He was wont to flick whole scoops of ice cream at her sometimes, even when her friends were at dinner. If fact,
He had been so kind since mother died. As she grew into her teenage years, Natalya came to understand how hard that time must have been for him, with so many responsibilities to take him away from the family.
“
Her father waved over their housekeeper, Valechka, to clear away the dishes. “You do not like it here?” he mocked his daughter gently. “You would have me send you away again?”
“No, but we have not been on holiday since the war started. And you have sent all of my books away. The apartment is very dark, and it always feels so empty. Can’t we go to the seaside, like we used to? The fascists have gone, haven’t they?”
“
Natalya was reaching the age when she would soon be able to fight, just like her brother—well, hopefully better than her brother, who was a hopeless lout and a drunk, from all she’d heard. But she knew better than to broach that subject with her father. Since the news of the miracles, he swung between periods of black depression and unrestrained bouts of fevered joy. She worried that it was another symptom of his weariness with the war. He had even turned his legendary temper on her once, storming into the apartment one evening, slapping the homework from her hands, and shaking her violently, shouting,
She had no idea what he was talking about, but the outburst terrified her. So many of their friends and relatives had disappeared that she feared she may have said something irresponsible or ill-considered, something that might have been overheard by a zealous informer. Her father’s rage seemed tainted with a fear that she had never known before, and like the little girl she had once been, she found her parent’s terror infectious. Within minutes, she was shaking and blubbering and begging him to tell her what she’d done. The fire had gone out of his eyes immediately, and he’d collapsed into a chair, awkwardly pulling her down with him, onto his lap, where she had sat for so many hours as a child. He’d held her tightly to him, wiping her hot tears away.
They had never spoken of the incident again.
Her father’s eyes clouded over now as he spoke about the Germans, and she wished she hadn’t mentioned them. He held a piece of black bread in his hands, which he had probably been meaning to throw into her soup. Now it seemed forgotten.
“I received a very good mark for my essay on
A phone rang, and was answered by Valechka. She said a few words and hung up. “They have called for you,” the housekeeper reported.
Natalya’s father nodded, and the change came over him. He stood up, patted her on the head, and apologized for leaving before dinner was over. “I have important work,” he explained, and he shrugged.
“I know,
Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party and premier of the Soviet Union, pushed back his chair and smiled absently. “I sometimes miss Gorky,” he said. “He was a great loss. Study hard, Natalya. You will have to make your way alone in this world when I am gone.”
He shrugged on a heavy trench coat and walked out of the apartment.
The office was located in the same building as Stalin’s apartment, in the old Senate building, sometimes called the Yellow Palace. In the time line from which the Multinational Force had arrived, it remained the center of Russian power. The Cabinet still met there, where the Politburo had reigned. Presidents Putin and Dery had both governed from the same building; Putin’s chief of staff and Dery’s national security adviser actually working at the same desk in the same converted corridor that had once housed Stalin.
Beria was privy to all this information. As were Malenkov, Poskrebyshev, and, of course, Stalin himself. The researchers who had compiled the data from the
As Beria waited in the anteroom, he wondered idly at his own fate. The air between him and Malenkov, who sat in another armchair as far away as possible, was frozen with malice. It was a fact that Malenkov would betray him, conspiring with Khrushchev and Molotov to charge him with anti-state activities. Beria would have been executed in 1953.
Well, Khrushchev was no longer an issue, and before long, Malenkov and Molotov would join him. Just as soon as Beria could convince the
Beria’s face was a cast-iron mask, but his gut burned with acid at the memory of
Malenkov, he noted with bleak satisfaction, appeared to be no more comfortable than he. The fat faggot looked even more like a weeping wheel of cheese than normal. Like an old woman with her rosaries, he fingered that stupid little notebook that was labeled
It was getting late, which meant that Stalin would soon arrive at the Little Corner to begin work. He lived nocturnally, and had done so for years. It didn’t bother Beria. As a secret policeman, he preferred the darkness. He considered opening his flexipad and doing some file work, but neither he nor Malenkov had moved since they’d arrived, and it seemed as if to do so now would be to give away an important advantage. So Lavrenty Beria sat in the funereal waiting room, with its shoulder-high dark wood panels, its polished floors and dreary drapes, its worn red and green carpets and, of course, its guardian, the unchanging Poskrebyshev, sitting at his immaculate desk, scratching at papers with his fountain pen.
Beria wondered if it was significant that Stalin’s secretary did not have a flexipad. They were precious instruments, rare and valued, not just for their near magical powers, but for the status they conferred on those chosen few who were authorized to possess them.
Stalin had three, but he almost never used them. He still carried his most important documents around wrapped up in newspaper, and filled his pockets with scraps of paper covered in crayon scrawl—everything from the number of T-34s produced last month to the latest results of the never-ending search for traitors, and they pored through the enormous library of the British warship.
At last, Stalin appeared and bade them both enter his sanctum. The Soviet leader’s office was a long, rectangular space, lined with heavy drapes but well ventilated, which it had to be because of the ornate Russian stoves that lined the walls. As winter closed in, the
“You tested Khrushchev?” Stalin asked without preemption. “He confessed?”
Beria knew the question was directed at him. “Another miracle, comrade. He would have signed a statement saying he was Hitler’s mistress, if I’d asked. And we were right to imagine that the drug protected him from feeling even the harshest interrogation. Again, I believe I could have shot him in the genitals and he would not have flinched. At least not much.”
Stalin turned his flat, Asiatic glare on Beria. “A pity we did not discover this earlier. When we still had some