Presently she packed herself a case with her toothbrush, warm clothes, underwear. She chose her best. Why not?
The next day she went to work again, taking her case. And the next day. And the day after that. The stress was making her ill. She had a sore throat, her face was drawn and she could barely eat. At night she dreamed of Vanya and the children. Where were they now? Three nights on the road: were they with a family? Or on some railway station, lonely, hungry, lost? She talked to the children all the time, aloud, like a crazy woman.
Benya Golden came to her in the night. She awoke filled with regret, guilt, disgust – and, horribly, a feverish excitement. She hated him suddenly. She would like to kill him with her bare hands, gouge his eyes out: was it him, with his smug defiance, his refusal to write, his curiosity about the Organs, his famous friends in Paris and Madrid – was it his connections that would kill her and steal her children? Yes, she had loved him, yes, he had given her the wildest happiness, but now, compared to her love for her children – it was dust!
On the third day, she saw something different in the eyes of the guards. When she greeted the janitor, he looked up towards her apartment and she knew it was about to happen. She stopped on the stairs, almost relieved that this limbo was over.
When she let herself back into the apartment, the study was unsealed and she smelt cloves. She walked past the Red Corner into the sitting room, and saw plates of half-eaten food on the dining-room table. A very large man in a specially tailored NKVD uniform lay with his patent leather boots on the divan. High boots creaking, he got to his feet and gave Sashenka a gleaming white smile. His skin was brown and glossy, his hair kinky, and he had colourful rings on every fat brown finger. His clove-scented cologne was so pungent that Sashenka could taste it on her tongue. He was not alone. A couple of other Chekists tottered to their feet, perhaps a little drunk, sniggering.
Sashenka was wearing a pink cotton summer dress. She had had her hair styled recently, slightly curled at the front, coiffured the new way in a permanent wave, and her face was made up. She drew herself up to her proudest.
‘Comrades, sorry to have kept you. Have you been waiting long? I am Sashenka Zeitlin-Palitsyn, whom Lenin called Comrade Snowfox.’
‘Well, comrade, what a nice welcome,’ said Commissar-General of State Security (Second Degree) and Deputy People’s Commissar NKVD Bogdan ‘the Bull’ Kobylov. ‘You know Comrade Beria is an admirer of yours?’
Sashenka took a deep breath, nostrils flaring, grey eyes narrowed.
‘I’ve been expecting you any minute. I’m almost pleased …’
‘Now I see why Comrade Beria speaks so highly of you,’ he said.
Like many oversized men, his voice was mellifluous, almost effete. Sashenka despised him. She thought of her children far away – they had been gone for three nights now. She knew that within minutes she would be stepping off the edge of the world but she remembered what she had to do. She coolly took out a cigarette and held it out like a film star. Kobylov, fluttering his rings on amber-skinned fingers, leaned over and lit it for her. She could smell his oily flesh – and those cloves.
‘Thank you, comrade.’ She inhaled, closing her eyes and blowing out the blue smoke. Someone was playing the piano in a nearby apartment and a child was singing, a family in a normal world. ‘What do you want?’
‘When it’s a pretty woman,’ said Kobylov, wrinkling his nose at her, ‘I like to come and get her myself.’
33
A thousand miles to the south in the small city of Tiflis, a grey-haired woman was packing an overnight bag. She lived alone in a single room, close to the centre, down a dark, overgrown lane just below the sulphur baths, the old town and the Orthodox Church with the round Georgian tower.
Her tiny room, which contained a bed, a lamp, a wardrobe and old photographs of a rich family, all waxed moustaches, bowler hats, sailor suits and shiny limousines, was in an elegant mansion, once the property of a line of Georgian princes, the last of whom had been an eccentric antiquarian, book collector and owner of the sulphur baths. (He was now a taxi driver in Paris.) At the time of the 1905 revolution, he had sold the palace to a Jewish oil magnate based in St Petersburg. Now the mansion was divided up into small apartments and the princely library on the ground floor was a café, a flamboyant venue of a kind that no longer existed in Moscow or anywhere in Russia proper. But here in Georgia, despite the recent killings that had decimated the intelligentsia, this curiosity shop of a café, with its damp old books, candlesticks overflowing with wax and dense, curling vines covering its steamed-up windows, still prospered, serving Turkish coffee and Georgian dishes.
The grey-haired lady worked in the café all day as a waitress. It was not well paid but it was a decent job for those times; she had the correct papers; it was all legal. She kept herself to herself, never chatted with customers or even with the other waitresses, who had given up gossiping about her. It was clear that she was a bourgeois and that she did not belong there, but provincial cities in those days were full of such flotsam and Georgia was more tolerant than anywhere else. It was said that Communism did not extend much beyond the limits of the capital. She had once lived with an older man but he had gone and she showed no interest in discussing her private life.
The waitress’s Russian was excellent, her Georgian more than adequate, but she spoke both with an accent. She was polite to everyone but they noticed she reserved her real solicitude for the library itself. The kitchen and bar had been jerry-built between two bookcases at the end of the dark old room. The humidity of the kettles and cauldrons had rotted the woodwork; the books were peeling and warping; the old pictures were mildewed and yellowing – but she did what she could, dusting the books, sometimes drying them out in her own room upstairs.
On the previous day, the woman had asked for a week off, something that had never happened before. But she had years of unused holiday so Tengiz, the manager, gave her two weeks instead.
Today, she rose very early and walked across Beria Square to the Armenian Market, where she bought provisions. Returning to her room, she filled her case not only with clothes but also with a bag of flat Georgian lavashi loaves, cured meats and candies. Taking a photograph of an awkward schoolgirl in the uniform of a Tsarist boarding school off the wall, she removed its back and took out some notes. She hid two hundred roubles in her girdle, kissed the photograph and replaced it on the wall.
She checked herself in the mirror and tutted: those apple cheeks in that heart-shaped face were now weathered and coarsened; there were bags under her eyes; and her clothes were dignified but frayed at the edges. She looked fifty but she was younger. How on earth, she asked herself, did you end up here? She shook her head and smiled.
A few hours later she caught the tram to the station, where she bought a ticket to Baku and thence to Rostov-on-Don. She changed at Baku Station, a place teeming with Muslims, Turks and Tatars in Soviet uniforms, skullcaps and robes, carrying chickens and sheep and children. One family offered her some Turkish plov, cold lamb stew, and she was grateful. She waited for her train. When it was called, it seemed that the entire station charged at it but her Turkish friends helped her and pulled her up into their carriage. She sat close to them and was again grateful for their protection. On the train, she tried to sleep but could not stop reflecting on the strange events of the previous week.
Four days earlier, a sweaty official in a Party tunic had arrived to inspect the residence and work permits of the employees at the café. All were asked to go to the Party Headquarters, the old Viceroy’s Palace, on Beria Boulevard to have their papers checked. Tengiz told her she was to go first. This was odd but one did not ask questions: checks, cleansings and purges were part of everyday life. Her husband was already gone, certainly dead; and she had been expecting them to come for her. Surely she would be arrested and vanish in her turn. Well, did it matter any more?
The woman tramped up the hill to the splendid white Viceroy’s Palace, from wher
e the First Secretary ruled Georgia. The wait made her very anxious. There were many questions she longed to ask. But like everyone else, she was helpless before the clumsy and colossal state. Questions from you could lead to questions about you – it was better to keep your head down. She waited like the other coughing, scratching, grunting, depressed people, old and young, in the filthy anteroom with its battered wooden window.
When it was her turn, she passed her papers through the hole. She was then called into a grubby, unpainted office. She braced herself for the rude tyranny of some minor Georgian bureaucrat. But the official who awaited her was not that type at all. A slim and handsome man, clearly a Party boss, stood up when she came in, drew out a chair for her and then took his place behind the desk. His Stalinka tunic fitted his broad shoulders and slim waist perfectly. He radiated the energy of the Stalin generation, and appeared much too sophisticated to belong in this chipped office. He must be a Muscovite, a potentate, she thought. Yet his blue eyes were bright, questioning.
‘Audrey Lewis?’
She nodded.
‘Don’t be nervous. I’ve always known you were here in Tiflis. Do you remember me?’ he asked. ‘I saw you long ago in St Petersburg. The house on Greater Maritime Street, the day Sashenka’s mother died. Three comrades came to collect her that day. One was her uncle Mendel. The second was Vanya. I was the third. Now, Lala, there is something I want you to do.’
34
The smell of sweat and clove cologne rose from Commissar Kobylov’s expansive neck and thighs during the ride through the summer night in Moscow. Sashenka was squeezed next to him and he was enjoying their proximity, shifting his elephantine bottom and wrinkling his nose at her like an oversized tabby cat.
The car drove up the hill to the brooding granite of the Lubianka, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, and then swerved into a side street, through the opening gates of a courtyard, driving Kobylov’s spicy breath on to her neck. But already Sashenka did not care. She was trying to pace herself, to conserve her energy, as all prisoners try to do.
The lights over the courtyard – invisible from the exterior – illuminated a scene that resembled a railway station where people arrived but never left. Sashenka guessed that this hidden nine-storey building was the dreaded Internal Prison. Black Crow vans and Stolypin trucks, back doors open to reveal barred cages, unloaded bleary-eyed men in nightshirts with bleeding lips, shrieking women in cocktail dresses and smeared eye shadow, piles of badly bound papers and battered leather suitcases. Each of the arrivals had the white face of a once-settled person falling into an abyss of fear.
An officer opened Kobylov’s door. Breathing heavily, he raised his clumsy boots and leaned out until his weight landed him on the ground. The officer helped him out.
Sashenka’s door was opened and a Chekist gripped her arm, and guided her into a large basement with chipped arches and battered wooden walls, where yet more bewildered people stood in queues. The room stank of cabbage soup, urine and despair. Sashenka – a special case, she noted ruefully – was led to the front.
‘I am a Soviet woman and a member of the Party,’ she told a bored Chekist. She had helped build this Soviet system; she believed this oppressive machine was necessary to create the new world according to the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist science of dialectical materialism; she wanted the Chekists to know she still believed in it even though it was about to consume her. But the Chekist just shook his head and told her to empty her pockets, handbag, suitcase. He waved a yellow hand to hurry her, and filled in a form. Full name, patronymic, year of birth. He peered at her. Colour of hair? Colour of eyes? Distinguishing marks? He pressed her fingers on a blue inkpad and took her prints. She received a prisoner number.
‘Watch? Rings? Any money?’ He noted her belongings and cash, gave her the form to sign and tore off a receipt. Behind her, other bodies pushed against her. ‘Women that way!’ pointed the Chekist. Sashenka remembered her arrest in St Petersburg and the identical questions – but now she was much more afraid. The Tsarist Empire was soft; she had helped create this man-eating USSR.
She entered a small room where a woman in a white coat sat on a desk smoking an acrid makhorka cigarette.
‘Clothes off!’ the woman barked.
Sashenka removed her dress and shoes. She stood in her underwear and stockings, shivering slightly in the night chill of the cold concrete. She remembered that her underwear was silk. The woman’s beady eyes noticed too.
‘Everything off! Don’t waste my time, and don’t be stuck up!’ The woman rammed the cigarette into the corner of her mouth and pulled up her sleeves to reveal powerful hairy forearms.
Sashenka removed her brassiere and stood with her hands over her breasts. Not bad breasts after two children, she told herself stoically.
‘And the rest!’
She took off her camiknickers, standing shyly, a hand over her pubis.
‘No one’s interested in you and your clipped little tail. Move it! Mouth open!’
The woman stuck her fingers into Sashenka’s mouth. They tasted of stale cheese.
‘Hands on desk now. Legs open.’
She pushed Sashenka’s head down. A finger scooped painfully into her vagina and then plunged into her rectum. Sashenka gasped at the invasion.
‘Toughen up, princess. It wasn’t torture! Get dressed.’ She took Sashenka’s shoes. ‘Take out the laces. Give me that belt. No pens allowed.’ The woman measured her prisoner’s height and wrote it down. ‘Sit!’
Sashenka fell back into a chair, relieved to be dressed again.
‘Vlad!’ called the woman.
A skinny old photographer with slicked-back hair, a tiny head and a worn blue suit appeared in the room: clearly an alcoholic, he was shaking and could hardly hold his heavy camera. A round flashlight blossomed out of it like a chrome sunflower.
‘Look at me,’ he said.
Sashenka looked into the camera, wearily at first, but then she tried to primp herself up, touching her hair. Suppose one day her children saw that picture? She fixed her eyes on the lens trying to transmit a message: Snowy and Carlo – I love you, I love you! This is your mother! Remember me! Dream of me!
‘Keep still! Done.’ The bulb flashed with a sizzling pop. Sashenka saw silver stars melting across a black sky.
A guard led her by the arm through a locked door that clicked behind them. Her shoes were loose without the laces and her dress no longer fitted. There were three guards now, one in front, one holding her, one behind. She passed metal cages, climbed up steel staircases and down stone ones, waited in concrete assembly areas, marched along rows of cells with steel doors and sliding eyeholes. She heard the percussion of prisons – coughing and swearing, the clank of locks, slam of doors and scrape of feet, the clack of bunches of keys swinging. Floors of worn parquet glistened with burning detergent.
The smell of prisons – urine, sweat, faeces, disinfectant, cabbage soup, the oil of guns and locks – reminded her of Piter in 1916. Back again – but this time Papa won’t be getting me out! she thought sadly. She felt that Vanya and Benya and Uncle Mendel were all nearby, and somehow it comforted her. On one corridor, another prisoner approached with a guard – she glimpsed a pretty young woman, younger than her, with a black eye.
‘Avert your eyes, Prisoner 778,’ barked her guard, the first words he had spoken. He pushed Sashenka towards a corner where what appeared to be a metal coffin stood upright. He opened its door and pushed her inside, locking it. The coffin door pressed on her back. Was this a torture? She fought for breath in the airless space. The other guards and prisoner were passing. When they were gone, the coffin was unlocked and they continued until they reached a line of cells where a guard held a door open. There, 778 was scrawled on an oily card.
The cell was small and cool with two bunk beds, no window whatsoever, a bucket of slops in the corner, brick walls and a damp floor. The door shut; the locks scraped; she stood there alone; the peephole opened; eyes s
tared at her. Then the Judas port shut. She closed her eyes and listened to the life around her. Prisoners sang, spat, coughed and spluttered, and tapped to each other using prisoners’ code that had not changed since the days of the Tsar. The giant building throbbed like a secret city. Pipes gurgled and shook. A metal pail was dragged along and then a wet mop swished outside. A trolley clanked. There was the murmur of voices, the echo of metal cups and spoons. The eyehole opened and closed. The door rasped open again.
‘Supper!’ Two prisoners, one bearded, old and frail, the other grey but probably her own age, were serving soup out of a swinging pan in the trolley. The old one gave her a tin cup while the other poured from a ladle, filling up the cup with steaming water from a kettle. Two guards, hands on their pistols, watched closely. There must be no contact between prisoners.
‘Thank you!’ she said.
‘No talking!’ said the guard. ‘Never look at other prisoners!’
The younger prisoner gave her a sugar lump and a small square of black bread and looked at her for a moment, with a spark of feeling on a sensitive, rather mischievous face. Before Benya she would not have recognized it but now she spoke that particular language. My God, she thought, it was lust! Sashenka was pleased: the people in here still feel desire! Perhaps lust lasts beyond many other things. When the door slammed, she drank her watery buckwheat porridge. She used the slop bucket and lay down.
Vanya, wherever you are, she thought, I know what to do. All was not yet lost: the children had gone but there might be no case against her. Vanya knew that. She could still return. She would return. What could they have on her, the most loyal of Communists? Then aloud she said one word: ‘Cushion!’