Sashenka (26 page)

“Well, Satinov’s coming and so is Uncle Mendel if you want to talk politics,” she answered.

“How many have you asked?” he said, trying out the balance of the bike.

“I don’t know,” she answered dreamily. “It’s a big house…”

The dacha was a recent acquisition—and sometimes, in spite of herself, the sounds and smells reminded Sashenka of Zemblishino, the Zeitlin family estate where Mendel had converted her to Marxism.

Sashenka and Vanya had been assigned the dacha a year previously, in the summer of 1938, when they had also been granted the apartment on Granovsky and their driver. The cleansing of the Party had been a brutal and bloody process. Many had failed the test and fallen by the wayside, sentenced to death, the Highest Measure of Punishment in the official terminology. Some of Sashenka’s oldest friends and acquaintances had turned out to be traitors, spies and Trotskyites. She had never realized so many of them wore masks, pretending to be good Communists while actually being Fascists, saboteurs and traitors.

With so many comrades vanishing into the “meat grinder,” as it was known, Sashenka had, like all her friends, culled their photos from the family photograph albums, scratching out their faces. Even she and Vanya had been worried, although they were completely committed to the rapture of the Revolution. Their marriage was a Communist marriage too. Sashenka and Vanya shared faith in the Party; for them, the faith was everything.

They shared so much even if, she suddenly thought, the differences in their interests had become more marked as they grew older.

But the Terror was over now; they could breathe easy again. The country was ready and united for the coming war against the Hitlerite Fascists.

Vanya stood up and called Snowy, who came scampering around the corner with little Carlo trying to keep up.

“The bikes are ready.” He lifted her onto the seat. “Now take it slowly, Comrade Cushion, easy now, not too fast, feet on the pedals, now start to pedal…”

“Me too,” piped Carlo.

“Hang on, Carlo, oh Carlo…Don’t worry, bear cub, I’ve got you!”

“I’m a bunny, Papochka!” shouted the little boy furiously. His parents laughed. “Don’t laugh, silly Mummy!”

Sashenka smiled, her heart full of love for her small son. It didn’t matter if he was rude to her providing he was not rude to his father, who had a furious temper.

“Careful, Bunny,” she called. But it was too late. Desperate to catch up with his sister, he went too fast, swerved to avoid a chicken and fell off his bicycle.

“I want my mummy!” he sobbed.

Sashenka scooped him up again, at which he instantly stopped crying and demanded to go back on the bike.

“Look at me, look at me, Papochka and Mamochka!” He was off again.

“When aren’t we looking at you?” retorted Sashenka, tenderly. Turning round she could see that Snowy had mastered the bicycle. Triumphant, the little girl jumped off and danced away, waving her cushion.

“Right, it’s too hot and I’m hungry,” announced Vanya. “Brightness burns. I want you all out of the sun right now.”

2

An hour later, Sashenka, sitting crosslegged on the floor, was playing with the children in the nursery next to the Red Corner, with its posters of Lenin and Stalin, and the family radio mounted in a varnished oak casing. She could hear Razum and Vanya in the kitchen arguing about the soccer match between Dynamo Moscow and Spartak. Dynamo Moscow had played appallingly. Spartak had fouled the Moscow striker, who had been borne off the field, but the referee had not sent off the Spartak player.

“Perhaps he’s a saboteur!” Razum joked.

“Or maybe he needs new spectacles!”

No one would have laughed about a saboteur six months earlier, Sashenka reflected, even a soccer saboteur. People had been arrested and shot for lesser things. She recalled how the director of the Moscow Zoo had been detained for poisoning a Soviet giraffe, and how a schoolboy at School 118 near their Moscow apartment had been arrested for throwing a dart that accidentally hit a poster of Stalin. Whenever one of their friends was arrested, Vanya would close the kitchen door (so the children could not hear) and whisper the name. If it was someone famous like Bukharin, he would just shrug: “Enemies are everywhere.” If it was a good friend with whom they had holidayed in Sochi, for example, she would be mystified and concerned. “The Organs must know something but…”

“There’s always a reason,” he’d say. “It means it’s necessary.”

“The masks that people wear! The evil of our enemies beggars belief. Snowy was going to play with their children—”

“Cancel Snowy’s visit,” Vanya would say sharply, “and don’t call Elena! Careful!” He would kiss her forehead and no more would be said.

“You can’t make a revolution with silk gloves,” said Comrade Stalin, and Sashenka had repeated it to herself every day. But now Comrade Stalin had told the Eighteenth Congress that the Enemies of the People had been destroyed. Yezhov, the crazy secretpolice boss, had been fired and arrested for his excesses, while the new Narkom of the NKVD, Lavrenti Beria, had brought back justice and moderation.

The men, their voices increasingly sticky from the succession of beers and the heat, were guffawing about a goal Vanya had scored in their amateur soccer team. Sashenka could not imagine why anyone would want to discuss soccer. She sighed. She and Vanya were opposites—he a worker of peasant origins, she an intellectual of bourgeois upbringing.

But everyone knew that opposites make good marriages, and she had a kind, successful husband, two beautiful children, the drivers, the cars, this idyllic dacha—and now an American fridge.

Carolina started to set the big table on the veranda for an early May Day supper.

Sashenka, who always held a party on May Day, thought about the evening ahead—and their guests. Uncle Gideon would bring his raffish friends and proposition somebody inappropriate, she supposed. There was a squeal. Carlo had grabbed Snowy’s beloved cushion and she was chasing him into the sitting room and out again, careering round the Red Corner, both laughing their heads off.

Sashenka walked onto the veranda, humming a tune, one of Liubov Orlova’s songs.

She stopped, jolted by a terrifying attack of happiness. She was on the right side of history; Soviet power, with its colossal steel plants and thousands of tanks and planes, was strong; Comrade Stalin was loved and admired. How much the Party had achieved! What joyous times she lived in! What would her grandfather, the Turbin rabbi, probably still alive in New York, have said about her dizzy happiness? “Don’t tempt the Fates.” That would have been his warning—all that nonsense about the Evil Eye and those dybbuks and golems. But this was just medieval superstition! There was much to celebrate.

“Have we got vodka?” she called out to Vanya.

“Yes, and a crate of Georgian wine in the trunk of the car.”

“Well, pour me a glass! Put Utesov’s jazztango on the gramophone.”

The children and her husband joined her on the veranda. Vanya lifted up Snowy and pretended to slowdance with her as if she were a grownup. Sashenka held Carlo and danced with him, singing along to the music. She and Vanya turned the children upside down at the same moment and then swooped them up again. The children squealed with joy. How many comrades dance with their children like we do? thought Sashenka. Most of them are much too dull.

3

The sun was going down, suffusing the garden with the lilac light that always made Muscovites think of bygone summers in their dachas. At seven the party began and, as Sashenka had predicted, Uncle Gideon arrived first, bringing some friends—the famous jazz singers Utesov and Tseferman, as well as Masha, a pouty young actress from the Maly Theater who was his latest conquest.

Gideon, no longer young but still strong and irrepressible, was as shameless as he had been twenty years earlier. He wore a peasant blouse and blue beret from Paris, a gift, he said, from his friend Picasso, or was it Hemingway? Gideon claimed to know everyone—

ballerinas, pilots, actors and writers. Sashenka depended on her uncle to bring these glamorous artists to her house on May Day night.

Uncle Mendel, roasting in a winter suit and tie, and his wife Natasha, the plump Yakut lady whom Sashenka remembered from the days before the Revolution, arrived right on the invited hour with their pretty daughter Lena, a student, who had inherited her mother’s slanting eyes and amber skin.

Mendel immediately started in on foreign policy with Vanya. “The Japanese are spoiling for a fight,” he said.

“Please don’t talk politics,” said Lena, stamping her foot.

“I don’t know what else to talk about, sweet one,” protested her father in his resonant baritone.

“Exactly!” cried his daughter.

Soon the driveway was jammed with drivers in ZiSes, Buicks and Lincolns trying to park along the grass shoulder, and Sashenka begged Razum to impose some order. Razum, who was blind drunk, shouted, pointed and banged the roofs of cars but ended up handing out vodka to the other drivers and having a party at the gates. The traffic jam got worse and the chauffeurs sang saucy ditties, to Sashenka’s amusement. A soused Razum was a feature of her parties.

Inside, Sashenka invited guests to eat at the buffet. They piled their plates with the
zakuski
snacks laid out on the table: pirozhki, blinis, smoked herring and sturgeon, veal cutlets.

They drank vodka, cognac, wine and Crimean champagne. It was hard work but she enjoyed it, especially meeting Gideon’s new arty friends.

“So this is your niece, Gideon?” said Len Utesov, the jazz singer from Odessa, who would not let go of her hand. “What a beauty! I’m spellbound. Will you run away from your husband and come on tour with me to the Far East? No? She says no, Gideon. What must I do?”

“We love your songs,” said Sashenka, basking in the attention and pleased she had worn such a pretty summer dress. “Vanya, let’s play Len’s record on the gramophone.”

“Why play his records,” cried Gideon, “when you can play him?”

“Behave yourself, Uncle, or you’ll be doing the dishes,” teased Sashenka, sweeping her thick brown bob with its streaks of auburn behind her ears.

“With Carolina?” he roared. “Why not? I love all shapes and sizes!”

Vanya called for quiet and toasted May Day—“and our dear Comrade Stalin.”

As the light faded, Utesov started to tinkle on the piano, then Tseferman joined him. Soon they were singing the Odessa prison songs together. Uncle Gideon accompanied them on the bayan, a sort of accordion. The pianist from the Art Theater played on the upright piano while the writer Isaac Babel, sturdy but with laughing eyes behind round spectacles and mischief curling his full, playful mouth, leaned on the piano and watched. There was always a party, said Gideon, when Babel was around.

Sashenka had loved his
Red Cavalry
stories, and admired the way he saw things. “Babel is our Maupassant,” she told Vanya when he came to watch but he shrugged his shoulders and returned to the study. She stood with the musicians, holding Carlo, who was staying up late, and sang along while the men pretended to sing to her, and Snowy danced around the room in a pink party dress, all long limbs like a new foal, waving her inevitable companion.

As the thieves’ songs of the Black Sea wafted over the dacha, Sashenka’s guests—writers in baggy cream suits, mustachioed Party men in matching white tunics, peaked caps and wide trousers, a pilot in uniform (one of “Stalin’s Eagles”), actresses in Coty perfume and lowcut silk dresses à la Schiaparelli—talked and sang, smoked and flirted. May Days started with the parade in Red Square and ended with a Soviet bacchanalia, from the top down. Somewhere, even Comrade Stalin and his comrades were toasting the Revolution.

Vanya had told Sashenka there was a little room for drinks and
zakuski
behind the Mausoleum on Red Square, after which the leaders lunched all afternoon at Marshal Voroshilov’s place and then caroused at some dacha in the suburbs until the early hours.

Slightly drunk on the champagne and still strung up with an uneasy elation, Sashenka strolled into the garden and lay down in the hammock between two gnarled apple trees.

She could hear herself singing those songs, watching her children, and swinging back and forth as the tipsy world spun a little.

“Sashenka.” It was Carolina, the nanny. Carolina appeared dry, serious and formal—but underneath she was very affectionate and loving to the children. Sashenka had chosen her carefully. “Shouldn’t we put the children to bed? Carlo’s exhausted. He’s still so young.”

Sashenka could see Carlo, in blue pajamas embroidered with Soviet airplanes, sitting in a chair watching the musicians in a dreamy way. Uncle Gideon was playing his bayan for Snowy, shouting, “Bravo, little Cushion! Hurrah!”

“My cushion, cushion, cushion is dancing with Uncle Gideon,” sang the little girl, in her own world. “Giddygush, giddygush, giddy, giddyup!”

“Thank you, Carolina,” said Sashenka. “Let’s put Carlo to bed in a minute. They’re having such fun.” It was way past their bedtime but when they were older they would be able to boast, “We saw Utesov and Tseferman play thieves’ songs together! Yes, in 1939 during the Second Five Year Plan in the joyous period after the Great Turn, after collectivization and after the times of struggle, at our dacha!”

She congratulated herself on the success of her soirée. Why did they all come to her house?

Was it because she was an editor? She was a “Soviet woman of culture” well known for her
partiinost
, her strict Partymindedness. Was it because men found her attractive? I’ve never had so much fuss made of me, she thought, and was glad she had worn her white linen summer dress that showed off her tanned shoulders. And then of course there was the attraction of her husband’s power. All writers were fascinated by that!

Just then the hammock lurched so violently that she almost fell off.

“So here’s the comrade editor of
Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping
magazine,” a mocking voice crooned from behind her.

“You gave me a shock creeping up on me like that,” she said, laughing as she swiveled in the hammock to see who had ambushed her. “You should treat the comrade editor with some Soviet respect! Who are you anyway?” she asked, sitting up, pleasurably dizzy from the champagne.