Sashenka (33 page)

Yes, seven thousand rubies to celebrate her and Benya Golden. What had happened to her? she wondered. She could not believe Benya’s uninhibited carnality or the fog of sweat that had blurred that little room. Passing the old university on her right, she turned down little Granovsky Street. Her pink turnofthecentury weddingcake home, the Fifth House of Soviets, was on the left with guards outside. The guards nodded at her. The janitor was hosing down the yard.

She let herself into the apartment on the first floor. She did not turn on the lights but she relished the shining parquet floors that smelled of polish and caught the meager light; she enjoyed the high ceilings, molded so beautifully; and the woody aroma of the Karelian pine furniture, issued by the government. Her parentsinlaw were asleep round the corner of the Lshaped corridor but she turned on the lamp by her bedside, its base a muscular golden bicep holding a bulb surrounded by a green shade. She sat on her bed for a second and caught her breath. Was she betraying everyone she loved? Could she lose it all?

Yet she could not regret what she had done.

She opened the door to the children’s rooms and looked in on them. Would they smell the reek of sin on her? But they slept on angelically. She had not betrayed them, she told herself firmly. She had just found a part of herself.

Sashenka stood looking down on them, then kissed Snowy’s forehead and Carlo’s nose.

Carlo held one of his many bunnies in his arms. She suddenly longed to wake them up and cuddle them. I am still their mother, I am still Sashenka, she told herself.

Just then Snowy, holding her cushion, sat up. “Mama, is it you?”

“Yes, darling, I’m back. Did Babushka put you to bed?”

“Did you go dancing?”

“How did you know?”

“You’re still singing a song, Mama. What song are you singing? A silly song?”

Sashenka closed her eyes and sang softly just for her and Snowy:
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…

What a song she had sung with Benya Golden, she thought. Was he still singing it?

Snowy grabbed her mother’s hand, folded it into her floppy cushion, put them both under her golden head and went back to sleep.

Sitting on the bed, her hand trapped under Snowy’s alabaster cheek, Sashenka’s uneasiness evaporated. She was not Ariadna; she could not remember Ariadna ever kissing her good night. Her mother had become a wanton creature, a lunatic animal. But sitting there on Snowy’s bed, she remembered her mother’s death. She wished they had talked. Why had Ariadna killed herself with her Mauser? Sashenka would never forget sitting beside her wheezing mother, waiting for her to die.

Listening now to the soft breathing of the children, she thought of her father again. How proud she had been that he had not fled abroad but had renounced capitalism and joined the new regime. But she had not seen him since 1930, when he fell from being a “non

Party specialist” to a “former person” and “saboteur” and was sent into a lenient exile in Tiflis, where he’d lived in a single room. During the Terror, Sashenka might have been vulnerable as a “capitalist’s daughter” but she was an Old Bolshevik, an enthusiast even for the Terror, and she had “reforged” herself as one of Stalin’s New Soviet Women.

Vanya’s workingclass credentials and success protected her, but she’d accepted that she could not appeal for her father, help him or even send him packages.

“Let him go,” Vanya had told her. “It’ll be best for him and us.” She had almost appealed to Comrade Stalin, but Snowy had stopped her just in time.

She had last heard Samuil Zeitlin’s gentle, urbane voice—its tone and mannerisms so redolent of their old mansion and life before the Revolution—on the telephone just before his arrest in 1937. Her children had never met him: they believed that her parents had died long before. Sashenka never criticized the Party for the way it treated her father, not even in her own mind, but that did not stop her wondering now: are you out there, Papa? Are you chopping logs in Vorkuta, in the wastes of Kolyma? Or did they give you the seven grams of lead—the Highest Measure of Punishment—years ago?

Slowly she went back to her room, showered, then, collecting Carlo in her arms, she got into bed with him. Carlo awoke and kissed her on the nose. “You’ve found a baby bunny in the woods,” he whispered, and with his mouth still close to her ear, they slept.

The next morning, she had just sat down at her Tshaped desk in the office when the phone rang.

A low humorous voice with that Jewish Galician intonation that immediately, embarrassingly, resonated between her legs, said: “It’s your new writer, Comrade Editor. I wasn’t sure—did you commission that article or not?”

15

Ten days later, Benya Golden lunched as usual at the Writers’ Club with Uncle Gideon.

Later they visited the Sandunovsky Baths and Benya continued on to Stas, the Armenian barber, in his little shop right next door. There was a portrait of Stalin on the wall, an array of metal clippers and naked razors stuck on a magnetic strip, and a plastic plant in the window. The radiogram, always playing at Stas’s place, reported clashes with the Japanese in Mongolia. War was coming. Benya sat in the soft leather chair as Stas bathed his face in foam and warm water.

“You seem happy enough,” said Stas, an old Caucasian with thick oily hair dyed an unnatural jet black and a small raffish mustache. “You’ve got a commission? Or you’re in love?”

“Both, Stas, both, simultaneously! Everything in my life has changed since I last saw you.”

As he luxuriated in the warm towels wrapped around his face and neck, Benya’s spirits soared. He didn’t give a fig for his commission. All he could think about was Sashenka.

Her meltingly husky voice, how she would stroke her short upper lip when concentrating; how they danced, made love, sang, talked, and understood each other “as if we were born under the same star,” he said aloud, shaking his head slowly.

Not a day, not an hour, not a minute passed when he wasn’t consumed by his need to see her, talk to her, touch her. He wanted to feast his eyes on her and fill up his stores of memories, so that even if she was not with him he could almost reach out and feel her. Now he viewed even the most familiar places with reverence, if they were associated with her.

That day he had wandered down Gorky Street. The stars and towers celebrated not the Tsars or Stalin, but her, Sashenka. When he ambled past Granovsky, where she lived, a diaphanous halo illuminated that very street. The NKVD guards were not guarding marshals or commissars, they were guarding his heart, which dwelled there.

Yet with love, there was always suffering: she was married. So was he. And they had met in cruel times. He had once loved his wife, but the struggle of everyday life had ground their passion into routine; they had become brother and sister—or, worse, lodgers in the same apartment that they shared with their little daughter. And Sashenka was—highfalutin romantic phrases failed him—simply the loveliest woman he had ever met. He felt he was sitting atop a dizzying peak, peering down on the glowing earth, crowned with stars.

Could it last? We mustn’t waste a second, he thought.

“What time is it? I’m late. Hurry up, Stas!” He felt impatient suddenly as if he had to tell someone about his ardent secret. “I’m in love, Stas. No, more than love, I’m crazy about her!”

Across town in the Kitaigorod, Moscow’s Chinatown, Sashenka, in the smart scarlet suit she wore sometimes for work, was climbing up a small staircase to the atelier of Monsieur Abram Lerner, the last oldfashioned tailor in Moscow. He worked for the special services section of the NKVD, and it was he who had designed the new marshals’ uniforms when Stalin had restored the old ranks of the army. It was said that he made Stalin’s own tunics but the Master hated new clothes and it was probably just a rumor.

Lerner had taken on Cleopatra Fishman to serve the leaders’ wives. Sashenka knew that Polina Molotov and the other wives all came to her (and that some insisted on paying, while some did not pay at all). Now, at the end of a busy day, she had arrived to collect another new outfit. She waited impatiently in the reception area, where there were piles of
Bazaar
and
Vogue
magazines from America. If a client liked a certain design, she pointed to it in
Vogue
and Cleo and her team of seamstresses would work it up for her. Lerner and Cleopatra, who were not related but had worked together for decades, existed in an island of oldworld courtesy: their atelier was probably the only insti tution in the entire Soviet Union where no one had been denounced or shot over the last decade.

Cleopatra Fishman, a stocky little woman with grey, curly hair who smelled of chicory, escorted Sashenka into the dressing room, where she unveiled the blue silk dress with the pleated flounces on the skirt.

“Do you want to try it now or just take it?”

Sashenka looked at her watch.

“I’ll put it on.” She quickly threw off her clothes—in a way, she reflected, that she would never have thrown them off before—and folded them away into a bag and pulled on her new outfit. She shivered as the silk settled onto her newcast body.

“You’ve had a new hairdo too, Sashenka.”

“The permanent wave. Do you approve?”

The older woman looked her up and down. “You’re glowing, Comrade Sashenka. Are you pregnant? Anything you want to tell old Cleopatra?”

Fifteen minutes later, at 7:00 p.m., in that eyrie at the top of the Metropole, Sashenka, in her new dress and hairdo, her new brassiere, her new perfume and silk stockings, was kissing Benya Golden, who, while his white suit got dirtier and shabbier, was also primped, barbered and bathed.

They made love, they talked, they laughed—and then she brought a package out of her bag and tossed it on the bed.

He jumped up and opened it, weighing it in his hands.

“A little present.”

“Paper!” He sighed. The Literary Fund Shop had refused him any more paper so she had ordered it for him. “Paper’s the way to a writer’s heart.”

They had met at the Metropole every day for ten days, and their relationship had moved beyond mere sexual infatuation. Sashenka had told him the story of her family; he had told her of his upbringing in Lemberg, of his adventures in the civil war, and the many outrageous erotic shenanigans in which he had become embroiled. After twenty years in the grip of Bolshevik officialdom, Sashenka was bowled over by the exuberance of Golden’s life: every disaster became a ridiculous comedy in which he starred as chief clown. His clashes with officialdom—dreary and heartbreaking in anyone else—became hilarious sketches peopled by grotesques. His views on the Socialist Realists, writers and filmmakers, were riotously scabrous, yet he spoke of poetry with tears in his eyes. He lent her books and took her to movies in the middle of the day; they relished Moscow in bloom

—the lilacs and the magnolias—and he even bought her garlands of mimosa and bunches of violets, which came, the shopkeeper assured them, all the way from the Crimea.

“You’ve brought me back to life,” Benya told her.

“What am I doing with you?” she answered. “I feel as if I’m in delicious freefall. When a woman lives a disciplined life for twenty years and then the discipline snaps, she may lose her mind.”

“So you do like me a bit?” he persisted.

“You’re always fishing for more praise, my darling.” She smiled at him, taking in his blue eyes with the yellow speckles that bored into her so intensely, the dimpled chin, the mouth that was always on the verge of laughter. Sashenka realized that though she laughed so much with the children, she had not laughed enough in her life since those early days with Lala. There was precious little laughter with Mendel and Vanya, and now she discovered how many joyless people there were in the world (and especially in the Bolshevik Party). When she was not making love with Benya, they were laughing, their mouths wide open, their eyes shining.

“You need more and more praise, don’t you? I can tell your mother loved you as a boy.”

“She did. Is it that obvious? I was so spoiled.”

“Well, I’m not going to tell you what I think of you, you silly Galitzianer. Your head’s quite swollen enough. Anyway, isn’t the proof of the pudding in the eating?”

“This pudding always wants to be nibbled,” he said.

She sighed. “I want you all the time.”

She was at the window, letting the breeze cool her sweat, wearing just her stockings. He was lying naked and spreadeagled on the bed, smoking a Belomor and wearing nothing but his white peaked cap. She went to him and lay on his limbs, resting her head on her hand, taking his cigarette for a puff and then blowing blue circles into his mouth. But for once, he did not start making love to her.

“I’ve written your article,” he said, not looking at her.

“The Felix Dzerzhinsky Communal Orphanage…”

“…for the Reeducation of Children of Traitors to the Motherland.”

“Well, it must be quite an uplifting institution,” she mused. “The front line in the creation of the new Soviet child.”

“I can’t write it like that, Sashenka. Even if I turned myself into the most coldhearted, cowardly, murderous scum, I couldn’t write it…”

“What do you mean? It’s a story of redemption.” She was shocked by his sudden vehemence.

“Redemption? More like perdition, Dante’s inner circle of hell!” He was shouting suddenly, and she ran a finger over her lips, surprised by his anger. “I don’t know where to start. At a distance it looked very sweet—an old noble house in the woods, probably somewhat like the Zemblishino of your upbringing. Children parading at morning assembly in their white uniforms to discuss the new
History of the Bolshevik Party—Short Course
.

But when I wanted to come inside and observe, the director, a brutish Ukrainian named Khanchuk, made a fuss, although he surrendered when he learned the name of the editor’s husband. Inside, away from public scrutiny, the children are starving, dirty and ill educated. One sixyearold died yesterday—there were cuts and burns all over his little body.