Comrade General?’

      ‘To buy a bottle of vodka to celebrate your engagement,’ Sedov said.

      They shook hands and walked into the street and went their separate ways in the cold bright sunshine.

      The swan died. The curtain fell. The audience erupted.

      In his box in the great red and gold well of the theatre Talin watched the audience clapping and cheering. Sedov should have been with him: nothing was arranged here.

      Beneath him a stout woman dressed in grey was crying; her husband, a balding man in a black suit and open-neck white shirt, put his arm round her.

      The Bolshoi, the gold domes of the Kremlin, wooden cathedrals in the countryside, dachas, Tzarist treasures, icons … they were all the scourge of the Party publicist trying to accommodate the decadent past in the present. The publicist’s mistake was in trying; the extremes and contradictions were an entity, part of the exquisite torment of Russia.

      In the front stalls they were on their feet, these discriminating judges. If they departed after a mere couple of encores then the ballerina might as well retire to teach dancing in Archangel. Tonight Talin lost count of the encores for Bragina who, according to his companions in the box, was comparable with Pavlova. Her arms were full of flowers.

      Talin excused himself from the box; outside he drank a glass of pink champagne in which a glacé cherry bobbed like a cork. Communism! He fetched his coat from the cloakroom and in the street, beneath the Quadriga of Apollo, hailed a cab and told the driver to take him to the Georgian restaurant where he had reserved a table for two.