Sashenka (42 page)

For them. Any folly, any stupid sentimentality could ruin it.

Her heart drummed, her vision sharpened. She reveled in her heightened senses. On the street, she noticed the janitors watching her as they cleaned their courtyards. The militiamen at the Granovsky corner whispered to one another.

She stopped at the corner and glanced back. Yes: her parentsinlaw had come out into the street. On time. Vanya’s mother swung her usual canvas handbag but this time none of the other gossiping peasants in the courtyard greeted her. Vanya’s father looked toward Sashenka but gave no sign of recognition.

Helped by her husband, Vanya’s mother hobbled on her swollen legs down the street in the opposite direction, smoking a cigarette.

Sashenka turned the corner and headed past the Kremlin on her right, the National Hotel on her left, and then up Gorky Street. Just about now, she knew that Carolina would be coming downstairs with the children, taking them for a walk.

She would lead them in the same direction as the grandmother and grandfather, left out of the door.

The guards in the Granovsky guardpost would watch them impassively: who cared? The NKVD was interested in the parents. Besides, they had no orders. Yet.

Sashenka lingered outside the National. She hoped Carolina and the children had caught up with their Palitsyn babushka and dedushka, who would hand over a tiny canvas suitcase. It belonged to Snowy. The plan was to get the children’s suitcases out of the house without the guards noticing.

The children remained with the grandparents. Carolina took the next right and came into Gorky Street just as Sashenka was about to cross. They greeted each other.

“Time for a coffee, Comrade?”

“Of course.” They entered the National Hotel and ordered a coffee in the café. Sashenka tried to remain caught up in the cloakanddagger moment—but she felt so sick, so desperate, that her gorge rose, and her belly lurched as it had the day that Lala first left her at boarding school and she wanted to chase after her. Frantic, she had broken away from her teacher and sprinted down the Smolny corridors, pushing aside other girls and running outside to the gates, where Lala saw her and cuddled her again. Now that frenzy returned.

But Carolina, bony and expressionless, sipped the coffee, kissed Sashenka briskly, and then hurried off with barely a glance, carrying Carlo’s little case, which contained winter clothes, underwear, soap, toothbrush and three bunny rabbits. Sashenka ran through the items: had they remembered everything? What about Carlo’s cookies?

At the door of the café, Carolina turned back one more time. She and Sashenka exchanged a last beseeching gaze of the most terrible emotions—love, gratitude, sorrow. Then Carolina set her jaw and was gone. The plan was in motion. Vanya had sent the signal with Razum that Sashenka had to act now. Just as Satinov had suggested, so Sashenka and Carolina had arranged.

Sashenka watched the nanny’s thin back with a desperate wild envy. As an amputee feels his absent leg walking, so she felt her own ghostly body running after them, while she still sat in the café. Then her body bunched and twitched and she was on her feet. She started to run after Carolina. She found herself tossing coins for the coffee onto the table. She was running, sweating, her heart thrashing in her chest as if she were having a heart attack, flying almost, tears splashing in her wake like rain on a car windshield. She was on the street.

She looked left and right. Carolina was already gone. God, she
had
to see them again! The sob in her throat became a wild groan, a sound that she had never heard in her life. She sprinted frantically down the side street.

And then she saw them. A streetcar had stopped in the distance, casting sparks in its wake. Snowy was on the first step, waving her pink cushion and laughing, so that Sashenka could distinctly see her wide white forehead and fair curls. Carolina, holding both bags in her left hand, handed up Carlo, who was playing the fool, pretending to march, singing a song.

He was tugging at her sleeve. “Carolina, Carolina, can I tell you something?” Sashenka knew he was saying this but Carolina was up the steps now too. Two soldiers climbed on behind them, both smoking.

“Stop! Carolina! Carlo! Snowy!” Sashenka was actually screaming.

Carolina paid at the little window. Sashenka could see only the tops of their heads, Carlo’s tousled brown hair and Snowy’s buttercolored tresses, catching a speck of sunlight like spun gold. She was ruining everything by running. The NKVD would see her and know she was spiriting them away; they’d arrest her as a spy; they’d throw the children into the Dzerzhinsky Orphanage, shoot them. But Sashenka was out of control, careering forward now, colliding with an old lady whose shopping bag was torn, potatoes rolling on the pavement; still Sashenka ran, tears cascading down her face. But the streetcar, in a shower of sparks, jolted. The doors shut. It gathered speed. Sashenka was catching up and she saw them again: Carolina was helping them into a seat by the window. Just a blurred impression of blue eyes and a milky forehead, and brown eyes and hair—and they were gone.

A man pushed Sashenka out of his path, and she fell into a doorway and sat on the step.

She heard herself howling as her mother had howled when Rasputin was killed. People hurried by, slightly disgusted at her. Slowly she gathered herself.

The grandparents would return to the apartment and tell the guards they were going back to the dacha for the summer. The guards understood because Vanya Palitsyn had been arrested, and they would shrug: who cared?

Sashenka stood up and straightened her clothes. Everyone was safe. Hoping no NKVD informant had noticed her hysteria, she tidied her face, got to her feet and crossed Gorky Street, glancing down to the Kremlin and up at Uncle Gideon’s window. There was no point in calling him though she longed to do so. Her phones might be bugged and he would find out soon enough. She beamed him her love: would he ever know it? Now she thought about her father again: where was he? Would she join him in some forgotten grave? She could not, just could not conceive of her own vanishing from the surface of the turning world.

She chose a different route to Petrovka, not via Pushkin Square but taking the Stoleshnikov Alley. She tried to absorb everything—the little bars there, the Aragvi Georgian restaurant, the shoeshine stall, the kiosk selling newspapers, Zviad the Mingrelian’s barbershop—but nothing stayed with her. Like the night. There was too much to take in.

Where would Snowy and Carlo be now? Don’t even glance at your watch, she told herself.

Suppose you are being observed: they might ask why you are checking the time constantly. But the train to the south was leaving at 10:00 a.m. and now it was 9:43. Her children were on their way.

32

The doorman straightened as Sashenka arrived at work; her secretary, Galya, blushed at the sight of her; Klavdia did not even look up as she passed. Everyone knew that Sashenka was no longer a real person. She was a Former Person; worse, they all knew somehow that she was the wife of an Enemy and Vanya was in the cellars of the Internal Prison of the Lubianka—and so was Benya Golden, her new writer whom she had met at her dacha on May Day night, with whom she had left the office, with whom she had been seen walking…

Sashenka sat at her desk. No one came in. She spent the entire day there, except for a brief visit to the cafeteria, where she ate some borscht alone. She tried to read the proofs of the magazine but could not concentrate. She had known many friends and comrades who had endured shadows and clouds over them but who had continued as if nothing had happened—and they had survived. Like Uncle Gideon. Keep your nerve and you might just keep your children, she promised herself.

She returned home in the evening.

The high ceilings, the shiny parquet floor, the ornate moldings on the walls, the dappled glossy brown of the Karelian pine furniture, the green lamps with the muscular bronze figures belonged to her life with the children. She hated the apartment now. It was echoingly quiet. She longed to look into the children’s rooms. Don’t do that to yourself. It will break you up, send you mad, she told herself. But just a glance?

Dropping her handbag and coat, she rushed down the corridor, throwing herself onto their beds and smelling their pillows, first Snowy’s then Carlo’s. There, at last, she could cry. She imitated their voices and she talked to their photographs. Then she burned their photographs, all of them, and their passports too. Snowy had left most of her cushions and Carlo had left most of his army of rabbits. Sashenka took them to bed with her, company for the sleepless night that lay ahead.

Presently she packed herself a suitcase with her toothbrush, warm clothes, underwear. She chose her best. Why not?

The next day she went to work again, taking her suitcase. And the next day. And the day after that. The stress was making her ill. She had a sore throat, her face was drawn and she could barely eat. At night she dreamed of Vanya and the children. Where were they now?

Three nights on the road: were they with a family? Or in some railway station, lonely, hungry, lost? She talked to the children all the time, aloud, like a crazy woman.

Benya Golden came to her in the night. She awoke filled with regret, guilt, disgust—and, horribly, a feverish excitement. She hated him suddenly. She would like to kill him with her bare hands, gouge his eyes out: was it him, with his smug defiance, his refusal to write, his curiosity about the Organs, his famous friends in Paris and Madrid—was it his connections that would kill her and steal her children? Yes, she had loved him, yes, he had given her the wildest happiness, but now, compared to her love for her children—it was dust!

On the third day, she saw something different in the eyes of the guards. When she greeted the janitor, he looked up toward her apartment and she knew it was about to happen. She stopped on the stairs, almost relieved that this limbo was over.

When she let herself back into the apartment, the study was unsealed and she smelled cloves. She walked past the Red Corner into the sitting room and saw plates of halfeaten food on the diningroom table. A very large man in a specially tailored NKVD uniform lay with his patent leather boots on the sofa. High boots creaking, he got to his feet and gave Sashenka a gleaming white smile. His skin was brown and glossy, his hair kinky, and he had colorful rings on every fat brown finger. His clovescented cologne was so pungent that Sashenka could taste it on her tongue. He was not alone. A couple of other Chekists tottered to their feet, perhaps a little drunk, sniggering.

Sashenka was wearing a pink cotton summer dress. She had had her hair styled recently, slightly curled at the front, arranged the new way in a permanent wave, and her face was made up. She drew herself up to her proudest.

“Comrades, sorry to have kept you. Have you been waiting long? I am Sashenka Zeitlin

Palitsyn, whom Lenin called Comrade Snowfox.”

“Well, comrade, what a nice welcome,” said CommissarGeneral of State Security (Second Degree) and Deputy People’s Commissar NKVD Bogdan “the Bull” Kobylov. “You know Comrade Beria is an admirer of yours?”

Sashenka took a deep breath, nostrils flaring, grey eyes narrowed.

“I’ve been expecting you any minute. I’m almost pleased…”

“Now I see why Comrade Beria speaks so highly of you,” he said.

Like many oversized men, his voice was mellifluous, almost effete. Sashenka despised him. She thought of her children far away—they had been gone for three nights now. She knew that within minutes she would be stepping off the edge of the world but she remembered what she had to do. She coolly took out a cigarette and held it out like a film star.

Kobylov, fluttering his rings on amberskinned fingers, leaned over and lit it for her. She could smell his oily flesh—and those cloves.

“Thank you, comrade.” She inhaled, closing her eyes and blowing out the blue smoke.

Someone was playing the piano in a nearby apartment and a child was singing, a family in a normal world. “What do you want?”

“When it’s a pretty woman,” said Kobylov, wrinkling his nose at her, “I like to come and get her myself.”

33

A thousand miles to the south in the small city of Tiflis, a greyhaired woman was packing an overnight bag. She lived alone in a single room, close to the city center, down a dark, overgrown lane just below the sulphur baths, the old town and the Orthodox church with the round Georgian tower.

Her tiny room, which contained a bed, a lamp, a wardrobe and old photographs of a rich family, all waxed mustaches, bowler hats, sailor suits and shiny limousines, was in an elegant mansion, once the property of a line of Georgian princes, the last of whom had been an eccentric antiquarian, book collector and owner of the sulphur baths. (He was now a taxi driver in Paris.) At the time of the 1905 revolution, he had sold the palace to a Jewish oil magnate based in St. Petersburg. Now the mansion was divided up into small apartments and the princely library on the ground floor was a café, a flamboyant venue of a kind that no longer existed in Moscow or anywhere in Russia proper. But here in Georgia, despite the recent killings that had decimated the intelligentsia, this curiosity shop of a café, with its damp old books, candlesticks overflowing with wax and dense, curling vines covering its steamedup windows, still prospered, serving Turkish coffee and Georgian dishes.

The greyhaired lady worked in the café all day as a waitress. It was not well paid but it was a decent job for those times; she had the correct papers; it was all legal. She kept herself to herself, never chatted with customers or even with the other waitresses, who had given up gossiping about her. It was clear that she was a bourgeois and that she did not belong there, but provincial cities in those days were full of such flotsam and Georgia was more tolerant than anywhere else. It was said that Communism did not extend much beyond the limits of the capital. She had once lived with an older man but he had gone and she showed no interest in discussing her private life.

The waitress’s Russian was excellent, her Georgian more than adequate, but she spoke both with an accent. She was polite to everyone but they noticed she reserved her real solicitude for the library itself. The kitchen and bar had been jerrybuilt between two bookcases at the end of the dark old room. The humidity of the kettles and cauldrons had rotted the woodwork; the books were peeling and warping; the old pictures were mildewed and yellowing—but she did what she could, dusting the books, sometimes drying them out in her own room upstairs.