Sashenka (3 page)

“Luda, ask Pantameilion to decarbonize the PierceArrow in the garage,” said Zeitlin.

“Yes, master,” she said, bowing slightly from the waist: peasants from the real countryside still bowed to their masters, Zeitlin reflected, but nowadays those from the cities just sneered.

As Luda closed the study door, Zeitlin sank down in his highbacked chair, pulled out his green leather cigar box with the gold monogram and absentmindedly drew out a cigar.

Stroking the rolled leaves, he eased off the band and smelled it, drawing the length of it under his nose and against his mustache so that it touched his lips. Then with a flash of his chunky cufflinks, he took the silver cutter and snipped off the tip. Moving slowly and sensuously, he flipped the cigar between finger and thumb, spinning it round his hand like the baton of the leader of a marching band. Then he placed it in his mouth and raised the jeweled silver lighter in the shape of a rifle (a gift of the War Minister, for whom he manufactured the wooden stocks of rifles for Russian infantrymen). The smell of kerosene rose.

“
Calmetoi
, Mrs. Lewis,” he told Lala. “Everything’s possible. Just a few phone calls and she’ll be home.”

But beneath this show of confidence, Zeitlin’s heart was palpitating: his only child, his Sashenka, was in a cell somewhere. The thought of a policeman or, worse, a criminal, even a murderer, touching her gave him a burning pain in his chest, compounded by shame, a whiff of embarrassment, and a sliver of guilt—but he soon dismissed that. The arrest was either a mistake or the fruit of intrigue by some jealous war contractor—but calm good sense, peerless connections and the generous application of gelt would correct it. He had fixed greater challenges than releasing an innocent teenager: his rise from the provinces to his current status in St. Petersburg, his place on the Table of Ranks, his blossoming fortune, even Sashenka’s presence at the Smolny Institute, all these were testament to his steely calculation of the odds and meticulous preparation, easy luck, and uninhibited embrace of his rightful prizes.

“Mrs. Lewis, do you know anything about the arrest?” he asked a little sheepishly. Powerful in so many ways, he was vulnerable in his own household. “If you know something, anything that could help Sashenka…”

Lala’s eyes met and held his through the grey smoke. “Perhaps you should ask her uncle?”

“Mendel? But he’s in exile, isn’t he?”

“Quite possibly.”

He caught the edge in a voice that always sounded as if it were singing a lullaby to a child, his child, and recognized the glance that told him he hardly knew his own daughter.

“But before his last arrest,” she continued, “he told me this house wasn’t safe for him anymore.”

“Not safe anymore…,” murmured Zeitlin. She meant that the secret police were watching his house. “So Mendel has escaped from Siberia? And Sashenka’s in contact with him?

That bastard Mendel! Why doesn’t anyone tell me anything?”

Mendel, his wife’s brother, Sashenka’s uncle, had recently been arrested and sentenced to five years of administrative exile for revolutionary conspiracy. But now he had escaped, and maybe somehow he had entangled Sashenka in his grubby machinations.

Lala stood up, shaking her head.

“Well, Baron, I know it’s not my place…” She smoothed her floral dress, which served only to accentuate her curves. Zeitlin watched her, fiddling with a string of jade worry beads, the only unRussian hint in the entire stalwartly Russian study.

There was a sudden movement behind them.

“Shalom aleichem!”
boomed a broadshouldered, bearded man in a sable greatcoat, astrakhan hat and high boots like a hussar. “Don’t ask me about last night! I lost every kopek in my pocket—but who’s counting?”

The door to the baron’s sanctuary had been shoved open and Gideon Zeitlin’s aura of cologne, vodka and animal sweat swept into the study. The baron winced, knowing that his brother tended to call on the house only when he needed his funds replenished.

“Last night’s girl cost me a pretty fortune,” said Gideon. “First the cards. Then dinner at the Donan. Cognac at the Europa. Gypsies at the Bear. But it was worth it. That’s paradise on earth, eh? Apologies to you, Mrs. Lewis!” He made a theatrical bow, big black eyes glinting beneath bushy black brows. “But what else is there in life except fresh lips and skin? Tomorrow be damned! I feel marvelous!”

Gideon Zeitlin touched Mrs. Lewis’s neck, making her jump, as he sniffed her carefully pinned hair. “Lovely!” he murmured as he strode round the desk to kiss his elder brother wetly, twice on the cheeks and once on the lips.

He tossed his wet fur coat into the corner, where it settled like a living animal, and arranged himself on the sofa.

“Gideon, Sashenka’s in trouble…,” Zeitlin started wearily.

“I heard, Samoilo. Those ideeeots!” bellowed Gideon, who blamed all the mistakes of mankind on a conspiracy of imbeciles that included everyone except himself. “I was at the newspaper and I got a call from a source. I haven’t slept from last night yet. But I’m glad Mama’s not alive to see this one. Are you feeling OK, Samoilo? Your ticker? How’s your indigestion? Lungs? Show me your tongue?”

“I’m bearing up,” replied Zeitlin. “Let me see yours.”

Although the brothers were opposites in appearance and character, the younger impecunious journalist and the older fastidious nabob shared the very Jewish conviction that they were on the verge of death at all times from angina pectoris, weak lungs (with a tendency toward consumption), unstable digestion and stomach ulcers, exacerbated by neuralgia, constipation and hemorrhoids. St. Petersburg’s finest doctors competed with the specialists of Berlin, London and the resorts of Biarritz, Bad Ems and Carlsbad for the right to treat these invalids, whose bodies were living mines of gold for the medical profession.

“I’ll die at any moment, probably making love to the general’s girl again—but what the devil! Gehenna—Hell—the Book of Life and all that Jewish claptrap be damned! Everything in life is here and now. There’s nothing after! The commanderinchief and the general staff”—Gideon’s longsuffering wife Vera and their two daughters—“are cursing me.

Me? Of all people! Well, I just can’t resist it. I won’t ask again for a long time, for years even! My gambling debts are…” He whispered into his brother’s ear. “Now hand over my bar mitzvah present, Samoilo: gimme the
mazuma
and I’m off on my quest!”

“Where to?” Zeitlin unlocked a wooden box on his desk, using a key that hung on his gold watch chain. He handed over two hundred rubles, quite a sum.

Zeitlin spoke Russian like a court chamberlain, without a Jewish accent, and he thought that Gideon scattered his speech with Yiddish and Hebrew phrases just to tease him about his rise, to remind him of whence they came. In his view, his younger brother still carried the smell of their father’s courtyard in the Pale of Settlement, where the Jews of the Tsarist Empire had to live.

He watched as Gideon seized the cash and spread it into a fan. “That’s for me. Now I need the same again to grease the palms of some ideeeots.”

Zeitlin, who rarely refused Gideon’s requests because he felt guilty about his brother’s fecklessness, opened his little box again.

“I’ll pick up some London fruitcake from the English Shop; find where Sashenka is; toss some of your vile
mazuma
to policemen and inkshitters and get her out if I can. Call the newspaper if you want me. Mrs. Lewis!” Another insolent bow—and Gideon was gone, slamming the door behind him.

A second later, it opened again. “You know Mendel’s skulking around? He’s out of the clink! If I see that
schmendrik
, I’ll punch him so hard his fortified boot will land in Lenin’s lap. Those Bolsheviks are ideeeots!” The door slammed a second time.

Zeitlin raised his hands to his face for a few seconds, forgetting Lala was still there. Then, sighing deeply, he reached for the recently installed telephone, a leather box with a listening device hooked on to the side. He tapped it three times on the top and spoke into the mouthpiece: “Hello, exchange? Put me through to the Interior Minister, Protopopov! Petrograd two three four. Yes, now please!”

Zeitlin relit his cigar as he waited for the exchange to connect him to the latest Interior Minister.

“The baroness is in the house?” he asked. Lala nodded. “And the old people, the traveling circus?” This was his nickname for his parentsinlaw, who lived over the garage. Lala nodded again. “Leave the baroness to me. Thanks, Mrs. Lewis.”

As Lala shut the door, he asked no one in particular: “What on earth has Sashenka done?”

and then his voice changed:

“Ah, hello, Minister, it’s Zeitlin. Recovered from your poker losses, eh? I’m calling about a sensitive family matter. Remember my daughter? Yes, her. Well…”

5

At the Gendarmerie’s Temporary House of Detention within the red walls of the Kresty Prison, Sashenka was waiting, still in her sable coat and Arctic snow fox stole. Her Smolny dress and pinafore were already smeared with greasy fingermarks and black dust. She had been left in a holding area with concrete floors and chipped wooden walls.

A pathway had been worn smooth from the door to benches and thence to the counter, which had slight hollows where the prisoners had leaned their elbows as they were booked. Everything had been marked by the thousands who had passed through. Hookers, safecrackers, murderers, revolutionaries waited with Sashenka. She was fascinated by the women: the nearest, a bloated walrus of a woman with rough bronzepink skin and an army coat covering what appeared to be a ballerina’s tutu, stank of spirits.

“What do you want, you motherfucker?” she snarled. “What are you staring at?”

Sashenka, mortified, was suddenly afraid this monster would strike her. Instead the woman leaned over, horribly close. “I’m an educated woman, not some streetwalker like I seem. It was that bastard that did this to me, he beat me and…” Her name was called but she kept talking until the gendarme opened the counter and dragged her away. As the metal door slammed behind her, she was still shouting, “You motherfuckers, I’m an educated woman, it was that bastard who broke me…”

Sashenka was relieved when the woman was gone, and then ashamed until she reminded herself that the old hooker was not a proletarian, merely a degenerate bourgeoise.

The corridors of the House of Detention were busy: men and women were being delivered to their cells, taken to interrogations, dispatched on the long road to Siberian exile. Some sobbed, some slept; all of life was there. The gendarme behind the counter kept looking at her as if she were a peacock in a pigsty.

Sashenka took her poetry books out of her book bag. Pretending to read, she flicked through the pages. When she came across a piece of cigarette paper with tiny writing on it, she glanced around, smiled broadly at any policeman who happened to be looking at her, and then popped it in her mouth. Uncle Mendel had taught her what to do. The papers did not taste too bad and they were not too hard to swallow. By the time it was her turn to be booked at the counter, she had consumed all of the incriminating evidence. She asked for a glass of water.

“You’ve got to be joking,” replied the policeman, who had taken her name, age and nationality but refused to tell her anything about the charges she faced. “This isn’t the Europa Hotel, girl.”

She raised her grey eyes to him. “Please,” she said.

He banged a chipped mug of water onto the counter, with a croaking laugh.

As she drank, a gendarme called her name. Another with a bunch of keys opened a reinforced steel door and she entered the next layer of the Kresty. Sashenka was ordered into a small room and made to strip, then she was searched by an elephantine female matron in a dirty white apron. No one except dear Lala had ever seen her naked (her governess still drew her a bath every evening) but she told herself it did not matter. Nothing mattered except her cause, her holy grail, and that she was here at last, where every decent person should be.

The woman returned her clothes but took her coat, stole and book bag. Sashenka signed for them and received a chit in return.

Then they photographed her. She waited in a line of women, who scratched themselves constantly. The stench was of sweat, urine, menstrual blood. The photographer, an old man in a brown suit and string tie, with no teeth and eyes like holes in a hollow pumpkin, manhandled her in front of a tripod bearing an enormous camera that looked like a concertina. He disappeared under a cloth, his muffled voice calling out:

“OK, full face. Stand up. Look left, look right. A Smolny girl, eh, with a rich daddy? You won’t be in here long. I was one of the first photographers in Piter. I do family portraits too if you want to mention me to your papa…There we are!”

Sashenka realized her arrest was now recorded forever—and she gave a wide smile that encouraged the photographer’s sales patter.

“A smile! What a surprise! Most of the animals that come through here don’t care what they look like—but you’re going to look wonderful. That, I promise.”

Then a yellowskinned guard not much older than Sashenka led her toward a holding cell.

Just as she was about to enter, an official in a belted grey uniform emerged from nowhere.

“That’ll do, boy. I’ll take over.”

This popinjay with some stripes on his shoulder boards appeared to be in charge.

Sashenka was disappointed: she wanted to be treated like the real thing, like a peasant or worker. Yet the Smolny girl in her was relieved as he took her arm gently. Around her, the cold stone echoed with shouts, grunts, the clink of keys, slamming of doors and turning of locks.

Someone was shouting, “Fuck you, fuck the Tsar, you’re all German spies!”

But the chief guard, in his tunic and boots, paid no attention. His hand was still on Sashenka’s arm and he was chatting very fast. “We’ve had a few students and schoolboys in—but you’re the first from Smolny. Well, I love ‘politicals.’ Not criminals, they’re scum.

But ‘politicals,’ people of education, they make my job a pleasure. I might surprise you: I’m not your typical guard here. I read and I’ve even read a bit of your Marx and your Plekhanov. Truly. Two other things: I have a fondness for Swiss chocolates and Brocard’s eau de cologne. My sense of smell is highly sophisticated: see my nose?” Sashenka looked dutifully as he flared narrow nostrils. “I have the sensory buds of an aesthete yet here I am, stuck in this dive. You’re something to do with Baron Zeitlin? Here we are! Make sure he knows my name is Volkov, Sergeant S.P. Volkov.”