Sashenka

  ‘I feel …’ She squeezed her daughter’s hand. Sashenka squeezed back. The eyes dimmed again.

  ‘I long to ask you one question, Mama. Why did you …? Mama?’

  At that moment Dr Gemp, a plump, worldly man with a shiny pink pate and the theatrical air often associated with society doctors, entered the room.

  ‘Did your mother wake up then? What did she say?’ he asked. ‘Ariadna, are you in pain?’

  Sashenka watched him lean over her mother, bathing her forehead and neck with a cold compress. He unravelled the dressing on her chest and inspected, cleaned and dabbed the wound, which looked like a congealed fist of blood.

  Her father appeared beside her, also leaning over the sickbed. He looked terrible, his collar filthy and the beginnings of a prickly grey beard on his cheeks. He reminded Sashenka of an old Jew from the Pale.

  ‘Is she coming round? Ariadna? Speak to me! I love you, Ariadna!’ said Zeitlin. Ariadna opened her eyes. ‘Ariadna! Why did you harm yourself? Why?’

  Behind him stood Ariadna’s parents, Miriam, her small, dry face pointed like that of a field mouse, and the Rabbi of Turbin, with gaberdine coat and skullcap, his face framed by his prophetic beard and whimsical ringlets.

  ‘Darling Silberkind,’ said Miriam in her strong Polish-Yiddish accent, taking Sashenka’s hands and kissing her shoulder tenderly. But Sashenka sensed how out of place the old couple felt in Ariadna’s room. They had been in there before, yet they peered, like paupers, at the pearls, gowns, tarot cards and potions. For them this was the Temple of the Golden Calf and the very ruin of their dreams as parents.

  Dr Gemp, who specialized in the secret tragedies – abortions, suicides and addictions – of Grand Dukes and counts, stared at the old Jews as if they were lepers, but managed to finish dressing Ariadna’s wound.

  Ariadna pointed at her parents. ‘Are you from Turbin?’ she asked them. ‘I was born in Turbin. Samuil, you must shave …’

  * * *

  Hours, nights, days passed. Sashenka lost track of time as she sat by the bed. Ariadna’s breathing was hoarse and laboured, like an old pair of bellows. Her face was grey and sallow and sunken. She had become old, tiny and collapsed. Her jaw hung open, and her chest creaked up and down, catching on clots of phlegm in her lungs so that her breath rattled and crackled. There was no beauty or vivacity left, just this shivering, quivering animal that had once been a vibrant woman, a mother, Sashenka’s mother.

  Sometimes Ariadna struggled to breathe, and began to panic. Sweat poured off her, soaking the sheets, and she clawed the bed. Then Sashenka would stand up and take her hand. All of a sudden, there was so much she wanted to say to her mother: she wanted to love her, wanted to be loved by her. Was it too late?

  ‘Mama, I’m here with you, it’s me, Sashenka! I love you, Mama!’ Did she love her? She was not sure, but her voice was saying these things.

  Dr Gemp came again. He pulled Zeitlin and Sashenka aside.

  ‘Don’t raise your hopes, Samuil,’ said the doctor.

  ‘But she wakes up sometimes! She talks …’ said Zeitlin.

  ‘The wound’s infected and the infection has spread.’

  ‘She could recover, she could …’ insisted Sashenka.

  ‘Perhaps, mademoiselle,’ replied Dr Gemp smoothly, as a maid handed him his black cape and fedora. ‘Perhaps in the land of miracles.’

  37

  ‘Would you like me to read something to you?’ Ariadna heard her daughter ask the next morning.

  ‘No need,’ she replied, ‘because I can come and read it myself.’ Another Ariadna rose up from the Ariadna on the bed and hovered over Sashenka’s shoulder. She looked down and barely recognized the waxy creature with a dressing on her chest, breathing fast like a sick dog. Her hair was lank and greasy but she did not demand that Luda bring the curling tongs – so she must be dying. Ariadna wondered if she had always been cursed by the Evil Eye or infested by a dybbuk, or whether she had brought all her troubles upon herself.

  She spun away from reality into wondrous dreams. She flew gracefully around the room. What visions she had! She and Samuil were together in a garden with tinkling fountains and luscious peaches. Were they in the Garden of Eden? No, the forests were slim silver birches: these were Zeitlin’s forests, soon to be the butts of rifles in the dead hands of Russian solders. The trees became ballerinas in tutus, then stark naked.

  She opened her eyes. She was in her room again. Sashenka was sleeping on the divan. It was night. The room was softly lit by a lamp, not electric light. Samuil and two old Jews, a man and a woman, were talking quietly.

  ‘I’ve lost myself, Rabbi,’ said Samuil in Yiddish. ‘I no longer know who I am. I’m not a Jew, not a Russian. I have long ago ceased to be a good husband or a good father. What should I do? Should I wear phylacteries and pray as a religious Jew, or should I become a socialist? I thought I had my life in order and now …’

  ‘You’re just a man, Samuil,’ answered the bearded sage.

  Ariadna knew that voice: it was her father. What a fine voice, so deep and kind. Would he curse Samuil and call him a heathen? she wondered.

  ‘You’ve done bad things and good things. Like all of us,’ her father said.

  ‘So what should I do?’

  ‘Do good. Do nothing bad.’

  ‘It sounds simple.’

  ‘It’s very hard but it is a great thing. Don’t harm yourself or others. Love your family. Ask for God’s mercy.’

  ‘But I’m not even sure I believe in him.’

  ‘You do. Or you would not be asking these questions. All of us sin. The body is for sinning in this world. Without the choice, goodness would be meaningless. The soul is the bridge between this world and the next. But everything is God’s world. Even for you, even for poor, darling Finkel, God’s mercy is there, waiting. That is all you need to understand.’

  Who on earth was Finkel? Ariadna asked herself. Of course, it was her real name. Her father and her bewigged mother seemed to her at one moment like laughable cartoons; at another, they were as sacred as priests in the Temple of Solomon.

  ‘And Ariadna?’ Samuil asked.

  ‘A suicide.’ Her father shook his head. Her mother started to weep.

  ‘I blame myself,’ said Samuil.

  ‘You did more for her than us, more than anyone,’ said her father. ‘We failed her; she failed us. But we love her. God loves her.’

  Ariadna was moved; she felt fondness for her parents, but not love. She no longer loved anyone. These were characters from her life, familiar faces and voices, but she loved none of them.

  She was light as a goose feather, a draught from a window blew her this way and that. Her body lay there, croaking and wheezing. She was interested in this, but not involved in its mechanical functions. Dr Gemp came into the room and threw off his cape like a Spanish bullfighter. She felt her forehead being dabbed; her dressing changed; morphine injected; her lips wetted with warm, sugary tea. Her belly ached; bowels groaned; the congested fist in her chest throbbed around a single bullet that she herself had placed there. This thing on the bed – the body she recognized as hers – was no more important than a laddered pair of stockings, a good pair, but an object that could be thrown away without a thought.

  Her father was praying aloud, reading from the Psalms, singing in a deep chant that filled her with disinterested joy. It was the voice of a nightingale outside in the garden. But when she looked at his face, he was young, his beard a reddish-brown, eyes strong and bright. Her mother was there too, full of life, even younger. She did not wear a wig but her own long blonde hair in braids, and a girl’s dress. And her grandparents too, all much younger than she. There was her husband as a teenager. Sashenka as a little girl. They could now be her sisters and brothers.

  The rabbi’s chanting carried her to Turbin three decades earlier. Her father and the beadle were walking out of the studyhouse; her mother was cooking dumplings and noodles laced with saffron, cinnamon and cloves. A
riadna was in trouble even then: she had refused to marry the son of the Mogilevsky rabbi, had been seen talking to one of the Litvak lads who did not even wear ringlets – and she had met a Russian officer in the woods near the barracks. She adored that uniform, the gold buttons, the boots, the shoulderboards. No one knew she had kissed not only the Litvak boy but also the young Russian, sipping cognac that made her glow, their hands all over her, her skin fluttering under their caresses. How that officer must have boasted and laughed to his friends in the officers’ mess: ‘You’ll never guess what I found in the woods today. A lovely Jewess fresh as the dew …’

  I was too beautiful for the rabbi’s court in Turbin, she told herself. I was a peacock in a stable. And now she was happily going back to Turbin. Or at least passing through there, on the way to somewhere else. What was written for her in the Book of Life?

  But when Ariadna flew back to that familiar bedroom filled with family and re-entered her body, she realized that it was no longer her bedroom, Sashenka was no longer her daughter, Miriam no longer her mother – and she herself was no longer Ariadna Finkel Barmakid, Baroness Zeitlin. She became something else, and she was filled with joy.

  Sashenka was the first to notice. ‘Papa,’ she said, ‘look! Mama’s smiling.’

  38

  ‘She’s gone,’ said Miriam, taking her daughter’s hand.

  ‘Woe is to outlive your own child,’ said the rabbi quietly and then he started to pray for his daughter. Sashenka felt that she had made some peace with her mother, but her father, who had been napping on the divan, awoke and threw himself on to the body, weeping.

  Uncle Gideon, now writing for Gorky’s New Life newspaper, flirting with both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, was also there, waiting in the corridor, and he rushed into the room and lifted Zeitlin off Ariadna’s body. He was immensely strong and he carried the baron away and sat him in a chair outside.

  The doctor sent them all out. He closed Ariadna’s mouth and her eyes and then called them back. ‘Come and see her now,’ he instructed.

  ‘She’s become … beautiful again,’ Sashenka whispered. ‘Yet there’s no one there.’ Sure enough, Ariadna was no longer the quivering ruin but as beautiful as she had been as a girl. She was serene, her skin white, her pretty nose upturned, and those lush lips slightly opened as if expecting to be kissed by some dashing young officer.

  This is how I’ll remember her, thought Sashenka. What a beauty. Yet she felt a gnawing dissatisfaction and uneasiness: she had never known her. Her mother had been a stranger.

  And who was she herself in this play? She no longer belonged there. While her mother was dying, she had become her daughter again. Her father, who had been unfazed by revolutions, wars, strikes and abdications, by his daughter’s arrest, his brother’s mischief, his wife’s affairs, who had defied Petrograd workers, Baku assassins and aristocratic anti-Semites, had crumpled under this, a domestic suicide. He had abandoned his business, left his contracts unsigned, his contacts neglected and, in a few weeks, he had lost almost all interest in money. The businesses in Baku, Odessa and Tiflis were already unravelling because the Azeri Turks, Ukrainians and Georgians were liberating themselves from the Russian Empire. But the details were in his mind, and it seemed that this unshaven, grief-stricken man was beset by doubts about everything. She could hear him jabbering and crying.

  It seemed to Sashenka that she might be losing both parents in one day.

  She did not cry any more – she had cried often enough in recent nights – but still she longed to know why her mother had used her daughter’s gun. Was Ariadna punishing Sashenka? Or was it simply the first weapon that had come to hand?

  Sashenka stood beside the bed for a long time as people came and went to pay their respects. Gideon staggered into the room and kissed Ariadna’s forehead. He ordered the doctor to sedate her father. The old Jews prayed. She watched as Turbin reclaimed the wicked she-devil of St Petersburg.

  Ariadna’s smile remained, but gradually her face started to subside. Her cheeks sank, and her gentile nose, the perfect little button that had allowed her to romance Guards officers and English noblemen, became Semitic and hooked. Sashenka’s grandfather covered the body with a white shroud, and lit two candles in silver candleholders at the head of the bed. Miriam covered the mirrors with cloths and opened the windows. Since Zeitlin himself seemed paralysed, the rabbi took control. Orthodox Jews, liberated by the Revolution and allowed to visit the capital, appeared in this most secular of houses, as if by magic. Low stools were provided for the women to sit shiva.

  There was a debate among the rabbis about what to do with the body. A suicide was beyond God’s law and should have consigned her to an unholy burial, another tragedy for Ariadna’s father. But two other rabbis had arrived and they asked what had actually killed Ariadna. An infection, Dr Gemp replied, not a bullet. By this pragmatic and merciful device, the Rabbi of Turbin was allowed to bury his daughter Finkel, known as Ariadna, in the Jewish cemetery.

  Finally, the servants, shocked and confused by the presence of these gaberdine-coated Jews with ringlets and black hats, filed past the bed.

  Sashenka knew she had to get back to her job at the Bolshevik newspaper. As if on cue, the door opened and Mendel, who had appeared only once for ten minutes a few days after the shooting, limped into the room between two young comrades, the powerful, thick-set Vanya Palitsyn, now clad in a leather coat and boots with a pistol in his holster, and the slim, virile Georgian, Satinov, who wore a sailor’s jacket and boots. They brought the welcome breath of a new age into the chamber of decay.

  Mendel was wearing a long lambskin coat and a worker’s cap. He approached the bed, looked coldly at his sister’s face for a moment, shook his head and then nodded at his sobbing parents.

  ‘Mama, Papa!’ he said, in his deep voice. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Is that all you have to say to us?’ asked Miriam through a curtain of tears. ‘Mendel?’

  ‘You’ve wasted enough time here, Comrade Zeitlin,’ Mendel said brusquely to Sashenka. ‘Comrade Lenin arrived last night at the Finland Station. I’ve got a job for you. Get your things. Let’s go.’

  ‘Wait, Comrade Mendel,’ said Vanya Palitsyn quietly. ‘She’s lost a mother. Let her take her time.’

  Mendel stopped. ‘We’ve work to do and Bolsheviks can’t and shouldn’t have families. But if you say so …’ He hesitated, looking back at his parents and the deathbed. ‘I lost a sister too.’

  ‘I’ll bring Comrade Snowfox,’ said Vanya Palitsyn. ‘You two go ahead.’

  Satinov kissed Sashenka thrice and hugged her – he was a Georgian after all, she remembered. ‘You mourn all you need,’ said Satinov, following Mendel as he limped out.

  Vanya Palitsyn, brawny in his leathers and holster, looked out of place in the exquisite boudoir, yet Sashenka appreciated his support. She saw his brown eyes scan the room and imagined what the peasant-worker would make of the decadent trappings of capitalism: of all those dresses and jewels, Zeitlin the prostrate, sobbing industrialist, the society doctor in his cape, the half-soused bon viveur Gideon, the tearful servants and the rabbi. Vanya could not take his eyes off those wailing Jews from Poland!

  Sashenka was pleased to be able to smile at something.

  ‘I’ve read about deathbeds in Chekhov stories,’ she said quietly to him, ‘but I never realized they’re so theatrical. Everyone has a role to play.’

  Vanya just nodded, then he patted Sashenka on the shoulder. ‘Don’t rush, comrade,’ he whispered. ‘We’ll wait. Cry all you need. Then go and get cleaned up, little fox,’ said Vanya, his tenderness all the more touching in one so big. ‘You’ll come back for the funeral but for now I’ve got a motor car outside. I’m taking you to the mansion. I’ll wait for you downstairs.’

  Sashenka took in the room and the family in a last sweeping glance of farewell. She approached the bed and kissed her mother’s forehead. She was crying again and she noticed tears in Vanya’s eyes too. r />
  ‘Vanya, wait. I’m coming right now,’ said Sashenka, her voice breaking as she backed out of the room.

  39

  At midday the next day, in the silk-walled splendour of the modernist Kschessinskaya Mansion, where once the ballerina Mathilde had entertained both her Romanov lovers, Sashenka sat at an Underwood typewriter at a neat wooden desk on the first floor. She wore a white blouse, buttoned to the neck, a long brown woollen skirt and sensible laced-up ankle boots. She was not alone in the anteroom. Three other girls, two of them wearing round spectacles, also sat at desks, pivoting round to watch the door.

  The mansion was manned by armed Red Guards, actually workers who wore parts of different uniforms, commanded by Vanya himself. Vanya had taken her out for a quick meal the night before and driven her home afterwards. In the morning she had visited, for the first and last time, the Moorish-style synagogue on Lermontovskaya (which her father had paid for) and then seen her mother buried in the Jewish cemetery, where she, her father and Uncle Gideon seemed drowned in the sea of mourning Jews in their wide hats and coats, attired entirely in black, except for the white fringes of their prayer shawls.

  Vanya had begged her to take another day off but she replied that her mother had already consumed too many days of her life, and she’d hurried back to her new office – to meet her new boss. How could a young person wish to be anywhere else in the world but here in the ballerina’s mansion, the furnace of revolution, the cynosure of history?

  At her desk, Sashenka heard the buzz of excitement from downstairs. The meeting in the ballroom, attended by all the Central Committee, was about to break up. Just then its doors opened, the sounds of laughter and voices and the tread of boots on the stairs coming closer.

  Sashenka and the other three girls settled their bottoms on their chairs and straightened their blouses, and arranged their inkwells and blotters once again.