Sashenka (5 page)

“I’m going to hold my nose and go to Prince Andronnikov’s. They’ll all be there.”

Ariadna seized Zeitlin’s face between her hands. Her spicy breath and tuberose scent made his eyes water.

“You and me on a mission, Samuil!”

Despite the coarseness of her skin—the mark of drink and opium—her face, he thought, was still magnificent; the bruised lips, the overbite and long upper lip utterly, selfishly greedy; her shoulders and legs still superb despite the protuberant belly. Whatever her flaws, Ariadna had the look of a woman to whom rough pleasure came almost too easily, as easily as bruises to a ripe peach. Now, with the kohl on her eyes smeared with tears, she looked like a drugged Cleopatra. “Samuil, can I take the RussoBalt?”

“Done,” said Zeitlin, happy for her to use the limousine. He stood up and kissed her.

Ariadna gave a little shiver of pleasure, opened the top of her diamond and gold clock, took an Egyptian cigarette out of the hidden compartment, and looked up at him with eyes that held the echo of empty rooms.

Thinking how she had become like a lost child and blaming himself, he lit her cigarette and then the cold cigar he was holding.

“I’ll be off then,” he said, watching her inhale and then open her lips to let the blue smoke dance its way out.

“Good luck, Samuil,” she called after him.

He did not want to be late for Prince Andronnikov—Sashenka’s welfare depended on him

—yet he stopped and glanced back before he closed the door.

“How does this look? And this? Look, it moves as I walk. See, Galya?” Ariadna was laughing as the maids bustled around her. “Don’t you agree, Nyuna, Worth’s dresses put the rest to shame! I can’t wait for them to see this at the Aquarium…”

With a sinking heart, Zeitlin realized that the moment his wife left the house she would forget all about him and Sashenka.

8

Throughout the night, Sashenka clung to Natasha’s whalelike bulk.

The older woman snored and when she turned over she pushed Sashenka, who was almost too afraid to move, off the mattress. Sashenka lay there, her hips ground into the freezing stone floor, but grateful just to be next to Natasha, safe. Her mouth felt as if it were ballooning where she had been hit, and her hands were shaking. She was still afraid the monster would hit her again—or maybe she would come and stab her in a frenzy during the night? They would all have knives. Sashenka peered through the semidarkness at the tangle of female bodies—one half naked with bare shriveled breasts and long nipples like bottle stoppers—sensing the heat and rot rising around her. She prayed someone would come soon to rescue her.

Lanterns flickered outside the cell, as a guard doublelocked the doors. A cleaner mopped the corridors. The smell of naphtha and disinfectant temporarily defeated that of piss and shit, but not for long. Sashenka hoped every grunt and creak and slam signaled her deliverance, but no one came. The interminable night stretched out before her, cold, frightening, hostile.

“We got a message on the cell telegraph that you were coming,” Natasha had whispered to Sashenka. “We’re almost family, you and I. I’m your uncle Mendel’s wife. We met in exile. I bet you didn’t know he married a Yakut? Yes, a real Siberian. Oh, I see—you didn’t know he was married at all. Well, that’s Mendel for you, the born conspirator. I didn’t even know he had a niece until today. Anyway, he trusts you. Keep your wits about you: there are always opportunities…”

Now Natasha grunted and heaved in her sleep, saying something in her native language.

Sashenka remembered that Yakuts believed in shamans and spirits. A woman shouted,

“I’ll cut your throat!” Another whimpered, “Lost…lost…lost.” There was a brawl in the men’s cell next door; someone was wounded, and guards dragged him away groaning and brought a mop to clean up. Doors opened and slammed. Sashenka listened to consumptive coughing and squelching bowels, the footsteps of the guards, and the bubbling of Natasha’s stomach. She could not quite believe this was happening to her. Even though Sashenka was proud to be there, the fear, the stink and the endless night were making her desperate. Yet hadn’t Uncle Mendel told her prison was a rite of passage? And what had Natasha the Yakut whispered before she fell asleep? Yes: “Mendel trusts you!”

It was because of Mendel that she was here, because of their meeting the previous summer. The family’s summers were spent at Zemblishino, an estate south of the city near the Warsaw Highway. Jews were not allowed to live in the capital or own property unless they were merchant princes like Baron Zeitlin. Sashenka’s father owned not only the mansion in town but also the manor house with white pillars, the woodlands and the park.

Sashenka knew that her father was not the only Jewish magnate in St. Petersburg. Another Jewish baron, Poliakoff, the railway king, lived in Prince Menshikov’s old redbrick palace, the first house built in Peter the Great’s new city, on the new quay almost opposite the Winter Palace.

Each summer Sashenka and Lala were left to their own devices in the country, though sometimes Zeitlin persuaded them to play tennis or go bicycling. Her mother, usually in the frenzy of a neuralgic crisis, mystical fad or broken heart, rarely left her room—and would soon rush back to the city. Lala spent her days collecting mushrooms and blueberries or riding Almaz the chestnut pony. Sashenka read on her own; she was always happy on her own.

That summer, Uncle Mendel had been staying too. A tiny twisted man with thick pincenez on a big bent nose and a clubfoot, he worked all night in the library, smoking selfrolled
makhorka
cigarettes and brewing Turkish coffee that filled the house with its scalded, nutty aroma. He slept above the stables, lying in all morning, rising only after lunch. He seemed incapable of adapting to the summer, always wearing the same filthy dark suit and a crumpled shirt with a grimy collar. His shoes always had holes in them.

Alongside her dapper father and fashionable mother, he really was a stranger from another planet. If he caught Sashenka’s eye, he scowled and glanced away. He looked terribly ill, she thought, with his pale blotchy skin and asthmatic wheeze, the fruit of years in prison and exile in Siberia.

The family despised Mendel. Even Sashenka’s mother, Mendel’s own sister, disliked him

—but she let him stay. “He’s all on his own, poor sad creature,” she would say disdainfully.

And then one night Sashenka could not sleep. It was 3:00 a.m. The summer was hot and the heat gathered in her room under the roof. She wanted some lemon juice so she came downstairs, past the portrait of Count OrlovChesmensky, a former owner of the manor, the fifteen crystal peacocks on the shelf, and the English grandfather clock, and into the deliciously cool hall with its black and white flagstone floor. She saw the library lights were still on and smelled the coffee and smoke blending in the warm, rosy night.

Mendel opened the library door and Sashenka stepped aside into the cloakroom, from where she watched her uncle limp out with a gleam in his bloodshot eyes, a sheaf of valuable papers gripped in his clawlike hands.

The trapped miasma of an entire night’s chainsmoking poured out like a ghostly tidal wave. Sashenka waited until he had gone and then darted into the library to look at the books that so gripped him that he was happy to go to prison for them. The table was empty.

“Curious, Sashenka?” It was Mendel at the door, his voice in congruously deep and rich, his clothes defiantly motheaten.

She jumped. “I was just interested,” she said.

“In my books?”

“Yes.”

“I hide them when I’ve finished. I don’t like people knowing my business or even my thoughts.” He hesitated. “But you’re a serious person. The only intellectual in this family.”

“How do you know that, Uncle, since you’ve never bothered to speak to me?” Sashenka was delighted and surprised.

“The others are just capitalist decadents and our family rabbi belongs in the Middle Ages.

I judge you by what you read. Mayakovsky. Nekrasov. Blok. Jack London.”

“So you’ve been watching me?”

Mendel’s pincenez were so greasy the lenses were barely transparent. He limped over to the English collection, the full set of Dickens bound in kid with the gold Zeitlin crest, and pulling out one, he reached behind and handed her a wellthumbed old book:
What Is to
Be Done?
by Chernyshevsky.

“Read it now. When you finish, you’ll find the next book here behind
David Copperfield
.

Understood? We’ll take it from there.”

“Take what? From where?”

But Mendel was gone and she was alone in the library.

That was how it started. The next night, she could hardly wait until everyone was asleep before she crept down, savoring the smells of coffee and acrid
makhorka
tobacco as she drew closer to the set of Dickens.

“Ready for the next? Your analysis of the book?” Mendel had said without looking up.

“Rakhmetov is the most compelling hero I have ever known,” she told him, returning his book. “He is selfless, dedicated. Nothing stands in the way of his cause. The ‘special man’

touched by history. I want to be like him.”

“We all do,” he replied. “I know many Rakhmetovs. It was the first book I read too. And not just me but Lenin as well.”

“Tell me about Lenin. And what is a Bolshevik? Are you Bolshevik, Menshevik, Socialist Revolutionary, Anarchist?”

Mendel observed her as if she were a zoological specimen, narrowing his eyes, inhaling the badly rolled
makhorka
that caught in his throat. He coughed productively.

“What’s it to you? What do you think of Russia today, the workers, the peasants, the war?”

“I don’t know. It seems as if…” She stopped, aware of his scathing stare.

“Go on. Speak up.”

“It’s all wrong. It’s so unjust. The workers are like slaves. We’re losing the war. Everything’s rotten. Am I a revolutionary? A Bolshevik?”

Mendel rolled a new cigarette, not hurriedly and with surprising delicacy, licked the paper and lit it. An orange flame flared up and died down.

“You don’t know enough to be anything yet,” he told her. “We must take our time. You are now the sole student on my summer course. Here’s the next book.” He gave her Victor Hugo’s novel of the French Revolution,
1793
.

The next night she was even more excited.

“Ready for more? Your analysis?”

“Cimourdain had never been seen to weep,”
she quoted Hugo’s description of his hero.
“He
had an inaccessible and frigid virtue. A just but awful man. There are no half measures for a revolutionary priest who must be infamous and sublime. Cimourdain was sublime, rugged, inhospitably repellent, gloomy but above all pure.”

“Good. If Cimourdain were alive today, he’d be a Bolshevik. You have the sentiment; now you need the science. Marxism is a science. Now read this.” He held up a novel called
Lady Cynthia de Fortescue and the Love of the Cruel Colonel
. On its cover stood a lady with vermilion lipstick and cheeks like a puff adder, while a devilishly handsome officer with waxed mustaches and narrowed eyes lurked behind.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Just read what I give you.” Mendel was back at his desk, scratching with his pen.

In her bedroom, when she opened the book, she found Marx’s
Communist Manifesto
hidden inside. This was soon followed by Plekhanov, Engels, Lassalle, more Marx, Lenin.

No one had ever spoken to Sashenka like Mendel. Her mother wanted her to be a foolish child preparing for a life of overheated balls, unhappy marriages and seedy adulteries. She adored her father but he barely noticed his “little fox,” regarding her as no more than a fluffy mascot. And darling Lala had long since submitted to her place in life, reading only novels like
Lady Cynthia de Fortescue and the Love of the Cruel Colonel
. As for Uncle Gideon, he was a degenerate sensualist who had tried to flirt with her, and once even patted her behind.

At meals and parties she barely spoke, so rapt was she by her short course in Marxism, so keen was she to ask Mendel more questions. Her mind was with him in his smoky library, far from her mother and father. Lala, who sometimes found her asleep with the lamp shining and some vulgar novel beside her, worried that she was reading too late. It was Mendel who exposed Sashenka to the grotesque injustice of capitalist society, to the oppression of workers and peasants, and showed her how Zeitlin—yes, her own father—was an exploiter of the working man.

But there was a solution, she learned: a class struggle that would progress through set stages to a workers’ paradise of equality and decency. The Marxist theory was universal and utopian and all human existence fitted into its beautiful symmetry of history and justice. She could not understand why the workers of the industrial world, especially in St.

Petersburg and Moscow, the peasants in the villages of Russia and Ukraine, the footmen and maids in her father’s houses, did not rise up and slay their masters at once. She had fallen in love with the ideas of dialectical materialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Mendel treated Sashenka as an adult; more than a woman, as an adult
man
, a coconspirator in the worthiest, most exclusive secret movement in the world. Before long they were meeting almost like lovers, in the twilight, at dawn and in the glowing night, in the stables, in the birch woods and blackberry thickets, on expeditions to collect mushrooms, even whispering by night in the dining hall, sealed within its yellow silk walls that were fragrant with carnations and lilac.

Yes, Sashenka thought now, the road to this stinking prison in the black St. Petersburg winter had started on her father’s fairytale estate on those summer nights when nightingales sang and the dusk was a hazy pink. But was she really such a threat to the throne of the Emperor that she should be arrested at the gates of the Smolny and tossed into this hell?

A woman behind Sashenka got up and staggered toward the slop bucket. Somehow she tripped over Sashenka and fell, cursing her. This time Sashenka grabbed the woman’s soft throat, ready to fight, but the woman apologized and Sashenka found she suddenly didn’t mind. Now she was tasting the real misery of Russia. Now she could tell them she did not just know big houses and limousines. Now she was a woman, a responsible adult, independent of her family. She tried to sleep but she could not.