Sashenka (36 page)

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 Theater—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 always 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 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 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 were 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.”

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 hiphugging 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 savor 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 favorite love songs 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 into 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 to see that 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 favored 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 lovemaking 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 diamondencrusted 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 favorite 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 forever 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 three 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, motheaten 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 caftan. Her parents were talking to someone. Who could it be?

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

She saw her father rubbing his redrimmed 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 jewelhandled 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 eyewatering 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 time 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, VladLena, was short for Vladimir Lenin.

“Good evening, comrades,” said Mendel in that PolishYiddish 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 Nagant 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 onto the sofa 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 and ’38, there had been arrests and raids in their building every night—she’d hear the elevators 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!”