‘See if you can pretend it isn’t happening!’ was his suggestion as he buried his face in her. When she finally looked down, he peered back at her, laughing. I’ve got a lover, she thought, incredulous. His irrepressible carnality enthralled her. It was like the first time with her husband, her only other lover – but then it was not like that at all. In fact, she reflected, this is me losing my real virginity at the hands of this infernal, lovable, Jewish clown who is so unlike any of the macho Bolsheviks in my life.
He’s a madman, she thought as he made love to her again. Oh my God, after twenty years of being the most rational Bolshevik woman in Moscow, this goblin has driven me crazy!
He eased out of her again, showing himself.
‘Look!’ he whispered and she did. Was this really her? There he was between her legs again, doing the most absurd, lovely things to places behind her knees, the muscle at the very top of her thighs, her ears, the middle of her back. But the kissing, just the kissing, was heavenly.
She lost all sense of time and place and decorum. He made her forget she was a Communist, he made her forget herself for the first time in twenty years – and at last she began to live in the luscious, invincible present.
13
All was silent. Lying on creased sheets, she opened her eyes like one who has been in a deep sleep, awakening after a flood or an earthquake. Were those Kremlin stars still outside the window or had they been swept away by their lovemaking? Reality returned to her slowly.
‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘What have I done?’
‘You loved that, didn’t you?’ he said.
She shook her head, eyes closing again.
‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘Tell me how much you love it. Or I’ll never kiss you again.’
‘I can’t say it.’
‘Just nod.’
She nodded and felt her bruised face. She could hardly believe the intoxication of her pulsating body in that dark little room at the top of the Metropole on a night in May 1939 after the Terror was over.
Her dress and her underwear were on the floor but her bra was still on her stomach; one stocking was still in place but the other draped the lamp, casting a brassy sepia light on their limbs. Their mouths were salty and the taint of pleasure and sweat made her giddy with sheer delight.
Benya was kissing her again on the lips, then between her legs – it was so sensitive there now that she winced. He gave her a kiss on the mouth and then delicately there again. She shivered, blisters of perspiration on her rounded belly. Then she pulled Benya up and turned him over so she was on top and he was inside her again. Somehow they just slotted together. Why did she feel so at home in his arms? Why did it seem so natural?
The enormity of what had happened struck her like a blow. She had betrayed kind, hearty Vanya, her husband and friend of all these years, the father of her children. She loved him still but this earth-tilting fever was another love, utterly foreign, and contradictory to that cosy habitual love of home and children. Women aren’t supposed to be able to love two men at once but now I see that’s absurd, Sashenka thought. Yet a tremor of guilt slipped down her throat to her uneasy heart.
‘I’ve never done anything like this before,’ she whispered. ‘I bet everyone says that to you …’
‘Well, funny you should ask but according to “The Soviet Proletarian Guide to the Etiquette of Adultery”, it is the traditional female comment at this very moment of the first encounter.’
‘And according to this … “Soviet Proletarian Guide to the Etiquette of Adultery”, what is the correct male answer?’
‘I’m meant to say, “Oh, I know!” as if I believe you.’
‘Which you don’t.’
‘Actually, I do believe you.’
‘And who is the author of this famous book of wisdom?’
‘A certain B. Z. Golden,’ answered Benya Golden.
‘Does it say what happens next?’
He was silent, and she saw a shadow pass over his face.
‘Are you afraid, Sashenka?’
She shivered. ‘Slightly.’
‘We need never meet again,’ he said.
‘You don’t mean that, do you?’ she asked, suddenly terrified that he might indeed mean it.
He shook his head, his eyes very close to hers. ‘Sashenka, I think this is the most joyful thing that has ever happened to me. I’ve had lots of girls, I sleep with lots of women …’
‘Don’t boast, you filthy Galitzianer!’ she scolded.
‘Perhaps it’s the times. Perhaps we live everything so intensely now. But we deserve a little selfishness, don’t we?’ He took her face in his hands and she was surprised how serious he became. ‘Do you feel anything for me?’
Sashenka pushed him away and stumbled to the window, sweat drying on her back, a pulse still beating between her legs. They were in the eaves of the old building. In the moon-blanched night, she looked down at the Moskva River, the bridges, the gaudy onion domes of St Basil’s, and into the Kremlin, sixty-nine acres of ochre palaces, emerald rooftops, blood-red battlements, golden cupolas and cobbled courtyards, and saw where Comrade Stalin worked, in the triangular Sovnarkom building with the domed green roof. She could even see the light on in his office. Was he there now? The people thought so but she knew he was probably at Kuntsevo. He was her friend, Josef Vissarionovich … well, not quite. Comrade Stalin was beyond friendship, but the Father of Peoples – yes, her new acquaintance and sometime guest who had promoted her husband and admired her journal – was the greatest statesman in the history of the working class. She did not doubt it, and she remained a Bolshevik to her fingertips. What had happened in this room had not changed that.
But something had changed. Benya was lighting a cigarette, lying stretched out on the bed. He was watching her silently, barely breathing. The band might still have been playing downstairs, but in the room it was quiet and calm. She had everything but this in her life. She was a Communist woman and a mother, while Benya was a blocked writer out of tune with the boldest ideals of his time, alienated from the great dialectic of history, a piece of faithless flotsam who regarded Comrade Stalin and the workers’ state with sneering zoological interest. Yet this vain, impertinent and flashy Galitzianer with his dimpled chin, his low-set brows over dancing blue eyes, his forlorn last tuft of blond hair on his balding forehead, and yes, his sex, had made her savagely happy.
He got up and stood behind her. ‘What is it?’ he asked, wrapping his arms around her.
‘I’ve done something worse than be unfaithful – something I thought I would never do. I’ve become my mother.’
But he wasn’t listening. ‘You don’t even know how erotic you are,’ he said, running his hands up her thighs from behind. And they started again, another shuddering tournament. When it was over, they had become creatures of the sea, their bodies as sleek and wet and lithe as leaping dolphins.
Later, she rested her elbows on the window sill so she was looking at the Kremlin again and he touched her, from behind, with such delicate tracery, such gleeful tenderness, that she barely recognized the geography of her own body. ‘What a glutton you turn out to be!’ he teased her. He seemed to live with joyfulness, a gaiety that dyed her monochrome world all the wild colours of the rainbow.
So this, she mused to herself, this is what all the fuss is about.
14
Her body still tingling and burning, Sashenka walked home past the Kremlin, higher and brighter than ever in the searchlights that sent strange white columns boring into the sky, across the Manege and alongside the National Hotel. When she looked back at the Kremlin, its eight red stars made her think of Benya. They were, she’d read in the newspaper, made of crystal, alexandrite, amethyst, aquamarine, topaz – and seven thousand rubies! Yes, seven thousand rubies to celebrate her and Benya Golden. What had happened to her? she wondered. She could not believe Benya’s uninhibited carnality or the fog of sweat that had blurred that little room. Passing the old university on he
r right, she turned down little Granovsky Street. Her pink turn-of-the-century wedding-cake home, the Fifth House of Soviets, was on the left with guards outside. The guards nodded at her. The janitor was hosing down the yard.
She let herself into the apartment on the first floor. She did not turn on the lights but she relished the shining lacquer floors that smelt of polish and caught the meagre light; she enjoyed the high ceilings, moulded so beautifully; and the woody aroma of the Karelian pine furniture, issued by the government. Her parents-in-law were asleep round the corner of the L-shaped corridor but she turned on the lamp by her bedside, its base a muscular golden bicep holding a bulb surrounded by a green shade. She sat on her bed for a second and caught her breath. Was she betraying everyone she loved? Could she lose it all? Yet she could not regret what she had done.
She opened the door to the children’s rooms and looked in on them. Would they smell the reek of sin on her? But they slept on angelically. She had not betrayed them, she told herself firmly. She had just found a part of herself.
Sashenka stood looking down on them, then kissed Snowy’s forehead and Carlo’s nose. Carlo held one of his many bunnies in his arms. She suddenly longed to wake them up and cuddle them. I am still their mother, I am still Sashenka, she told herself.
Just then Snowy, holding her cushion, sat up. ‘Mama, is it you?’
‘Yes, darling, I’m back. Did Babushka put you to bed?’
‘Did you go dancing?’
‘How did you know?’
‘You’re still singing a song, Mama. What song are you singing? A silly song?’
Sashenka closed her eyes and sang softly just for her and Snowy:
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 …
What a song she had sung with Benya Golden, she thought. Was he still singing it?
Snowy grabbed her mother’s hand, folded it into her floppy cushion, put them both under her golden head and went back to sleep.
Sitting on the bed, her hand trapped under Snowy’s alabaster cheek, Sashenka’s uneasiness evaporated. She was not Ariadna; she could not remember Ariadna ever kissing her goodnight. Her mother had become a wanton creature, a lunatic animal. But sitting there on Snowy’s bed, she remembered her mother’s death. She wished they had talked. Why had Ariadna killed herself with her Mauser? Sashenka would never forget sitting beside her wheezing mother, waiting for her to die.
Listening now to the soft breathing of the children, she thought of her father again. How proud she had been that he had not fled abroad but had renounced capitalism and joined the new regime. But she had not seen him since 1930, when he fell from being a ‘non-Party specialist’ to a ‘former person’ and ‘saboteur’ and was sent into a lenient exile in Tiflis, where he’d lived in a single room. During the Terror, Sashenka might have been vulnerable as a ‘capitalist’s daughter’ but she was an Old Bolshevik, an enthusiast even for the Terror, and she had ‘reforged’ herself as one of Stalin’s New Soviet Women. Vanya’s working-class credentials and success protected her, but she’d accepted that she could not appeal for her father, help him or even send him packages.
‘Let him go,’ Vanya had told her. ‘It’ll be best for him and us.’ She had almost appealed to Comrade Stalin, but Snowy had stopped her just in time.
She had last heard Samuil Zeitlin’s gentle, urbane voice – its tone and mannerisms so redolent of their old mansion and life before the Revolution – on the telephone just before his arrest in 1937. Her children had never met him: they believed that her parents had died long before. Sashenka never criticized the Party for the way it treated her father, not even in her own mind, but that did not stop her wondering now: are you out there, Papa? Are you chopping logs in Vorkuta, in the wastes of Kolyma? Or did they give you the seven grammes of lead – the Highest Measure of Punishment – years ago?
Slowly she went back to her room, showered, then, collecting Carlo in her arms, she got into bed with him. Carlo awoke and kissed her on the lips. ‘You’ve found a baby bunny in the woods,’ he whispered, and with his mouth still close to her ear, they slept.
The next morning, she had just sat down at her T-shaped desk in the office when the phone rang.
A low humorous voice with that Jewish Galician intonation that immediately, embarrassingly, resonated between her legs, said: ‘It’s your new writer, Comrade Editor. I wasn’t sure – did you commission that article or not?’
15
Ten days later, Benya Golden lunched as usual at the Writers’ Club with Uncle Gideon. Later they visited the Sandunovsky Baths and Benya continued on to Stas, the Armenian barber, in his little shop right next door. There was a portrait of Stalin on the wall, an array of metal clippers and naked razors stuck on a magnetic strip, and a plastic plant in the window. The radiogram, always playing at Stas’s place, reported clashes with the Japanese in Mongolia. War was coming. Benya sat in the soft leather chair as Stas bathed his face in foam and warm water.
‘You seem happy enough,’ said Stas, an old Caucasian with thick oily hair dyed an unnatural jet black and a small raffish moustache. ‘You’ve got a commission? Or you’re in love?’
‘Both, Stas, both, simultaneously! Everything in my life has changed since I last saw you.’
As he luxuriated in the warm towels wrapped around his face and neck, Benya’s spirits soared. He didn’t give a fig for his commission. All he could think about was Sashenka. Her meltingly husky voice, how she would stroke her short upper lip when concentrating; how they danced, made love, sang, talked, and understood one another ‘as if we were born under the same star’, he said aloud, shaking his head slowly.
Not a day, not an hour, not a minute passed when he wasn’t consumed by his need to see her, talk to her, touch her. He wanted to feast his eyes on her and fill up his stores of memories, so that even if she was not with him he could almost reach out and feel her. Now he viewed even the most familiar places with reverence, if they were associated with her. That day he had wandered down Gorky Street. The stars and towers celebrated not the Tsars or Stalin, but her, Sashenka. When he ambled past Granovsky, where she lived, a diaphanous halo illuminated that very street. The NKVD guards were not guarding marshals or commissars, they were guarding his heart which dwelt there.
Yet with love, there was always suffering: she was married. So was he. And they had met in cruel times. He had once loved his wife, but the struggle of everyday life had ground their passion into routine; they had become brother and sister – or, worse, lodgers in the same apartment that they shared with their little daughter. And Sashenka was – highfalutin romantic phrases failed him – simply the loveliest woman he had ever met. He felt he was sitting atop a dizzying peak, peering down on the glowing earth, crowned with stars. Could it last? We mustn’t waste a second, he thought.
‘What time is it? I’m late. Hurry up, Stas!’ He felt impatient suddenly as if he had to tell someone about his ardent secret. ‘I’m in love, Stas. No, more than love, I’m crazy about her!’
Across town in the Kitaigorod, Moscow’s Chinatown, Sashenka, in the smart scarlet suit she wore sometimes for work, was climbing up a small staircase to the atelier of Monsieur Abram Lerner, the last old-fashioned tailor in Moscow. He worked for the special services section of the NKVD, and it was he who had designed the new marshals’ uniforms when Stalin had restored the old ranks of the army. It was said that he made Stalin’s own tunics but the Master hated new clothes and it was probably just a rumour.
Lerner had taken on Cleopatra Fishman to serve the leaders’ wives. Sashenka knew that Polina Molotov and the other wives all came to her (and that some insisted on paying, while some did not pay at all). Now, at the end of a busy day, she had arrived to collect another new outfit. She waited impatiently in the reception area, where there were piles of Bazaar and Vogue magazines from America. If a client liked a certain mode, she pointed to it in Vogue and Cleo
and her team of seamstresses would work it up for them. Lerner and Cleopatra, who were not related but had worked together for decades, existed in an island of old-world courtesy: their atelier was probably the only institution in the entire Soviet Union where no one had been denounced or shot over the last decade.
Cleopatra Fishman, a stocky little woman with grey, curly hair who smelt of chicory, escorted Sashenka into the dressing room, where she unveiled the blue silk dress with the pleated flounces on the skirt.
‘Do you want to try it now or just take it?’
Sashenka looked at her watch.
‘I’ll put it on.’ She quickly threw off her clothes – in a way, she reflected, that she would never have thrown them off before – and folded them away into a bag and pulled on her new outfit. She shivered as the silk settled on to her new-cast body.
‘You’ve had a new hairdo too, Sashenka.’
‘The permanent wave. Do you approve?’
The older woman looked her up and down. ‘You’re glowing, Comrade Sashenka. Are you pregnant? Anything you want to tell old Cleopatra?’
Fifteen minutes later, at 7 p.m., in that eyrie at the top of the Metropole, Sashenka, in her new dress and hairdo, her new brassiere, her new perfume and silk stockings, was kissing Benya Golden, who, while his white suit got dirtier and shabbier, was also primped, barbered and bathed.
They made love, they talked, they laughed – and then she brought a package out of her bag and tossed it on the bed.
He jumped up and opened it, weighing it in his hands.
‘A little present.’
‘Paper!’ He sighed. The Literary Fund Shop had refused him any more paper so she had ordered it for him. ‘Paper’s the way to a writer’s heart.’
They had met at the Metropole every day for ten days, and their relationship had moved beyond mere sexual infatuation. Sashenka had told him the story of her family; he had told her of his upbringing in Lemberg, of his adventures in the Civil War, and the many outrageous erotic shenanigans in which he had become embroiled. After twenty years in the grip of Bolshevik officialdom, Sashenka was bowled over by the exuberance of Golden’s life: every disaster became a ridiculous comedy in which he starred as chief clown. His clashes with officialdom – dreary and heartbreaking in anyone else – became hilarious sketches peopled by grotesques. His views on the Socialist Realists, writers and film-makers, were riotously scabrous, yet he spoke of poetry with tears in his eyes. He lent her books and took her to movies in the middle of the day; they relished Moscow in bloom – the lilacs and the magnolia – and he even bought her garlands of mimosa and bunches of violets which came, the shopkeeper assured them, all the way from the Crimea.