‘Me too,’ piped Carlo.
‘Hang on, Carlo, oh Carlo … Don’t worry, bearcub, I’ve got you!’
‘I’m a bunny, Papochka!’ shouted the little boy furiously. His parents laughed. ‘Don’t laugh, silly Mummy!’
Sashenka smiled, her heart full of love for her small son. It didn’t matter if he was rude to her providing he was not rude to his father, who had a furious temper.
‘Careful, Bunny,’ she called. But it was too late. Desperate to catch up with his sister, he went too fast, swerved to avoid a chicken and fell off his bicycle.
‘I want my mummy!’ he sobbed.
Sashenka scooped him up again, at which he instantly stopped crying and demanded to go back on the bike.
‘Look at me, look at me, Papochka and Mamochka!’ He was off again.
‘When aren’t we looking at you?’ retorted Sashenka, tenderly. Turning round she could see that Snowy had mastered the bicycle. Triumphant, the little girl jumped off and danced away, waving her cushion.
‘Right, it’s too hot and I’m hungry,’ announced Vanya. ‘Brightness burns. I want you all out of the sun right now.’
2
An hour later, Sashenka, sitting cross-legged on the floor, was playing with the children in the nursery next to the Red Corner, with its posters of Lenin and Stalin, and the family radiogram mounted in a varnished oak casing. She could hear Razum and Vanya in the kitchen arguing about the football match between Dynamo Moscow and Spartak. Dynamo Moscow had played appallingly. Spartak had fouled the Moscow striker, who had been borne off the pitch, but the referee had not sent off the Spartak player.
‘Perhaps he’s a saboteur!’ Razum joked.
‘Or maybe he needs new spectacles!’
No one would have laughed about a saboteur six months earlier, Sashenka reflected, even a football saboteur. People had been arrested and shot for lesser things. She recalled how the director of the Moscow Zoo had been detained for poisoning a Soviet giraffe, and how a schoolboy at School 118 near their Moscow flat had been arrested for throwing a dart that accidentally hit a poster of Stalin. Whenever one of their friends was arrested, Vanya would close the kitchen door (so the children could not hear) and whisper the name. If it was someone famous like Bukharin, he would just shrug: ‘Enemies are everywhere.’ If it was a good friend with whom they had holidayed in Sochi, for example, she would be mystified and concerned. ‘The Organs must know something but …’
‘There’s always a reason,’ he’d say. ‘It means it’s necessary.’
‘The masks that people wear! The evil of our enemies beggars belief. Snowy was going to play with their children—’
‘Cancel Snowy’s visit,’ Vanya would say sharply, ‘and don’t call Elena! Careful!’ He would kiss her forehead and no more would be said.
‘You can’t make a revolution with silk gloves,’ said Comrade Stalin and Sashenka had repeated it to herself every day. But now Comrade Stalin had told the 18th Congress that the Enemies of the People had been destroyed. Yezhov, the crazy secret police boss, had been sacked and arrested for his excesses while the new Narkom of the NKVD, Lavrenti Beria, had brought back justice and moderation.
The men, their voices increasingly sticky from the succession of beers and the heat, were guffawing about a goal Vanya had scored in their amateur soccer team. Sashenka could not imagine why anyone would want to discuss football. She sighed. She and Vanya were opposites – he a worker of peasant origins, she an intellectual of bourgeois upbringing. But everyone knew that opposites make good marriages, and she had a kind, successful husband, two beautiful children, the drivers, the cars, this idyllic dacha – and now an American fridge.
Carolina started to set the big table on the verandah for an early May Day supper. Sashenka, who always held a party on May Day, thought about the evening ahead – and their guests. Uncle Gideon would bring his raffish friends and proposition somebody inappropriate, she supposed. There was a squeal. Carlo had grabbed Snowy’s beloved cushion and she was chasing him into the sitting room and out again, careering round the Red Corner, both laughing their heads off.
Sashenka walked on to the verandah, humming a tune, one of Liubov Orlova’s songs.
She stopped, jolted by a terrifying attack of happiness. She was on the right side of history; Soviet power, with its colossal steel plants and thousands of tanks and planes, was strong; Comrade Stalin was loved and admired. How much the Party had achieved! What joyous times she lived in! What would her grandfather, the Turbin rabbi, probably still alive in New York, have said about her dizzy happiness? ‘Don’t tempt the Fates.’ That would have been his warning – all that nonsense about the Evil Eye and those dybbuks and golems. But this was just medieval superstition! There was much to celebrate.
‘Have we got vodka?’ she called out to Vanya.
‘Yes, and a crate of Georgian wine in the boot of the car.’
‘Well, pour me a glass! Put Utesov’s jazz-tango on the gramophone.’
The children and her husband joined her on the verandah. Vanya lifted up Snowy and pretended to slow-dance with her as if she was a grown-up. Sashenka held Carlo and danced with him, singing along to the music. She and Vanya turned the children upside down at the same moment and then swooped them up again. The children squealed with joy. How many comrades dance with their children like we do? thought Sashenka. Most of them are much too dull.
3
The sun was going down, suffusing the garden with the lilac light that always made Muscovites think of bygone summers in their dachas. At seven the party began and, as Sashenka had predicted, Uncle Gideon arrived first, bringing some friends – the famous jazz singers Utesov and Tseferman, as well as Masha, a pouty young actress from the Maly Theatre who was his latest conquest.
Gideon, no longer young but still strong and irrepressible, was as shameless as he had been twenty years earlier. He wore a peasant blouse and blue beret from Paris, a gift, he said, from his friend Picasso, or was it Hemingway? Gideon claimed to know everyone – ballerinas, pilots, actors and writers. Sashenka depended on her uncle to bring these glamorous artists to her house on May Day night.
Uncle Mendel, roasting in a winter suit and tie, and his wife Natasha, the plump Yakut lady whom Sashenka remembered from the days before the Revolution, arrived right on the invited hour with their pretty daughter Lena, a student, who had inherited her mother’s slanting eyes and amber skin.
Mendel immediately started in on foreign policy with Vanya. ‘The Japanese are spoiling for a fight,’ he said.
‘Please don’t talk politics,’ said Lena, stamping her foot.
‘I don’t know what else to talk about, sweet one,’ protested her father in his resonant baritone.
‘Exactly!’ cried his daughter.
Soon the driveway was jammed with drivers in ZiSes, Buicks and Lincolns trying to park along the grass verge, and Sashenka begged Razum to impose some order. Razum, who was blind drunk, shouted, pointed and banged the roofs of cars but ended up handing out vodka to the other drivers and having a party at the gates. The traffic jam got worse and the chauffeurs sang saucy ditties, to Sashenka’s amusement. A soused Razum was a feature of her parties.
Inside, Sashenka invited guests to eat at the buffet. They piled their plates with the zakuski snacks laid out on the table: pirozhki, blinis, smoked herring and sturgeon, veal cutlets. They drank vodka, cognac, wine and Crimean champagne. It was hard work but she enjoyed it, especially meeting Gideon’s new arty friends.
‘So this is your niece, Gideon?’ said Len Utesov, the jazz singer from Odessa, who would not let go of her hand. ‘What a beauty! I’m spellbound. Will you run away from your husband and come on tour with me to the Far East? No? She says no, Gideon. What must I do?’
‘We love your songs,’ said Sashenka, basking in the attention and pleased she had worn such a pretty summer dress. ‘Vanya, let’s play Len’s record on the gramophone.’
‘Why play his records,’ cried Gideon
, ‘when you can play him?’
‘Behave yourself, Uncle, or you’ll be doing the washing-up,’ teased Sashenka, sweeping her thick brown bob with its streaks of auburn behind her ears.
‘With Carolina?’ he roared. ‘Why not? I love all shapes and sizes!’
Vanya called for quiet and toasted May Day – ‘and our dear Comrade Stalin’.
As the light faded, Utesov started to tinkle on the piano, then Tseferman joined him. Soon they were singing the Odessa prison songs together. Uncle Gideon accompanied them on the bayan, a sort of accordion. The pianist from the Art Theatre played on the upright piano while the writer Isaac Babel, sturdy but with laughing eyes behind round spectacles and mischief curling his full, playful mouth, leaned on the piano and watched. There was always a party, said Gideon, when Babel was around.
Sashenka had loved his Red Cavalry stories, and admired the way he saw things. ‘Babel is our Maupassant,’ she told Vanya when he came to watch but he shrugged his shoulders and returned to the study. She stood with the musicians, holding Carlo, who was staying up late, and sang along while the men pretended to sing to her, and Snowy danced around the room in a pink party dress, all long limbs like a new foal, waving her inevitable companion.
As the thieves’ songs of the Black Sea wafted over the dacha, Sashenka’s guests – writers in baggy cream suits, moustachioed Party men in matching white tunics, peaked caps and wide trousers, a pilot in uniform (one of ‘Stalin’s Eagles’), actresses in Coty perfume and low-cut silk dresses à la Schiaparelli – talked and sang, smoked and flirted. May Days started with the parade in Red Square and ended with a Soviet bacchanalia, from the top down. Somewhere, even Comrade Stalin and his comrades were toasting the Revolution. Vanya had told Sashenka there was a little room for drinks and zakuski behind the Mausoleum on Red Square, after which the leaders lunched all afternoon at Marshal Voroshilov’s place and then caroused at some dacha in the suburbs until the early hours.
Slightly drunk on the champagne and still strung up with an uneasy elation, Sashenka strolled into the garden and lay down in the hammock between two gnarled apple trees. She could hear herself singing those songs, watching her children, and swinging back and forth as the tipsy world spun a little.
‘Sashenka.’ It was Carolina, the nanny. Carolina appeared dry, serious and formal – but underneath she was very affectionate and loving to the children. Sashenka had chosen her carefully. ‘Shouldn’t we put the children to bed? Carlo’s exhausted. He’s still so young.’
Sashenka could see Carlo, in blue pyjamas embroidered with Soviet aeroplanes, sitting in a chair watching the musicians in a dreamy way. Uncle Gideon was playing his bayan for Snowy, shouting, ‘Bravo, little Cushion! Urrah!’
‘My cushion, cushion, cushion is dancing with Uncle Gideon,’ sang the little girl, in her own world. ‘Giddy-gush, giddy-gush, giddy, giddy-up!’
‘Thank you, Carolina,’ said Sashenka. ‘Let’s put Carlo to bed in a minute. They’re having such fun.’ It was way past their bedtime but when they were older they would be able to boast, ‘We saw Utesov and Tseferman play thieves’ songs together! Yes, in 1939 during the Second Five Year Plan in the joyous period after the Great Turn, after collectivization and after the times of struggle, at our dacha!’
She congratulated herself on the success of her soirée. Why did they all come to her house? Was it because she was an editor? She was a ‘Soviet woman of culture’ well known for her partiinost, her strict Party-mindedness. Was it because men found her attractive? I’ve never had so much fuss made of me, she thought, and was glad she had worn her white linen summer dress that showed off her tanned shoulders. And then of course there was the attraction of her husband’s power. All writers were fascinated by that!
Just then the hammock lurched so violently that she almost fell off.
‘So here’s the comrade editor of Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping magazine,’ a mocking voice crooned from behind her.
‘You gave me a shock creeping up on me like that,’ she said, laughing as she swivelled in the hammock to see who had ambushed her. ‘You should treat the comrade editor with some Soviet respect! Who are you anyway?’ she asked, sitting up, pleasurably dizzy from the champagne.
‘You didn’t invite me,’ said the man, ‘but I came anyway. I’ve heard about your parties. Everyone comes. Or almost everyone.’
‘You mean I’ve always forgotten to invite you.’
‘Precisely, but then I’m very hard to get.’
‘You don’t seem too shy to me. Or too hard to get.’ She was glad she had worn the Coty scent. ‘Then why did you come?’
‘I’ll give you three guesses who I am.’
‘You’re a mining engineer from Yuzovka?’
‘No.’
‘You’re a hero-pilot, one of Stalin’s Eagles?’
‘No. Last chance.’
‘You’re an important apparatchik from Tomsk?’
‘You’re tormenting me,’ he whispered.
‘All right then,’ Sashenka said. ‘You’re Benya Golden, writer. My naughty uncle Gideon said he’d asked you. And I love your Spanish stories.’
‘Gee, thanks,’ he said in English with an American accent. ‘I’ve always really wanted to write for Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping. It’s one of my life’s ambitions.’
‘Now you’re mocking me.’ She sighed, aware of how much she was enjoying talking to this strange man. ‘But we do need a piece for the autumn on “How to prepare Happy Childhood chocolate cakes and Soviet Union candies – tasty and nutritious food for the Soviet family”.’ Or if that doesn’t take your fancy, how about a thousand words on the new Red Square perfume produced by Comrade Polina Molotov’s Cosmetics Trust? Don’t laugh – I’m being serious.’
‘I wouldn’t dare. No one laughs these days without thinking first, especially not at Comrade Polina’s scent, which, as every Soviet woman knows, is a revolution in the struggle of perfumery.’
‘But you usually handle wars,’ Sashenka pointed out. ‘Do you think Benya Golden could handle a really serious subject for a change?’
‘Yours are truly challenging subjects, Comrade Editor,’ replied Benya Golden, ‘and I know you wouldn’t tease a poor scribbler.’
‘Poor scribbler indeed. Your stories sell really well.’
There was a silence.
‘Must I stand here in holy audience,’ Benya asked, changing the subject, ‘or may I sit beside you?’
‘Of course.’ She made space in the hammock. Benya was wearing a white suit with very wide sailor trousers and was looking at her intensely from beneath eyebrows set low over blue eyes with yellow speckles. His fair hair was balding. In the dimming pink light, she could see he had long eyelashes like a girl. She knew he was originally a Jew from Habsburg Galicia, and she remembered her mother saying that Galitzianers were jackanapes and rogues, worse than Litvaks – and Ariadna had probably had personal experience of both. I’m not sure I like him, she decided suddenly; there is something brash about him.
She found herself aware of her movements as she rearranged herself in the hammock, and felt irritated by the way he had crept up on her. He was invading her privacy, and his proximity made her feel shivery inside.
‘I have an idea for our article,’ said Benya. ‘What about “The disturbing effect of Red Square ladies’ scent and Moscow Tailoring Factory stockings on those promiscuous shockworkers and Stakhanovites in the Magnitogorsk steelworks”? That will really get their furnaces stoked.’
He started to laugh and Sashenka thought he must be drunk to say something so clumsy and dangerous.
‘I don’t much like that idea,’ she said soberly. She stood up, sending the hammock rocking.
‘Now you’re behaving like a solemn Bolshevik matron.’ He lit a cigarette.
‘I’ll be who I like in my own house. That was an un-Soviet philistine joke. I think you should leave.’
She stormed towards the dacha, so furious that she w
as shaking. She had relaxed for a moment, her head turned by his fame, his presence in her house, but her Party-mindedness now righted her tipsy mind. Was this sneering vulgarian here by coincidence or had he been sent to provoke her into a philistine joke that could ruin her and her family? Why was she so infuriated by his boozy arrogance and pushy flirtatiousness? Wasn’t he wary of her husband’s position? Her anxiety about her fragile happiness made it all the more unsettling.
Then, stepping from the fuzzy darkness into the light of the house, she saw Carlo asleep in the big chair by the piano. He looked adorable, his upturned nose and closed eyes so innocent. Snowy was sitting on Uncle Gideon’s knee, trying to poke the corners of her pink cushion into his mouth while he talked to Utesov about Eisenstein’s new movie, Alexander Nevsky. Gideon’s actress girlfriend, almost a child herself, sat next to them on the divan, wide-eyed as she listened to Gideon’s loud reflections on famous writers, beautiful women and faraway cities.
‘Uncle Gideon?’ said Sashenka.
‘Am I in trouble?’ he replied with mock fear.
‘I don’t much like your friend Golden. I want him to leave.’ Sashenka scooped up Carlo, kissing him, careful not to wake him.
‘Come on, Snowy. Bedtime.’ Carolina appeared magically at the door and was beckoning to her.
‘I don’t want to go to bed! I won’t go to bed,’ shouted Snowy. ‘I’m playing with Uncle Gideon.’
Gideon slapped his thigh. ‘Even I had to go to bed when I was little!’
Sashenka felt suddenly weary of her party and her guests.
‘Don’t act spoilt, Snowy,’ she said. ‘You’ve had a lovely present today. We’ve let you stay up and now you’re tired.’
‘I’m NOT tired, you silly – and I want a cuddle with Uncle Hercules!’ Snowy stamped her foot and pretended to be very angry indeed – which made Sashenka want to laugh.
The sitting room was at right angles to Vanya’s study. As she headed towards the door, Sashenka could make out her husband’s curly greying head and barrel chest. He was still in his blue trousers although now sporting his favourite embroidered shirt.