Sashenka

  Afterwards, Gideon, a giant with his prickly beard, ox-like jaw and playful black eyes, walked in the streets with Mouche. It was early summer. Girls were promenading.

  ‘Mouche, did you notice that, until recently, everyone dressed like prissy nuns?’ announced Gideon. ‘Thank God that’s over! Skirts are getting shorter, slits getting higher. I adore summertime!’

  ‘Stop looking, Papa momzer,’ Mouche scolded him, calling him a rogue in Yiddish, like in the old days. ‘You’re too old.’

  ‘You’re right. I am too old, but I’m slightly soused and I can still look. And I can still do!’

  ‘You’re a disgrace.’

  ‘But you love me, don’t you, Mouche?’ Gideon held Mouche’s hand. His daughter was now in her thirties, married with children, and dramatically good-looking, with black eyes, thick black hair, strong cheekbones – and almost famous in her own right. Gideon was a grandfather but damn that! The girls were out in force in Moscow that May, and the old connoisseur relished the legs, the bare shoulders, the new look of permed hair – oh, he could taste their skin, their thighs. He decided to call on his new mistress, Masha, the girl he’d brought along to Sashenka’s party. Masha, he mused, was one of those placid, easygoing girls who would be boring were it not for their almost insane appetite for sex in all its varieties. He was just playing the scene in his mind when he realized Mouche was pulling on his arm.

  ‘Papa! Papa!’

  A white Emka car had stopped right next to them. The driver was waving at Gideon and his passenger, a young man in a baggy brown suit, round intellectual’s spectacles and a pompadour hairstyle, jumped out and opened the car’s back door.

  ‘Gideon Moiseievich, any chance of a chat? It won’t take long.’

  Mouche had gone quite pale. The pretty girls in the streets drifted out of Gideon’s vision, and he put his hand on his chest.

  ‘If you’re not feeling well, we can talk another time,’ said the young man, who sported a thin ginger moustache.

  ‘Papa, will you be OK?’ asked Mouche.

  Gideon puffed up his barrel chest and nodded.

  ‘It’s probably just a chat, darling. I’ll see you later.’

  It was routine, he told himself. Nothing to worry about. He’d be back with Mouche in a couple of hours.

  As Mouche watched her father get into the car, she had a terrible feeling that she might never see him again. Where was her uncle Samuil? Vanished. Half of her father’s friends had disappeared. First their works were mocked in the newspapers, then their apartments were searched and sealed. When she saw those friends again, she could barely say hello. They carried the plague of death. Finally they too were arrested, and vanished. But Gideon had strode over their bodies, and Mouche saw that he was a master of survival. He did what he had to do, although his family background was utterly damning. He survived only because it was said that Comrade Stalin liked his work and his connections with the European intelligentsia.

  Now swaying in the summer wind, Mouche watched the car drive off with an ostentatious skid of the wheels up the hill towards the Lubianka. As it left, she had seen her father turn and blow her a kiss.

  Mouche hurried to the public telephone and rang her cousin.

  ‘Sashenka? Papa’s fallen ill unexpectedly.’ She knew this was all she needed to say.

  ‘Which hospital is he at?’

  ‘The one at the top of the hill.’

  18

  At her apartment in the Granovsky, Sashenka was playing with the children in the playroom. Carolina, the nanny, had made them toast and peach jam for tea and was now frying calf’s livers for supper. Vanya was meant to be home by seven but he was late, and Satinov and his heavily pregnant wife, Tamara, had already arrived for dinner.

  ‘What is it?’ Satinov had asked, as soon as he saw her anxious face.

  ‘Hercules, may I show you our new car downstairs?’

  Sashenka knew that Satinov understood this code perfectly. Leaving the doll-like Tamara with the children, they took the lift down to the courtyard where an array of the most dazzling limousines were parked under the watchful eye of the janitor and an NKVD guard. Granovsky was now such a bosses’ residence that it had its own wooden guardhouse.

  A gaggle of elderly men and women sat in a half-circle of canvas chairs in the evening light, warmed by the hot asphalt – the mottled men in trilbys, white vests and shorts, displaying creased old bellies and white-furred chests, the swollen women in cheap sandals and sundresses with floppy hats, broad in hip, white skin burning raw. The men were reading the newspapers or playing chess, while the women talked, pointed, laughed, whispered and talked more.

  At their centre was Marfa, Vanya’s fishwife of a mother, a cheerful walrus in a straw hat.

  ‘Hey, there’s my daughter-in-law,’ Marfa cried out raucously. ‘Sashenka, I’m telling them about the May Day party and who turned up at the dacha. They can’t believe it.’

  Her father-in-law, Nikolai Palitsyn, an old peasant, pointed proudly at Sashenka. ‘She talked to HIM!’ said Nikolai. ‘HIM!’ He raised his eyes to heaven.

  ‘But HE mentioned how much he admired Vanya!’ added Vanya’s mother.

  Sashenka tried to smile but Vanya’s parents were a source of danger. The courtyard was in its way quite select: these were all the parents of bosses but any gossiping was reckless, and could prove fatal.

  ‘Hello, Comrade Satinov,’ called out the old Palitsyns.

  Satinov waved, impeccably smart in tunic and boots.

  ‘I’m showing Hercules the new car,’ Sashenka said. ‘Can you believe them?’ she whispered. ‘How can we shut them up?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Vanya will keep them quiet. Now tell me what’s happened,’ he said.

  ‘Mouche called. They’ve arrested Gideon. I thought it was all over except for a few special cases. I thought …’

  ‘Mostly it’s over but it’s our system now. It’ll never be over. It’s the way we make our USSR safe, and we’re living in such dangerous times. Probably it’s nothing, Sashenka. Gideon’s always been a law unto himself. He’s probably got drunk, told a stupid joke or groped Molotov’s sourpuss wife. Remember: do and say nothing.’

  A Buick drew up and the driver opened the door.

  ‘It’s Vanya.’

  Sashenka was not surprised to see her husband looking bleary, unshaven and exhausted – it was the hours he worked, and the stress.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, before he even kissed Sashenka or greeted Satinov.

  ‘I’m going upstairs to play with the children,’ said Satinov.

  ‘Did you know about Gideon’s arrest?’ Sashenka asked her husband, while, for the benefit of the geriatrics and the guards, pretending to look at the car.

  Vanya took her smooth hands in his big ones. ‘Rest assured, they’re very pleased with me at the moment. I don’t know any details but they mentioned it to me and I just said, “Let our comrades check him out.” Understand? I promise you this doesn’t touch us in any way.’

  Sashenka looked into Vanya’s reassuringly proletarian face, taking in his lined forehead, greying temples and crumpled uniform. She was so relieved that they were safe. Gideon was a special case, she told herself, a European writer who knew foreigners, who visited whorehouses in Paris, who gave interviews to English newspapers. Once again, she was grateful for her husband’s rock-like stability. Then she remembered Benya’s sarcasm about his ‘boisterous’ hard work, which, in turn, was obscured by a delicious memory of Benya’s lips on her body earlier that day. A trickle of unease ran down her spine.

  Upstairs, Snowy and Carlo were chasing Satinov round the apartment. Sashenka came in as they caught Satinov and tickled him.

  ‘Tell me, Uncle Hercules,’ said Snowy, sitting astride her godfather, ‘where do cushions live?’

  ‘Cushonia, of course.’ Satinov had helped Snowy develop her fantasy world. ‘Are they Wood Cushions, Sky Cushions or Sea Cushions?’

  ‘Hercules, you’re such
a sport,’ said Sashenka. ‘You’ll be marvellous when you have your own!’

  ‘I love these children,’ said Satinov as he surrendered to them, allowing Carlo to pull off his boots.

  Carolina came in to announce that dinner was ready.

  19

  Gideon was numb with fear as the car crossed Red and Revolution Squares, then climbed the hill towards Lubianka Square. His vision crumpled as five mountainous storeys of grey granite and three of yellow brick overshadowed the car, which turned through a side gate into Lubianka Prison.

  His mind kept working. He thought remorsefully of his brother, whom he had not seen for almost ten years and whom he had not telephoned since 1935. Surely Samuil had understood that it was risky for them to be in contact? But where was he now?

  Gideon remembered his brother at the mansion on Greater Maritime Street, in that study crammed with Edwardian bric-a-brac, clanking on his Trotting Chair. How could it be that he had ceased to exist?

  Without even thinking, Gideon bowed his head and whispered the Kaddish for his brother, amazed he could even recall that old Jewish prayer for the dead … Facing death, one returns to childhood, to family. Gideon realized that he loved his daughter Mouche more than anyone in the world. Will Mouche understand me, remember me, after I get the seven grammes in the back of the neck? he wondered. The pain in his chest was unbearable. He was almost weeping with fear.

  ‘Here we are!’ The young man smiled at Gideon. He did not treat Gideon like a prisoner. On the contrary, a uniformed Chekist – as all secret policemen were known, in honour of Lenin’s ‘knights of the Revolution’, the Cheka – opened the door and helped him out of the car. Well, I am a literary celebrity, Gideon thought, reviving a little. There was no tonic like fame.

  He noticed the many Buicks and ZiSes parked there. This was not the courtyard where they brought new prisoners.

  Gideon was guided through double wooden doors into a marble hall and then a wood-panelled corridor with a blue carpet runner along the middle. Officers in NKVD uniform, and secretaries, bustled about. It was like any other state office. Gideon was relieved they were not taking him to the Internal Prison but he kept searching his mind for the meaning of this summons. What had he written recently? What had he said? What was happening in Europe that could involve him? He was a Jew and they had just sacked Litvinov, the Foreign Commissar, and also a Jew. Were Jews going out of favour? Was the USSR moving closer to Hitler?

  If I am going to die, have I fucked enough women? Gideon thought suddenly. Never enough! Heartburn pierced his chest and he gasped.

  ‘This is my office,’ said the young man, his pompadoured hair rising in a perfectly formed wave over his pink forehead. ‘I’m Investigator Mogilchuk of the Serious Cases Section, State Security. Are you all right? Here!’ He offered Gideon a pillbox. ‘Nitroglycerine? You see, I was expecting you.’

  Gideon swallowed two pills, and the pain in his chest diminished.

  A busty freckled redhead with a slit up the side of her dress sat typing in the anteroom. Even here his mind wandered up her skirt for that delicious first touch of the new … There were flowers on her desk. She took Gideon’s hat.

  ‘Come on in, Gideon Moiseievich,’ said Investigator Mogilchuk, clean-cut and young. When they were sitting down, the freckled girl brought tea for both of them and shut the door.

  ‘Thanks for coming in, Citizen Zeitlin,’ Mogilchuk started, pulling out a pad of paper and a pen. Gideon could smell the coconut sweetness of that damned pomade in the youth’s red hair. ‘I shall take notes. By the way, have you seen Romm’s new movie, Lenin in 1918? As a young fan of your writing, I just wondered what you thought of it?’

  Gideon virtually spat out his tea: had these ideeeots terrified him in order to bring him here just for a chat on movies? No, of course they had not. Ever since the twenties, the Cheka had used sophisticated faux-intellectuals to manage the real ones. This freckly youth was merely the latest in a long line.

  ‘Lenin in 1918 is a wonderful film, and Stalin is beautifully portrayed in contrast to the murderous terrorist Bukharin,’ he replied.

  ‘You know Romm of course. And how about Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky?’

  ‘Eisenstein is a sublime artist and a friend. The movie shows us how Bolshevism is utterly compatible with the Russian nation and its stand against our national enemies.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said the interrogator sincerely, stroking his ginger moustache. ‘I must tell you I’m a writer myself. You may have read my collection of detective stories published under the name M. Sluzhba? One of them will soon be performed as a play at the Art Theatre.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Gideon, who vaguely remembered a review of a volume of clichéd detective yarns by a certain Sluzhba in some thick journal. ‘I thought those tales had the tang of reality about them.’

  Mogilchuk smiled toothily. ‘You flatter me! Thank you, Gideon Moiseievich, from you that’s a compliment. I would welcome any comments.’ He passed his hand over the papers before him but did not change his tone. ‘Now let me start by showing you these.’ He pushed a bound wad of papers towards Gideon.

  ‘What are these?’ Gideon’s confidence sank again.

  ‘Just some of the confessions of your intimate friends in the last couple of years.’

  Gideon surveyed the typed-up pages on special headed NKVD paper, each one signed in the corner.

  ‘You’re a big name and you appear frequently in these confessions,’ explained the youngster keenly, almost admiringly. ‘They all mention you. Look here in these Protocols of Interrogation and see there!’

  Could the wild-eyed hag in this photograph really be that lissom creature of pleasure Larissa, whose throaty laughter and delicious breasts he remembered so joyfully from that summer at the Mukhalachka Sanatorium in the Crimea just four years ago? Had she really denounced him for planning to kill Comrade Stalin? But then he remembered that he had himself denounced Larissa at meetings of the Writers’ Union as a traitor, snake and spy who should be shot along with Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin. And no one had had to torture him to make him do it.

  Where were these friends of his? Were they all dead?

  Gideon’s breath was shallow with fear; red specks rose before his eyes.

  Outside that comfortable sunny office with this unctuous Soviet New Man with his pomaded hair were scores of corridors and offices where baby tyrants grew into big tyrants, where ambitious bullies became systematic torturers. And somewhere in this nest of misery was the Interior Prison with its cellars where his friends had died, where he might die yet. Gideon was amazed by the evil in the world.

  ‘This is all totally false,’ said Gideon. ‘I deny this nonsense.’

  The quiff smiled affably. ‘We’re not here to discuss that now. We just want a chat. About your relative Mendel Barmakid.’

  ‘Mendel? What about Mendel? He’s an important man.’

  ‘You know him well?’

  ‘He is the brother of my brother’s late wife. I’ve known him since they married.’

  ‘And you admire Comrade Mendel?’

  ‘We’re not friends. We’ve never been friends. In my view, he’s an ideeeot!’ Gideon felt a guilty relief. He had always disliked Mendel, who had banned two of his plays at the Little Theatre – but no, he wished this fate on no man. On the other hand, Gideon was in his fifties and never hungrier to embrace life, to gobble it up. Who loves life as much as me, he wondered, who deserves to live more? He thanked God they wanted Mendel, not him!

  ‘Where did you last see Comrade Mendel?’

  ‘At the Palitsyns’ house on May Day night.’

  ‘Did you talk to him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who was he talking to?’

  ‘I don’t remember. I don’t pay attention to him. He doesn’t approve of me. Never did.’

  Gideon noted that the interrogator still called Mendel ‘comrade’, which meant that this was merely a fishing expedition. These torturers alwa
ys tried to rope in other big names to add to their invented conspiracies. That was why all his old friends had denounced Gideon himself: the NKVD was just letting him know that he was living on ice. OK, he surrendered. They owned him and that was fine!

  ‘Comrade Mendel appears in many of the confessions we have here too. Does Comrade Mendel reminisce about his early revolutionary career in the underground? His role in 1905? In exile? In Baku? In Petersburg? The early days of 1917? Does he boast of his exploits?’

  ‘All the time. Ad nauseam.’ Gideon, hands resting on his fat prosperous belly, laughed so heartily and unexpectedly that the young investigator laughed too, in a high and reedy squeak. ‘I know all his stories off by heart. He doesn’t so much boast as drone on interminably.’

  ‘Do you have enough tea, Citizen Zeitlin? Want some cakes? Fruit? We so value these friendly chats. So, tell me the stories.’

  The youngster opened his hands. Gideon felt braver.

  ‘I’m happy to tell old stories but if you want an informant, I’m not right for such work …’

  ‘I quite understand,’ said Mogilchuk mildly, collecting up the files. A photograph half fell out of them. Gideon’s chest constricted sharply. It was Mouche, his beloved daughter, walking with Rovinsky, the film director, who’d vanished in 1937. So Mouche was the reason they asked him about movies. Mogilchuk quickly gathered up the photograph again and it disappeared into his papki.

  ‘That was Mouche,’ cried Gideon.

  ‘With her lover, Rovinsky,’ said Mogilchuk. ‘Do you know where Rovinsky is now?’

  Gideon shook his head. He had not known about Mouche’s love affair – but she was so like him. He must protect his darling daughter.

  Mogilchuk just opened his hands as if sand was running through them.

  ‘You want all Mendel’s stories?’ said Gideon. ‘That might take all night!’

  ‘Our State can place eternity at your disposal if you wish. Are you dreaming of Masha, that little honey of yours? She’s much too young for you and so demanding! She’ll give you a heart attack. No – much safer for you to think about your daughter as you tell us those Mendel stories.’