Sashenka (16 page)

The Zeitlins, Lala discovered, were Jews. She had never met Jews before. There were no Jews in her village in Hertfordshire and Lord Stisted knew no Jews, although Lady Stisted talked disdainfully of the unscrupulous Jewish diamond millionaires from South Africa and the thousands of filthy Jewish cutthroats from Russia who had turned the East End into a “rookery of crime.” Audrey had been warned that Jews were not good people to work for—but she knew her own position would not stand too much scrutiny. The Zeitlins for their part were delighted to find a girl who had worked in a noble London household.

They suited each other—especially as the Zeitlins seemed very civilized Israelites.

The moment Mrs. Lewis arrived, indeed before her cases had been taken to her room, Ariadna, who looked dazzling in a dress of turquoise crépe de chine, led her into a nursery to meet her charge.

“Here she is!
Voilà ma fille
,” said Ariadna in her pretentious FrancoEnglish. “She almost killed me when she was born. Never again. I’ve told Samuil—from now on, I deserve some fun! She’s an unbiddable child, ungrateful and unruly. See if you can tame her a little, Mrs. Linton—”

“Lewis, Audrey Lewis, madame.”

“Yes, yes…from now on, she’s yours.”

It was at that meeting that Mrs. Lewis had become Lala, and had fallen in love with Sashenka. She herself was in her teens; this child not that much younger. Her doctor in London had told her after the abortion that she would never have a child of her own and suddenly, passionately, she wanted to nurture this young girl.

The child and her governess needed each other and so Lala became Sashenka’s mother, her
real
mother. What fun they had: skating and sleigh rides in winter, carriage rides, mushroom collecting and blackberry picking at Zemblishino in the summer, always laughing and always together.

The Zeitlins traveled constantly, to Odessa and Baku and Tiflis, by train but in a private compartment. Lala studied Russian on the long trips.

In Baku they stayed in a palace that Zeitlin’s father had had copied from a French château: they promenaded on the seafront surrounded by a phalanx of
kochis
, armed bodyguards sporting fezzes, wielding Berdana rifles. In Odessa they stayed at the Londonskaya Hotel right on Seaside Street, just above the famous Richelieu Steps; Lala spent her free time sitting in cafés, eating sturgeon kebabs on Deribaskaya. But her English heart remained in Tiflis.

Spring was a glory in Tiflis, magical Tiflis in Georgia, Tiflis the capital of the Caucasus, midway between the Zeitlin oil wells in Baku, on the Caspian Sea, and the Zeitlin oil tankers in Batum, on the Black Sea.

There the Zeitlins rented the mansion of a penniless Georgian prince, on a cobbled lane nestled into the steep slopes of Holy Mountain. Russian colonels and Armenian millionaires called at the house. Ariadna greeted them, laughing under her breath, from among the vines on the balcony, her hungry white teeth and violet eyes glistening. She never visited the nursery.

“Lewis and child are coming with the baggage” was her line. But even though he was so busy, Zeitlin would drop in on the nursery. He seemed to prefer it to Ariadna’s “at homes” full of officers and bureaucrats in frock coats and top hats, sashes and shoulder boards. In the highest circles, children were to be admired briefly and then removed from sight, but Zeitlin adored his Sashenka and kissed her forehead again and again.

“I must go back to work,” he’d say. “But you’re so sweet, darling Sashenka. Your skin is like rich satin! You’re good enough to eat!”

One day, during a rare evening off work, Lala dressed in her Sunday best and a parasol and promenaded down the main avenue, past the white Viceroy’s Palace (where, she’d heard, Ariadna had shocked the officers’ wives with her bare shoulders and her frenzied dancing). The Tiflis streets smelled of lilac and lily of the valley. She passed theaters, opera houses and mansions on her way to Yerevan Square.

She’d been warned to be careful of the square and she soon realized why. The noisy, filthy side streets seethed with Turks, Persians, Georgians and mountain tribesmen in the brightest and wildest costumes, wielding daggers and blunderbusses. Urchins or
kintos
scampered through the crowds. Water sellers and porters pushed wheelbarrows. Officers walked their ladies but there were no women on their own. Barely had Lala stepped into the square when she was surrounded by a mob of urchins and salesmen, shouting in their own languages, all offering their wares—carpets, watermelons, pumpkin seeds and lobio beans. A fight broke out between a Persian water seller and a Georgian urchin; a Chechen drew a dagger. It was early evening and still boiling hot. Jostled and harassed, with sweat pouring down her face, Lala was afraid. Then, just as she began to panic, the crowd parted and she found herself being pulled into a phaeton.

“Mrs. Lewis,” said Samuil Zeitlin, in an English blazer and white trousers, “you’re brave but silly venturing out here on your own. Would you like to see the Armenian bazaar? It’s not safe for a lady on her own but it’s most exotic: would you join me?” She noticed he carried a cane with a wolf’s head.

“Thank you, but I should be getting back to Sashenka.”

“It’s a joy to me, Mrs. Lewis, that you so treasure my only child but she’ll be fine with Shifra for an hour,” said her master. “Are you all right? Then let’s stroll. You’ll be safe with me.”

Zeitlin helped her down from the phaeton and they plunged into the wild crowd. Urchins offered Georgian snacks, Persians in fezzes poured water from wineskins; Russian officers in jodhpurs and goldbuttoned tunics strode past; Circassian tribesmen with sabers and coats with pouches for bullets dismounted from their tough ponies. The sounds of hawkers shouting, “Cool water, over here!” and the smells of fresh bread, cooking vegetables and heaps of spices were intoxicating.

Zeitlin showed her the steep alleyways and dark corners of the bazaar where bakers baked flat Georgian
lavashi
, Armenians displayed
kindjal
daggers and silverchased saddles, Tatars sold sherbet prepared by their veiled women in back rooms, stopping sometimes to kneel on Persian carpets to pray to Allah, and a Mountain Jew played a hurdygurdy. As they walked, she put her hand through Zeitlin’s arm: it seemed only natural. In a little café behind a stall selling spices, he bought her an iced sherbet and a glass of Georgian white wine that was stone cold, fruity, slightly sparkling.

It was dusk. The warm streets, steaming with the smells of hot Georgian cheesecake—

khachapuri
—and Armenian shashlik lamb, and reverberating with the laughter of women from balconies and the clip of horses on the cobbles, were still crowded and mysterious.

Men brushed against her in the shadows. The wine made her head spin a little.

She dabbed her forehead with her handkerchief. “Perhaps we should go home now.”

“But I haven’t shown you old Tiflis yet,” he said, leading her down the hill, through tiny winding streets of crumbling houses with leaning balconies embraced by ancient vines.

No one else was out in these streets and it was as if Zeitlin and she had stepped out of real life.

He opened an old gate, using a chunky key. A watchman with a spadeshaped white beard appeared and gave him a lantern. They were in a lost garden, draped in rich vines and honeysuckle that breathed out a heady perfume.

“I’m going to buy this house,” said Zeitlin. “Doesn’t it remind you of a Gothic novel?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, laughing. “It makes me think of ghostly women in white gowns…

What was that book by Wilkie Collins?”

“Come and see the library. Do you like books, Audrey?”

“Oh yes, Monsieur Zeitlin…”

“Call me Samuil.”

They entered a cobbled courtyard, thick with creepers that reached up to the balconies.

Zeitlin opened some bolted wooden doors into a cold stone hall decorated with bronze engravings. Inside, they found themselves in a highceilinged room paneled in dark wood and hung with dark lace curtains. He paced around lighting bronze lanterns with green shades until she could see this was a library. The Karelian pine bookshelves were full and more books were piled so high that in the midst of the room they formed a table and one could sit on them like chairs. The walls were covered with the strangest curiosities—the heads of wolves and bears, ancient maps of the world, portraits of kings and generals, Chechen sabers, medieval blunderbusses, pornographic postcards, socialist pamphlets, Orthodox icons, the cheap mixed with the priceless. A lost world. But it was the books in so many languages—Russian, English, French—that delighted her most.

“Take any books you want,” Zeitlin told her. “While we’re here, you must read whatever you like.” She followed him outside.

Their eyes met and glanced away and then met again in the darkening light of this perfumeheavy garden, the air so thick with the breath of vines and that special Georgian appleandalmond scent of
tkemali
blossom that she could hardly breathe. She could smell his lemon cologne, his acrid cigar, and the sweet wine on his breath.

She would have done anything at that moment in the garden of the old house in Tiflis, anything he asked of her—yet just when she thought he was going to kiss her, he’d stepped back abruptly and left the garden. They hailed a phaeton on Golovinsky Prospect.

Next morning, when she brought Sashenka in to see Zeitlin at breakfast—madame of course was still sleeping—Lala was grateful that he had not touched her. Giving her a distant smile and a “Morning, Mrs. Lewis,” he kissed his daughter and returned to reading the shipping prices in his
Black Sea Gazette
. Neither of them had ever mentioned that evening again.

Since then, Lala’s days had been full of Sashenka and she had no time or inclination for gentlemen friends. But recently, Sashenka had grown up much too fast. The Silberkind had darkened and slimmed down, becoming quiet and thoughtful. “You and I will never marry, will we, Lala?” she had once said.

“Of course not.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Lala did not understand politics but lately she realized that Karl Marx had taken her place in Sashenka’s heart and she knew this was a bad, dangerous thing and it filled her with sorrow. She blamed that cripple with the trumpeting voice, Mendel.

Often, when she had turned out the oil lamp in her little room at the top of the house on Greater Maritime Street, her sleep was interrupted by dreams, wonderful dreams, of that moment with the master in that Georgian garden. As she turned over in bed, her skin flushed, and she imagined her breath against his chest, his lips touching her breasts, his hand between her thighs. Sometimes she awoke trembling all over.

And then, out of the blue, Zeitlin had invited her to the Donan.

“I really want my daughter back and you know her better than anyone,” he had said.

“Let’s meet outside the house and plan her future. It’s too late to enrol her in the Gymnasium on Gagarin Street. I was thinking of Professor Raev’s Academy on Gorokhovaya…”

How differently things had turned out. At the restaurant he had never mentioned Sashenka. It had been like one of her disturbing dreams—yet Lala knew it was wrong and it alarmed her. She needed stability. If the master became reckless, what would happen to the household, to her, to Sashenka?

Lala feared change. The start of the war had been thrilling: she had stood among hundreds of thousands of peasants, workers, maids and countesses on Palace Square. She had seen the Tsar, Tsarina, the pretty Grand Duchesses and the little Heir on the balcony of the Winter Palace, blessing the crowd. Lala, now almost a Russian, had sung the Russian anthem and rejoiced as the recruits marched down Nevsky singing, “
Nightingale, nightingale,
you little bird!”

Now she sensed something terrible was about to happen to her adopted country, yet it was too late for her to return home; she was too worldly, with her fluent Russian and visits to Biarritz and Baku; too set in her ways to start again in another household, and too attached to Sashenka to mother another child. She had saved a lot but not enough to live on.

She saw the bread lines in the streets, and the fast women outside the casinos and nightclubs of St. Petersburg. She read in the newspapers how the armies were retreating, how the Germans had conquered Poland and many of Zeitlin’s forests. She had to be civil to Ariadna’s parents, who were camping in the house, talking in guttural Yiddish and chanting in Hebrew. The Tsar was at the front. Her hero Lord Kitchener, victor over the Mahdi and the Boers, had set out to visit Russia but his ship had hit a mine and he had drowned.

But she still believed that, even though there might be trouble, her Samuil, her baron, would get them all through it.

In all these years, Lala had kept herself to herself, knowing her responsibilities, living modestly, already a spinster destined for a solitary old age, the ghost in the attic of a grand family. Like Shifra, in fact. And yet, well concealed beneath her dutiful blandness, like a frothy brook rushing down a mountainside under a carapace of thick ice, her blood was foaming. That night, as she prepared for bed, she replayed her teatime encounter with the baron. Curiously unembarrassed, they had lain together naked in the
kabinet
at the Donan.

“I’m divorcing Ariadna,” he said afterward. “Marry me, will you?”

For so long her body had been untouched, ignored, that every slightest caress, inside and out, had left marks as if tiny beestings had grazed her skin.

Now, as she looked at herself in the little mirror in her wellordered bedroom, she could feel, deliciously, where he had been. Her skin scintillated. Unused, unknown muscles in tender places fluttered like captive butterflies. Her legs kept turning to rubber. As she waited for Sashenka to return, she tried to read a new book from England but she had to put it down.

She trembled inside and out with the wildest joy.

The bell suddenly rang in her room. This was unusual. As Lala came out, she heard a woman shouting and ran downstairs. Sashenka, pale and drained, stood in the lobby with the front door open, and a bedraggled, murmuring Ariadna reclined on a chair with her head in her hands.