Sashenka

  Snowy slept like an angel in her pink room, her hands resting open on her pillow, either side of her head. That damn cushion lay on her bare chest. Sashenka smiled. Even Comrade Stalin loved Cushion. What a strange night it had been.

  8

  Stalin sat in the middle pullout seat between the front and back seats of his new ZiS limousine, Beria in the back with Egnatashvili, and his chief bodyguard, Vlasik, in the front beside the driver. The rest were in other cars.

  ‘To the Kremlin please, Comrade Salkov,’ he told the driver gently. He knew the names and circumstances of all his bodyguards and drivers, was always kind to them and they were devoted to him. ‘Take the Arbat.’

  ‘Right, Comrade Stalin,’ said the driver. Stalin lit his pipe.

  They sped down avenues of birch and spruce, the blossoms bright in the moonbeams. They came out on the Mozhaisk Highway, and took Dorogomilov Street.

  ‘She’s a good Soviet woman, Sashenka,’ said Stalin after a while to Beria, ‘don’t you think so, Lavrenti? And Vanya Palitsyn’s a good worker.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Beria.

  The convoy was on the Borodino Bridge with its stone bulls, its colonnades and obelisks, and about to cross Smolensk Square.

  ‘That Sashenka can dance all right,’ mused Egnatashvili, who was no politician but lived for sports, food, horses and girls.

  ‘And she can edit too,’ joked Stalin, ‘though that magazine’s hardly a heavy journal. But that sort of housekeeping shit is important. Soviet women need to know these things.’ They sped down the Arbat. ‘But what a family! She still has hints of her alien bourgeois origins – did you know she was at the Smolny? But she doesn’t bore us with stupid lectures like Molotov’s wife. Keeps home, makes cakes, raises children, works for the Party. She’s “reforged” herself into a decent Soviet woman.’

  ‘Agreed, Comrade Stalin,’ said Beria.

  ‘This’ll be about the tenth time I’ve seen Volga, Volga,’ said Stalin. ‘It’s always like a holiday every time I see it! I think I know it off by heart!’

  ‘Me too,’ said Beria.

  They were approaching the Kremlin along wide empty roads, the security cars in front, alongside and behind. The blood-red towers of the medieval fortress veered up ahead of them, gates opening slowly, preparing to swallow them up. Guards saluted. The wheels gave rubber gulps over the cobbles. ‘Ivan the Terrible walked here,’ said Stalin quietly. It had been his home for over twenty years, longer than he had spent in his mother’s house, longer than the Seminary.

  Stalin looked round at Beria, whose eyes were closed.

  ‘Tell me, Lavrenti,’ he said loudly, pointing his pipe, and Beria awoke with a start. ‘Where’s Sashenka’s father, Zeitlin the capitalist? I remember we checked him out. Is he still with you at one of your places or was he shot? Can we find out?’

  9

  ‘I like the article “How to Do the Foxtrot”,’ said Sashenka, inspecting the proofs at her T-shaped desk. ‘Are you happy with it, comrades?’

  Two days had passed, and she was in the offices of Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping on Petrovka. There were portraits of Stalin, Pushkin and Maxim Gorky on the walls; photographs of Vanya Palitsyn in uniform last May Day parade with Snowy and Carlo stood on her desk; and one grey Bakelite telephone and a very small grey safe sat on a table in the corner. The size of the safe, the number of phones and the quality of the Stalin portraits were signs of power. This was not a powerful office.

  ‘We must entertain our readers, of course, Comrade Editor,’ said Klavdia Klimov, the pointy-faced, bug-eyed deputy editor who dressed in the hideous shrouds of the Moscow Tailoring Factory. ‘But shouldn’t we also look at the class implications of foxtrot?’

  Sashenka was a master at playing this game: she was herself a believer and took the journal’s mission seriously. She might still be a little dizzy from the excitements of the May Day holiday, but she knew the rules: never talk about the bosses and especially not the Master. Nonetheless, she hoped somehow the story would leak out. She wanted Klavdia and the three other editors in her office to know who had come to visit the Palitsyns on May Day night! After all, Comrade Stalin had endorsed the journal and her work, so shouldn’t she share this with her comrades? Several times it was on the tip of her tongue but even she baulked at the scale of this name-dropping and she swallowed it … Back to the foxtrot and jazz dancing.

  ‘Do we agree with Comrade Deputy Editor? A vote?’ All five of them raised their hands. ‘Can we resolve to commission a further piece on jazz dancing as an expression of the American capitalist’s oppression of the Negroes? Klavdia, would you write it yourself or do you have a writer in mind? And photographs? Should we pose a shot with professional dancers or send someone down to the Metropole one night?’

  The editors agreed to pose a shot: there were sometimes alien elements at the Metropole. Finally they dispersed. The meeting was over. Sashenka took out a Herzegovina Flor cigarette and lit it with her lighter. She offered them round. The other four lit up too.

  ‘You know, Utesov and Tseferman played at our house on the holiday,’ Sashenka said, unable to prevent herself from a little harmless boasting.

  There was an awkward silence and immediately Sashenka regretted it. ‘Would they give an interview to the magazine?’ asked Klavdia.

  ‘Well, I couldn’t ask them there and then,’ said Sashenka, blowing out blue smoke. ‘But I’ll give it some thought.’

  Just then there was a knock on the door. Sashenka’s secretary, Galya, stood in the doorway.

  ‘There’s a writer waiting to see you.’

  ‘Does he have an appointment?’

  ‘No, but he’s very arrogant. He says you’ll know who he is and he wants to apologize.’

  There was a leap in Sashenka’s belly as if she had driven over a hill too fast. ‘That must be Benya Golden,’ she said dismissively. ‘What impudence! A very rude man. Tell him I haven’t got time, Galya.’

  ‘Benya Golden?’ said their one male editor, Misha Kalman. He had got up to leave but now he put his briefcase down again. ‘Will he write for the journal?’

  ‘How do you know him?’ asked Klavdia almost accusingly, eyes bulging. She remained in her seat and when she inhaled she made a wet sucking sound.

  ‘I don’t know him. But he came to the dacha at the weekend.’

  ‘It must have been quite a party,’ said the deputy editor in her shapeless brown shift dress. ‘Utesov, Tseferman – and now Golden too.’ Sashenka wished she had not boasted about the guest list. She turned to Galya.

  ‘I don’t wish to see him. He should make an appointment. Besides, I hear he’s washed up. He hasn’t written a thing for two years. Tell him to go, Galya.’

  ‘Right, comrade,’ said Galya.

  ‘No, wait,’ said Misha Kalman, whose voice was high and quizzical.

  Galya turned as if to leave the room.

  ‘Tell him, Galya,’ Sashenka insisted, and Galya moved towards the door.

  ‘Hang on!’ said Kalman. ‘I’m a fan of his work. We so rarely get writers of his quality in the journal. Carpe diem!’

  Klavdia’s protuberant eyes, like those of a big red crab, swivelled at Sashenka. ‘Are you allowing individualism to penalize the collective?’ she asked.

  Sashenka sensed danger in overplaying her dislike. Bathing in the majesty of Stalin himself, she felt suddenly generous. Besides, maybe she had overreacted at her party? Had Benya been that bad?

  ‘Wait a minute, Galya,’ she said at last, and Galya, giggling this time, stopped.

  ‘Comrades, we need to decide if we really want him to write for Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping.’

  Klavdia pointed out that Golden had been a member of the delegation to the Writers’ Congress in Paris in 1936 with Ehrenburg, Babel and others, and that he had been involved in the Pushkin Centenary of 1937.

  ‘His stories are unforgettable,’ said Kalman, ruffling his grey corkscrew curls as he praised Benya?
??s writing on the Spanish Civil War. Sashenka recalled that some of the generals Benya knew had been unmasked as Enemies of the People and executed in 1937–8. His patron, Gorky, was dead and many other writers had been liquidated.

  ‘But why hasn’t Golden written anything lately?’ she enquired. ‘Is this a protest against the Party or is it on “guidance” from the Culture Section at Old Square?’

  ‘I’ll call Fadeyev at the union,’ said Klavdia, ‘and Zhdanov’s cultural apparat at the Central Committee. I’ll take soundings.’

  ‘Proposal accepted. What would you like him to write, Klavdia?’

  ‘Could he write about how the Bolshevik Cake Factory has made the largest chocolate gateau in the world in the shape of a tank for Comrade Voroshilov’s birthday? Golden could interview the workers and reveal how they used Bolshevik ingenuity to create the tank’s gun barrel out of biscuit and wafer …’

  The Bolshevik Cake Factory loomed large in the magazine’s features but Sashenka frowned as she imagined Benya’s reaction to a cake story, however grand and military in design.

  ‘Or how about the dancing piece?’ suggested Klavdia. ‘Under my close supervision.’

  ‘Comrade, you yourself had a better idea,’ said Sashenka. ‘Remember the work of our Women’s Committee. You suggested a piece on the orphanage for children of Enemies of the People!’

  ‘It’s a heart-warming story of class redemption and the reforging of identity,’ said Klavdia.

  ‘Surely that’s the piece for a serious writer in our pages? We’ll run it big, a cover story, five thousand words. I heard the place is delightful and many children are adopted into warm Soviet homes. So, comrades, shall I ask him to do the piece on the Felix Dzerzhinsky Communal Orphanage for Children of Traitors to the Motherland?’

  Sashenka felt tired. It was already 7 p.m. and Carlo had woken at six that morning and climbed into her bed. Outside, Moscow basked in the vermilion light of a May evening. Despite the Five Year Plan and the signs of building work everywhere, there was still something primitive about Moscow. The streets were half empty and there were not many cars. A horse and carriage clipped along Petrovka, delivering vegetables.

  ‘Thank you, comrades!’ said Sashenka. ‘Resolution carried.’ Her comrades filed out of the room. ‘Galya?’

  ‘Final decision, comrades?’ Galya joked, popping her head round the corner.

  ‘Send him in, and you can go home!’

  A moment later, Benya Golden stood in her office.

  ‘I can’t talk in this ink-shitting bureaucratic morgue,’ he exclaimed in his gravelly voice. ‘The breeze outside is so balmy, it’ll make you want to sing. Follow me!’

  Afterwards, long afterwards, when she had too much time to replay these moments, Sashenka knew this was where it had all started. Her blood pounding in her ears, she walked with him to the lifts, then stopped.

  ‘I’ve left something on my desk, Benya. I must grab it. Excuse me!’

  She left him in the foyer and ran back to her office. Her fingers touching her lips, she looked at her desk, her photographs of Vanya and the children, her phone, her proofs, at everyone and everything that was important to her. She told herself this preening man was bad news. He was rude, arrogant, insincere and lacking Party-mindedness (he was not even a Party member) – and not as afraid of life as he should be. She should not go walking with him.

  Then, aware of what she was doing yet curiously unable to stop herself, she turned round and walked back to where Benya Golden was waiting for her.

  10

  ‘This is one of those rare moments when no one knows where we are,’ said Benya Golden as they walked in the Alexander Gardens beside the red crenellated fortress-towers of the Kremlin which reached up to pierce the pink sky.

  ‘You know, sometimes you strike me as very naïve for a writer,’ replied Sashenka briskly, remembering his foolish comments at the dacha. ‘We’re both well known and we’re walking in the most famous park in the city.’

  ‘That’s true but no one’s watching us.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Well, I told no one I was coming to your office, and you told no one we were going for a walk around Moscow. I was on my way home to my wife, and you were on your way to your husband at the Granovsky. So there was no reason to follow either of us. Your comrades imagine we’re earnestly discussing commissions in your office. If they cared, the Organs would assume that we were going home as we always do.’

  ‘Except we didn’t.’

  ‘Precisely, Sashenka, if I may call you that. Anyway no one would recognize me in my hat.’ Benya doffed his white peaked cap and bowed low.

  ‘Well, they’d certainly recognize you now,’ she said, looking at the fair spiky strands of his receding hair.

  ‘Look around you. The whole of Moscow is promenading tonight. Don’t you ever want to be rid of your responsibilities? Just for an hour.’

  Sashenka sighed. ‘Just for an hour.’ The soothing balmy air caressed her skin and reached into her white dress, inflating and rippling the cool cotton so she felt as light and gay as a sail on the wind. Golden was walking faster, talking as quickly, and she struggled to keep up, almost running in her high heels.

  She thought about her responsibilities. There was her husband, conventional, industrious and successful, and their two mercurial, spirited cherubs in the bloom of health and happiness. They had two residences, the new dacha and the huge new apartment in the pink Granovsky building known as the Fifth House of Soviets in that little street near the Kremlin. There were the service workers: Carolina the nanny and cook, Razum the driver, the gardeners, the groom. Then there were Vanya’s parents, who lived with them at the apartment – they were a full-time job in themselves, especially Vanya’s mother, who sat in the yard all day gossiping in a dangerously loud voice. She considered Vanya’s stressful, prestigious position, and her own duties on the Women’s Committee and the Party Committee. They both had hectic lives; war was coming; they had to build their socialist world; they were emerging from deep sorrow and tragedy; many had vanished beneath the waves of revolution. That night, like most nights, Vanya would work until dawn – everyone did, following the Master’s nocturnal hours. Vanya told her how the leaders sat at their desks waiting until the words came down the vertushka: ‘The Master’s just left the Little Corner for the Nearby Dacha.’

  Now, there was something big going on. After Munich, Stalin was changing his foreign policies – and his ministers. This was significant for the future of Europe – but it also meant that Vanya was busy working on the changes at the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.

  As usual when he had secrets to share, he had pulled Sashenka into the garden at the dacha. ‘Litvinov’s out; Molotov’s in. I’ll be busy for a few days,’ he had told her.

  Sashenka knew that meant she would not see Vanya at night either and she must not mention this to anyone. Meanwhile Vanya’s parents were babysitting Snowy and Carlo at the Granovsky apartment.

  Feeling light-hearted suddenly in Benya’s company, Sashenka stopped and twirled around like a girl. ‘Just for an hour. I can be lost for an hour. What a delicious idea!’

  Her words sounded indulgently extravagant somehow – not like her at all, and she wanted to take them back.

  ‘You were a Party member before the Revolution, weren’t you, Comrade Snowfox?’ said Benya. ‘You must have been adept at dodging the Okhrana spooks. So are we being followed?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. Our Organs have never been as good at surveillance as the Okhrana was.’

  ‘Careful, Comrade Editor! Rash talk!’

  She could see that he was teasing her. ‘And yet I feel I can trust you.’

  ‘You can, I promise you that,’ said Benya. ‘Isn’t it wonderful sometimes to be able to escape one’s duties and be completely selfish for a while?’

  ‘We Communists can never do that,’ she objected. ‘We mothers can never do it either …’

 
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, just shut up and try it for a bit. Time is so short.’

  Sashenka said nothing, but she was shocked and her head spun with a sort of vertigo.

  They walked around the Kremlin. The Great Palace shimmered glass and gold beneath the evening sky. They passed the brooding dark modernist labyrinth of Government House on the Embankment, where Satinov, Mendel and many other bosses lived, where so many had been arrested in the dark times, where the lifts had groaned all night, as the NKVD drove people away in their Black Crows. There was no traffic on the streets now, just a couple of horses and carts – and an old lady selling greasy pirozhki from a kiosk.

  Moscow, thought Sashenka, once called the city of a thousand cupolas because there were so many churches, is a grim place. Comrade Stalin will beautify it and make it a worthier capital for the workers of the world, but now it’s still partly palatial, partly a collection of villages – and the rest is just a building site. She had one of her periodic pangs of nostalgia for her home city: St Petersburg – or Leningrad, as it was now called, the cradle of revolution.

  I love you, Peter’s creation, she thought, quoting Pushkin.

  ‘You’re missing Piter, aren’t you?’ said Benya, out of the blue.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I can read you, can’t you tell?’

  She could, and it made her very uneasy.

  They stood on the Stone Bridge, looking down on the Great Palace and the Moskva River, the whole of the city reflected and amplified in tiny detail as if it was resting on a mirror.

  ‘Will you dance with me?’ he asked, taking her hand.

  ‘Here?’ Goosebumps covered her arms and legs.

  ‘Just here.’

  ‘You really are the most foolish man.’ She felt dizzy again, and recklessly young, and her skin scintillated where he touched her as he took her in his arms, confidently, and turned her left and left, back and forth in the foxtrot, all the time singing a Glenn Miller song in an American accent, in perfect tune.