Sashenka

  ‘Happy New Year, Zemfira,’ he said and he kissed her cheeks three times. ‘How was the coming of 1917 in your house?’

  ‘Joyful. Our house was more like a sanatorium this year.’

  ‘How’s your mother?’

  ‘Ask your spies if you really want to know.’ Accustomed to conspiracy, she seemed more confident than ever. Yet he was sure that, since Rasputin’s death, she had started to trust him, in spite of her Bolshevik vigilance. When they met the night after Rasputin’s death, she had thanked him. For a moment he even thought she might hug him in her prim comradely way, but she did not. Yet they kept meeting.

  ‘Is the baroness’s opium working? Is she trying hypnosis? I understand it works.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she replied. ‘She’s better, I think. She’s getting another dress made and grumbling about Uncle Gideon’s outrages.’

  ‘And the divorce?’

  ‘Papa should divorce her but I don’t think he’ll dare. She’s a lost soul. She believes in nothing but pleasure. I’m hardly at home now.’ There was a pause. ‘The Party’s growing. Have you noticed? Have you seen the bread queues? There are fights every day for the last loaves.’

  He sighed, suddenly craving more cocaine, fighting an urge to tell her more about himself, more of what he knew. He was surprised by a wave of hopelessness that seemed to blow in from the streets of the city and sweep over him. Were Tsar, Empire and Orthodoxy already lost?

  ‘You know the truth from your reports,’ she said, leaning forward, ‘and I know you sympathize with us. Come on, Petro. Show me a little of yourself – or I might get bored and never meet you again. Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me what your reports say?’

  The perceptive grey eyes studied him unforgivingly, he thought.

  He said nothing.

  She raised her eyebrows and gestured with her hands. Then, jumping up, she gathered her karakul coat and shapka and headed for the door. She opened it.

  ‘Wait,’ he said, his head tightening like a vice. He did not want her to go. ‘I’ve got a headache. Let me have a toke of my tonic.’

  ‘Go right ahead.’ She watched him open his crested silver box, an heirloom set with diamonds, and, wetting his finger, take a thick layer of white powder and rub it into his gums. His arteries distended, the blood gushed once more to his temples, and he wondered if she could see the seething swell of his lips.

  ‘Our reports,’ he started to tell her, ‘warn the Tsar of revolution. I’ve just written one that reads: If food supplies are not improved, it will be hard to enforce law and order on the streets of Petrograd. The garrison remains loyal but … Why do we bother? The new government’s a joke. Sturmer, Trepov, now this antique Prince Golitsyn, are pygmies and crooks. Rasputin’s murder hasn’t solved anything. We need a new start. I don’t agree with everything you believe in, but some of it makes sense …’

  ‘Interesting.’ She stood right in front of him so that he thought he could smell her – was it Pears soap? Her finger stroked her lips. He understood that she had grown up faster than he had realized. ‘We’ve been back and forth, haven’t we, Comrade Petro? But now we’re getting impatient! If you think I like meeting you, you might just be right. We might almost be friends … but are we? Some of my comrades don’t think I should see you any more. If you really sympathize with us, there are things we need to know. “It’s a waste of time,” my comrades say. “Sagan wouldn’t give us ice in winter.” In any case, you know your work’s all for nothing. Your world’s about to end. You need to give us something to persuade us to spare you.’

  ‘You’re too optimistic, Sashenka, deluded. I don’t think much of the standard of your newspapers but, between ourselves, they tell the truth about the situation in the factories and at the front. I’ve agonized about this. But I might have something for you.’

  ‘You do?’ Sashenka’s smile as she said this made it worthwhile. She tossed off her coat and sat again, still in her shapka.

  Not for the first time, Sagan wrestled with the infinite possibilities of who was playing whom. Sashenka’s new confidence informed him that she was still telling Mendel about their meetings. Sagan was disappointed that she was not coming just out of affection – maybe he was losing his touch – but she was surely a little fond of him? ‘Almost friends,’ she had said. In spite of himself, the secret policeman felt a tinge of hurt. But they talked about their families, poetry, even health.

  So how much did she tell Mendel? He hoped she was keeping back their closeness, because this was how it worked: the holding back of small things led to small lies and then the holding back of larger things led to big lies – this was how he recruited his double agents. He wanted to destroy Mendel and Sashenka was the tool to do it. Duplicity, not honesty, was his métier – but if he was honest for once, she was not only a tool. She was his delight.

  ‘Listen carefully,’ he said. ‘They’re planning a raid tomorrow night on your printing press down the road. You need to move it. I don’t need to know where.’

  She tried to conceal her excitement from him, but the way she knitted her eyebrows to assume a military briskness made him want to laugh.

  ‘Are you leading this raid?’ she asked.

  ‘No, it’s a Gendarmerie operation. To find out the details, I had to promise to trade some information in return.’

  ‘That’s presumptuous, Comrade Petro.’

  He flicked his wrist impatiently. ‘All intelligence work is a marketplace, Sashenka. This has kept me up night after night. I can’t sleep. I live on Dr Gemp’s powder. I want to help your Party, the people, Russia, but everything inside me rebels against giving you anything. You know I’m risking all by telling you this?’

  Sashenka turned to leave. ‘If it’s a lie, this is over and they’ll want your head. If your spooks follow me from here, we’ll never meet again. Do we understand each other?’

  ‘And if it’s true?’ he called after her.

  ‘Then we’ll meet again very soon.’

  26

  A gentle sepia light shone through the clouds, reflected off the snow, and burst brighter through the curtains: the opium sailed through Ariadna’s veins. Dr Gemp had called to give her the injection. Her head dropped on to the pillow and she drifted in and out of dreams: Rasputin and she were together in heaven, he was kissing her forehead; the Empress was inspecting them, dressed in her grey nursing outfit. Rasputin held her hand and, for the first time in her life, she was truly happy and secure.

  In her bedroom, she could hear soft voices speaking in Yiddish. Her parents were sitting with her. ‘Poor child,’ murmured her mother. ‘Is she possessed by a dybbuk?’

  ‘Everything is God’s will, even this,’ replied her father. ‘That’s the point of free will. We can only ask for his mercy …’ Ariadna could hear the creak of the leather strap as the rabbi tied his phylactery on to his arm and he switched to Hebrew. He was reciting the Eighteen Benedictions and this familiar, reassuring chant bore her like a magic carpet back in time …

  A young and handsome Samuil Zeitlin was standing in the muddy lane outside the Talmudic Studyhouse, near the workshop of Lazar the cobbler in the little Jewish-Polish town of Turbin, not far from Lublin. He was asking for her hand in marriage. She shrugged at first: he was not a Prince Dolgoruky or even a Baron Rothschild, not good enough for her – but then who would be? Her father shouted, ‘The Zeitlin boy’s a heathen! He doesn’t eat or dress like one of us: does he keep kosher? Does he know the Eighteen Benedictions? That father of his with his bow ties and holidays in Bad Ems: they’re apostates!’

  Then she was circling the Jewish wedding canopy – the chuppah – seven times; Samuil was smashing a wine glass with a decisive stamp of his boot. Her new husband was borne aloft by the singing Hasids, with an expression on his face that said: I just pray I never have to see these primitive fanatics ever again – but I’ve got her! I’ve got her! Tonight I make love to the most beautiful girl in the Pale! Tomorrow, Warsaw! The day af
ter, Odessa. And she would escape Turbin, at last, for ever.

  Then it was years later and she was caressing Captain Dvinsky in a suite at the Bristol in Paris, where she amazed even that connoisseur of flesh with her depravities. In a torn camisole, she was on all fours, pressing her loins down on to his face, smearing his face, revolving like a stripper, delighted by the wantonness of it, hissing swear-words in Polish, obscenities in Yiddish. Even now, waves of lust, the stroking of naked men, the kisses of women, washed over her.

  She sat up in bed, cold, sober. She thought she saw the Elder: yes, there was his beard and his glittering eyes at the end of the bed. ‘Is it you, Grigory?’ she asked aloud. But then she realized that it was a combination of the curtain pelmet and a dress on a stand that somehow suggested a tall, thin man with a beard. She was alone and clear-headed suddenly.

  Rasputin, who offered me a new road to happiness, is dead, she thought. Samuil, whose love and wealth were the pillars of my rickety palace, is divorcing me. Sashenka hates me – and who can blame her? My Hasidic parents shame me and I am ashamed of my shame. My whole life, every step of the way, has been a fiasco. My happiness has been tottering on a tightrope, only to tumble through the air. Even my pleasures are like the moment that high-wire artiste starts to tremble and loses her footing …

  I mocked my father’s world of holiness and superstition. Perhaps my mother was right: was I cursed since birth? I mocked Fate because I had everything. Does the Evil Eye possess me?

  Ariadna lay back on the pillow, alone and adrift on the oceans like a ship without a crew.

  27

  Sashenka left an emergency message for Mendel at Lordkipadze, the Georgian pharmacy on Alexandrovsky Prospect, and then walked home down Nevsky. The clouds billowed into creamy cauliflowers that hung low over the city. The ice that curled from the drainpipes and the roofs was stiffening. The thermometer was sinking to minus 20. In the workers’ districts, the sirens and whistles blared. Strikes had started to spread from factory to factory.

  On Nevsky, right in the centre, clerks, workers, even bourgeois housewives queued outside the bakeries for bread. Two women rolled around in the sludge fighting for the last loaves: a working woman repeatedly hit the other in the face, and Sashenka heard the crack as her nose broke.

  At Yeliseyev’s Grocery Store, where the Zeitlins ordered their food, Sashenka watched as workers burst in and grabbed cakes and fruit. The shop assistant was bludgeoned.

  That night, she could not even pretend to sleep. Her head was buzzing. The anger of the streets replayed in her mind. Outside, the sirens of the Vyborg echoed across the Neva, like the calling of whales.

  She rose from her bed, and in the early hours Comrade Molotov met her at the coachmen’s café outside the Finland Station.

  ‘Comrade Mendel is busy now. He sent me.’ Molotov was humourless and stern but also meticulous and he listened carefully to Sashenka’s tip-off.

  ‘Your s-s-source is r-reliable?’ Molotov stammered, his forehead bulging.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Thank you, c-c-comrade. I’ll get to work.’

  At dawn, Comrades Vanya and Satinov were already dismantling the printing press. Sashenka and other comrades removed the parts in beer barrels, milk churns, coal sacks. The bulky press itself was placed in a coffin, collected by a stolen undertaker’s hearse and accompanied by a carriage of weeping (Bolshevik) relatives in black to the new site in Vyborg.

  At dusk the following afternoon, Mendel and Sashenka climbed the stairs of an office building down the street from the printing press. For Mendel, every step was an effort as he dragged his reinforced boot behind him.

  They came out on the roof and Sashenka gave Mendel one of her Crocodile cigarettes, its gold tip incongruous beside his worker’s cap and rough leather coat. Together, they watched as three carriages of grey-clad police and two carloads of gendarmes pulled up outside the cellar and broke down the door.

  ‘Good work, Comrade Snowfox,’ said Mendel. ‘You were right.’

  She flushed with pride. She really was an asset to the Party, not the spoilt child of the degenerate classes.

  ‘Do I continue to meet Sagan?’

  Mendel’s eyes, magnified by his bottle-glass lenses, pivoted towards her. ‘I suppose he’s in love with you.’

  She laughed and shook her head simultaneously. ‘With me? You must be joking. No one looks at me like that. Sagan talks mostly about poetry. He really knows his stuff. He was helpful about Mama but he’s very proper. And I’m a Bolshevik, comrade, I don’t flirt.’

  ‘Fucking poetry! Don’t be naïve, girl. So he lusts after you!’

  ‘No! Certainly not!’ She blushed with confusion. ‘But he sympathizes with us. That’s why he tipped us off.’

  ‘They always say that. Sometimes it’s even true. But don’t trust any of his shtik.’ Mendel often used the Yiddish of his childhood. While Ariadna had completely lost the accent, Sashenka noticed that Mendel still spoke Russian with a strong Polish-Jewish intonation.

  ‘If you’re right about his immorality, comrade, I don’t think I should meet Sagan again. He sent me a note this morning, inviting me to take a sleigh ride with him in the countryside. I said no of course and now I certainly shan’t meet him.’

  ‘Don’t be such a schlamazel, Sashenka,’ he replied. ‘You don’t know what’s best here, girl. Beware bourgeois morality. We’ll decide what’s immoral and what isn’t. If the Party asks you to cover yourself in shit, you do it! If he desires you, so much the better.’

  Sashenka felt even more flustered. ‘You mean …’

  ‘Go on the sleigh ride,’ he boomed, exasperated. ‘Meet the scum as often as it takes.’

  ‘But he needs something to show for it too.’

  ‘We’ll give him a morsel or two. But in return, we want a gold nugget. Get me the name of the traitor who betrayed the press in the first place. Without that name, this operation is a failure. The Party will be disappointed. Be vigilant. Tak! That’s it.’ Mendel’s face was livid with the cold. ‘Let’s go down before we freeze. How’s your mother coping with the divorce?’

  ‘I never see her. Dr Gemp says she’s hysterical and melancholic. She’s on chloral, bromine, opium. Father wants her to try hypnotism.’

  ‘Is he going to marry Mrs Lewis?’

  ‘What?’ Sashenka felt this like a punch in the belly. Her father and Lala? What was he talking about? But Mendel was already on his way downstairs.

  The factory whistles started up again across the city, yet the black slate of the rooftops revealed none of the seething furies beneath. The world really was going mad, she thought.

  28

  The next day was warmer. The sun and the moon watched each other suspiciously across a milky sky. The sparse clouds resembled two sheep and a ram, horns and all, on a snowy field. The factories were on strike.

  As she took the tram to the Finland Station, Sashenka saw crowds crossing the bridges from the factories, demonstrating for bread for the third day running. The demonstration had started on Thursday, International Women’s Day, and grown since then.

  ‘Arise, you starvelings, from your slumbers!’ the crowds chanted, waving their red banners. ‘Down with autocracy! Give us bread and peace!’

  The Cossacks tried to turn them back at the Alexander Bridge but tens of thousands marched anyway. Sashenka saw women in peasant shawls smash the windows of the English Shop and help themselves to food: ‘Our men are dying at the front! Give us bread! Our children are starving!’ There were urchins on the streets now, creatures with the bodies of children but with swollen bellies and the faces of old monkeys. One sat on the street corner singing and playing his concertina:

  Here I am abandoned, an orphan, with no one to look after me,

  And I will die before long and there’ll be no one to pray at my grave,

  Only the nightingale will sing sometimes on the nearest tree.

  Sashenka gave the boy some money and a Red pamphlet: ‘After
the Revolution,’ she told him, ‘you’ll have bread; you’ll be the masters; read Marx and you’ll understand. Start with Das Kapital and then—’ But the boy had scampered off.

  Sashenka had no special orders from the Party. At first light, she’d checked with Shlyapnikov at the Shirokaya safehouse. ‘The demonstrations are a waste of time, comrade,’ he insisted. ‘Don’t squander any of our leaflets. This’ll lead to nought like all the other riots.’ On Friday, a police officer had been killed by the workers on the bridge – and a mob had broken into Filippov’s, the patisserie where Delphine the cook bought Baron Zeitlin’s millefeuille.

  Now the authorities were striking back. The city was filled with Cossacks and soldiers, and it seemed to Sashenka like an armed camp. Every side street, every bridge was guarded by machine-gun nests and armoured cars; squadrons of horsemen massed on the squares; horse manure steamed on the snow.

  The theatres were still playing and Ariadna was so improved that she and Zeitlin were off to the Alexandrinsky to see Lermontov’s Masquerade, a most avant-garde production. The Donan and the Contant were still crowded, and the orchestras played waltzes and tangos at the Europa and Astoria hotels.

  Sashenka was meeting Sagan. She hurried first to the safehouse at 153 Nevsky but Mendel, who was with Shlyapnikov and Molotov, ordered her to calm down. ‘Give these workers a few shots over their heads and a loaf of bread and the movement will be gone.’ The others agreed. Perhaps they were right, Sashenka thought uncertainly.

  At the Finland Station, Sashenka checked her police tails out of habit. There was one spook who fitted the bill but she lost him easily before she caught the train, travelling third class. In the cold, the steam seemed to wheeze out of the train, whirling around it like a wizard’s spell.