When they parted, his body seemed to leave a burning imprint on her belly where he had pressed her against him. She saw there was another couple on the bridge. They did not react as Sashenka and Golden approached. They were youngsters, he in a Red Army uniform and she in a white coat over a dress with a slit up the side. She was probably one of the girls from the food shops on Gorky Street. They were openly kissing each other with an intense hunger, their mouths wide open, their tongues licking like cats at a dish of milk, faces shining, eyes closed, her curtain of thick flaxen hair getting caught in his teeth, his hands up her skirt, her fingertips on his zipper.
Sashenka felt disgusted: she remembered the couple necking on her street during the Revolution, and Gideon and Countess Loris outside the Astoria – yet she could not take her eyes off the couple and suddenly felt a starburst of the wildest wantonness in her body, and such urgency that she did not recognize herself, so foreign was it to her, so alien. This gulping spasm was so insistently physical that she feared it was her period arriving early to cramp her insides.
Benya towed her along the Embankment with insouciant arrogance, not talking any more, just singing old romances and gypsy songs:
Ach, those black eyes have captivated me,
They are impossible to forget,
They burn before my eyes
Black eyes, passionate eyes, lovely burning eyes, how I love you, how I fear you.
I first laid eyes on you in an unkind hour …
When he finished singing, her hand remained in his, first by accident, then tensely, and when she became aware of it she did not try to remove it.
He was flirting with her in an audacious and dangerous way, Sashenka told herself. Didn’t he know who she was? Didn’t he understand what her husband did? I’m a Communist, a believer, she thought, and I’m a married woman with two children. Yet now, in that hot Muscovite night, after twenty years of survival and discipline, and three years of terror and tragedy while thousands upon thousands of Enemies were unmasked and liquidated, she suddenly experienced a flutter of madness in the company of this slight, balding Galician Jew who had ambushed her with his frivolous dance steps, blue eyes and raffish songs.
Benya handed her down a small set of stone steps that led directly to the river’s brim, a secret quay. ‘No one can see us!’ he told her again, and they sat on the steps, their feet just over the water. It should have been muddy and scummy but tonight the Moskva was coated with diamonds that reflected light on to their faces, etching them in purple and bronze, making them both feel younger. A flush spread throughout her body, the sensation of wings beating. She had been powerfully bedded by her husband and had children by him – yet she had never experienced anything like this.
‘Did you ever do this as a teenager?’ he asked her. He kept reading her mind uncannily.
‘Never. I was a solemn child and a very serious Bolshevik …’
‘Didn’t you ever wonder what the popular songs were about?’
‘I thought they were nonsense.’
‘Well then,’ he said, ‘you deserve just an hour in the world of popular song.’
‘What do you mean?’ she said, noticing his lips, his sunburnt neck, his eyes burning into her. He offered her his last Egyptian cigarette, a Star of Egypt with a gold tip – and it took her back twenty years. He lit it for her with a silver kerosene lighter, then offered her a swig from a flask. She expected vodka; instead, sweetness flooded her senses.
‘What on earth is it?’
‘It’s a new American cocktail,’ he said. ‘A Manhattan.’
It went straight to her head – and yet she was more sober than she had ever been.
A hulking barge, piled high with coal or ore like a floating mountain, rumbled past them, lying low and rusty in the water. The sailors sat around, drinking and smoking. One was playing a guitar, another an accordion. But when they saw Sashenka, in her white wide-brimmed hat and her beaded dress tight across the hips, her gleaming white stockings reflected on the dappled waters, they started to call out and point at her.
‘Hey, look over there! A real vision!’
Sashenka waved back.
‘Fuck her, man! Kiss her for us! Bend her over, comrade! You lucky bastard!’ one of the sailors called.
Benya jumped to his feet, raising his hat like a dancer. ‘Who! Me?’ he called.
‘Kiss her, man!’
He shrugged apologetically. ‘I can’t disappoint my audience,’ and, before she could protest, he kissed her on the lips. She fought it for a second but then, to her own astonishment, she surrendered.
‘Hurrah! Kiss her for us!’ The sailors cheered. She laughed into his mouth. He pushed his tongue between her lips, delving as deep as he could reach, and she groaned. Her eyes closed. Surely no one in the world had ever kissed like this.
She had never understood before. In the Civil War she’d been young, but she had been with Vanya then and men like Vanya did not kiss like this. And she had never wanted him to kiss her this way: they’d been comrades first; he had cared for her after her mother’s suicide; they worked closely together during the Revolution of October 1917; and then she’d travelled through Russia on the Agitprop trains and he with the Red Army as a commissar. Afterwards, they had met again in Moscow. There was no time for romance in those days: they had moved into an apartment with other young couples, all of them working days and nights, living on carrot tea and crackers. Sashenka was still the strait-laced Bolshevik and that was how she liked it. She’d always recalled her oversexed mother with horror and regret. Yet this insolent Galitzianer, this Benya Golden, had no such inhibitions. He licked her lips, nuzzled her forehead, inhaled the smell of her skin as if it was myrrh – and the pleasure of these simple things amazed her!
She opened her eyes as if she had been asleep for an age. The sailors and the barge were gone but Benya kept on kissing her. The secret places of her body purred. She shifted her position, embarrassed, but every time she moved, her loins felt liquid and heavy. She was nearly forty years old – and she was lost.
‘You know, I just don’t do this sort of thing,’ she said at last, a little breathlessly.
‘Why the hell not? You’re very good at it.’
She must have been a little mad because now she leaned over again and took his head in her hands and started to kiss him back in a way she had never done before.
‘I want you to know, Benya, I love your stories. When I read them, I wept …’
‘And I love these freckles on either side of your nose … And these lips, my God, they never quite close as if you’re always hungry,’ Benya said, kissing her again.
‘So why have you stopped writing?’
‘My ink is frozen.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ She pushed his face away roughly, holding his chin in her hand. ‘I don’t believe you’re not writing. I think you’re writing secretly.’
He stared out at the river, where the lights of the British Embassy in its stately mansion right opposite glowed in the water.
‘I’m a writer. Every writer has to write or they’ll die. If I didn’t I’d shrivel up and rot away. So I translate articles from socialist papers, and get commissions to work on film scripts. But they’ve almost dried up too. I’m nearly penniless now, even though I still have my apartment in the writers’ building.’
‘Why didn’t you stay in Paris?’
‘I’m a Russian. Without the Motherland, I’d be nothing.’
‘So what are you working on?’
‘You.’
‘You’re writing about the secret police and the top of the Party, aren’t you? You write it by hand at night, and hide it in your mattress. Or maybe at the home of some girl in the suburbs? Am I just material for your secret work? Are you using me to see into our world?’
He sighed and scratched his head. ‘We writers all have something secret that keeps us alive and gives us hope, although we know we can never publish it. Isaac Babel’s working on something
secret, Misha Bulgakov’s writing a novel about the devil in Moscow. But no one will ever read them. No one will ever read me.’
‘I will. Can I read what you’re working on?’
He shook his head.
‘You don’t trust me, do you?’
‘I long to trust you, Sashenka. I’d love to show you the novel because no one knows of it, not even my wife, and if I showed it to you, then I would have one reader, one beautiful reader, instead of none and I’d feel an artist again instead of a washed-up scribbler in these days when we’ve all become cannibals.’
Benya looked away from her and she sensed, even if she did not see, that there were tears in his eyes.
‘Let’s make a pact,’ she said, taking both his hands. ‘You can trust me with anything, even the novel. I’ll be your reader. And in return, if you swear never to hurt me, never to break this confidence, you can kiss me again after sundown by the Moskva.’
He nodded and they held hands, their faces luminous in the summer night like the burnished death masks of pharaohs. Behind her, she heard the call and then the haunting creak of wings as two swans landed with a clean foamy swish on the rippling surface of the river.
She was happier at that moment, in herself and for herself, than she could ever remember.
11
Benya led Sashenka by the hand up the steps from the Embankment and towards the Metropole Hotel. She hung back as the doorman in the top hat and braided tails opened the door, but Benya could tell that she wanted to dance as much as he did.
Benya loved the atmosphere at the Metropole. Even during the Terror, the jazz band went on playing there and he would dance away his troubles to the blare of the trumpets and saxophones. Before 1937, the hotel had been full of foreigners with their Russian girls in French gowns, but now the businessmen, diplomats, journalists and social delegations from abroad sat apart. Before the killing started, Gideon had sometimes brought him here for dinners with important foreign writers. He had met H. G. Wells, Gide and Feuchtwanger. He had heard his patron Gorky give a speech here to the Party writers and theatre bureaucrats such as Averbakh and Kirshon. One by one, they had all vanished. Alien elements liquidated! But he had survived, and Sashenka had survived the Terror by some miracle, and it seemed to Benya all of a sudden that tonight they should celebrate being alive.
As they walked together through the doors, they were so close and so in step, momentarily, that he could see the dark wood and polished chrome of the front desk reflected in her grey eyes. But as soon as they were in the lobby, Benya noticed how Sashenka kept apart from him. He realized she was worried that she might be recognized – but she sometimes entertained her writers for the journal here and he was her new writer.
‘Relax,’ he whispered to her.
The waiters in black coats showed them to a black art-deco table. How different the dining room seemed. The brilliant mirrors, the curling blue smoke rising to the moulded ceiling like mist on a mountain, the lights on the stage, the silhouettes of men with their hair en brosse and their tidy moustaches, the gleam of boots, the curve of jodhpur breeches on the Red Army officers, the permanent-wave hairdos of the girls – all were infinitely more glamorous tonight.
A girl in a white blouse with a torch and a tray of cigarettes and chocolates appeared before them. Never taking his eyes off Sashenka, Benya bought a pack of cigarettes, offering her one. He lit hers, then his own. They said nothing but when she looked at him, her gaze seemed like the beam of a lighthouse shining out from a friendly shore. The smoke whirled around her in broken circles as if it too wanted to be close to her. Everything in the nightclub revolved around her.
He thought she seemed cool and calm again, the ‘Soviet woman of culture’ in her white dress, but then her lips, which stayed just open enough for him to catch the glint of her teeth, twitched a little as she dragged on the cigarette. Her eyes closed for a second so that her dark eyelashes fanned against her skin and those rare archipelagos of freckles. The lights caught the chestnut in her thick dark hair, and he saw that beneath all the composure she was a little breathless. He was breathless himself. Tonight it seemed the world was turning a little faster and tilting a little bit more.
The show was about to start. The lights spun and then shone on to the fountain in the middle of the room. The drums rolled. It was not Utesov’s band tonight but another jazz group with three trumpeters, a saxophonist and two double-bassists, all in black suits with white collars. New Orleans met Odessa in the strut of a louche, smoky rhythm.
Benya ordered wine and vodka and zakuski: caviar, herring, pelmeni – and then realized he had barely a kopek in his pocket. ‘I order, you pay,’ he told her. ‘I’m as broke as a cockroach on Millionaya Street!’
She drank the Georgian wine, and he watched her relish its taste and then swallow it and sigh as it quenched her thirst – and even that commonplace act seemed precious. At last, he pulled her up to dance.
‘Just once,’ she said.
Benya knew he was good at the foxtrot and the tango, and they danced for more than one song. His body was slim and slight but he spun her around, making the steps as if he was walking on air. He suddenly felt that time was short. The circumstances that had allowed this freedom might never coincide again and he must push things as far as they could go. So he held her against him, knowing just from her breath how exhilarated she was too.
She broke away quickly and sat down again.
‘I’ve got to go now,’ she said as he joined her.
‘This is a night that doesn’t exist in our lives,’ he whispered. ‘Nothing that happens tonight ever happened. Suppose we took a room?’
‘Never! You’re insane!’
‘But imagine what a joy it would be.’
‘And how would we even book it?’ she answered. ‘Goodnight, Benya.’ She grabbed her bag.
‘Wait.’ He held her hand under the table and then, in a crazy gamble that would either ruin the night or make it, he put her hand right on his zipper.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she demanded, snatching it away.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘Look what you’re doing to me. I’m suffering.’
‘I must go at once.’ But she didn’t and he could see the effects of his brashness in her wide grey eyes. She was drunk, but not on the wine.
‘Don’t you have a room here already, Sashenka? For your magazine?’
She blushed. ‘Room 403 belongs to Litfond but, yes, the editors of Soviet Wife can use it for out-of-town writers, but that would be completely out of …’
‘Anyone using it now?’
Cold anger flashed in her eyes and she stood up. ‘You must think I’m some sort of … bummekeh!’ She stopped and he realized she was surprised by her use of the Yiddish for a disreputable woman, a relic from her childhood.
‘Not a bummekeh,’ he answered quick as a flash, ‘just the most gorgeous bubeleh in Moscow!’
She started to laugh – no one had ever called her a babe, a little doll, before and Benya understood that they shared an oddly reassuring past in the old Jewish world of the Pale of Settlement.
‘Room 403,’ he said, almost to himself.
‘Bonsoir, Benya. You’ve made me surprise even myself but enough is enough. File your article by next Monday,’ and she turned and walked out of the dining room, the chrome and glass double doors swinging behind her.
12
Sashenka laughed at her own stupidity. She had pushed through the wrong doors, but after such an exit she could not go back into the dining room. Now, she sat on the scarlet stairs leading to the rear lifts of the hotel and lit up one of her own Herzegovina Flors. Her presence in this hidden space right in the heart of the hotel seemed quite appropriate. No one knew she was there.
Without really thinking, she walked into the service lift and rode it up to the fourth floor. Like a somnambulist, she crept along the musty, humid corridors, smelling the stale whiff of chlorine, cabbage and rotting carpet even in
Moscow’s smartest hotel. She was lost. She must go home. She feared there might be the usual old lady (and NKVD informant) at the desk on the fourth floor, but then she realized that by entering the back way she had missed the crone altogether.
As she reached Room 403, she heard a step behind her. It was Benya. She opened the door with the key that she held as editor of the magazine, and they almost fell into the little room that, if she analysed it (and she would never forget these smells as long as she lived), was like a sealed capsule of mothballs and disinfectant. Inside, the room was dark, lit only by the lurid scarlet of the electric stars atop each of the eight spires of the Kremlin outside the window. They backed on to a bed that sagged in the middle, the sheets rancid with what she later identified as old sperm and alcohol in a cocktail specially mixed for Soviet hotels. She wanted to struggle, to reprimand, to complain, but he grabbed her face and kissed her so forcefully that a lick of flame burned her to the core.
His hands pulled her dress off her shoulders and he buried his face in her neck, then her hair, scooping up between her legs. He pulled down her brassiere, cupping her breasts, sighing in bliss. ‘The blue veins are divine,’ he whispered. And in that moment, a lifetime of unease about this ugly feature of her body was replaced with satisfaction. He licked them, circling her nipples hungrily. Then he disappeared up her skirt.
She pushed him away from there, once, then twice. But he kept returning. She slapped his mouth, quite hard, but he didn’t care.
‘No, no, not there, come on, no thank you, no …’ She cringed, closing her eyes bashfully.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he said.
Could that be true? Yes, he insisted and he swiped her with his tongue. No one had ever done this to her before. She shivered, barely able to control herself.
‘Lovely!’ he said.
She was so ashamed she actually hid her face in her hands. ‘Just don’t!’