4
The woman stood in the small sunlit kitchen watching the boy as he ate his Jell-o and and ice-cream. He was her sister’s son and she had been pleased to have him. He was a bright, cheerful boy and had done well in his first year at the school. He was no trouble, he did as he was told and the Californian sunshine suited him. The chronic cough had disappeared after a couple of months.
When she reached for his empty plate she said, “D’you want some more, boy?”
He shook his head. “No more thank you, aunt.”
“I had a letter from your mother today. She sends you her love and told me to tell you that she’s very pleased that you’re doing so well at school.”
“Why isn’t she write to me?”
“Why doesn’t she write to me.”
“Why doesn’t she write to me?”
“There are problems, boy. Government regulations and so on. It’s not her wish, you can be sure of that.”
“What else she say?”
“She says there’s still snow in Moscow and she’s sending you photographs of the new apartment. Two rooms she says. She’s very lucky.”
“Why doesn’t she come and live here too?”
She walked into the small kitchen with the empty dishes. “They wouldn’t allow that.”
“Why do they allow it for me then?”
“I don’t know, boy. All I know is the people in Moscow gave permission and here you are. What homework have you got?”
“Not much. Can I play with the Carter boys first?”
“Where?”
“In the park.”
“OK. But you’ve got to be back by seven.”
“Thanks. What does goose mean, aunt?”
“It’s a bird. You had goose at Christmas.”
“Tom Carter said old man Field had goosed Jenny and he was reporting him to the sheriff.”
“That’s a vulgar word, boy. Not a word you should be using nor young Carter neither.”
“But what’s it mean?”
“I guess in that case it means grabbing a girl’s backside. Now run on with you or you’ll be back before you’ve started.”
It wasn’t until 1938 and Konrad Molody was sixteen that he eventually went back to Moscow. It took him a few weeks to settle down. He missed the San Francisco sunshine and his friends, and Moscow seemed grim after the free and easy time in Berkeley with his aunt. But there were compensations. He spoke fluent and almost perfect English, and he had been given a place at Moscow University and that meant a sure career in some government department.
At the end of his first year at university he had been interviewed by two men. They were both Red Army officers. One a major, the other a lieutenant-colonel. They both spoke excellent English and they had talked English for most of the time, asking him about his five years in the United States. They obviously knew the United States better than he did but they talked as if he were the expert, especially on the details of everyday life. They were unlike any army officers he had talked with before. They were almost like Americans. Easy-going, amused and amusing, and no hint of using their rank. They seemed to know quite a lot about him and his background, but they gave no hint as to why they had talked with him.
When he saw one of them again, the colonel, the Germans were already into the Ukraine. Five hundred thousand Russians had been killed or captured when they took Kiev. And now an army of a million men, seventy-seven German divisions under Field Marshal Bock, were heading up the open road to Moscow. Molody had been recruited into the Red Army and was driving an ammunition truck for an artillery battery. He had no uniform, just a band round his arm with a red star. A despatch rider had brought him a message to report back to the temporary headquarters in a bombed-out shop by the railway station at Volchonka-zil, one of the southern suburbs of Moscow.
Molody stood there in the flickering light of a paraffin lamp, his civilian clothes in tatters and his face pale and drawn with hunger and exhaustion.
“D’you remember me?”
“Yes, comrade Colonel.”
“Have you kept up your English?”
“Yes, Comrade.”
“Where are your parents?”
“My father died a long time ago. I don’t know where my mother is. Our block was shelled but I heard that she survived.”
“I’m sending you on a training course. You’ll be leaving Moscow tomorrow.” He looked at the youth’s ragged figure. “Have you got any other clothes?”
“No, Comrade Colonel.”
“You’d better come back with me. My car’s outside.”
“I’ll have to report to my officer.”
“Don’t bother. He knows. Let’s go before they start the night barrage.”
The colonel drove him to a villa way out of Moscow on the road to Vladimir. The rooms had been turned into offices and an officers’ mess. He was given a meal and then told to be ready at six o’clock the next morning. He slept on a mattress on the floor of an empty room.
It was still dark at five o’clock but he was up and waiting. He was driven to an airstrip near Yaroslav. It took ten days by plane and trains to get to Sverdlovsk.
The training school was outside the city in a clearing in the forest. Rows on rows of wooden huts behind a ten-foot stockade with an outer perimeter of barbed wire. It was to be his home for almost five years. The training he received as a future intelligence officer was thorough and comprehensive, and the extra year had been because he spoke fluent English. He attended lectures with four others on Canadian, US and British history, politics and armed forces. He himself gave several talks on his boyhood in California.
During all the remaining years of the Great Patriotic War he lived at the training school. Well fed, healthy and cut off from any aspect of the war. The war might not have existed for the
