‘Here you are, Comrade.’ He looked at Korolev’s well-worn coat and handed him a second.
Korolev settled into his seat and looked out as part of the wing dropped down at the back and the plane juddered forward, turning to the left. He could see burning oil drums marking a way forward across the flattened snow and he made the sign of the cross in his pocket, feeling his stomach squirm as the plane bounced along, slowly picking up pace. Surely only birds and the Lord belonged above – if only he could have taken the damned train instead. The window offered him a distorted reflection that gave him no comfort – his face looked as pale as a choirboy’s surplice and as miserable as a bereaved mother.
‘Christ protect me,’ Korolev muttered as the plane lurched into the air before landing again with a solid bump and a worrying slide. He was thankful no one could hear him with all the racket. Finally, with the engine whining like an angry swarm of giant hornets, the plane soared upwards and the lights disappeared into the mist.
For a while they flew in a grey world, completely alone, as the plane hauled itself upward, metre by metre, the pressure in Korolev’s ears building as he desperately tried to swallow, before, eventually, they left the milky sea beneath them and he saw a splash of blue sky to the left, which slowly grew so that the dawn sun shone into the cabin, bathing the other passengers in gold. Korolev could see the suburbs of Moscow far beneath him, or at least the rooftops, and a frozen curve of the Moskva River where the morning mist had cleared a thousand feet below. He glanced away from the window and caught Lomatkin looking over at him. Korolev nodded back with what he hoped was polite enthusiasm, but he didn’t like this flying one bit. Not one tiny little bit.
After a few minutes of gritting his teeth so hard he thought there was a chance they might crumble to dust, Korolev decided it would be best to occupy his mind. His gaze fell on Goldberg’s thick envelope and he opened it.
Whoever had prepared the papers had fixed a photograph of Lenskaya to the first page and he quickly replaced it in the envelope, although not before taking a quick squint at it. She was unsmiling in the picture, looking to the side and downwards, her dark hair held back with a ribbon. Pretty, clearly, and there was a certain sexuality about her that was unusual for an official picture. Still, he knew better than to rely on impressions created from a photograph. Whoever had said the camera never lied – well, they’d been lying.
Reading through her Party record he decided that, if nothing else, she must have been tough. An orphan who’d battled her way into the Komsomol, the youth wing of the Party, then the State Film School, and finally the Party itself. Impressive. What was more, her professional career had been exemplary – each teacher, each project leader, each professor, each department head had congratulated her in the most flattering terms. ‘A comrade of the highest moral integrity and the greatest technical proficiency’ was the evaluation of some film director he’d never heard of. He turned a page and came to a sudden stop when Belakovsky’s name caught his eye. He looked up, but Igor Zakharovich, hatless now, was paying no attention to him, being more interested in what was passing beneath them. Korolev returned to the papers – praise, of course, this time for her invaluable assistance on a fact-finding mission to the United States of America two years before. Belakovsky had headed a delegation from the Main Directorate of the Cinematic and Photographic Industries – GUKF for short – and now Korolev remembered where he knew the man from. Belakovsky was the GUKF chairman, no less. An interesting coincidence that he should be on the same plane. Korolev looked at Belakovsky once again, curious. Lenskaya had been admitted to the Moscow orphanage in ’twenty-three at the age of twelve. That was her first bit of luck, as back then most orphans had had to take their chances on the streets. The Lord alone knew how many citizens had died in the course of the Civil War and the famines and diseases that had come with it. Twice as many as in the German War, they said. Maybe more still. And the State had struggled to cope with the aftermath. Still, she must already have been able to read and write, as one of her first acts of political usefulness had been to assist in the teaching of the younger children, and perhaps that had given her the roof over her head that many in the same position had struggled to find.
There was no mention of Lenskaya’s parents, though, or where she’d come from, or indeed where she’d acquired her education, and no information as to how she’d ended up in a Moscow orphanage, and that bothered him. After all, if she was able to help teach other children how to read and write, she’d surely have been able to tell the orphanage about her past. He made a mental note to ask Yasimov to look into it. Perhaps the Party record had been cleaned up to remove an embarrassing detail. She’d had a powerful friend – and such things were not uncommon. It might be nothing, but it would be worth looking into if this turned out to be more than just another suicide.
He turned to the next document. The author’s name and its recipient were blacked out, but it was a report on the film that Lenskaya had been working on when she died. He skipped through the background on the film director Savchenko – he wasn’t so uncultured that Savchenko’s reputation as a premier artist of Soviet cinema was unfamiliar to him. But here was another interesting thing – Savchenko was one more person who’d recently returned from Hollywood. He checked the dates. More interesting still, they’d all been there at the same time. Savchenko had tried to make some socialist cowboy film, or so Babel had told him once. It had been a failure, and he’d come back to Moscow with his tail between his legs. It was a reasonable assumption therefore that this film, The Bloody Meadow, was an attempt by Savchenko to re-establish his socialist credentials.
Of course, the subject matter of the film was tricky: the murder of the ten-year-old Pioneer Pavlik Morozov by his family when he betrayed them as wreckers was an event that could be looked at in different ways. As far as the Party was concerned, the message was clear – even the youngest citizen owed loyalty not to themselves or their family, but only to the State and the Party – even to the point of death. Some citizens, however, and Korolev was one of them, might just harbour the suspicion that the brat had got what was coming to him. So it would be important for the director of such a film to make sure that the correct message was received by all, and that might be a difficult proposition. It seemed this was also the opinion of the author of the report. Concerns have been raised at the highest levels which have led to constructive criticism being passed on to Nikolai Sergeevich Savchenko by GUKF Director Belakovsky and others in explicit and forthright terms. Such criticism has resulted in the reshooting of several scenes and the hiring of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel to assist in rewriting parts of the scenario to place the political aspects of the case at the heart of the film. However, it would appear that N.S. Savchenko has persisted in his failure to address the Morozov incident correctly and has proved unable to show it as an unequivocal example of selfless socialist heroism. Furthermore the changes made by I.E. Babel have not reflected the direction required by the Party. Instead the story is fragmented, portrays sympathy to the traitors and appears ambivalent about Soviet Power. Comrade Belakovsky has made repeated efforts to persuade N.S. Savchenko of the necessity of developing the film within the bounds of socialist realism rather than bourgeois concepts of dramatic and psychological drama. It is to be feared that, following his visit to the United States, N.S. Savchenko is no longer capable, or willing, to portray the murder of Pavlik Morozov within the correct socialist parameters.
Korolev let out a quiet whistle. He didn’t understand exactly what this fellow was going on about, but he understood enough to work out that Savchenko was in trouble up to his neck, as was Korolev’s friend Babel. Korolev pulled out his notebook and made some notes, not convinced any of this was relevant to the case, but not prepared to discount it either. If whoever had written the report was of the opinion that Savchenko’s approach to the film was causing concern amongst Party members involved in the production, then that meant there had been tension, and possibly fear, amongst the cast and crew. If criticism like this was being voiced publicly, it could be as lethal as an aimed bullet. And if the girl had been the subject of criticism, it could be the reason for her suicide.
There was more to be read, including a brief note on Babel, which he took a moment to peruse, pleased to see that Ezhov himself considered the writer politically reliable, if recently unproductive, but by now the aircraft’s vibration was beginning to make him feel unwell and so he returned the papers to the envelope and turned to look out of the window, not without a further twinge of nervousness.
They were flying over a forest that seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see but at such low altitude that Korolev was able to make out individual branches, and the snow that weighed them down. The sense of speed was quite terrifying as the long shadow of the aeroplane raced across the snow-dusted treetops in the flat winter sun. They were following a long straight road which was completely deserted until a cart drawn by two horses appeared beneath them. Korolev caught a glimpse of the terrified face of the peasant as he turned to see what devil was pursuing him, and how the horses seemed to lift in their traces as the plane roared over them. And then they were gone, vanished far behind them.
Soviet Power, Korolev thought to himself. It had a way of coming up on you when you least expected it.
