Sashenka

  20

  Two days had passed and it was dusk on the Patriarchy Ponds. In the sweltering half-light, couples walked like pink shadows around the cool ponds, holding hands under the trees. Their feet crunched on the gravel, their laughter tinkled and someone was playing the accordion. Two old men stared at a chessboard, neither moving.

  Sashenka, in her white hat and hip-hugging white beaded dress, bought two ice creams and handed one to Benya Golden. They walked slightly apart but an observer would have known they were lovers, for they kept a constant symmetry between their bodies as if linked by invisible threads.

  ‘Are you busy?’ she asked him.

  ‘No, I’ve virtually nothing to do and no money to do it with. But’ – here he whispered – ‘I am writing brilliantly all day on your delicious paper! Can I have some more? I’m so happy to set eyes on you. I just long to kiss you again, to savour you.’

  She sighed, half closing her eyes.

  ‘Shall I go on?’

  ‘I can’t believe I want to hear your talk – but I do.’

  ‘I want to tell you something crazy. I want to run away with you to the Black Sea. I want to walk with you along the seafront at Batum. On the boardwalk there’s a barrel organ that plays all our favourite romances and I could sing along, and then when the tropical sun goes down we could sit at Mustapha’s café and kiss. No one would stop us, but at midnight some old Tatars I know would take us in their boat to Turkey—’

  ‘What about my children? I could never leave them.’

  ‘I know, I know. That’s one of your attractions.’

  ‘You’re shamefully perverse, Benya. What am I doing with you?’

  ‘You’re a wonderful mother. I’ve behaved badly all my life – but not you. You’re a real woman of milk and blood, a Party matron, an editor, a mother. Tell me, how’s the magazine?’

  ‘Wildly busy. The Women’s Committee is planning a gala for Comrade Stalin’s sixtieth in December; we’re doing a special issue for the Revolution Holidays; I’ve managed to get Snowy on her first Pioneers’ Camp at Artek – she’s already dreaming of wearing her famous red scarf. But best of all, Gideon is back home.’

  ‘But he could still be doomed, you know. They could just be playing him like a fish on a hook.’

  ‘No, Vanya says he might be all right. Comrade Stalin said at the Congress—’

  ‘No more Party claptrap, Sashenka,’ Benya said urgently. ‘We haven’t time to talk about congresses. There’s only now! Only us.’

  They turned a corner, away from the ponds, and suddenly they were on their own. Sashenka took his hand. ‘Do you look forward to seeing me?’

  ‘All day. Every minute.’

  ‘Then why are you looking so mischievous and crafty? Why have you lured me here?’

  They were approaching an archway that led into a courtyard. Checking no one was watching them, Golden pulled her into the archway, through the courtyard and into a garden where there was a rickety garden shed, the sort favoured by pensioners to store their geranium seeds. He flashed a key. ‘This is our new dacha.’

  ‘A shed?’

  He laughed at her.

  ‘You’re displaying bourgeois morality.’

  ‘I am a Communist, Benya, but when it comes to love-making I couldn’t be more aristocratic if I tried!’

  ‘Imagine it’s the secret pavilion of Prince Yusupov or Count Sheremetev!’ He unlocked the wooden door. ‘See! Imagine!’

  ‘How can you even think for a moment that I would …’ Sashenka realized that the days of living with Vanya in the spartan bunk beds of their tiny room in the Sixth House of the Soviets were long ago. She was a Bolshevik – but she’d earned her luxuries. ‘It’s rotten and it stinks of manure.’

  ‘No, that is Madame Chanel’s new perfume.’

  ‘That looks like a garden fork to me!’

  ‘No, Baroness Sashenka, that’s a diamond-encrusted fork made for the Empress herself by the celebrated craftsmen of Dresden.’

  ‘And what’s that disgusting old rag?’

  ‘That blanket? That is a pelt of silk and chinchilla fur for the baroness’s comfort.’

  ‘I’m not going in there,’ said Sashenka firmly.

  Golden’s face fell but he persisted. ‘What if I just told you, with no bullshit at all, that this door leads us into a secret world where no one can see us or touch us and where I will love you more than life itself? It’s not a mansion, I know. It may be just a pathetic garden shed, but it is also the shed where I want to adore you and cherish you without wasting another second during my short lifetime in this menacing world. It may sound silly but you’ve arrived in the summer of my life. I’m not old, but I’m no longer young, and I know myself. You are the only woman of my life, the woman I will remember as I die.’ He looked very serious suddenly, as he handed her a book he’d drawn out of his jacket – a volume of Pushkin. ‘I prepared this so we would never forget this moment.’

  She opened it and on the page of her favourite poem, ‘The Talisman’, was a single, rare dried orchid.

  He began to recite:

  You must not lose it,

  Its power is infallible,

  Love gave it to you.

  ‘You never stop surprising me,’ she whispered. Sashenka felt so moved and desperate to kiss him that her hands shook. She stepped into the shed and kicked the door shut. Everything in there – tools and seeds and some old boots – seemed as alive and full of love as she was.

  Benya took her in his arms, and somehow she could tell by the look in his eyes, and the cast of his lips, that he meant what he’d said, that he did love her, and that this moment, in their private world, was one of those sacred occasions that occur once or twice in a lifetime, and sometimes never at all. She wanted to bottle it, store it, keep it for ever in a locket at the very front of her memory so she could always reach for it and live it all over again, but she was so entranced that she couldn’t even hold that thought. She just reached for him and kissed him again and again until they had to go home. But even as they parted, she repeated to herself, You must not lose it, Its power is infallible, Love gave it to you. And she could scarcely believe her own joy and luck that someone had actually said those words to her.

  21

  ‘What now? I’ll complain to the Housing Committee. Stop that rumpus! It’s 3 a.m.!’ shouted Mendel Barmakid, Central Committee member, Orgburo member, Deputy Chairman of the Central Control Commission, Supreme Soviet deputy. His daughter Lena was also awakened by the banging on the door and for a moment she lay there, smiling at her father’s absurdly operatic fury, imagining him in his ancient corded dressing gown, moth-eaten and stained. She heard him open the door of the family apartment in the Government House on the Embankment.

  ‘What is it, Mendel?’ called out Mendel’s wife, Natasha.

  Now my mother’s up too, thought Lena, and she could almost see the plump Yakut woman with the Eskimo features in her sweeping blue kaftan. Her parents were talking to someone. Who could it be?

  Lena jumped out of bed, put on a scarlet kimono and her spectacles, and came round the corner from her room towards the front door.

  She saw her father rubbing his red-rimmed eyes and squinting up at a bulging giant in NKVD uniform. In shining boots, immaculate in his blue and scarlet uniform, holding a riding crop in a hand covered in gaudy rings and a jewel-handled Mauser in the other, Bogdan Kobylov stared down at the three Barmakids. He was not alone.

  ‘Who is it? What do they want, Papa?’

  Before Mendel could answer, Kobylov swaggered into the hall, almost blinding Lena with his eye-watering Turkish cologne. ‘Evening, Mendel. On the orders of the Central Committee, you’re coming with us,’ he said in a barely intelligible rustic Georgian accent. ‘We’ve got to search the apartment and seal your study.’

  ‘You’re not taking him,’ said Lena, blocking the way.

  ‘All right! Step back,’ said Kobylov in a surprisingly soft voice. ‘If you waste my t
ime and fuck around, I’ll grind you all to dust, the little mare included. If we keep things polite, it’ll be better for you. As you can imagine, there are other things I’d far rather be doing at this time of night.’ He flexed his muscles.

  Lena glared up at their tormentor’s jewels and kinky hair but her father laid a gentle hand on her shoulder and pulled her out of Kobylov’s way.

  ‘Thank you, Vladlena,’ sneered the interloper with a flashy smile. Lena’s full, revolutionary name, Vlad-Lena, was short for Vladimir Lenin.

  ‘Good evening, comrades,’ said Mendel in that Polish-Yiddish Lublin accent that he had never lost. ‘As a Bolshevik since 1900, I obey any summons from the Central Committee.’

  ‘Good!’ Kobylov beamed mockingly.

  Lena, who was twenty and studying, sensed how this uneducated secret policeman from some village in Georgia hated the Old Bolsheviks, Soviet nobility, with their libraries, fancy airs and intellectual pretensions.

  ‘May I get dressed, Comrade Kobylov?’ asked Mendel.

  ‘Your women will help you. One of my boys will keep an eye on you. Where are the weapons?’

  Lena knew from her father how Comrade Stalin hated suicides.

  ‘There’s a Nagan in the bedside table, a Walther in the study,’ boomed Mendel, limping back to the bedroom.

  ‘I’ve got to sit down,’ murmured Natasha. She collapsed on to the divan in the sitting room.

  ‘Mama,’ cried Lena.

  ‘Are you all right, Natasha?’ called Mendel.

  ‘I’m fine. Lena, help Papa dress, please.’ Natasha lay down, breathing heavily.

  Lena brought a glass of water to her mother, then watched the Chekists opening drawers and making piles of manuscripts in Mendel’s study. During ’37–’38, there had been arrests and raids in their block every night – she’d hear the lifts working in the early hours and see the NKVD Black Crows parked outside. The next morning, she’d noticed how the doors on the apartments had been sealed by the NKVD. ‘The Cheka’s defending the Revolution,’ her father told her. ‘Never speak of this.’ But that was all over. The arrests had stopped a year ago. This must be a mistake, she thought.

  ‘Mendel,’ called Kobylov. ‘Any letters to or from the Central Committee? Old things?’ He meant letters from Comrade Stalin. ‘Your memoirs?’

  ‘In the safe, it’s open,’ retorted Mendel from the bedroom. To Lena’s surprise, there were a few postcards from Stalin in exile; some notes from the twenties; and typed memoirs on yellowing sheets of foolscap, marked by Mendel’s spidery notes. Her father was so modest. He told stories of his adventures but never dropped names. ‘Lena!’

  Lena followed her father into his bedroom. She opened his wardrobe and took out his three-piece black suit, his black trilby, his walking boots with the built-up sole, a leather tie, his Order of Lenin. Then, struggling to show no emotion and aware that she must not add to his troubles, she helped him dress, as her mother often did. He said nothing until he was ready. ‘Thank you, Lenochka.’

  ‘What’s it about, Papa? Do you know?’ she asked, then wished she hadn’t bothered him.

  He just shook his head. ‘Probably nothing.’

  Mendel entered the sitting room and kissed his wife’s forehead. ‘I love you, Natasha,’ he said in his deep voice. ‘Long live the Party!’ Then he turned to his daughter.

  ‘I’ll see you down,’ said Lena, feeling numb. In the hall, she helped her lame father step over a heap of family photographs, papers, letters and proofs of his famous book, Bolshevik Morality. The floor looked like a shattered collage of their entire lives.

  They rode down in the ornate but creaking lift. Outside, the night was warm. The Great Palace of the Kremlin glowed majestically. Even though it was so late, there were two lovers on Stone Bridge; tango music escaped from an open window somewhere in the huge building. There was no traffic, just a Packard touring car and a Black Crow van that bore the words Eggs, bread, vegetables, both with engines idling.

  In the humid street, the glossy, oversized Commissar of Security Kobylov somehow reminded Lena of a shiny papier-mâché statue on a May Day carnival float.

  ‘Your carriage awaits, Mendel,’ he said, inclining his kinky-haired head towards the Crow.

  Lena watched her father, limping in his old-fashioned suit, his metallic boots clicking on the asphalt, as he approached the open door of the black van. He paused and Lena gasped, her heart in her mouth, but Mendel just looked up at the super-modern apartment block they were so proud to inhabit and said nothing, though a nervous tic fluttered on his cheek. Her severe, laconic and very old-fashioned father was not a demonstrative man but Lena knew from a million little things that he absolutely loved her, his only child. Now Lena did something she had never done before. She took his hand and, placing it between both hers, she squeezed it. He looked away, and she could hear him wheezing. He was sixty but he looked much older.

  Then he turned to Lena and, to her surprise and deep emotion, he bowed formally and then kissed her thrice, the old way, à la russe. ‘Be a good Communist. Goodbye, Lena Mendelovna.’

  ‘Goodbye, Papa,’ she answered.

  She wanted to inhale his smell of coffee and cigarettes and soap, his presence, his love; she fought an urge to hold on to his suit, to fall to the pavement and grip his legs so they couldn’t take him – but it was over too fast.

  Mendel didn’t look at her again – and she understood why. The step was too high. Two Chekists took Mendel and lifted him into the van. Inside, there were metal cages so Mendel could not sit. They closed him into one such compartment and as they slammed the van door, Lena saw not only her father’s liquid eyes catching the light – but others’ too.

  Kobylov banged the top of his limousine as he swung into the passenger seat. Lena stood in the street and watched the two vehicles speed across the bridge past the Kremlin and out of sight.

  The janitor, so friendly, always doing chores for the family, stood on the steps staring, but he said nothing and averted his eyes. Then Lena went upstairs to tend Natasha.

  Her mother was sobbing so hard, she could not speak. Lena sat down wearily and wondered what to do. She remembered that her mother had cared for Sashenka during her night in prison in 1916.

  At dawn, Lena called Sashenka from a phone on the street. She could hear Snowy singing in the background, the clack of cutlery. Sashenka was serving the children breakfast over at Granovsky.

  ‘It’s Lenochka,’ she said.

  ‘Lenochka – what is it?’

  ‘Papa’s fallen ill unexpectedly and they’ve … he’s gone for treatment.’ Lena was overcome with foreboding. Tears flooded her eyes and she put down the phone.

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Snowy. ‘Lenochka? Aunt Lenochka’s a fat cushion. What’s wrong, Mama?’

  ‘My God,’ sighed Sashenka, sinking into a chair, her hand at her forehead. What did this mean? First Gideon, then Mendel. She felt sick.

  ‘Mamochka,’ said Carlo in his piping voice, climbing on to her knee like a tame bearcub. He wore blue pyjamas. ‘Are you feeling poorly? I’m going to give you a cuddle and stroke your face and kiss you like this! I love you, Mamochka, you’re my best friend!’

  Carlo kissed her on the nose with such pliant gentleness that Sashenka shivered with love.

  22

  The following Saturday, Sashenka was waiting for Vanya to come home. The dacha was quiet, its stillness suffocating. The children were baking a cake with Carolina.

  Doves cooed in the dovecote and crows cawed in the birch trees. The horses in Marshal Budyonny’s stables whinnied and the children’s pony answered. Bees buzzed; the jasmine was sickly sweet. The important neighbour next door was singing a song from the movie Jolly Fellows. But the phone did not ring. Satinov had not called for his game of tennis.

  Everything had slowed down. Sashenka sat on the verandah, pretending to read the newspapers and her magazine proofs. There was no clue in the newspapers, no hint of the spy mania and show trials o
f a year earlier. People were being freed; cases were being reviewed. Perhaps she was being paranoid. She had rung Benya and told him about the uncles in code. ‘The geraniums are budding,’ he’d answered calmly and she remembered the garden shed and their talisman.

  She thought about Benya all the time. They could meet next week. He would soothe her; he would make her laugh in that fatalistic Jewish way of his. How had she survived so long without the one and only Benya? She yearned to call him, but not from the dacha. There was a public phone down the lane. Benya kept teasing her, trying to make her say that she loved him. ‘Don’t you feel something special for me?’ he’d ask. After ten days? She, Party member, mother, editor and Old Bolshevik, fall in love with an idle writer? Was he mad? No, it was she who was crazy. Oh, Benya! What would he make of all this?

  The signs were confusing. Gideon had not been arrested, and Mouche had called to report that ‘they’ had just wanted to discuss movies with him, ‘movies and the history of the Greeks and the Romans’. Was that a hint for Sashenka or a random throwaway phrase? Was Gideon warning them about Mendel’s arrest? ‘The Greeks and the Romans’. Mendel knew ancient history. He was ancient history. His arrest must stem from something in the distant Bolshevik past. Stalin’s old Georgian friend, ‘Uncle’ Abel Yenukidze, had written a history of the Bolshevik printing press in Baku – yet fatally downplayed the Master’s role in it. Sashenka remembered Comrade Abel well, a sandy-haired playboy with blue eyes, wandering hands and a harem of ballerinas. He had been shot in 1937.

  Yet Mendel was no Abel. Uncle Mendel had never joined an opposition and had fought for Stalin ferociously. He was the Conscience of the Party and no chatterer. Why Mendel and why now, when the Terror was really over? They could have arrested Mendel at any time since 1936. It did not make sense.

  Or had Gideon meant ancient family history? But everyone knew about the Zeitlins and that she had typed for Lenin, she the millionaire’s Bolshevik daughter, Comrade Snowfox! Were the Organs circling her and her family? Her antecedents might be bourgeois – but she was protected by her marriage to Vanya Palitsyn, by his loyal service and proletarian pedigree, and by their joint Party orthodoxy.