Sashenka

  ‘Greetings! I thought you’d never come.’ A familiar voice – so why did it give her such a shock?

  ‘Don’t mess with me,’ she said, swallowing hard. She had the Mauser. ‘Lift up the light.’

  He illuminated his face. ‘Did you buy some sweet dresses, Zemfira?’

  Captain Sagan sat in the chair, wearing an ill-fitting black suit with a string tie. A fur coat lay on the floor.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ She was conscious that her voice sounded high and a little squeaky.

  ‘Your comrade’s not coming. We picked him up. Tomorrow, the Special Commission’ll sentence him to two years of Siberian exile. Nothing too serious. So rather than leave you to waste your evening, I came instead.’

  She shrugged, struggling to remain calm. ‘So? This safehouse will no longer be safe. If you’re not arresting me, I’ll go home and get some sleep. Goodnight.’ As she turned, she remembered Mendel’s order. She needed to get to know Sagan better. Besides, she was curious as to why he was here. ‘Or perhaps it’s too late for sleep?’

  ‘I think so,’ he said, pushing back his hair and looking younger suddenly. ‘Are you a night owl?’

  ‘I feel lazy in the mornings but I come to life at night. All this conspiracy suits me. What about you, Captain? If I’m a night owl, you’re a bat.’

  ‘I live on a knife-edge. Like you and your uncle Mendel. I sleep so little that when I go home to bed, I find I can hardly settle. I get up and read poems. This is what happens to us. We enjoy it so much that it changes us and we can’t do anything else. We conspirators, Sashenka, are like the undead. The vampires. We feed on the blood of the workers, and you feed on the blood of the bloodsuckers themselves who suck the blood of the workers. Quite Darwinian.’

  She laughed aloud and sat on the edge of a metal bed, where the mattress was dyed sepia yellow by the hissing lamp.

  ‘We conspirators? There’s no parallel between us, you police pharaoh. We have a scientific programme; you’re simply reacting to us. We’ll win in the end. You’ll be finished. You’re digging the grave of the exploiters for us.’

  Captain Sagan chuckled. ‘Yet I see no sign of this. At the moment, your vaunted Party is just a few freaks: the intellectual Mendel Barmakid, a worker named Shlyapnikov, a middle-class boy named Scriabin (Party alias Molotov), a few workers’ circles, some troublemakers at the front. Lenin’s abroad, and the rest are in Siberia. That leaves you, Sashenka. There can’t be more than a thousand experienced Bolsheviks in the whole of Russia. But you’re having a lot of fun, aren’t you? Playing the revolutionary.’

  ‘You’re deluding yourself, Sagan,’ she said hotly. ‘The queues are growing longer, the people getting angrier, hungrier. They want peace and you’re asking them to die for Nicholas the Last, Nicholas the Bloody, the German traitor Alexandra and the pervert Rasputin …’

  ‘Whom you know all about from your mother. Let me try some thoughts on you. Your parents are the very definition of the corruption of the Russian system.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘The aspirations and rights of the workers and peasants are totally ignored by the present system.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘And we know that the peasants need food but they also need rights and representation, and protection from the capitalists. They must have land, and they are desperate for peace. Your father’s dream of a progressive group taking power is too little, too late. We need a real change.’

  ‘Since we agree on everything, why aren’t you a Bolshevik?’

  ‘Because I believe a revolution could come soon.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Sashenka.

  ‘No, you don’t. As a Marxist, you know a socialist revolution isn’t yet possible. The Russian proletariat isn’t yet developed. That’s where we differ. According to you, there’ll be no Bolshevik revolution.’

  Sashenka sighed. ‘Our beliefs are so close. It’s a shame we don’t agree on that.’

  They were silent for a moment then Sagan changed the subject. ‘You’ve heard the new Mayakovsky?’

  ‘Can you recite it?’

  ‘Let me try:

  To you who lived from orgy to orgy

  To you who love only wine and food …

  Sashenka took it up:

  Why should I give my life for your convenience?

  I’d be better off serving pineapple water

  To the whore at the bar.

  ‘Beautifully declaimed, Mademoiselle Zeitlin. I salute you!’

  ‘In our country, poetry’s more powerful than howitzers.’

  ‘You’re right. We should use poetry more and the gallows less.’

  She watched him closely, keenly aware that both of them were risking their lives in what Mendel called the Superlative Game.

  Her hand was on the frozen butt of the Mauser. A few weeks previously, Mendel had arranged for her to be taken out of the city to the birch forests and taught how to shoot: soon she could hit the target more than she missed it. When the Party ordered her to kill Sagan, she would do so.

  ‘What are you carrying?’

  The gun at her fingertips made her heart thump. She heard her voice and it did not sound like hers any more. It was stranger, deeper, surprisingly calm. ‘Arrest me if you wish. Then you can have some Medusa of a policewoman search me.’

  ‘There’s only one big difference between us, Sashenka. I believe human life is sacred. You believe in terror. Why do your comrades have to kill? I wonder if there is something in their mentality that suits them to this creed? Are they criminals or madmen?’

  She stood up again. ‘Do you have a home to go to, Captain? Are you married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Happy?’ Sashenka rubbed her eyes, now weary.

  ‘Are any marriages happy?’ he answered.

  ‘I pity you,’ she said. ‘I’ll never marry. Goodnight.’

  ‘One thing, Zemfira: do you think there’s anywhere I’d rather be than here?’

  Sashenka frowned. ‘That’s no compliment. I suspect most men don’t want to go home. Particularly when they’re vampires like you and me.’ We are both armed, she thought almost deliriously. We could both die tonight.

  Outside again, Sashenka walked through the streets with a light sleet caressing her face and eyelashes. Sagan was certainly an odd sort of gendarme, she reflected. She was playing along with him, drawing him out. He was older than her, much older, and he had recruited many double agents but his smug confidence in his gamesmanship was his Achilles heel. Somehow, she’d break him down and deliver him to the Party, like John the Baptist’s head on a platter.

  Far away, a train rushed whistling through the night. The black smoke of the factories encircled a silver moon. It was almost dawn: the sky was tinged with pink; the snow a deep purple. The muffled trot of a sleigh approached, and she hailed it.

  The bulldog was so cold in her pocket, it burned her fingers.

  ‘The price of oats is up again,’ said the coachman, pulling on his tangled beard as they trotted towards the Zeitlin house on Greater Maritime Street.

  21

  Zeitlin knocked on the door of Ariadna’s boudoir and entered without waiting for an answer. It was midday but she was still in bed, wearing a silk nightgown with blue bows that revealed the bruised white skin of her shoulders. The room smelt of coffee and tuberose. Leonid had brought her breakfast earlier, and the painted wooden tray with its dirty plates and empty glasses now stood on a stand beside the bed. Luda the maid was laying out the dresses for that day – one for a luncheon, one for calling on friends, one for drinks, then one for a dinner. Four outfits, Zeitlin noted. Were so many dresses really necessary?

  ‘Will this do for tea, Baroness?’ Luda appeared from the boudoir holding up a crêpe-de-Chine dress. ‘Oh Baron! Good morning.’ She bowed.

  ‘Leave us alone, Luda.’

  ‘Yes, Baron.’

  ‘Sit down, Samuil,’ said Ari
adna, stretching. She was enjoying letting him see her flesh, he could tell. ‘What is it? Has the Bourse crashed? That’s all you care about, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll stand.’ He was conscious that he was clenching his cigar between his teeth.

  She stiffened. ‘What’s happened? You always sit down. Shall I send for coffee?’ She reached for the bell but was distracted by the smoothness of her upper arm, which she nuzzled against her lips.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Please yourself. I had such fun last night. I saw the Elder again. He told me such fascinating things, Samuil. Everyone was talking about the new Premier. Samuil?’

  ‘I want a divorce, Ariadna.’ There – he’d said it.

  There was a long silence, then Zeitlin saw the words register. She shook her head, and raised a hand as if trying to speak.

  ‘You? But why? We’ve lived like this for years. You’re not a jealous man. You’re too … too confident for that. You’re joking surely, Samuil. We’ve been married for eighteen years. Why now?’

  Zeitlin took a puff of his cigar, trying to appear calm and rational.

  ‘It’s just … weariness.’

  ‘Weariness? You’re divorcing me out of weariness?’

  ‘You’ll have a generous allowance. Nothing will change. You’ll just be living in a different house. Is it such a shock?’

  ‘You can’t!’ He had turned to leave but she jumped out of bed and threw herself to the floor at his feet, knocking the cigar out of his hands. He bent to catch it and she gripped him so hard that he lost his balance and fell beside her. She’d begun to weep, her eyes wild, the whites rolling. He tried to release himself but, in the process, tore her nightgown, exposing her breasts. Yet still she held on to him so hard that the diamond studs on his stiff shirtfront popped out on to the floor.

  They lay side by side, breathing heavily. He looked down and noticed her long dark-brown nipples peering through her thick tresses. She looked like a gypsy dancer. This is how her lovers must see her, he thought, marvelling at her uninhibited wantonness. How strange are we humans, he reflected. The light is dark, the night is bright.

  Over the years, while they were strangers by day, they had still shared a passion by night. In daylight she either worried or disgusted him, but then she would come to him in the early hours, her breath stale with old champagne, fresh brandy and yesterday’s scent, other men’s cigars, and whisper to him of adventures of startling depravity. She hissed an argot of peasant Polish and gutter Yiddish, the language they had spoken when they first met at the court of her father, the Turbin rabbi, in that Jewish village near Lublin.

  What things she told him, what delicious visions! Desires and exploits almost incredible for a respectable lady! One night a lover had taken her to the Summer Gardens, a place of dogs and prostitutes … she spared him no detail. Roused to a fever, he performed erotic feats worthy of an athlete, he the most moderate of men who regarded passion as a dangerous thing. But in the morning he awoke feeling filthy and remorseful, as if he had met a whore in a seedy room and made a fool of himself. And this was his own wife!

  ‘Aren’t I still beautiful?’ she asked him, smelling of tuberose and almonds. ‘How can you leave this? You can make love to me. Go on, push me down. You know you want to. But you’re so cold. No wonder I’ve been so unhappy. You’re joking about the divorce, aren’t you? Samuil?’ She began to laugh, almost to herself, but then she threw back her head, laughing huskily from her belly. He could feel the warmth radiating from her skin like heat from a burning coal, could smell the taint of her excitement. She took his hand and plunged it between her thighs, then pointed at the mirror. ‘Look at us! Look at us, Samoilo! What a good-looking pair! Like when we met. Remember? You said you’d never met a girl like me. What did you say? “You’re like wild horses.”’

  Samuil had meant it differently – he had wondered even then if she was too unpredictable to marry.

  He stood up, not without difficulty, adjusting his clothes. ‘Ariadna, we’ve become ridiculous.’

  The servants had talked: Pantameilion had told Leonid, who had agonized how to tell the master that Sashenka had rescued her mother, drunk in the street. The butler had despatched Shifra, Zeitlin’s own ancient governess, to tell him this unpalatable news. Zeitlin had not reacted, simply thanking Shifra politely, kissing her blue-veined hand and showing her to the door again. Historians, thought Zeitlin, try to find a single explanation for events but really things happen for many reasons, not one. Lighting up his Montecristo cigar, he reflected on Sashenka’s arrest, on Mrs Lewis’s belief that he barely knew his own daughter – and on the unwelcome arrival of Rasputin in his life (which was somehow worse than Ariadna’s lovers). While his irrepressible brother Gideon sought his pleasures recklessly because ‘I might croak at any minute and go straight to hell,’ Zeitlin had believed that calm discipline would ensure a long life.

  Then last night he had been visited by dreams of sudden death, train crashes, gunshots, smashed automobiles, the house on fire, overturned sleighs, revolution, blood on the snow, himself on a deathbed dying of consumption of the intestines and angina pectoris, with Sashenka weeping beside him – and at the very gates of heaven, he had realized he was carrying nothing. He’d invested in treasure, not love. He was naked and he had wasted his life.

  At dawn, he had gone to Shifra in the pantry – but the old witch, crouched in the chair like a translucent spider, already knew his dreams. ‘You need love in your life too,’ she’d told him. ‘Don’t always live for the future. There might not be a future. Who knows what’s written for you in the Book of Life?’

  Zeitlin hated change and feared shaking the foundations of his world. But something in the Chain of Being was shifting and he could not help himself. Against his better judgement, in a trance that he believed might be the presence of Fate, he’d gone to Ariadna’s room.

  Now he looked down at his wife, still lying in a tangle of easy limbs on the floor.

  ‘Is there someone else?’ she asked. ‘Are you in love with some ballerina from the Mariinsky? A gypsy bitch from the Bear? If there is, I don’t care. You see, you selfish, cold fool, I just don’t care! I’m going to be as good as a nun. The Elder is showing me the rosy path to redemption. We have another appointment next week, on 16 December. Just Rasputin and me. “I will teach you, Honey Bee,” he says. “You’ve sinned so much, you ooze Satan’s darkness. Now I’ll teach you love and redemption.” That was what he told his Honey Bee. He’s kind to me. He listens to me for hours on end even when his antechamber is filled with petitioners, generals, countesses …’

  Zeitlin clicked his studs on to his shirt and retied his cravat.

  ‘I just want to live a normal life,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m not so young and I might drop dead at any minute. Is that so strange? Flek will arrange everything.’ And feeling a quiet sorrow and fear of the future, he left, closing the door behind him.

  22

  On the broad glowing screen of the Piccadilly Cinema on Nevsky, the matinee that afternoon was entitled Her Heart Is a Toy in His Hands. Sashenka was late and missed the beginning but as she raised her face to the screen and lit up a cigarette, she soon gathered that the gentleman in question was a supposedly handsome dandy (who actually looked like a stuffed dummy) wearing tails and white tie on a beach while the lady in a red-tinted balldress stared out at a sea of blue-tinted waves.

  On stage a quartet of students from the Conservatoire were playing music chosen to represent the sea breeze. The lady’s heart had been toyed with enough, and she’d begun to wade into the ocean. A fat man in a tailcoat ran on to the stage and started to turn a wheel on a brass machine. The quartet ceased playing and the machine produced a sound that resembled the crunch and swish of the surf.

  In the darkness of the half-full Piccadilly, the air was dry with electricity, and silvery cigarette smoke curled through the beam of light that projected the images. A peasant soldier sitting with his sweetheart commented l
oudly: ‘She’s in the water! She’s stepping into the sea.’ A couple in the back were kissing passionately, both probably married and too poor to afford a hotel. A drunk snored. But most stared at the images in rapt amazement. Sashenka had just delivered a message from Mendel to Satinov, the Georgian comrade who wore the hood, and she had an hour to kill before meeting Comrade Vanya over in Vyborg. Then it was home for supper as usual. The End declared the ornate letters on a black background before a new picture show was announced: The Skin of Her Throat Was Alabaster.

  Sashenka sighed loudly.

  ‘You think it’s nonsense?’ said a voice beside her. ‘Where’s your sense of romance?’

  ‘Romance? You’re the smiling cynic,’ she said. It was Sagan. ‘You realize that we’ll conquer Russia with the silver screen? We will paint the world red. I thought you slept during the day?’

  Since Sashenka’s arrest, they had been meeting every two or three days, sometimes in the middle of the night. She reported to Mendel on every detail. ‘Be patient,’ he said. ‘Keep playing. One day, he’ll offer something.’

  ‘He thinks he can flatter me as a fellow intellectual.’

  ‘Let him. Even the Okhrana are human and will make human mistakes. Make him like you.’

  She never knew when she would see the secret policeman. In between discussions about poetry, novels and ideology, he had asked questions about the Party – was Mendel still in the city? Who was the new Caucasian comrade? Where did Molotov live? And she responded by asking, as specified by Mendel, what raids were planned, what arrests, was there a double agent in the committee?

  On the screen the new moving picture had started. The quartet played a sweeping melody on their strings.

  ‘I’m not here for the film,’ said Captain Sagan, suddenly serious. ‘I’ve got a troika waiting outside. You need to come with me.’

  ‘Why should I? Are you arresting me again?’

  ‘No, your mother’s in trouble. I’m doing you and your family a favour. I’ll explain on the way.’

  They climbed into the troika, pulled the bear-rug over their laps, and sat swathed in furs as the sleigh skated over the ice with that effervescent swish that felt like flight. The streets were already dark but the electric lights were shining. Low Finnish sledges decorated with ribbons and jingling bells and screaming students rushed through the streets, their silhouettes forming cut-outs against the snow. The food shortages were spreading, prices rising, and Sashenka spotted a massive queue of working women jostling outside a bakery. The worse, the better, she thought gleefully. The sirens of the Vyborg factories whistled. The snow, so rarely white, glowed a gritty orange.