Sashenka (47 page)

Mendel Barmakid, Party member since 1904

41

A cadaverous old man with yellow translucent skin and tufts of pale hair on a peeling, scabby scalp sat opposite her in blue prison uniform. He sucked his gums, jerkily glanced around him, and scratched himself in bursts, rolling his eyes, followed by long minutes of comatose stillness.

Sashenka had never met a Zek, but everything about this brokendown ruin shouted Zek, a veteran of the Gulags. She sensed that he had spent years in Vorkuta or Kolyma, breaking rocks, cutting down trees. He no longer even smelled of prisons or possessed the shifty, artful craving for survival that she herself now displayed. This meager husk existed without hope or spirit. Now she saw the true meaning of that expression favored by Beria and even her Vanya: “ground into camp dust.” She had never understood it before.

At last she dared to peer into the face, tears welling: was it Baron Samuil Zeitlin, arrested in 1937? No, it could not be her father. This man did not look anything like her father.

Kobylov smacked his lips with a sportsman’s glee, and Sashenka observed how the investigators noted his impatience.

“Do you recognize each other?” asked Mogilchuk keenly.

“Speak up, prisoner,” said Rodos with surprising warmth. “You recognize her?”

Sashenka searched her memory. Who was he? He must be in his eighties or more.

He swallowed loudly and opened his mouth. He had no teeth, and his gums were pale with ulcerated streaks. She noticed a mark on his neck and realized it was blueblack bruising.

“It’s her! It’s her!” the creature said in a strikingly educated, level and delicate voice. “Of course I recognize her.”

“What’s her name?” demanded Rodos briskly.

“She looks exactly the same. But better.”

“Speak up! Who is she?”

The husk smirked at Rodos. “You think I’ve forgotten?”

“Do you want me to remind you?” said Rodos, still playing with the coarse hairs that grew out of his mole.

“What will you do with me after this? Put me out of my misery?”

Rodos ran a hand over his bumpy scalp. “If you don’t want any more French wrestling…”

and then he stood up and shrieked in a voice of maniacal violence: “What is her name?”

The prisoner stiffened. Sashenka jumped, breaking into a sweat.

“Are you going to beat me again? You don’t have to. That’s Baroness Alexandra Zeitlin—

Sashshenkka, whom I once loved.”

Rodos walked to the door. “I have another appointment,” he said to Kobylov.

“Enjoy it,” said Kobylov. “Carry on, Investigator Mogilchuk.”

“Accused ZeitlinPalitsyn,” said Mogilchuk, “do you recognize the prisoner?”

Sashenka shook her head, fascinated and horrified.

“Prisoner, your name?”

“Peter Ivanovich Pavlov.” It was another man’s voice, from another city in another vanished time.

“That’s not your real name, is it?” coaxed Mogilchuk gently. “That’s the false name under which you masqueraded as a teacher in Irkutsk for more than ten years when you were really a White Guardist spy. Now look at the accused and tell her your real name.”

42

In another interrogation room, Benya Golden sat in a chair in front of Investigator Boris Rodos.

“You’ve been arrested for treacherous antiSoviet activities,” Rodos said. “Do you acknowledge your guilt?”

“No.”

“Why do you think you’ve been arrested?”

“A chain of coincidences and my inability to write.”

Rodos grunted and peered at his papers, with a sneer that further flattened his broad boxer’s nose. “So you’re a writer, are you? No wonder Mogilchuk wanted to interrogate you. I thought you were just a filthy traitor and a piece of shit. A writer, eh?”

Benya could not contain his surprise. “I wrote a book called
Spanish Stories
that was a success two years ago and then—”

“What the fuck do I care, you vain little prick?” spat Rodos. “I just see a smug Jew who I could break in half like a stick. I could grind you to dust.”

Benya did not doubt it. Rodos, with his squashed bald head, overdeveloped shoulders and short legs, reminded him of a hyena. Benya was scared of losing the things he loved, his child and, above all, his darling, his Sashenka. They were all that mattered now.

“Again, why did we arrest you?”

“I honestly don’t know. I lived in Paris, I was associated with French and American writers. I knew some of the generals arrested for being Trotskyites.”

“So? Don’t make me open the drawer on my desk where I keep my sticks and smash your Yid hook nose into pulp. I like French wrestling—that’s what we call it here. Confess your criminal and amoral activities and I won’t even have to raise a sweat. Tell me the full story of your sexual depravity in the Metropole Hotel, room four hundred and three.”

“That?”
exclaimed Benya. So had he been arrested because of his affair with Sashenka?

Gideon had warned him about meddling with a secret policeman’s wife. Even in such puritanical times that couldn’t be so serious, could it? Perhaps this meant that he would be sent into provincial exile, far from Moscow, but at least he’d live. He had to protect Sashenka.

“Yes, that,” answered Rodos, holding up a thick file. “We know every disgusting detail.”

“I get it. Her husband’s behind this. But she’s innocent, I promise. She’s done nothing wrong. She’s a loyal Communist.” Benya scanned Rodos’s face but it was like trying to read a slab of meat.

“Who said she wasn’t?”

“So she’s not in any trouble then?”

“That’s secret information, Accused Golden. Just confess how it all started…”

Benya prayed that Sashenka knew none of this. Perhaps she would return to being the good wife she had always been. She would assume that Benya had been arrested as a Trotskyite spy and she would despise him and forget about him and continue her life of Partyminded duty and luxury. He loved her so much he wanted to suffer for her, to save her pain.

When they arrived to arrest him, he had not been surprised. He had been so happy in those two weeks of loving Sashenka that he could not believe it would last—even though he knew that she was truly the love of his life. It was a love that comes just once, if ever.

As he sat inside the car on the way to prison, he watched the city streets pass by, the lights fluid through his tears. It was dawn, the time when cities renew themselves before the day breaks: trucks collected garbage, janitors sprayed steps, old ladies swept up paper, a man in overalls carried a pail of milk. But the red stars of the Kremlin that had lit up their room in the Metropole belonged to them both together. Now he would suffer on the rack: they would tear him to pieces, and his blood ran cold.

Sashenka would live on outside, that adorable woman whom he loved. No one would ever know what was in their hearts, no matter how much they beat him. Her existence outside the prison, like that of his own young child, meant that he would live on too as long as she lived. She had never told him that she loved him but he hoped that she did…

Why couldn’t she tell him when so much suffering stretched out ahead of him? She was making him wait for it, and probably he would have to wait to hear it in another world.

Now he asked himself—what was the right thing to say? How to protect Sashenka? Or was she beyond protecting? Such was his writer’s curiosity that, even as he mocked death, he speculated on this latest twist in his own liquidation. What would his “Soviet Proletarian Guide to the Etiquette of Adultery” recommend? he wondered, recalling how he and Sashenka had laughed about it together.

“Disarm and make your confession!” Rodos shouted.

Suddenly he pulled open the drawer of the desk and smashed Benya once, twice and again across the face with a black rubber truncheon.

Benya fell to the floor, his cheek scouring on concrete. Rodos followed him, his boots smashing into Benya’s nose, blood fountaining out, and the truncheon thudding into his face, his kidneys, his groin, his face again. He vomited in agony, bringing up bile and blood and teeth.

“Sashenka!” he moaned, realizing with each blow that she was not free, sensing that she was somewhere here, near and in pain—and that broke him utterly. “I love you! Where are you?”

43

“Peter Sagan, Captain of Gendarmes,” the old Zek said in the most urbane and aristocratic of tones. “There, that’s given her a shock.”

Sashenka gasped. Hadn’t he died in the streets of Petrograd? Her heart drummed, claws tweaked her insides.

“How do you know her?” asked Mogilchuk.

“I loved her once,” said the husk in his Corps de Pages, Yacht Club accent.

“You had a sexual relationship with her?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a lie!” cried Sashenka, thinking back to that romantic but chaste sleigh ride and then the miserable night when Sagan had tried to rape her.

“Quiet or you’ll be removed,” said Mogilchuk. “You’ll get your chance in a minute. She was a virgin?”

“Yes. She became my mistress and I corrupted her with unspeakable perversions. I also gave her cocaine, which I pretended to take as a medicine.”

“Never!” shouted Sashenka. “This is not Peter Sagan. I don’t recognize this man. He’s an impostor!”

“Ignore her, prisoner. Let’s carry on. You had a professional relationship?”

“I used her…I hated the revolutionaries as scum…but I came to love her.”

“We don’t want your romantic reminiscences, prisoner. Your
professional
relationship?”

“She was my double agent.”

“When did you recruit her for the Okhrana?”

“Winter 1916. We arrested her as a Bolshevik. I recruited her at Kresty Prison. Thereafter we met in safe houses and hotel rooms where she betrayed her comrades.”

“This is not true. You know it’s not true! Whoever you are, you’re telling lies!” Sashenka stood up. Kobylov’s bejeweled hands fell heavily on her shoulders, jolting her back into her seat. A chill rose up her body, and she started to shiver.

“Did she recruit other agents for you, higher up the Bolshevik high command?”

“Yes.”

“Tell us who.”

“First, Mendel Barmakid.”

Sashenka shook her head. She felt she was drowning, the waters closing above her head.

“Was Mendel a valuable agent, Prisoner Sagan?”

“Oh yes. The other leaders were in prison, Siberia or abroad. He was a member of the Central Committee in contact with Lenin.”

“How long did he remain a double agent?”

“Mendel’s still a double agent.”

“Lies! You bastard!” she shouted again, energy draining from her. “You’ll rot in hell for this! If you knew what you were doing! If you only knew…” She started to weep.

“Get a grip on yourself, accused,” said Mogilchuk, “or Rodos will tear you apart.” There was a moment of silence. “After the Revolution, Sagan, what happened to your Okhrana agents?”

“They went underground as I did myself.”

“Under whose control?”

“Initially the White Guards but later we became the servants of…an unholy alliance of snakes and running dogs.” At this, Sagan again smirked, and Sashenka sensed within him a mixture of shame and mockery. Behind his shifting, restless blue irises he seemed to be weeping, begging her to forgive him. Had they drugged him?

“Under whose command, Sagan?”

“Ultimately under the command of Japanese and British intelligence but taking orders from the United Opposition of Trotsky and Bukharin.”

“So all these years you were still in contact with the accused?”

“I was the contact between her and the enemies of the Soviet working people.”

“You met regularly?”

“Yes, we did.”

“This is laughable,” Sashenka shouted. “I’ve never heard of this man. The policeman Sagan was killed on Nevsky Prospect in 1917. This man is an actor!”

“What other agents did she recruit?”

“Her husband, Vanya Palitsyn. And more recently the writer Benya Golden—using the same degenerate sexual techniques I taught her as a girl.”

“So Japanese and British intelligence, along with Trotsky and Bukharin, were running traitor Mendel in the Central Committee, traitor Palitsyn in the NKVD, and traitor Golden the writer for years on end?”

“Yes!”

“You bastard!” Sashenka threw herself across the table but when her fingers came into contact with her accuser, it was like grabbing handfuls of sand. There was nothing to hold.

The old man was so weak that he fell off his chair, grazing his head on the side of the table and lying on the floor in a heap.

Kobylov lifted her up from behind like a rag doll and dropped her hard onto her chair.

“Careful, girl, we’ve got to look after him, haven’t we, boys?” said Mogilchuk as he helped Sagan off the floor. He was still floppy and could barely sit up, legs and hands a blur of spasms.

Sashenka experienced the despair of the damned. This scarecrow was tolling the bells on her entire life. She thought of her children. The unthinkable had happened. Nothing was as she had imagined.

She was not irrelevant to this case, she realized. She was its pivot—the center of the spider’s web—and she would never get out, never see Snowy and Carlo again. “Give me time to settle the children,” Satinov had demanded. She prayed he had succeeded.

Was it now time to put Vanya’s plan into action? “Only confess when you realize you have no choice,” he’d instructed. Had he held out this long?

“Good work, boys!” Kobylov clapped his hands together and left, kicking the door shut behind him with a gleaming boot.

Mogilchuk held up a file entitled
Protocol of Interrogation
and opened it.

“Here’s your confession. You’ve signed every page and at the end, have you not?”

Sagan nodded, jiggling his knees and scratching.

The Chekist tossed it over to Sashenka. “There, Accused ZeitlinPalitsyn! Read it! You couldn’t remember all this? How could you have forgotten?”

44

“Comrade Stepanian, any sign of a telegram?”

Carolina staggered into the stationmaster’s office. It was the next morning, a fan whirred overhead, and the hot office was crowded that day. An old peasant in blouse and clogs, two little eyes peering over a long white beard, sat in front of the desk; a young man in a Party tunic with a Kalinin beard waited with passport and tickets; an NKVD officer read a sports magazine with his feet up on the radiator.