Sashenka (31 page)

Her words sounded indulgently extravagant somehow—not like her at all, and she wanted to take them back.

“You were a Party member before the Revolution, weren’t you, Comrade Snowfox?” said Benya. “You must have been adept at dodging the Okhrana spooks. So are we being followed?”

She shook her head. “No. Our Organs have never been as good at surveillance as the Okhrana was.”

“Careful, Comrade Editor! Rash talk!”

She could see that he was teasing her. “And yet I feel I can trust you.”

“You can, I promise you that,” said Benya. “Isn’t it wonderful sometimes to be able to escape one’s duties and be completely selfish for a while?”

“We Communists can never do that,” she objected. “We mothers can never do it either…”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, just shut up and try it for a bit. Time is so short.”

Sashenka said nothing, but she was shocked and her head spun with a sort of vertigo.

They walked around the Kremlin. The Great Palace shimmered glass and gold beneath the evening sky. They passed the brooding dark modernist labyrinth of Government House on the Embankment, where Satinov, Mendel and many other bosses lived, where so many had been arrested in the dark times, where the elevators had groaned all night, as the NKVD drove people away in their Black Crows. There was no traffic on the streets now, just a couple of horses and carts—and an old lady selling greasy pirozhki from a kiosk.

Moscow, thought Sashenka, once called the city of a thousand cupolas because there were so many churches, is a grim place. Comrade Stalin will beautify it and make it a worthier capital for the workers of the world, but now it’s still partly palatial, partly a collection of villages—and the rest is just a building site. She had one of her periodic pangs of nostalgia for her home city: St. Petersburg—or Leningrad, as it was now called, the cradle of revolution.

I love you, Peter’s creation,
she thought, quoting Pushkin.

“You’re missing Piter, aren’t you?” said Benya, out of the blue.

“How did you know?”

“I can read you, can’t you tell?”

She could, and it made her very uneasy.

They stood on the Stone Bridge, looking down on the Great Palace and the Moskva River, the whole of the city reflected and amplified in tiny detail as if it were resting on a mirror.

“Will you dance with me?” he asked, taking her hand.

“Here?” Goosebumps covered her arms and legs.

“Just here.”

“You really are the most foolish man.” She felt dizzy again, and recklessly young, and her skin scintillated where he touched her as he took her in his arms, confidently, and turned her left and left, back and forth in the foxtrot, all the time singing a Glenn Miller song in an American accent, in perfect tune.

When they parted, his body seemed to leave a burning imprint on her belly where he had pressed her against him. She saw there was another couple on the bridge. They did not react as Sashenka and Golden approached. They were youngsters, he in a Red Army uniform and she in a white coat over a dress with a slit up the side. She was probably one of the girls from the food shops on Gorky Street. They were openly kissing each other with an intense hunger, their mouths wide open, their tongues licking like cats at a dish of milk, faces shining, eyes closed, her curtain of thick flaxen hair getting caught in his teeth, his hands up her skirt, her fingertips on his zipper.

Sashenka felt disgusted: she remembered the couple necking on her street during the Revolution, and Gideon and Countess Loris outside the Astoria—yet she could not take her eyes off the couple and suddenly felt a starburst of the wildest wantonness in her body, and such urgency that she did not recognize herself, so foreign was it to her, so alien. This gulping spasm was so insistently physical that she feared it was her period arriving early to cramp her insides.

Benya towed her along the Embankment with insouciant arrogance, not talking anymore, just singing old romances and gypsy songs:

Ach, those black eyes have captivated me,

They are impossible to forget,

They burn before my eyes

Black eyes, passionate eyes, lovely burning eyes,
how I love you, how I fear you.

I first laid eyes on you in an unkind hour…

When he finished singing, her hand remained in his, first by accident, then tensely, and when she became aware of it she did not try to remove it.

He was flirting with her in an audacious and dangerous way, Sashenka told herself. Didn’t he know who she was? Didn’t he understand what her husband did? I’m a Communist, a believer, she thought, and I’m a married woman with two children. Yet now, in that hot Muscovite night, after twenty years of survival and discipline, and three years of terror and tragedy while thousands upon thousands of Enemies were unmasked and liquidated, she suddenly experienced a flutter of madness in the company of this slight, balding Galician Jew who had ambushed her with his frivolous dance steps, blue eyes and raffish songs.

Benya handed her down a small set of stone steps that led directly to the river’s brim, a secret quay. “No one can see us!” he told her again, and they sat on the steps, their feet just over the water. It should have been muddy and scummy but tonight the Moskva was coated with diamonds that reflected light onto their faces, etching them in purple and bronze, making them both feel younger. A flush spread throughout her body, the sensation of wings beating. She had been powerfully bedded by her husband and had children by him—yet she had never experienced anything like this.

“Did you ever do this as a teenager?” he asked her. He kept reading her mind uncannily.

“Never. I was a solemn child and a very serious Bolshevik…”

“Didn’t you ever wonder what the popular songs were about?”

“I thought they were nonsense.”

“Well then,” he said, “you deserve just an hour in the world of popular song.”

“What do you mean?” she said, noticing his lips, his sunburnt neck, his eyes burning into her. He offered her his last Egyptian cigarette, a Star of Egypt with a gold tip—and it took her back twenty years. He lit it for her with a silver kerosene lighter, then offered her a swig from a flask. She expected vodka; instead, sweetness flooded her senses.

“What on earth is it?”

“It’s a new American cocktail,” he said. “A Manhattan.”

It went straight to her head—and yet she was more sober than she had ever been.

A hulking barge, piled high with coal or ore like a floating mountain, rumbled past them, lying low and rusty in the water. The sailors sat around, drinking and smoking. One was playing a guitar, another an accordion. But when they saw Sashenka, in her white widebrimmed hat and her beaded dress tight across the hips, her gleaming white stockings reflected on the dappled waters, they started to call out and point at her.

“Hey, look over there! A real vision!”

Sashenka waved back.

“Fuck her, man! Kiss her for us! Bend her over, comrade! You lucky bastard!” one of the sailors called.

Benya jumped to his feet, raising his hat like a dancer. “Who! Me?” he called.

“Kiss her, man!”

He shrugged apologetically. “I can’t disappoint my audience,” and, before she could protest, he kissed her on the lips. She fought it for a second but then, to her own astonishment, she surrendered.

“Hurrah! Kiss her for us!” The sailors cheered. She laughed into his mouth. He pushed his tongue between her lips, delving as deep as he could reach, and she groaned. Her eyes closed. Surely no one in the world had ever kissed like
this
.

She had never understood before. In the Civil War she’d been young, but she had been with Vanya then and men like Vanya did not kiss like this. And she had never wanted him to kiss her this way: they’d been comrades first; he had cared for her after her mother’s suicide; they worked closely together during the Revolution of October 1917; and then she’d traveled through Russia on the Agitprop trains and he with the Red Army as a commissar. Afterward, they had met again in Moscow. There was no time for romance in those days: they had moved into an apartment with other young couples, all of them working days and nights, living on carrot tea and crackers. Sashenka was still the straitlaced Bolshevik and that was how she liked it. She’d always recalled her oversexed mother with horror and regret. Yet this insolent Galitzianer, this Benya Golden, had no such inhibitions. He licked her lips, nuzzled her forehead, inhaled the smell of her skin as if it were myrrh—and the pleasure of these simple things amazed her!

She opened her eyes as if she had been asleep for an age. The sailors and the barge were gone but Benya kept on kissing her. The secret places of her body purred. She shifted her position, embarrassed, but every time she moved, her loins felt liquid and heavy. She was nearly forty years old—and she was lost.

“You know, I just don’t do this sort of thing,” she said at last, a little breathlessly.

“Why the hell not? You’re very good at it.”

She must have been a little mad because now she leaned over again and took his head in her hands and started to kiss him back in a way she had never done before.

“I want you to know, Benya, I love your stories. When I read them, I wept…”

“And I love these freckles on either side of your nose…And these lips, my God, they never quite close as if you’re always hungry,” Benya said, kissing her again.

“So why have you stopped writing?”

“My ink is frozen.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She pushed his face away roughly, holding his chin in her hand. “I don’t believe you’re not writing. I think you’re writing secretly.”

He stared out at the river, where the lights of the British Embassy in its stately mansion right opposite glowed in the water.

“I’m a writer. Every writer has to write or he’ll die. If I didn’t I’d shrivel up and rot away.

So I translate articles from socialist papers, and get commissions to work on film scripts.

But they’ve almost dried up too. I’m nearly penniless now, even though I still have my apartment in the writers’ building.”

“Why didn’t you stay in Paris?”

“I’m a Russian. Without the Motherland, I’d be nothing.”

“So what are you working on?”

“You.”

“You’re writing about the secret police and the top of the Party, aren’t you? You write it by hand at night, and hide it in your mattress. Or maybe at the home of some girl in the suburbs? Am I just material for your secret work? Are you using me to see into our world?”

He sighed and scratched his head. “We writers all have something secret that keeps us alive and gives us hope, although we know we can never publish it. Isaac Babel’s working on something secret, Misha Bulgakov’s writing a novel about the devil in Moscow. But no one will ever read them. No one will ever read me.”

“I will. Can I read what you’re working on?”

He shook his head.

“You don’t trust me, do you?”

“I long to trust you, Sashenka. I’d love to show you the novel because no one knows of it, not even my wife, and if I showed it to you, then I would have one reader, one beautiful reader, instead of none and I’d feel an artist again instead of a washedup scribbler in these days when we’ve all become cannibals.”

Benya looked away from her and she sensed, even if she did not see, that there were tears in his eyes.

“Let’s make a pact,” she said, taking both his hands. “You can trust me with anything, even the novel. I’ll be your reader. And in return, if you swear never to hurt me, never to break this confidence, you can kiss me again after sundown by the Moskva.”

He nodded and they held hands, their faces luminous in the summer night like the burnished death masks of pharaohs. Behind her, she heard the call and then the haunting creak of wings as two swans landed with a clean foamy swish on the rippling surface of the river.

She was happier at that moment, in herself and for herself, than she could ever remember.

11

Benya led Sashenka by the hand up the steps from the Embankment and toward the Metropole Hotel. She hung back as the doorman in the top hat and braided tails opened the door, but Benya could tell that she wanted to dance as much as he did.

Benya loved the atmosphere at the Metropole. Even during the Terror, the jazz band went on playing there and he would dance away his troubles to the blare of the trumpets and saxophones. Before 1937, the hotel had been full of foreigners with their Russian girls in French gowns, but now the businessmen, diplomats, journalists and social delegations from abroad sat apart. Before the killing started, Gideon had sometimes brought him here for dinners with important foreign writers. He had met H. G. Wells, Gide and Feuchtwanger. He had heard his patron Gorky give a speech here to the Party writers and theater bureaucrats such as Averbakh and Kirshon. One by one, they had all vanished. Alien elements liquidated! But he had survived, and Sashenka had survived the Terror by some miracle, and it seemed to Benya all of a sudden that tonight they should celebrate being alive.

As they walked together through the doors, they were so close and so in step, momentarily, that he could see the dark wood and polished chrome of the front desk reflected in her grey eyes. But as soon as they were in the lobby, Benya noticed how Sashenka kept apart from him. He realized she was worried that she might be recognized—but she sometimes entertained her writers for the journal here and he was her new writer.

“Relax,” he whispered to her.

The waiters in black coats showed them to a black artdeco table. How different the dining room seemed. The brilliant mirrors, the curling blue smoke rising to the molded ceiling like mist on a mountain, the lights on the stage, the silhouettes of men with their hair
en
brosse
and their tidy mustaches, the gleam of boots, the curve of jodhpur breeches on the Red Army officers, the permanentwave hairdos of the girls—all were infinitely more glamorous tonight.

A girl in a white blouse with a flashlight and a tray of cigarettes and chocolates appeared before them. Never taking his eyes off Sashenka, Benya bought a pack of cigarettes, offering her one. He lit hers, then his own. They said nothing, but when she looked at him, her gaze seemed like the beam of a lighthouse shining out from a friendly shore. The smoke whirled around her in broken circles as if it too wanted to be close to her. Everything in the nightclub revolved around her.