"Close the door, it's freezing."
Karol did as he was told, although the badly fitted door was loose in its frame and barely kept out the cold draughts swirling through the hallways outside.
He looked down at his lover as she looked up expectantly at him, her thin body wrapped in a thin dress that cannot have kept the cold out.
He thought she looked tired and sad, but all he said was, "Where is your husband tonight?"
"He's out. Party business. He could be all night."
Karol nodded, took off his hat and sat on the bed next to Rasa, still wearing his outdoor coat. The tiny apartment had no couch.
Rasa leaned in against him and he put an arm around her distractedly. Even in his misery and in that cold room, he could feel the heat of her body through his coat.
Instinctively, he pulled her closer. Unresistant to both the animal pull of warm female flesh and the more human bonds of companionship, she snuggled into him.
It felt like all they had left.
It had all been so different in Naples.
Eating ice cream under a warm southern sky, watching the locals go about their colourful business, making love in the afternoon and dancing and talking all night long.
The world then had seemed so open then and full of possibilities; philosophical, political, erotic.
But here, in the beating heart of the world revolution, it felt like a world of the dead.
Just a single bare room with a single bed, a table and chairs, a stove burning low and a raging, howling blizzard outside.
When he was a boy in Hamburg, he had loved to curl up in bed at night and listen to the storms rage outside. The worse it was outside, the softer and cosier and safer he felt inside. It had never occurred to him that the storms could cross the threshold.
But now Hamburg was under the heel of that pig, Hitler, and he had been disowned by his father for trying to make a living from his philosophy. He was driven out on the wings of the storm to wherever it would take him.
And now it had taken him here, to Rasa, to Moscow while her husband roamed the dark city performing the delicately brutal dance of the purger and the purged.
Rasa slipped her hand under his jacket. Her fingers pushed through his shirt to touch his skin.
Her touch was as soft and reassuring as it ever was. He placed his hand over it, feeling the sharpness of her fingers in his.
She leaned in and put her head on his shoulder.
They sat side by side in that tiny, cold apartment feeling the basic warmth of human contact.
He remembered Naples.
Colours he had never dreamed of. The smells and tastes. The blue brilliance of the waters. The brownness of her hair loose over bare shoulders.
Her smile. The way her hips curved as she danced, drunk on cheap marsala wine. The softness of her lips. His hand on her waist. Her small ripe breasts in his mouth. Her hot, wet, eager cunt.
He looked down at her. She was asleep.
He lay her down on the bed and stood up.
Part of him wanted to leave. But where else would he go?
